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Empathy Practice Trio outline and directions

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The Inner Circle - Everything you need to know about Shame

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Podcast Episode · Real Schools - The Inner Circle Podcast · 26/08/2020 · 1h 2m

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RS Webinar Tutorial: Restorative Circles

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The Inner Circle - Conflict and Fairness

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Real Schools - The Inner Circle Podcast · Episode

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In this episode, Claire Matthews, Principal of Firhouse Educate Together Secondary School who opened in August 2018 with a restorative ethos and vision, Andrew Moloney, Deputy Principal, Aisling O'Neill, Student Support Assistant, Carol Flynn, Secretary, Charlene Nolan, a 1st year student mother and three 2nd Year Students, Maïssa, Millie and Amy explain how the restorative culture in the school was created and what tools help to maintain it.

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Episode 11: A restorative Secondary School - Part One

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In this episode, Claire Matthews, Principal of Firhouse Educate Together Secondary School who opened in August 2018 with a restorative ethos and vision, Andrew Moloney, Deputy Principal, Aisling O'Neill, Student Support Assistant, Carol Flynn, Secretary, Charlene Nolan, a 1st year student mother and three 2nd Year Students, Maïssa, Millie and Amy explain how the restorative culture in the school was created and what tools help to maintain it.

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The first Unlocking Us podcast is here! Along with the excitement of sending this into the world, I'm feeling equal doses of fear, awkwardness, and vulnerability. In this episode I talk about my strategy for staying in tough first times versus tapping out and shutting down. When we get to the point that we only do things that we're already good at doing, we stop growing. And truly living.

Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston, where she holds the Huffington Foundation Endowed Chair at the Graduate College of Social Work. She also holds the position of visiting professor in management at the University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.

Brené has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy. She is the author of six #1 New York Times best sellers and is the host of two award-winning Spotify podcasts, Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead.

Brené's books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and her titles include Atlas of the Heart, Dare to Lead, Braving the Wilderness, Rising Strong, Daring Greatly, and The Gifts of Imperfection. With Tarana Burke, she co-edited the best-selling anthology You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience.

Brené's TED talk on the Power of Vulnerability is one of the top five most-viewed TED talks in the world, with over 50 million views. Brené is the first researcher to have a filmed lecture on Netflix, and in March 2022, she launched a new show on HBO Max that focuses on her latest book, Atlas of the Heart.

Brené spends most of her time working in organizations around the world, helping develop braver leaders and more-courageous cultures.

She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, Steve. They have two children, Ellen and Charlie, and a weird Bichon named Lucy.

Follow Brené

Brené Brown: Hi everyone, I'm Brené Brown, and this is Unlocking Us. You can hear me, like you can hear me smiling through my talking here. This is our very first Unlocking Us podcast and I am... I'm somewhere at the intersection of like maybe scared and excited, which is an intersection that I frequent often, but you'd think it'd get easier, but it doesn't always get easier. I think I've recorded three episodes, and I have to say, I love it. I want to do this for the rest of my life. As much as I love giving talks, I think I like listening even more. I love listening, I love learning, I love talking to people, and I've been an interviewer for 20 years, 25 years, it's just my... It's my thing. So welcome to the first episode of Unlocking Us. I will tell you this, and this is what we're going to talk about FFTs today, and here's where I'll start. As much as I love this new podcast, what I don't love is being new at things, and we're going to talk about being new at things today. I think for all of us, being new at something is incredibly vulnerable. Even when we're excited and committed and we're like, "I'm going to do this. I'm going to try this new thing," the awkward, uncomfortable time comes right after the excitement and it feels awful. And I can tell you if the definition of vulnerability is uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure, then being new at something is the epitome of vulnerability.

BB: What's also tricky, I think for me is, by the time you reach middle age, which I define "somewhere between late 30s and dead", by the time you reach middle age, you know that the only way to get to the other side of the discomfort of being new is to push right through the middle. Experience teaches us that as much as we want to fast forward through the hard, rocky parts of doing something that we've never done before, we just can't. And being new... Being new at big things is hard, but it's not just life's big moments, like new jobs or new roles or moving in with a new partner for the first time or having a baby, it's not just the big things that are tough when it comes to being new. Little things, small daily things can also push us in really tough ways. I'll give you an example. I have a Peloton bicycle. I'm sitting here with my sister Barrett, would you call it a bicycle, like...

Barrett Guillen: Bicycle.

BB: Are you sure?

BG: Yeah.

BB: She's shrugging her shoulders like, "I don't know. Don't put me on the spot." I don't know, I have a Peloton bike, I'm going to say that because that sounds cooler. I have a Peloton bike, so like... For spinning classes. So, I have a Peloton bike and I was so excited to get started, and the first five times I rode it, the whole time, I had this... I have a very difficult habit that when I'm trying something new, and I feel scared and like everyone is going to judge me, I always go to the, "This is bullshit. This is just bullshit." You should have seen me on this bike. I could not get clipped into it, so the first time I rode it, I rode it for 30 minutes, not even watching a class, just by myself, not clipped in, it didn't work at all. Then I finally learned how to get clipped into it, and I left my shoes clipped into my bicycle, my bike for three months. For three months, my bike just sat in my study with the shoes attached to it, because I couldn't get them off, I didn't know how to do it. Now I can get on and off and ride it but being new is hard. Another great small example. I just got bangs. Now, I have not had bangs since the '90s. And back then, they were like your standard issue breakup bangs. They came with a cigarette and a wine cooler, and you got them cut right after some asshole broke up with you.

BB: So, I got bangs. How long ago did I get bangs, about a month ago, two? About a month ago? [chuckle] I got bangs. And when I left the... I was going to call it a beauty parlor, but we'll call it... What's this... Salon. [chuckle] I need like a "what's cool?" translator for my podcast, I need to put something on the microphone so that when I say, "I left my pocketbook on the drainboard," it translates it to, "I left my purse on the counter." Anyway, so I got these bangs, and I was leaving the salon, because I'm too cool to go to a beauty parlor, but I left the salon and I thought they looked so cute. Well, let me just tell you, for the next four to five days, at least, I'd be late for work, I couldn't get my hair to work, all I could do is resort back to my... I had to rely on muscle memory in my wrist and my round brush and... Let me just tell you, I looked like Vince Neil. And if you don't know who Vince Neil is, you can Google Mötley Crüe, 1985. I just had big '80s hair, and everyone was trying to be very supportive. They would say things like, "Wow, still looks good after all these years. [chuckle] Would you like a wine cooler?" So hard things, hard where... New is hard and we don't like the discomfort.

BB: But something that I've seen over the past 20 years has really scared me. The last 20 years of research, I've seen how sometimes we all get so afraid of the vulnerability that we actually stop trying or doing anything that we're not already good at doing. So if it's not already comfortable, if we already don't have some expertise, if we don't already know how to do it and do it well, we're not doing it. Here's what's hard, and I think scary about that. When we give up being new and awkward, we stop growing, and we stop growing, we stop living. I love that quote from Shawshank Redemption, "Get busy living or get busy dying." When we stop growing, we start declining, there's no neutral here. When we no longer feel that discomfort of being new, of being an awkward learner, things start to shut down inside of us. The discomfort of exploration of doing new things, of being an awkward rookie again, that's the juice, it's our lifeblood. It's the secret sauce.

BB: And here's the even bigger news, I think. The more we're willing to embrace the suck and try new things, the more new things we're willing to try. And it's not because being new gets comfortable, it's because we learn how to normalize discomfort. If there's one thing I know for sure, normalizing discomfort, learning how to stay standing in the midst of feeling unsure and uncertain, that's the foundation of courage. Imagine what it would be like to know that you can get through something that's vulnerable and uncomfortable, that you have what it takes to survive the cringey, awkward moments, as my kids would say, "That's so cringey, mom." Knowing that we have the strength to survive those moments and come out on the other side with new information, new ideas, new habits, new skills, that's how we get braver with our lives and with our hearts.

BB: So I want to share a strategy with you for embracing the suck of new, and I'm going to confess that I am 100% leaning in to that strategy right now. The strategy is called the FFT. Now, if you're social distancing right now, and you're home with your kids... And you're home with your kids, and someone who filters the language they hear, I'd like for you to walk slowly and calmly to your phone and take it off speaker. I'm going to tell you what FFT stands for. You may not want to blast this, or you may want to. Take your phone and hold it up to your ear for just a sec. I'll give you five, four, three, two, one. Okay, FFT stands for Fucking First Time, and right now it is saving me. I am white knuckling about five different FFTs right now, and without this strategy, I'd be out of my mind. The first most powerful part of the strategy is naming the FFT when you're in it, "Hey, what is going on right now? Why am I... Why do I feel out of control? Why do I feel like I don't know what I'm doing? Why am I in a shame spiral? Why am I so confused?" I'm like, "Is this an FFT? I'm in an FFT." So naming it is key to understanding it, because we're meaning-making species. We've got to have the meaning and we have to have language as a handle. So first we identify that we're in an FFT and we name it.

BB: Sometimes, and this is a really big myth, sometimes we're afraid to name experiences or feelings because we think naming them gives them power, and if we're feeling something hard or uncomfortable, the last thing we want to do is give it power. Let me dispel this myth now with 400,000 pieces of data and 20 years of research. When we name and own hard things, it does not give them power, it gives us power. And what do I mean by power? The best definition of power that I think exists in the world is from Martin Luther King Jr., "Power is the ability to effect change and achieve purpose." So if we put it all together, when we name and own hard things, it doesn't give the hard things power, it gives us the power to effect change and achieve purpose. So if we can say, "Oh my God, this is hard because I'm in an FFT," again, maybe it's something small, like trying to fix my bangs or ride my new bike, or your first yoga with goats class, or a new job, or a new relationship, "Why is this so hard? Oh, FFT. I'm in the FFT."

BB: And naming the FFT leads to three steps. One, we can normalize it, "Oh, this is exactly how new is supposed to feel. This is uncomfortable because brave is uncomfortable." Two, we can put it in perspective, "This feeling is not permanent, and it doesn't mean I suck at everything. It means I'm in the middle of an FFT around this one thing." Three, I can reality check my expectations, "This is going to suck for a while. I'm not going to crush this right away." And if you're interested in teaching your kids the FFT strategy, you can always call it TFT, terrible first times. And remember, the thing to teach them is when you're in a TFT, when they're at that first gymnastics class, or their first Spanish class, or their first spelling bee, or the first date, or the first time driving, when you're in a TFT, a terrible first time, what you're trying to do is normalize it, put it in perspective, and reality check your expectations.

BB: A great example that I can give you around the FFT and being new is when you're newly sober and you're working a 12-step program or many of the other programs, people will say you need to go to six meetings in six days, or you need to go to 10 meetings in 10 days. Why? Because expectation says, "I'm going to go to a meeting, someone's going to say something, and I'm going to be cured." We have terrible expectations around first times. We just set ourselves up for such shame and such disaster with our expectations. So if you go to six meetings in six days, this is how it normally works: Meeting one, it's the Brené approach, "This is bullshit. I don't know what I'm doing here, and these people are mostly losers, and I'm better than everyone here." Day two, "Okay, this again, just confirming what I thought. I shouldn't be here, I'm better than everyone here." Day three, "Well, I mean, maybe I'm not better than everyone here, maybe some of the things I'm hearing, maybe they're resonating, but this shit smells like cigarettes, and it's stale, the coffee is horrible. I just... It's not for me." Day four, "Okay, these are my people, and I need a cigarette and a cup of coffee, really bad coffee." That's the way it works. And so, name the FFT, and that leads us to normalizing, putting things in perspective, and reality checking.

BB: So I'm going to walk you through a couple of examples in my own life right now. And this is pretty vulnerable for me, but I thought, "Screw it. It's the first podcast. Go vulnerable or go home," that's my new motto. But I'm in a lot of FFTs right now. The podcast is one, advertising, which is part of the podcast, is another. And I'm not sure about you, but this is my first f'ing global pandemic. So I'm going to just be super honest with you about what FFTs feel like for me right now and walk you through naming them, what was going on before I named them, and then how I normalized, put things in perspective, and started reality checking.

