I’ve been living with sudden-onset hyperacusis for 1,979 days, and it isn’t just the panic attacks, sensory migraines, and agoraphobia that developed my mental fortitude.

It’s when things started to get better that new mental battles began.

Imagine this: you’ve been in a car wreck. You survived by the grace of God and your seatbelt. Three surgeons contributed their combined decades of training, and a staff of dozens monitors your lines and incision sites. Friends take over the running of your household and colleagues handle your projects and appointments.

No one expects you to handle your work. They want you to keep breathing. They want your pain to recede. They want you to survive.

That’s what life felt like at the onset of Hyperacusis. At the beginning of any trauma, surviving really is the work that needs doing. Holding the pain and fear and uncertainly loosely is a full time job. Doing the work to be just a little resilient in the moment, to endure what is with hope and openness to other good things in the midst of suffering is real work.

But there’s a clarity and absoluteness in moments of crisis. It makes it easier to devote our resources to meeting the moment. Because, the moment of crisis is a challenge. And humans have challenge-response baked into our programming. Some of us seem better at challenge-response than others. But all of us have a separate gear for the moment of crisis.

It’s after you leave the hospital, and begin to shower and stand without help that the distance between crisis and normal life starts to show.

Your first day (maybe week) back at work, people are easy on you.

But how long does it take for your back to stop cramping if you sit in the desk chair for too long? Probably longer than it took the stitches in your face to come out.

And what if your beard can cover the new scar, and sleeves hide the surgical repair of your elbow. It’s nice to not feel like you look like a car accident victim. But the first buddy who forgets you’re recovering, and grabs you by your newly-constructed elbow to drag you into a bear hug…you wonder if it wasn’t safer to show your sutures.

The next day you shave and choose short sleeves.

Let the visual cue of healing skin remind people you’re not all the way better yet.

Maybe you don’t even mean to, but you stop trying so hard to quit limping. Limping reminds people you have a reason for walking slowly or taking the elevator.

I chose a car accident because it’s a classic example of fast trauma. Something happened, out of the blue: status change.

Getting better from fast (or what medical professionals call “acute”) trauma isn’t easy or necessarily complete.

But it’s even murkier for slow traumas like cancer, disorders like my hyperacusis or chronic illnesses that don’t “heal” the way we can often heal a fracture or a wound.

In my own life, the clarity of incapacity was a gift of sorts. I learned how to say “I can’t” and have it be a good thing. It was me figuring out how to be more present to the moment, and not ignore the need to be safe and cared for without pushing myself to perform.

The “I can’t come do that” felt easier to say when I had the clarity provided by a migraine. I was still the car accident victim, hooked up to an IV. But what happens when the migraine is over? if my ears still struggle to process life at normal decibels, I may be better…but it’s not the kind better that means “fixed.”

Even two years ago, attending a social event would have resulted in pain and panic attack symptoms; my ears simply could not have tolerated the inevitable barrage of multiple excited voices.

Two years ago I was still on crutches.

But what about today?

Now the clatter of my nephew’s toy truck doesn’t feel like a gunshot aimed at my head. I’m better. But even with the reprieve from the worst of my symptoms, “what I can do” feels messy, confusing.

A friend of mine has chronic neurological issues that are not terminal (in that she can generally hope to live a long time with them). Yet they are degenerative and, for most intents and purposes, permanent. She has good days and great days, hard days and harrowing days. But like any chronic illness, the tough days are sometimes easier to approach. My friend has learned how to support and care for herself when a flareup starts. She’s had to learn.

But when she’s having a good day and spending time with friends, she’s often invited to do things she can’t safely do…by friends who are confused when the answer to “why not?” is the illness they thought “had gotten better.”

I’m not sure how you feel, but when a friend hopes for me to be better, I know they’re wishing me joy, freedom from pain, and the restoration of my ability to do all the things I love and care about. They truly celebrate with me for every little improvement. That’s love right there. So it feels like I’m letting them down each time they get excited about my good reports, only to crash into my ongoing limitations.

I myself have been tempted not to involve people on my good days for fear of raising impractical expectations for the future.

I think it’s because there’s a binary bent to our classification of other people’s experiences. We try toggle their status between “are they okay or are they not okay?”

But life defies this binary quick-sort. We spend most of our lives, not just traveling between good and bad states but somehow braiding them together. Finding depth during pain and noticing dissatisfaction in moments of triumph.

This is not my way of saying “look for the good-coming-from-bad.” There’s something demoralizing about the expectation that success means jumping from hurt to happy, lost to content, from unable to able. In a Nike ad, those stories can sound inspiring, But for real life that story is treacherous.

We want our friends to be okay, to be happy and well on their life’s adventure.

If we pray for them, we can hold our breath waiting for our prayer to be “answered” which means a “fix” for the problem our friend has. If we help them, we can invest all of our optimism and tenacious service to trying to help drag our friend across the wasteland of suffering into wholeness, wearing ourselves out because we treated a long-term challenge like an acute crisis.

I think it would help if we could try to engage two beliefs in interacting with others:

1. Everyone is hurting.

2. Everyone has strength.

We shouldn’t be surprised that when people are getting stronger, growing, and engaging life, both pleasure and pressure are present.

People are both able and not able at the same time.

Let’s stop defining “doing well” as an absence of limitations.

Let’s donate our attention to the inches of progress, moments of joy, and daily discoveries that make life meaningful.

Over time, I’ve learned to stop cringing at my own pain. To allow it to be in my body without assuming the pain must leave before I can have a beautiful, powerful, interesting day. It’s the same with the feelings of anxiety or nervous over-stimulation so intertwined with my sensory condition.

I’ve learned how to say “it’s a good day” without feeling like I’m dishonoring how brave I am to navigate the day’s serving of sensory overload. And I’m learning how to be honest about my pains and needs without feeling trapped in the avatar of a victim.

I’ll admit, some days I still limp. I find ways to make my sensory scars visible to try to cue people who care to be gentle with me. But I’m also trying to have more conversations that braid my joy and pain together to show one didn’t have to defeat the other.

The result is intimate friendships where I feel more seen, more loved, more whole. And I think it gives people who love me more ways to be excited for me in my joy without holding their breath, hating the pain until it’s “over.”

If we think this way, we start inviting each other to participate in life together without expecting we always know what that will look like. We are more compassionate in trying to think about how we can lower barriers to being better — both for ourselves and for others. Because at the end of the day, the point of being better is being able to bring yourself to the meaningful mix of challenges and delights of daily life. The power to try, the freedom to change, and the grace to start again in this moment to invest whatever resources we have into the present.

Maybe you’re reading this, and you haven’t wrapped the words around how insecure it feels to share progress in your mental health or medical journey. Maybe it’s helpful to acknowledge how vulnerable it feels to connect with others on good days.

It does take us out-on-a-limb when we say “maybe I can do it” instead of digging a shallow grave at the center of our comfort zone.

So in case it helps to hear it today, moving from “I can’t” to “maybe I can” is a vulnerable process. It (by necessity) increases your focus on yourself, how you feel, and what could go wrong. That heightened attention to your pain or uncertainty is naturally going to increase your awareness of that pain or uncertainty.

But on the road to wholeness, those vulnerable feelings are part of your primary challenge. The uncertainty itself is part of what we learn to navigate when we live well with chronic challenges, or work to heal slow trauma.

When I get ready to substitute teach at my local Tai Chi studio in a small, in-person class I acknowledge that it isn’t just the lesson plan that needs preparation. I prepare myself also to succeed in the challenge of handling the uncertainty. I gather resources to show up to the pain my body may feel, just like I gather resources to show up to the need for knowledge my students may have. I also allow space after the challenge to notice the wins and collect myself.

I don’t dismiss it as “no big deal” or compare myself to others (or more dangerously, to myself in a different season of life.) I have some humility toward my own humanity, and take pride in showing up for the moment in the ways I can.

I’m better. It’s harder.

Go me.

This is a research snack from the book Positivity by Barbara L. Fredrickson, which we’re going to be reading in the Read Wild Book Club, coming January 2026. But this time of year we hear a lot about gratitude and giving thanks. As the holiday season cranks up, let’s be mindful of a type of gratitude that can backfire.

