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PRINCIPLE 4. Don’t Work Against Yourself

Ironically enough, in the same way that fear brings to pass what one is afraid of, likewise a forced intention makes impossible what one forcibly wishes.¹ (V. Frankl)

Have you ever worked so hard at something that the more you tried, the harder the task became and the farther away you seemed to get from your goal? In other words, one step forward, two steps back? I (Alex) have experienced this kind of situation in my life, especially in my work life. Let me share an example that took place when I was a full-time professor, directing a graduate degree program in public administration at a university in the United States. Among my duties as director, I was charged with the challenge of obtaining accreditation for the program from a professional association. Becoming accredited was viewed by those in the field as a prestigious distinction and competitive advantage, through which my program stood to gain increases in student enrollment and research funding, greater ease of faculty recruitment, and other embellishments for its resource base.

As a new faculty member, I took on the responsibility of seeking this accreditation milestone as a way of making my mark. I moved full-steam ahead, demonstrating that I was committed and passionate, convinced that the objective would be reached in short order. I had been through this same accreditation process before at other institutions, which I felt was sufficient evidence that I knew what I was doing. My experience would carry me through to another victory. Alas, this did not turn out to be the case. I found pockets of resistance everywhere I looked, and the more I looked, the more resistance I found. My expertise in this process, I learned later, proved to be a liability. I thought I knew what to do. I thought I knew how to do it best. I thought all of my colleagues were doing it wrong! I became fixated on every detail of the program, and I assured myself that single-handedly I would be able to correct any and all imperfections that might jeopardize the objective of gaining full accreditation.

I had good intentions, and in hindsight most of my university colleagues would probably agree with me. Unfortunately, my fixation on the outcome backfired, and I was unable to fulfill the ultimate goal. I never was able to obtain accreditation during my tenure as program head. I could easily blame the situation on everyone else or at least shift the bulk of responsibility for failing to reach my objective onto others. I choose not to, however, for I can see how my own actions worked against me. I tried too hard to get everything done my way and, as a result, estranged myself from the very colleagues upon whom I depended for success. My fixation on the “right” way to do things marginalized the contributions of my colleagues and, in some cases, invited forms of subtle—if not overt—sabotage. I had become my own worst enemy, and at the time I didn’t even know it!

The meaning of life is meaning. The meaning of life at work is meaning. When we look for meaning, there is meaning in the looking. It’s right here, all around us, within us, and beyond us. But if we try too hard to create meaning, it can backfire, especially at work. Like our personal lives, our jobs come complete with their own dynamics. But unlike in our personal relationships, we can’t always interact with our coworkers with emotional honesty and vulnerability. We are often afraid to confront others, to tell them what we are really thinking, for fear of reprisal. We shy away from conflict in order to appear professional. We tell ourselves to focus on the task at hand, to ignore the human dynamics.

Work usually represents the area in which the individual’s uniqueness stands in relation to society and thus acquires meaning and value. This meaning and value, however, is attached to the person’s work as a contribution to society, not to the actual occupation as such.² (V. Frankl)

Most often our performance on the job is measurable—what we produce might be immediately tangible: making sales or products, meeting a quota, driving a certain distance in a day, meeting a deadline, baking bread, fixing a car, or serving a customer, for example. Other professional responsibilities are less tangible: involving long-term planning and projects that require creative involvement, teamwork, complex expectations, and more subjective goal-setting. They all require performance and most often evaluation as well. Most of us are accountable to others in our jobs. We want to please, to perform well, and to be effective at what we do. Often, when we most want to impress others, we undermine ourselves. We become obsessed with results, and we overlook the very success we are seeking.

Relationships at Work

One reason we may miss succeeding is that we overlook the importance of relationships in the workplace. Our jobs are always more than just jobs. They represent relationships—with coworkers and ourselves; with customers and consumers; with the products we are designing, creating, and selling; with the services we offer; and with the environment and the ways in which our work affects the world. These relationships weave together through our work, and they have meaning individually and collectively. When we focus too intently on outcomes, these relationships suffer. The harder we work for success, the more elusive it can become.

The job at which one works is not what counts, but rather the manner in which one does the work.³ (V. Frankl)

Consider Angela’s experience. Angela had just graduated from college with a degree in business administration, and she was especially excited when she was promoted to a supervisory position at the drugstore where she worked. It was her first attempt at being a manager, and she envisioned this promotion as her initial step up the corporate ladder. Of course, Angela wanted more than anything to do her best in the new job and prove to her bosses that they made the right decision in promoting her. Right away, she proclaimed her intentions for building better teamwork, sharing responsibilities, and improving performance with all the employees on her shift. Angela’s enthusiasm appeared to be contagious, and it looked as if she would immediately be able to make some major improvements. However, Angela soon found out that good intentions are not enough.

