Not all those who wander are lost.
—J. R. R. TOLKIEN, The Lord of the Rings
In November 1975, William Henry “Bill” Gates took a leave of absence from Harvard College to start his own computer company. This made him both a college dropout and something of a maverick. Over the next few decades, Bill Gates seemed to evolve, as a person and as a leader, in front of our eyes.
He started out as a tech wizard. His Thinker could crack technical problems others didn’t understand. His Dreamer was an innovative genius as a software developer, and as a visionary in the market for personal computers. He built Microsoft and launched a social revolution with his Thinker and Dreamer in the lead.
As Microsoft grew, so did Gates. He developed a tough leadership style and competitive business practices. The computer nerd and entrepreneur were making room for the hard-hitting businessman. Soon he faced antitrust litigation and a judge ruled that Microsoft had violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The dazzling Thinker-Dreamer had empowered another member of his inner team—the Warrior.
Of course the Thinker-Dreamer never went away. With audacity and unique problem-solving in new products, Bill Gates’ material success ballooned. His wealth at one point surpassed $101 billion, causing the media to call him a “centibillionaire.” For most people, this would be a complete life story, undeniably one of enormous triumph and contribution.
For Gates, these achievements in the corporate world offered another opportunity to reflect: on his focus, his life purpose, and how to realize his full potential. Attuned to the Voyager’s call to keep learning and growing, Gates changed course yet again.
In 2010, Bill Gates surrendered the top spot on the Forbes list of the world’s richest men—a position he’d held for fourteen of the previous fifteen years. He did this by giving away more than $29 billion of his personal fortune through The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Rounding out his profile, he expanded on his previous favorite strategies to take on yet another role, as a Lover of humanity. Gates embraced a new chapter in his life as a philanthropist, dedicating The Gates Foundation to improving global health, development, and education.
With Gates’ support, U2 front man Bono applied his rock star swagger to the bland issue of debt relief for impoverished countries. Together, they convinced wealthier nations to retire $40 million of debt that could be redirected for AIDS research and prevention, eradication of malaria and tuberculosis, prenatal care for pregnant women, and more.
We see the Voyager’s imprint over the course of Gates’ life. Time and again, he expanded his profile and his favorite strategies to take his leadership and his life to new levels. In his current endeavors, we see: the Dreamer who started Microsoft innovating a movement he calls “creative capitalism”; the Thinker who created Windows convincing the wealthiest people to hand over half of their fortunes to better the world; the can-do Warrior who fought the government on antitrust matters, now delivering tangible results that improve the lives of the disenfranchised; and the Lover, redirecting Gates’ formidable life force toward humanitarian ends.
So, who is the “real” William Henry Gates? The college dropout? The captain of industry? The computer pioneer? The philanthropist? The social entrepreneur? The humanitarian?
He is all of these.
Bill Gates’ biography continues to move and transform, pulling him forward to the next part of his life story. You might think we’d obviously define Gates as the genius of Microsoft. But his voyage keeps going. As Bono has said of Bill Gates, “He’s changing the world twice. And the second act for Bill Gates may be the one that history regards more.”
What Is a Voyager?
A Voyager sees life as an adventure. As a series of explorations, with one learning opportunity followed by another. Voyagers seek new experiences because they know they can gain wisdom as they travel through life. It’s no accident that the first shuttle into space was called Voyager. Nor a coincidence that the same name was given to the Star Trek ship traveling the farthest into uncharted space.
The “voyage” is a timeless motif for self-discovery and fulfilling your potential, both as a person and as a leader. As Voyagers we live in a state of paradox. We need audacity and humility. The hunger to grow and acceptance of where we are now. The urgency to act and the patience to let things ripen.
As you know, I hit a personal low when I discovered I was a “trailing spouse.” Notwithstanding my good friend Nemo Larry, I did wonder about the voyage I’d undertaken. Whether things would get better. And when. Then I got a card in the mail from my sister Heather, the social worker, who understands the passages of life as well as anyone I know. I taped the card to the window over my desk, because it summed up the spirit of this chapter in my life so well.
It said:
It will all be okay in the end.
If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
And so it goes.
We feel lost, we get found. The Voyager in us keeps us moving, rolling with the punches, falling down and picking ourselves back up. We adapt to new circumstances. Rise to meet new occasions. It’s our Voyager who learns from our successes and our mistakes.
Why do we need our inner Voyager?
For one thing, because life throws us curveballs.
I know a woman whose husband had a vasectomy. About two months later, she learned she was pregnant—with twins. Turns out the impact of that procedure is not immediate. That couple faced a journey of adapting expectations. I know lawyers who’ve turned nearly suicidal when they lost a huge case for a client, and they believed it was their fault. Their journey is one of self-forgiveness.
We also need our Voyager to help us rise to new opportunities.
I work with lots of professionals as they enter leadership roles. They’re crossing a bridge to jobs that create new demands on them. Success will require them to expand their profiles and their favorite strategies. They’ll need to welcome new inner negotiators to their table. It’s the Voyager who builds their capacity over time, as they lean in to their new roles.
