March 28, 2025

#84 Dancing the Tightrope: Chapter 3; Invisible Tools

Show Notes
Transcript

This week’s episode is – drumroll – Chapter 3 of Dancing the Tightrope. I’m just going to say it – you were right and I was wrong! I’m speaking to those who’ve been telling me for a long time that they would appreciate an audio version of my book.

Not only have I been getting great feedback and gratitude for providing the book in this form, but I have also surprisingly enjoyed reading it myself. After all, I wrote this over 4 years ago. It’s given me a fresh perspective on the themes and principles I began learning and refining after my fall from the horse – and it’s also shown me how far I’ve come. For example, if you had told the 2020 version of me that I would be riding with Stevie Delahunt at an endurance boot camp a mere five years later, I would have laughed in your face. But that’s where I was in early March when Chapter 2 of the book came out. It just goes to show you that you can teach an old – dare I say it – dog new tricks.

This chapter sets the stage for so much of what I’ve put into practice in the last five years. It chronicles my first visit to Camden to work with Bruce Anderson. To say that I was resistant is an understatement. So was Jen, as you will hear in this Chapter 3 of Dancing the Tightrope.

Transcript

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Lynn, Welcome to Creative spirits unleashed, where we talk about the dilemmas of balancing work and life. And now here's your host, Lynn Carnes,

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Welcome to Creative spirits unleash Podcast. I'm Lynn Carnes. Your host. This week's episode is Drum roll, please, yes. Chapter Three of dancing the tightrope. I'm just gonna say it. You were right. I was wrong. Of course, I'm speaking to those who've been telling me for a long time that they would appreciate an audio version of my book. Not only have I been getting great feedback and gratitude for providing the book in this form, but I have also surprisingly enjoyed reading it myself. After all, I wrote this over four years ago, it's given me a fresh perspective on the themes and principles I began learning and refining after my fall from the horse, and it's also shown me how far I've come. For example, if you had told the 2020, version of me that I would be riding with Stevie Delahunt at an endurance boot camp a mere five years later, I would have laughed in your face. But that's where I was in early March when chapter two of the book came out, and it was actually my third visit to ride with Stevie in the last year. It just goes to show you that you can teach an old dare I say it dog, new tricks. So this chapter sets the stage for much of what I've put into practice in the last five years. It chronicles my first visit to Camden to work with Bruce Anderson, where I first began to hear the idea of invisible tools. To say that I was resistant is an understatement, and so was my daughter, Jen, who went with me that day, as you will hear in this, Chapter Three of dancing the tightrope. I hope you enjoy chapter three, invisible tools when the student is ready. Three inner fault lines finally provoked me enough to make the pivotal phone call. One had been planted months before and lay dormant, waiting for more energy to widen the crack in a conversation during my recovery, my friend Daryl mentioned her horse trainer Bruce Anderson and the work he did in the corporate leadership realm. Daryl and her husband had recently moved to the area, and we became fast friends with a shared love of the outdoors, conservation and water. She had several well trained dressage horses, and one she mainly used to ride on the trail, named Scotty. Three months before I got on Mocha, Daryl asked me over to ride Scotty. We were hoping I could brush up my childhood horseback riding skills so I could join Daryl out on the trails on her farm. We started in the arena. I quickly discovered I was way over my head on Scotty over my head in the same way that any typical driver might experience in a finely tuned Ferrari surging around the racetrack for the first time. You can read the whole story in the sidebar of this chapter. Interestingly, I did not see what happened with Scotty as a red flag to my horseback riding aspirations until at least a year after my fall. Nor did I realize that this blog was a call out to the universe to help me deal with pressure. Blog post, where is my choice here? And yes, I got back on the horse. My theme for this week seems to be adrenaline. Let me start by saying there is a joke in our house about who is the real adrenaline junkie around here? I contend it's me, and I got a lot of adrenaline this week. It's left me pondering how to use this involuntary pulse of fight, flight or freeze energy pulsing through my veins. What would happen if I actually channeled it instead of running away or curling up in a ball to make it go away? What is the best choice to make between that moment of stimulus and response, and how do I continue to build the inner fortitude to tolerate discomfort and get comfortable with being uncomfortable from the outside, looking in, almost no one would see me as the daring one. So if I'm the one who is such a chicken, how can I be the adrenaline junkie? It's all a matter of perspective. I'm married to a mountain dew man who does everything from extreme scuba diving to sky diving to horse endurance racing to back flips off giant boat houses. By all accounts, he looks like the adrenaline junkie in our household. He has spent his whole life doing brave and daring things, most activities don't even touch his fear system. So while he is considered an adrenaline junkie, he has to work very hard to get ahead of adrenaline me, on the other hand, I was raised in a don't go near the edge household, and I didn't. As a result, I was generally a careful child who turned into a fearful adult. I hate admitting this my. Fear system gets jacked with the slightest hint of danger because my threshold is so low I get hits of adrenaline all the time. That's why I say I'm the true junkie in our house. I'm the one getting regular doses of it. So what happened this week to fill me with adrenaline? Oh, let me count the ways. It started with the spider on the boat platform.

