In the midst of procrastinating on something for work, a thought bubbled up out of me: I was procrastinating for a good reason.
What I realized is that when I entertained the thought of getting back to work, the immediate reaction was almost a fear, a recoiling. I was recoiling from a vague feeling that if I try to do my work (in this case, writing code), I might end up in pain.
That’s a bit of a weird reaction, isn’t it? Yeah, work sucks, but straight up fear of getting hurt seems excessive.
Still, at this point I’ve learned not to ignore feelings like this. These kinds of feelings that bubble up are actually quite trustworthy, and usually indicative of something deeper or more meaningful. So what’s going on; where is that feeling coming from?
When I took some time and sat with that feeling of dread for a bit, turned it over in my head, looked at it for a bit, what clicked for me is that primarily what I was trying to avoid was anger and frustration. See, trying to get things done at work was incredibly volatile. It seemed like every week there would be some kind of show-stopping issue. The build tools for local dev wouldn’t work, the VPN would be down, CI would be broken, build tools would be broken again, upgrading macOS caused my entire workflow to need reinstalls, some horrendous bug showed up in prod and I have to drop everything and work on it immediately. All this random bullshit would show up and prevent me from working on anything for a few hours. Worse, these issues would almost always bite me while I was in the middle of working on something else! Double frustration of having to deal with this issue itself, and being pulled away from something that should be easy, if it weren’t for getting ejected halfway.
That sense of constantly getting prevented from doing my work led to anger and frustration. Every time I’d hit one of these issues: yelling. Lots of yelling at the computer screen, cursing technology and the incompetence of others that had led to this kind of degeneration. “Why couldn’t they have tested this before merging a change to the build tooling, or before forcing an OS update?” I’d find myself fuming like that.
Staying angry forever, however, is not pleasant, to put it lightly. Because of that, the procrastination makes sense: it evolved as a defense mechanism against anger. So that’s the culprit, right? Now that we’ve figured out the source of the procrastination, we just need to take some anger management courses, right? No. This anger, too, is something that we should examine more closely. Because why exactly does this manifest as anger? Where is that anger coming from?
What I mean is, there are a lot of different possible responses to hitting an issue with my workflow. I could, for instance, calmly work to improve the situation, or spend time figuring out what the problem is and providing a patch. I could potentially work towards putting in guardrails so instances like this don’t happen again. Or if I had less self-worth, I could become sullenly resigned to the situation; problems like this are what someone as worthless as me deserves, it’s a rightful punishment.
That’s not how I (probably unconsciously) decided to respond. It seems there’s yet another layer underneath that anger, and when I examined these feelings I found what I saw as a core part of myself: those feelings of anger and frustration were coming from a place of wanting to do good! Specifically, what I found was a sense of wanting to improve how things are done, of wanting to do good work. But that desire was being frustrated by the constant issues I was running into, as well as a sense that spending effort to try to improve things wouldn’t be worth it. That these issues were too entrenched, would require too much work and buy-in from vast parts of the organization; I despaired of ever making meaningful change.
And underneath that desire to do good: one more feeling, this time a trust in my own competence and ability. A sense that no matter what comes, I’ll be able to do what I need to do.
Once I understood all that, I could see how that whole stack of emotions came to be. Both that sense of competence and the desire to do good work were beliefs that I hold pretty strongly. But because of very real external factors, that desire to do good was being frustrated. Now, that very inability to make things better causes a psychological contradiction: it contradcis my self-image of seeing myself as competent. And the mind internally hates contradiction; it has to find some way, any way, of resolving that confusion.
With that it’s easy to see why the result of hitting roadblocks was anger, and not those other potential results. Anger at other people’s incompetence resolves the contradiction. It’s not my fault that this is happening and isn’t getting better, it’s because of other people’s stupidity. Therefore, the lack of progress doesn’t mean anything for my own ability; I can acknowledge both the shittiness of the situation and see myself as capable, without any logical inconsistency.
Anger was a defense mechanism.
And procrastination was a defense mechanism against the anger. Layers on layers.
Now we can see why a superficial solution to the problem, like taking anger management courses, wouldn’t have been enough. Underneath there was another root cause, and further layers beneath that. If the anger went away, then all that would have happened is that the negative emotions resulting from having my work impeded would have manifested themselves in another, probably undesirable, way.
This idea that every feeling has layers; that defense mechanisms pile up and have to be understood and dealt with individually, is not new. If you’ve read Carl R. Roger’s On Becoming a Person, this knowledge of people’s inner emotional worlds dates back to the 1950s! So I posit that this kind of complex, nuanced response to the pains and problems around us is not something unique to me; rather, it’s likely that everyone forms this kind of mental scarring to deal with the suffering of being alive.
It’s important to note that these emotional responses, these defense mechanisms that I enacted were not illogical. It’s easy, seeing someone else seemingly harm themselves or ruin their own life through “unintelligible” decisions, to conclude that they’re swept away by dark, irrational impulses or emotions. But if you look at my responses, they do have their own logic to them. The anger makes sense: in fact, its main purpose is to reconcile the facts of the situation that prevent me from making a difference with my own self-image of competence. And the avoidance and procrastination, when looked at in an isolated fashion, make sense: if something makes you angry and hurts you, stay away from it. My brain is doing a very good job of trying to keep me away from situations that will harm me! Put another way, these responses are, quite literally, adaptive to the environment. And if I’m adapting in this nuanced way to my environment, likely everyone else is as well. Just because a behavior is unintelligible to you doesn’t mean that it isn’t intelligent.
