Episode Transcript
For nearly 20 years, I’ve had a habit that follows me to the blank page. When I write, I bite my nails. It seems ridiculously minor, but I’ve done it to the point where I’ve had to hide my hands in meetings. I interlace my fingers, keep them below the table. I’ve come up with all sorts of ways to hide my embarrassment.
During the time I was writing Malaria, Poems, I was traveling to meet researchers, attending conferences. My nails were completely destroyed. I felt so proud of my work on the book, and at the same time so much shame. And I always believed these kinds of things were willpower problems. I just didn’t have enough of it.
And sometimes I could white knuckle my way through a writing session without biting, but mostly I couldn’t. At one point, I painted my nails with some kind of hot pepper concoction. Didn’t work. No matter what I tried to have, it always came back. What I didn’t have. The tools to do back then, but do now is to ask the question underneath the question.
So it’s not, how do I stop biting, but what does the blank page mean to me that makes biting feel necessary in the first place? And when I finally sat with that, what came up wasn’t about writing at all. It was about my parents’ divorce, about watching financial instability up close as a kid, about a narrative I had come up with that my writing had to move me further from those times.
Do you see where I’m going here? The blank page wasn’t just a blank page. It was uncertainty and biting was how I’d learned to manage uncertainty right? It was a way to distract myself from those fears and hard times. And so as we do here at three MR, we discover that we’re not alone in our thinking and our experiences, and we’re so not alone that oftentimes folks have not only thought about these experiences, but they’ve researched and named them.
Enter organizational psychologist, Chris Argyris. Chris spent decades studying why smart, capable people keep getting stuck. He called it the difference between single loop and double loop learning, single loop learning: adjust the behavior like a, like a thermostat that turns up the heat when the room gets cold, solves the problem within the existing sort of set of roles. Double loop learning goes a level deeper. It doesn’t just ask why the room keeps getting cold, which is important. It questions the system. It asks whether 68 degrees was the right goal to begin with, whether we’re even measuring the right thing.
Today I take a few intentional breaths before sitting down to write, and I pair that with a kind of internal reminder to myself that now is not then right? This blank page is not that childhood kitchen table, right? The result has been less biting and another result is something I rarely accessed when fear was leading the way, which is playfulness.
Playfulness with what I’m making. As you may have seen this year, I’ll be launching a deck of cards all about feedback. Every card is of course, evidence-based, but I am proud to say I was able to express playfulness in every card. So think of a habit or pattern you keep trying to fix by changing what you do or by blaming yourself or by chalking it all up to willpower.
Like set a five minute timer and just sit in silence, wondering: what about the situation makes my system do the behavior I want to stop doing? That insight may take you somewhere deeper than the surface fixes. See you next week.
Show Notes
Don't Just Keep Up.
Define the New Rules.
3-Minute Reframe isn't just another newsletter. It’s where new language for modern leadership is forged. Explore some of the frameworks shaping the future of personal and professional growth.