“My coworkers are unbelievably lazy,” she complained to the customers, “and they don’t carry their weight around here no matter what I say or do.” Indeed, Angela displayed an extremely negative attitude about work and was quick to point out the failings of other employees. Her work situation had become dysfunctional for reasons that were largely her own doing. She had been exhibiting two behavioral traits or tendencies—hyperintention and hyper-reflection—that are central to Viktor Frankl’s teachings. Angela was unaware that she had begun to micromanage her employees in order to attain her goals of demonstrating that she was a good manager and achieving her stated performance objectives. She had become so fixated on accomplishing her mission (that is, hyperintending) that she had forsaken the means for the end. Because she was so obsessed with reaching her goals, Angela fixated on the problems that she saw. The more she looked, the more she saw (that is, hyper-reflecting). Despite her good intentions, she actually worked against herself by focusing on the problems, not the solutions to her escalating management dilemma.

As a result, the more she complained and called for increased teamwork, job sharing, and improved performance, the less she saw among her coworkers. Angela had become so consumed with her intended outcome—a form of anticipatory anxiety—that she began to see herself failing to achieve it. She became even more negative about the situation and, in effect, had unconsciously created a self-fulfilling prophecy, as many of us do. The more problems she saw, the more problems she had. The more problems she had, the more negative she became. The more negative she became, the less her team wanted to excel. A vicious cycle had begun. Unfortunately, Angela was unaware that letting go of (or at least relaxing) her intentions would probably have allowed her to find ways to resolve the situation and fulfill her original work objectives.

I (Elaine) have also been guilty of hyper-reflection at work. Although I was blessed with leading a group of very skilled managers at a multinational company, one of the managers always seemed to lag behind. I thought the best approach to inspire improvement was to coach him every day, to clearly outline my expectations. However, the more I singled him out, the more I highlighted where his work was below par, the worse he performed. In hindsight, I realize that I was micromanaging this manager’s performance when I should have taken the opposite approach—encouraging him and letting him rise to the occasion on his own. Indeed, I learned from this experience that good intentions are not always enough!

We should point out that hyperintention and hyper-reflection, in many ways, are similar to a condition called hypochondria, now known as Illness Anxiety Disorder—an obsession with the idea of having a serious or life-threatening but undiagnosed medical condition. Although these people may not actually be ill, the thought of being so and the anticipatory anxiety that is associated with it end up making them sick! In effect, hypochondriacs are working against themselves!

Paradoxical Intention

Meaning is found in the awareness of the moment, and when we move too far from the moment, we start to lose our effectiveness. Even when the stakes are high and our success essential, focusing obsessively on the results rather than on the process can result in failure to achieve our intended aim. We all know how this works: our nervousness and anxiety about getting it right keep us from getting it right. The higher our expectations are about something, the more disconnected we are from the actual process, and the less we are able to participate in the project’s successful unfolding. Viktor Frankl calls this paradoxical intention. Our good intentions actually become the cause of our failure. When a specific success is so fervently sought that we overlook and neglect the relationships that are an integral part of the process, we lay the seeds for something to go wrong. We fly in the face of our own success. We neglect our own meaning, the meaning of others, and the meaning of the process.

“My boss is a jerk.” “My boss hates me.” “My boss steals all the credit.” How many times have you made or heard statements like these? Think about what you are saying, what it really means, and how it may be affecting you and your coworkers. Bosses do have flaws, but on the whole most people deserve the positions they hold. They have usually moved up in the organization for a good reason. If you dismiss your boss because of her or his flaws, you may be cheating yourself out of a chance to learn and grow. What is your boss good at? What can you learn from him or her? What kinds of workers get along best with your boss? Are you doing anything that brings out the worst in your boss? From the perspective of Frankl’s paradoxical intention, are you encouraging your boss to be a micromanager by asking questions every few minutes rather than by doing your job well? You might be working against yourself!

Human beings are intuitive, affected by the moods of those around us; we know feelings of trust and mistrust; we know when something just doesn’t feel right. We recognize when we are being treated badly, superficially, carelessly, or dishonestly, whether in our personal life or our work life. We know when we are being used as part of someone else’s agenda. We can sense when our intrinsic meaning as a human being is being overlooked in the wake of somebody else’s ambition. Something is missing, and it’s usually meaning.

