Unconscious Paradigms Worth Examining #3: Your Views on Causation

This is the third article in a series about the inner paradigms that shape how we...see, navigate, make sense of, and carve our success...in the world.?

If it's true that "what got you here, won't get you there," then these are the largely unconscious paradigms you need to "hold up to the light" if you want to make fundamental changes to how you show up and lead.

The three paradigms are:

1. What's the motivation/drive that gets you out of bed in the morning?
2. What is your "Winning Strategy?"
3. How do you think about the causes and meaning of outcomes in your life?

In Part 1 , I outlined some of the forces that might be driving you out of bed in the morning and some inquiries that will help you examine your prime mover so you can decide whether what you're pointing yourself at needs to change in light of the 'there' you are trying to reach.

In Part 2 , I examined Winning Strategies, how to identify them, how they help you succeed and limit you, and how to own them instead of them owning you.

The third paradigm relates to the outcomes in your life that you experience.? It has two parts:? cause and meaning.? That's a lot to cover in one post.? So, in this third installment, I'll explore how you think about causation. And in Part Four, we'll explore what those outcomes mean.

Causation Paradigms

You landed your dream job.? Or maybe you got turned down for a promotion you really wanted. You drove by the perfect home as the For Sale sign was going up and bought it before the bidding war started.? A potential enterprise client you had been courting for months suddenly decides to go in a different direction and you lose the sale.? You rarely make small talk with strangers, but you blurt out an off-handed comment to someone in a coffee shop.? He laughs.? You keep talking and after a few months of interaction, you realize he's the love of your life.

What caused these events??

The answer is unknowable of course, but that doesn't stop most of us from spending quite a bit of time attributing it to something...our hard work, the effort we put into visualization, blessings from the gods, bad karma, etc.?

I don't care what views you hold about causation and I am not going to try to change your beliefs. In my view, how someone thinks about cause is an unconscious paradigm worth examining if you are serious about changing how you show up and lead.

The Two Big Buckets of Cause

Most of us think of two broad sources of causation: Human Effort and Unseen Forces

Human Effort.? When outcomes occur people point to the human effort that preceded the outcomes.? It could be the effort of an individual or the effort of a group.? The efforts can be quite visible or more mental, in the form of visualization/affirmation/prayer.? The efforts can be Herculean or half-assed.? Since they preceded the outcome, they are thought to have something to do with causing it.

Unseen Forces.? The other bucket of causes believed to affect outcomes I'll call Unseen Forces, of which there are many forms.

God/Goddesses/Spirit/Angels/Helper Beings.? I am not going to get into all the flavors of people's spiritual beliefs, but many believe that god(s) or spirit are operating behind the scenes affecting the outcomes in their lives.?

As a variation on the god theme, there are those who believe there are not separate people and things, that it is all One Thing...all One...all god...all consciousness...or, for the spiritual scientists, it's all energy and empty space between electrons.?

Adherents of the view of the Oneness of everything believe there are actions but no actors.? When asked what caused something they experienced, these folks would place a lot of their chips on this unknowable, unseen, "One Thing" as the force behind the outcomes they were experiencing.

Fate/Karma.? Some believe that you come into this world with a predetermined Fate and you just play out the hand you were dealt.? Some believe it is that predetermined Fate that is exerting significant influence on the outcomes in your life.

In Moby Dick , Captain Ahab laid a lot at the feet of Fate:

"Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike."

Karma might be viewed as Fate's cousin, influencing outcomes but perhaps not as completely deterministic as Fate is.

Teleology/Unconscious Processes.? With this particular invisible force, you are not just "playing out the hand" as you are with a predetermined Fate.? You have an active role in trying to uncover your Life Myth or purpose.? There is some teleological seed in the ground, but it is up to you to discover and nurture that seed and see what it flowers into.

From Carl Jung's autobiography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections :

The inner personality desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and experience itself as a whole. We each are a psychic process which we do not control and which we only partly direct.? Each human life is a dubious experiment that always seemed to me like a plant that lives from its rhizome.? Its true life is invisible, hidden in that root.? The part that appears above ground lasts only for a season and then it withers away.? In the end, the only events worth telling are those where the imperishable world erupted into the transitory world.

Electromagnetic Waves. When it comes to unseen forces, everything is not all woo-woo.?

