Distinguish Role from Self

It is easy to confuse your self with the roles you take on in your organization and community. The world colludes in the confusion by reinforcing your professional persona. Colleagues, subordinates, and bosses treat you as if the role you play is the essence of you, the real you.

In the 1980s, Alan Alda starred in the movie The Seduction of Joe Tynan. Alda plays a United States senator contemplating a run for president. The seduction takes two forms. In a traditional physical seduction story, costar Meryl Streep plays a liberal activist, and it isn’t clear who seduces whom. But the title has another meaning as Alda gets increasingly caught up in his role as an effective, popular senator and presidential possibility. He begins to make speeches to his own kids, just like he does on the floor of the Senate, and treats his wife like a staff person who needs to toe the party line. He begins to think that he is the public and professional role that he plays. The movie ends before we know whether Alda wins the presidency, or whether his marriage survives his delusion. But the danger is clear: the all-too-common pitfall of losing yourself in your role.

Confusing role with self is a trap. Even though you may put all of yourself into your role—your passion, values, and artistry—the people in your setting will be reacting to you, not primarily as a person, but as the role you take in their lives. Even when their responses to you seem very personal, you need to read them primarily as reactions to how well you are meeting their expectations. In fact, it is vital to your own stability and peace of mind that you understand this, so that you can interpret and decipher people’s criticism before internalizing it.

Thus, you have control over whether your self-worth is at stake. If you take what is said personally, your self-esteem becomes an issue. “You are a jerk” is not necessarily a personal attack, even though it is framed that way. It might mean that people don’t like the way you are performing your role. Perhaps you have not been tactful enough in making your challenge. You may have raised the temperature too high or too quickly, or you may be raising an issue people would rather leave alone. In fact, they may be right to criticize your sensitivity or your pacing, and you may have a lot to learn to correct your style, but their critique is primarily about the issue, not about you. In the guise of attacking you personally, people are trying to neutralize the threat they perceive in your point of view.

Indeed, say you put forth an idea and it is attacked. If you accept the notion that the purpose of your intervention is to stimulate the group’s work, then the attack becomes a form of the work. It is an opportunity. The resistance you receive is not a criticism of you, or even necessarily a dismissal of your point of view. On the contrary, it suggests that your input was worth reacting to, that it provoked engagement with the issue.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton described how people responded in what became the first women’s rights convention in the United States.¹ As Stanton tells the story, one summer afternoon in 1848, she told a group of friends about her encounters with the outrageous, entrenched positions of men, including teenaged boys, workmen, and policemen, when she organized and managed the refurbishment of a property in Seneca Falls, New York. The discussion made it obvious to at least some of those present that something had to be done to change how men and women thought about women. They decided not only to meet again the next week, but also to begin writing a declaration of women’s rights.

After several meetings, they adopted a declaration of women’s rights and resolutions demanding that American men change the laws to allow women to vote. Stanton described the resulting uproar throughout the country: “So pronounced was the popular voice against us, in the parlor, press, and pulpit, that most of the ladies who had attended the convention and signed the declaration, one by one, withdrew their names and influence and joined our persecutors. Our friends gave us the cold shoulder and felt themselves disgraced by the whole proceeding.”²

The response, with its personal costs, was hard not to take personally. Stanton said at the time, “If I had had the slightest premonition of all that was to follow that convention, I fear I should not have had the courage to risk it, and I must confess that it was with fear and trembling that I consented to attend another, one month afterward, in Rochester.”³

Anchoring yourself may enable you to sustain the furious opposition even of your own friends and former collaborators, who may remake your role overnight from a darling to an outcast. But if you can anchor yourself, you may find the stamina to remain responsive, focused, and persistent. Progress may take decades. The Seneca Falls convention in 1848 was the beginning of Stanton’s work on women’s suffrage. It took her thirty more years to tackle the constitutional flaws that underlay the problem in America. In 1878, Stanton drafted a federal suffrage amendment, introduced and rejected by every Congress for the next forty years. When in 1918 the House finally approved the essence of Stanton’s draft for Senate approval of what would become the Nineteenth Amendment, Stanton had been dead for sixteen years.