Brett is a perfect example. He worked as a tax accountant and had excellent technical skills. In time, his company promoted him. Until then, Brett’s rising-star status came from his capacity as a Thinker-Warrior. His Thinker prowess was central, as it is for most knowledge workers. And his Warrior enabled him to get things done well and efficiently.
Now Brett enters management.
He needs to expand his profile to succeed in his new position. Brett needs his inner Lover to manage people successfully. That’s not something he can do simply by snapping his fingers. If he’s left his Lover behind years ago, he’ll need his Voyager to stretch into the role of people manager, and help integrate his Lover back into the scene.
Very often, people in Brett’s shoes continue applying their Warrior and Thinker instincts. While those skills are still valuable, they’re not fit-for-purpose now as a manager. The Voyager plays a crucial role in these transitions if new leaders are going to succeed.
In fact, in many workplaces, people follow a track that goes something like this: project leader, which requires Thinker and Warrior strength; to team leader or client leader, which requires Lover strength; and ultimately, to firm leader or organization leader, which stands on Dreamer strength. It’s the Voyager in you that helps you to evolve your profile and your favorite strategies over time, so you can meet each set of opportunities and challenges with the inner team that serves you best.
The third reason we need our inner Voyagers is to overcome our fears. Like learning to manage people, facing fear and learning to live with it differently takes time, intention, and sometimes professional help. It can’t always be done. But there is growing evidence that, even in the aftermath of severe trauma, healing, growing, and integrating are possible.
Daniella is a home care nurse who attended a workshop of mine. She told the group her story about this kind of voyage.
“I never thought I had a fear of dogs. So when I went to see my new patient, I wasn’t worried. I arrived to a massive circular driveway in front of a beautiful New England mansion. A pretty blonde woman came to the door, tailored from head to toe, along with two very large dogs. They were barking at me, jumping up on the window panes inside the door. The woman said, ‘Don’t worry. They won’t hurt you,’ as she opened the door, and both dogs came plowing past her, jumped up and bit me.”
Daniella was shocked and ran from the house.
She was bruised black-and-blue the next day, but the real damage was on the inside. “For a while I turned new patients away. I’d call a house to schedule an appointment, and I could hear a dog barking in the background. I guess people could hear my anxiety, because they’d say things like, ‘Oh, she’s a little dog,’ or ‘Don’t worry, he’s harmless.’ But I didn’t believe them. So I’d tell my nurse manager to send another nurse.”
Daniella said her job wasn’t in jeopardy. Her nurse manager “was great” and told her if she felt unsafe going to anyone’s house, she didn’t need to go there. But after a while, she felt angry that this fear was choosing her patients for her. She wanted to deal with it so she could move past it.
At first she asked people with dogs to put them in another room, or in the garage, before she arrived. At times she heard a dog barking but knew it was a safe distance away. Once she felt comfortable, Daniella let families bring a dog into the same room, if they were on a leash, supervised by an adult, and didn’t come too close to her.
She told us that she still feels anxious going to a new patient if they have a large dog. “But I’m dealing with it,” she said. “It still feels like I’m on a journey. But I don’t feel like it controls me anymore.”
The Voyager Helps Us Grow Over Time
We’d like to think we can pull off anything we want with the knowledge and know-how we have now. Let’s face it: we’ve been around the block more than a few times already.
But we also know it doesn’t really work like that.
A colleague and friend of mine, Aryeh Ben-David, leads an organization called Ayeka in Israel. Aryeh is a lifelong scholar and teacher of Jewish wisdom. Like me, he’s more interested in the power of education to transform than to inform. He talks about the tension between wanting to fulfill our potential, while also wanting to stay right where we are. He wrote on his blog:
“There is nothing as daunting as personal change and growth. I am who I am. Isn’t that enough? No, it is not enough. I am infinitely more than I am. My soul is vastly beyond what I am presently. I am not nearly what I will and can become.”
The path to fulfillment, high performance, and lasting change requires the journey to an expanded self. That’s where your Voyager comes in to point the way.
The Voyage Motif Is Timeless
Since ancient times, people have taken voyages to move forward in their lives and societies. The classic path involves the hero or heroine going on a physical voyage, while undertaking a transformational journey within. Like the Greek hero Odysseus, who leaves home and wanders for ten years. He develops as a man by facing fearful enemies. Only then can he return home, at last ready to lead Ithaca.
Or the biblical character Joseph, well known for his “Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat,” portrayed in the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Joseph’s story illustrates a path that appears throughout history, in the lives of prophets, literary figures, mythology, and popular culture. An archetypal journey often involves a birth or rise; followed by a fall or death; followed by rising again, or rebirth. Depending on the context, this can happen literally or symbolically. And the cycle can repeat.
In the book of Genesis, Joseph starts off as the beloved son, publicly honored as his father’s favorite. Then comes his fall: thrown into a pit by his brothers, Joseph is sold into slavery. He rises to become a trusted advisor to the wealthy Potiphar. Then he falls again: falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife, Joseph gets thrown in jail, abandoned by the world. In the end, he’ll rise again, all the way to leading man of Egypt, second only to the Pharaoh.