BB: So let's start with the podcast, because you're here with me in it right now. You're not in an FFT because you're probably not listening to your first podcast, but I am in my FFT, and I'll tell you why.

BB: Because I did my first podcast... When did... When did I Thought It Was Just Me come out, like 2007? So I did my first podcast in 2007, I bought a little microphone, I set it up in my red kitchen table, and I did a read along podcast for 10 weeks, and it was so much fun, but then it kind of went away, and it got complicated for me, and I didn't know how to do all the feeds, at that time. It was hard, and I was doing it on GarageBand which seemed super complicated for me, so I kind of gave it up, but it's never left the back of my mind. And I just... To be honest with you, this has always felt like my dream job or dream medium, is building community and having real hard conversations about everything, from love to heart break. This is what I want to do.

BB: So we decided, "This is it, we're going to podcast." So we went whole hog. We transformed the downstairs space in our office to a beautiful podcast room with a green room, we found a wonderful partner, we set up interviews, we set up a big launch at South by Southwest, we did everything in my dream scape for this podcast, and then Corona came, and now I'm in a closet on top of my son's dirty Under Armour clothes. And, I have to say that I recorded my first podcast a couple of days ago, then after I recorded, I said, "I don't want to go on with my podcast to my community the first time, with other people. I just want to talk directly to y'all." I had to practice saying hi, I have to think about it right now, wait, do I have it written down somewhere, do I have a post it note? Check.

BG: Hey, everyone.

BB: No, oh, is it hey everyone?

BG: Yeah.

BB: What am I saying?

BG: Hey, everyone. This is Brené.

BB: Do I say hey or hi?

BG: Hi.

BB: Oh, hi, yeah. See, you suck too. [laughter] FFT. Hi, everyone. I'm Brené Brown.

BB: And this is Unlocking Us. [laughter] God, you see. I have practiced that 30 times because I didn't like it at first because it lacked something. So for some reason, I thought I would do something more around, "Hey, guys and gals, dolls and... " I don't know what comes with a doll, and my sister looked at me and said, "I think that's the guy from Grease. " I was like, "Shut up." It took me like 20 times to get this right, and I still can't really do it without looking. Then I tried to do something more serious, where I was going to get really close to the mic, because I saw that in a movie and I said, "Somewhere I saw this great podcaster talking into a mic with this kind of like... Not a sexy voice, but more of a, 'Hi, everyone, this is Brené Brown.'" Then I thought to myself, "Check, no, that's Pirate Radio. And he was the crazy guy who unzipped his pants and made the zipper sounds on his radio station as they were broadcasting from the ship."

BB: So all I'm saying is that I'm in an FFT, I don't know how it's all going to work. I don't know how it's all going to sound, but what I know is that I'm in an FFT, and it's hard and I want to be myself, but in those f'ing first times, we have a tendency to armor up and protect, and do things from movies or other ideas that usually move us away from being ourselves. In fact, when things started canceling and shifting, I called an emergency meeting of our leadership team, and within five minutes, we were all frustrated and we were kind of vying for, "Who's the most overwhelmed?" Is that true?

BG: Yes.

BB: And I just kept saying, "Y'all, the wheels are falling off of the podcast, the shit is hitting the fan, what's happening?" And then finally, and it might have been you, was it you Barrett? Someone said, maybe Suzanne, someone said, "FFT, we're in an FFT." It was like opening that little knob on the Instant Pot, wasn't it?

BG: Yes.

BB: It was like shhhhhh, just the pressure relief. Just naming it. We were like, "We're in an FFT." So what are the three things in an FFT? Normalize it, put it in perspective, reality check. So normalize it; This is exactly how we're supposed to feel, this is new, we don't know what we're doing. That's why it's so wobbly. That's why we're scared. That's why we don't know. We can't draw on history, we can't draw on experience, we can't say, "Oh, this is the way we did it, this is the way we really crushed it back when we did that podcast in '85." We are coming atcha, from a pile of dirty clothes, in a closet, without a net, because we're FFT'ing. Put it in perspective; The simple thing, again, not permanent, it doesn't mean we suck at everything. Let's remember, for us, this is how we're getting our FFT, getting through our FFT with a podcast, in five days, five weeks, or five months, when we look back, we might laugh a little and we will for sure say, "Do you remember when that was so hard? And here are the 25 things that we were super sure about doing back then that we would never do again." That's the reality of the first time, that's why it's the secret sauce, that's why it's the juice, that's why it keeps us growing and our brains firing. Last, reality checking expectations; Here is the universal reality check in the FFT, whether it is a parenting FFT, whether it is a professional FFT, this is a heavier lift than what we thought or expected.

BB: An emotionally heavier lift, a physically heavier lift, a strategy resource heavier lift. This is harder than we thought, and it's scary. So when you're in the FFT, you've got to remind yourself, it's going to take twice as long, be 10 times as hard, and I personally am going to be 25% more pissed off all the time because I don't do wobbly. And this is a great time, first podcast, I think I should just clear this up with them right now. If you're thinking Brené doesn't do wobbly? She's like the patron saint of vulnerability. The joke's on all of us. I believe in vulnerability, I try to practice it. I'm not really into it. I am not it. I am not. Don't let me be the representative of vulnerability. I'm the researcher, not the representative. I don't like wobbly. The other things that were shocking, when I say, "Reality check your expectation; the lift is going to be worse."

BB: So our partners Cadence13. We love them. They sent their audio engineer down to Houston to take our beautiful podcast space and set it up. So I thought he was going to come with maybe a handle bag, like a Nordstrom size handle bag with some microphones. I walk into the podcast space, there are 20 boxes, and he's under the table with a drill. And he kind of slides out and says, "Hey, your grandpa didn't build this or anything, right? I'm just drilling all into it." It took three 12-hour days to set up the podcast room, and 50 boxes of stuff.

BB: If you're like me, and you're not good at estimating time or energy or effort, the FFT will really F you up because it's always going to be harder than you thought. It's just going to be new, wobbly. But here's the thing new, wobbly, honest, coming right at you from the dirty clothes in the closet, in social distancing right now, I'm super glad you're here. Second thing that's very, very scary for me right now is advertising on this podcast. I've never done a paid ad in my life. I don't even stand close to podiums with brands on them when I speak in public. I don't talk about brands, nothing, nada. I think that's partly because of my academic training. If you do any type of brand work or take any money even like, I think it's over $5 or something. There's a shit ton of paperwork and I'm just not great at... I'm the paperwork person... I do the paperwork when I get the 14th email that says, "We're revoking everything, including your birth certificate." So I've never done any kind of brand work, ad work. I've just never done it.

BB: We went with an advertising model for this podcast because it makes the most sense to us. It's free, you can... Everyone can get it. But there are ads. And there have to be ads because we have a team of 10 people, and we have a huge partner, and people need to make a living. And it's not that I can't evangelize a product. So I come from a long line of evangelists. I have these very vivid memories of sitting at my grandmother's table in San Antonio, south side of San Antonio, over if you're San Antonian, hey, hey, over by McCreless Mall. And she'd come out of the kitchen wearing... She always wore a patchwork housecoat that snapped at the front, with pearl snaps, and she has square-toed cowboy boots, kind of like a bronzy leather with Eagles stamped on both sides of them. And she wore black cat-eye glasses until the very end, and I remember very distinctly sitting there one day, and I was sitting there with Curley, her husband who was a forklift driver for Pearl Brewery and said, "This is Jimmy Dean's new sausage. It has sage in it. Sage is a spice. This is the best sausage I've ever had, and you can get it too in the frozen food aisle at the Piggly Wiggly." She was the best ad person of her time.

BB: My mom was the same way. So she's... My mom still does ads, all the time. She'll say, "Try this lotion." "Oh, I'm good Ma." "Try this lotion. It's both silk and smoothing, but won't leave you feeling... " [chuckle] Okay, yes or no? I don't know. I don't know. We just have it. So I come from a long maternal line of cursers and evangelists. But I'm still anxious about it because I don't want to go through the new part of it. What if I can't do it? What if it sounds weird? What if I'm ridiculous? What if I'm embarrassed or I go into a shame spiral while I'm trying to say something? I just... It's going to be hard.

BB: So, I had a little FFT breakdown about the advertising. And my team looked at me and said, "FFT Brené. Normalize it, this is the first time. Put it into perspective, it won't always be hard, and set realistic expectations." I said, "What does that mean?" And they said, "Reality check the expectations, not only of yourself but the people around you. When we're in FFT, we have to reality set expectations for everyone." So I said, "Okay, let me think about this." Reality check expectations, even with external partners. Even if you're with your family, don't just reality check your expectations. Reality check them with your partner, with your kids. So I said, "Okay." We sat down, big leadership meeting, everyone from Cadence13, everyone from our side and I just was completely honest about expectations. I basically said, "I've got good news and bad news about the advertising. Good news, I can get really excited about things I love. The bad news, I will do no ads, zero, for anything that I do not love, period. If I don't love it, I'm not going to talk about it. And when I do talk about it, I'm not going to read anyone's copy." And you could just kind of see their faces going...

BB: Maybe I threw them into the... Maybe I threw them into an FFT. Oh, I definitely... [chuckle] Barrett's laughing and smiling. We definitely threw them into an FFT, and they said, "Say more about not reading the copy and only things you love." And I said, "I can't bullshit this community because I've spent over a decade building this community and I trust them, and I think they trust me." So if I love it, I'll talk to them about it freely, but I'm going to tell stories about it, and my own stories about it and why I love it, and that's not reading ad copy, and if I have never tried it or I just kind of like it a bit, I'm not going to sell it to them any more than I'd sell it to people that I love. So here's the thing, ads start next week. Our ad policy is straightforward, I like to call it, all BB, no BS. If I'm advertising it, then I believe in it, I'll tell you the story about why I love it, listen to it, use it or do it, and you can count on me for that.

BB: So normalize, this is new and sometimes I have intentionally stayed away from things like this. I feel weird but I feel less weird when I'm in my values. Perspective, I can't feel weird forever. I might even start to enjoy telling you about things I love. And expectations, there's this great quote... We're reality checking expectations as a part of dealing with our FFT. So this quote that I love, I've seen it attributed to Nelson Mandela, I've seen it attributed to Anne Lamott, well suffice it to say that some really smart person said, "Expectations are just resentments waiting to happen." So when as part of... In our FFT, we're in something new and hard, reality check expectations and that really minimizes resentment, I have saved the hardest FFT for last, the COV1D-19 pandemic. I think it's safe to say that this pandemic is a collective FFT, so let's just name that right off the bat.

BB: We don't know what we're doing, many of us are trying to make our kids feel reassured when we don't feel sure about anything, we're trying to be normal, but nothing is normal. And can I just also say it's the worst FFT ever? I mean, I'm a grown-ass person, but I do not know what I'm doing. So if I take the strategy that I use personally and professionally for the FFT, and we normalize it, put it in perspective and reality check expectations, here's what that looks like for me. Normalize it, we don't know how to do this, and by "this" I mean, we don't know how to social distance and stay sane. We don't know how to stay socially connected, but far apart. We're learning and we're getting better, and you can see that every day. We don't know what to tell our kids, we don't know exactly how to homeschool. I saw something on TikTok or Instagram that said, "I have home schooled for one day, every teacher should make one billion dollars a day."

BB: We don't know exactly what we're doing, we're anxious, we're uncertain, we are, a lot of us, afraid, and it is okay to feel all those feelings. And let me tell you this for sure, and I know this from my life, I know this from again, 20 years of research and 400,000 pieces of data, if you don't name what you're feeling, if you don't own the feelings and feel them, they will eat you alive. And if you're a parent, you can give your kids a sense of safety while also modeling and teaching them what not knowing and uncertainty looks and feels like. Helping your kids feel safe and secure during this time of uncertainty, and modeling what uncertainty can look like and feel like are not mutually exclusive. It is... That is that dual mind, that's being able to hold two different things that have a lot of tension and to have the strength to hold things like that, is really how we measure human intelligence and emotional intelligence.