Like Stanton, if you are to be authentic and effective, you must play your role in accordance with what you believe so that your passions infuse your work. You need to realize that you cannot have it both ways. If you are attacked, discredited, ostracized, or fired, you may feel that you have experienced a kind of assassination. But you cannot expect people to seriously consider your idea without accepting the possibility that they will challenge it. Accepting that process of engagement as the terrain of leadership liberates you personally. It enables you to make room for others to get just as involved in working on your idea as you are, without withdrawing or becoming entrenched in a personal defense.

Again, distinguishing yourself from your role is just as important with regard to praise as it is to criticism. When you begin to believe all the good things people are saying about you, you can lose yourself in your role, distorting your personal sense of identity and self-image. Also, people can gain control over you because of your desire to maintain their approval. Losing yourself in your role is a sign that you depend on the institution or community for meeting too many of your personal needs, which is dangerous, as we saw in chapter 8.

Do not underestimate the challenge of distinguishing role from self. When people attack you personally, the reflexive reaction is to take it personally. We all find it exceedingly difficult in the midst of a personal attack to get to the balcony, maintain an interpretive stance, and identify the way our messages generate distress in other people. As Stanton discovered, it is especially hard when your friends and the people whose support you seek are doing the attacking. But being criticized by people you care about is almost always a part of exercising leadership. When Bill Clinton successfully reached across party lines in 1993 to fashion with Newt Gingrich a crucial deficit-reduction bill that raised taxes and reduced government spending (contributing to a decade of prosperity), his wife Hillary was sharply critical of the president and his advisers. Front the president’s point of view, that was her job.⁴

Indeed, leadership often means going beyond the boundaries of your constituency and creating common ground with other factions, divisions, and stakeholders. Adaptive work rarely falls in the lap of any one faction. Each has its work of adjustment to do. In crossing boundaries, you may appear a traitor to your own people, who expect you to champion their perspective, not turn around and challenge their view. Violating their expectations generates a sense of betrayal, perhaps expressions of outrage. However, little of this is personal, even when it’s coming from your compatriots, friends, spouse, or partner.

When you take “personal” attacks personally, you unwittingly conspire in one of the common ways you can be taken out of action—you make yourself the issue. In an election campaign, a candidate’s character and personal qualities are accepted as appropriate subjects of debate. But in most situations, even in politics, the attack is a defense against the perspectives you embody, which threaten other people’s own positions and loyalties. As we’ve asked before, does anyone ever critique your personality or style when you hand out big checks or deliver good news? We don’t think so. People attack your style when they don’t like the message.

It’s the easy way out to attack the person rather than the message itself. For example, some might accuse a courageous woman of being pushy if she seeks a change in the culture of the organization. By making her style or character the issue, those who are threatened distract people in the organization from her message. Discrediting her reduces the credibility of her perspective.

Although Bill Clinton provided plenty of ammunition for his detractors, would people have attacked him so unceasingly had they liked everything about his points of view on the issues facing America? It is no accident that those attacking him on the character issue also disagreed with him on many of his policies, and moreover were furious with his appropriation of some of their positions as he moved to the political center. It is also not surprising that the people more forgiving of Clinton’s character flaws agreed with key elements of his agenda. Feminists were almost unanimous in defending him in the impeachment process, rather than attacking him for his exploitation of women, because he had strongly supported their agenda.

Ironically, though the Clintons and their political consultants prided themselves on mounting a quick and effective defense, their attack-defense dynamics focusing on character served them poorly. Every time the attackers succeeded in generating a defensive response from the White House, they siphoned public attention from the issues. The more the Clintons acted defensively (by withholding documents, fashioning legal arguments, using legalistic language, or lying), the more they added momentum and intensity to the attack.⁵ Reacting defensively to the literal substance of personal attacks colludes with the attackers by perpetuating the diversion. This work avoidance mechanism almost always succeeds simply because it’s so natural to take a personal attack personally.

Of course, everyone could learn better styles of communicating a challenging message. Unfortunately, there is no way around the fact that it is just plain difficult to pass out bad news. It is easy, even enjoyable, for a doctor to say to a patient, “Here’s your penicillin. You’ll be cured.” But what if the news is grave? “I don’t think I can save you. I wish I could, but I don’t think I can. Let me help you and your family grasp what you are about to face, so that you can make the appropriate adjustments in your lives.” It is hard to imagine a message more painful to deliver or to receive than this. Nearly any teacher would prefer to give out A’s than C’s. Nearly any boss would prefer to hire than fire. But if the doctor, teacher, or boss gets deflected from the goal of helping people take in the message, and instead becomes the issue, the work won’t get done and precious time will be lost.