Consider Neal, a software engineer at a major hightech firm. Newly married, Neal had just completed an MBA degree from a prestigious university and was determined to be promoted to a management position as quickly as possible. He was so determined to show off his newly acquired management knowledge and skills—primarily as a way to propel himself up the corporate ladder—that he went out of his way to be noticed by his supervisors, even if it meant ignoring or irritating his coworkers. Neal’s technical skills as a software engineer were recognized, but his people skills were not. In fact, his coworkers did not consider him a team player, let alone a supervisor or leader, and they voiced their disdain for him whenever possible. At team meetings, during performance reviews, and in the lunch room, Neal the aspiring manager was targeted by his coworkers as being out of touch. He was disliked by the very colleagues he had hoped to supervise.

Because Neal was so busy looking at his prospects for promotion, he failed to see that the water was beginning to boil all around him. No matter how competent he portrayed himself as a manager, and no matter how hard he tried to convince his bosses to promote him, he was unable to do so. Neal was fixated on the possible promotion, but the more he tried to get it, the farther out of reach it became. Because he was unaware of the meaning moments that begged for his attention, he was unable to adjust his course. Neal was working against himself.

Whenever we overlook the opportunity to have respectful, meaningful moments with others at work, we undermine our chances of long-term success. But when we take the time to nurture our relationships, the definition of success expands exponentially. Our day-to-day, minute-by-minute lives become successful in and of themselves, and our specific goals become more accessible. In work relationships it is important to recognize that business and personal issues are frequently tied together. “Smart companies know that the individual’s ability to create relationships” is the engine that drives value.⁴ Trusting each other’s motives is critical to success, both in the moment and over the long haul. If trust is missing, we can get caught up not only in figuring out how others are trying to undermine us but also in calculating how best to respond to their motivations. As a result, the search for meaning at work suffers, and the engine that drives value sputters or stalls.

The tendency to hold others, such as coworkers, prisoners of our own thoughts can work in ways opposite to our intentions. For example, in their article “The Set-Up-to-Fail Syndrome,” Jean-François Manzoni and Jean-Louis Barsoux describe the way bosses often relegate weaker performers to an “out-group” because they assume that these employees are less willing to go the extra mile, are more passive, and are less innovative.⁵ This management approach, and the assumptions upon which it is based, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because these employees have been typecast as weak performers and management has low expectations of them, they tend to allow their performance to erode to meet expectations. So even though the bosses sought to get the best performance possible through the out-group assignment, their personal attitudes and business decisions eventually worked against them. The tendency to micromanage the work of others may create hyperintensive stress, performance anxiety, or even covert or overt actions of sabotage that can end up creating the opposite of the result sought by a manager. (A similar result also has been observed in cases where well-meaning parents, under the guise of parental guidance, try to micromanage their teenagers, who are predisposed to being contrarian!) Sometimes focusing too closely on a problem can keep us from seeing the solution.

The opposite of micromanagers are missing managers, who stay so far out of the picture they have no idea what goes on and have no effect on the success of the work group. There are also those managers who profess to practice management by wandering around (known as MBWA managers): “Keep up the good work, whatever it is, whoever you are!” If the micromanager, the missing manager, and the MBWA manager can instead honor the fact that the job means something to everyone, and that most employees have good intentions, then more success is possible.

For the dignity of man forbids his being himself a means, his becoming a mere instrument of the labor process, being degraded to a means of production. The capacity to work is not everything; it is neither a sufficient nor essential basis for a meaningful life. A man can be capable of working and nevertheless not lead a meaningful life; and another can be incapable of working and nevertheless give his life meaning.⁶ (V. Frankl)

Few of us move through our lives unscathed. We get divorced; we lose our jobs, sometimes after many years of dedicated service; our health fails us in some way; our children fail us; we fail one another. Life can be as full of failures as it is successes. Yet in our failures we can find tremendous meaning, and only in meaning do our failures have a useful legacy. When our failures become useful, we triumph over them. Instead of leading with our disappointment and bitterness over a job loss or a lost relationship, we lead with our ability to have compassion and understanding—for ourselves and others. Then, in our search for our next job, our next friend, or better health, we project wisdom and experience. Our appeal is heightened and our possibilities increase. The power of failure has received an increasing amount of attention in the world of business, both in the literature and among motivational speakers.⁷ Management guru Tom Peters, for instance, has advised that “only with failure can you verify wrong ways of doing things and discard those practices that hinder success.”⁸ Tales of failure that offer lessons of recovery are being used by many who are turning to the “drama of defeat” to inspire.