From his all-time low in prison, Joseph will even regain his original stature as first among equals. Caught in the famine that Joseph had predicted, his brothers are forced to turn to him for help, begging for food and mercy. By the time they reunite, Joseph has taken a physical voyage to Egypt, but “traveled” so much more through his experiences. He stands before his brothers not only in power, but also empowered.
At the story’s close, Joseph takes back his amazing dreamcoat and returns to his father’s side as a changed man. This is the kind of experience T. S. Eliot described when he wrote, “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”
In the Christian Scriptures, the life of Jesus follows a path like this. Born in poverty in a manger, Jesus rose to preach a ministry of love and humility alongside his growing number of disciples. When he caught the attention of the Roman rulers, however, Jesus seemed to fall: he was tried and convicted of sedition and was crucified. The Scriptures go on to teach that Jesus rose from the dead on Easter Sunday. To this day Christians celebrate the voyage of Jesus from birth to death to resurrection as an inspiration for their own individual voyages.
In other traditions, the voyage to develop, heal, and evolve as fully as possible isn’t limited to one lifetime. The journey extends from one body to another, and the path toward awakening plays out from one form to the next. The journey is completed when the soul awakens to its original divine essence and is liberated from the cycle of birth and rebirth.
In the West, we might call the voyage of life a path to self-actualization. In the East, perhaps a path to enlightenment. By whatever name, societies around the world converge on the notion that we develop as we travel. They likewise agree that the journey to growth has an outer expression and an inner dimension. There is a part of each of us designed for this very process. That’s the part of human nature that I’m calling the Voyager.
The Voyager Expands Your Horizons
When we hear the word Voyager, many of us think of explorers and adventurers. Like Edmund Hillary, the mountaineer renowned for making the first solo ascent of Mount Everest. Or Ernest Shackleton, legendary figure among pioneers of the Antarctic. After Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, got crushed and sank in a pack of dense ice, he famously persevered through unimaginable circumstances to bring every member of his crew home alive.
Other explorers travel to discover foreign lands, like cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead. Or Isak Dinesen, whose experiences in Kenya formed the backdrop of her book Out of Africa, on which the movie is based. And Elizabeth Gilbert, who memorialized her passages across the world in Eat, Pray, Love.
For other voyagers, exploring involves taking flight. Like famed astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first person to walk on the moon. And extreme sportsman Felix Baumgartner, renowned for free-falling from amazing heights. His motto says it all: “Everyone has limits—not everyone accepts them!”
But for most of us, our voyages are less about climbing literal mountains. They’re more about meeting and navigating the moments that we face, and the stages we go through, over the course of our lives. In these developmental voyages we also traverse challenging ground and travel large distances. Think of American senator John McCain. His life journey took him from a prisoner-of-war camp to the nomination for President of the United States. Or Wael Ghonim, a person who stretched himself to meet a moment in history. His unexpected turn as the leader of a movement demanded big changes, and expansion of his profile.
Ghonim was a technology executive, the head of Google marketing in the Middle East. He was shocked at the police brutality he witnessed against another Egyptian citizen, Khaled Said. Activating his inner Dreamer and Warrior, the Internet businessman turned social activist. Ghonim uploaded a page on Facebook proclaiming, “We are all Khaled Said.” The page amassed 350,000 fans, whom Ghonim invited to a peaceful protest in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Just weeks later, the Egyptian people removed Hosni Mubarak and his regime from office, ushering in the “Arab Spring” of movements for democratic reform.
Some journeys take you from humble beginnings to greatness. Maya Angelou dropped out of high school to become San Francisco’s first African-American female cable car conductor. She worked as a cook and a waitress to make ends meet as a young single mother. Angelou became the author of thirty bestselling books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and she delivered the opening poem at the inauguration of President Clinton. We can only imagine how much she grew over time on the inside to travel that distance on the outside. Embracing all of her experiences, Angelou said, “I can be changed by what happens to me. I am not reduced by it.”
Of course, our lives don’t follow a straight line north. Somewhere along the way, we fall down. We can’t expect otherwise. If we can find a route to get back on our feet, the “failures” and setbacks become one more chapter in our life story. Think of Al Gore. He spent most of his life preparing to serve as President of the United States. He came as close to fulfilling that dream as a person could—without seeing it come true. That devastating loss could have been his last hurrah. But it wasn’t. After that tumultuous period—for Gore and for America—he went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to educate the public about climate change.
Up and down and back again. We just need to keep walking.
Voyaging Can Start Where You Are
It’s true that in many journey stories, protagonists “leave” where they are to take a voyage. At the same time, throughout folklore of civilizations, people search for things in faraway places, only to find what they seek right where they already are. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, who needs only to click her heels three times to get home, the lesson you need is available the moment you recognize it.
Consider this tale about a stonecutter.
