9. Making Moral Decisions

Today, Roger Arnold is executive vice president and Chief Distribution Officer for Wealth Enhancement Group, a financial advisory firm based in Minneapolis that serves the Midwest. Roger recalls a dilemma he faced a few years back when he had the national responsibility for distribution for products for a large financial services company. His top-producing regional manager, whom we’ll call Sam, was using a questionable sales technique to boost revenues. Sam’s approach wasn’t illegal. Roger wasn’t even certain it was unethical. But deep down, Roger just knew that Sam’s technique wasn’t right. It wasn’t in their clients’ best interests. So Roger told Sam to stop using his technique. Roger thought he’d made it clear that he was serious: “If you do this again, Sam,” Roger warned, “I’ll fire you.”

So Sam did it again. Roger thought briefly about how he should respond.

I could have kept it a secret and protected Sam, thereby protecting my own bonus. But I confronted him and gave him thirty days’ notice. And my bonus was indeed negatively affected. It would have been easy to wink at Sam’s behavior or turn the other way and act like I didn’t know what he was doing. But I knew what the right thing to do was, so I did it. And because I was willing to let Sam go despite his impressive financial results, I sent a clear message to all the other sales leaders across the country that doing what’s best for our clients really does matter.

What allowed Roger to do the right thing—the hard thing—when he knew it would cost him personally, and when he could so easily have kept Sam’s sales technique a secret? Roger practices the “4 Rs,” a four-step decision-making method that overrides our natural tendency to make emotionally driven decisions that have moral implications when in the face of strong emotions such as fear or excitement. The 4 Rs consist of four steps (or skills): recognize, reflect, reframe, and respond.

Roger uses the 4Rs to keep his excitement about his group’s financial performance, and the promise of a hefty bonus from driving a decision that was not consistent with his, or his company’s, values.

In the following section, you see how Roger uses those critical skills, and as you proceed through the chapter, you learn how you can develop those same skills.

How Roger Used the 4 Rs

RECOGNIZE all the elements of the situation you are in. Stop whatever you are doing to take notice of everything you’re thinking, feeling, and doing related to the situation you are in. Pay particular attention to what stimulates your thoughts and emotions.

Roger paid attention to everything he was thinking, feeling, and doing. He recognized how stimulated he was by his excitement about the financial results that Sam was producing. He also recognized that he was uncomfortable about the methods Sam was using to deliver those results. Finally, Roger recognized that he was tempted to look the other way and that he felt a conflict between his values and the potential for recognition and financial gain he and his group could obtain if he allowed Sam to continue doing what he was doing.

REFLECT on how you are interpreting your situation. What does the big picture look like for you? What values are important to you, and how should they influence your choices? What biases might influence your understanding of the situation you’re considering?

Roger actively reflected on his situation. He thought about his values, including “Doing the right thing,” and his company’s value of doing what was best for the customer. He reflected on his potential short-term loss of some of his bonus if he were to let Sam go, and weighed that against the long-term opportunities that would come from doing the right thing for customers, and sending the right messages to other sales leaders about the right way to do business. Roger also recognized that he needed to stay clear about what “success” should mean to him and his team. Success didn’t mean selling products at all costs, but about being financially successful by looking out for the best financial interests of their customers.

REFRAME your ideas about the situation by stating the most positive yet still realistic outcome for the decision you need to make.

Though Roger knew he would personally suffer financially in the short term if he terminated Sam, his reflection led him to reframe the situation as “Short-term pain. Long-term gain.”

RESPOND by making a decision consistent with your values and goals and take the reality of your current situation into account.

Roger terminated Sam. He set an example about the kind of culture he expected in his organization. And he inspired other sales leaders to be responsible about their own groups’ sales practices.