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No, I'm not scared of spiders. I used to be, but that's another story. When I saw him as I was stepping onto the platform ski, I moved my boot so as not to step on him, and the boot suddenly slipped out from under me. Imagine the feeling of hitting wet ice at a boat with a jagged edges to fall on, and you will get the idea of the next move, I managed to sit back into the boat without doing the splits or crashing onto my knees. Once I recovered my poise, I realized that I had taken one of the biggest hits of adrenaline in me. Recent memory, my heart was racing, my stomach was flipping, and I generally felt incapacitated. I looked at Jen, my daughter, and the one who was driving, who knows my tendencies in me so well? And said, I can't ski like this. I sat back in the boat and said, Give me a minute. Of course, adrenaline takes a while to drain from your system. And I said, as much she offered to ski and let me get calmed down. And that was certainly an option.

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Then it hit me, the perspective, not more adrenaline, my body had just inadvertently created tournament conditions. The feeling I was having was no different than the feeling I have before skiing in a tournament. Being able to perform with that kind of energetic surge in the body is a hugely valuable skill, and one that I have not mastered. This was my chance to practice with the inner feeling of true tournament conditions. So I looked at Jen and said, Let's see if I can use this. I'm going to ski the first pass proved why tournament conditions are so difficult. I overshot every buoy. Even though I had anticipated being stronger than normal, it was difficult to corral all the energy surging through my body. Had I been in a tournament, my performance would have been short lived. It was on the next few passes that I started understanding how to channel the energy in a productive way when my mind caught up with my body's enhanced capabilities. I skied my best of the summer to that point, by far. In fact, the next day, I was missing that surge when I skied, I came to see the adrenaline as enhancing my capabilities rather than debilitating me. Over the past few years, I've been rewiring my brain to make it less sensitive to those fear hits. For example, the first time I drove a boat through a ski course, my heart was pounding and the boat guide seemed to scream past me at Mach four. Now I drive said, course, every day at faster speeds with advanced short light skiers, deliberate practice and familiarity have made the once scary now the norm. But of course, you know, my lessons on managing fear and adrenaline were not yet over. I'm sure you have heard the old adage, if you fall off the horse, you gotta get back on. I got to test that one as well. A friend invited me over to ride her horse, which was one of my very favorite things to do as a young woman.

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Almost all of my riding had been on the very calm nose to tail riding horses typical of public riding stables. Yes, I had been on real horses, but not that often, and all of my riding has been western riding. The difference between Western and English are much more than a different saddle.

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We started with catching and grooming my mount, which gave the horse and me a chance to get to know each other and build some trust. Smart move. Then we mounted up in the ring and I started learning how to ride all over again, different saddle, different reins, real horse, and unlike my ski, the horse could feel my every emotion. Just knowing that made it a little harder for me to settle in. At first. After a while, I did begin to get comfortable, and we started speeding up, just like in snow skiing, it's important to learn the basics of how to slow down before you get too much momentum. In this case, it's with a live animal who understand specific signals. The first couple of times were okay, I was able to get him going and stop him without too much trouble. Then, while the horse was moving at a quick gate, I inadvertently gave a go signal when my deepest desire was to stop before I knew it, we were running. This was certainly not what I had expected. You can imagine what happened inside of me. My body was now in full flight or flight. I was literally in flight mode, and I would have loved to been able to fly off that horse and land on my two feet. My friend was calmly giving me instructions on what to do. I'm not sure how she could be so calm while I felt like I was on a runaway train.

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Damn. Why won't this horse stop?

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Needless to say, when we got stopped, my first instinct was, get off that horse. She knew better, and I knew better. That horse would never respect me again. First, we debriefed those few minutes while I was still astride him, we realized my Western riding style conflicted with his training. My. Signal was confusing him, and my adrenaline, sense of flight came through the as the stronger signal. So I went back to walking for a few minutes to regain my composure and reconnect with the horse. My system was pulsing with the huge hit of adrenaline. In this case, I intentionally channeled that feeling into deep focus, connection and gratitude with the horse, he did eventually slow down, and he was simply doing his best to please me and I had managed to stay on through the whole thing. Who now you may be wondering what all this talk about adrenaline has to do with business at work, we rarely talk about it in these terms. We don't say, Wow, when you call my idea stupid, I got a hit of adrenaline. Or, dang, I get super scared when I see you and your boss talking, because half the time it means I'm getting in trouble for something I've done.