All day he labors in the heat, cutting stone with the hot sun beating down on him. Each day he yearns to be more powerful than a humble stonecutter. And what is more powerful than the sun? So one day he calls out and prays to become the sun, the most powerful being on earth. His wish is granted.
With his warm rays he beams down on flowers and makes them grow, shines on children playing, and drains away puddles from the ground. All of a sudden, a large cloud moves in front of him, and he is completely blocked. Shocked by his realization that the cloud is more powerful than the sun, he begs to be made a cloud. His wish is granted.
And he moves around the sky, raining on the grass, making fog over the cities. He is delighted with his newfound power, until one day the wind comes along and blows him out of the way. Distressed by losing his powerful role, he prays to become the wind. His wish is granted, and he blows around the sky, casting a breeze past lovers on the beach, turning umbrellas inside out.
He is content. Until one day he hits up against a mountain. He can move around the mountain, or over it, but he cannot move through the mountain. “Aha,” he thinks to himself, “the mountain is the most powerful of all.” So he prays and begs to become a mountain. His wish is granted.
And he rules over all the land.
Until one day, when he feels the chipping away of the stonecutter.
Endlessly searching to acquire more “tips, tricks and techniques” is like wishing to be the sun, the clouds, and the wind. There is always the next thing to learn, the next tool to add to your toolbox, the next effective habit. You can find yourself at the top of the mountain only wishing to be the stonecutter—again.
This parable holds a key that unlocks the door to high performance and lasting change. Yes, you need to develop skills to perform out in the world. But the real moral of the story lines up with my mother’s good advice about cooking. You become masterful by cultivating what’s inside of you. You can start doing that right here, right now.
Whether you’re working with the best tools or the worst ones, at the end of the day it’s you who’s putting them to work. If you skip the inner journey, then a pile of dirt and water is just mud. Once you start learning about yourself—what makes you tick, what hits a nerve in you—those same materials in your hands become the start of a blossoming garden.
You don’t need to leave home for the Holy Land or wander in the desert for forty years. You don’t need to give up your house and move to an ashram in India. You already have all the raw materials you need, inside of you, living as unrealized potential. Your voyage takes off the moment you realize you’re already on it.
Your Voyager Can Shape Your Life
In his play Hamlet, William Shakespeare handed down a timeless challenge: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” Pulling that off can take a lifetime: you have to figure out what living truly to yourself even means, and then find out how to make it happen in your life.
Hard as it may sound, that’s the invitation that your Voyager gives you. This is your life. Can you live well and lead wisely, while being true to yourself? Only you can decide. As Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield writes, “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.”
In the last chapter I told you that Nelson Mandela is always mentioned when I collect names of centered leaders from a group. Throughout his years in prison, Mandela had a poem engraved on the wall, written by William Ernest Henley. These are the last two lines of the poem, clung to by a man imprisoned by authorities for nearly three decades, a person who seemingly lacked all autonomy or power to create his own destiny:
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.
Your Voyager stands for the idea that you have choices, and that ultimately, you create your life. Yes, your biology makes a difference. Yes, of course, the life circumstances into which you’re born make a large impact on where your journey begins. Your health. Your financial reality. Your status in society. Your opportunities for education. The degree of freedom granted to you by your government. Absolutely true.
At the same time, think of John McCain, Maya Angelou, Wael Ghonim. Remember what they were up against, and how far they came. The challenge is to hold it all at the same time. Acknowledge the constraints that life has given you. They are real and significant. And—you can still ask yourself the question posed by Mary Oliver in her poem “The Summer Day.” To paraphrase her well-known inquiry, what will you do with the unique and precious gift called your life? No matter where you’ve come from, that is the question beating in your Voyager’s heart.
Change Isn’t Easy, but Neither Is Standing Still
Change is hard. Sometimes it’s gradual. Sometimes it happens in a flash. Either way, it often involves growing pains. Spending Christmas in The Netherlands has involved both kinds of change.
I practice the traditions of Hanukkah, but I grew up in America. That makes Christmas part of my cultural heritage. I wasn’t raised with the religious significance of the day. So Christmas to me meant a few reliable, if secular, things.
Rudolph has a red nose. Mr. Scrooge will discover a change of heart, and help Tiny Tim. Santa and his reindeer live in the North Pole, where elves make presents. On Christmas Eve, December 24, reindeer pull Santa’s sleigh to deliver the gifts, and children wake up to them on Christmas morning, December 25.
These facts were as much “a given” to me as four quarters make a dollar.
Then I moved abroad.
The Dutch celebrate Sinterklaas on Saint Nicholas’ birthday, December 5, so they exchange gifts then. Santa doesn’t have a sleigh or reindeer—he rides a white horse with black spots. He also doesn’t have elves. He has servants called “Zwarte Piet”—“Black Peter”—who look terrifyingly like African slaves (admittedly from an American point of view). Perhaps most shocking of all, and the adjustment I cannot seem to make, is that in The Netherlands, Sinterklaas is from Spain.
Spain.
He arrives every year—by steamboat—from Spain.