BB: I know we want to try to make everything certain for our kids, and we think that's what makes them feel safe, but what happens is when they're away from us and then they feel uncertain, they think that automatically means they're unsafe and that's not the truth. So we can say, "We don't know what's happening, we're doing the best that we think we can do, it is scary, and that's okay to feel." But y'all, it's okay, let's just... It's okay to even be overwhelmed with emotion right now. You just have to name it and feel it, so if you're with people and you're social distancing with a group of people, have a check-in, one word to describe what you're feeling right now, one thing you're grateful for right now. If you're by yourself, reach out, and not text. Phone, or FaceTime, or Zoom, or something where you can see people or hear people, and just say, just check... One word check-in, "What's going on for you right now?"

BB: We did it to... Did we do that? Was that today? And we got everything from kind of settling in to uncertain to anxious, but just being able to say it, again, meaning-making species, we need language as handles to be able to say what we're feeling, to wrap words around it, allows us to start making meaning. Number two, putting this FFT of the pandemic in perspective, we don't know when this will end, but we do know it's not forever. And if you're a parent, remember that perspective is a function of experience, the less experience, the less perspective. If you have kids who are saying, "I'll never see my friends again," or, "I can't believe we're missing spring break." That lack of perspective is not always about selfishness, and we don't make them tougher or more empathic towards others by diminishing their feelings.

BB: Disappointment is something that a lot of us are feeling right now, and it's okay to feel disappointed. It's okay to be safe, have enough food, have some resources and still feel disappointed, because denying your disappointment doesn't make you more empathetic towards people who have it a lot worse than you do, it makes us less empathetic. So all of the feels, all okay. Name them and talk about them. And then reality checking expectations, we've got to be more patient with each other. And as Harriet Lerner, my friend, says, "Listen with the same passion that you have for being heard," that's hard, because I have a lot of passion for wanting to be heard, and sometimes not very much passion for listening. We have to ask for what we need. We have to reality-check ourselves when we start drifting towards so-called experts that know everything and are offering certainty.

BB: One of the scariest times for us collectively is when we're vulnerable, because when we're vulnerable, people who call themselves leaders or experts can pop up and quickly gain our trust by selling and peddling certainty to us. And anyone who's certain right now, in my opinion... I mean not certain like, "Social distancing will be helpful, hand washing," but can tell you, "This is exactly what's happening. This is exactly when it's going to end. This is exactly who's going to get sick. This is exactly... " Anyone who is telling, "It's not a big deal. We're all okay." Anyone who is using anything but science and facts to give you certainty right now, in my opinion, needs to be reality checked.

BB: Exercise, sleep if you can, and also... Listen, all of these TikToks and Instagrams and Facebooks of our Italian neighbors and friends on their porches, singing, dancing, doing exercises together, I want a reality check that they're a solid week ahead of us, and I don't think we saw that from them when they were in day three, or day two, or day four of social distancing or quarantine. If I had an instrument right now, I would ask for a tuba because I'm with my entire family, my extended family, then we busted my mom and her husband out of assisted living when they went into lockdown there. And I would ask for a tuba and then I would crawl inside of it and hide, and then I'd ask someone to push the tuba down the hill in our backyard and rolling into it, into like the lake in the tuba. I'm not... I'm not leading a band right now. I'm... We're having... Are we having kind of a hard time? I'm looking at Barrett.

BG: Yup.

BB: What would you say?

BG: A lot of hard conversations. Definitely FFTs, definitely having to ask for what we need, having to say, "This is how I'm feeling. This is how I'm experiencing this," and making sure that we're all on the same page is the only way we're getting through.

BB: Yeah, she's really... She's really good. We had a hard conversation today.

BG: True. [chuckle]

BB: We did, that's why I'd like to climb into a tuba and roll down the hill. I don't even know where that came from. It's just the visual I have right now.

BG: It's fair.

BB: It's fair. We can't give up on each other y'all. We're all we have, even in the FFTs. So we're going to drop this podcast every Wednesday, once we find our footing. Next week, we're going to drop podcasts Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday because we want to, and I'm excited about you hearing from some of the people I've interviewed. Monday, I'm talking to Tarana Burke, the founder of the "Me Too" movement, who is a dear friend, and we talk about everything from falling in love and sharing space with people that we love, namely, our partners. And then Tuesday, I'm going to talk to Glennon Doyle on her new book, Untamed. If you have not read Untamed yet, this is a book for these times, Untamed. It'll be really fun if you can get it, but what a great conversation I had with Glennon.

[music]

BB: I have not practiced a fancy sign off yet so I will just say I'm grateful for you, I think this is going to be fun. I think we're going to learn some stuff. I think we're going to get braver and hopefully unlock a little bit about what it means to be human in this crazy world. So this is Unlocking U s, thank you for listening.

© 2020 Brené Brown Education and Research Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Brown, B. (Host). (2020, March 20). Brené on FFTs. [Audio podcast episode]. In Unlocking Us with Brené Brown. Cadence13. https://brenebrown.com/podcast/brene-on-ffts/

Brené Brown: Hi everyone, I'm Brené Brown, and this is Unlocking Us. You can hear me, like you can hear me smiling through my talking here. This is our very first Unlocking Us podcast and I am... I'm somewhere at the intersection of like maybe scared and excited, which is an intersection that I frequent often, but you'd think it'd get easier, but it doesn't always get easier. I think I've recorded three episodes, and I have to say, I love it. I want to do this for the rest of my life. As much as I love giving talks, I think I like listening even more. I love listening, I love learning, I love talking to people, and I've been an interviewer for 20 years, 25 years, it's just my... It's my thing. So welcome to the first episode of Unlocking Us. I will tell you this, and this is what we're going to talk about FFTs today, and here's where I'll start. As much as I love this new podcast, what I don't love is being new at things, and we're going to talk about being new at things today. I think for all of us, being new at something is incredibly vulnerable. Even when we're excited and committed and we're like, "I'm going to do this. I'm going to try this new thing," the awkward, uncomfortable time comes right after the excitement and it feels awful. And I can tell you if the definition of vulnerability is uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure, then being new at something is the epitome of vulnerability.

BB: What's also tricky, I think for me is, by the time you reach middle age, which I define "somewhere between late 30s and dead", by the time you reach middle age, you know that the only way to get to the other side of the discomfort of being new is to push right through the middle. Experience teaches us that as much as we want to fast forward through the hard, rocky parts of doing something that we've never done before, we just can't. And being new... Being new at big things is hard, but it's not just life's big moments, like new jobs or new roles or moving in with a new partner for the first time or having a baby, it's not just the big things that are tough when it comes to being new. Little things, small daily things can also push us in really tough ways. I'll give you an example. I have a Peloton bicycle. I'm sitting here with my sister Barrett, would you call it a bicycle, like...

Barrett Guillen: Bicycle.

BB: Are you sure?

BG: Yeah.

BB: She's shrugging her shoulders like, "I don't know. Don't put me on the spot." I don't know, I have a Peloton bike, I'm going to say that because that sounds cooler. I have a Peloton bike, so like... For spinning classes. So, I have a Peloton bike and I was so excited to get started, and the first five times I rode it, the whole time, I had this... I have a very difficult habit that when I'm trying something new, and I feel scared and like everyone is going to judge me, I always go to the, "This is bullshit. This is just bullshit." You should have seen me on this bike. I could not get clipped into it, so the first time I rode it, I rode it for 30 minutes, not even watching a class, just by myself, not clipped in, it didn't work at all. Then I finally learned how to get clipped into it, and I left my shoes clipped into my bicycle, my bike for three months. For three months, my bike just sat in my study with the shoes attached to it, because I couldn't get them off, I didn't know how to do it. Now I can get on and off and ride it but being new is hard. Another great small example. I just got bangs. Now, I have not had bangs since the '90s. And back then, they were like your standard issue breakup bangs. They came with a cigarette and a wine cooler, and you got them cut right after some asshole broke up with you.

BB: So, I got bangs. How long ago did I get bangs, about a month ago, two? About a month ago? [chuckle] I got bangs. And when I left the... I was going to call it a beauty parlor, but we'll call it... What's this... Salon. [chuckle] I need like a "what's cool?" translator for my podcast, I need to put something on the microphone so that when I say, "I left my pocketbook on the drainboard," it translates it to, "I left my purse on the counter." Anyway, so I got these bangs, and I was leaving the salon, because I'm too cool to go to a beauty parlor, but I left the salon and I thought they looked so cute. Well, let me just tell you, for the next four to five days, at least, I'd be late for work, I couldn't get my hair to work, all I could do is resort back to my... I had to rely on muscle memory in my wrist and my round brush and... Let me just tell you, I looked like Vince Neil. And if you don't know who Vince Neil is, you can Google Mötley Crüe, 1985. I just had big '80s hair, and everyone was trying to be very supportive. They would say things like, "Wow, still looks good after all these years. [chuckle] Would you like a wine cooler?" So hard things, hard where... New is hard and we don't like the discomfort.

BB: But something that I've seen over the past 20 years has really scared me. The last 20 years of research, I've seen how sometimes we all get so afraid of the vulnerability that we actually stop trying or doing anything that we're not already good at doing. So if it's not already comfortable, if we already don't have some expertise, if we don't already know how to do it and do it well, we're not doing it. Here's what's hard, and I think scary about that. When we give up being new and awkward, we stop growing, and we stop growing, we stop living. I love that quote from Shawshank Redemption, "Get busy living or get busy dying." When we stop growing, we start declining, there's no neutral here. When we no longer feel that discomfort of being new, of being an awkward learner, things start to shut down inside of us. The discomfort of exploration of doing new things, of being an awkward rookie again, that's the juice, it's our lifeblood. It's the secret sauce.

BB: And here's the even bigger news, I think. The more we're willing to embrace the suck and try new things, the more new things we're willing to try. And it's not because being new gets comfortable, it's because we learn how to normalize discomfort. If there's one thing I know for sure, normalizing discomfort, learning how to stay standing in the midst of feeling unsure and uncertain, that's the foundation of courage. Imagine what it would be like to know that you can get through something that's vulnerable and uncomfortable, that you have what it takes to survive the cringey, awkward moments, as my kids would say, "That's so cringey, mom." Knowing that we have the strength to survive those moments and come out on the other side with new information, new ideas, new habits, new skills, that's how we get braver with our lives and with our hearts.

BB: So I want to share a strategy with you for embracing the suck of new, and I'm going to confess that I am 100% leaning in to that strategy right now. The strategy is called the FFT. Now, if you're social distancing right now, and you're home with your kids... And you're home with your kids, and someone who filters the language they hear, I'd like for you to walk slowly and calmly to your phone and take it off speaker. I'm going to tell you what FFT stands for. You may not want to blast this, or you may want to. Take your phone and hold it up to your ear for just a sec. I'll give you five, four, three, two, one. Okay, FFT stands for Fucking First Time, and right now it is saving me. I am white knuckling about five different FFTs right now, and without this strategy, I'd be out of my mind. The first most powerful part of the strategy is naming the FFT when you're in it, "Hey, what is going on right now? Why am I... Why do I feel out of control? Why do I feel like I don't know what I'm doing? Why am I in a shame spiral? Why am I so confused?" I'm like, "Is this an FFT? I'm in an FFT." So naming it is key to understanding it, because we're meaning-making species. We've got to have the meaning and we have to have language as a handle. So first we identify that we're in an FFT and we name it.

BB: Sometimes, and this is a really big myth, sometimes we're afraid to name experiences or feelings because we think naming them gives them power, and if we're feeling something hard or uncomfortable, the last thing we want to do is give it power. Let me dispel this myth now with 400,000 pieces of data and 20 years of research. When we name and own hard things, it does not give them power, it gives us power. And what do I mean by power? The best definition of power that I think exists in the world is from Martin Luther King Jr., "Power is the ability to effect change and achieve purpose." So if we put it all together, when we name and own hard things, it doesn't give the hard things power, it gives us the power to effect change and achieve purpose. So if we can say, "Oh my God, this is hard because I'm in an FFT," again, maybe it's something small, like trying to fix my bangs or ride my new bike, or your first yoga with goats class, or a new job, or a new relationship, "Why is this so hard? Oh, FFT. I'm in the FFT."

