Blog | Page 6 | Ali Levin

It’s that time of year again where many of us engage in some reflection, and we coaches have many exercises to choose from in helping us think about who we are and who we want to become. One I’ve been thinking about this week is reframing your story. Because as the novelist John Barth said, “the story of your life is not your life, it’s your story.”

In this exercise we think of a challenge or a challenging period in our lives that we survived. We consider what skills we relied upon and how they served us. We then think about how we are using those skills now – it’s a post-traumatic growth practice. And it can help us to reframe and reclaim our own narrative.

This year, I want to share my story with you in the hopes that it may resonate or help you in some way.

When I was very young, I felt the light inside me. In my memory (or my imagination though I’ve come to see those as having more in common than I once believed), the world was indeed light. And I experienced my own light as a source of personal joy and warmth.

My understanding of the world changed quickly when I was five, as so many children of divorce or people who have experienced trauma may also know. What really changed was my relationship to my light (though I couldn’t have named it back then). The light was still inside me and I still used it for warmth, but as a survival skill.

In dark moments, I noticed that when I shined my light on other people, they seemed somehow better. They smiled more in response to my smile, they laughed more in response to my laugh, and it seemed like they felt better. And that made me feel better.

I suppose this happened first in my immediate family. Some of them described me as being the one who brought the fun or the party, the one who delighted and entertained, or the one who always lit up the room. Like many things about which we are unconscious, it wasn’t a deliberate act to shine my light on other people. It’s just what I learned to do so that things didn’t seem so dark. One day though, one of my sisters told me, “It is so warm in your light, Ali, but when you turn your light away, it gets really cold.”

I didn’t understand what she meant back then, but I do now. I could only shine my light on one person at a time, and only for as long as it was making someone else feel good, which in turn made me feel better and like I knew who I was. I experienced relationships like this: if I shine my light on you, then you will show me the best part of you – something I will call your light. And somewhere in that overlap of my light and yours, I will find myself.

When the combination of the light stopped making me feel good or believing I was still on a path to get any closer to my true self, or when it went dark, I left. Turning my light elsewhere.

I hurt a lot of people this way.

My deepest friendships were affected by this and so were many, many unsuccessful relationships.

Of course, no relationship can survive if that is the foundation. The whole them needing my light and me needing their light to find myself only got me further away from knowing who I was. The real me sat minimized in the shadows.

In my late 40s, my marriage ended. In the beginning, our relationship took its usual course. I shined my light on him and in its warmth, he shined. And that made me feel better.

But after a while, I needed to shine my light elsewhere. On friends. On work colleagues and clients. On my child. On my dying father. And each time, I saw another version of myself in the colliding light and I had to ask myself, who am I? Who am I other than the person who shines light on others?

When my marriage ended, I left a grey British sky for the beaches of Southern California. Land of light. Because I already had one of the best coaches ever, I hired a therapist for my head and my body, a meditation teacher, and an energy healer. I taught my Brittany Spaniel who was a trained bird dog to sit on a paddle board while we soaked in the light in Newport Beach. I bathed in light for four years.

My teachers and healers showed me how to bring the light back inside of me, how to practice a loving-kindness meditation, and how to use my own light to heal me. I learned to find joy and warmth once again in my own light. And I learned to love and connect with my family and friends in genuine care, profound respect and unbridled laughter, with or without me doing my old job of shining the light.

Light brings me joy and keeps me warm. I can shine it all around all the time and I don’t lose myself. And I don’t do it because of how it makes others feel. I know my light helps others in their own journeys, and I have gratitude for that, but it is not why I shine light.

I learned that I don’t need to be the light because I am light.

How do you take something you used as a survival skill to create a more empowered you?

As companies around the globe make the difficult decision to lay off a percentage of their workforce, they are faced with another challenge: how to help the remaining employees feel safe in their jobs. The problem becomes even more acute when senior leaders find themselves with less time to spend with their employees as they hustle to fill the gaps created by layoffs, revise strategy, protect their existing customer base, and double down on their solid revenue streams.

Employees who have survived the last round of layoffs are expending too much of their energy wondering if they are next, and when people are in survival mode, they underperform.

When your employees are in survival mode because they’ve seen their friends and colleagues disappear, the following is happening:

They secrete cortisol, a contagious stress-based hormone that diminishes their thinking and performance.
They have an incoherent heart rate variability which reduces energy levels, induces more stress and anxiety, and has a profound influence on their ability to think clearly.
They experience disrupted sleep, which diminishes their capacity to focus and work intelligently; and
They engage in behaviors they think will make them feel better, but which minimize motivation, optimism and focus.

Over the years, during times of stress, my clients often ask for two workshops – one designed for all employees and one designed for those who are charged with leading and managing through the stress.

Resilience workshops provide employees with easily accessible tools to help them quickly reset when stress takes over. For some people, hacks that help them feel their way into a new way of thinking work best. For others, thinking their way into a new way of feeling is more effective. There are evidence-based tools that can be learned and practiced through virtual trainings and can breathe life into your beleaguered workforce.

Here are three things that happen at the end of these trainings:

Employees express gratitude to the organization for making the investment in them and providing them with easily accessible tools that work.
Because these workshops have breakout sessions, employees have a safe place to connect with others and share the fears they are experiencing. The realization that they are not alone creates a sense of cohesion and community that companies desperately need to foster during times of stress.
Employees commit to experiment with resilience practices and find a support accountability partner to keep them working positively.

The second workshop is for leaders and managers and is focused primarily on how to communicate with teams in a way that is motivating and inspiring during times of stress. They practice crafting messages that will resonate with their employees and find a way to personally reconnect with the organization’s vision, mission, and values.

Executives tell me that constructing a resonant narrative about where the company is and how it will get through this time reinvigorates them as well. These sessions start with an envisioned future, also known as a positive emotional attractor. Like my high school track coach used to say, if in your mind you can conceive it and, in your heart, you do believe it, your body will achieve it. If you can’t see it, you’ve little hope of leading anyone else in that direction.

In the envisioned future employees are engaged, connected, and aligned. Here it is critical that leaders can detail what that would look like. Describe how these employees are acting, what they are doing, and the behaviors you are witnessing. As if I were watching a movie, what am I seeing?

Behind every action is a thought and a feeling. Leaders are challenged to think about why they do the things they do. (Hint: it is usually because they have an emotional attractor – excitement for the challenge, joy for the potential success and knowledge or information that leads them to believe they will be successful). The practice of leadership requires the leader to understand how their teams need to feel and what they need to do to act in the manner most likely to lead to success. And how does that fit with how they feel now and what they know?

Simply put, what would they need to know (data, evidence, information) and how would they need to feel (excited, perhaps, or maybe even angry) to behave the way you want them to. Of course, the desired emotional state is entirely dependent upon what is happening in the organization and the macroenvironment. A narrative must be designed to move them from their current state to their desired state and ultimately to action and results. [GH1]

Here are three things that happen at the end of these trainings:

Leaders co-create a positive compelling vision of the future, which is the antidote to survival anxiety, even for them.
They learn the power of story and the critical nature of constructing a narrative that people buy into, which is one of the primary jobs of any leader.
In working together in this way, they learn even more about themselves and each other, and giving feedback on their work builds the team’s trust and therefore the psychological safety of the team.

Although many companies think that during lean times they should reduce their investment of time and money in anything that is not product, sales or marketing related, that is exactly the wrong approach. As always, your employees are your most valuable resource. They need your support now more than ever.

Reframing Your Story

How to Support Remaining Employees After a Layoff