This is a level of change that goes to the heart of my cultural DNA. How can Santa Claus not live in the North Pole? It feels like saying our capital is not in Washington, D.C., or that Arizona isn’t home to the magnificent Grand Canyon. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Isn’t one of those that Santa lives in the North Pole?
I share this example to acknowledge that change is rough. It’s painful. It’s hard to wrap our heads around. Let’s face it. Santa’s residence is not an important fact. Indeed, it’s not a “fact” at all. Add to that, Santa comes from a tradition that’s not my own. All of that said, I find it difficult to accept that Sinterklaas comes from Spain.
In contrast to my ongoing Santa transition, my young Dutch nieces made a much bigger one with a lot less fanfare. Until last winter, these little girls were more than happy to write letters to Santa, listing all of the gifts their hearts desired. But this winter, something changed. They started to ask questions, ones that poked holes in their formerly satisfying blind faith.
“If there are millions of houses, then how can Santa get around to all of them in only one night?” they wanted to know.
“If Santa comes down through the chimney, and some houses don’t have a chimney, then how can Santa get into those houses?”
After about a week of these searing inquiries, one of them made a nine-year-old declaration.
“I know,” she said. “Santa doesn’t exist.”
And that was that. In a snap. For the rest of her life, she will never again live in a world where Sinterklaas is real.
Voyagers Know You’re a Lifelong Learner
Crossing this threshold for my nieces marked more than learning a new skill. That’s a line the Little Dude will cross when he masters tying a knot in a rope. This shift in perspective indicated development in their capacity—to think, to make meaning, to explain their world. They’d taken a step away from simplicity toward a higher level of complexity, a move that marks the kind of change people call transformation.
You’re older than my little nieces. You might or might not be older than I am, as I try to embrace Santa’s Spanish domicile. Either way, you’re growing and learning, too. We all are. No matter what stage of life you’re in right now. Like everyone you know, you’re subject to a basic law of the human condition: you are a work-in-progress.
You might think you stopped “developing” a long time ago. Perhaps when you entered adulthood, or completed your formal education. Perhaps you were fully cooked when you got a license to drive. Or when you left home for the first time. Maybe you were all grown up when your last child left home. Or on your fiftieth, sixtieth, seventieth, or eightieth birthday.
But it isn’t so.
Although the changes were more visible in the first twenty years of your life, this law applies forever. Regardless of your age.
You are always a work-in-progress.
Full stop.
One Voyage with Two Sides
The movement of our times is to remember both sides of our journey, to reunite our outer and inner lives. The deeper truth of the Voyager is that the human experience isn’t one or the other: it’s both at the same time. Anchoring in your center is about embracing opposites—even seemingly contradictory ones—and finding ways to hold them together, side by side.
By and large, we don’t see our lives from this view. We mostly value what happens in the outside world. For a sizable majority, at least in Western countries, the inner life doesn’t get too much attention. We’re far too busy doing important things in the world. For those of us who do take our inner lives seriously, there’s a tendency to believe that the inner journey is all that matters. We operate from the premise that our inner life is our only true self, and everything else is egocentric hogwash. Whichever way you go, you’re embracing half of your life.
The approach of Winning from Within stands for the idea that both outer and inner experience constitute who we really are. The Big Four aren’t more or less important than the Transformers. The Transformers aren’t the only aspect of human nature that really counts. It is one system with seven elements, each of which has a role to play in our inner development as well as in our interface with the world around us.
We’ll come back to this idea shortly. Let’s pause, to look more closely at the common separation of the outside world and interior experience.
We Value the Outer Voyage
You’ve likely heard the saying that “the journey is the destination.” What does that actually mean? It means that you are changing over time. As long as you live. And those changes operate on two levels: in your outer world, and in your inner world. If you’re like most people, you pay more attention to events in your outer world. This maxim points you to also notice your inner journey along the way.
Our common tendency is to signpost our lives by the successes and failures we see in our outer world. The formula is simple: we set a goal—and we arrive at the “destination” when we meet the goal. You long to buy a home someday, and you finally do it. You’ve arrived. You hope to start your own nonprofit. When you open the doors for the first time, you’ve made it. If you work for nearly a decade to become a partner in your office, then you feel you’ve “arrived” when the title is finally yours. You’re almost finished with the paperwork on your divorce. When the court documents arrive in the mail, you’ve crossed the finish line. You stop smoking. You lose the last ten pounds you’ve carried around since pregnancy. You’re done. You made it.
On the outside, your journey will include recognizable milestones. Depending on your circumstances, they will vary. Here’s a sample of common experiences that people give in workshops when I ask about passages in their lives that other people can see when they happen.
You might ask yourself as you read the list: Have I experienced something like this? Can I remember a moment in time, or a period in my life, when this was happening? Can I recall when they “started,” and a time or even a moment when I felt like they were “done”?