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We are mature, powerful business people, so we frame those adrenaline hits as just business or we don't even realize that we're in a reactive mode that lack of awareness can cost us.

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Here's the problem with adrenaline, we don't really have a choice about when it hits it's based on our history, our personal fears, our experiences with parents, teachers or bosses. When that stimulus hits us, we start operating in fight or flight mode. When the conditions actually call for us to be calm and reasonable, we are more likely to escalate a conflict, to take something personally, to get hurt or defensive or just to pick a fight. All that energy surging through our system tells us to do something, and we do. It's just that then we do something that is probably an overreach for the situation. You may be thinking, okay, I get it. I don't want to overreact and I don't want to damage relationships, so I will quit having adrenaline, huh? If it were only so simple, our inner nervous system decides when we get the adrenaline. Our conscious mind has little or nothing to do with it. Unless we do serious self awareness training, we will get hit when we get hit. So first we have to learn to deal with the adrenaline hits we get start by being aware. Recognize that when you have that pit in your stomach or the leap in the heart, there is a chance you are surging with more energy than usual. That signal is designed to keep you alive. When it hits in a business environment, it drives behavior that does not match the situation. Learn when your tendency is to fight, flee or freeze. You may also want to consider doing some inner work to rewire your system to tolerate and normalize those situations that trigger you. You can desensitize yourself if you deliberately practice doing so.

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But I digress back to Bruce Anderson. I had experienced Equine Assisted Learning before, and I thought I had learned all I needed to know. Now that I'd just been thrown off a horse, the thought of working with them was still up in the air for me, and I did not want to literally be up in the air like before ever again. In the meantime, I was coaching a leadership team that was operating under extreme pressure. Every one of us needed to take our game to another level. The idea of working experientially with someone like Bruce who could potentially accelerate our learning intrigued me from my earlier work in a horse focused Leadership Program. My big takeaway was this, horses don't act because of the title you hold or the words you say. They engage through clarity of thought and energy, and they show you when your energy is incongruent, the challenges the team members faced were not about positional power, rather influence mattered. Influence was their currency, and they needed more of it. Learning to influence a 1200 pound animal would help these team members influence leaders above, below and around them in their organizational hierarchy. Those were both logical reasons to work with Bruce, but it would take a third, unspoken longing known only looking back on it when the pressure got high and I went into the froth, in other words, the space outside my comfort zone, but still in the learning zone. I quit at this point in time. I had not allowed that awareness to move into my conscious mind. It was my subconscious longing to learn to operate in the froth that spurred me to make the call. It was October, a month after my accident, when Daryl first mentioned the leadership work with Bruce. At the time, I said I would think about it being the go getter that I am. I got right on it and called him in March.

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When I spoke with Bruce on the phone, he began to take me through his method. He didn't talk about himself, his clients, or how he worked. He just started doing his thing, which involved asking me lots of questions, as if we were in a coaching session. And that phone call, I realized this was nothing like the experiential work I had done with horses before i. He didn't really talk about the horses. He was mostly talking about the mental cycle that occurs when we are under pressure and make a mistake. He also said things like, we are not meant to live in man's world. We were meant to live in nature's world. As we relearn how to dance with nature in the world we were made for, we can also learn how to dance with human nature. I didn't realize yet just how different this work would be. In fact, after we hung up from that first call, I thought I fully understood his methods and that Bruce would see that when we worked together the following week, my proving mindset the very same pattern that told my friend I knew how to ride asserted its dominance once again, what I thought was micromanaging. Before we hung up from that first call, I mentioned to Bruce that my daughter, Janet worked with me, and he also invited her to the show and tell session which we would do at his farm in Camden, South Carolina. We picked a day in the next week, and he warned us to dress for anything, including mud. As Jen and I drove the 165 miles from Lake Lure to Camden. We were full of anticipation about what to expect going in. I had some preconceived notions, given that I had done one whole leadership session using horses, I expected Bruce to do the same, or at least something similar, plus, I had read a bunch of books, so I was feeling rather confident on our drive, I described to Jen some of the activities I had done in the one session, as well as some of the exercises I had read about in books. She had been helping me with the leadership team, so we mapped out how my preconceived notions of the exercise Bruce would share would help the team with several of its challenges. We also talked about the big stuff, like, how would we feed the team? Where would they sit, and what if it rains? Would there be a bathroom? In other words, corporate land showed up. The horses would see right through me. When we got out of the car, a giant of a man greeted us. He asked us if we would like to sit and visit on the porch. Before we got started, I was pretty sure there were no horses on the porch, so I naively suggested we get right to it. Looking back, this makes me chuckle. I would come to realize just how much my past was interfering, not informing. And even later, I would come to think of my past as interfering, spelled e n t, e r, F, E, A, R, I N G. But there I go, getting ahead of myself again. Bruce handed me a rope and a halter with these instructions, your picture is to choose one of the two horses, put the halter on the horse you choose, and bring him or her to the round pin. A round pen is like a corral seen in westerns.