How the 4 Rs Work

Using the 4 Rs rewires our brains to make values-based decisions in the face of strong emotional responses that override rational thinking. Over time, these emotionally based responses to life situations become habits. These habits are encoded in the brain in the form of neural pathways that increase the likelihood that we will respond in the same emotionally driven manner time and time again. Fortunately, we’ve also learned that we have the power to change our response patterns in ways that allow us to make smarter decisions. The 4 Rs are designed to help us develop that power. By practicing the 4 Rs regularly, we create new neural pathways in the brain. By doing so, we establish new habits that, over time, replace our reflexive emotional responses with deliberate and reflective responses that take our values into account. The 4 Rs help retrain our brains in a number of ways.

The 4 Rs interrupt our brain’s default responses to external situations.¹ When faced with highly stimulating events, our brain’s emotional center typically disables our brain’s rational center, thus provoking a fear or anger response that Daniel Goleman, author and emotional intelligence pioneer, labeled the “amygdala highjack”² Jeffrey Schwartz, noted psychiatrist and researcher in the field of neuroplasticity, has conducted research that explains the mechanisms underlying an amygdala highjack. According to Schwartz, in the process of shutting down our rational center, the amygdala leaves our habit center intact.³ Our habit center, which activates primitive physiological behavior and habitual unthinking responses to events, is now in charge of complicated decisions such as those leaders face every day.

To prevent this chain of events, think of the 4 Rs as hitting the pause button on our brain’s programmed responses to highly charged situations. We cannot always prevent our brains from kicking up an emotional storm in the face of a business challenge or opportunity, but we can, by practicing the 4 Rs, keep our emotional brain from hijacking our rational brain and setting our habit center free to run the show. And, because of the brain’s capability to develop new neurons and new pathways (neuroplasticity), when we hit the play button again, whatever we did during the pause contributes to changing our brain’s actions going forward.

The 4 Rs spur the development of new brain pathways that actually change the way we process information related to moral decisions. Extensive neuroscience research has left no doubt about the brain’s capability to change. We can change our brains, but only if we deliberately try. As Jeffrey Schwartz explains, “Physical changes in the brain depend for their creation on a mental state in the mind—the state called attention.”⁴ That is why the 4 Rs are effective in changing our brains—because they force us to pay attention to what we are doing.

When we respond to a leadership challenge or face a key decision, we usually react emotionally to stimulation from the outside in. The 4 Rs give us the tools to respond to leadership challenges, such as the one Roger Arnold faced from the inside out. They change the power balance between the reflexive emotional center of our brain (which sacrifices accuracy for speed), and the reflective, rational center of our brain (which is more accurate, but not quite as fast). The 4 Rs give us better access to our rational, thinking brain. But they do more than that: The 4 Rs greatly improve the quality of the data upon which we make thoughtful decisions. The 4 Rs won’t increase your IQ, but they can help you more effectively access the IQ you have, thereby enhancing your decision making effectiveness. The 4 Rs also ensure that you make decisions aligned with your most important personal values.

Practice Makes Permanent⁵

When practiced regularly, the 4 Rs create a strong foundation for making smart, responsible, values-based decisions about any aspect of our personal or professional lives. But changing habits requires commitment and persistence. Think about the last time you tried to change your behavior. Maybe you decided to lose a few pounds, or become more physically active. In each case, the process is simple: Maybe it’s a matter of eating less, or eating more fruits and vegetables, or signing up for a yoga class, or getting up an hour earlier each day to take a walk. Maybe it’s a decision to quit smoking. None of the things we need to do to make positive changes are complicated. But they can be hard to do. For example, nothing could be simpler—or harder—than not lighting up a cigarette. Why? Because our brains are wired to keep doing what we’ve already been doing. Similarly, the 4 Rs are both simple and hard. They are not complicated, but it can take some effort to make them part of how you live and think. You need to decide that you don’t want to be at the mercy of your reflexive brain. You need to decide that living in alignment is worth the initial discomfort of developing new habits. You need to decide that you want to be someone who makes moral choices that benefit you, your company, your loved ones, and your community.