If you’ve been around Wild + Brave for a while, or you love positive psychology research like we do, you probably know gratitude is like a superfood for you soul. Mind, body, spirit, when you experience gratitude, it has all kinds of good impacts on you.

But gratitude has a sort of evil twin.

In psychology, there’s a concept called “benefit finding,” which entails verbalizing or acknowledging positive aspects of undesirable or challenging circumstances. For example, if you just totaled your car you could use benefit finding to remind yourself “at least my air bag and seat belt functioned well and I’m still healthy.” Or if you lost an important client, you might benefit-find by saying “now I’ll have more time to focus on my creative projects.”

The most common (and troublesome) benefit finding statement I hear is “other people have it much worse than I do.”

On some level, choosing to identify good things in a bad situation is a skill, and like all skills, when we need it most we often are bad at it. It takes practice to lift our focus off of what is wrong to find what is right. In that way, going through the motions to identify some “benefits” or positive implications of a bad situation is just part of the process.

But something horrible happens when we confuse the mechanical process of benefit finding with gratitude.

Most of us have verbalized a positive statement that we didn’t feel. Technically, just saying the words means we’ve succeeded at the psychological technique of benefit finding. But something happens in our bodies when we say things that don’t feel true.

In Positivity, the author references a study that shows our heart valves react to certain emotions — specifically anger and insincere gratitude — collapsing in response to micro moments of those specific emotions.

In other words, insincere gratitude impacts our hearts in the same way rage does.

Pretty shocking since sincere gratitude has a heart-healthy impact on your nervous system and overall health. In Positivity the author links the insincere gratitude reaction with the concept of benefit finding and I find this helpful. On it’s own, “insincere gratitude” sounds like a moral failing.

As in she said “thank you,” but she didn’t really mean it.

But Frederickson goes further, noting that the difference between a life-giving and life-sapping expression of positive factors in your life is whether you actually feel their positive impact.

I can acknowledge or admit I have many blessings…but if I allow myself to spew a litany of benefits, without feeling connected to the good, feeling joy in the good things, voicing them makes me feel even more alienated from the good in my life.

So today at Wild + Brave, we already know you’re bypassing performative gratitude. You’re not making a show of it. But chances are good there are some things in your life you tell yourself you should be grateful for. This year, instead of forcing yourself to say those good things, take a pause.

Identify a good thing, a potentially gratitude-worthy thing, and before you verbalize it, try to notice and savor the good. Think into it, to let yourself visualize the implications, the value, the loveliness of the good. Warm the benefit up like a rock in your palm. Let your busy brain slow down, your heart open to experience the good. And once you feel it, then you can say it.

PS: If feeling the positive emotion of gratitude is difficult for you, you’re not alone. There are a lot of factors that can block our access to these emotions. Bring your awareness to what you feel, and what feels blocked. Try to give yourself permission to sit with it, without judgment, and stay curious as you untangle and reconnect to your emotional responses.

When I talk with friends who are mental healthcare professionals, we sometimes talk about the difference between “little t trauma” and “big T Trauma.” There’s a sense that the pains and losses, the shocks and shifts of life are not all equal. That certain types of strain yield different classes of repercussions.

Is the trauma/Trauma line drawn based on whether we can navigate it with self-growth and self-help (trauma), or if outside support or professional help is necessary (Trauma)? Or is it the specific type of negative fallout that determines how traumatized we are?

But lately, my friends and I feel drawn to make a different classification. It’s less about the scale or category of traumatic experience and more about duration and recurrence. Some t/Traumas crack our lives open like an ax, or knock down our high places like an earthquake, taking days or weeks for the rubble to settle. But once they happen, they’re over. Quickly or slowly, the bad thing has happened, and we begin the process of suturing wounds, scraping up debris, and trying to come to terms with a new reality.

But what happens when the bad thing is isn’t over? What if the threads of trauma are woven into the fabric of our lives, chronic or unremitting? Ongoing exposure to the unsolvable, seemingly irreconcilable fractures in relationships, community divides that bring our culture cauldrons to a simmer. The slow trauma of building a life surrounded by things we cannot control or successfully avoid seems a different animal.

I’ve noticed this in my life as life-changing weather seems to be changing classes. Born and raised on the Gulf Coast of Florida, Hurricanes have always been a fact of life. Large scale impact and recovery events from my childhood and teens were epoch-defining.

When I hear the names Andrew, Charlie, Irma, Michael, Ian, or Milton, I don’t see faces. I see walls of wet trash lining the road…the guts of people’s homes vomited streetside to wait weeks for removal following landfall of major hurricanes near me. The first three decades of my life saw only two of these storms. Andrew as a child, and Charlie as a teenager. Since Irma in 2017, the frequency of intense storms has escalated.

I think most of us see Hurricane Ian (September ‘22) as shattering our previous paradigm of storm response.

An occasional natural disaster was a sort of planetary tax we pay for living with palm trees, sheltered from snow. “Hurricane Season” was a phase of the calendar, but we didn’t prepare for it like an average winter.

Now, it feels like I have a “disaster season” baked into the annual plan. It’s influencing my professional calendar (better only take writing gigs and teaching projects that I can do while evacuating during Mid April to Mid October). Instead of seeing hurricanes as a t/Trauma based on the level of impact and devastation. It’s no longer just the landfall that is destructive.

The danger seems to live in that thread of anxiety that never quite stops. The way we think about the things we can’t control can suck us into the tide of slow trauma even when things around us are going well.

Take that last sentence for example. Even using the words “can’t control” instead of “don’t control” almost implies to me that I can’t (but I should). Don’t control by contrast feels a bit more factual.

I can say to myself “I don’t control the weather,” and it’s calming somehow. It shifts my brain to move away from the weather and toward what I “do control.”

This probably won’t be the last post exploring our relationship with slow trauma. But I want to stop here with a tiny Wild + Brave hypothesis.

What if changing “can’t” to “don’t” could have a positive influence on our sense of agency and calm?

Let’s add to the toolbox, one of positive psychology’s favorite words: yet.

Instead of…

…I can’t make my supervisor happy.

…I don’t know what my supervisor is looking for from me. …I’m not sure how I will address this, YET.

YET is the antidote to two emotionally frazzling words: NEVER and ALWAYS.

When we say things like “I never get a thank you” or “things always go this way” we’re drowning our mental resources for optimism, curiosity, and positive change. Even when we describe the behavior of others, or the patterns in an organization, using the words “never” or “always” makes us mentally inflexible toward noticing (and therefore profiting from) the moments where things could change.

The major struggle with enduring chronic uncertainty or prolonged stress is finding ways to put it down for a moment, to restore our resources or gather new possibilities.

DON’T and YET are tools of productive pause.

They frame the situation with a form of temporary closure, while being honest but not resigned about the present.

If you’re processing the latest shock from the news, or dealing for the umpteenth time with the same old conflict at work, take a moment to notice the words you’re using.

Use the words DON’T and YET to come back to where your feet are. To lift your head and re-settle yourself. When you talk to your friends about what’s going on in your life, notice where you’re using the word “can’t” or “never” or “always” and experiment with don’t and yet instead.

Even saying the words “I don’t like how it feels when ___ happens” is a statement that can put you back in your boots, and build your confidence to change direction.

If life is feeling dark, or the threads of slow trauma feel tangled all around you, look for your DON’T and YET phrase…

I don’t know what to do…yet.

We don’t have a pleasant communication dynamic…yet.

I don’t know how to talk to people about differences in our political perspectives…yet.

Sure, using phrases like these doesn’t “fix” the problems we face. But the words we use to think about our feelings, our experience, and our world are the building blocks of our responses. How we talk to ourselves about what we’re experiencing can deplete our resources before we even have the chance to take action.

Our words are only a piece of the puzzle…but some words are like corner pieces. They create a framework to put the other pieces together with more clarity and confidence.

Whether you’re feeling freshly traumatized by the latest incident of political violence, or frayed by the chronic challenge in your relationship or health, it can help to notice what kind of trauma you’re feeling.