BB: And naming the FFT leads to three steps. One, we can normalize it, "Oh, this is exactly how new is supposed to feel. This is uncomfortable because brave is uncomfortable." Two, we can put it in perspective, "This feeling is not permanent, and it doesn't mean I suck at everything. It means I'm in the middle of an FFT around this one thing." Three, I can reality check my expectations, "This is going to suck for a while. I'm not going to crush this right away." And if you're interested in teaching your kids the FFT strategy, you can always call it TFT, terrible first times. And remember, the thing to teach them is when you're in a TFT, when they're at that first gymnastics class, or their first Spanish class, or their first spelling bee, or the first date, or the first time driving, when you're in a TFT, a terrible first time, what you're trying to do is normalize it, put it in perspective, and reality check your expectations.

BB: A great example that I can give you around the FFT and being new is when you're newly sober and you're working a 12-step program or many of the other programs, people will say you need to go to six meetings in six days, or you need to go to 10 meetings in 10 days. Why? Because expectation says, "I'm going to go to a meeting, someone's going to say something, and I'm going to be cured." We have terrible expectations around first times. We just set ourselves up for such shame and such disaster with our expectations. So if you go to six meetings in six days, this is how it normally works: Meeting one, it's the Brené approach, "This is bullshit. I don't know what I'm doing here, and these people are mostly losers, and I'm better than everyone here." Day two, "Okay, this again, just confirming what I thought. I shouldn't be here, I'm better than everyone here." Day three, "Well, I mean, maybe I'm not better than everyone here, maybe some of the things I'm hearing, maybe they're resonating, but this shit smells like cigarettes, and it's stale, the coffee is horrible. I just... It's not for me." Day four, "Okay, these are my people, and I need a cigarette and a cup of coffee, really bad coffee." That's the way it works. And so, name the FFT, and that leads us to normalizing, putting things in perspective, and reality checking.

BB: So I'm going to walk you through a couple of examples in my own life right now. And this is pretty vulnerable for me, but I thought, "Screw it. It's the first podcast. Go vulnerable or go home," that's my new motto. But I'm in a lot of FFTs right now. The podcast is one, advertising, which is part of the podcast, is another. And I'm not sure about you, but this is my first f'ing global pandemic. So I'm going to just be super honest with you about what FFTs feel like for me right now and walk you through naming them, what was going on before I named them, and then how I normalized, put things in perspective, and started reality checking.

BB: So let's start with the podcast, because you're here with me in it right now. You're not in an FFT because you're probably not listening to your first podcast, but I am in my FFT, and I'll tell you why.

BB: Because I did my first podcast... When did... When did I Thought It Was Just Me come out, like 2007? So I did my first podcast in 2007, I bought a little microphone, I set it up in my red kitchen table, and I did a read along podcast for 10 weeks, and it was so much fun, but then it kind of went away, and it got complicated for me, and I didn't know how to do all the feeds, at that time. It was hard, and I was doing it on GarageBand which seemed super complicated for me, so I kind of gave it up, but it's never left the back of my mind. And I just... To be honest with you, this has always felt like my dream job or dream medium, is building community and having real hard conversations about everything, from love to heart break. This is what I want to do.

BB: So we decided, "This is it, we're going to podcast." So we went whole hog. We transformed the downstairs space in our office to a beautiful podcast room with a green room, we found a wonderful partner, we set up interviews, we set up a big launch at South by Southwest, we did everything in my dream scape for this podcast, and then Corona came, and now I'm in a closet on top of my son's dirty Under Armour clothes. And, I have to say that I recorded my first podcast a couple of days ago, then after I recorded, I said, "I don't want to go on with my podcast to my community the first time, with other people. I just want to talk directly to y'all." I had to practice saying hi, I have to think about it right now, wait, do I have it written down somewhere, do I have a post it note? Check.

BG: Hey, everyone.

BB: No, oh, is it hey everyone?

BG: Yeah.

BB: What am I saying?

BG: Hey, everyone. This is Brené.

BB: Do I say hey or hi?

BG: Hi.

BB: Oh, hi, yeah. See, you suck too. [laughter] FFT. Hi, everyone. I'm Brené Brown.

BB: And this is Unlocking Us. [laughter] God, you see. I have practiced that 30 times because I didn't like it at first because it lacked something. So for some reason, I thought I would do something more around, "Hey, guys and gals, dolls and... " I don't know what comes with a doll, and my sister looked at me and said, "I think that's the guy from Grease. " I was like, "Shut up." It took me like 20 times to get this right, and I still can't really do it without looking. Then I tried to do something more serious, where I was going to get really close to the mic, because I saw that in a movie and I said, "Somewhere I saw this great podcaster talking into a mic with this kind of like... Not a sexy voice, but more of a, 'Hi, everyone, this is Brené Brown.'" Then I thought to myself, "Check, no, that's Pirate Radio. And he was the crazy guy who unzipped his pants and made the zipper sounds on his radio station as they were broadcasting from the ship."

BB: So all I'm saying is that I'm in an FFT, I don't know how it's all going to work. I don't know how it's all going to sound, but what I know is that I'm in an FFT, and it's hard and I want to be myself, but in those f'ing first times, we have a tendency to armor up and protect, and do things from movies or other ideas that usually move us away from being ourselves. In fact, when things started canceling and shifting, I called an emergency meeting of our leadership team, and within five minutes, we were all frustrated and we were kind of vying for, "Who's the most overwhelmed?" Is that true?

BG: Yes.

BB: And I just kept saying, "Y'all, the wheels are falling off of the podcast, the shit is hitting the fan, what's happening?" And then finally, and it might have been you, was it you Barrett? Someone said, maybe Suzanne, someone said, "FFT, we're in an FFT." It was like opening that little knob on the Instant Pot, wasn't it?

BG: Yes.

BB: It was like shhhhhh, just the pressure relief. Just naming it. We were like, "We're in an FFT." So what are the three things in an FFT? Normalize it, put it in perspective, reality check. So normalize it; This is exactly how we're supposed to feel, this is new, we don't know what we're doing. That's why it's so wobbly. That's why we're scared. That's why we don't know. We can't draw on history, we can't draw on experience, we can't say, "Oh, this is the way we did it, this is the way we really crushed it back when we did that podcast in '85." We are coming atcha, from a pile of dirty clothes, in a closet, without a net, because we're FFT'ing. Put it in perspective; The simple thing, again, not permanent, it doesn't mean we suck at everything. Let's remember, for us, this is how we're getting our FFT, getting through our FFT with a podcast, in five days, five weeks, or five months, when we look back, we might laugh a little and we will for sure say, "Do you remember when that was so hard? And here are the 25 things that we were super sure about doing back then that we would never do again." That's the reality of the first time, that's why it's the secret sauce, that's why it's the juice, that's why it keeps us growing and our brains firing. Last, reality checking expectations; Here is the universal reality check in the FFT, whether it is a parenting FFT, whether it is a professional FFT, this is a heavier lift than what we thought or expected.

BB: An emotionally heavier lift, a physically heavier lift, a strategy resource heavier lift. This is harder than we thought, and it's scary. So when you're in the FFT, you've got to remind yourself, it's going to take twice as long, be 10 times as hard, and I personally am going to be 25% more pissed off all the time because I don't do wobbly. And this is a great time, first podcast, I think I should just clear this up with them right now. If you're thinking Brené doesn't do wobbly? She's like the patron saint of vulnerability. The joke's on all of us. I believe in vulnerability, I try to practice it. I'm not really into it. I am not it. I am not. Don't let me be the representative of vulnerability. I'm the researcher, not the representative. I don't like wobbly. The other things that were shocking, when I say, "Reality check your expectation; the lift is going to be worse."

BB: So our partners Cadence13. We love them. They sent their audio engineer down to Houston to take our beautiful podcast space and set it up. So I thought he was going to come with maybe a handle bag, like a Nordstrom size handle bag with some microphones. I walk into the podcast space, there are 20 boxes, and he's under the table with a drill. And he kind of slides out and says, "Hey, your grandpa didn't build this or anything, right? I'm just drilling all into it." It took three 12-hour days to set up the podcast room, and 50 boxes of stuff.

BB: If you're like me, and you're not good at estimating time or energy or effort, the FFT will really F you up because it's always going to be harder than you thought. It's just going to be new, wobbly. But here's the thing new, wobbly, honest, coming right at you from the dirty clothes in the closet, in social distancing right now, I'm super glad you're here. Second thing that's very, very scary for me right now is advertising on this podcast. I've never done a paid ad in my life. I don't even stand close to podiums with brands on them when I speak in public. I don't talk about brands, nothing, nada. I think that's partly because of my academic training. If you do any type of brand work or take any money even like, I think it's over $5 or something. There's a shit ton of paperwork and I'm just not great at... I'm the paperwork person... I do the paperwork when I get the 14th email that says, "We're revoking everything, including your birth certificate." So I've never done any kind of brand work, ad work. I've just never done it.

BB: We went with an advertising model for this podcast because it makes the most sense to us. It's free, you can... Everyone can get it. But there are ads. And there have to be ads because we have a team of 10 people, and we have a huge partner, and people need to make a living. And it's not that I can't evangelize a product. So I come from a long line of evangelists. I have these very vivid memories of sitting at my grandmother's table in San Antonio, south side of San Antonio, over if you're San Antonian, hey, hey, over by McCreless Mall. And she'd come out of the kitchen wearing... She always wore a patchwork housecoat that snapped at the front, with pearl snaps, and she has square-toed cowboy boots, kind of like a bronzy leather with Eagles stamped on both sides of them. And she wore black cat-eye glasses until the very end, and I remember very distinctly sitting there one day, and I was sitting there with Curley, her husband who was a forklift driver for Pearl Brewery and said, "This is Jimmy Dean's new sausage. It has sage in it. Sage is a spice. This is the best sausage I've ever had, and you can get it too in the frozen food aisle at the Piggly Wiggly." She was the best ad person of her time.

BB: My mom was the same way. So she's... My mom still does ads, all the time. She'll say, "Try this lotion." "Oh, I'm good Ma." "Try this lotion. It's both silk and smoothing, but won't leave you feeling... " [chuckle] Okay, yes or no? I don't know. I don't know. We just have it. So I come from a long maternal line of cursers and evangelists. But I'm still anxious about it because I don't want to go through the new part of it. What if I can't do it? What if it sounds weird? What if I'm ridiculous? What if I'm embarrassed or I go into a shame spiral while I'm trying to say something? I just... It's going to be hard.

BB: So, I had a little FFT breakdown about the advertising. And my team looked at me and said, "FFT Brené. Normalize it, this is the first time. Put it into perspective, it won't always be hard, and set realistic expectations." I said, "What does that mean?" And they said, "Reality check the expectations, not only of yourself but the people around you. When we're in FFT, we have to reality set expectations for everyone." So I said, "Okay, let me think about this." Reality check expectations, even with external partners. Even if you're with your family, don't just reality check your expectations. Reality check them with your partner, with your kids. So I said, "Okay." We sat down, big leadership meeting, everyone from Cadence13, everyone from our side and I just was completely honest about expectations. I basically said, "I've got good news and bad news about the advertising. Good news, I can get really excited about things I love. The bad news, I will do no ads, zero, for anything that I do not love, period. If I don't love it, I'm not going to talk about it. And when I do talk about it, I'm not going to read anyone's copy." And you could just kind of see their faces going...