■ Finding a job; losing a job; getting promoted; retiring
■ Choosing a career; getting educated; changing careers
■ Living with family; moving out; moving back in, and out again
■ Periods of sobriety; of addiction; of recovery
■ Periods of good health; of illness; of completing treatment
■ Years on your own; in a couple; in a family; in a community; on your own again; years in a new relationship or starting a new family
■ Starting a new project; working on it; completing it; starting something else
■ Periods of fidelity; of infidelity
■ Not having enough money; gaining wealth; losing wealth; gaining or losing it again
■ Giving birth to a child; adopting a child; infertility; gaining stepchildren; sharing custody of your children; losing a pregnancy; choosing not to have children; ending a pregnancy; becoming grandparents; losing a child.
These kinds of experiences—and many other milestones not listed here—are how we mark time and how we measure our lives. They show us how things are going. They let us know if we’re on track.
That means that in truth, we don’t believe the journey is the destination. We believe that meeting our goals is the destination.
We use things like these as indicators of whether we’re succeeding or failing, moving forward or backward. Looking at the world around us, we think we can tell if these are good times, or bad times. To some extent, that’s true. These kinds of experiences tell us something about whether our lives are coming together, or falling apart. But surely that’s not the whole story.
The Outer Journey Tells Half of Your Life Story
A parallel track—as significant as the first—is the development path you travel inside of yourself. In fact, the advice to seek wisdom and truth by paying attention to your inner landscape is one of the oldest teachings in the world. It’s also one of the most universal.
There is a famous precept inscribed at the temple of Apollo at Delphi—gnothi seauton—that means “know thyself.” With a similar message, Jesus said in the gospel of Luke: Physician, heal thyself. One of the first injunctions in the Bible is in Genesis 12:1, when God says to Abram, “Lech lecha.” This command is often translated as “go forth” or “go out.” But the Hebrew words literally mean “go to you” or “go to yourself.” Twenty-five hundred years ago the Buddha instructed followers to observe the inner workings of their minds. The Chinese Zen master Tung-Shan taught, “If you look for the truth outside yourself, it gets farther and farther away.” Myriad traditions direct us inward.
Winning from Within starts with a focus on what’s happening inside of you. That’s because what’s happening in here will directly produce what happens out there. Teaching you tips and tricks for new behavior that you’ll implement from your original internal landscape won’t get you much better outcomes than you got before.
I saw this up close when I helped a global business prepare for a “culture transformation.” In a business, the inner world is often called your mindset, and what you do on the outside is your behavior. Put in those terms, to get lasting change in your behavior, you need to make some corresponding shifts in your mindset.
For this client, the corporate culture of “every man for himself” wasn’t capturing synergies across businesses: they wanted to end the “silo” mentality. Related to that, they aimed to create a less closed environment, and one less driven by fear. In the “new world,” colleagues would share information, give each other constructive feedback, and bring opportunities to each other’s attention. They’d see each other as teams rather than as internal competition. Over time, the company hoped to build a culture of trust.
A task force got to work on writing guidelines for the “new world.” They circulated a draft of the new rules for comments. It was a classic example of trying to do the right thing, but not making any shift in the internal mindset before jumping into action. In other words, they wanted to pull off a transformation in people’s behavior but bypass the inner learning they needed to enable it. Like so many change efforts, this one would fail because of this oversight, if not addressed.
When I got their new rules, I read things like this: “Everyone Must Be Open” and “Everyone Will Collaborate.” I don’t know about you, but to me, starting a statement with “everyone must” already lets me know this is not an open environment. Even if the same statement tells me that what I “must do” is be open. Likewise, compelling people to collaborate through proclamation—because everyone will—hardly instills the feelings of trust and free exchange they were seeking to foster.
I knew what they were trying to say, despite the way they said it. My biggest concern wasn’t the rules themselves. It was that they didn’t see the irony in giving “mandates” for openness and teamwork. Going for outer change without the parallel inner development doesn’t fly. Have you ever experienced a change process like this, and watched it break down? If you have, then you know what I’m talking about firsthand.
This dynamic is not limited, by the way, to the private sector. This is a truth about the way lasting change happens, whether your context is a nonprofit, a government agency, or a church. It applies in a hospital, a school, a music studio, a candy store, or your condo association. Do the mindset work. Behavior change will follow.
After these new guidelines went around, we took a few steps back to look at the underlying drivers of the current culture. This was the ground from which these “new” rules came: competition, fear, control, survival of the fittest. Whether you’re working as an individual, an institution, or a society, you’re going to grow new flowers when you plant seeds in new soil. Otherwise, you might wish for a different garden, but when spring comes, that flower bed is going to feel darn familiar.
The Complete Voyage Includes Both Sides
At the end of the day, it’s not about choosing between the inner journey and the outer one. You don’t need to figure out which is the important one, or which one will impact the “real” you. The Big Four and the Transformers are all part of who you really are. Your inner world, and what happens at home and at work in your daily life, are all part of who you really are. The approach of Winning from Within fosters transformation and lasting change precisely because it weaves the two of them together.
The most well-known symbol for this idea is probably the Taoist image of yin and yang. That’s the circle with two halves, one black and one white, with a curve moving down the middle where the two sides meet. You’ve likely seen the image at some point. Both sides include a smaller circle in the opposite color. Its curved lines suggest motion, while the interchange of opposites, black and white—all held in a circle—conveys completeness.