If it were a single traumatic experience, pushing past the incident to start cleanup and repair can make sense. But if we’re dealing with slow trauma, we need more than blast of bravery and willpower to get through it at a run. We need to find ways to care for ourselves and connect with others as we explore how we can keep thriving in the midst of the problems we don’t know how to respond to…yet.

I didn’t explain I bought it for research.

I didn’t assure her I’m not that kind of person.

It took more guts to hold those words in than it did to walk to the counter with a book I disliked.

But why buy a book I disagree with? Maybe it would make more sense to try to withhold “support” from the ideas by boycotting. And shouldn’t I think about protecting myself from being exposed to ideas I estimate will be untrue?

I am More than My Money

To be sure, I don’t read every book I think is disturbing. And I think where you spend your money matters. But something happens when we allow our identity to be shaped into that of a consumer. If my power is in my wallet, I try to control and censure the behaviors of others by throwing my financial weight around. This mindset of money-equals-power leads to problems in general. There’s this sense of condescension and superiority that creeps into my soul when I begin to pride myself on withholding funds, withholding approval.

If I can use money to help me understand something better, to escape the ignorance of surface knowledge, to find answers, that’s money well spent. It takes humility to step off the pedestal of self-identified influencer instead care more about the ideas.

But even if money isn’t the issue, shouldn’t I be protecting myself from ideas I already belive are false?

Mental Avoidance is a Hard Habit to Break

There’s a difference between focusing yourself on something compelling…and avoiding thinking about something disturbing. One of the best Mental Growth Tactics we can develop is directing our attention, evoking it in directions that support well-being, curiosity, and joy. That’s focusing on something compelling, and we should do that.

But when something unpleasant develops in our world, failing to focus on it effectively leaves us vulnerable to unanticipated consequences. Simply not wanting something to be true, to exist, or for anyone to ever behave / think / feel that way doesn’t change things.

When we remove ourselves from unpleasant or undesirable circumstances, we can go so far as to fall into what Malcolm Gladwell calls a monoculture (or what my friends call “living in a bubble”). Isolated, we become even less well-equipped to address, prevent, or repair the damage that an undesirable idea does to our world.

Understanding is Stabilizing

Some of us feel traumatized, not just by what we see happening, but by the sense that “other people” are going along with the thing we find disturbing. This happens every election cycle when we learn that a friend or colleague we admire voted for someone we don’t respect. When a fellow parent makes a choice for their child we cannot fathom. On some level, the inability to imagine how that person could have made the choice makes us feel not just at odds with the other person, but also somehow unsafe.

Something shifts when we gain insight into what might be driving that person’s choice. Understanding is stabilizing.

This shift usually happens when we hear a story. A behavior we would have said “I can’t imagine how anyone could ____” takes on new meaning when we hear a story about someone who was in that circumstance. And it’s in the details.

Often, when we hear more of the story, we still don’t agree with the person’s choice. But if we start to understand where they’re coming from, the ground re-forms under our feet. We see how that person might have gotten there.

We might feel compassion for what’s driving them, or the drive to help change their circumstances so they might make different choices. We might see a tangle in their logic, gaps in their facts. We might be motivated to change their minds, but the threads of understanding weave us back into community with this person.

We become less vulnerable. More engaged. More ready to help.

Of course, if we’re doing it right, listening deeply to ideas we disagree with will sometimes change our own opinions. Or our simplistic stances will gain some nuance.

High Quality Bad Ideas

If I’m going to disagree with something, it does me no favors to pick apart a cartoon version of the idea. As soon as I hear myself thinking “I can’t imagine how anyone could think _____” I know I have some work to do. That means when I make my argument against that position, the version of that position in my mind is paper-thin.

But I give myself zero points for shredding a thin facsimile of the idea.

By trying to understand where people might be coming from—to see what parts of their motives, goals, or values we share—allows me to partially validate and agree where I can, forming a better basis for genuine disagreement.

Who is helped by safely skewering a caricature of the ideas we don’t like, secluded in the bubble of a community that agrees with us? Nothing changes. My disagreement is useless to me and others.

But if I seek first to understand, to find threads of shared meaning, there’s hope for growing further together, finding sustainable compromise, and making the world safer for us even when we disagree.

What Ideas are Worth Sitting With

Most of the time, we spend our attention chasing after awesome, meaningful, fascinating ideas. But when it comes time to dance with the ideas we disagree with, here are some of the things that make the effort worth it:

1. People I love disagree with me

2. If I’m wrong, the cost could be huge

3. I feel powerless to challenge the idea

4. People I love are impacted / vulnerable to the idea

You’ll know you’re reading wild when…

1. You start to see elements of others’ ideas that you can acknowledge the value of.

2. You are willing and unbegrudging to acknowledge areas of agreement with ideas (or people) you disagree with.

3. You notice where you’re feeling resistance or dislike for an idea and inquire what it is driving the dislike, where the disagreement is coming from.

If you’re friends with me on GoodReads, you may see books pop up on my “Read” list that you don’t agree with…and maybe I don’t either. I’ll even share some wild ideas here on Read Wild from books I don’t particularly endorse. I’ll do that because the truly essential thing is that we keep thinking, talking, and exploring ideas. Especially the ones that scare or horrify us.

We need to think about what our beliefs mean, chart the consequences of our actions, and do the hard work of holding our ideas accountable.

We can’t do that from soundbites, or by passing radioactive stories around like a game of hot potato, served up by the divisively designed media algorithms that regulate our environment.

So if you feel perplexed by an idea out there, or baffled by the behavior of others, don’t immediately assume that other person must just be an unintelligent, immoral, or different-than-you person. Get curious and find a way to explore what’s inside that person’s perspective. Find a safe and honest way to investigate the highest quality version, the most nuanced and intelligent expression of the idea, and have a brave conversation with that idea.

Let’s not fracture into embattled communities where we don’t even know how to talk to each other. The isolation and feeling of threat keeps us from thinking wild and living brave together.

Keep Exploring:

If you found this intriguing, you might like to read Think Again: the Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant to develop your learning and critical thinking skills. Or check out Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection by Charles Duhigg—especially the part where he talks about having “Learning Conversations” and using questions to help people share and explore their honest values with you.

Let’s keep thinking together.

~Morgan

At the mercy of unreasonable human beings, we reach out for something — anything that feels like a weapon in the war of words. We try to find some leg to stand on that won’t be kicked out from under us, some argument that will penetrate the dastardly defenses of our unreasonable assailant.

People sometimes hire me as a coach to sharpen their words, to find defenses and plan an offensive attack for those causing them harm. To resource themselves for the grown-up gooeyness of life. Friendships that sour, romance that shatters, sweat that never gets appreciated at work. We may find ourselves making appeals to our landlords, requests to our suppliers, explanations to our bosses, demands of our school boards, and endless arguments with our children.

Whether you’re doing something as small as a retail return or as significant as seeking social justice, sometimes you need your words to WORK.

Using Negotiation to Persuade

When we need to make people listen, we grab for communication techniques. I’ve been re-reading some of the books on that topic that are favorites for many of us.

• Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High

• Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In

• Never Split the Difference: Negotiation as if Your Life Depended on It

My personal favorite is the toolbox of FBI-style negotiation techniques shared by Hostage Negotiator Chris Voss in Never Split the Difference. I like it best because it’s a system of thought that seems to produce these working words.

We think, “If this is how they get terrorists to give up hostages, maybe it’ll work with my boss.” This comparison between a hostage crisis and the way we feel in personal conflicts is not extreme. I would wager you have felt hostage to someone else at some point this month…maybe this morning.

Life is not in our control, and yet techniques like negotiation significantly enhance our skills for handling out-of-control situations, to the point where teachers often market negotiation as the way to “get control back.”

To have such a way with words that you can make even a terrorist help you out...if that isn’t power, then what is?

Most people who study advanced negotiation techniques quickly realize that negotiation isn’t a power technique bought with money and time.

Becoming a negotiator will cost you headspace and heartspace. It will repossess entire sections of your worldview. People effectively change the behavior of terrorists (as well as your more garden-variety unreasonable human) every day with negotiation. But when they do it, they are not wielding the kind of power most people who begin to study are seeking.