BB: Maybe I threw them into the... Maybe I threw them into an FFT. Oh, I definitely... [chuckle] Barrett's laughing and smiling. We definitely threw them into an FFT, and they said, "Say more about not reading the copy and only things you love." And I said, "I can't bullshit this community because I've spent over a decade building this community and I trust them, and I think they trust me." So if I love it, I'll talk to them about it freely, but I'm going to tell stories about it, and my own stories about it and why I love it, and that's not reading ad copy, and if I have never tried it or I just kind of like it a bit, I'm not going to sell it to them any more than I'd sell it to people that I love. So here's the thing, ads start next week. Our ad policy is straightforward, I like to call it, all BB, no BS. If I'm advertising it, then I believe in it, I'll tell you the story about why I love it, listen to it, use it or do it, and you can count on me for that.

BB: So normalize, this is new and sometimes I have intentionally stayed away from things like this. I feel weird but I feel less weird when I'm in my values. Perspective, I can't feel weird forever. I might even start to enjoy telling you about things I love. And expectations, there's this great quote... We're reality checking expectations as a part of dealing with our FFT. So this quote that I love, I've seen it attributed to Nelson Mandela, I've seen it attributed to Anne Lamott, well suffice it to say that some really smart person said, "Expectations are just resentments waiting to happen." So when as part of... In our FFT, we're in something new and hard, reality check expectations and that really minimizes resentment, I have saved the hardest FFT for last, the COV1D-19 pandemic. I think it's safe to say that this pandemic is a collective FFT, so let's just name that right off the bat.

BB: We don't know what we're doing, many of us are trying to make our kids feel reassured when we don't feel sure about anything, we're trying to be normal, but nothing is normal. And can I just also say it's the worst FFT ever? I mean, I'm a grown-ass person, but I do not know what I'm doing. So if I take the strategy that I use personally and professionally for the FFT, and we normalize it, put it in perspective and reality check expectations, here's what that looks like for me. Normalize it, we don't know how to do this, and by "this" I mean, we don't know how to social distance and stay sane. We don't know how to stay socially connected, but far apart. We're learning and we're getting better, and you can see that every day. We don't know what to tell our kids, we don't know exactly how to homeschool. I saw something on TikTok or Instagram that said, "I have home schooled for one day, every teacher should make one billion dollars a day."

BB: We don't know exactly what we're doing, we're anxious, we're uncertain, we are, a lot of us, afraid, and it is okay to feel all those feelings. And let me tell you this for sure, and I know this from my life, I know this from again, 20 years of research and 400,000 pieces of data, if you don't name what you're feeling, if you don't own the feelings and feel them, they will eat you alive. And if you're a parent, you can give your kids a sense of safety while also modeling and teaching them what not knowing and uncertainty looks and feels like. Helping your kids feel safe and secure during this time of uncertainty, and modeling what uncertainty can look like and feel like are not mutually exclusive. It is... That is that dual mind, that's being able to hold two different things that have a lot of tension and to have the strength to hold things like that, is really how we measure human intelligence and emotional intelligence.

BB: I know we want to try to make everything certain for our kids, and we think that's what makes them feel safe, but what happens is when they're away from us and then they feel uncertain, they think that automatically means they're unsafe and that's not the truth. So we can say, "We don't know what's happening, we're doing the best that we think we can do, it is scary, and that's okay to feel." But y'all, it's okay, let's just... It's okay to even be overwhelmed with emotion right now. You just have to name it and feel it, so if you're with people and you're social distancing with a group of people, have a check-in, one word to describe what you're feeling right now, one thing you're grateful for right now. If you're by yourself, reach out, and not text. Phone, or FaceTime, or Zoom, or something where you can see people or hear people, and just say, just check... One word check-in, "What's going on for you right now?"

BB: We did it to... Did we do that? Was that today? And we got everything from kind of settling in to uncertain to anxious, but just being able to say it, again, meaning-making species, we need language as handles to be able to say what we're feeling, to wrap words around it, allows us to start making meaning. Number two, putting this FFT of the pandemic in perspective, we don't know when this will end, but we do know it's not forever. And if you're a parent, remember that perspective is a function of experience, the less experience, the less perspective. If you have kids who are saying, "I'll never see my friends again," or, "I can't believe we're missing spring break." That lack of perspective is not always about selfishness, and we don't make them tougher or more empathic towards others by diminishing their feelings.

BB: Disappointment is something that a lot of us are feeling right now, and it's okay to feel disappointed. It's okay to be safe, have enough food, have some resources and still feel disappointed, because denying your disappointment doesn't make you more empathetic towards people who have it a lot worse than you do, it makes us less empathetic. So all of the feels, all okay. Name them and talk about them. And then reality checking expectations, we've got to be more patient with each other. And as Harriet Lerner, my friend, says, "Listen with the same passion that you have for being heard," that's hard, because I have a lot of passion for wanting to be heard, and sometimes not very much passion for listening. We have to ask for what we need. We have to reality-check ourselves when we start drifting towards so-called experts that know everything and are offering certainty.

BB: One of the scariest times for us collectively is when we're vulnerable, because when we're vulnerable, people who call themselves leaders or experts can pop up and quickly gain our trust by selling and peddling certainty to us. And anyone who's certain right now, in my opinion... I mean not certain like, "Social distancing will be helpful, hand washing," but can tell you, "This is exactly what's happening. This is exactly when it's going to end. This is exactly who's going to get sick. This is exactly... " Anyone who is telling, "It's not a big deal. We're all okay." Anyone who is using anything but science and facts to give you certainty right now, in my opinion, needs to be reality checked.

BB: Exercise, sleep if you can, and also... Listen, all of these TikToks and Instagrams and Facebooks of our Italian neighbors and friends on their porches, singing, dancing, doing exercises together, I want a reality check that they're a solid week ahead of us, and I don't think we saw that from them when they were in day three, or day two, or day four of social distancing or quarantine. If I had an instrument right now, I would ask for a tuba because I'm with my entire family, my extended family, then we busted my mom and her husband out of assisted living when they went into lockdown there. And I would ask for a tuba and then I would crawl inside of it and hide, and then I'd ask someone to push the tuba down the hill in our backyard and rolling into it, into like the lake in the tuba. I'm not... I'm not leading a band right now. I'm... We're having... Are we having kind of a hard time? I'm looking at Barrett.

BG: Yup.

BB: What would you say?

BG: A lot of hard conversations. Definitely FFTs, definitely having to ask for what we need, having to say, "This is how I'm feeling. This is how I'm experiencing this," and making sure that we're all on the same page is the only way we're getting through.

BB: Yeah, she's really... She's really good. We had a hard conversation today.

BG: True. [chuckle]

BB: We did, that's why I'd like to climb into a tuba and roll down the hill. I don't even know where that came from. It's just the visual I have right now.

BG: It's fair.

BB: It's fair. We can't give up on each other y'all. We're all we have, even in the FFTs. So we're going to drop this podcast every Wednesday, once we find our footing. Next week, we're going to drop podcasts Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday because we want to, and I'm excited about you hearing from some of the people I've interviewed. Monday, I'm talking to Tarana Burke, the founder of the "Me Too" movement, who is a dear friend, and we talk about everything from falling in love and sharing space with people that we love, namely, our partners. And then Tuesday, I'm going to talk to Glennon Doyle on her new book, Untamed. If you have not read Untamed yet, this is a book for these times, Untamed. It'll be really fun if you can get it, but what a great conversation I had with Glennon.

[music]

BB: I have not practiced a fancy sign off yet so I will just say I'm grateful for you, I think this is going to be fun. I think we're going to learn some stuff. I think we're going to get braver and hopefully unlock a little bit about what it means to be human in this crazy world. So this is Unlocking U s, thank you for listening.

© 2020 Brené Brown Education and Research Group, LLC. All rights reserved.

Unlocking Us Podcast with Attica Locke & Tembi Locke

Unlocking Us Podcast with Attica Locke & Tembi Locke

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The first Unlocking Us podcast is here! Along with the excitement of sending this into the world, I'm feeling equal doses of fear, awkwardness, and vulnerability. In this episode I talk about my strategy for staying in tough first times versus tapping out and shutting down.

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Restorative Problem Solving Circle in School

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If you are working to implement restorative practices in your school or youth focused organization, one of the many informal practices you may have learned is using " affective statements." I agree that affective statements can be a powerful way of modeling to kids and youth better ways to express our feelings. I also agree that using affective statements is a better way of pointing out behavior issues in a way the creates more connection between student and teacher. Here's where I have a problem, the current books, toolkits, and even some workshops give examples of affective statements that sound more like blame statements than connection statements. I think we can do better.

What are Affective Statements?

They are often described as personal expressions of feelings in response to others' positive or negative behaviors. The idea is for teachers to connect students with how their behavior is "affecting" or impacting self or others. "Using affective statements helps us to specify the behavior that a student is exhibiting and encourage or discourage that behavior while improving or maintaining the relationship between the teacher and student."

Many sources trying to teach affective statements give examples like this one from the Fix School Discipline Toolkit:

"It makes me sad when I have to keep telling you to keep your arms by your sides when we're walking in a line."

A few examples from the IIRP published book, The Restorative Practices Handbook for Teachers, Disciplinarians, and Administrators say:

"Lisa, I am frustrated that you keep disrupting class today"

"Don, I was shocked when I graded your paper. You are capable of doing much better"

When we say to others that our feelings are being caused by their behaviors, it will most likely be heard as blame and fault. "I am feeling this way because of YOU" and if you change your behavior, you will "MAKE ME" feel better. The statements above and the other examples I have seen fit the formula of state feelings and then explain how the feeling is the fault of the student. I am very uncomfortable with what this teaches kids. I am even more uncomfortable we haven't changed this belief in our teachers.

First off, kids need to understand that nobody causes other people's feelings or theirs. Kids benefit from learning that feelings are caused by needs being met or not met, not the actions of others. If other people's actions caused our feelings, then each time they make that action, the same feeling would come for us. Except we know that isn't true. On one day your student coming past the agreed time might leave us happy because we had a need for some privacy to catch up on emails. The next day, the same action of coming past the agreed time could leaving us feeling angry because we are needing more structure in our day. Our needs in the moment bring about our feelings not the actions of others. As Marshall Rosenberg would say, "Other people may be the stimulus for our feelings but they are never the cause."

In the example above, Lisa is being sent the message that the teacher is feeling frustrated because of her actions. In reality, I would think the teacher is frustrated because she has a need for order, respect, or cooperation from her students. It isn't Lisa's "fault" the teacher is frustrated, it is the teacher's needs. ( Maybe Lisa has a need for more excitement and activity in the lesson!!)

We want students to look at their inner world more so they can learn emotional regulation. If they learn that their feelings are owned by and originate from themselves, they can then learn to get out of the blame game. Feelings are never someone's "fault." On the other hand, if we teach them (possibly through these type of blame statements) that they are the cause of other's behavior, they are also learning the myth that other's control their feelings. When you see others as the source of your pain, you increase the likelihood you will want to punished them when the feelings hurt or cause pain. This continues the cycle of violence.

In the example above with Don, not only is the statement full of blame, it is also laced with a tinge of diagnosis of Don and his capabilities. If Don disagrees, this statement is likely to cause shame and disconnection, not connection. If he agrees he will only feel disappointed rather than motivated for change. These types of statements are better than the alternative of criticizing students behavior as good or bad, right or wrong. They still could be made to be more connecting for both students and teachers. That connection or relationship based classroom style could be much impacting than the model being used.

I would like to see RP practitioners move toward Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication (NVC) model of Observations, Feelings, Needs, and Requests (OFNR) as the new and improved way of doing affective statements. The formula is fairly simple and with practice will be far more "affective" than the typical statements currently being taught in the RP models. Of course, I would like to see RP practitioners combining all of Rosenberg's materials and ideas into the work they do. I still believe starting with OFNR is a nice first step if you are not ready in your life for everything Marshall proposed.

Observations: If we want to point out to students exactly what behavior we want to address, we are best to do that in ways that don't drudge up shame, defensiveness, or resistance to our feedback. I suggest starting with an observation of the behavior free of judgments, criticism, blame, or diagnosis. Looking at the examples above, it is point about what Lisa is doing to "disrupt" the class rather than judging the behavior as disruptive. "Lisa, when I hear you talking at the same time I am talking" would be an example. Another example from the above quotes would be "This is the 3rd time I have seen you with your hands in the air" as opposed to "I have to keep telling you" which sounds more like judgment. Observations are about separating what happened from the story we tell ourselves about what happened.