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Instead of being square, the round pin is round, well, almost round. More on that later, however, I hadn't gotten to the not quite round, round pen, yet my mind tripped up over the word picture. What did he mean? Did he mean goal instead of picture?

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What an odd thing to say. Much later, I would come to realize that horses think in pictures.

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His word choice was not only deliberate, it was essential, but in my rush to show off, I mentally replaced the word picture with goal and set off to crush the goal. In my mind, this would take five minutes, max. It would be less, but for the two gates I would have to open and close on my way out and my way in to complete his assignment.

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Here's my embarrassing little secret. I only cared about one thing at this point. I wanted Bruce to ask me where I had learned to catch and halter a horse like that in the world.

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According to Lynn, I was just one step shy of being a natural horse. Woman, overconfidence struck again. Secretly, there was also a part of me hoping he would absolve me from any responsibility for the horse accident, not to mention I wanted to see those cool activities for the leadership team. So much for my wishful thinking and getting the horse into the round pen in five minutes. Yes, I caught the horse in short order. Then I had to figure out the halter, which was unlike any I had ever seen. Let the halter tell you how to put it on the horse. Bruce said, talking halters were not part of my preconceived expectations.

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And best I could tell, this one looked more like a rope than a halter. And the last I checked, ropes, don't talk. Finally, I got the halter on and started walking with the horse on the way into the round pen. Bruce stopped and asked me to feel my negative, positive pole. My what? There he goes, using funny words again, yes, I feel something. What I'm feeling is pissed you are not letting me get this horse into the round pen. Okay, where all the fun will start. Your negative positive pole is like a car battery. There's a little charge of electricity inside of you.

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See if you can feel it. As he spoke, he moved his hands up and down in front of his midsection with his thumbs up. When something is off, that little charge of electricity will surge through. You notice it and give it a number. If I learned nothing else for the rest of my life, learning this lesson would be the worth, worth the trip to Bruce, but it would not get through my numbed out brain for a long time. On this day, my number, on a scale of one to 10, was a 10 an hour and 50 questions later, the horse and I finally walked into the round pen. Yay. I thought, now I get to do something with the horse.

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Not so fast. First, he had me take off the halter I had worked so hard to put on the horse.

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Man, do I hate to do rework in the intervening hour, my annoyance had been rising click by click, I mostly stuffed it and tried to assume positive intent, but asking me to remove the halter was almost a click too far. However, my inner good girl went out and I removed the halter as ordered. I watched the horse start grazing and turned back to Bruce, still wondering, when would we get to do my preconceived notions of working with the horse. I had conveniently forgotten that Bruce calls this work natural humanship. For the next hour, we talked and did an exercise with flags. Best I could tell that was a complete waste of time.

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Our mission was to find the middle of the round pen, and all I could think was, if the middle is so damn important, why the hell has he marked it before?

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Now, when, oh, when will we do the leadership lessons with the horse? There was a lot of talk about the negative positive pole, but the noise in my head drowned it out. The noise in my head had been drowning out my god given instincts my whole life. Someday I would learn the transformative power of finding the middle but on this day, I just wanted to get on with it.

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Mistakes. Finally, Bruce handed me a tool that looked like it might lead to doing something with the horse a good old fashioned cowboy, Lariat, the assignment was simple and clear.

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Take the rope from its current unorganized state into a set of equally sized coils with no tension in the rope. Jen and I were still standing in the middle of the round pen, talking to Bruce, who was sitting in a chair just outside the fence.

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When Bruce gave me the picture, there's that word again, I was sure it would be easy and we could start quickly working with Trinny, the horse I had worked so hard to catch and bring into the round pen. She was still peacefully grazing behind us.