We need a symbol for these times, to represent our collective journey toward wholeness. The Winning from Within method uses the Mobius strip. Its design comes from mathematics, making it both universal and secular. In a Mobius strip, the interior seamlessly becomes the exterior, and then it reverses. What is outer becomes inner; what was inside moves outside. Like the yin and yang symbol, there is no beginning and no end. It’s a steady motion, like breathing. You inhale, and exhale. Inhale, and exhale (see Figure 11.1).
Figure 11.1
This image stands for the union of opposites that happens when we come back to our center of well-being. It also harkens back to one of Jung’s central ideas, one that we talked about near the start of the book. Jung taught that we all know things about the universal voyage called the human experience. That’s how we recognize archetypes, even though we never learned about them in school. We also all follow our own unique path, the voyage that is ours alone. A life is like the Mobius strip: it exists on the inside and on the outside, but it’s one piece of paper. We are at once parts of the collective journey, and at the same time, singular travelers. One voyage with two sides.
The Inner Journey Involves Getting Centered
In business conversation today, I often hear the word pivot. People seem to be looking for the magical “pivot point” that will turn everything around. When I’m designing leadership programs for companies, the two things that come up most often are whether the program will provide “lasting change” and whether the participants will “pivot” after the experience to the next level of performance.
I tell clients the same thing: let’s help your people to develop centering practices, and then support them to practice them. This is a fundamental aspect of the inner voyage, which in turn supports lasting impact in the organization.
Why?
Because the reliable road to that treasured pivot point is to activate your Transformers. Knowing how to tap those inner resources, and how to harness them for effective action, is the game-changing move. All of your Transformers—the Lookout, the Captain, and the Voyager—reside in your center. As you develop ways to connect to your center of well-being, you learn to draw out your Lookout’s capacity for reflection-in-action, your Captain’s ability to assess your context and make the best decision for your current situation, and your Voyager’s skill at helping you expand your profile and strategies over time.
Explore Ways to Center Yourself
Centering is a practice of turning inward to connect with your core of well-being. From time immemorial, countless practices have evolved for helping us get back to our center. Like Bernardus and his friends when they jump from the sauna to the freezing water, people have used centering practices to quiet the mind, still the heart, and reconnect to what’s important.
Everyone should have a centering practice.
Whether you run a household or a private practice, manage a charity or a hedge fund, develop children’s minds or research drugs for new medicine, this applies to you. We all need a trustworthy path to our sense of well-being. The wisdom of centuries says you learn how to center yourself through the discipline of a practice.
Centering practices are making a comeback in the twenty-first century. Because we need them. When things are changing so quickly, and the layers of complexity and uncertainty make your head spin, you realize that you can’t count on the world “out there” for orientation or stability. What’s here today may be gone tomorrow. Arthur Andersen. Bear Stearns. Lehman Brothers. All things of the past. It’s unthinkable. But it all happened. That’s why this age-old wisdom is coming back: because the times demand it. When you feel lost and things are crumbling around you, don’t look out there. Look in here.
Your center of well-being is an essential part of you that can’t get lost, damaged, compromised, or tarnished. It can’t go bankrupt. It can’t go out of business. It can’t leave you for a younger woman. It can’t gain weight, go bald, or forget where you left your keys. Your center is right here, and you owe it to yourself to have a practice that helps you remember that, even when things look bleak. When you can feel your center, that’s when you can say to yourself, “It will all be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
A growing number of CEOs are practicing mindfulness meditation to get back to their center. One example is Ray Dalio, CEO and founder of Bridgewater Associates. Dalio is widely considered one of the most successful investment managers of all time. He told Business Insider magazine that “it’s 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening,” and that meditation gives him “clarity” and “creativity.” The same article reported that Legal Sea Foods CEO Roger Berkowitz also meditates twice a day for twenty minutes. This trend is so significant that sessions on mindfulness were oversold at the 2013 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Apple cofounder the late Steve Jobs practiced Zen meditation. Many organizations, from Google and Genentech to parts of the United States military, have instituted mindfulness programs. Other companies, like Bill George’s former stomping ground, Medtronic, have dedicated a conference room in their office as a quiet place where people can go for a bit of tranquility. Imagine the world when every office has one room designated for quiet. Everyone at work knows there’s an assigned space, available at any time, for a few minutes of silence during the day. That will be a big step in the right direction.
The key isn’t what your centering practice is—it’s that you choose a practice, and then you actually practice it. Like going to the gym, building new strength requires discipline. If you commit, you’ll see dividends from your investment. A leading brain researcher, Richard Davidson of the University of Wisconsin, puts it like this: “In our country, people are very involved in the physical fitness craze, working out several times a week. But we don’t pay that kind of attention to our minds. Modern neuroscience is showing that our minds are as plastic as our bodies. . . . [You] can train the mind in the same way exercise can train our body.” Brain researcher Rick Hanson has written about “self-directed neuroplasticity.” That means not only that your brain is changing throughout your life, but also that you can play a role in the changes that it makes.