What we see...visible light...makes up .0035% of the electromagnetic spectrum, which also includes radio waves, microwaves, infrared radiation, ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and gamma rays. This energy is bombarding the earth and passing through our bodies every second, completely unseen by us.?

To put the amount of unseen electromagnetic forces in perspective, if the full electromagnetic spectrum...from radio waves to gamma rays...were the 2340 mile Mississippi River, the visible light portion of that spectrum would be about 400 feet of that majestic river.? That's a lot of unseen forces exerting influence behind the scenes on you, your reactions, and the events around you.

Telepathy.? People who have had telepathic-like experiences...e.g., thinking of someone right before they call or getting a bad feeling about someone you later find out has had an accident or been given a difficult diagnosis...see those experiences as the work of unseen forces.

Others would scoff and chalk telepathic experiences up to coincidence.

But even card-carrying empiricists would tell you not to dismiss these phenomenon too quickly.?

Quantum mechanics experiments have shown when two entangled particles are separated, what is done to one affects the other.? Einstein called this?"spooky action at a distance," because the particles are communicating at faster than the speed of light.

Unseen Forces: Random or Purposeful?

Unseen forces can be further characterized as operating randomly or with intention/purpose.

For some, unseen forces are just stochastic events, like balls tumbling through a Pachinko machine, randomly breaking right or left. There is no rhyme or reason to the observed pattern the falling balls make on any given pull of the lever.

Quantum Mechanics would cast a vote for this view.? Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle and the unpredictable nature of photon behavior implies that, at a fundamental level, Nature is inherently random.

Some would argue that notions of luck come in here.? A dice throw goes your way and you win the family board game.? For some, that's just a random event.

But others think they see patterns in the randomness. They feel as if good luck follows them..."I have good 'Parking Karma'"...or sometimes the opposite, as captured in that famous Blues lyric, "Been down since I began to crawl. If it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all."

But many don't believe there is anything random about those forces.? Einstein famously said: "God does not play dice with the universe ."

For the non-random folks, these unseen forces operate with some imagined purpose or intention, even intelligence.? Whether the outcome is good or bad, it is brought to you by the unseen as a kind of reward or punishment, as a deserved or undeserved blessing, or perhaps a challenge, tailor-made just for you and your growth by this intelligent force.

Causation Purists vs. "It Depends"

Some choose one extreme or the other in their view of cause.? There's the "it's all human effort" tribe:? "Fate is what you make ."

And, at the other end of the spectrum, the "it's all unseen forces" cluster...it's all God's plan...inshallah...if god/allah wills it.? From this perspective, we're just on an amusement park ride imagining the controls we're twisting and turning actually work.

This "all god" view is captured in a Joni Mitchell lyric: "Oh, you Tireless Watcher.? What have I done to you, that you make everything I dread and everything I fear come true?" ~ Sire of Sorrow (Job's Sad Song)

But most seem to have an "it depends" approach and they mix and match their hypotheses about causation.? For this group, Human Effort and Unseen Forces operate dynamically and get combined in interesting ways and at interesting times.?

The "Trust in god, but tie up your camel" folks think it's really the unseen forces that determine outcomes, but you have to do your part.

An Esther Perel vignette captures this. She said her parents used to tell her "Chance came first. And there is what you did with the Chance that was given to you. So there is always a mixture between Choice and Coincidence."

Others take a more contingent approach:? If the outcome is considered bad, they blame themselves.? If it is good, it is Unseen Forces at work.? To wit,? many athletes kneel or point to the heavens after they make a great play, but they do neither after they fumble the ball away.

I like to say, we don't live in the world, we live in our matrix of stories about the world.? A kind of freedom comes from dismantling the stories.

Questions about Your Causation Story

Whatever you think about cause the real answer is that causation is indeterminable.?

All the potential causes I went through previously are hypotheses... mental models...of what is going on inside the black box that is spitting out the outcomes we experience.

A mental model is a nice way of saying "cognitive invention," aka, a made up story.

I like to say, we don't live in the world, we live in our matrix of stories about the world.? A kind of freedom comes from dismantling the stories.