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Laureates are stiff making the assignment a lot more challenging than it appeared on the surface. Lariats are sort of like a garden hose that only loops when coiled just right in just a matter of seconds. I was in deep shit. I had made several coils, and they were not equally sized, and the loops looked like my disorganized garden hose at home. I was failing and desperate to cover it up. As my internal tension rose, the nice, calm horse I wanted so badly to play with started walking in circles around us, with my attention on coiling the rope, I barely noticed Bruce would say something, and I would feel the heat rise in the back of my neck, sitting under his stair raised the pressure even more.

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Soon I started to notice the horse. I couldn't help it. No longer was she peacefully grazing. She had started trotting and then running, and now was kicking up her heels Great. Between the horse, the Lariat, and the guy heckling me in the cheap seats, I felt naked and exposed. Now I feared for my life. Horses are big, and this one was moving faster and faster as I watched Trinity kick and buck. It never dawned on me that Jen might be getting concerned about the chaos running around us, nor did I understand how or why my actions might have sent the horse into such a state, it was like I was looking at the world through a rolled up tube of paper. I did have a flash, flashback to my accident.

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Remembering being on the back of a horse that had kicked me off in similar fashion. Bruce stopped me and said something about me beating myself up. I fully denied it and tried to keep convincing him and myself that I've got this. None of my bullshit games worked. He saw me. He saw me. Now. All he had to do was coax the real me to come out from behind the conditioning of my past while calling the Lariat I did not conscious. Feel like I was making a mistake, nor did I feel like I was beating myself up.

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Yet, at some level, my physiology was responding to my lack of rope coiling skills as a mistake. Once the mistake button got pushed, the automatic cycle took me into my past, the unconscious memories and emotions stored in my body came flooding to the surface. I was no longer the grown up version of me, but the eight year old being scolded for getting something wrong. And yes, I was beating myself up. That's no way to learn anything. When Bruce interrupted me in that moment, he gave me a different path to take, rather than operating from the past, he took my focus into the present moment as my tension drained out through tears, the horse calmed down and faced me.

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Now we could work on the picture. How does one learn how to coil a rope without training?

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The use of the word picture began to come into focus. Bruce said, you are trying to do everything at once. A moving picture is made of lots of smaller frames, right? What are the frames still I stood frozen.

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Break it into the smallest steps. Try stuff. Where is the twist in the coil coming from?

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What move could you make to release the tension? Would you twist the rope to the right or to the left from my helpless Kid Mode, state of being I ask for the answer, which, why do I turn the rope?

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He said, to try it and see what happens. But what if I make it worse? You might make it worse, and then what? I go the other way. But what if that doesn't work? Try something else, but that might not work. You won't know until you try, but I might die. Okay, I didn't say the last thing out loud, even though that's what my mind had been screaming from the first horrible coil of the rope. I might die. It feels like I'm dying here. It wasn't death, it was a path to life. In that moment, I could not appreciate what a profound lesson this would be. As he stayed with me through the Messy emotions of wanting to throw the rope on the ground and leave the problem altogether, I began to chart a new path out of my old ways. I tried twirling the tension out by swinging the rope to the right. It made it worse, and yet, somehow I was still alive.

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Let the rope tell you which way to turn it. He said. There he was with his talking ropes again, but this time, something inside opened just a little bit as I tried working with the coils, I began to tune into the rope, which meant I had made space to tune out the inner voices telling me what an awful rope Coiler I was. When my attention turned to the problem in front of me, it was as if I had a whole new set of resources at my disposal. My mind quieted and I started working the puzzle, first this way and then that way. Soon, my brain and my hands made a connection, and before I knew it, the Lariat was beautifully coiled. Tears began to well up as I realized that I was alive the shame and embarrassment of not being able to do a simple task had evaporated. I had experienced a glimpse of who I was born to be without the internal noise and drama. It was just me and the rope patiently working out a problem, listening to it tell me where to find the relaxed path.

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On this day, I was not yet clear on what I had just learned. It had nothing to do with coiling a rope. Bruce had provided a safe space for me to solve a problem for most of my life, I had not been afforded that kind of psychological safety in most of the cultures I had experienced, whether at school or in my career, while he was providing this space for me, my intensity and fear of getting it wrong did the opposite for the horse trainees. Bucha showed me the cost when safety is lacking. Her response was pure without the usual human cover up. More importantly, Bruce had eliminated the key to my own treasure chest of invisible tools. It was a magical key that would turn only when I was present accidentally showing up.

