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Welcome to Episode 310 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. If you are new to this podcast, I want to let you know that you can reach me at jack@christian-leaders.com. Go ahead and email me because I'd love to hear your feedback, your comments, your questions, and ideas for future episodes. You can also find more resources at thenonanxiousleader. com. You can find out about the books that I've written, if you'd like to engage me for coaching or a speaking engagement, and you can see my past episodes and blog posts. Finally, if you want to sign up for my 2 for Tuesday email newsletter, I will put a link in the show notes, and you're going to also find a sign-up page at thenonanxiousleader.com. Now, without further ado, here is episode 310, Five Ways You Can Grow as a Non-Anxious Presence.

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This is part 2 of 2. If you haven't listened to the first part of this series, I encourage you to do that. In that episode, I cover the importance of monitoring your emotional distance and your own unworked-out issues or residue. In this episode, I'll go through three more things to monitor. The third way you can grow as a non-anxious presence is to watch your feedback. Feedback. Feedback is either reactive or adaptive behavior. Reactivity is when you get defensive or aggressive in response to another. Adaptivity is when you give in without standing up for yourself. Both reactivity and adaptivity are considered forms of feedback, and it is this feedback that keeps patterns of interactions stuck. A key family system's principle is that chronic conditions need feedback to maintain themselves. A chronic condition is a pattern of functioning that is either ongoing or recurring. I used an example from Marshall Goldsmith in a recent Two for Tuesday newsletter. Goldsmith is a world-renowned business educator and coach. He was recognized in 2011 as a number one leadership thinker in the world at the biannual Thinkers 50 ceremony sponsored by the Harvard Business Review. In his book, Triggers: Creating behavior that lasts, Becoming the person you want to be, he shares a story about Amy, a 51-year-old senior executive at a media company.

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Amy described a close mother-daughter relationship, perhaps too close. Her mother was in her late '70s and they spoke daily, but the conversation was governed by sniping and petty arguments. Parent and child were engaged in a zero-sum game of proving herself right and the other wrong. Love by a thousand cuts, Amy called it. One day, triggered by her mother's mortality and the realization that neither of them was getting younger, Amy decided on a truce. She didn't tell her mother about it. She simply refused to engage in the verbal scarmishing. When her mother made a judgmental remark, Amy let it hang in the air like a noxious cloud, waiting for it to vaporize from neglect. With her daughter unwilling to counterpunch, mom soon stopped punching and vice versa. End quote. Edwin Friedmann described criticism as a push for togetherness or connection. That is, when someone criticizes, when they are judgmental, they are wanting to be closer, more connected. This is a problem when the person being criticized is either reactive or, worse yet, distances, as either will just make the person wanting connection to bear down with more criticism. Instead, when there is no feedback, the anxiety and the criticism will, as Goldsmith says, vaporize with neglect.

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It's important to note that when you stop providing feedback in chronic situations, things will get worse before they get better. Friedmann calls this sabotage because systems don't make change, even a change for the better. Anxiety and intensity will actually increase. However, if you can maintain a non-anxious presence by defining yourself and not others, maintaining healthy emotional connection, and avoiding a conflict of wills, things will ultimately get better than they ever were. This is how you can rework relationships. It's not easy to do, but it's the only way that I've seen that fundamental and lasting change can take place. The fourth thing you can do to grow as a non-anxious presence is to watch your pain threshold. Friedmann writes in Generation to Generation, To the extent that one can increase one's own threshold for another other's pain, the other's own threshold will increase, expanding his or her range of functioning. In other words, it's our own inability to tolerate the pain of others that keeps relationships stuck. When you try to relieve another person of their pain, it's a sign that your own pain tolerance is low. The typical response is to bail the other person out, which actually reduces their capacity to respond to challenge.

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The path out of this trap is to focus on working through your own stuff, that is, whatever it is that causes you pain. When you do this, you not only increase your own tolerance to emotional pain, you increase your tolerance to the emotional pain of others. That's a good thing. It's helpful to remember that you can't make another person responsible. Ironically, the act of trying to make them responsible actually preempts their own responsibility. The challenge is we want to help others out. We don't want them to suffer or go through hardship. We want them to be their best. But this becomes a problem when we over function to relieve them of their pain. This will make them less responsible and or less capable of responding to challenge. The hardest thing to do is to let others live with the pain and consequences of their own actions. Doing this while staying emotionally connected is the best thing we can do for another. Friedmann and Generation to Generation uses a case study he calls a Stimulus for Motivation on page 49. A woman found her husband coming home from work ever more tipsy. Her anxiety increased. She tried everything she could to keep him sober, from constant warnings in the morning to herangs in the evening.

