Duane Black meets with his people and defuses a stressful situation by saying:
I am a pilot, and therefore, I like the metaphor of flying a plane to explain this process. On a flight, a pilot is always off course. And therefore it’s continuous realignment that gets him to his destination. And if there were no such thing as “off course,” there could be no flight. Because a flight is a series of realignments from off course to on course. Every step of the way. Even an autopilot operating on a GPS (the technology that keeps you almost perfectly on course) is designed to constantly monitor any minor course deviation and correct that in order to keep you on course. So the way the autopilot functions is also the way a pilot functions, in a constant process of course correction, of altitude correction, of turn and bank correction, until you come into alignment with the correct space. And then as soon as you notice yourself a little bit off course, you make a correction and come into alignment again.
Notice that an autopilot does not get depressed or angry when it’s off course. It welcomes that feedback from the environment, because “off course” puts the plane on course.
But a person similar to Chuck will think, merely out of superstition, that there’s something wrong with being off course. So he negatively judges that feedback from the environment and gets so upset about it that he can’t take in the information it’s trying to give him.
A real feeling of being off course for a lot of people on your team will happen whenever there is change. They have a natural resistance to change, and generate a deep inner fear of it. They don’t see that change is synonymous with a happy life and a vibrant organization.
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It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
—Charles Darwin
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The hands-off manager treats change as the joy and pleasure of living in a four-season environment. You probably enjoy a rainy day once in a while. It nourishes the Earth! The mix, the newness, is what keeps life fresh. Change is what keeps life interesting and what keeps us growing.
The hands-off manager helps her people see that life is a process of becoming and evolving (in other words, changing). And when her people can accept change as a friend, not as an enemy, they’ve completed another successful reversal.
Look again to the inside
Most managers look outside themselves, at the organization and the world, to see what needs to be fixed. Then they look outside again to see what they want to aspire to. Then they try, through judgment, to change what’s in the world to what they think it ought to be.
It’s time to reverse this process. Not just at work but in your whole life.
It’s time to look at the world only to see your own reflection. The world without is a mirror of what’s within. Only by seeing it as a mirror can you learn to alter your internal approach from micromanaging the world to hands-off harmony with its forces.
The first step toward this is to stop thinking so critically. Stop comparing. Stop judging others. Stop trying to determine what people “should” do.
Instead, first discover who they are.
Then discover who you are.
The world outside will act as a mirror reflecting back to you. As you go into it and attempt different things, it will show you what works best for you. Listen to the compliments coming from other people. Listen to what people say about what you’re doing. Do they acknowledge how good you are at it? Look to the world almost as a sounding board to give you feedback to help you understand and come to know better what’s inside you.
Then see what comes to you naturally. See what you don’t have to work so hard to be good at, because that’s your gift. Mozart started composing when he was a child. He found it early. And his parents and those around him gave him immediate positive feedback.
There’s a gift similar to that in all of us.
So it’s time to stop looking externally for what we need to fix out there. Instead, we can look externally for what we align with inside ourselves. And then we can let what we experience communicate to us. Our practice becomes a practice of trusting life. Just as a beginning swimmer learns to trust the water.
Some people we introduce to this practice don’t believe that such natural ability is there. Some of them say, “I’m not good at anything. Everything I’ve ever tried I’ve failed at.” But soon they find out, after careful self-observation, that they have consistently tried to be who others thought they should be, which will almost always end in frustration.
That process must be reversed.