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The pressure of trying to figure out the rope took me out of the moment. As I stood there struggling with the rope, it felt like I was on center court in the finals of Wimbledon. I wasn't fully in the game. A part of me was in the stands watching myself fumble and stumble with the task, with the audience of 1000s offering their critique, the imaginary critique created by my mind leaving the moment happens all the time. I jump into the other person's head and start imagining what they are thinking. When I was a kid riding my bike down the street, I used to. Uh, quote, unquote, here in my head, what each neighbor must be thinking about me as I passed their house, this little mind game continued for the rest of my life, pretending I knew what was going on in someone else's head. The same thing happened at work. Often, I reacted based on what I thought someone was thinking, rather than taking the time to ask, listen and truly hear what they were actually thinking. One of the biggest promotions of my banking career put me in both the spotlight and the headlights. My job was to take the core training program for commercial bankers from a one year program to 10 weeks while delivering better bankers as things often get done in the corporate world, the decision to reorganize around this idea happened before there was any proof at all that this idea could work. The pressure to get it right fell on me and my team.

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The heads of many commercial banking divisions were anxious to see how we would solve the problem. They look forward to the benefits of a much less costly program, while at the same time, feared the possibility that they might be stuck doing remedial training for the newly minted bankers they were counting on to be proficient very quickly, this was a tall order. Learning to assess whether or not to give a business a sizable loan is a difficult task. In one of the early meetings presenting our plans to this group of executives, I experienced an out of body moment, watching myself crumble from the stands and then somehow brought myself back into my body. Everyone had come to corporate headquarters for a planning session around the new organizational structure, and I was one of several team leads slated to report on our plans.

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This was the kind of working session that would be full of probing questions, pushback, decisions and occasionally condescension. Nothing can knock me off center like being talked down to. The executive team.

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Would either leave the meeting confident that we were up to the task, or would begin taking measures to make sure that someone got the job done. In other words, I had a real shot at screwing things up here, as we were gathering for the meeting, you could cut the tension with a knife on the surface, everything looked friendly and supportive. The undercurrent told a different story, one that carried an awareness of the tech of the stakes. Luckily for me, I was not the first to speak, but My luck was short lived, as I watched others stumble and fumble under the examination of senior leaders who had much to gain and lose, my planned presentation started looking weaker and weaker. Doubt started creeping in. I thought, would they press me as hard on my staffing plan as they did the presenter before me? Would they open doors for me to hire from their teams, an essential part of my strategy, or would they insist I somehow manage with a less experienced cohort? What if I made a mistake? What if I look unprepared or even stupid? Is this the end of my career? The pressure started to rise as the consequences of this moment washed over me. My mind started chattering ideas to help me out, to get an idea of the self talk.

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Picture a parent watching their kids play a sport instead of yelling for me to choke up on the bat. It said things like, come on. You know these people, they like you be sweet and cute so you can get your way. Okay?

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Maybe if they liked me enough, they would overlook the potential holes in the plan. But wait, they like the guy talking right now. He's choking. What about him? Then my competitive side started saying things like, you could do better than him.

00:33:32.720 --> 00:34:36.800
He's being too cautious. Show him what you got. Even though we were all on the same team, I found myself thinking I could do better than the other presenters. I needed to do better than the other presenters now I wanted to win. None of my mind chatter nonsense helped. It came my turn to speak. My body tensed. A flood of sensations coursed through my torso. I was feeling like I had just been gut punched. I looked down to open my presentation. When I looked up, I had that sort of tunnel vision that was like seeing a room through the peepholes in the door. The expectant faces of these executives enter my brain, looking like distorted figures in a fun house mirror. The words coming out of my mouth felt equally contorted about two sentences in, I had enough presence of mind to be aware that I was speaking gibberish with a trembling voice that I didn't recognize, with the sinking feeling my main mind chatter told me I was going to get exactly what I had feared.

00:34:33.260 --> 00:34:59.920
Here. I was a grown ass woman with a big job, and yet a skill I had learned as a toddler was suddenly out of reach. I could not talk. The pressure had gotten to me. I was sinking. A huge part of me wanted to run out of the room. In some ways it already had leaving a shell of me behind to face the music. I needed to find my voice and.

00:35:00.000 --> 00:36:06.000
Find it now, if I couldn't handle the pressure of talking about my plans, what would make them think I could bring those plans to life? Then I stumbled on an analogy that somehow got me out of my head and back into my body. I said these Young Bankers are coming in believing they are ready to run the ship, even though they can't yet read financial statements. What we have found is that we must balance helping them see the reality of their lack of skills with giving them a sense of progress. It's like a roller coaster. If they can feel the click, click, click, as the car heads to the top, they will have the patience to see the training program through in what seemed like a magical moment at the time, I could feel the room change as my physical demeanor shifted, my voice came back. I was fully present in the room. I quit pitching and started talking through our plans. Their eyes changed from hard and skeptical to interested and excited. We had an engaged discussion where we jointly solve problems, developed strategies and made decisions.