More than a decade of scientific research shows that sustained repetition of contemplative practice fosters measurable changes in the brain. For example, brain scans of long-term meditators show reduced activity in the limbic system, where the amygdala sits. By meditating as a dedicated practice over time, people have stimulated their brains in ways that lower their emotional reactivity. Admittedly, subjects in these studies included Tibetan monks who’ve been meditating their whole lives. That said, self-directed neuroplasticity is a brand-new subject. Who knows what we’ll learn about how to direct our own neural pathways in the years to come?
Find Something That Works for You
No one can tell you what kind of practice fits you best. But you have an enormous set of options to explore for learning how to find your center when you fall off-balance. Just think about the vast range of practices used for centering over time.
Saying the rosary. Repeating a mantra. Prayer. Walking in nature. Atonement. Whirling like a dervish. The Japanese tea ceremony. The Catholic centering prayer. Contemplation of a koan. Walking the labyrinth. Chanting. Lighting candles. Martial arts.
The list goes on.
Reading psalms. Taking vows. Playing music. Silence. Dancing. Dialogue. Drawing a mandala. Singing. Bowing. Cooking. Drumming. Confession. Repeating the serenity prayer:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.
Observing the Sabbath as a day of rest. Fasting. Sacred calligraphy. The sweat lodge. And so much more.
In our times, we have informal and formal practices for centering ourselves. You might find centeredness when playing sports, going for a run, or engaging in intimate conversation with a dear friend. You might take yoga classes, where feeling centered means not falling out of a posture and instead achieving a deeper stretch. You might write in a journal or simply take walks. You might find peace and quiet when you’re gardening.
You can attain a sense of centeredness and well-being by doing what feels right. Like participating in a walk-a-thon to raise money for breast cancer. Or choosing not to tell a lie. By helping a friend who needs you, or turning down a business opportunity because you have insider information. By saying no when you mean no. Or taking a stand for justice.
To see yourself grow as a person and as a leader over time, though, finding your center can’t be a casual thing you do once in a while. That’s why it’s called a practice.
Think back for a minute to Elena Kagan when she was the law school dean, and the way she responded with so much agility to the alumnae crowd. It would have been easy for her to get offended or defensive. You and I probably feel insulted for less troubling reasons—she was accused publicly of racial discrimination. Ouch. She held her ground while respecting her audience because she knew how to stay centered under pressure. Yes, she’d developed the skill set of each of her Big Four. But it was her centeredness in that moment of heat that enabled such high performance.
We Don’t Travel Alone, and We Travel Alone
Let me close with one of those paradoxes I mentioned, a pair of opposites that sound like they’d cancel each other out, though they’re both true.
The presence of support for our journey through life is a timeless principle. As one example, traditional Chinese fishermen prayed to Kuan Yin for a safe return from their fishing voyages. Along with her masculine counterpart, Avolokiteshvara, Kuan Yin embodied compassion, and she sustained the voyagers. Throughout human existence, people have prayed for help to a higher power—a source many people call God, and many people know by another name.
From generation to generation, people have expressed the idea that reality operates on more than one level. In one way, we’re separate from one another; each of us is alone. But on another level, we’re all connected. Ralph Waldo Emerson called this collective meeting place the Oversoul. Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh refers to it as “inter-being.” Scientist Albert Einstein was searching for what he called a “unified field theory” to explain how the whole world works. He wrote this:
A human being is part of a whole, called by us the “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
The overwhelming message from history is that we don’t walk alone.
With all of that said, we also walk alone.
And we can.
As I’ve navigated this roller-coaster year, I’ve experienced both of these realities. At different times, and sometimes both at the same time. I’ve known that I’m not alone, and also that I am ultimately alone. I found for myself that my journey to wholeness requires me to live in both of these truths. To find a solid place to stand in both of them.
Catholic monk and teacher Thomas Merton wrote that “humans have a responsibility to find themselves where they are, in their own proper time and place, in the history to which they belong. . . .” This resonates with me as something we each have to do for ourselves. This is our time and place. These unprecedented times are the history to which we belong. Now each of us is on our own journey, our unique voyage to find ourselves where we are, and to discover where we are going.
Laurence Gonzales is the author of several books, among them Deep Survival and another called Surviving Survival. He wrote a passage that I’ve read many times, because it brings me back to my center of well-being. It says: “Not being lost is not a matter of getting back to where you started from; it is a decision not to be lost wherever you happen to find yourself. It’s simply saying, ‘I’m not lost, I’m right here.’ ” This feels like an important piece of wisdom for us as we live and lead in uncertain times.
In whatever work we do, and wherever we live, we want to do more than just survive: we want to thrive. Whether we’re making decisions that impact our own lives, the people around us, tens of thousands of people working in the same global company, or millions of people through multinational organizations and international affairs, it would be nice to know that we’re not lost. As we figure out where we are and where we’re going, we can take comfort in remembering: We’re not lost. We’re right here.