Even physical assassination, the ultimate form of attack, is not personal. Though this is no comfort to the victim, it can help supporters and surviving family comprehend and survive the tragedy. Moreover, knowing that even physical attacks are not personal can bolster courage, helping the person exercising leadership to take needed risks. If you understand this, then, in your heart you may feel that even if you lose your life, the essence of your intent will continue to infuse meaning in the lives of others.

Clearly, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed for no other reason than to eliminate the role he played in the changing of America. Yigal Amir, the assassin of Yitzhak Rabin, claimed that his purpose was to silence Rabin, and killing him was the only way to do that. It was Rabin’s message—his role—that was threatening, not Rabin himself.⁶

Failing to distinguish role from self can also lead you to neglect the proper levels of role-defense and role-protection. Rabin risked his life many times during his career as a soldier. By the time he became prime minister of Israel, he was well accustomed to physical peril. So when his secret service informed him of the increasing risks of assassination and advised him to use a bulletproof vest before leading a massive public rally, he refused. Having crossed that threshold of risk years back in the army, and perhaps with some lingering pride in his personal, physical courage, he made himself and his role more vulnerable than necessary. The irony is tragic.

Had Rabin distinguished role from self, he might have worn that vest, not in self-protection, but for role-protection—he might have recognized the increasing need to protect the crucial part he was playing in the Middle East peace process. Had he stepped back, moved to the balcony, and considered the stakes at risk, he surely would have agreed with his bodyguards. Instead, in the fleeting moment of decision, he calculated the risks according to his personal level of risk tolerance, rather than assessing the risk to his historic role in the future of Israel and the Middle East.⁷

Of course, a more common example of role-protection occurs when new parents find themselves becoming risk-averse because of the significance of their new roles. Fortunately, most people who seek to lead do not have to weigh the risks to their lives. The physical dangers do not loom so large as the everyday ways people push back personally when you introduce a controversial idea.

To draw people’s attention back to the issues after you have been attacked or unduly flattered, you have to divert them from your personality, personal judgment, or style. The absolute best long-term defense against personal attack is to be perfect and make no mistakes in your personal life. But, of course, none of us is perfect. Our human hungers and failings are there always, causing us to lose our tempers in public, to hit the send button before thinking twice about the effects of an email, to lie reactively when we feel cornered, to make an off-handed remark that offends people we are trying to reach. We have been susceptible to these behaviors ourselves—everyone has. The key, however, is to respond to the attack in a way that places the focus back where it should be, on the message and the issues.

In their campaigns for president, the press accused both Gary Hart and Bill Clinton of philandering. They responded in very different ways. Hart counterattacked. He criticized the reporters who had shadowed him. He questioned their scruples. He got defensive. Bill Clinton took a very different road. He went on 60 Minutes right after the Super Bowl, sat before the cameras holding hands with his wife and essentially admitted that he had strayed. Hart responded personally; Clinton, strategically, and more honestly.

No one watching Hart or Clinton knew for sure how many women either of them had romanced. What everyone could know and judge was how both men handled the situation. People made up their minds about these men not by poring through the accounts of their dalliances, but by observing the data at hand. That’s what people see. Your management of an attack, more than the substance of the accusation, determines your fate. Even though the attacks were deeply personal, Clinton understood them to be political attacks on his credibility. He responded with a disarmingly honest, non-defensive defense to gain trust and put the issue away, and was then able to return the conversation to the policy issues in the campaign.

Remember our friend Kelly, who tried to stay out of the fray in order to secure her appointment to the Denver Civil Service Commission? She was criticized publicly and repeatedly during the process. But she realized that the criticism (and occasional praise) was not really about her, but about what she represented for different factions of the community. Had she taken the attacks to heart, she would have been inclined to react defensively, and would have placed herself in the midst of a crisis that was not hers. She might well have put her appointment in jeopardy.

