March Forth with No FOPO
First, I must confess I used the catchy FOPO to get you here. It’s not mine. It’s Dr. Michael Gervais’s “first rule of mastery,” and he uses it in his "high-performance" consulting work. FOPO is “fear of people’s opinions” and pairs nicely with FOMO, "fear of missing out," which came to us with social media and other people’s perfectly-curated lives.
Alas, however, what I would like to share this March Forth cannot be summed up in a gimmicky way. I have been thinking and reading about it for several years, and it grew out what can only be described as “my dark night of the soul” -- that profoundly impactful inflection point in one’s life in which everything falls apart and after which nothing will be the same. So, now that I have you, please stay with me.
In the rearview mirror now, as much as any set of traumatic experiences can reside there, the facts surrounding my dark night of the soul seem rather unexceptional. I was dealing with something deeply wrong and unfair at work (never fear, it was resolved favorably, but it felt interminable), I was worried about our country which was vibrating with angry polarization, I was evaluating myself, my relationships, my long-held beliefs, and I was suffering with the heavy weight of uncertainty from which I could not extricate myself no matter what I tried (for reasons internal and external to me). In the middle of this midlife set of crises, I also found I was dealing with unresolved and re-triggered pain from the past.
I suppose my dark night wasn’t unusual. So many people go through similar dark nights with similar themes. But I admit those years made me feel terribly alone and chock full of self-doubt. The image I had in my mind was that my life had been this neatly constructed village of toy blocks, and then a huge earthquake-tsunami came along and devasted the village. The blocks, in my mind's eye, were now chaotically strewn about the floor and some had gone missing. I sat quietly and overwhelmed, on the floor beside the scattered blocks, trying to figure out how to rebuild as the ground still trembled with aftershocks.
Then, the problem became that I found myself doing what I always do – asking everyone else how to rebuild. What should I want? What I should do? And once I had done this standard survey of what everyone else wanted (often guessing or assuming without actually knowing), then I set about figuring out how to contort and bend myself to be most satisfying to as many people as possible. I was sort of the Jeremy Bentham of people-pleasing.
During my dark night, I worked with an exceptional and patient coach. She showed me a diagram in our early work that I recall finding unremarkable as I jotted it down in my notebook. She called it “Go Direct”:
The idea is that we waste an enormous amount of energy in determining how we feel about ourselves and our work by seeking the approval of others. We climb the mountain of the triangle, constantly scanning the room for reactions, adjusting who we are or how we present ourselves to achieve more approval, and, in its more malign forms, manipulating or attempting to control narratives and other people’s perceptions. It lacks authenticity. It’s exhausting. It places us in the position of attempting to control what we cannot control (other people’s perceptions). And it keeps us focused on outward indicia of performance and acceptance rather than our internal purpose and values.
Make no mistake – this phenomenon of approval-seeking is biologically driven. On the savannah, if we were cast out of the tribe, we were defenseless. Rejection was death. It is also psychologically driven. We are social creatures who derive great meaning and even survival from our relationships. Studies have shown that infants enter the world keeping a close eye on the facial expressions of their mothers, and they become deeply agitated when the mothers show no warmth or regard.
What is also remarkable is that we, as humans, despite this biological imperative to be able to read faces and rooms, are particularly bad at it. We overestimate by dozens of percentage points how much people notice or register us thanks to an egocentric bias called the “spotlight effect” (it's true what my friend's mother used to say: "ain't nobody studying you.") We also are remarkably bad at accurately discerning or guessing what someone else is thinking - even people with whom we share a close relationship. It turns out, our own filters and fears are often the drivers of what we think another person is thinking instead of any form of accurate mind-reading. If you doubt this, spend a day guessing what other people are thinking about you and then ask them.
Using her triangle, my coach explained to me that if we can “go direct,” along with base of the triangle, from what our purpose and values are to how we evaluate our performance, we will not waste time trying to shape narratives or earn approval. We will also not use the “bad data” of what we think other people are thinking to shape our behavior and will be far more inclined to ask questions rather than make assumptions.
I confess I found the original presentation of the Go Direct triangle unremarkable because I was a bit like David Foster Wallace’s two young fish who don’t know what water is. As Foster Wallace wisely notes “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about.” My coach had to work for my a-ha moment. We did exercises, examinations, and internal family system work.