Practicing Recognition

To manage the emotions that affect your decisions, you must first recognize them. That’s easier said than done. Most of us think we’re self-aware. By the time we get to be adults, we think we know ourselves well. And most of us like to think that we’re objective, even when we’re not. But as we learned from Chapter 2, “Born to Be Moral,” when it comes to making the best choices, we’re simply not aware of how our physiological state may be clouding our thinking. So, the first step to greater moral competence is to recognize exactly what you are thinking, feeling, and doing when in the throes of a stimulating situation. And to recognize your cognitive, emotional, and physical states when you need to, you must train yourself in advance. You want to become so skilled at recognition that it becomes second nature for you. By practicing the skill of recognition, you can transform yourself from a reflexive responder to a reflective recognizer.

Recognition in the Moment: The Experiential Triangle

All our life experiences fall into one of three categories (see Figure 9.1):

• Cognitive (our thoughts)

• Emotional (our feelings)

• Physical (our physiology and our actions)

Figure 9.1 The Experiential Triangle

Think of these three categories of experience as points on a triangle. Thoughts, feelings, and actions are interconnected and usually influence one another. For example, if I think about someone who punched me yesterday, I am likely to feel angry; my heart rate will go up (physiology) and I may clench my fists (action) at the thought of what happened. My feelings and actions may even set off a new cycle of the experiential triangle, perhaps causing me to think about exacting revenge, which in turn stimulates new feelings, and so on.

Try this to experience the powerful connections between thoughts, emotions, and physical responses:⁶

• First close your eyes and identify a memory of something that happened that made you angry.

• Focus your attention on what happened and who was involved, and think about that situation for two minutes.

• After two minutes, open your eyes and recognize what you just experienced relative to your thoughts, your emotions, and your physical being.

What you will notice if you are self-aware is that you thought about what made you angry. It usually was a person, and within two minutes you might have thought about how that person angered you more than one time, to other occurrences when that person angered you.

You may also have noticed that your emotional state changed. You might have become angry again; or you might have felt guilt or regret. Your focus on your initial response may change how you feel emotionally within the two minutes. You probably also noticed that you were beginning to feel physical tension in your shoulders, your heart rate picked up, and your breathing became shallower.

Everything that happened to you was a result of what you were thinking about. As neuroscientist Jeff Schwartz points out, “Focus is power. What you choose to focus your attention on has power over your emotional and physical state.”⁷

Now, take the exercise to another step:

• Take a few deep breaths, close your eyes, and for the next two minutes, imagine that your brain is a radio receiver and that you have three channels permanently programmed into your automatic selections. One channel is the gratitude channel. The second channel is the love channel. The third channel is the beauty channel. For the next two minutes, turn on one of those channels. Depending on the channel you choose, focus completely on what you are grateful for, or whom you love deeply, or what beautiful aspects of life and your environment you most appreciate, for instance, mountains, ocean, desert, and so on.

• Now open your eyes and recognize what you have experienced.

If you’re like most people, you notice that your emotional state became much more peaceful. You begin to feel love, relaxed, and calm. You might think about all the things you are grateful for; or you may discover that you have a deep appreciation for certain people or natural settings. What you surely notice is that your physiological state changed. Your heart rate and breathing are slower, and your face is relaxed. You might even notice a smile come across your face. Once again you discover the power of focus, and the surprising amount of control you have over what you think and feel.

These exercises help us understand the importance and power of recognizing our experiential triangle. Managing our thoughts, emotions, and physical state is central to our ability to make smart, responsible, values-based decisions. Therefore, cultivating the art of recognizing our thoughts, feelings, and emotions is a crucial skill of moral intelligence. Recognition helps us fully access our experiences so that we have information we need to choose our responses to events rather than automatically (and often unconsciously) reacting to them.

Freeze!

One of the simplest and most powerful ways to cultivate the skill of recognition is to practice the Freeze Game.⁸ When you use the Freeze Game, you declare a short time out from whatever you happen to be doing in the moment. Imagine you’ve just hit the pause button on the DVD of your life. Then ask yourself these three questions:

• What am I thinking right now?

For example, what am I saying to myself inside my head? Am I thinking about a problem at work? A relationship issue? The weather?

• What am I feeling emotionally?

Emotions are words, not sentences; for example, I feel sad, excited, angry, or frustrated.