Here are some inquiries you can make to help you decide if you want to decorate the causal construction you live in or if you want to step out and establish a different relationship with cause:

1. Think about some good or bad things that have happened in your life.? How do you think about what caused them?a) Or since we are talking about how what got you here won't get you there, how did you get to this point in your career?? What were the causes?? In addition to your hard work, can you point to any blessings, or grace, or heck, just good old fashioned luck? (I have written elsewhere that good fortune, wherever it comes from, does not get enough acknowledgement. )
2. Think of something that was a really great outcome.? Now think about one that you wish had turned out differently. Is your view of cause relatively fixed across the two outcomes or do you mix and match your view on causation depending on the outcome?
3. If your view fluctuates depending on outcome, for example bad outcomes are all on you, good outcomes are god/karmic blessings/luck, how did you come to believe the 'causal machine' works this way?
4. How did your overall views of causation coalesce?? Is your current view something you iterated towards throughout your life or did you adopt it from someone else or at an earlier point in your life?
5. If your view of cause is fixed and immutable to change, how do you believe viewing cause the way you do helps you?
6. Can you think of ways in which your view of causation created difficulties for you?

I am not trying to change your causal model.? If it has worked for you and if you think it can continue to work for you as you take chances to go for something bold, then stick with your story.

But if you are not sure, it might be worth asking if a different way of thinking about cause or responding to how you think about cause would serve you in this new, challenging role you aspire to.

• For example, if you are an "it's all on me," "Fate is what you make" person, you're putting an enormous amount of pressure on yourself.? Is it possible that orientation makes you more responsible than you actually are?? That you are not seeing the grace that is operating in your life?? Possible that it causes you to continually add to your own task list vs delegating to the team? To fail to look for partnerships?? To overwork yourself and fail to recharge?? Will that work with this stretch goal you are aiming for?
• If the bad outcomes are all on you and the good ones are due to the gods or luck, aren't you solely bearing all the weight of past mistakes? Could this be feeding your Inner Critic, causing you to blame yourself for every blow that lands and increasing the frequency and duration of downward spirals?
• If so much of what happens to you is the work of these Unseen Forces, are you failing to see the role of your own abilities and gifts and effort in your success?? Will you need confidence in your gifts and abilities for the ascent ahead of you?

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"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." ~Carl Sagan

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Helping you Get 'There' with an Alternative Relationship to Causation

Remember what we are doing here.? We're assuming you have to change your stripes to get to the stretch goals and stretch org levels you have your sights set on you. Changing your stripes likely means changing your core paradigms.

Since cause is unknowable and whatever cause paradigm you have is "just a story," switching cause stories is not going to help you get there because all stories have limitations.

Here is a different approach: what if you just did your best and notice where the chips fall without making any causal attributions?? What if you instead put your focus on where you are going and what you are trying to create and put your energy into figuring out what you need to do next, from where you currently are, to reach your goals?

This point is emphasized in verse 2:47 of the Bhagavad Gita , the God Krishna says to the warrior Arjun:

You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself to be the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction. ?

Bad luck?? Blessing?? Out of favor with the gods? Karma? Didn't try hard enough??

Who knows??

Since no one does or can, why speculate?

I am not saying to not reflect on your actions that preceded the outcome that occurred.? After-Action Reviews are one behavioral reflection approach, especially helpful in group contexts.? Said reviews often result in updates to Standard Operating Procedures or the addition of error-proofing approaches to improve future outcomes.? But that review can happen quickly and without much angst vs. the usual time spent ruminating...why didn't I do that? Why does this always happen to me...on something that is unknowable.

With the time freed up from thinking about what caused what, you put your the focus on your goal and you figure out what the next step you need to take from where you are to move closer to goal.

Like your GPS. When you miss a turn, GPS doesn't do a deep dive on how or why it happened.? It doesn't try to shift the blame onto the incompetent "others" involved. And it doesn't waste a single second berating itself.? In fact, it doesn't care.? It just recalculates.?

More time spent keeping the focus on the destination and charting a new course from wherever you are and less time spinning up stories about the unknowable could expedite progress towards that 'there' we've been talking about.? At a minimum, it would reduce a lot of meaningless cycles and friction.

Part 4 of this series will address the meaning of outcomes and the role of meaning in reinventing yourself.

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Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is the President of Adsum Insights and designer of?The First 100 Days and Beyond , a consulting service for leaders in transition who need to get off to the best possible start in new jobs.