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As in all such emotional triangles, her own stress increased and her husband seemed to feel more freedom to drink. Worried that she might be left a widow with two children, she was encouraged to get out of the triangle between her husband and his symptom, to shift the pain by telling him, when he was not drunk, in as calm a manner as possible, Honey, I've been thinking things over. I've decided that you have a right to drink all you want, to enjoy life to the hilt and to risk it. After all, it's your life. I would like to stop nagging you, but I've got a problem. It's fairly clear to me that you probably won't make it for too much longer, and I don't want to be stuck with the mortgage and the car payment, so I'll make an agreement with you. If you will agree to triple your life insurance, I will agree never to mention your drinking again. Sticking someone with the pain of responsibility for his or her own destiny is far more sobering than giving the person black coffee afterwards. What's going on here is the family system's principle of paradox. It's doing the opposite of what we think we should do.

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The natural response is to try to get the other to stop drinking, but this would just perpetuate a conflict of wills and keep us stuck in the triangle between the other and their drinking. Instead, paradox turns the wheel in the direction of the skid. It's about defining self and giving other the freedom to choose in a non-anxious way. It's also about giving responsibility for the situation back to the other. In this case, the woman not only gave the responsibility back to her husband, she also limited her own feedback such as nagging, begging, or just giving in. When you feel stuck in a situation, ask yourself, Am I taking responsibility only for myself and not others? If the answer is no, then think about how you can give responsibility back to others in a healthy way. The fifth and final thing you can do to grow as a non-anxious presence is to watch your seriousness. Friedmann taught that it's often the intensity of our seriousness that causes more difficulty than the challenge itself. When we are too serious, it can turn a challenge into a problem because the seriousness limits our ability to respond in non-anxious ways.

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In my book, If You Met My Family, You'd Understand a Family System's Primmer, I write, Seriousness is a funny thing. In life, you have to be serious or you will be irresponsible. You have to show up to work on time, pay your bills, and take out the garbage. If you don't pay attention, your life will become a mess. Life is hard enough without being irresponsible. However, if you are too serious, you get anxious. This is the problem. Nobody gets the problem they can handle. If we could handle it, then it wouldn't be a problem. It's often our super serious efforts to deal with a challenge that makes it a problem. How can you be responsible without being too serious? One way is to remember that you can only be responsible for yourself. Another is to remember that it's often our serious, anxiety-laden efforts that turn a challenge into a problem and a simple problem into a chronic one. In family systems theory, the best way to keep seriousness in check is through paradox and playfulness. I've already mentioned paradox. Playfulness is a form of paradox that can help bring down your own anxiety and that of others.

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It helps to free us from the seriousness of the situation and can help others do the same. It also helps avoid reactivity, adaptivity, and a conflict of wills. A great example of paradox and playfulness is in a case study called Reversing Direction on page 51 of Generation to Generation. A good husband and dedicated father found that his wife had chronically been having affairs. He took her once to a marriage counselor, but she refused to go again. He continued for two years desperately trying to make her see the light. He showed anger. He threatened. He tried making her jealous. At his witz end, ready to throw in the towel, he heard a discussion at church about how families never teach their members to push one another away. We are trained to hang on to others or to withdraw, pull away. Pushing people we care about at others or into activities we don't care about is almost inconceivable. When a relationship is caught in a skid, we almost never think to turn the wheel the other way. The next day, when the husband came home, he found his wife on the phone. Predictably, she hung up quickly.

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Resisting the urge to berate her, he said, Listen, honey, I know you want some privacy. I'll go for a walk around the block. Predictably, the wife's behavior escalated. At the end of the week, she informed him she was going to Miami to visit an old boyfriend. He went to a travel agency and got her brochures places to have fun in Southern Florida, adding some suggestions based on his own experience. She took them without comment and flew off, returned within three days, and announced that she had had a terrible time. The following week, she joined him in counseling and continued long after he dropped out. The emotional process angle here is that the husband was able to realize that his wife's infidelity had less to do with him and more to do with something that was unresolved in error, and that this created a triangle that was maintained by his constant efforts to get her to remain faithful. The paradoxical and playful responses from the husband were more designed to help him manage his own serious efforts to reduce his feedback and to give responsibility back to his wife. As with most all efforts to change, there was sabotage.

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She got worse before she got better, but he was able to avoid a failure of nerve, kept the course, and ultimately, she took responsibility for self. One thing is for sure, applying family systems principles is easier to understand than to put into practice, but it is possible. I've seen significant personal and professional change occur for myself and others, which is why I feel it's so important to share. It's hard work, but it's work worth doing. That's it for episode 310. Remember, if you want to connect with me, you can email me at jack@christian-leaders.com, and you can find more resources at thenonanxiousleader.com. If you have found this episode helpful, please share it with someone else who might benefit, and please leave a review on your podcast platform of choice. Thank you for your help. Until next time, go be yourself. Thank you for listening.