There is also a long-term value to distinguishing role from self. Roles end. If you are too caught up in your role, if you come to believe that you and your role are identical, what will happen to you when your role ends? Will Jack Welch find the strands of himself after playing the part of “Jack Welch: CEO of General Electric”? After putting all of himself into that role for so many professional years, will he know where to look?⁸

While parenting is a part of one’s personal life, it provides a powerful example of the need for the self/role distinction in all aspects of our lives. When Ron starting having children, Marty told him, “You know you will have succeeded as a parent when your child acts really badly toward you and you don’t take it personally. And you won’t figure it out until the second child.”

Ron then proceeded to discover the truth of that prediction. At his worst as a father, he says, he took it personally when his children got angry and were disrespectful to him. First he yelled inside his own head, “Why don’t you kids appreciate all I do for you, and all that you have?!” Before long that internal sob story leaked out. He started yelling out loud, shamefully losing his temper, and then, feeling guilty about having lost his temper, compounded it all by yelling at his kids further for making him lose his temper. “Why are you making me yell, don’t you know how I hate losing my temper!” After a few minutes of this craziness, he withdrew defeated to his study where he licked his wounds. By the time he rejoined his family, he had lost sight of whatever may have precipitated the incident.

At his best, Ron stayed calm. Instead of taking his children’s behavior personally, he remembered his job: He corrected their behavior by setting limits of some kind, and then he started listening to find out the problem. If he kept listening for a day or two, the story eventually came out: Inevitably, something upsetting had happened in a friendship, on the ball field, or in class. Having identified the issue, he could then help the child solve that problem, whatever it was. Rather than turn his attention inward to tend his wounds, he focused outward, where the problem was located.

It may be obvious from this example, but it’s worth emphasizing that we are not talking about playing a role at a distance from yourself, or separating yourself from your role. We use the word distinguish because we want you to differentiate self from role, not distance or withhold yourself. Indeed, we hope you can find ways to put all of your heart and soul into many of the roles you take in relationship to the people and institutions in your lives. In other words, distinguishing between self and role does not mean you need to avoid embodying important issues, though there are dangers when you do so, as we’ve discussed earlier. There are some situations in which you have no choice. Whether you like it or not, you will embody issues in the eyes of other people, and sometimes they will attack you when they see you running with the ball down the field. If you choose to play, you will incur these dangers because it is the only way to move the issue forward.

This role/self distinction becomes extremely hard to practice when we get tackled in surprising ways that cut close to the bone. At those times, we find it far more difficult to get to the balcony and see that the challenges we represent to others remain distinct from our own essential identity.

For example, when Geraldine Ferraro ran for vice president in 1984 and was attacked mercilessly regarding her husband’s business dealings, she held a massive news conference. Some of you will remember. She told the reporters that she would stand up and answer every one of their questions, however long it took, to clear her name. And in fact, the news conference lasted hours.

Did it actually let her bring the attention back to the real issues? No. The media, on behalf of their readers and viewers, kept inventing newer variations of the attack even when she answered their questions, because her family finances were never the issue anyway. They were merely a distraction, and indulging the media and the public in this diversion with a marathon news conference was precisely the wrong move. The issues she embodied were real issues, and they were intensely provocative in America: What does it mean for a woman to be powerful and professional? What would it mean for a woman to be second in line to the most powerful position of authority in the world? What has the sexual revolution done to our families? These continue to be challenging questions in our society, as we’ve seen in public debates and elections through the present.

With disastrous results, the campaign managers in 1984 advised Ferraro to stay away from the issues she embodied. She was told to stick to international security, poverty, taxes, and the budget, but not to talk from a woman’s perspective; moreover, she was advised to avoid issues of particular urgency to women, like equal opportunity. Ironically, by following this advice, expressing a generic perspective on the issues rather than one more authentically shaped by her own experience, she may have indirectly roused the media to search for something distracting in her personal life.

As the first female vice presidential candidate, she could not escape her role, even if she had wanted to, because in the eyes of the nation she inevitably embodied questions regarding women’s ability and perspective. As a leader, she needed to play the role fully, which she finally allowed herself to do with great inspiration in the last four days of the campaign.

