Doug-Fraley.com

Disappointment is no fun. Reduce the role it plays in your life by setting (high) expectations and aspirations that are in your power to achieve.

Your ‘job’ with respect to the past is to learn from it. Your role in the present moment is to attend to it, to experience it.

Just as the present contains memories of the past, it holds intentions and expectations of the future. Here lie your goals and aspirations, and these have a variety of flavors.

The issue with most goals, dreams and aspirations is that we need the world’s cooperation to achieve them. But we can’t wrestle external reality to our will to guarantee success. As an example, I might aspire to publish a global best-selling novel. Even if I am a talented writer, countless factors sit outside my control — most importantly, the individual buying decisions of readers across the country.

"There is only one way to happiness, and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will."— Epictetus

What the Stoics counsel is that I refine my goal to focus on that which I can control. I aspire to do all I can to become a top-selling author, not on actually becoming one. I aim to do my best. I can break this broad objective into more concrete contributing steps: improve my craft, approach an agent, create an outline, draft and edit chapters. These are in my control. I am able, by my own efforts, to achieve them and avoid disappointment.

You may distrust this advice. It goes against one of the most fundamental principles of our modern, productivity-focused world-view — that results are what matter. The Stoics say the opposite. Because the results sit to a great extent outside our direct influence, while our disciplined ex*****on of our part in moving toward them is chiefly within our control, we should focus on the latter.

The Stoics value results, but they recognize that obsessing on them is counterproductive. They teach that focusing on our own activity and the process of which it is a part is at least as likely to lead to a good outcome as chasing the result directly.

This is not an instruction to flow vs swim. It's an invitation to Realize that all we do is float, even when it feels like we're swimming (or sinking).

The movements of water show the importance of timing. Flow, for pushing creates resistance.

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching has 81 chapters of only a couple pages each. I draw from John Heider's translation / interpretation: The Tao of Leadership to give bite-sized leadership tips.
Get all 81 Tao Bites in my free Bite-Sized Tao Te Ching eBook (pdf). Link in comments.



https://innerfrontierway.substack.com/p/tao

In 1981, Columbia pictures released Stripes, one of Hollywood's greatest contributions to my children's cultural inheritance. In it, Private Francis Soyer (hair much too long for a boot camp recruit), was the platoon's most uptight person. If you put a lump of coal up his backside, in three minutes it would be a diamond.

With a psychotic glare and menacing tone, he introduces himself by informing his colleagues that he'll kill anyone who touches him, touches his stuff, or calls him Francis--he prefers the nickname Psycho. The drill sergeant, with a dismissive smirk, utters the line I've used on myself and others ever since:

Lighten up, Francis.

In our weaker, more brittle moments, we can all be Francis. The world gets on our nerves (welcome back to work, everyone!), and anything outside our skin is a threat. But of course it's not.

In one of my favorite books, The Art of Possibility, Rosamund and Benjamin Zander tell the story of a visitor witnessing a CEO calm one after another of his senior managers as they rotate through his office with their own emergencies for the day. The CEO reminds each of them to "Remember Rule #6," and each thanks him before leaving, lighter and more grounded. The visitor asks what Rule is, and the CEO replies, "Don't take yourself so bleeping seriously." Asked what the first five rules are, he responds, "There are no other rules."

Well, life may or may not be quite that simple. But the CEO and the drill sergeant both have a point. Take that power into your own hands. We each have a contracted, defensive, uptight piece of us that we might name Francis. Remind him of the one rule he needs. A hip-pocket sense of humor can be a super-power.

As an autobiographical footnote, I'll let you know that Stripes changed my life. Within three years after seeing it, overwhelmingly inspired to join the Army, I entered the West Point class of 1988. Bill Murray and John Candy were not present.

#6

Behold the other; behold yourself. Grant me the gift of seeing myself as others see me.

All behaviors contain their opposites. Learn to see things from all angles.

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching has 81 chapters of only a couple pages each. I draw from John Heider's translation / interpretation: The Tao of Leadership to give bite-sized leadership tips.
Get all 81 Tao Bites in my free Bite-Sized Tao Te Ching eBook (pdf). Link in comments.



https://innerfrontierway.substack.com/p/tao

Our need to be right is hurting us. But I must admit, I COULD be wrong.

The thing is that certainty Feels comfortable; it feels secure. This is ironic, because certainty and full security don't even exist. But subscribing to an illusory certainty can give both a (seemingly) solid handhold in a sea of flux and a tribe (especially in today's social media world) we can belong to.

We first need to take this onboard ourselves. To see that the handhold is imaginary, that the tribe is unreliable. Continuing with the sea of flux metaphor, we can build our skills and confidence to Sail on the sea, to operate without fixed moorings.

Ever notice how the navy puts its ships to sea when a hurricane approaches a major port? They know that being tethered to something fixed in the midst of wild change is likely to end in major damage.

Helping others on this front is essentially about getting them to experientially value Learning over any fixed knowledge. To see that if they pay attention to what's going on in and around them they can navigate life. They begin to trust their own adaptability, intuition, and awareness.

Every process has its own timing. Pay attention, and you can time light action to great effect.

Gentle, early leadership interventions work best. Recognise critical moments. As the process matures, interrupt as little as possible.

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching has 81 chapters of only a couple pages each. I draw from John Heider's translation / interpretation: The Tao of Leadership to give bite-sized leadership tips.
Get all 81 Tao Bites in my free Bite-Sized Tao Te Ching eBook (pdf). Link in comments.



https://innerfrontierway.substack.com/p/tao

We're desperately bad at arguing.

Of course, it helps if you see arguments/debates as a joint search for the best solution rather than a contest of wits. But sometimes it's too much to ask if we're caught up in emotion.

So it's important to at least enter these discussions open to the possibility that you just might learn something from them. If you are dead sure of the right answer, you'll spend all your energy speaking or listening only with the intent to rebut.

If it helps, think of it as an expression of strength (which it is) to remain open to being convinced and changing. Then you can be proud of the fact that you learned, even if you 'lose' the argument.

Cycling through argument and justification crowds out attunement to what is happening right now.

Unwise leaders are blinded by the desire to be right. Pay attention to what is happening rather than fuss over abstract rules.

Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching has 81 chapters of only a couple pages each. I draw from John Heider's translation / interpretation: The Tao of Leadership to give bite-sized leadership tips.
Get all 81 Tao Bites in my free Bite-Sized Tao Te Ching eBook (pdf). Link in comments.



https://innerfrontierway.substack.com/p/tao

Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.

-Susan David

The world, and the full range of human experience, has good and bad, success and failure, comfort and discomfort.

If our apparatus (body and mind) is to be sensitive and attuned enough to partake of the "good" half, it must, by necessity, bring us face-to-face with the "bad" half as well.

Shutting out or numbing ourselves to discomfort equally deadens our access to wonder and joy.