In one helpful exercise, she asked me to imagine I was in my car in a parking lot, driving, and about to park in a space when I “hear a car honk.” She asked me simply, "what is happening?" "You mean who is honking?" I asked. "Sure," she said. "Well, I imagine I've done something inadvertently stupid and someone is angry and honking at me," I responded, self-deprecatingly, searching her face for a grin of approval (so much to unpack there, right?). "What else could be the case?" she asked. Silence. "Are there any other narratives? Anyone else who might be honking for other reasons?" It took a while, but we developed a list of five other potential options and discussed the likelihood that those other options could be true. "For next week," she concluded, "let's consider your initial assumption and what that might mean about the filters with which you process neutral information." Boof.
After many sessions and many more books, it slowly began to dawn on me how hypervigilant I am to other people’s opinions. The reasons are myriad and no doubt have much to do with my family of origin, the culture in which I grew up, my gender, and various other contributing factors. It also dawned on me that so often I had become “stuck” in life – unable to make important decisions or take risks or do what I wanted to do – because I was desperate to please all the people. It was a humbling and startling realization, to say the least.
Once I pulled back the curtain on how much I was driven by other people’s opinions, the consequence of the revelation was to understand that I did not have good tools to know what my own desires were. My signal-to-noise ratio was quite low. I could not hear my own signal for all the noise. I was a nearly-50-year-old mother of two, and I did not know how to know what I wanted. I did not know how to reduce noise. I did not know how to power down my high-sensitivity, oscillating, motion-detecting radar busily collecting data on other people’s reactions. I did not know how to observe and trust the sensations of my body. Sure, I had a sense of my values, but I did not know how to be fully guided by them. I couldn’t “go direct.”
In fact, I had to physically go into my closet and shut the door to introduce myself to myself. I wish I were kidding. Anyone who has read Untamed will smile knowingly. I sat in the dark in my closet, cross-legged, with my eyes closed, trying to hear my faint voice. I tried to feel what “resonated” with me. Outside the closet, I had to practice observing what my body was telling me in a given situation. I had to notice that, when my stomach was in knots or my palms were sweating when I was with someone or in a certain building, it was likely not a safe place for me to be. I stopped trying to override and ignore that bodily data. I also had to learn to catch myself when I was guessing what someone else wanted and trying to give it to them. I started asking more open-ended questions to initiate real exchanges.
This work will be my “practice,” no doubt, for the rest of my life. Some people practice yoga poses, and I will practice how to connect with my knowing. I imagine that, for all of us, when we make the shift from a performance-based life (guided by the question “how am I doing based on outside indicia of success”) to a purpose-driven life (“how do I minimize the delta between my values and the choices I make”), then life must become enormously easier and more peaceful. Peaceful. That’s the word for it. I can see glimpses of the peace that must come from acting from inside out instead of the reverse.
Let me hasten to add, at this moment when our airwaves and social media feeds are filled with narcissists and the chronically self-obsessed, I do not mean to suggest that we act without concern or empathy for others or, indeed, without the wise counsel of others. One of my core values is to treat people with dignity and kindness. What I have now learned though is that I can move out from that internal value into the world because I value grace and not because I want you to think I am graceful.
Also, I maintain a core network of wise, gentle souls from whom I seek advice. At this point in my life, however, I am drawn to the people who ask me questions to help us both better understand and then offer, without attachment, their reflections. I am far less drawn to the people who tell me what I should do based on what they “know” or need (these people usually do not know they are swimming in water either), especially when they do so without being asked. As well, we can care about what our loved ones and friends think of our actions, especially when we believe they have our best interests and growth at heart, without worrying about what people, whose motives are unclear, think or need.
These are subtle distinctions and balancing acts to consider as we march forth to a life with less FOPO. True mastery of purpose-driven living is the stuff is Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Maya Angelou. I am sure we can all think of a person in our lives who does not waste precious energy fretting about the shifting winds of other people's opinions and whose purpose shines from her as if it were light emerging from cracks in her chest. At a minimum, I am enjoying those peaceful first glimpses of the third chapter of my life in which I shut down my ever-oscillating radar and am driven by what I value and what gives me joy and meaning. Following my truth north. For now, you will find me in my closet, listening intently.