Acknowledging that these defense mechanisms are reasonable completely changes how we have to deal with them. If you believe that these responses are irrational, then you will deal with them accordingly; you’ll try to stamp them out or suppress them. But doing so is useless; we’ve seen that they have real causes; treating the symptoms may initially seem like it produces results, only for a different, unproductive emotional response to rear its ugly head down the line. Cue more suppression, more emotional whack-a-mole. Real treatment requires accepting those feelings for what they are, understanding where they’re coming from, and using that understanding to resolve the root cause.
Assuming you accept the premise of this multilayered model of emotions and the ways they manifest, what does changing one’s responses actually look like?
For the most part I want to approach this from the angle of helping other people with their problems, say from the view of an organization seeking to understand their employees. But I do want to make a slight digression and outline how this process might look at an individual level.
Firstly, one must be able to accurately feel and describe their own feelings in order to make progress here. You cannot, after all, address the root cause of your feelings if you don’t know what either your feelings or that root cause are. And though the description of how I came to know what I felt above proceeded smoothly, discovering your feelings does not generally go so smoothly in practice; if it were easy, no one would need therapy.
If you can already process your emotions well, then great! Otherwise, some therapy may be in order to get you in tune with… yourself. Perhaps the most surprising result of research from therapists like Rogers is that acceptance of your feelings alone is enough to effect major improvements in your overall happiness. And if that alone is not enough, now you know where your issues are really coming from and can take steps to change it.
So. Back to companies and employees.
If this seems at all like a reasonable model of how people work and how behaviors form, it begs the question of whether we can apply this to building better organizations. Just like with applying this at the individual level, this starts with improving your understanding.
How do you understand what employees are actually thinking? Don’t overthink it. It’s very simple: you talk to them. You’re not a mind reader. Just talk to them. At the same time, it’s not so simple: if you’re like most people, you’re probably a terrible communicator. You don’t go into conversations meaning to listen and understand. As soon as you get the chance, you blurt out your opinions and suggestions. You unconsciously imply that the other person’s feelings and opinions are irrelevant.
Here is a different model of how to have a conversation. First of all: shut up. Stop butting in with your thoughts. Then, when someone says they feel angry, or disappointed, or upset, reflect their feelings back to them. Say “that seems tough,” or “it sounds like you’re upset about X.” Let them keep talking, then repeat. If they say something that you don’t quite understand, ask them to tell you more. Reflect, reflect, reflect, then summarize. Avoid telling them your thoughts. And if you do it right, the results are spectacular. People will open up and really tell you what’s going on.1
Contrast that with what most people do.
Asking people “have you tried X” whenever they voice a concern is not good communication. You are immediately shutting down their concerns with your own opinions.
Asking a vague question like “what’s wrong?” is not good communication. It’s especially bad if you immediately combine it with the above when they answer. You are not demonstrating that you’re listening and paying attention; as a result the other person will not feel like they’re being heard. If they’re not being heard, why would they keep talking?
Asking a question like “what can we do to help you?” is not good communication. Understanding their problems, and thus coming up with ideas to improve the situation, is your job as their superior, not theirs. You are pushing all the burden of understanding onto them.
Too many people jump straight into trying to solve problems, while pushing all the emotional effort onto the other party, who is just trying to have their feelings acknowledged. Doing this is a great way to get people to shut down and stop talking.2
Instead, what we want is simply to understand what problems and pains employees are having. Really understanding them, not just superficially asking “how have you been feeling recently.” And once we understand them, trying to remove those problems or roadblocks. In other words, we’re not trying to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of employees; all we’re trying to do is make sure that they’re not frustrated and powerless at work. This should not be a radical idea.
I also want to address the concern that this might constitute some form of emotional manipulation of other people, and the ethical concerns that raises. First of all, nothing about the method I’ve outline consists of making suggestions to other people. All you’re doing is acknowledging other people’s thoughts and feelings, striving to understand other people, and through that letting them know that they’re being understood. Secondly, this method isn’t about exerting power over people; in fact, the only way to make it work is to relinquish power in the conversation and give the other person agency to express themself. It’s purely a way to make people feel accepted and heard, the exact opposite of emotional manipulation. What you do with your understanding of the other party is another thing entirely, and has nothing to do with how you got that understanding.
If we could apply this, what kind of companies would we end up with? Imagine a world where managers really understand what their employees want, what kinds of people they are. Where the company starts acting for the sake of its employees, not the other way around. I think that’s something to strive for.
↥1 You may have noticed that the approach I’ve outlined here contains nothing that’s specific to the concept of work. And indeed, all I’ve really told you is how to communicate well, period. This is how you communicate well with friends. With family. With children. This is a general-purpose approach to all human relations.
↥2 I don’t take any credit for this method. Credit goes to the groundbreaking work of Carl R. Rogers.
The first place I remember learning about this method of communication is this video by HealthyGamerGG, which remains the best resource I’ve found for learning to apply it.
Intentionally Irrational