• What am I doing and what is happening with me physically right now?

For example, am I sitting or standing? Am I smiling or frowning? What’s the look on my face? Is my heart racing or calm? Is my breathing pattern normal or accelerated? Am I tense or relaxed?

As you probably noticed, each question is intended to help you become aware of one aspect of your experiential triangle of thoughts, feelings, and actions/physiological state. Why not try playing the Freeze Game right now?

When you played the Freeze Game, what did you become aware of that you hadn’t noticed before? Your experiential triangle might not be too dramatic at this moment. But imagine now your experiential triangle when faced with a stimulating situation that could compromise your ability to make values-based decisions. Using the Freeze Game enables us to catch flaws in our thinking before they can cause us, or the people whom we lead, any harm.

Recognition is a powerful tool, but only if you use it. If you’re not accustomed to taking time out for recognition, it probably won’t occur to you to hit the pause button when in the throes of an emotionally charged situation. Your ability to call on recognition when you need it depends on your ability to make recognition second nature. That takes practice. The more you play the Freeze Game, the more natural it will become to check in with yourself to see what you’re thinking and feeling and doing. After the Freeze Game is a habit, you are that much more likely to use it when you most need to stay in alignment. As you regularly play the Freeze Game, you’ll probably begin to notice many other benefits in your life. You’ll develop more self-awareness, and that deeper understanding of how you really think, feel, and act may translate into more positive relationships with family and friends, and even more productive behavior at work.

Recognizing Thinking Patterns

Our supposedly rational thought processes may not be as objective as we think. That’s why it’s useful to pay attention to the ways in which patterns of thought affect our actions. Our ability to make smart, responsible, values-based decisions is dependent on the way we typically think. One aspect of our thinking patterns is especially important to moral decision making: mental biases. Mental biases are a form of “self-spin” that fools us into thinking we are logical and objective when we actually aren’t. Everyone has mental biases. And they’re not necessarily bad. They are shorthand principles that the brain uses to manage the thousands of decisions and actions we must take in any given day. For instance, we may have a mental bias that “people are trustworthy.” This principle enables us to deal with people in an efficient way. By assuming that most people can be trusted, we feel fine about answering the door, asking for directions, working on a project with a fellow employee, eating food prepared by others, and going to sleep at night next to our spouse. Imagine what your life would be like if, every time you came into contact with another person, you had to figure out whether that person could be trusted. Your daily life would probably collapse under the strain of gauging each person’s trustworthiness from scratch. So, for the most part, our mental bias that “people are trustworthy” is highly functional—even though it’s not completely true. Some people are not trustworthy. Some people could harm us, and everyone has had occasional negative experiences with untrustworthy people. Mental biases become a problem only when we forget that we have them. For example, assuming that people are trustworthy can blind us to the warning signs that a particular person may not have our best interests at heart. That’s why we need to recognize our mental biases, not so that we can eliminate them (an impossible task) but so we can be aware of how they could influence the decisions we make. Some common mental biases include the following:

• Overconfidence: As opposed to appropriate self-confidence.

• Excessive optimism: The bias that can cause us to overestimate how frequently we will experience favorable outcomes and underestimate how often we will experience less than desirable results.

• Confirmation bias: A tendency to look for or interpret information in a way that confirms what we already think. Confirmation bias also involves ignoring information that would contradict what we already think.

• Familiarity bias: This is a tendency to apply too much weight to information with which we have had prior contact.

When it comes to moral decisions, mental biases operate in various ways; for example, they can cause us to ignore important data, attach too much importance to certain data, or encourage us to make decisions based on misguided beliefs about ourselves or the situation we’re in. Imagine that you have a tendency to be trusting and are excessively optimistic and prone toward confirmation bias. If you have a colleague who behaves in an untrustworthy manner, your excessive optimism bias may lead you to believe that your colleague is basically a good person, and your confirmation bias may cause you to ignore data that your colleague should not be trusted. Therefore, you might continue to work with that person, exposing you and your organization to potential harm.