Joseph Lieberman, America’s first Jewish vice presidential candidate learned from her. He played the role of religious Jew fully throughout the 2000 campaign. In nearly every speech and occasion, he spoke about the role of faith in America. Instead of begging the issue and avoiding the role the public ascribed to him, he spoke to the issue he embodied. Had he done otherwise, he would have made himself vulnerable to personal attack.

Remember, when you lead, people don’t love you or hate you. Mostly they don’t even know you. They love or hate the positions you represent. Indeed, we all know how quickly idealization turns into contempt when suddenly you disappoint someone. Surely, if Monica Lewinsky had met Bill Clinton in a supermarket behind a shopping cart, he would have been just another middle-aged guy getting burgers.

By knowing and valuing yourself, distinct from the roles you play, you gain the freedom to take risks within those roles. Your self-worth is not so tightly tied to the reactions of other people as they contend with your positions on issues. Moreover, you gain the freedom to take on a new role once the current one concludes or you hit a dead end.

No role is big enough to express all of who you are. Each role you take on—parent, spouse, child; professional, friend, and neighbor—is a vehicle for expressing a different facet of yourself. Anchored in yourself, and recognizing and respecting your distinct roles, you are much less vulnerable to the pains of leadership.

Keep Confidants, and Don’t Confuse Them with Allies

The lone warrior strategy of leadership may be heroic suicide. Perhaps no one can be sufficiently anchored from within themselves for very long without allies, whom we discussed in chapter 4, and confidants.

Allies are people who share many of your values, or at least your strategy, and operate across some organizational or factional boundary. Because they cross a boundary, they cannot always be loyal to you; they have other ties to honor. In fact, a key aspect of what makes allies extremely helpful is precisely that they do have other loyalties. That means they can help you understand competing stakes, conflicting views, and missing elements in your grasp of a situation. They can pull you by the collar to the balcony and say, “Pay attention to these other people over here. You’re not learning anything from your enemies.” Moreover, if persuasive, they can engage their people in the effort, strengthening your coalition.

Sometimes however, we make the mistake of treating an ally like a confidant. Confidants have few, if any, conflicting loyalties. They usually operate outside your organization’s boundary, although occasionally someone very close in, whose interests are perfectly aligned with yours, can also play that role. You really need both allies and confidants.

Confidants can do something that allies can’t do. They can provide you with a place where you can say everything that’s in your heart, everything that’s on your mind, without it being predigested or well packaged. The emotions and the words can come out topsy-turvy, without order. Then once the whole mess is on the table, you can begin to pull the pieces back in and separate what is worthwhile from what is simply ventilation.

Confidants can put you back together again at the end of the day when you feel like Humpty Dumpty, all broken to pieces. They can remind you why it’s worth getting out there and taking risks in the first place.

When you ask them to listen, they are free to care about you more than they do about your issue. They either share your stakes completely or, better, they may not care about your issue at all, one way or the other.

Confidants must be people who will tell you what you do not want to hear and cannot hear from anyone else, people in whom you can confide without having your revelations spill back into the work arena. These are people you can call when a meeting has gone sour, who will listen as you recount what happened and tell you where you screwed up. You can reveal your emotions to them without worrying that it will affect your reputation or undermine your work. You do not have to manage information. You can speak spontaneously.

When you do adaptive work, you take a lot of heat and may endure a good measure of pain and frustration. The job of a confidant is to help you come through the process whole, and to tend to your wounds along the way. Moreover, when things are going well, you need someone who will tell you that you are too puffed up, and who will point out danger signals when you are too caught up in self-congratulation to notice them.

Almost every person we know with difficult experiences of leadership has relied on a confidant to help them get through. A governor who is making painful choices in bringing the state out of a perilous financial condition plays pool at night with an old friend who lives down the street. A businesswoman trying to change the values and culture of her company to meet new competition has long phone calls with her sister late in the evening. A bureaucrat trying to lead difficult change in his organization e-mails a new professional colleague thousands of miles away whom he just met at an intensive two-week seminar. A spouse, too, can be an excellent confidant, except of course when the issues are about the spousal relationship or family dynamics. Sometimes a confidant can be explicitly engaged. “I’m about to start a difficult process here at work. Do you mind if I call you from time to time and just pour my guts out so you can tell me what you hear?” Sometimes, of course, the dynamic is more spontaneous.