Feelings: It is first and most important that we follow the words "I fe el" with a word that describes physical emotions when doing affective statements. We want to model for students how to express their emotions using their words rather than acting out their emotions in negative ways. Most of us remember our first grade teacher saying "use your words" as opposed to having us act out our feelings. It becomes important for teachers to develop a strong vocabulary of feeling words. Be careful of following "I feel" with thoughts. (I feel like, I feel as if, I feel that you) We also want to steer clear of pseudo-feelings. These tend to be words that evaluate or accuse others of a behavior. (Examples: disrespected, threatened, bullied, misunderstood) Make sure you express your feelings and emotions with words that actually express a physical experience you are having.

Needs: It is important to follow a feeling with a need and not a blame statement about other people. We need to own our feelings and the best way to do that is to learn to associate our feelings with the needs behind them. Our feelings act much like the dashboard in a car. Your car's dashboard has a light that comes on to tell you it needs gas, another that tells you you need air in your tires, mine is constantly telling me to service engine soon. Our emotions do something similar for us. We we feel tired, it is our bodies way of telling us we need rest. When we feel hungry, we most likely need food. When we feel scared, it may mean we have a need for safety. This is the best way of making an affective statement. "I feel.....because I need......" as opposed to "I feel because you...."

Requests: If we are going to go through the trouble of pointing out the behavior, expressing our feelings and needs, we might as well ask for what would make life more wonderful! Ask for what would meet your needs. Be as direct and clear as possible with something doable. Ask for what you DO want rather than what you DON'T want. Honor choice by starting with "Would you be willing.....?" Be prepared and welcome to hear NO.

Let's take a look at what these statement would look like using the examples written in the Restorative Practices Handbook from IIRP and then what they would look like if we used Marshall's NVC approach of OFNR:

I truly believe we could transform schools, organizations for youth, and our families by implementing restorative practices. We just need to make sure we can model the discipline we are trying to get from our students. If we want students who can "use their words" rather than violent actions to express themselves, we need to model how it is done. It is also import for us to model what a blame free world looks like.

I also focused this article on the use of affective statements to address negative behaviors. I also think we can use affective statements following the same formula to express gratitude instead of praise. Trading praise for gratitude is another powerful way of allowing youth and kids to see the "impact" of their actions rather then hear judgements about their actions. More to come on that in future articles!

Lastly, I don't intend to slam anyone with this article and I highly recommend the book listed below. I learned tons from it and continue to use it as a resource. I simply want us to make our practices better!

Download a helpful free 18 x 24 inch poster to help you with your honest expression statements (affective statements)

Sources not otherwise linked:

Costello, Bob; Wachtel, Joshua; Wachtel, Ted (2013-12-11). The Restorative Practices Handbook for Teachers, Disciplinarians and Administrators (Kindle Location 216). International Institute for Restorative Practices. Kindle Edition.

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT AFFECTIVE STATEMENTS AND RESTORATIVE DIALOGUE, JOE BRUMMER WILL BE PRESENTING A DAY LONG INTENSIVE AT SUFFOLK UNIVERSITY JANURY 26, 2017. CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS

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Making "Affective Statements" More Effective in Restorative Practices

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If you are working to implement restorative practices in your school or youth focused organization, one of the many informal practices you may have learned is using " affective statements." I agree that affective statements can be a powerful way of modeling to kids and youth better ways to express our feelings.

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Restorative practice is based primarily on a set of core values and the explicit promotion and enhancement of particular skills such as the ability to empathise and to find solutions to specific problems. This practise allows for building trust between and with people. It provides a structured approach in the form of a scaffold, which helps build and sustain relationships, and provides a focus which allows for the potential growth of positive relationships to become established between people. It also provides a platform for dealing with conflict in a healthy manner when conflict occurs.

In response to school requests for support in dealing with conflict and bullying, questions raised during the delivery of national seminars about the intervention and prevention of bullying behaviour, school visits by advisors, and a wider professional dialogue, a project emerged which set about introducing Restorative Practice in to a number of schools across the Republic of Ireland.

This report is an evaluation of the project, and highlights the steps taken, and how the project developed and progressed over the period from September 2018- March 2019. It includes an overview of the restorative practice pilot project, an examination of some of the relevant literature pertaining to both the value of RP and what it can achieve, and an outline of the rationale for approaching this project through a model of sustained support. Finally, it considers the findings of the project and concludes with the implications for future practice and engagement with schools.

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Restorative practice is based primarily on a set of core values and the explicit promotion and enhancement of particular skills such as the ability to empathise and to find solutions to specific problems. This practise allows for building trust between and with people.

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Michelle Stowe on the role of RP in Irish Schools

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Ep 25 Is Restorative Practice the way forward in Irish schools?

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Listen to this episode from Lead the Way on Spotify. Michelle Stowe is a teacher at heart and a restorative practice practitioner, trainer and consultant who is interested in creating relational communities that promote connection and wellbeing in the work place.

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Episode #47: Dr. Bruce Perry - Trauma Informed Educators Network Podcast

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Podcast Episode · Trauma Informed Educators Network Podcast · 06/04/2021 · 1h 8m

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Episode 8: Restorative Meetings and Conferences

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In this episode, some participants in the previous episodes share the impact that taking part in a formal facilitated Restorative Meeting or Conference had on them.

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Restorative Approach Example - Primary School

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When employees don't trust managers to make good decisions or to behave with integrity, their motivation is seriously compromised. Their distrust and its attendant lack of engagement is a huge, unrecognized problem in most organizations. This issue has always mattered, but it matters now more than ever, because knowledge-based organizations are totally dependent on the commitment and ideas of their employees.

Unfortunately, neither integrity nor good judgment can be magically conferred on all the managers in an organization. But it is possible for top executives to create processes that help keep managers honest-and that also help build employees' trust. In this article, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne describe one such process, which grew out of their research into the links between trust, idea sharing, and corporate performance. Their central finding is that employees will commit to a manager's decision-even one they disagree with-if they believe that the process the manager used to make the decision was fair. Sounds simple, but most organizations don't practice fair process. And because they don't, they never know what they've lost in the way of ideas and initiatives.

A London policeman gave a woman a ticket for making an illegal turn. When the woman protested that there was no sign prohibiting the turn, the policeman pointed to one that was bent out of shape and difficult to see from the road. Furious, the woman decided to appeal by going to court. Finally, the day of her hearing arrived, and she could hardly wait to speak her piece. But she had just begun to tell her side of the story when the magistrate stopped her and summarily ruled in her favor.

How did the woman feel? Vindicated? Victorious? Satisfied?

No, she was frustrated and deeply unhappy. "I came for justice," she complained, "but the magistrate never let me explain what happened." In other words, although she liked the outcome, she didn't like the process that had created it.

For the purposes of their theories, economists assume that people are maximizers of utility, driven mainly by rational calculations of their own self-interest. That is, economists assume people focus solely on outcomes. That assumption has migrated into much of management theory and practice. It has, for instance, become embedded in the tools managers traditionally use to control and motivate employees' behavior-from incentive systems to organizational structures. But it is an assumption that managers would do well to reexamine because we all know that in real life it doesn't always hold true. People do care about outcomes, but-like the woman in London-they also care about the processes that produce those outcomes. They want to know that they had their say-that their point of view was considered even if it was rejected. Outcomes matter, but no more than the fairness of the processes that produce them.

Never has the idea of fair process been more important for managers than it is today. Fair process turns out to be a powerful management tool for companies struggling to make the transition from a production-based to a knowledge-based economy, in which value creation depends increasingly on ideas and innovation. Fair process profoundly influences attitudes and behaviors critical to high performance. It builds trust and unlocks ideas. With it, managers can achieve even the most painful and difficult goals while gaining the voluntary cooperation of the employees affected. Without fair process, even outcomes that employees might favor can be difficult to achieve-as the experience of an elevator manufacturer we'll call Elco illustrates.

Good Outcome, Unfair Process

In the late 1980s, sales in the elevator industry headed south as overconstruction of office space left some large U.S. cities with vacancy rates as high as 20%. Faced with diminished domestic demand for its product, Elco knew it had to improve its operations. The company made the decision to replace its batch-manufacturing system with a cellular approach that would allow self-directed teams to achieve superior performance. Given the industry's collapse, top management felt the transformation had to be made in record time.

Lacking expertise in cellular manufacturing, Elco retained a consulting firm to design a master plan for the conversion. Elco asked the consultants to work quickly and with minimal disturbance to employees. The new manufacturing system would be installed first at Elco's Chester plant, where employee relations were so good that in 1983 workers had decertified their own union. Subsequently, Elco would roll the process out to its High Park plant, where a strong union would probably resist that, or any other, change.

Under the leadership of a much beloved plant manager, Chester was in all respects a model operation. Visiting customers were always impressed by the knowledge and enthusiasm of Chester's employees, so much so that the vice president of marketing saw the plant as one of Elco's best marketing tools. "Just let customers talk with Chester employees," he observed, "and they walk away convinced that buying an Elco elevator is the smart choice."

But one day in January of 1991, Chester's employees arrived at work to discover strangers at the plant. Who were these people wearing dark suits, white dress shirts, and ties? They weren't customers. They showed up daily and spoke in low tones to one another. They didn't interact with employees. They hovered behind people's backs, taking notes and drawing fancy diagrams. The rumor circulated that after employees went home in the afternoon, these people would swarm across the plant floor, snoop around people's workstations, and have heated discussions.

During this period, the plant manager was increasingly absent. He was spending more time at Elco's head office in meetings with the consultants-sessions deliberately scheduled away from the plant so as not to distract the employees. But the plant manager's absence produced the opposite effect. As people grew anxious, wondering why the captain of their ship seemed to be deserting them, the rumor mill moved into high gear. Everyone became convinced that the consultants would downsize the plant. They were sure they were about to lose their jobs. The fact that the plant manager was always gone-obviously, he was avoiding them-and that no explanation was given, could only mean that management was, they thought, "trying to pull one over on us." Trust and commitment at the Chester plant quickly deteriorated. Soon, people were bringing in newspaper clippings about other plants around the country that had been shut down with the help of consultants. Employees saw themselves as imminent victims of yet another management fad and resented it.

In fact, Elco managers had no intention of closing the plant. They wanted to cut out waste, freeing people to enhance quality and produce elevators for new international markets. But plant employees could not have known that.

The Master Plan.

In March 1991, management gathered the Chester employees in a large room. Three months after the consultants had first appeared, they were formally introduced. At the same time, management unveiled to employees the master plan for change at the Chester plant. In a meeting that lasted only 30 minutes, employees heard how their time-honored way of working would be abolished and replaced by something called "cellular manufacturing." No one explained why the change was needed, nor did anyone say exactly what would be expected of employees under the new approach. The managers didn't mean to skirt the issues; they just didn't feel they had the time to go into details.

The employees sat in stunned silence, which the managers mistook for acceptance, forgetting how many months it had taken them as leaders to get comfortable with the idea of cellular manufacturing and the changes it entailed. The managers felt good when the meeting was over, believing the employees were on board. With such a terrific staff, they thought, implementation of the new system was bound to go well.

Master plan in hand, management quickly began rearranging the plant. When employees asked what the new layout aimed to achieve, the response was "efficiency gains." The managers didn't have time to explain why efficiency needed to be improved and didn't want to worry employees. But lacking an intellectual understanding of what was happening to them, some employees literally began feeling sick when they came to work.

Managers informed employees that they would no longer be judged on individual performance but rather on the performance of the cell. They said quicker or more experienced employees would have to pick up the slack for slower or less experienced colleagues. But they didn't elaborate. How the new system was supposed to work, management didn't make clear.