Recognizing Emotional Patterns

When you play the Freeze Game frequently and consistently, you may begin to notice similarities in how you react to everyday situations, positive and negative, at home and work. You may begin to see a pattern in your responses to situations as varied as being cut off by an aggressive driver, dealing with a difficult co-worker, tucking your kids in for the night, or facing a huge mound of laundry. Recognition of these patterns can further increase your self-awareness about common reactions that can trip you up in your decision making and behavior. We know that the emotions that cloud our judgment are those that are strongly positive or negative. So we can increase our recognition of emotional patterns by looking at past experiences that have prompted us to respond with strong emotions. You may, for instance, want to ask yourself the recognition questions such as During what experiences in my past have I felt happy, excited, hopeful, angry, sad, or fearful? Answering such questions can help you recognize some of your most important emotional patterns.

Practicing Reflection

Recognition increases your awareness of what you are experiencing in a particular moment and of your habitual responses to highly charged emotional events. Armed with that crucial information, you are in a much better position to practice reflection.

The primary purpose of reflection is to change the source of stimulation from the outside-in to the inside-out. Reflection begins the process of creating an internal source of stimulation, one based on your moral principles, personal values, and the big picture of your life. Following are three aspects to the practice of reflection:

• Preparing to be reflective. Like any habit, reflection often requires a “cueing mechanism” to help us get into the frame of mind required for reflective thought.

• Making reflection a daily habit. As with recognition, your ability to use reflection when you need it most requires routine practice. This means taking time to be reflective several times a day.

• Using your reflection skill in any moment when you are being actively stimulated by a personal or leadership challenge.

Preparing Your Mind for Reflection

Juggling the demands of family, work, and community obligations can leave us in a chronic physiological state in which our danger system is always operating at some level. That’s why it’s necessary to do something to help us break from our routines or detach from the emotions of the moment. Of course, practicing recognition is key to clearing the path to reflective thought. We stop action and observe what is going on in us. In addition to practicing recognition, a number of practices can calm the mind and body, paving the way for a more reflective and rational state of mind. Dr. Herbert Benson, founding president of the Mind/Body Medical Institute, calls these practices “triggers” because they change our physiology in ways that in turn trigger well-being and improved performance. Triggering activities include prayer or meditation, listening to your favorite music, biking or walking in nature, soaking in a hot tub, or even mundane tasks like yard work or dishes.

Making Reflection a Habit

When you’re in the grip of a challenging situation, it’s vital to reflect on your values, your big picture, and the realities of whatever situation you face. Developing the habit of reflection makes it much easier to be reflective when you need it most. When those exciting opportunities or scary crises do come along, we’ll be programmed to use our values to make the best possible decisions. Cultivating the habit of reflection helps us align all our varied daily actions with our values and the realities of our lives and the world in which we live.

Reflecting on Values

In Chapter 3, “Your Moral Compass,” you had an opportunity to identify your most important values. Reflecting daily on those values is a powerful way to set the stage for acting on challenging situations whenever they strike. Choose a regular time each day to reflect on your values and your life context. The more you practice reflection, the more easily you can call on it when you need it most.

Reflecting on the Big Picture

Understanding the big picture of your life creates a context in which you can make better decisions. Your big picture includes five major areas of life:

• Family

• Goals (business and personal)

• Finances (business and personal)

• Health

• Environment (business and personal)

Armed with the reflection skill, we are ready to be reflective in those highly charged moments or during those challenging times when a personal or leadership situation is causing us either anxiety or excitement.

Although all four of the Rs are important, reflection is probably the most central to our ability to make smart, values-based decisions. Reflection forces us to evaluate the reliability of our automatic outside-in responses to situations. Building our reflective skill is key to ensuring that the decisions we make are not impulsive but are aligned with what we want to accomplish in our lives. And as you may have already noticed, after you reflect on what’s most important to you, and on the realities of the environment in which you live, it’s almost inevitable that you will begin to think differently about the situations you face. Reflection can naturally lead to the third R—reframing—a new way to see yourself and interpret your reality. Reflection done well and consistently can dramatically alter your sense of what is and can be true for you.

