To beat the virus – ‘become’ the virus

I had a dream couple of nights ago…

In my dream Jim (one of my best mates from University), Prince William, Prince Harry and myself were packing the car in preparation for a road trip from the Gold Coast down to Melbourne. The sun was shining, the skies were blue. The car itself was nothing too grandiose, plain at best, something akin to what I drove in my university days, which was actually a Toyota Corona (no pun intended, I am totally serious).  Prince William, Prince Harry and I were trying to figure out how to get our respective bags into the boot of the car. We laughed and joked together as we tried various combinations in an attempt to ‘tetris’ the bags into the very limited boot space. For those of you who have ever owned a Toyota Corona, I am sure you can relate. The most striking part of the dream was how casual Prince Harry and Prince William were. Dressed in jeans and T-shirts, Prince William with a red baseball cap on backwards and Prince Harry wearing a pair of dishevelled, ankle-high basketball shoes with the laces barely done up, there was a spirit of genuine camaraderie between us. No royal protocols, no social distancing, no airs and graces – just the simple pleasure of four “mates” hanging out…

Let’s just press pause on my dream for the time being and come back to it a little later on.

My growing survival instinct

With all the craziness going on in the world, in the last few weeks I have been noticing my own survival instinct; something that is usually quite dormant has been stirred and is gradually, perhaps even rapidly, awakening. I feel more anxious than usual; I have a greater tendency to withdraw, and go further inside of myself; the boundaries around what is ’mine’ have definitely become more pronounced; and I am sheepishly willing to admit, that in more moments than I would like to admit, the ‘me’ has taken precedence over the ‘we’.

I have been surprised and also disappointed by these tendencies. But with a little time and reflection the disappointment has begun to abate and in doing so given way to sufficient curiosity for me to start to explore and ‘unpack’ my burgeoning survival instinct…

I do acknowledge that there is a threat to my health and this makes me feel somewhat nervous, but this is not what is eliciting my survival instinct. What feels most under threat is my identity! These are the aspects in my life that I have constructed and created over a lifetime in order to validate a certain self-perception. For me, much of my identity is formed by the work I do; the relationships and connections I have with those I work with and for; the sense of contribution and purpose my work allows me to cultivate; the income I earn; and the degree of skill or mastery I feel I have in the work that I do.

So the biggest threat I feel, what makes me nervous and keeps me up at night, is the danger of losing those mostly external and professional elements of my life, that I have used to ‘prop myself up’. To prop up my self-importance; to prop up my sense of achievement; to prop up my sense of value and contribution; to basically prop up my ego. And I am not using the term “ego” in a manner which connotes arrogance, exuberance and overconfidence, but rather in a way which pertains to an externalising of my sense of validation, worth and contribution.

The irony of course, is that for someone who runs a business that works primarily with and in sport, the effective shutting down of all sport in Australia means that I am on the verge (assuming that it has not already happened?) of having those aspects of my life that form my identity stripped away from me in one fell swoop. So personally, this is what I feel most threatened by; this is the disturbing aspect of the current COVID-19 related crisis that is triggering my survival instinct.

Finding the ‘seeds’ of a solution

My training in Process Oriented Psychology has taught me that when we – individually, collectively or even organisationally – are experiencing a disruptive event or challenge, there is often an aspect or element within that disturbance that is useful to us, perhaps even required for our own development. So weirdly, the ‘seeds’ of a solution to a particular problem, can sometimes lie embedded within the problem itself. To do this we need to temporarily suspend our judgement and moral critique of those disruptive forces; this can be challenging given they have potentially resulted in us experiencing pain and discomfort. However, this is critical because our very judgement of these elements may represent our own resistance to them and also a difficulty in seeing their functionality and potential usefulness.

So if we apply this principle, then it follows that if the virus is the thing that is disturbing me and challenging my identity, then there must be some aspect of the virus itself that I need in terms of my own development. This in itself is beneficial because it provides me with an avenue for growth, which in these times where so much is out of my control, is something I can control. This is in contrast to viewing my current situation only through the lens of how my identity feels threatened, which in turn makes me feel out of control and therefore a victim to the virus and the related measures taken to “flatten the curve”. And like most people, feeling like a victim and that I am out of control does not sit well with me.

So I started to explore those attributes that I project onto the virus. (And please excuse my tendency to anthropomorphise the virus; I am being slightly tongue-in-cheek here as a way of assisting me to compare the ‘nature’ of the virus to my own nature.) The virus is tiny, basically imperceptible. It has no ego, no ambition or need to be ‘bigger’ than it actually is. It is not attached to any kind of identity. It does not need to validate its success based on status, education, wealth or any other kind of external reference point or KPI. In fact, the virus is not worried about ‘success’ at all!! If we were to evaluate its power through most of the metrics that we in the first world normally use to determine success, status and influence we would place it well and truly at the bottom rung of the power hierarchy.

Yet, despite all this, look at the power this microscopic organism is exerting over humanity! Our health systems are on the verge of collapsing as they reach and exceed their capacity to look after the sick and infirmed. Financial markets are in freefall, with no real sign of the “volatility” abating any time in the near future. Anxiety and stress are hitting peak levels; as anyone who has been to the supermarket in the last few weeks can attest to, you can feel the tension in the atmosphere. Businesses, even large and well established ones, are closing down left, right and centre, and people are losing their jobs en masse. And finally, the social and moral norms, which in the past have kept us accountable to a certain set of behaviours, have eroded to the point where behaviours which would have been totally unacceptable six weeks ago, have now become commonplace. Given all this, I can’t help but feel that this virus, as imperceptible and ‘powerless’ as it may be, is actually kicking our arse. If this was a boxing match, we would be on our knees begging for mercy, and a trainer would be on the verge of throwing in the towel. For something that is so tiny, imperceptible and powerless, the impact of the virus is certainly deep and widespread.