In fact, the new cell design offered tremendous benefits to employees, making vacations easier to schedule, for example, and giving them the opportunity to broaden their skills and engage in a greater variety of work. But lacking trust in the change process, employees could see only its negative side. They began taking out their fears and anger on one another. Fights erupted on the plant floor as employees refused to help those they called "lazy people who can't finish their own jobs" or interpreted offers of help as meddling, responding with, "This is my job. You keep to your own workstation."

Chester's model workforce was falling apart. For the first time in the plant manager's career, employees refused to do as they were asked, turning down assignments "even if you fire me." They felt they could no longer trust the once popular plant manager, so they began to go around him, taking their complaints directly to his boss at the head office.

The plant manager then announced that the new cell design would allow employees to act as self-directed teams and that the role of the supervisor would be abolished. He expected people to react with excitement to his vision of Chester as the epitome of the factory of the future, where employees are empowered as entrepreneurial agents. Instead, they were simply confused. They had no idea how to succeed in this new environment. Without supervisors, what would they do if stock ran short or machines broke down? Did empowerment mean that the teams could self-authorize overtime, address quality problems such as rework, or purchase new machine tools? Unclear about how to succeed, employees felt set up to fail.

Time Out.

By the summer of 1991, both cost and quality performance were in a free fall. Employees were talking about bringing the union back. Finally, in despair, the plant manager phoned Elco's industrial psychologist. "I need your help," he said. "I have lost control."

The psychologist conducted an employee opinion survey to learn what had gone wrong. Employees complained, "Management doesn't care about our ideas or our input." They felt that the company had scant respect for them as individuals, treating them as if they were not worthy of knowing about business conditions: "They don't bother to tell us where we are going and what this means to us." And they were deeply confused and mistrustful: "We don't know exactly what management expects of us in this new cell."

What Is Fair Process?

The theme of justice has preoccupied writers and philosophers throughout the ages, but the systematic study of fair process emerged only in the mid-1970s, when two social scientists, John W. Thibaut and Laurens Walker, combined their interest in the psychology of justice with the study of process. Focusing their attention on legal settings, they sought to understand what makes people trust a legal system so that they will comply with laws without being coerced into doing so. Their research established that people care as much about the fairness of the process through which an outcome is produced as they do about the outcome itself. Subsequent researchers such as Tom R. Tyler and E. Allan Lind demonstrated the power of fair process across diverse cultures and social settings.

We discovered the managerial relevance of fair process more than a decade ago, during a study of strategic decision making in multinational corporations. Many top executives in those corporations were frustrated-and baffled-by the way the senior managers of their local subsidiaries behaved. Why did those managers so often fail to share information and ideas with the executives? Why did they sabotage the execution of plans they had agreed to carry out? In the 19 companies we studied, we found a direct link between processes, attitudes, and behavior. Managers who believed the company's processes were fair displayed a high level of trust and commitment, which, in turn, engendered active cooperation. Conversely, when managers felt fair process was absent, they hoarded ideas and dragged their feet.

In subsequent field research, we explored the relevance of fair process in other business contexts-for example, in companies in the midst of transformations, in teams engaged in product innovation, and in company-supplier partnerships. (See the sidebar "Making Sense of Irrational Behavior at VW and Siemens-Nixdorf.") For companies seeking to harness the energy and creativity of committed managers and employees, the central idea that emerges from our fair-process research is this: Individuals are most likely to trust and cooperate freely with systems-whether they themselves win or lose by those systems-when fair process is observed.

Economic theories do a good job of explaining the rational side of human behavior, but they fall short in explaining why people can act negatively in the face of positive outcomes. Fair process offers managers a theory of behavior that explains-or might help predict-what would otherwise appear to be bewilderingly noneconomic, or irrational, behavior.

Consider what happened to Volkswagen. In 1992, the German carmaker was in the midst of expanding its manufacturing facility in Puebla, Mexico, its only production site in North America. The appreciation of the deutsche mark against the U.S. dollar was pricing Volkswagen out of the U.S. market. But after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) became law in 1992, Volkswagen's cost-efficient Mexican facility was well positioned to reconquer the large North American market.

In the summer of 1992, a new labor agreement had to be hammered out. The accord VW signed with the union's secretary-general included a generous 20% pay raise for employees. VW thought the workers would be pleased.

But the union's leaders had not involved the employees in discussions about the contract's terms; they did a poor job of communicating what the new agreement would mean to employees and why a number of work-rule changes were necessary. Workers did not understand the basis for the decisions their leaders had taken. They felt betrayed.

VW's management was completely caught off guard when, on July 21, the employees started a massive walkout that cost the company as much as an estimated $10 million per day. On August 21, about 300 protesters were attacked by police dogs. The government was forced to step in to end the violence. Volkswagen's plans for the U.S. market were in disarray, and its performance was devastated.

In contrast, consider the turnaround of Siemens-Nixdorf Informationssysteme (SNI), the largest European supplier of information technology. Created in 1990 when Siemens acquired the troubled Nixdorf Computer Company, SNI had cut head count from 52,000 to 35,000 by 1994. Anxiety and fear were rampant at the company.

In 1994, Gerhard Schulmeyer, t he newly appointed CEO, went out to talk to as many employees as he could. In a series of meetings large and small with a total of more than 11,000 people, Schulmeyer shared his crusading mission to engage everyone in turning the company around. He began by painting a bleakly honest picture of SNI's situation: The company was losing money despite recent efforts to slash costs. Deeper cuts were needed, and every business would have to demonstrate its viability or be eliminated. Schulmeyer set clear but tough rules about how decisions would be made. He then asked for volunteers to come up with ideas.

Within three months, the initial group of 30 volunteers grew to encompass an additional 75 SNI executives and 300 employees. These 405 change agents soon turned into 1,000, then 3,000, then 9,000, as they progressively recruited others to help save the company. Throughout the process, ideas were solicited from managers and employees alike concerning decisions that affected them, and they all understood how decisions would be made. Ideas would be auctioned off to executives willing to champion and finance them. If no executive bought a proposal on its merits, the idea would not be pursued. Although 20% to 30% of their proposals were rejected, employees thought the process was fair.

People voluntarily pitched in-mostly after business hours, often until midnight. In just over two years, SNI has achieved a transformation notable in European corporate history. Despite accumulated losses of DM 2 billion, by 1995 SNI was already operating in the black. In the same period, employee satisfaction almost doubled, despite the radical and difficult changes under way.

Why did employees of Volkswagen revolt, despite their upbeat economic circumstances? How, in the face of such demoralizing economic conditions, could SNI turn around its performance? What is at issue is not what the two companies did but how they did it. The cases illustrate the tremendous power of fair process-fairness in the process of making and executing decisions. Fair process profoundly influences attitudes and behavior critical to high performance.

Fair process responds to a basic human need. All of us, whatever our role in a company, want to be valued as human beings and not as "personnel" or "human assets." We want others to respect our intelligence. We want our ideas to be taken seriously. And we want to understand the rationale behind specific decisions. People are sensitive to the signals conveyed through a company's decision-making processes. Such processes can reveal a company's willingness to trust people and seek their ideas-or they can signal the opposite.

The Three Principles.

In all the diverse management contexts we have studied, we have asked people to identify the bedrock elements of fair process. And whether we were working with senior executives or shop floor employees, the same three mutually reinforcing principles consistently emerged: engagement, explanation, and expectation clarity.

Engagement means involving individuals in the decisions that affect them by asking for their input and allowing them to refute the merits of one another's ideas and assumptions. Engagement communicates management's respect for individuals and their ideas. Encouraging refutation sharpens everyone's thinking and builds collective wisdom. Engagement results in better decisions by management and greater commitment from all involved in executing those decisions.

Explanation means that everyone involved and affected should understand why final decisions are made as they are. An explanation of the thinking that underlies decisions makes people confident that managers have considered their opinions and have made those decisions impartially in the overall interests of the company. An explanation allows employees to trust managers' intentions even if their own ideas have been rejected. It also serves as a powerful feedback loop that enhances learning.

Expectation clarity requires that once a decision is made, managers state clearly the new rules of the game. Although the expectations may be demanding, employees should know up front by what standards they will be judged and the penalties for failure. What are the new targets and milestones? Who is responsible for what? To achieve fair process, it matters less what the new rules and policies are and more that they are clearly understood. When people clearly understand what is expected of them, political jockeying and favoritism are minimized, and they can focus on the job at hand.

Notice that fair process is not decision by consensus. Fair process does not set out to achieve harmony or to win people's support through compromises that accommodate every individual's opinions, needs, or interests. While fair process gives every idea a chance, the merit of the ideas-and not consensus-is what drives the decision making.

Nor is fair process the same as democracy in the workplace. Achieving fair process does not mean that managers forfeit their prerogative to make decisions and establish policies and procedures. Fair process pursues the best ideas whether they are put forth by one or many.

"We Really Screwed Up."

Elco managers violated all three basic principles of fair process at the Chester plant. They failed to engage employees in decisions that directly affected them. They didn't explain why decisions were being made the way they were and what those decisions meant to employees' careers and work methods. And they neglected to make clear what would be expected of employees under cellular manufacturing. In the absence of fair process, the employees at Chester rejected the transformation.

A week after the psychologist's survey was completed, management invited employees to meetings in groups of 20. Employees surmised that management was either going to pretend that the survey had never happened or accuse employees of disloyalty for having voiced their complaints. But to their amazement, managers kicked off the meeting by presenting the undiluted survey results and declaring, " We were wrong. We really screwed up. In our haste and ignorance, we did not go through the proper process." Employees couldn't believe their ears. There were whispers in the back of the room, "What the devil did they say?" At more than 20 meetings over the next few weeks, managers repeated their confession. "No one was prepared to believe us at first," one manager said. "We had screwed up too badly."

At subsequent meetings, management shared with employees the company's dismal business forecast and the limited options available. Without cost reduction, Elco would have to raise its prices, and higher prices would further depress sales. That would mean cutting production even more, perhaps even moving manufacturing offshore. Heads nodded. Employees saw the bind the company was in. The business problem was becoming theirs, not just management's.

But still there were concerns: "If we help to cut costs and learn to produce elevators that are twice as good in half the time, will we work ourselves out of a job?" In response, the managers described their strategy to increase sales outside the United States. They also announced a new policy called proaction time: No one would be laid off because of any improvements made by an employee. Instead, employees could use their newly free time to attend cross-training programs designed to give them the skills they would need to work in any area of operations. Or employees could act as consultants addressing quality issues. In addition, management agreed not to replace any departing employees with new hires until business conditions improved. At the same time, however, management made it clear that it retained the right to let people go if business conditions grew worse.

Employees may not have liked what they heard, but they understood it. They began to see that they shared responsibility with management for Elco's success. If they could improve quality and productivity, Elco could bring more value to the market and prevent further sales erosion. To give employees confidence that they were not being misled, management pledged to regularly share data on sales, costs, and market trends-a first step toward rebuilding trust and commitment.

Elco's managers could not undo past mistakes, but they could involve employees in making future decisions. Managers asked employees why they thought the new manufacturing cells weren't working and how to fix them. Employees suggested making changes in the location of materials, in the placement of machines, and in the way tasks were performed. They began to share their knowledge; as they did so, the cells were redesigned and performance steadily improved, often far exceeding the expectations originally set by the consultants. As trust and commitment were restored, talk of bringing the union back died out.

High Park's Turn.

Meanwhile, management worried about introducing the new work methods at Elco's High Park plant, which, unlike the Chester plant, had a history of resisting change. The union was strong at High Park, and some employees there had as much as 25 years' service. Moreover, the plant manager, a young engineer new to High Park, had never run a plant before. The odds seemed to be against him. If change had created animosity at Chester, one could only imagine how much worse the situation could become at High Park.

But management's fears went unrealized. When the consultants came to the plant, the young manager introduced them to all employees. At a series of plantwide meetings, corporate executives openly discussed business conditions and the company's declining sales and profits. They explained that they had visited other companies' plants and had seen the productivity improvements that cellular manufacturing could bring. They announced the proaction-time policy to calm employees' justifiable fears of layoffs. At the High Park plant, managers encouraged employees to help the consultants design the new manufacturing cells, and they encouraged active debate. Then, as the old performance measures were discarded, managers worked with employees to develop new ones and to establish the cell teams' new responsibilities.