00:36:02.340 --> 00:36:24.559
By the end of my part of the meeting, the executives expressed their full support of our direction. I left the meeting with confidence and clarity. Looking back on this event, I've wondered, what shifted that day? Did I suddenly rise to the pressure? Did I find a level of inner strength. How did I get myself back in the present moment?

00:36:26.179 --> 00:36:58.358
Or did the people in the room lower the pressure when their eyes changed? Was it a way to encourage and support the clearly faltering me? Were they taking the role of audience member who showers the performer with positive vibes? What would have happened if they'd gone harsh instead of friendly, without a time machine, I will never know for sure. However, with an increasing knowledge of the pressure gap, I believe their friendly faces and positive vibes help lower the pressure. The pressure gap.

00:36:53.318 --> 00:37:31.518
Pressure has a way of interfering with our most basic skills. We know how to talk until we are faced with a huge audience or a make or break sales presentation, we know how to write and yet can't seem to hit send on an email that makes a bold offer. Pressure can even make walking next to impossible, especially for someone with a fear of heights, like me. Here's an illustration you can test in your mind right now, find a 20 foot span where you can walk comfortably on flat ground. Walk for 20 feet in a straight line.

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Now reverse direction and walk the same span as if this were a 12 inch wide beam. You might have to put one foot in front of the other. Did you fall? Did you even feel wobbly? Probably not.

00:37:47.199 --> 00:38:32.418
The pressure created by the first task was really low. You handle that level of pressure all day long. The pressure created by the second task was also low, although slightly higher. Keeping your balance along a 12 inch beam is slightly more difficult than regular walking. Now, for the next task, it is best to use your imagination. Unless you have a balance beam handy, imagine that you're going to walk across said balance beam, like the one the gymnast use in the Olympics, chances are the pressure created by the height of the beam will test your mental tools if you really do it personally, just imagining it can create the sensation of falling in my body, while I can easily walk a four inch wide span across the floor.

00:38:32.478 --> 00:38:57.458
I cannot do the same four feet off the floor. I have a pressure gap. Now for the final task, use your imagination again. In this case, imagine that you're going to walk across a 12 inch wide beam, three times wider than a balanced beam that is several 100 feet off the ground. We have already established that you have the skills to walk a 12 inch beam without falling over.

00:38:57.699 --> 00:39:05.458
So this is well within your skills. Envision yourself walking across that beam several 100 feet above the Earth.

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Everything on the ground is really tiny. You wouldn't even be able to recognize your own mother from this distance. You might be tempted to stare at your feet, even though that's not how you normally walk. But remember, the beam is 12 inches wide. You have the skills to do this all day long. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say you would love to have something to hang on to while up there, or, better yet, that you would like to be roped in. Or, if you're like me, you might say to hell, or that never go in there.

00:39:33.739 --> 00:40:09.478
The pressure gap is the difference between the combination of your skills and mental tools to handle a situation and the pressure created by that situation, you can close the gap by either reducing the pressure or building your mental tools, which will raise your pressure threshold. Once I understood this concept, all of Bruce's micromanaging started making sense. He was created. Getting micro moments for me to choose a new way with my usual Hurry up itis My goal was to get what he was doing by noon the first day.

00:40:05.998 --> 00:41:12.719
Huh? In my dreams, it would take a lot longer, a whole lot longer, if I were to have the courage to return. We can never go back there again. Jen's turn with the horses happened after lunch, after coiling the Lariat, which felt like a lifetime, the three of us went to a local restaurant in a different setting, this big, imposing man was nothing like the guy who had micromanaged my every move that morning. I was still trying to put my finger on his methods, and I peppered him with questions during lunch, what I was starting to learn was unexpected. He was not certified in some course or method with working with horses. He had learned what he was teaching the hard way, the really, really hard way of trial and error. No wonder the exercises I was looking for were nowhere to be found. He spoke sentences like, I'm here to help the horse to help himself survive in the world we have created, and I'm teaching you to live in the world you were made for instead of the world we have made. And it's not the horse, it's the pressure created by the horse.