Practicing Reframing

Our typical way to interpret reality is based on long-standing habit patterns burned into our brains. But because of our brain’s plasticity, we can change the way we view situations we face. And that’s what reframing is all about: taking the results of our reflections—about values, goals, and the big picture—and re-interpreting whatever situation we are in.

Every decision we face happens in the context of the attitudes and beliefs we have about our situation. That collection of attitudes constitutes our “frame” for that situation. And that frame, in turn, powerfully influences the actual decision we make. Often, our frames for leadership situations consist of attitudes that get in the way of our ability to make smart, responsible, values-based decisions. Say, for example, your boss has asked you to withhold information from senior management about a mistake your unit has made in manufacturing a product. What you say to yourself about this challenging event affects everything you do—or don’t do—about it. The economy happens to be bad, and so you frame your situation like this: “If I don’t go along with my boss, I’ll lose my job, and I won’t get another one.” Of course, there is a chance that could happen, but by treating our beliefs about a situation as though they are objective facts, we limit our options for responding in a smart, values-based manner. And many of the frames we adopt may be unrealistically negative. When we reframe, we adopt a perspective about our situation that is realistically optimistic. For instance, we may adopt the following frame: “Our company’s code of ethics calls for us to admit our unit’s mistakes. There’s a chance I can help my boss see that it’s in our best interest to come clean about the manufacturing problem. Even if I can’t convince him, he probably won’t fire me. And even if he did fire me, I’ve got a good track record and should be able to get another job.” Notice that this frame is optimistic but not unrealistic. We know there’s no guarantee that our boss won’t fire us if we don’t go along with a deception, but our new perspective increases the odds that we will act in ways true to our values.

The way we reframe a situation virtually dictates how we respond to that situation. Reframing sets the stage for making a better decision than we would have made had we responded reflexively to our emotions. Dr. Rick Aberman of the Lennick Aberman Group came up with a simple way to understand and begin to practice reframing. He quotes Winnie the Pooh: “I was going to change my shirt but decided to change my mind instead.” Once Winnie reframed, he no longer needed to change his shirt. As a leader, you might say to yourself, “I was going to scream at my assistant, but I decided to change my mind instead.”

Responding

The first three Rs—recognize, reflect, and reframe—are meant to change a highly charged emotional state to a calm and productive emotional state that supports objective, unbiased thought. That is the state of mind that enables us to respond optimally to any challenging situation. Therefore, after we recognize our current state—reflected on our values, capabilities, and options—and reframed our situation, the next step is the fourth R—to respond with the best possible decisions. But it’s not actually a “final” step. Although each of the 4 Rs is discussed separately, it’s hard to separate them from one another in practice. Each R flows into the next—almost as soon as we recognize our thoughts, feelings, and physical state, we begin reflecting on what is going on in and around us. Almost as soon as we start reflecting on our values and the big picture, we begin to reframe our situation differently. And almost as soon as we reframe, we begin to think about how we want to respond. Many of us feel a strong desire to respond, that is, to act on those choices as soon as we’ve thought about them.

After we work through the first three Rs, it’s tempting to assume that we are automatically ready to make an optimal decision. However, that’s not necessarily true. When practiced regularly and thoroughly, the 4 Rs greatly increase the odds that we will be in the right cognitive and emotional frame of mind for smart decision making. But because we are not perfect, it’s possible to use the 4 Rs in an imperfect way. There are two major reasons for putting on the brakes before responding:

First, the 4 Rs do not always produce the optimal cognitive state for making challenging decisions. The quality of our ultimate response depends of the quality we have brought to each of the previous three Rs: The quality of our response depends on the quality of our reframing, which depends on the quality of our reflecting, which depends on the quality of our recognizing. At each step of the way, it’s possible for us to make cognitive mistakes. As you’ll recall, when we stop to recognize, it’s important to notice how mental biases may affect our thoughts. Unexamined biases affect the quality of our reflecting and therefore the value of the reframing we make in response to our reflecting. And if our reframing is not ideal, the options we act on when we respond might not be in our best interest or in the best interest of our organization.