Using Paradoxical Intention

Paradoxical intention is more than a concept; it is a technique that Frankl developed and incorporated into his system of Logotherapy. Frankl used this technique as early as 1939 to help patients deal with a broad range of irrational fears and anxieties as well as obsessive-compulsive behaviors. For example, by asking a patient who suffered from a phobia to intend, even if only for a moment, precisely that which he or she feared, Frankl observed dramatic results in reducing the phobia or eliminating it altogether. When used effectively, this technique, in his words, “takes the wind out of the sails of the anxiety by reversing one’s attitude and replacing a fear with a paradoxical wish.”⁹ Instead of fighting the fear, the person is encouraged to welcome it, even to exaggerate it. The person deflates the anxiety associated with the situation by no longer resisting it. Thus, “while anxiety creates the symptoms over and over, paradoxical intention strangles them, over and over.”¹⁰

Frankl’s writing provides many instances in which he used the technique with his patients. Two examples stand out because they involve a work-related or workplace situation. In one case, the patient was a bookkeeper who was in extreme despair, confessing that he was close to suicide. For some years he had suffered from writer’s cramp, which had become so severe that he was in danger of losing his job. Previous treatments had been of no avail, and the patient was now desperate. Frankl recommended to the bookkeeper that he do exactly the opposite of what he usually had done—namely, instead of trying to write as neatly and legibly as possible, to write with the worst possible scrawl. The patient was advised to say to himself, “Now I will show people what a good scribbler I am!” And at the moment that he tried to scribble, he was unable to do so. Instead, his handwriting was actually legible. Within forty-eight hours the bookkeeper had freed himself from his writer’s cramp, was again a happy man, and was fully able to work.¹¹

Another case involved a young physician who consulted Frankl because of his fear of perspiring. One day the physician had met his boss on the street and, as he extended his hand in greeting, noticed that he was sweating more than usual. This situation was aggravated as the physician’s anticipatory anxiety increased with each new encounter. To break this cycle, Frankl advised his patient, if sweating should recur, to resolve deliberately to show people how much he could sweat. A week later the physician returned to report that whenever he met anyone who triggered his anxiety, he said to himself, “I only sweated out a quart before, but now I’m going to pour at least ten quarts!” Frankl wrote that the young physician was able to free himself permanently of the phobia from which he had suffered for four years, and he no longer sweated abnormally when he encountered other people.¹²

In his autobiography Frankl recalled using paradoxical intention to avoid a traffic ticket. He had driven through a yellow light and was pulled over by a police officer. As this officer menacingly approached him, Frankl greeted him with a flood of self-accusations: “You’re right, officer. How could I do such a thing? I have no excuse. I am sure I will never do it again, and this will be a lesson for me. This is certainly a crime that deserves punishment.” As the story goes, the officer did his best to calm Frankl; he reassured him that he need not worry—that such a thing could happen to anyone and that he was sure Frankl would never do it again. The technique worked, and Frankl saved himself from receiving a ticket!¹³

Paradoxical intention is the exact opposite of persuasion, since it is not suggested that the patient simply suppress his fears (by the rational conviction that they are groundless) but, rather, that he overcome them by exaggerating them!¹⁴ (V. Frankl)

Meaning also rests in the appreciation of the moment. When our awareness is focused on the past or on the future, we lose the connection to now. We lose the connection to where meaning is now. At work, as in our personal lives, we must pay attention to those around us and to the integrity of the process we are going through. The more meaning there is in the process, the more deeply satisfied we will feel, no matter what the outcome. When we work in awareness of the moment, we stay connected to meaning. Our existence, and the existence of all life, is meaning. Meaning is simply waiting to be discovered, whether we work at a construction site, a bakery, a high school, a movie theater, a multinational corporation, a landfill, a restaurant, a home office, or the White House. By not being prisoners of our thoughts, and by not working against ourselves, we find deeper meaning.

Meaning Reflections

Think of a challenge you face in your work or personal life. Now think of the worst-case scenario. In essence, you are doing as Viktor Frankl suggested: exaggerating your worst fears. Although you won’t actually experience this worst-case scenario, what does this exercise suggest about your situation? What can you learn from this exercise in terms of both process and outcome?

Meaning Questions

• How do you ensure that you don’t work against yourself in your work and personal life?

• What worries, fears, or other negative thoughts are holding you back? How might you discard them?

• How might you use the technique of paradoxical intention in your own work and life situations?

Meaning Affirmation

I will increase my awareness of when I am working against myself.