What you notice about any master negotiator you meet (and I mean the real negotiators, not the flashy, pushy, power-drunk celebrity manipulators) is their humility.

You might think that becoming capable of masterfully influencing people’s actions to garner participation and collaboration (even from unwilling parties) would go to someone’s head. That master negotiators would throw it around to get what they want. They’d become the spoiled brats of the professional world, or the megalomaniacs of the political sphere. But true negotiation breaks down manipulation; it cannibalizes pride and selfishness.

The very act of true negotiation eats away this arrogant isolation and knits you back into the human race.

The Negotiator’s Mindset

There is one element of negotiation that cannot be acquired for the sake of power, and it is the foundational operating system of negotiation. In the coaching industry, we call it “unconditional positive regard.” Put differently, it is choosing to value the human you are negotiating with, choosing to see them as a valuable and meaningful part of the world. You are not pretending to agree, or even to like the person. But you are choosing to value them as a collaborator. You are choosing to see them, to notice the way they’re showing up in the world, and even choosing to want them to get what they truly need.

Negotiation does an incredible job of separating us from our misguided wants, and identifying true needs. As a negotiator, you have lines you won’t cross, things you are unwilling to live without. But negotiation will leech the entitlement out of you. In the end, you will discover ways that move you forward, and also move the other party in the process.

Though you may never be able to want the other party to have what they want, as a negotiator, you begin to want them to have what they need.

Positive Psychology in Negotiation

I’m not sure the FBI uses this at Quantico, but the phrase that captures this perfectly to me comes from a lovingkindness meditation Dr. Barbara Frederickson taught me. It’s a prefix that positions your soul out of opposition with others and into harmony with their well-being.

Just as I wish to, may you…

In starting with the “just as I wish to” you stand next to the person you’re negotiating with. Whether it’s stepping off of my high horse to join the human race, or returning the status of “human” to the person I had started thinking of as a threat in my life, this phrase is a practice of positive regard.

To develop the ability to negotiate, you conclude your power trip, leave the pity party, close the carnival of righteous indignation and begin to do the hard work of living well with other humans.

True negotiation is nourishing to everyone involved. Parties are made safe, treated with dignity, listened to intently, and relentlessly challenged in the broken bits of thinking that are thwarting their attempt to have what they deeply need.

Respect is necessary for negotiation to work.

Respect includes things like gratitude, attempting to listen to what is actually being said rather than copy-and-pasting what you already think you know. It also involves challenging things you think may be untrue in a way that digs into the conversation rather than trying to end it with a powerful bang. In the end you may win the day only if you find ways to value the person you’re negotiating with...and for most of the people in our lives, that takes great humility.

Negotiation is how you can challenge a close friend about their selfish behavior without turning them into an enemy.

Negotiation is how you can address toxic culture at work without having to cancel some scapegoat.

Negotiation is how you can challenge injustice in the world...but you will only get there if you learn to see the human behind the prejudice, value the person behind the venomous words, and honor the parts of that person that you can.

When you’re negotiating for yourself, the process will expose all of your own prejudices, toxic judgments, selfishness, pride, insecurities, and flaws. But you won’t see them if you allow your counterpart to be a caricature.

If you ever do acquire the ability to move mountains with FBI-style negotiation, you will do a great deal of business with your own issues along the way. And you’ll find the capacity to value things in tiny little pieces, to appreciate the most minuscule progress, and to know that there is so much more to every situation than even your most insightful analysis can provide in a vacuum.

Dangerous Exceptions

But what about the not-good people? People who we cannot fathom a “good motive” or appreciate the chaos we see their lives creating? Violent, sadistic, cruel, narcissistic people — surely we don’t need to treat them with unconditional positive regard, right?

Doesn’t listening exacerbate narcissistic tendencies?

Won’t trying to help a natural manipulator make a fool out of you in the end?

The main problem I’ve found with drawing a line between “good people and bad people,” as well as good and bad intentions, is that it doesn’t just make a tidy pile of people we don’t have to negotiate with. This mindset of judging “worthiness” leaks into every relationship in our lives.

We can’t turn that “worthiness filter” off.

It means that when our partner lies, we start thinking of them as a liar...we decide we cannot listen to them...we usually then end up needing a new partner, who better not doggone lie to us like the last lying liar we were with.

When someone exhibits bullying behavior at work, they become a bully, someone we hate or can’t trust, or at the very least will never respect. They become off limits to our positive regard, undeserving of our best communication...which is unfortunate. Stakes are high in those unsafe relationships, and having our best communication skills would be ideal.

In the end, the magic happens because you start with the belief that every human has value and can become a collaborator. That even people whose behavior, beliefs, and attitudes are antithetical to you can indeed become valuable — even positive — forces in your life.

True, not everyone believes every human person is valuable, worth negotiating with. This isn’t a given. That’s why putting in the work to discover and develop The Negotiator’s Mindset bears massive dividends in how successful we are as negotiators. It’s usually a big shift.

Any worldview that supports the most effective style of negotiation on the planet requires believing that humans are meaningful beings with value at their core. But if my worldview sees our world as a chance expression of nature and chaos, my negotiation attempts can be on rocky ground. I’d be constantly undermined if I think this person I’m negotiating with is maybe just a bad seed...that natural selection hasn’t gotten to them yet, but by George, today is their day!

If there’s no essential value to reach toward inside of every human being, then negotiation would have wildly variable results.

But it doesn’t.

When executed with integrity, on a foundation of unconditional positive regard, with patience and humility, negotiation works incredibly well and with shocking consistency on all kinds of humans.

It turns out that there really is something inside that selfish friend, that lying partner, that bully of a boss (and yes even the terrorist trying to kill someone you love) that can advance the good in the world.

There’s something there.

The first, hardest job of a negotiator-in-training is coming to trust that. Not to prove it in the course of negotiation to “see if the person isn’t a lost cause.” Not with pie in the sky, not with pretend rapport. A police negotiator doesn’t pretend for a second that the team of thieves robbing a bank want to give back the money and pay for their crime with no harm to any hostage. But they learn to change their own mental dialogue. They are no longer talking to a thief...they are talking to a human being who is attempting to steal. As soon as they become a human being, you have a collaborator in the world.

In a royal address during the COVID 19 pandemic, I recall hearing Her Majesty the Queen of England use the phrase “fellow feeling.” She embodied this idea of seeing others around us as being “in this together.” Though it may seem antithetical to work to cultivate fellow feeling toward those we see as unreasonable, unethical, or unsafe; something strange happens when we dig under the offenses we see to affirm their essential human value.

When we do this, we find a peculiar power. Not the power we were seeking when we first began studying negotiation. But a curiously different power...the kind of power that immunizes you against the “oh no this is bad” or the “oh wow this is a horrible person.” You stop being so sure of what you think you see, and begin believing in the changes that happen between people when you have enough humility to become a powerful negotiator.

Strengthen Your Sight

So if you want to go forward and increase your negotiation power, to shift the dynamics in relationships where you feel vulnerable to evil, lost in the shuffle, invisible to the selfish, try to put on the Negotiation Mindset like a pair of glasses.

Look toward the person you feel most at odds with and search out their value and humanity.

If you’ve explored the Negotiation Toolbox with us at Wild + Brave, get out the Tactical Empathy techniques like:

Tactical Empathy Techniques

• What & How Questions (Explore your counterpart’s world with open-ended questions, and avoid asking “why” since it triggers defensiveness.)
  

• Tone of Voice Techniques (go for an open, positive, upward inflection more than harsh, closed, or downward inflection as much as possible.)
  

• Use Warm Silence (Listen in a way that invites vulnerable sharing, and don’t be in a hurry to correct or share your perspective.)
  

• Emotional Labels (Voice what it “seems like, sounds like, looks like, or feels like” the other person may be experiencing in an open, reasonable way. Allow them to validate or improve your understanding by correcting you as you listen in warm silence.
  

• Mother the Elephant (Take initiative to voice potentially negative realities in a way that makes it safe for everyone to acknowledge and engage them.