Every day, the High Park plant manager waited for the anticipated melt-down, but it never came. Of course, there were some gripes, but even when people didn't like the decisions, they felt they had been treated fairly and, so, willingly participated in the plant's eventual performance turnaround.

Three years later, we revisited a popular local eatery to talk with people from both plants. Employees from both Chester and High Park now believe that the cellular approach is a better way to work. High Park employees spoke about their plant manager with admiration, and they commiserated with the difficulties Elco's managers had in making the changeover to cellular manufacturing. They concluded that it had been a necessary, worthwhile, and positive experience. But Chester employees spoke with anger and indignation as they described their treatment by Elco's managers. (See the sidebar "The Price of Unfairness.") For them, as for the London woman who had been unfairly ticketed, fair process was as important as-if not more important than-the outcome.

Historically, policies designed to establish fair process in organizations arise mainly in reaction to employees' complaints and uprisings. But by then it is too late. When individuals have been so angered by the violation of fair process that they have been driven to organized protest, their demands often stretch well beyond the reasonable to a desire for what theorists call retributive justice: Not only do they want fair process restored, they also seek to visit punishment and vengeance upon those who have violated it in compensation for the disrespect the unfair process signals.

Lacking trust in management, employees push for policies that are laboriously detailed, inflexible, and often administratively constricting. They want to ensure that managers will never have the discretion to act unjustly again. In their indignation, they may try to roll back decisions imposed unfairly even when the decisions themselves were good ones-even when they were critical to the company's competitiveness or beneficial to the workers themselves. Such is the emotional power that unfair process can provoke.

Managers who view fair process as a nuisance or as a limit on their freedom to manage must understand that it is the violation of fair process that will wreak the most serious damage on corporate performance. Retribution can be very expensive.

Fair Process in the Knowledge Economy

Fair process may sound like a soft issue, but understanding its value is crucial for managers trying to adapt their companies to the demands of the knowledge-based economy. Unlike the traditional factors of production-land, labor, and capital-knowledge is a resource locked in the human mind. Creating and sharing knowledge are intangible activities that can neither be supervised nor forced out of people. They happen only when people cooperate voluntarily. As the Nobel laureate economist Friedrich Hayek has argued, "Practically every individual . . . possesses unique information" that can be put to use only with "his active cooperation." Getting that cooperation may well turn out to be one of the key managerial issues of the next few decades. (See the sidebar "Fair Process Is Critical in Knowledge Work.")

It is easy to see fair process at work on the plant floor, where its violation can produce such highly visible manifestations as strikes, slowdowns, and high defect rates. But fair process can have an even greater impact on the quality of professional and managerial work. That is because innovation is the key challenge of the knowledge-based economy, and innovation requires the exchange of ideas, which in turn depends on trust.

Executives and professionals rarely walk the picket line, but when their trust has not been won, they frequently withhold their full cooperation-and their ideas. In knowledge work, then, ignoring fair process creates high opportunity costs in the form of ideas that never see daylight and initiatives that are never seized. For example:

A multifunctional team is created to develop an important new product. Because it contains representatives from every major functional area of the company, the team should produce more innovative products, with less internal fighting, shortened lead times, and lower costs. The team meets, but people drag their feet. Executives at a computer maker developing a new workstation, for example, thoughtfully deploy the traditional management levers. They hammer out a good incentive scheme. They define the project scope and structure. And they allocate the right resources. Yet the trust, idea sharing, and commitment that everyone wants never materialize. Why? Early in the project, manufacturing and marketing representatives on the team propose building a prototype, but the strong design-engineering group driving the project ignores them. Subsequently, problems surface because the design is difficult to manufacture and the application software is inadequate. The team members from manufacturing and marketing are aware of these issues all along but remain passive in sharing their concerns with the powerful design engineers. Instead, they wait until the problems reveal themselves-at which time they are very expensive to fix.

Two companies create a joint venture that offers clear benefits to both parties. But they then hold their cards so close to their chests that they ensure the alliance will create limited value for either partner. The Chinese joint-venture partner of a European engineering group, for example, withholds critical information from the field, failing to report that customers are having problems installing the partner's products and sitting on requests for new product features. Why do the Chinese fail to cooperate fully, even if it means hurting their own business?

Early in the partnership, the Chinese felt they had been shut out of key product and operating decisions. To make matters worse, the Europeans never explained the logic guiding their decisions. As the Chinese withhold critical information, the increasingly frustrated European partner responds in kind by slowing the transfer of managerial know-how, which the Chinese need badly.

Two companies create a supplier partnership to achieve improved value at lower cost. They agree to act in a seamless fashion, as one company. But the supplier seems to spend more energy on developing other customers than on deepening the partnership. One consumer goods manufacturer, for example, keeps delaying the installation of a joint electronic consumer-response data system with a major food retailer. The system will substantially improve inventory management for both partners. But the supplier remains too wary to invest. Why? The retailer has a history of dropping some of the supplier's products without explanation. And the consumer company can't understand the retailer's ambiguous criteria for designating "preferred suppliers."

Voluntary cooperation was not what Frederick Winslow Taylor had in mind when at the turn of the century he began to develop an arsenal of tools to promote efficiency and consistency by controlling individuals' behavior and compelling employees to comply with management dictates. Traditional management science, which is rooted in Taylor's time-and-motion studies, encouraged a managerial preoccupation with allocating resources, creating economic incentives and rewards, monitoring and measuring performance, and manipulating organizational structures to set lines of authority. These conventional management levers still have their role to play, but they have little to do with encouraging active cooperation. Instead, they operate in the realm of outcome fairness or what social scientists call distributive justice, where the psychology works like this: When people get the compensation (or the resources, or the place in the organizational hierarchy) they deserve, they feel satisfied with that outcome. They will reciprocate by fulfilling to the letter their obligation to the company. The psychology of fair process, or procedural justice, is quite different. Fair process builds trust and commitment, trust and commitment produce voluntary cooperation, and voluntary cooperation drives performance, leading people to go beyond the call of duty by sharing their knowledge and applying their creativity. In all the management contexts we've studied, whatever the task, we have consistently observed this dynamic at work. (See the exhibit "Two Complementary Paths to Performance.")

Two Complementary Paths to Performance

Consider the transformation of Bethlehem Steel Corporation's Sparrows Point, Maryland, division, a business unit responsible for marketing, sales, production, and financial performance. Until 1993, the 106-year-old division was managed in the classic command-and-control style. People were expected to do what they were told to do-no more and no less-and management and employees saw themselves as adversaries.

That year, Bethlehem Steel introduced a management model so different at Sparrows Point that Taylor-who was, in fact, the company's consulting engineer about 100 years ago-wouldn't have recognized it. The new model was designed to invoke in employees an active sense of responsibility for sharing their knowledge and ideas with one another and with management. It was also meant to encourage them to take the initiative for getting things done. In the words of Joe Rosel, the president of one of the division's five unions, "It's all about involvement, justification for decisions, and a clear set of expectations."

At Sparrows Point, employees are involved in making and executing decisions at three levels. At the top is a joint-leadership team, composed of senior managers and five employee representatives, that deals with companywide issues when they arise. At the department level are area teams, consisting of managers like superintendents and of employees from the different areas of the plant, such as zone committee people. Those teams deal with day-to-day operational issues such as customer service, quality, and logistics. Ad hoc problem-solving teams of employees address opportunities and obstacles as they arise on the shop floor. At each level, team-mates share and debate their ideas. Thus, employees are assured a fair hearing for their points of view on decisions likely to affect them. With the exception of decisions involving major changes or resource commitments, the teams make and execute the decisions themselves.

Sparrows Point uses numerous processes and devices to ensure that all employees can understand why decisions have been made and how such decisions need to be executed. There is, for example, a bulletin board where decisions are posted and explained, allowing employees who haven't been directly involved in those decisions to understand what's going on and why. In addition, in more than 70 four-hour seminars, groups ranging in size from 50 to 250 employees have met to discuss changes occurring at the division, learn about new ideas under consideration, and find out how changes might affect employees' roles and responsibilities. A quarterly newsletter and a monthly "report card" of the division's strategic, marketing, operational, and financial performance keeps each of the unit's 5,300 employees informed. And the teams report back to their colleagues about the changes they are making, seeking help in making the ideas work.

Fair process has produced significant changes in people's attitudes and behavior. Consider, for example, the tin mill unit at Sparrows Point. In 1992, the unit's performance was among the worst in the industry. But then, as one employee explains, "People started coming forward and sharing their ideas. They started caring about doing great work, not just getting by. Take the success we've had in light-gauge cable sheathing. We had let this high value-added product slip because the long throughput time required for production held up the other mills in the unit. But after we started getting everyone involved and explained why we needed to improve throughput, ideas started to flow. At first, the company was doubtful: If the product had created a bottleneck before, why should it be different now? But people came up with the idea of using two sequential mills instead of one to eliminate the bottleneck. Did people suddenly get smarter? No. I'd say they started to care."

The object in creating this new way of working at Sparrows Point was to improve the intellectual buy-in and emotional commitment of employees. It has apparently been successful. Since 1993, Sparrows Point has turned a profit three years in a row, the first time that has happened since the late 1970s. The division is becoming a showcase demonstrating how a declining industry can be revitalized in today's knowledge economy. In the words of one Sparrows Point employee, "Since we know now everything that's going on in the company, we have more trust in management and are more committed to making things happen. People have started doing things beyond the normal call of duty."

Overcoming Mental Barriers

If fair process is such a simple idea and yet so powerful, why do so few companies practice it? Most people think of themselves as fair, and managers are no exception. But if you ask them what it means to be a fair manager, most will describe how they give people the authority they deserve, or the resources they need, or the rewards they have earned. In other words, they will confuse fair process with fair outcomes. The few managers who focus on process might identify only one of the three fair-process principles (the most widely understood is engagement), and they would stop there.

But there are two more fundamental reason, beyond this simple lack of understanding, that explain why fair process is so rare. The first involves power. Some managers continue to believe that knowledge is power and that they retain power only by keeping what they know to themselves. Their implicit strategy is to preserve their managerial discretion by deliberately leaving the rules for success and failure vague. Other managers maintain control by keeping employees at arm's length, substituting memos and forms for direct, two-way communication, thus avoiding challenges to their ideas or authority. Such styles can reflect deeply ingrained patterns of behavior, and rarely are managers conscious of how they exercise power. For them, fair process would represent a threat.

The second reason is also largely unconscious because it resides in an economic assumption that most of us have grown up taking at face value: the belief that people are concerned only with what's best for themselves. But, as we have seen, there is ample evidence to show that when the process is perceived to be fair, most people will accept outcomes that are not wholly in their favor. People realize that compromises and sacrifices are necessary on the job. They accept the need for short-term personal sacrifices in order to advance the long-term interests of the corporation. Acceptance is conditional, however, hinged as it is on fair process.

Fair process reaches into a dimension of human psychology that hasn't been fully explored in conventional management practice. Yet every company can tap into the voluntary cooperation of its people by building trust through fair processes.

A version of this article appeared in the January 2003 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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Fair Process: Managing in the Knowledge Economy

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When employees don't trust managers to make good decisions or to behave with integrity, their motivation is seriously compromised. Their distrust and its attendant lack of engagement is a huge, unrecognized problem in most organizations. This issue has always mattered, but it matters now more than ever, because knowledge-based organizations are totally dependent on the commitment and ideas of their employees.

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Ross Greene

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Episode #18 Dr  Ross Greene   Trauma Informed Educators Network Podcast

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How To Eat an Elephant - Goal Setting One Bite At A Time by Jeff Muir

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Step one begins with a close look at your beliefs about why and when a child exhibits concerning behavior. Thanks to an enormous amount of research that's been conducted over the past 50 years, we've learned that what we've been saying about kids with concerning behaviors (and what we've been doing to them) has often been counterproductive and ineffective.

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