Back to my dream…

In dreams those ‘actors’ that are further away from us in our everyday life, can represent elements or traits that are less conscious or that we identify with less. They therefore represent aspects of our psyche that the dream is ‘encouraging’ us to incorporate or integrate more into our lives. And of course, dreams are not literal, they play out in symbolic and metaphorical ways. As I said, the most striking part of the dream was how casual Prince William and Prince Harry were. Despite their royal status, they were egoless, casual and unattached to any particular outcome. In this way they are much like the virus. Now I am not for a second saying that my new “mates” are viruses, but what I am saying is that (at least in my mind) the attributes or energetic “valence” of the virus, are very similar to how Prince William and Prince Harry were behaving in my dream i.e. not “big” but small; unattached to outcomes rather than outcome focused; have little currency in power in the traditional sense, yet powerful in its effect.

So what does all this mean?

It feels like the effect the virus is having on me is powerful, almost to the point of being all consuming. I admit the circumstances that I find myself in as a result of COVID-19 have rattled me to the core, much more than I could have ever imagined, and probably completely out of proportion to the reality of the situation. This tells me that the threat I feel is probably much more about my own development or ‘inner process’ – a virus-induced mid-life crisis if you will.

It is taking increasing amounts of internal energy for me to maintain my identity in what feels like an onslaught of COVID-19 driven forces; each exerting their own unique pressure on my capacity to keep propping up that identity. My fear is if I stop fighting and give in to these forces, that in some ways I will become more like the virus itself – small and invisible; not attached to ambition, success, purpose; free of ego, the need to be bigger, smarter, more skilled than I actually am; insignificant and without worth. But as much as I fear the unknown of this way of being (mostly because it is totally foreign to me), the facilitator and coach inside of me knows that the resistance and fear I feel is the best indicator that this is the direction I need to explore. Furthermore, my waning ability to keep fighting the aforementioned COVID-19 driven forces, means that I might not have a choice!

What I do know is that I have spent decades reinforcing and strengthening my current identity, almost to the point of making it impenetrable. If I look back at how I have lived my life to this point, my ambition, drive and desire to make a difference have certainly come before pretty well everything else. So given this, I don’t think it is a process that I am going to work through in the next two weeks.

However, the more I can slowly and incrementally become more ‘virus-like’, the less power these virus related circumstances will have over me, and therefore the less I will be impacted by the current situation – at least that is what the theory would suggest.  At the end of the blog, there is a personal reflection I have being doing regularly. Feel free to go through the steps yourself and share any insights that you glean from the process, I would love to your thoughts and feedback.

What’s the bigger picture?

One of the hallmarks of good leadership is being aware of your own experience, and then asking yourself the question: How do I make this experience useful or relevant for others? So I am going to attempt to do that here and if you will now permit me to ‘zoom out’ and see how this relates to a bigger picture…

I think as a society, we have become complacent. We know that these kind of unexpected or “black swan” events are when not if phenomenon. Yet most businesses and individuals have not put in place the required reserves and buffers which would enable them to navigate a crisis even as half as severe as the one we are currently facing, let alone the magnitude of what we’re currently going through. What is of even more interest (as well as concern) to me is that most people, including myself, have not invested in reinforcing the internal or psychological structures which would make us better equipped to deal with such a crisis.

As a society, we have focused on growth (external as opposed to internal) and accumulation. For it is these things that prop up our collective and corporate identities in an analogous way to the way that I have propped up my own identity. For example the bulk of the increase in the US stock market (prior to the current crisis) has been driven by companies buying back their own shares, rather than genuine innovation and expansion, or organic growth as it’s called. Individually and collectively we fight tooth and nail to hang onto our relevance, because to be relevant must mean that we have value and worth. So in this era where our self-worth and sense of meaning is inextricably coupled with our status in life; the income we make; the size of our property portfolio; our lack of wrinkles; the number of “friends” we have on Facebook; our weight, body shape/size; the number of likes we have on Instagram etc etc….. maybe the virus is showing us the fragility that we as individuals and organisations have when our identity and sense of worth is based primarily on those external reference points??

So finally, if there is meaning and wisdom in the Universe (which I realise is a contentious statement in itself and there will be a diversity of viewpoints around), but if we can even temporarily entertain the idea that this is even minimally true….

What is how we experience the COVID-19 crisis ‘shining a light on’ in terms of where our individual, collective and organisational ‘approaches’ need more development and/or balancing? In other words, what aspects of our own nature, that up till now may have been marginalised or undervalued, is the virus ‘encouraging’ us to incorporate into how we live and work?

And if the virus is what is creating havoc, what are the aspects of this disturbing force that we need to integrate more into our own lives, not just by way of dealing with the (hopefully) the short-term impacts of the virus, but also in order to support our ongoing sense of meaning, fulfilment and purpose?

Personal reflection:

1. Make a short list of those external aspects of your life that you use to prop up, validate and reinforce your current identity e.g. your work, your status, your appearance, your physical fitness, your income, your relationship, your achievements, your wealth etc
2. Now imagine, in an instant, all those are stripped away from you until nothing is left but the core of your being, the essence of who you are
3. What is left at the end of this process? Take a few moments to really get a sense of it and capture how it feels
4. How would your leadership change if you were to integrate more of this aspect of yourself into your leadership style?
5. How is this aspect useful or needed in your current leadership given the current COVID-19 crisis?