There are lots more tools in the Negotiation Toolbox. But just remember. The most important piece of all is the Negotiator’s Mindset. Even if you never master the emotional label, or forget “why” questions are rarely helpful, approaching any tough situation with a negotiator’s mind will make you wiser, more stable, and more safe inside yourself to see and draw the best out of the other person.

If you really aren’t the problem, then the solution lies not in yourself, but in others. You do need others to listen, change, and care. It isn’t easy, but there is a way to draw others toward us into collaboration. It’s a wild idea, but you’re brave enough to chew on it.

Words have power.

But we notice it too in the way words tell stories. The story we’re telling ourselves when we minimize our accomplishments, or restrain the hope bubbling up, we try to avoid disappointment by murdering our excitement. When we do that, there’s a story under there.

Last weekend I read Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder, by Salman Rushdie. We had a long, cozy Sunday on the couch. I was recovering from an extra exciting week, waiting out the sensory backlash that felt like a mix between a concussion and a migraine. So we tucked in with tea and tigernut cookies and just read.

I didn’t expect to get far, but 200 pages into this memoir, I had to acknowledge the power of a master storyteller like Rushdie. I drifted through the complex ideas, grappling with topics from near-death experiences, medical trauma, human rights disputes, and the process of radicalization through YouTube…carried in the hull of a story.

I didn’t “like” the book because the author shares my worldview. He doesn’t.

But I loved the journey he took my awareness on.

The thoughtful, multidimensional exploration of what happens when we close our mind to reflection, challenging our own thinking, and staying curious about the experiences of others was powerful.

Disagreeing is a Skill

If there was one wild idea I think we can chew on from this memoir, it’s this:

Beware of telling yourself a story that stops you from thinking.

It brings to mind that G. K. Chesterton quotation from Orthodoxy: “There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” Chesterton and Rushdie couldn’t have more different conclusions about the nature of the world or the existence of God. But they both agree that ideas we disagree with don’t hurt us. It’s the inability to engage disagreement, to learn and change our minds, or to deepen our understanding even if our position doesn’t change, that’s what hurts us.

Disagreement is a skill. The ability to think into your own position, and to explore other ideas without fear or defensiveness is central to a wild and brave life.

There’s a level of anxiety and fear in our social connections that I think comes from this fear of disagreement. The fear of being forced to live together, to collaborate, compromise, and build communities with people who think differently from us. That fear is funding all kinds of isolation and spawning what Malcolm Gladwell calls “monocultures.”

In a monoculture, you cultivate resonance and agreement by grouping yourself together with those who resemble you, ideologically and often in physical or socio-economic traits. This kind of intentional community brings a lot of benefits. But those benefits come with costs. Sometimes that cost is a heightened sensitivity to the presence of disagreement.

Skill Up for Disagreement

I’m trying to put this wild idea to work, to really embrace the belief that disagreement can be productive, and fear of disagreement stunts my well-being. Most of us don’t need to become more certain of our positions. (This is what we sometimes inadvertently do when we prepare for a disagreement. We spend all of our time thinking through our position, preparing to defeat the arguments from the other side.)

Getting better at constructive disagreement usually requires preparing ourselves to listen, making emotional room in our own psyche to be surprised or to learn something we don’t expect, and trying to find threads of resonance within the thinking of our counterparts.

This means when someone shares their conclusion — something we absolutely do not agree with — we prepare ourselves to ask questions to explore what led to their conclusions. What was the story behind the conclusion? Is their position on vaccines, gender policies, or legislation driven by their concern for their family’s safety? Is it grounded in their love of education? Is it reinforced by their experiences of grief, loss or hope?

It takes skill to listen past a conclusion to hear what drives it, but when we do we find threads of resonance that bring us back into community. The things that unite us are invisible when we can’t carry on complex conversations. When the cost of admission to the discussion is ideological agreement, we stop having the most necessary discussions.

Let’s keep talking.

Let’s keep listening.

Let’s challenge ourselves to become skilled at the kinds of conversations that bridge gaps and unravel the barbed wire dividing us from others. It takes bravery…but in some ways we can build this skill one tiny brave question at a time.

Favorite Quotes from Knife by Salman Rushdie

"Above all, we must understand that stories are at the heart of what's happening, and the dishonest narratives of oppressors have proved attractive to many. So we must work to overcome the false narratives of tyrants, populists, and fools by telling better stories than they do, stories within which people want to live. The battleground is not only on the battlefield. The stories we live in are contested territories too.”

— Salman Rushdie Knife

“We would not be who we are today without the calamities of our yesterdays.”

— Salman Rushdie Knife

"…I experienced both the worst and best of human nature, almost simultaneously. This is who we are as a species: We contain within ourselves both the possibility of murdering an old stranger for almost no reason—the capacity in Shakespeare's Iago which Coleridge called "motiveless Malignity"—and we also contain the antidote to that disease—courage, selflessness, the willingness to risk oneself to help that old stranger lying on the ground.”

— Salman Rushdie Knife

Keep Exploring

• To explore the idea of Monocultures — their benefits and challenges — check out Revenge of the Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s fantastic on audio, if you’re an audiobook reader too.

• To play with conversation tactics that explore the story behind the story, check out Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg, or catch his podcast episode where he guests on Sharon McMahon’s Here’s Where It Gets Interesting podcast.

I didn’t expect to be shocked, or to change my mind when I started in on the two hour, two minute long performance. But part of me hoped listening would help me feel more ready to make some changes.

Like most of my friends, clients, and colleagues, I notice a daily energy slump, as well as less-than-restful sleep pattern sometimes. I know being more active, hydrating, and eating nutritious food are part of helping me feel energized and rested.

But I also play caffeine roulette everyday. Maybe that’s part of the problem solution. 😊

I wouldn’t say I was motivated to change my coffee behaviors. Right now, one of my few out-in-the-world activities is going to a local bagel shop for hot hazelnut drip coffee. I take my own mug from home, and percolate my ideas in the bubble of happy chatter as other locals come for breakfast sandwiches with friends.

Who wouldn’t want the rituals of creativity, of connectivity. Looking back through my camera reel, I see a lot of happy mugs.

I realize now more than ever, my mugs have been drunk on joy, drugged — in a literal sense — by the substance I use to focus.

The cup in our hand brings us together. But what’s in our cup changes the connection we build. Pollan paints a fascinating picture of world history as the public meeting places shifted from pubs and taverns to tea and coffeehouses.

Think of the difference in the topic of your conversation when you’re sipping alcoholic beverages, compared to drinking caffeine.

What’s in our cup changes the connection we build.

Caffeine gives us what attention researchers call “Spotlight Attention.” If you’ve read Think Wild, this means drinking coffee boosts the energy in our brain’s “central executive.” This is the function our brain uses to stay on task, to narrow our focus, and satisfy our drive to accomplish things.

My central executive will mainline that coffee all day long to do-do-do.

But like overheating an engine, hyperfocusing without relief corrodes our thinking. Our brain wasn’t meant to lock onto a single train of thought forever.

The default mode of the human brain is one of open association, “mind wandering,” and allowing various information to filter through without hijacking us.

Major Takeaways:

1. CAFFEINE COMPETES WITH ADENOSINE. (So savor a small cup early, and let your body come down hours before bedtime.)
   
   The role adenosine plays in helping us feel ready to sleep at the end of the day is crucial to our energy balance. Our body produces adenosine to preapre us to rest and sleep deeply. Caffeine competes with adenosine for receptors in our brain, blocking us from feeling tired while caffeine is still attached. But the adenosine doesn’t disappear. Instead it can make us crash as caffeine leaves our system. This process is a vote for limiting caffeine, for example enjoying a small amount of some favorite beverage early in the day, allowing the backlog of adenosine to be minimal, and your body to metabolize the caffeine well before bedtime.
   
   SUCCESS TIP: If you’ve been using more than a small bit of caffeine each day, you may need to reboot your caffeine sensitivity, taking a break from caffeine to let your baseline come back to normal. Slowly backing down from caffeine can create an extended “withdrawal” period, where you’re not resting better, but you’re also not feeling energized by the caffeine you do consume.
   

2. CAFFEINE POWERS SPOTLIGHT FOCUS + ACTION (So beware of what types of activities you actually end up doing powered by caffeine.)
   