Second, the 4 Rs do not always produce the optimal emotional state for making challenging decisions. The 4 Rs are meant to defuse emotions stimulated by outside events. However, each of the Rs can itself stimulate other emotions that occasionally get in the way of thinking at our best. For example, our collaborating writer Dr. Kathy Jordan lost a substantial number of clients in the economic downturn that began in the fall of 2008. Initially, she felt panicky about the drop in income. She had then reframed her situation as an opportunity to shift her career direction. She felt elated about this new opportunity, and in high spirits, responded by trying to market her new services, but without a lot of success. It took Kathy a few rounds of 4 Rs to recognize that she had become caught up in highly charged emotions that had been stimulated, not by outside events but as a result of her own reframing. She had unknowingly flipped her frame from excessive pessimism to excessive optimism. In effect, Kathy had replaced one set of highly charged emotions with another, interfering with the quality of her response. Had Kathy taken more time to reflect and spent more time analyzing the realities of the downturn, she would have recognized that it would be as difficult to find clients for her new services as it was to find clients for her original services. Economic conditions were a big picture reality that Kathy had to deal with no matter what kind of services she hoped to provide.

Recycling Before Responding

As tempting as it is to respond, after you’ve recognized, reflected, and reframed, there are times when it makes the most sense to postpone a response—postponing a response is frequently the best response. It’s fine to consider how we want to respond, but before carrying out a decision, it’s wise to repeat the first three Rs at least one more time. Responding naturally flows out of these other things, but the key is to keep cycling back among the other three Rs. As you prepare to respond, you have to continually keep recognizing what’s going on in your mind. Before you act on your choices, it’s essential to make sure you have done enough problem solving while reflecting. Look for aspect of your situation that you may have missed in your first go-around. For instance, ask yourself: “What haven’t I noticed about my situation that I should consider?” or “What might be some unintended consequences of the response I am considering?”

As you reflect, it’s also important to go back to recognition to confirm that reflecting actually has put you in a calm and productive state for decision making. For instance, how energized and how emotional are you as you reflect on your values? If you are excessively energized, you should recognize that you are still in a difficult situation to access your full faculties. As you think about your possible responses, use recognition once again to spot any mental biases. Are you looking for something to confirm your judgment? Are you choosing a course of action just because it’s easy or familiar to you?

Finally, before responding, it’s important to recheck your framing. Are you realistically positive or unrealistically optimistic in your view of your situation? The value of reframing is in seeing things clearly, with a slant toward optimism about your ability to deal with your situation. Looking at the situation through rose-colored glasses could lead you to consider responses that would be harmful to your organization or your personal well-being.

Now you have all the basic tools you need to be a morally intelligent leader: You understand how your brain works; you’re in touch with your values; and you’ve learned the key moral and emotional competencies that make great leaders. And you have the 4 Rs to help you access those critical moral and emotional competencies. In Part III, “Moral Leadership,” you discover how to put all these tools into action as you face the daily challenges of being a moral leader.

Endnotes

1. Neuroscientist Jeffrey Schwartz, author of The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (Harper Perennial, 2003), has confirmed the capability of the 4 Rs to disrupt habitual patterns to highly charged emotional events.

2. Daniel Goleman, Working with Emotional Intelligence. Bantam Books, 2000, p. 74–75.

3. Jeffrey Schwartz, The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force, Harper Perennial, 2003.

4. Ongoing personal communications between Jeffrey Schwartz and Doug Lennick, 2008–2010.

5. Appreciation goes to Gilbert L. Hoffer, Ph.D., president of PsyCor and emotional intelligence expert, for the phrase “Practice Makes Permanent.”

6. Doug Lennick learned this exercise from Fred Luskin, author of Forgive for Good and Rick Aberman, Ph.D., psychologist, and partner at the Lennick Aberman Group.

7. Interview with Jeffrey Schwartz.

8. The Freeze Game was introduced to Doug Lennick by psychologist Rick Amerman, Ph.D., a founding partner of the Lennick Aberman Group.