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Welcome to episode 164 of The Nonanxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. Today's episode brings us another Freedman's fable. Today's episode is The Magic Ring. So without further Ado, here is episode 164, Balancing the Tension Between Desire and Risk.

Please obtain a copy of Friedman's Fables and read "The Magic Ring."

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I'm going to repeat the moral again, because it's another puzzling one. Keep the ring on your finger, not in your nose. The main image here is that of an animal, perhaps a Bull, being led around by a ring through its nose. The lesson here, I believe, is that when we don't take responsibility for ourselves, for our decisions, for what we believe in what we do, and we abdicate them to somebody else, then the ring is in our nose. When the ring is on our fingers, then we have the ability to truly be ourselves.

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Being able to truly express yourself in any situation, to truly be free, to be who you are, is the magic of the ring. Anyone who has experienced loss and emotional pain understands the concern of the woman when her husband leaves her, the gift that her grandmother gives her helps her to avoid the pain because she knows she can be in a relationship and have emotional connection with others without the fear of being hurt. Again, the fact that it's a gift from her grandmother also tends to emphasize this idea that attitudes can be passed from generation to generation. This whole idea of intergenerational transmission is that the ability to self differentiate, the ability to truly be yourself, can be passed on through intergenerational transmission in the same way that anxiety can be passed on through intergenerational transmission. The upside of this in the story is twofold.

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First, it enables a woman to express herself freely and safely, and this makes her even more attractive. When you can self differentiate, when you can be a nonanxious presence, it is attractive to others. And I'm not talking about physical attraction. I'm talking about the idea that people want to be around you. They want to work with you.

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When you lead through selfdifferentiation, you are going to find that people will want to connect with you, they will want to work with you, they will want to see what you think, and that gives you the opportunity to lead positive change. The second upside to this is that the woman is able to follow her desires without fear of failure, without fear of emotional pain. And to me, this highlights the whole idea of leadership through selfdifferentiation in that when we are leading through selfdifferentiation, we are willing to take risks. We are willing to lean into the fear and not be afraid of negative outcomes, not be afraid of failure, and not be afraid of the pain of not achieving what we are setting out to do. This is the tension between desire and fear.

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When you know where God is calling you to go, when you know what you believe, when you know what you have to do, the problem you face is that there is fear of failure. There is risk in a failure of nerve. Edwin Friedman says that one of the signs of a chronically anxious society is the lack of adventure. People want to play it safe. And I see this more than ever in leaders, in churches and in leaders and nonprofits.

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And while playing it safe is at times appropriate, it often makes it difficult to truly lead positive and lasting change. What would it be like for you as a leader if you had a magic ring, if you could follow what you believe God is leading you to do and do so freely and express it in healthy ways without fear of failure? I believe that you would be able to be a non anxious presence, and this would be attractive that people would want to follow because they see somebody who, if they work with them, could actually make a difference in the world. Now I believe there is a downside to the magic ring, and that is even though the woman feels free to be herself, she never really goes deeper in any relationship. The ring protects her from that.

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So there's only so far that she can go before she has to cut things off. And there is only so far you can go to try to protect yourself from pain. So this idea of taking responsibility for self and being vulnerable, being willing to experience the pain that might occur if you are wrong or if you don't make the right decision, or if you take a risk and it doesn't work out is a vulnerability. It is a risk that we need to be willing to take. The magic ring won't protect us from that.

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The magic ring is great, but what it does is it helps us to avoid responsibility for self, for being vulnerable and going deeper in connection with others in a way that risks emotional pain. So how do we as nonanxious leader, express ourselves freely, engage in risk? How do we lead forward while being willing to be vulnerable and risk failure, loss and emotional pain. Self differentiation certainly enables us to define ourselves in a way similar to the magic ring when we are able to say what we believe while giving others the freedom to disagree. When we can define ourselves without defining others, we can truly be ourselves and we can lead positive change.

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However, we have to be willing to experience the potential downside. That's where the importance of doing our own work to grow in selfdifferentiation really comes in. It helps us as nonanxious leaders to balance the best of both sides. We can truly be ourselves. We can engage in the risk, but when things don't work out, we are able to see it as an opportunity, as a challenge to grow even more resilient, to grow even stronger emotionally.

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This is what nonanxious leader do. That's it for episode 164. Another Freedman's fable. I'll be back with another one next week. You can connect with me at the nonanxious leader.com and you can find the show notes at thenonanxiousleader.com/164.

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Until next time, thanks and goodbye.