00:41:13.139 --> 00:43:21.018
And forget the goal. Break it down, frame by frame. And my least favorite of all, I don't want the horse to do the picture. He had other confusing terminology, like alpha and tyrant. These did not mean what the dictionary said, and he spelled them with the capital of letters at the beginning and end. He used these words to describe a mindset. Instead, alpha meant that you were letting the horse or situation tell you what to do, when to do and how to do. Tyrant meant the past was interfering, causing us to over or under react. The idea of over and under reacting piqued my attention because it resonated with the change tight rope, a mental construct I had been using for years. The visual of a tightrope started for me in the context of leading change and dealing with the balancing acts of leadership, for example, in dealing with resistance to change, the typical leadership strategies fell into two buckets. The first was to be too easy on people which forced the leader to personally take on too much as deadlines slipped. The second was to be too hard on people, which drove resistance underground, letting the leader have the illusion all was okay, but causing conflict and chaos in the people who were upset and didn't want to change. Both sides of this equation slowed change down. Walking the tightrope meant allowing people to have their normal reactions to change, while at the same time requiring them to do good work. As our lunch wrapped up, we headed back to his farm, my head spinning. I had both loved and hated my experience from the morning Bruce's methods for leadership training seemed to have some promise, but I wasn't sure what it was, yet it did feel like I had released something in the round pen session that had nothing to do with horses. It went without saying, at least as far as I was concerned, that Jen would get a chance to play with the horses after we finished eating, in my mind, she was excitedly looking forward to it. Even though I had been her mother for 36 years, you would never have known him.

00:43:17.579 --> 00:43:54.818
Boy, did I misread the situation when Bruce handed Jen the halter and lead rope, the scene played out very differently. He gave her the same instructions he had given me, but everything was different. Jen had no experience with horses with halters or lead ropes, and the halter wasn't talking to her any more than it had talked to me. She slowly walked out into the field and greeted one horse, and then the other animals love her, and the horses were very happy to have her hang out with them. When it was time to put the halter on, all she saw was a tangled mess.

00:43:50.318 --> 00:44:09.418
After one attempt with putting the halter on, her solution to deal with the pressure was to throw the rope down and walk away. At that moment, we all saw a very different Bruce. All this happening while I was still thinking she was having fun.

00:44:05.219 --> 00:44:13.199
Instead of the micro managing questioner, she got support.

00:44:09.418 --> 00:44:35.239
Instead of telling her to listen to the rope, he showed her how to fit the horse's head. Instead of asking her why she tied it this way and not that way, he helped her make the special knot, step by step, frame by frame, he showed deep support and kindness with both Jen and the horse. Slowly but surely, she and Bruce solved problems together, eventually bringing the horse to the round pen.

00:44:36.139 --> 00:44:46.059
Later, I would come to learn that Bruce could see that Jen was well over her pressure threshold. He was letting her tell him what to do, when to do and how to do. Ie being Alpha.

00:44:47.259 --> 00:45:23.059
Rather than adding pressure by asking her tons of questions, he reduced the pressure by offering support. In other words, he avoided pushing her buttons where he had pushed every button I had to get a reaction out of me even later, I. Would come to learn the benefit of having someone push my buttons. On this day, I was thrilled and sure that Jen was loving the experience. One of these days, I will remember that she can hide what she's feeling better than anyone I've ever known while they worked. I planned my experience with the Lariat had made me realize the potential depth of this work. Now I had to figure out how to make it work for the leadership team.

00:45:23.898 --> 00:45:26.599
Clearly, it would be different than what I had anticipated.

00:45:27.559 --> 00:45:42.219
Eventually, Jennifer's session was over, and it was time for us to go. We had a three hour drive home in which to debrief, and I was picturing a rich conversation about possibilities as we roll down the highway. As we left, Bruce had one request.

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He wanted to speak with me the next morning to review the session. It seemed really important to him. I promised to be available and got in the car before I could get the seat belt on, Jen looked at me and said, We can never come here again, and there is no way you should bring the leadership team here. It was going to be a long drive home.

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Thank you for listening to the creative spirits unleash podcast. I started this podcast because I was having these great conversations, and I wanted to share them with others. I'm always learning in these conversations, and I wanted to share that kind of learning with you. Now what I need to hear from you is what you want more of and what you want less of I really want these podcasts to be of value for the listeners.

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Also, if you happen to know someone who you think might love them, please share the podcast and, of course, subscribe and rate it on the different apps that you're using, because that's how others will find it.

00:46:36.800 --> 00:46:40.039
Now, I hope you go and do something very fun today. You.

#84 Dancing the Tightrope: Chapter 3; Invisible Tools

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