The LIFT Blog

By Robert E. Quinn

I once read an account of an entrepreneur who went bankrupt.  He describes the experience as follows:

I could no longer say that I ‘was’ my job, because I had none.  I couldn’t rely on my wealth to create a sense of worth and identity, for I had no money and loads of debt.  I could not look to social standing, for a fail entrepreneur has no social standing.  And the failure of my love relationship, a month earlier, ensured that I could not find myself through the love of another.  I had nothing, therefore I was nothing.  And I had died. [1]

The Death and Rebirth of our Ego

We can feel and understand his agony.  Avoiding this kind of failure is something we all desire.  Indeed, if we were really honest, we might admit that we often design our lives according to our fear of failure.  We go to great lengths to remain in our zone of control so as to avoid the kind of events experienced by Youngblood.  Yet in organizational life, bad things do happen.

The bias in the POS perspective is to look for the positive patterns in negative situations.  The assumption is that we may learn important lessons.  Yet what positive patterns could possibly exist in the case of a failed entrepreneur?  Here is what the above man reported about reaching the depths of agony.

Until that point, I had lived my life through the eyes of other people. I had defined myself through object-reference – my sense of identity and my feelings of self-worth were tied directly to the outer circumstances of my life – all of these external references were stripped away.  When I looked in the mirror, I did not know who I was.  For me, the ego-death and subsequent “rebirth” was a wonderfully and powerfully transformative event.  I experienced a sort of “awakening” in which I realized in a flash of insight that “I” was not my ego or the external trappings of my life. “I” was still all that had ever been, my true self.  Nothing that was real and certain had changed, just superficial aspects of my environment. [2]

This is a stunning account.  His loss of identity or “ego death” was transformative.  He saw himself and his world in a new way.  He discovered that what most of us most value is an illusion.  He became internally directed.

Turning Points

We might be tempted to conclude that the above is a unique case.  Yet research suggests that many people experience such turning points.  Psychological turning points are defined as moments of transformation and redirection.  They are moments when people take a new view of self, experience a change in identity, or find an important new meaning in life.  The literature is reviewed in a paper by Elaine Wethington. [3]

• Memorable Events: Many life events simply reaffirm how people already see themselves.  These moments do not give rise to turning points.  Turning points are manifest in such things as revelatory insights, reevaluations of a position, or the emergence of a new capability.  Often they are associated with the sense of becoming a new or renewed person.
• Challenge: Most triggers of turning points are objective events that are seen as challenging.  In fact, the more stressful the event, the more likely it is that the event will result in a turning point.
• Positive Events: Many turning points are triggered by positive events.  These may include mastering a given life challenge or reaching an important milestone.  Turning points are often important symbolic moments. They may, for example, include taking a new role such as spouse, parent or group leader.  Sometimes they are a result of succeeding at a challenge or task or receiving meaningful appreciation. They can also result from prayer, meditation, fasting or a significant religious experience.
• Negative Events: Perceptions of growth and increased capacity can also come from setbacks.  Undesired events can result in learning something negative about oneself and still have a positive impact.  In such cases people tend to speak in terms of lessons learned.  In a negative situation a person may eventually learn to master a problem, discover what is really important in their life, gain confidence, learned they can withstand stress, or gain a greater self-understanding.  They often report becoming more confident, gaining higher self-esteem, establishing stronger relationships, getting recognition or achieving better health.
• Processing Negative Events: It is important to know how to handle our own emotional upheavals.  In many cases, when significant emotional events occur, we tend to talk about them within hours of the event. [4]  Yet some kinds of traumas tend to get buried.  We are slow to speak of events like rape, personal failure or other experiences that give rise to negative emotions like embarrassment, shame and fear.
• Disrupted Identity: Traumas, like the one experienced by Youngblood, often lead to a disruption of our core identity and an inability to provide a cause and effect explanation of the event.  We feel disoriented and have a reduced sense of predictability and control.  The mind keeps returning to the event, trying to understand why it happened, trying to construct a meaningful story that restores the sense of control and the feeling of being in synch with one’s core self.  The tendency to hold the trauma secret tends to inhibit our psychological functioning.  Holding back is a form of work that tends to give rise to psychological overload and increasing stress.  It is therefore crucial that we have the opportunity to disclose, to begin to tell our story. Appropriate ways to disclose that respect people’s privacy often become important in these situations.
• Reconstruction: Disclosing the event in written or verbal form may increase our ability to understand the event and integrate the experience into our meaning system.  The process of constructing the story is important because it creates a sense of causality, an ability to intellectually accept the event and an ability to share the event with others.  Sharing is particularly important because it can increase social integration.  When we keep a trauma secret we have to behave in guarded ways and we detach from our social networks.  Our social groups are actually a venue for our own growth, they are a place where we can experiment and change.  They help us engage in sense making as we organize our self-narrative and reorganize our identity.
• Turning the Negative to Positive: The process of story construction means we are translating emotional experience into words.  This is a transformational process.  Writing or talking about the trauma alters thinking.  There is a shift away from the negative and a move towards exploration.  We tend to have insights and redefine the meaning of the event.  We are able to integrate it into our identity.  As we eventually gain an increased sense of predictability and control, we may then feel a sense of resolution and let the event recede into our memory.  Experiments show that writing about our trauma can have a number of positive impacts including increased health, more job offers for people who have been laid off, or higher grades for college students.

Organizational Applications

In a world with accelerating technological change, global financial crises, downsizings, re-organizations, constant high levels of terror threats, major demographic shifts, policy changes, and so forth, the potential for managers and employees to experience disruptive change and ego death is higher than ever. At the same time, it may also be true that there has never been a greater need, by people and organizations, for managers and employees to be able to manage disruptive change effectively in their personal and professional lives.

There is much, then, that we can learn from Youngblood and from the people who study experiences like the one that Youngblood had when his business went bankrupt: the ability to turn a disaster into an empowering event.  In doing so we can create more positive and capable selves.

[1] Youngblood, Mark D.,  Life at the Edge of Chaos: Creating the Quantum Organization, Dallas Texas, Perceval Publishing.  1997. Page 207.

[2] Youngblood, Mark D.,  Life at the Edge of Chaos: Creating the Quantum Organization, Dallas Texas, Perceval Publishing.  1997. Page 208.

[3] Wethington, Elaine, “Turning Points as Opportunities for Psychological Growth” In Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-lived.  Corey L. M. Keys and Jonathan Haidt (eds), American Psychological Association, Washington DC, 2003.

[4] Neiderhoffer, Kate G. and James W. Pennebaker, “Sharing One’s Story: On the Benefits of Writing or Talking About Emotional Experience.” In Handbook of Positive Psychology. C. R. Snyder and Shane J. Lopez (Eds.). Oxford University Press, 2002.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 8:56 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.