   Many of us involve caffeine in our creative or relaxation activities. But the psychopharmacology of caffeine means caffeine is not the right substance to use when we want to explore, create, and allow our mind to make new connections. Many of us end up answering email, taking care of chores or busywork when we get the boost of caffeine. That’s because we’ve juiced our stay-on-task mode.
   
   In some ways, caffeine makes us human doings. So if your goal is to BE — more present, more innovative, more ready to make new connections and discover fresh pathways, open yourself up instead of hyping yourself up.

Overall, this was a frustrating audio production for me. In part because Pollan resisted giving any kind of prescriptive YOU SHOULDs or NEVER DOs. But there was honesty too.

The author knows people who don’t touch caffeine at all (like sleep expert Matthew Walker). But short of a completely caffeine-free life, we need to recognize that our judgment of how caffeine is affecting us is altered by our consumption. We can’t tell what it’s doing to us while we’re using it, as much as we think we can.

If you’re someone who drinks a lot of coffee but notices “caffeine doesn’t affect me,” you’re under the influence of caffeine as you make that judgment. If you feel you “need coffee to do my most creative work” (like I’ve often felt), the story we’re telling ourselves is co-written by caffeine.

I haven’t quit playing caffeine roulette, a rigged game where I savor my morning boost while hoping I stop early enough to get a happy sleepy at night. But I have become convinced that quantity and timing aren’t relative. I also know that I can’t judge how much is a good amount of coffee based on what I feel like.

For the most part, I don’t encourage people to doubt their own judgment. But when the second cup of coffee is calling and my gut says “that’s a great idea!” I squint at my craving and say no thank you. Instead I get up, and do 30 seconds of breathwork, and get back to writing.

And since I just finished this morning’s cup…I’m going to just that right now.

Stand up and join me for 30 seconds of a drug without bad side effects…Oxygen. And next time Caffeine calls, maybe you’ll put them on hold.

Until next time,

~Morgan (and coffee)

I don't usually listen. I let life be louder than the voice, louder than the possibility. But not today.

Today I embraced the opportunity that living right here on the Gulf coast gives me. The chance to drop Megan at work, and sip my coffee on the drive out to Captiva. The chance to test out my hurricane readiness by working remote.

Instead of running from a storm today, I'm running from mindlessness.

You see, today there's no reason for me to NOT get work done with sand between my toes and that warm glow in my chest that comes from beach air, sunshine, hot sand.

Instead of feeling spoiled, or knuckling down to work really extra super hard, I said yes to that voice.

come to the beach...

....beach here I come...

Now, even I can't always do this on a weekday. I wouldn't even say it's "often" that a fully remote, sunblock-sponsored workday is available. But it's here.

Somedays the voice says ...come to tai chi class... or it says ...walk to the library...

That little voice that invites a moment of savoring, the space to live as a human being, not a human doing.

Sometimes the opportunity for being is small...step away from the workspace...eat lunch on the porch... take a small walk before breakfast…

What does the voice invite you to do?

My friend Siree takes a few moments with her morning cup of coffee to step out of the noise and scurry of being a working mom. I think her voice says …coffee is waiting…

My friend Brittany takes a moment in the morning to write down her affirmation at the top of her to-do list… the voice says …come set your intention…

The words aren’t important in themselves…it’s just the invitation to step all the way into the moment, to savor, enjoy, and celebrate the present. To take what this day or this moment can give, and not let it pass by while our heads are down.

(Feel free to check out the previous posts about how to fight the fear of losing or the fear of being embarrassed if you’re joining for the first time.)

I feel inferior…

Maybe you don’t use these words when you think about your insecurities. But I bet you naturally tune into power dynamics in relationships. How much power do you feel you have to make choices? How important are your priorities…and who has the ability to override yours in favor of their own?

Whether we’re winning or losing at the game of power, the dynamic exists.

In this book, Lencioni is making a focused argument that serving clients doesn’t happen best from a high-power position, but by choosing, on principle, to step into a low-power position.

This means more than putting the other person’s needs, priorities, and preferences first. It’s not just a servant’s mindset in a generic way. It means pushing back against the drive to maximize our influence, power, and prestige. To not need our client (or our spouse) to know how smart we are, or make them remember that we tried to warn them away from the problem we’re now being forced to solve.

Strategic Altitude Adjustment

Today’s wild idea is to take the concept of “inferiority” as an ALTITUDE adjustment. To step back from strengthening my own visibility and prominence (a high altitude), and to drift down to helper height. Like one of my favorite pieces of advice says…

At the end of the day, most of my real insecurity comes from making my life too much about me. If a client is struggling to hit a metric, discouraged in their marriage, mentally blocked on their manuscript…the last thing they need is for me to make about myself.

But that’s what I do when I brandish my strategies and attack their problems with “my solutions.” My client’s victories are their own. Even the choice to work with me as a thinking partner is theirs. If I serve the work, they will get the help they asked me for. The help they get from me is still their own win.

So I step down to altitude. I try to be creative, open, and humble as I walk beside them, resisting the urge to make myself the lead actor in my client’s screenplay. What’s funny is this “inferior” position of help-but-not-take-over creates a stable footing for me to genuinely challenge their thinking, suggest some solutions, and bravely unpack the stuff that may be tripping them up.

3. The Fear of Feeling Inferior

(not mattering, not having a place, being powerless)

When we wrestle others for power it not always ann ego trip. Most of the time our power grab is simple self-preservation. Reputation management more than anything. And we manager our reputation to edit out stuff that makes us look bad because these hits to our reputation feel like threats.

One true way to overcome this threat programming is to strengthen our growth mindset.

Growth Mindset: A growth mindset doesn’t just see us as capable of growing. A growth mindset expects setbacks, mistakes, and even failure to contribute to learning, progress, and future victory. (See Mindset by Carol Dweck for more on Growth vs. Fixed Mindset.)

If mistakes contribute to success, if setbacks are part of progress, if failure is intrinsic to developing strength, wisdom, and victory, then we are safe to step out of the high power position.

If you find it agonizing to realize you’ve made a mistake, or are devastated by setbacks and failure, it will be excruciating to support friends and clients without making it about yourself. One of the ways to bench press your growth mindset is to try on Lencioni’s next principle: Take a Bullet.

Take a Bullet: Be willing to look bad, go first, and own up to problems without waiting to judge and assign blame. This can include voicing an unpoluar opinion, or inviting others to share their complaints or grevienances.

Passing blame. It’s natural to try to get out of the way of a runaway train…and that’s what mistakes and failures feel like. If something is crashing, we don’t want it to land on us.

But what if you were Superman? How much sense would it make for you to step aside and let calamity crush someone else when you can put out a hand and absorb the impact?

That’s what taking a bullet ultimately is about. It’s not becoming the scapegoat for everything that ever goes wrong. It’s about owning and engaging the problems that you are able to, without wasting energy and time on self-protection. It’s about letting the problem exist, and simply bringing your strengths, curiosity, and availability to deal with the situation.

Like in the book, passing blame doesn’t actually eliminate the harm of the mistake, loss or problem. But absorbing, redirecting, and dissolving it reduces the harm to others and tends to strengthen our own confidence, trustworthiness, and overall ability to deal with the chaos of life.

Admit Your Weaknesses & Limitations: Owning up to patterns of low readiness, endurance, or ability. Resisting the urge to explain away our inadequacies as specific incidences, and acknowledge instead that we need help or teamwork from others in areas where we haven’t developed sufficient strength, skill, or understanding.

I like how Lencioni is blatant about how different it is to own up to a weakness or limitation than it is to own a mistake. It is sometimes possible to own a mistake in a way that makes us more powerful. It adds to our prestige. We sometimes even talk about “being the bigger person” to “own up to our part of it.”

But that can still be reputation management.

Owning up to our weaknesses means we don’t entomb our flaws in the past. We walk with them into the future, asking for partnership, support, or even accountability to keep them from costing us in the future.

This is what happens when we admit our biases, explore our blind spots, and honestly design our commitments around the work we can truly promise to deliver.

At this point I might as well admit to one of my own weaknesses. I have a pattern of struggling to finish things like this 3-part article on my substack.

