Dan Erwin

Why It Pays to Work with a Well-Trained Athletic Coach

Or, how to live a much longer happy, meaningful life.

Over the years I've worked with four different coaches. The young man I've worked with for more than the last two years is in a completely different ball park. He's exceptionally well-educated, has unbelievably astute diagnostic ability, and can break any behavior down into the smallest imaginable bits and demonstrate them. 

Because I was an executive development coach, working with multi-billion dollar firms around the globe for more than twenty years, we have a lot of conversations about the coaching process. But a different context.

At my age, six months away from the big 90 years, we regularly focus on three issues: strength building, balance and flexibility. Part owner in a major franchise, he has machinery of all sorts for my issues--as well as seemingly endless exercise recommendations not involving the typical exercise equipment. 

He does a lot more for me than focus on the three objectives. When I have a problem, or suspect that I might be able to do a lot better in a physical area, he's right there to help. At my last session, I commented about typical behaviors he's updated for me, wondering whether others bring in such insights. He laughed and commented on my uniqueness and self-awareness--which I found somewhat disappointing.

The Very Mixed Bag of Anger

Anger can be dysfunctional, functional or “just for show.”

But over the years I’ve met with clients and business people who were resistant to working with a colleague because he or she was an “angry asshole.” When I analyzed their statement by talking to other colleagues, I found that so-called “angry” people were a very mixed bag. Their anger differed significantly. It took me awhile to figure out that some anger served a useful purpose and some did not. But that the differences are rarely clear to most people. What I learned was that it was often helpful and enlightening to push back on “useful” anger, but that I was liable to get burned by another person’s anger.

Intuitively, I could usually figure out the anger that was being displayed, knowing whether to charge ahead or back off. Furthermore, in my seminary studies (1960) I had stumbled across a very insightful statement by St. Thomas Aquinas: “Without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable and crimes unchecked.” That single statement had caused me to rethink my shallow, adolescent religious experiences with anger, making it far easier to either question or assert myself with some angry people, a competency that added to my value as a church pastor and then an executive coach. But it has always been difficult for me to explain these differences to clients or friends.

So, a few years ago, while working through some attachment theory issues, I discovered John Bowlby’s distinction between functional and dysfunctional anger.  I glommed onto his ideas, realizing that they could be highly valuable for myself and many others.

My Passion Turned Toxic

So I left it, nearly 40 years ago. It was one of the four or five smartest moves in my life of nearly 90 years.

I’ve loved my life even more for the last 40 years, and found it very meaningful. Initially, both of my professions in the first 22 years were also very meaningful—and even very happy and successful professions with national recognition. But eventually, both professions became toxic. Or, as my wife referred to the culture where I worked last, very “plastic.”

Let me explain.
The term, toxic, is defined as “harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way.” But that’s nothing more than a dictionary term. If you’ve talked to people who use the term in reference to a relationship or a situation, you know that the dictionary term doesn’t tell you very much. The term, like many others is ambiguous. It’s a classic case of polysemy. It has many meanings, but all the meanings are determined by the context. So what’s toxic to one person is not to another. Toxic is not merely sensitive to the context. The meaning of the word toxic depends completely on the situation for its meaning.

Of all the hundreds of people related to the last culture in which I worked, no one would ever think of that culture, except my wife and I, as toxic. In fact, when I talked to a leader from that culture, years after I left, he was very offended that I described the culture as toxic—even though I used my wife’s term—“plastic.”

How to Live to Become a Healthy Ninety-Year Old

I just turned a very healthy 89 years old. What’s intriguing about it are all the questions I get. At least eight or ten times over the past four months, people have asked about my  age. After being asked that often, I’m a bit “ho hum” about it. What’s the big deal? Another day. Another year.

On a couple of  occasions, I set up my audience to ask my age in order to make a point. But the rest of the questions were out of the blue. On my trip to Italy early this year, observing my active stance, a number of young people asked my age. One tourist, an athletic trainer from Ireland, had my picture taken with him standing beside me to show to his father, a seventy-year-old who’s “not taking care of himself."

But surprisingly, as soon as I respond to the request about my age, no matter the conversation, it turns immediately to one question: “How did you do that?”

How I Learned to Identify and Resolve My Unconscious Bias

On numerous occasions as a management consultant, I have asked execs about how much time they take to think about process, innovation or strategy. Often, the response was that they didn’t have time to think. A couple said that they were paying me to do the thinking. A compliment, but very unwise. And I provided a very deliberate rationale for why that rationale was lousy.

So how did we get to the place where managers don’t realize that thinking is part of their job? In a very thoughtful and fascinating article in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Duncan Simester pointed out that the bias for doing, not thinking, is built into business. Companies succeed by creating a successful business model—and then scaling it massively. Massive scaling requires a “finely tuned system with highly standardized processes.” So, getting promoted requires “almost a singular focus on execution. A bias toward execution.”