When you are discouraged and feeling low, think about an old friend, a roommate you have not seen in a decade or more, an employer or teacher who helped train you—someone who cares about you rather than any particular role you play. Give them a call. Ask them for time to hear you out. If they agree, then tell them the story, no holds barred, as well as how you feel so they can get a full picture of what is going on inside you as well as around you.

When you need someone to talk to in difficult times, it’s tempting to try to turn a trusted ally into a confidant as well. Not a good idea.

Remember Sara, the newspaper designer we introduced in chapter 4? She understood that her staff, the designers she recruited to join the paper and carry out the work, consisted of allies—as committed to the issue as was she. Indeed, they were terrific advocates and effective troops, bringing good design to every aspect of the paper, creating relationships of their own, and winning friends among reporters and editors who were reluctantly being brought along into the visual era.

But this was difficult and lonely work for Sara. She was a long way from her old colleagues in the Midwest. She had no family. She really had no one outside the newspaper in whom to confide. So she began to take into her confidence her young recruits, telling them how frustrated she felt, how difficult she found it to deal with some of the senior management and recalcitrant editors and reporters. In particular, she complained about the old-timers running the presses, who didn’t have the patience or the intelligence, she said, to cope with all the sophisticated changes she was introducing and her high standards of quality production.

Now, the pressmen walked on hallowed ground at this newspaper. Most of them came from lower-class backgrounds, fiercely proud of their heritage and their craft. Typically, they had been with the newspaper for years, through good times and bad. Many of them had relatives at the paper, sons or daughters who worked on the business side or even as reporters and editors. They were family.

In turning to her younger colleagues, Sara confused allies with confidants. Don, her deputy, was one of them. Don was talented, demanding, and high strung, and as committed as she was to the new visual emphasis of the paper. He was an effective ally, but this did not mean he was with her personally. On the contrary, Don found Sara abrasive and difficult to deal with, and thought her personality added to the already tricky problem of changing people’s attitudes and habits.

He also wanted her job. He believed he could do much more, much faster, to advance the cause than Sara. Unfortunately, caught up in her need for a confidant, she ignored clues to his doubts and envy. In fact, Don took every opportunity to undermine her. When she would air her critical thoughts about colleagues, he would later repeat them, sometimes to the colleagues themselves. When she would trust him to provide a safe harbor where she could ventilate her feelings, he would tell others that she threw tantrums and describe her unbecoming behavior. Sometimes the stories got her into trouble, but only momentarily. The newspaper’s editor mostly viewed them as unsubstantiated rumors and continued to stand by her.

Then Sara gave an interview to a design industry magazine. She was talking to her own community, and her guard was down. Ordinarily, pressmen would not read the magazine, so she didn’t worry about everything she said the way she did in the newsroom. She made some very disparaging comments about the pressmen, ridiculing their intelligence and their competence. Don, a subscriber to the magazine, read the interview and saw the offensive remarks. He made several copies, highlighted the provocative quotes, and circulated them to senior management.

The editor was now faced with hard evidence, a smoking gun. Though Sara’s change efforts at the paper had been quite successful, he could no longer defend her. Within weeks she was gone and Don was announced as her replacement.

Sara made a common mistake. When battling loneliness, insecurity, stress, or other pressures, the need to open up to someone can be almost overwhelming. In this frame of mind, it’s very easy to mistake allies for confidants. Sara thought that because she and Don were together on the issue, he backed her personally as well. When you try to turn allies into confidants, you never know when circumstances may force them to choose between their commitment to their own priorities and people, and their commitment to you. Since their previous commitment to the issue came first, it’s likely that their prior loyalty will prevail.

Why make them choose? With Don, it was easy. He didn’t like Sara in the first place, and he thought their issue would be better and more quickly advanced if he were at the helm. She gave him ammunition, and it was only a matter of time before one of the bullets hit home. But if your ally is committed to you as well as to the issue, you put him in a terrible spot by asking him to be loyal to both. It is better, whenever possible, to keep the two separate.

