The unbearable white bear problem

Well, let’s start with the painful memory. When I was a very inexperienced manager at the beginning of my career (I’d like to think this phase only lasted a week or two) I could not stop thinking about some negative feedback I received. I appreciated the suggestions, but like an author that focuses on one bad review out of hundreds of great ones, I was stuck on bad feedback vs positive comments.

I had a kind mentor who encouraged me to move on, but trying to not think about negative feedback made me think about it even more. Of course psychologists have a name for this affliction. The formal term is Ironic Process Theory, but it’s more commonly called the “white bear problem.”

Daniel Wegner (he’s the renowned Harvard professor) coined the term in 1984 and described it as “the psychological process whereby deliberate attempts to suppress certain thoughts make them more likely to surface.” In other words, if you tell someone not to think of something – like a white bear, the fact that their brain is going to remind them not to think of it makes them think about it all the time – and ironically makes the situation worse.

But why white bear? This is where Russian authors come in. There are references that Tolstoy played the "white bear game" with his older brother in 1840 - where he would have to "stand in a corner and not think of the white bear". Tolstoy of course could think of nothing else (and his brother sounds like kind of a jerk). And Dostoyevsky mentioned the same game in 1863 in the essay Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. In fact, Wegner saw this quote from Dostoyevsky when he was forming his theory.

“Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”

You can substitute pretty much anything in place of the white bear – “I think I blew that interview,” “I’m going to embarrass myself at the upcoming meeting,” “the CEO frowned during my presentation” or even "don't say anything about the mole". It’s a pretty tough thing to deal with – and it’s been proven scientifically that it gets worse in stressful circumstances – say like coping with a world-wide pandemic (“I will be stuck inside this house for years”).

My own white bear experience and how I dealt with it then (and deal with it now), got me thinking about how this phenomenon affects our development as leaders. I found – and research has verified - that the keys to dealing with whatever white bear shows up at work is self-awareness and mindfulness, which are very useful leadership traits.

A leader has to recognize that a thought like “trying something new or different could be a disaster” or “our last attempt at innovation failed spectacularly” could mean that a big white bear is living rent-free in their head - and that they need to take action. This could be:

1.    simply postponing the thought to a specific time (that’s my “go to” “I’ll give this 15 minutes on Friday and that’s it”)

2.    giving yourself a distracting thought (Wegner found in his initial experiments that telling his lab subjects to think of a red car helped them to forget about the white bear)

3.    or trying meditation (although trying to “clear my mind” makes me constantly think about how cluttered it is). 

All these remedies of course depend on your ability to recognize what you are going through at an emotional level.

Thank you and please don’t think about how wonderfully informative this was to read…

#leadershipdevelopment