Developing Bias.
Although the study of bias has focused largely on about a dozen standard bias processes, it’s very important to understand how we usually--and unconsciously--create our own biases, sometimes helpful and other times damaging—and how we can sometimes spot them and change them as necessary.

How to Create and Use Power Successfully

To a surprising degree, the American culture tends to think of power from the downside. And so, power is seen as a negative, evil, coercive or repressive force that causes us to do things against our wishes. The effects of power are in negative terms. It excludes, represses, censors, masks and conceals.

But, in fact, power is also a very necessary force, a productive and positive force in our world. So at its heart, power is fundamentally creative. It took power to create our magnificent colleges and universities, to develop social nets, create our various park systems and build our great organizations. Fundamentally, it took a lot of guts for the 56 leaders to create and sign the Declaration of Independence, a fundamentally creative act shifting England’s power to them. And though Britain saw the signing as an act of treason, many colonists—though not all—saw it as an act of powerful liberation, putting their lives on the line--an act of group power.

In the final analysis, they saw power through the potential for hope. To paraphrase Immanuel Kant, they actually saw the hope of a national future as a moral obligation. A lot more than merely an attitude readily impacted by fear and the emotions. Hope provided them with an orientation for the creation of power.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the Jewish American  philosopher, conceives power in a very distinctive way. She sees power as rooted in a political philosophy that celebrates the public realm of freedom that emerges when people act with others as citizens or political equals. For Arendt, power becomes a force when people act together to sustain or to change the world they share with one another. Her fundamental claim is this: “Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert.”

How to Keep Your Enemies Closer Than Your Friends

In April 2015, I wrote a blog questioning, “Why Should You Keep Your Friends Close and Your Enemies Closer?” With an excess of 30,000 reads of that post, it obviously identified a real need of a great many people.  The post provided a rationale for the issue, not least that you can learn a lot from people you dislike, gain a different perspective and make it easier for your allies to work with you. But it only addressed strategies for working with enemies and difficult people in a cursory fashion.

Near as I can tell, there are two vocations that absolutely require a person to keep their enemies closer just to keep their job: elected politicos and Protestant church ministers. However, most business people recognize early on that they’re going to have to work with “enemies,” people they don’t especially like or trust--or pay the price in performance and sometime job loss.

So how can you keep your enemies closer?

Why You Need to Think and Talk on Two Tracks

Metacommunication: talk about talk. It’s the ability to describe the intentions of what we’re saying and doing. It’s necessary and helpful for avoiding misunderstanding, especially when what we’re doing or saying can be readily misinterpreted. Metacommunication makes influence and cooperation from those we are working with a lot easier.

In complex business conversations, metacomm can profoundly impact conversations and make them far more constructive and efficient—even timesaving. To a significant degree, metacomm functions to facilitate conversation and is highly useful for training participants in sequencing or processing their conversations. In our studies and experience with metacomm, we have found a number of metacomm forms especially useful.

Monitoring processes. Conversations that stick to your planned objectives to focus on problem solving, innovation or developing cross-disciplinary agreements, readily become mere discussions rather than action-oriented. However, the use of metacomm can serve to facilitate the conversation, following the implicitly agreed-upon rules and making effective use of time to achieve the set expectations. ”I’m saying this because. . . .”

Do You Have a Two-Track Brain?

In today’s tech oriented business world you’ll need it. Here’s why.

One of the most difficult problems with collaborative conversation is staying on track. Smart people inevitably get waylaid by tangential ideas that are suggested by their meeting interactions. That’s precisely why many think that team meetings are such a waste. Yet solutions and decisions in today’s business world inevitably require conversations to gain the buy-in of diverse teams and multiple business disciplines.

One underlying limitation business groups face is that few participants have a good handle on sequencing ideas. We used to think that software coders, who constantly work with digital sequencing, should be able to manage linkages. We’ve found, however, that the majority of technical people are unable to make the transfer of digital sequencing to conversational sequencing. Those with an extensive background in

Best Political Quote of the Year. . . Gretchen Whitmer

In an extensive article, perhaps thinking about a future presidential run, the New Yorker had a long and enlightening article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells on Whitmer. The current governor of Michigan, Whitmer is one tough, very smart lady. But she's not the only Democrat in the State. Both houses are also Democratically run--creating a very thick Blue Wall and knocking the DeVos family out of much of their power games for extreme Republicans.

She understood well that the low turnout of 2016, which gave Trump the state, was not about a radical turn to the right, but about "low voter turnout."

Whitmer's wins suggest a different story about the Midwestern heartland.