I’ve sliced it up, and reworked it several times. Hearing in my head “does this actually matter to anyone? Will people think it’s ridiculous you’ve stayed on a simple fable for weeks? Why isn’t it done already?”

I have some natural weaknesses about seeing projects through to the end. And overthinking whether anything is valuable

Part of it is pride…I’m not sure this article is any good.

But when I say “any good” I’m really thinking “impressive.” And that is a self-absorbed goal

At the end of the day if there’s one thing I know about Wild + Brave humans it’s that we can find a glimmer of value in any wild idea. We can always find energy by taking a small brave action.

I know even a poorly written, over-thought, winding substack article that attempts to explore wild ideas can be useful to someone. Ultimately, my work is a pathway of growth for me, and the meaning created by my work is co-created by those who come after and interact with it.

Whether your work is obviously creative or not, all great work comes from a place of humility. So as you go about your day, may you have the bravery to step back from seeking the high-power position and reputation maintenance, and step down to the solid ground of honest curiosity and sincere service to make the difference you can make today.

(Read about how to fight the fear of losing in last week’s post.)

The Fear of Being Embarrassed

(looking bad, feeling foolish, shame spirals)

Nobody likes to be embarrassed. But often, we’re oblivious to how our attempts to avoid embarrassment often lead to embarrassment! We don't want to ask a stupid question because we don't want to look like we don't know things...but then we spend the rest of the conversation (or our lives) not knowing things! We don’t want to reach for a new opportunity at work in case we’ll be shot down…but that leads to us staying down where we already are.

For some reason, we are more driven by our craving to avoid problems than we are focused on creating good outcomes. It’s probably part of our brain’s pattern that researchers call Negativity Bias. One of the neurological mechanisms that creates negativity bias is called “selective attention.” This is the traffic controller in your brain that always prioritizes threat-based information over non-threat-based information. This is a security feature of your attention system, since “urgently good” news rarely has the potential to kill us, but “urgently bad news” does.

Negativity Bias: Your brain’s attention is more quickly activated and engaged longer by negative information (danger, threat, pain, fear) than it is by positive information (contentment, pleasure, interest). This term describes a universal survival instinct, not a personality trait.

Prioritizing Negative = Negativity Bias

Okay, so knowing that our survival instinct primes our brain to notice and attend to potential threats means we shouldn’t be surprised our much brain space fears like the fear of being embarrassed can take up. This happens because we have connected “looking stupid” with any number of bad outcomes.

If I do something embarrassing, I might…

• Lose respect of people who matter

• Lose my influence in a group

• Lose my opportunity to contribute or lead

• Lose a job, contract, or client

• Lose my confidence

This connection between “being embarrassed” and losing a laundry list of meaningful things like respect and success is so hardwired most of us don’t realize it’s an assumption we’re making. We think it’s just a fact.

But what if it wasn’t a fact?

What if most of the things we avoid for their embarrassment potential really don’t cost us? In fighting the “fear of losing,” Lencioni endorses the rule “Enter the Danger” which means homing in on the obvious problems that others are avoiding. Instead of treating them as radioactive (the natural human response), we facilitate the decontamination process by mothering the elephant in the room.

What happens when we’re willing to risk embarrassment to address something? We may wade through some chaos, but if we approach the issue with humility and openness, we usually emerge having earned greater respect.

Ask Dumb Questions: Use questions to uncover information you don’t know, or problems you think you see and in order to become aware of mistakes in your thinking or expecations. Dumb questions gather information in real time from a counterpart.

Unless you are completely open to asking dumb questions, you become cautious and selective, asking instead only questions that reveal what you already know and establish firm position in order to avoid the appearance of mistakes.

Some of the worst advice we give ourselves is “only ask a question you already know the answer to.” This is advice designed to prevent vulnerability in the face of a potential enemy or threat. It’s also a way of controlling relationships.

As a coach, I see another problem these carefully smart questions create. Careful, smart questions isolate us.

Most of us are spending way too much time walled off with our own research, planning, and rumination to prepare for conversations in a way that avoids surprise. We try to think through all the problems, objections, and barriers the other person is facing so we can be ready for them before we even start the conversation.

We call it being prepared. Some of us consciously do it to avoid asking dumb questions. But talking to us is like talking to a wall when we do this. Our counterpart may back away or try to punch holes in us just to escape the coldness of an interaction where no one really needs our input.

A Caution to Empathetic People

Some of the most valuable dumb questions I see asked are questions about how people feel. Highly empathetic people often have a strong sense of what others are feeling, and they try to treat the other person according to those perceived feelings. But here’s the danger: when we are sure what the other person must be feeling, it can keep us from seeking their perspective. We stop asking the question we think we know the answer to…and we stop learning what we don’t yet know.

Even when we understand a situation or know our counterpart well, we can’t fully weigh all that they’re experiencing or judge it from their perspective. So much of what we think and feel is formed by our experience, and no one has lived an identical life.

But there’s another danger, beyond being wrong about what the other person is feeling. Sometimes, the value of talking about feelings is allowing someone to process, explore, and move through their own feelings.

Even if you’re right about what the other person is feeling, they usually need the freedom and space that talking about it provides. If someone in your life is stuck in an emotional pattern that seems obvious from the outside, it may be that the person living the experience hasn’t effectively processed what they’re feeling so that they can resolve and release those emotions.

This book doesn’t go into this at all, but at Wild + Brave we know that emotions are temporary messengers, arriving in our lives with information and energy. Until we receive the information and do something with it, the energy of that emotion isn’t released and resolved.

So ask the dumb question.

Ask how the person who just lost their job is feeling. Ask the person torn between two obvious choices what they’re thinking. If what they say surprises you, you’ll know you’re on the right track. What they say will often surprise them…and trust me. Even in the messy conversations that may ensue, if you step back from your fear of looking embarrassed and get curious and present with people, you’ll emerge as a trustworthy colleague and a respected friend, not a dufus who asked something that might have seemed obvious.

Make Dumb Suggestions: Voice potential solutions or possibilities without waiting to be sure they’re going to work. Offer ideas in real time with colleagues and friends so open discussion can happen, rather than siloing thinking to make safe suggestions. Innovating in real time and siezing unexpected opportunities always require this form of vulnerability.

In my family, we often say “I have a bad idea.”

The “bad idea” announcement signals to others that we want to say something we’re not sure will land well. But we want to get input without being too attached to it. When one of us is stuck or stumped, we’ll flip it around and ask, “Who has some bad ideas?”

Haven’t you noticed how we often have to get through some ideas that won’t work before the idea that ends up working shows itself? Like priming the pump in our creative brain, the better we get at sharing potential ideas, the quicker we can bridge off of them with better ideas.

But we also are free to release a bad idea when it becomes clear it isn’t quite right, doing what Lencioni calls the principle of Celebrate Your Mistakes.

Celebrate Your Mistakes: Embrace the freedom, confidence, and bravery that comes from recognizing mistakes are inevitable if you’re even trying to do something interesting, challenging, or worthwhile. This allows you to readily acknowlege when you recongize you’ve made an error, or see that something isn’t working.

Celebrating means not simply groveling, or taking the hit with a grimace, but rather feeling completely free to welcome the insight that something is flawed, incomplete, or headed in the wrong direction. You can celebrate because the insight moves you forward, rather than grieving the ding to your reputation. (This is a good way to escape the pressure of perfectionism or needing to always be right.)

This includes bravely reflecting on the source and consequence of mistakes (without wallowing), and finding ways to share the learns with others, rather than sanitizing the retelling of our stories to omit the wrong turns.

Lencioni doesn’t draw the correlation between confidence and a growth mindset, but in this fable he really could have. This growth-mindset-driven celebration of mistakes is part of how we build REAL Confidence (Check out Mental Growth Tactic #11 in Think Wild if you want more ways to build confidence.)

When you make suggestions and explore wild ideas, some of what you talk through is like kicking up dust on a journey. The faster you go (and the wilder your terrain) the more dust gets kicked up. But you realize dust happens when you’re going somewhere. As long as you keep moving, the grunge of half-good ideas and unsuccessful suggestions settles behind you, safe in the rearview. You’ll have moved forward to other things.