Allies can be the closest of friends. They may confide in each other about many aspects of their lives. At work, however, they have overlapping, not identical, stakes and loyalties. To protect their relationship, it becomes crucial that they also respect the boundary that separates them, and honor each other’s loyalties when those come into conflict. This is easier said than done in nearly every profession except legislative politics, where representatives are accustomed to stating up front how the pressures of their constituencies conflict. Tom Edwards and Bill Monahan, whom you met in chapter 4, were unusual in their ability to speak openly after dinner about their competing interests, and thereby protect the relationship. “I’m sorry, Tom, I can’t back you on this one.” Far more frequently, your ally, caught between two loyalties, won’t know what to say. The likely consequence is the developing of distance between you.

In our experience, when you try to turn allies into confidants, you put them in a bind, place a valuable relationship at risk, and usually end up losing on both counts. They fail you as a confidant, and they begin to slip away even as reliable allies.

Seek Sanctuary

Like a loyal confidant, having a readily available sanctuary provides an indispensable physical anchor and source of sustenance. You would never attempt a difficult mountain journey without food or water, yet countless people go into the practice of leadership without reserving and conserving a place where they can gather and restore themselves.

A sanctuary is a place of reflection and renewal, where you can listen to yourself away from the dance floor and the blare of the music, where you can reaffirm your deeper sense of self and purpose. It’s different from the balcony, where you go to get a wider perspective on the dynamics of your leadership efforts. Analyzing from the balcony can be hard work. In a sanctuary, you are out of that world entirely, in a place where you feel safe both physically and psychologically. The rules and stresses of everyday life are suspended temporarily. It is not a place to hide, but a haven where you can cool down, capture lessons from the painful moments, and put yourself back together.

Too often, under stress and pressed for time, our sources of sanctuary are the first places we give up. We consider them a luxury. Just when you need it most, you cut out going to the gym or taking your daily walk through the neighborhood, just to grab a few more minutes at the office. Clearly, it’s when we are doing our most difficult work that we most need to maintain the structures in our lives that remind us of our essential and inviolable identity and keep us healthy.

We’re not peddling a particular type of sanctuary. It could be a jogging path or a friend’s kitchen table where you have tea. It could be a therapist’s office, a 12-step group, or a room in your house where you sit and meditate. It could be a park or a chapel on the route between home and workplace. It doesn’t matter what your sanctuary looks like or where it is. It doesn’t even need to be a quiet place; your sanctuary might be as noisy as the pounding surf. What matters is that it fits you as a structure that promotes reflection, and that you protect it daily. Once a week is not enough.

At a particularly difficult time in Ron’s life, when he struggled and felt pulled in too many directions both professionally and personally, he started picking up his children at school every day. He resigned from several committees, cut back on travel obligations, and cleared his afternoons. His kids usually got out at 3:30 P.M. They were then in first and second grade, and he found picking them up to be a challenging experience.

In fact, when three o’clock came around he had to pry himself out of his office—there were “important” calls left unmade, wonderful projects to do, money left on the table. (He usually could be seen racing out the door at 3:10 P.M.)

He would drive like a madman, and by the time he arrived at the school, he usually had to wait behind a long line of cars. With cell phone in one hand and dictating machine in the other, he would frantically try to make the most of every moment. “What am I doing here? I’ve got so many important things to do!” he would moan to himself. Finally, after inching his way to the front of the line, he would see their little round faces. He would ask them to get in one at a time, but did they listen? Throwing in their backpacks, always helter-skelter, they would crawl over each other to get to their usual seats. And then out would come the stories, stories Ron never used to hear at dinnertime, because apparently they only told them once, to whoever was there first. (Later he learned that if he stayed quiet at bedtime, they would do a second telling.)

Quite quickly, Ron would be transformed. He left behind the frenzied professional and recovered himself in being a father. After only three or four minutes the stories, the laughter, and even the kids’ problems would work their curative magic. He felt anchored in a different world.

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Everyone seeking to exercise leadership needs sanctuaries. We all need anchors to keep us from being swept away by the distractions, the flood of information, the tensions and temptations. As you provide leadership to people, you should expect to encounter emotions you cannot handle unless you have a time and place to sort them out.

Human beings were not designed to deal with the nonstop modern world, so we must compensate. Getting anchors and keeping them is, at root, a matter of self-love, discipline, and purpose. It is a serious recognition that we need to care for ourselves in order to do justice to our values and aspirations. Without antidotes to the modern world, we lose perspective, jeopardize the issues that matter, and risk our future. We forget what’s on the line.