To Find your Bravest Leadership, Let Go of your Sticky Attachments

Summary: To thrive as leaders and humans in our current landscape of uncertainty and disruption, we must practice the art of continually letting go of our attachment to beliefs and strategies that have brought us a false sense of control and comfort. Attachment to things and behaviours. Attachment to being right, being busy, or being in control. Attachment to proving, doing it all, or getting it perfect. None of these strategies allow us to meet our future as it emerges with the openness and creativity it so deserves.

One of the most challenging courses I’ve grappled with in Addiction School has been The Art of Letting Go. It’s not just about letting go of the target of my addiction, a very sticky attachment that yields a vicious cycle of escape and shame. That’s just the first semester. It turns out I’ve signed up for a multi-year, interdisciplinary curriculum.

Letting go of my sticky attachment to substances and activities that numb me into a false and short-lived comfort was a given — but just the start. In the vacated space that remained, a whole slew of other sticky attachments I’d been blind to began to reveal themselves. Like my sticky attachments to busyness, controlling outcomes, and looking to others to validate my value.

Busyness

“We are a culture of people who’ve bought into the idea that if we stay busy enough, the truth of our lives won’t catch up with us.” Brené Brown, Daring Greatly

Control

“There is no greater way to lose control than to try to control everything.” Ron Roberts, Fast Company

What Others Think

“Hold your horses when you’re coming to judge people. You don’t necessarily know what someone’s true value is. That is an unknown part of them and we shouldn’t behave as though it is known.” Alain de Botton, TEDGlobal 2009

I don’t know which sticky attachment has been harder to let go of, the one to alcohol or to everything else. It’s all intertwined into this tangled, knotted ball of yarn my therapist and I continue to unravel. But one theme has become clear: my sticky attachments have limited my leadership impact. And learning to let go has unleashed it.

My sticky attachments have limited my leadership impact. And learning to let go has unleashed it.

We come by our sticky attachments honestly. Our human condition is one big unsolvable paradox that has us endlessly teetering from simple to complex, from bitter to sweet, then back again. How do we get a hold of it, a fix on it, long enough to make sense of it?

The answer, of course, is that we can’t and that’s not the point anyway. The point is not to solve our human condition but to experience it. And yet many of us are stuck on figuring it out or doing it right.

We try to avoid or remove uncertainty and when we can’t, we get itchy and look for ways to scratch. We become attached to behaviours that reduce the discomfort, like checking our screens for likes, over-managing our task lists, or wasting hours perfecting a PowerPoint deck (who’s with me there?).

Whatever our sticky attachments are, when we choose to let them go, an empty space will appear. And just as our tongues probed the space where we lost a baby tooth, it feels weird for a time. The space might even become our next sticky attachment, rather than leaving it alone as we wait for the next tooth to emerge.

The Art of Letting Go

I was first introduced to Otto Scharmer’s Theory U framework several years ago and while I’m still working to understand the depths of his thinking, I keep coming back to this gem of his: let go to let come.

Let go to let come. Otto Scharmer

Scharmer gives us a context for understanding our sticky attachments — and a way to stay in the space as we let go of them. Individually and collectively, he says, when we’re faced with the discomfort of disruption and uncertainty, we act in one of two ways: we close in our reaction or we open in our response.

When we close ourselves, we turn away from others. We become absent, not just to others, but to our true selves. At it’s most benign, absencing changes nothing, but it also creates nothing. At it’s worst, it’s destructive — to ourselves, to others, and to the collective. Scharmer provides a timely case study on the destruction this caused through the 45th president of the United States (see takeaway 5).

I call this tendency to react and close The Stuck Zone.

My addictions and sticky attachments were born and bred here. The self-protective “freeze and close” strategies I learned to navigate trauma in my early life became entrenched in me, long past their expiry date. As opposed to Scharmer’s example; my closed heart and mind was internally focused, not externally. The destruction was turned within.

The good news is there’s another response to the discomfort of disruption and uncertainty. Rather than freezing and closing we can open ourselves. We can pause long enough to notice and suspend our judgments, beliefs, and habitual patterns. We can tame our knee-jerk reactions so that we can respond.

In responding, we open to our true selves and our world with the courage to stay with and get curious about what’s (really) there. We connect with and courageously activate our deeper sources of wisdom. We access our compassion — for ourselves and others.

I call this space where opening and response lives The Recovery Zone.

My addictions and sticky attachments lose their grip here. When I get present to any given moment with self-compassion I open myself to my own human-ness. My self-protective strategies feel less potent, less necessary here. I’m willing to step into what Brené Brown calls the arena without armour. I become curious about where my courage will take me, knowing I’ll be able to respond.

This is where Scharmer’s nugget shows up: Let go to let come.

What we’re really doing here is letting go. This space of responding instead of reacting, of shifting into The Recovery Zone, is about letting go of the parts of us that wants to predict or control what happens next. I’m not sure how it is for you, but the very notion of predicting and controlling makes my brow furrow and my body tighten, pulling me straight back into reaction.

What happens at the beginning of any creative process? Nothing! Creativity requires that we create space and wait for something to emerge. Otto Scharmer

Letting go becomes the launch pad toward creation. Letting go is about accepting that we interact only in this moment now. I can’t interact now with the situation I was in last Tuesday or the one I’m imagining will happen in three hours. I can look back on it now, or prepare for it now, but I can’t interact with it.

Better that I trust my ability to open and respond, to let go of the sticky attachments to ways of closing that have helped me survive so far. Better that I let what’s next come — with curiosity, courage, and compassion. From this space I can respond to and create with whatever (or whomever) shows up. Scharmer calls this co-creation.

I call this space The Impact Zone. It’s where true creativity is unleashed.

When we suspend our need to keep ourselves safe and comfortable with our sticky attachments and instead courageously and compassionately allow space for deeper sources of wisdom — in us, in others, and in our environment — to emerge, we recover to the best parts of ourselves.

We unleash the impact of our bravest leadership.

What are your sticky attachments?

If you let go, even a bit, what might emerge?