On Numbing

Thoughts from our CEO and Co-Founder Amy Elizabeth Fox :

In our intensive leadership programs at Mobius Executive Leadership, I ask executives to take a rigorous inventory of how they numb themselves. These are all the activities that help us manage our raw emotions. We all partake in numbing.

In a workplace where we make big delineations between the personal and the professional and in corporate cultures that are mostly disembodied and un-relational, where we ask people to be walled off from their feelings, we end up relying on hacks to interrupt our otherwise naturally arising feelings. The lists of numbing habits that our participants come up with are long and often shared with a tinge of embarrassment or shame.

They tell us we numb ourselves by:

• working too hard and too much
• scrolling through social media
• worrying and procrastinating
• lowering my ambition
• staying alone and isolated
• having shallow conversations
• excessive exercise, overeating, binge-watching Netflix
• yelling at our kids
• staying exhausted
• caretaking others

We numb by distracting ourselves, rationalizing things, and minimizing our reactions. Of course, there are other answers to the question of how you numb that people don't always dare speak aloud to the group, but they confide in us off to the side of the room: I have affairs. I drink too much. I watch a lot of pornography – activities that force people to sever a treasured alignment with their values and vows that cost them in soul and self-blessing.

When we examine the costs of this panoramic and widespread numbing phenomenon, their answers create a hush in the room.

They tell us:

• I lose vitality, creativity, closeness, and attention to what matters.
• I am not a good partner, parent, or leader.
• I feel so empty.
• I pursue external validation relentlessly.
• I am unhappy.
• Or, I simply do not feel ...

Then they breathe a sigh of relief when they realize they are not alone. We are all facing the enormous consequences of a collective habit. Secrets are lighter when confided to a safe listener among a loving community of witnesses prepared to receive without judgment.

Destructive habits receive more compassion when given the broader, systemic context of understanding they deserve. Sometimes, this conversation becomes the sacred beginning of a long path of recovery from an addiction (of any kind) that is costing them their life force and freedom.

Mostly, it is a sober moment when leaders start to understand that operating from a performative and transactional organizational culture has a huge cost in human experience and intimacy—never mind what the organization has set out to achieve.

An organization that is denuded of mutual compassion, mutual solidarity, and mutual tenderness is an organization that can act in cold and ruthless ways to its employees, in extracting ways to its ecological environment, and in disrespectful ways to the community of commons in which it operates. I do not know of another way to help leaders lean into their full nobility or their full possibility than to help them systematically un-numb their hearts and understand why that numbness is there in the first place.

We are not born numb. We numb ourselves because things happen in our lives that are too painful to integrate at the time that they happen. Helping an executive to safely and slowly explore the earlier incidents – which took place at a time when the process of numbing was the most intelligent option available – and to differentiate that context from the current one, allows their inner operating system to update. Their childhood survival strategy takes its rightful place as a "childhood hero" (from the teaching of Thomas Hübl, PhD ), which allows the adult to take center stage. This equips an executive to be the leader they can be and that the world needs of them.

In that soft, integrated, and open state, a leader can feel more, attune to more, perceive more, receive more, invoke more, consecrate more, steward more, forgive more, create more, learn more, and love more.