I’m going to stop here for today.

Instead of worrying it might look dumb to spend several posts on a book I read in a couple of hours, I’m going to take my time with it. We’ll come back next week to tackle the third fear — the Fear of Feeling Inferior (this is a huge one for me).

But for today, what if you freed yourself to ask the question, make the suggestion, and give yourself permission to celebrate not be right and tidy all the time?

• You really don’t have to know everything to be trustworthy.

• You don’t have to nail all your ideas down before they’re worth sharing.

Take a learner’s mind into what’s left of this week and see what happens to your wild ideas when others can join you on your journey.

Get (a little) brave,

~Morgan

Here’s a good look at the cover, in case you’re curious. The book is called: Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding the Three Fears that Sabotage Client Loyalty by Patrick Lencioni.

Why it’s called “Getting Naked”

If you haven’t read anything else by Patrick Lencioni, the “business fable” approach may sound like he’s just telling a story. As you listen, though, you’ll hear clear points and principles that structure the story, intended to be useful to you transposed into your life. In this fable, the story is structured to show (by example) how one guy learns (the hard way, as usual) how his own failures to embrace vulnerability have sabotaged his professional growth and success with clients. The fabled protagonist also experiences a massive quality of life improvement when he begins to embrace the principles to become vulnerable.

In Lencioni language, positive vulnerability is a way of “getting naked” with colleagues, customer prospects, and clients. He’s gone as far as to use the term “naked customer service” to describe how radically he believes successful teams can and should embrace vulnerability in the professional space.

I think this “naked” analogy is apt, since our fears always strip us down to where our vulnerabilities are. And let’s face it: we’re always going to have vulnerabilities as long as we’re handling something we care about.

The only way to avoid vulnerability (and the fears that rise up around them) is to keep a safe distance from the stuff that really matters to us. If we’re going to live a wild and brave life, we’re going to be vulnerable. Instead of trying to avoid feeling fear, we need to learn to be bravely vulnerable in a way that helps us serve what wildly matters to us.

This book looks at “the 3 fears that sabotage client loyalty.” They’re worth looking at since they aren’t just about strengthening your business or brand. They’re about being the kind of person others can trust, relate to, and receive the truth from.

Today I just want to tackle the first fear…

1. The Fear of Losing…

(losing business, money, or opportunities)

The author calls this fear “the fear of losing the business.” He’s acknowledging the quasi-conflict of interest coaches, salespeople, and consultants feel, knowing a client may fire you if they don’t like what you have to say…even though they’re hired you to tell them the truth! “If I say this will they stop listening to me” goes beyond losing a paycheck.

None of us want to be canceled, criticized, or ignored.

We need to care about how our words land. If you don’t care about the impact your words and delivery have on the other person, you’re not being naked…you’re distancing yourself. But if we care too much, and try to manage our message to force a desirable response from the other person, we’ve moved from communication into manipulation.

If we want to have real relationships (at home or work) truth is a non-negotiable, life-giving necessity.

Caution for Strong Communicators

If communication is a strength of yours, beware of the temptation toward manipulative communication. You don’t have to be intending to deceive, but you can land there all the same. When we’re manipulative, it’s usually for one of the following reasons:

• We want to build trust / respect / inspire confidence

• We want to minimize conflict, hurt feelings, or triggering old patterns

• We want to move quickly, save time, and avoid getting bogged down

• We want to build influence and be listened to, or retain a position

But if we choose what we say to control the other person’s response, we’ll undermine our own trustworthiness (and make ourselves bonkers). Trying to manage other people’s responses never seems to work! The author explores how respecting the other person’s right to a response (and need for the truth) creates a true basis for trust and engagement.

Tell the Kind Truth: Clearly communicate difficult messages in a way that recognizes the dignity and humanity of the other person.

Saying something the other person may not want to hear makes us vulnerable to their anger or blame shifting. But if we care about them having what they need, we have to care about telling them the truth.

We aren't being kind when we don't tell people the uncomfortable truth if the truth that is standing between them and what they need. These days we have plenty of examples of how not to do this.

“I’m telling you the truth” is not a license to disconnect from the dignity and humanity of our counterpart. But just because we see bad examples of truth bombing (especially on digital platforms) doesn't mean we can't find good examples of brave humans threading the needle through kind delivery of meaningful truth.

Always Consult Instead of Sell: Avoid describing what you know, how you’d help, or why you should be trusted and instead go to work being helpful, receptive, and trustworthy. In business this means helping solve problems immediately where possible instead of forcing your prospects through a pitch maze.

I started having a lot more fun in my coaching business when I replaced push marketing with Free Coaching. Instead of constantly running ads or cold-emailing people, I work with the people I already know and do what I can to solve problems, find strategies, and keep growing. When someone is interested in my help or referred to me by a friend, we jump right into a consulting or thinking partner session to tackle the problem or opportunity.

If you’re looking for a ghostwriter for your email newsletter or want a coach to help you think strategically, you don’t need to hear me talk about how I’ve written and strategized for other people. Maybe we should just see whether I can help you or not?

My conversion rate for these conversations is very high. But even when the conversation doesn’t convert to a new client, I gain insights, energy, and confidence from doing more of the work that matters. It’s not my job in life to make money (and I doubt you feel like yours is either). But it is my job in life to think wild with brave humans. That’s my “consulting.” I’m with Lencioni…always consult, never sell.

At the end of the call, you’re guaranteed to leave with an idea, exercise, or suggestion you can experiment with, even if we never work together in a paid relationship.

That’s another one of Lencioni’s principles:

Give Away the Business: Give help, advice, or support before figuring out how the cost-benefit or ROI for your time is settled. Particularly, don’t hold back on helping solve a problem to retain an edge for negotiating better payment or power in exchange.

In some seasons of life, “give away your value for free” sounds suicidal or gimmicky. But there’s something different that occurred to me reading this part. I noticed how tangled and energy-intensive it is to manage my time, attention, and ideas as if they’re scarce resources. We manage our friendships to make sure that we’re getting out as much as we put in. We manage our service or volunteer efforts to make sure our giving elevates only our values. We manage our mental and emotional energy at work, wary of doing “more than you’re paid for.”

We don’t want to be idiots.

But we pay a price when we commodify our own time, energy, and attention this way. Life becomes transactional. In an effort to not “use myself up,” I become a fragile, dwindling supply of Morgan, anxious of running out. Time, energy, and attention are all renewable resources. They rebound at different rates due in large part to how we feel as we use them.

The more we approach doing our work, listening to our friends, and helping strangers as an “investment” that we need a “return” on, the more anxious we will feel about our personal inventory. Lencioni doesn’t go into it too much (it’s a fable, guys), but plenty of other health and performance researchers have. They would agree that finding ways to get past the scarcity mindset, to engage meaningfully with people and projects because we can is often a better value proposition than withholding our energy from things we’re not sure will pan out in some form of return.

There’s one more principle to go with the Fear of Losing…one I kinda love. Lencioni calls it…

Enter the Danger: Notice and investigate touchy subjects and barriers, address and explore the topics and issues that others are avoiding but which are creating negative emotions or confusion. Prioritize solving the problems the group seems scared to broach.

My sister calls this “mothering the elephant in the room.” It’s not enough to notice the elephant or even state its presence. If we’re going to overcome the fear of losing, we need to take some positive, careful ownership of addressing the issues seething under the surface. Every elephant needs a mommy.

Sometimes, these elephants manifest as painful truths we need to say kindly. But most often, the elephant in the room is uncertainty or confusion. You don’t have to be the most empathetic person in the world to know when there’s a topic the people around you are avoiding addressing. Imagine your inner “let’s not talk about that” meter like a radioactive topic detector. When your detector hits “danger” that’s a signal to find a way in.

Different skills or approaches tend to be successful depending on the type of danger you’re facing. Like any adventure you tackle, be mindful of the terrain and take the right supplies. Whether you feel equipped to handle conversational and cultural hot potatoes or not, this book makes a good argument that learning how to do so is one of the best ways to win opportunities, strengthen relationships, and keep customers.

The next two fears Lencioni mentions interest me as well. They are:

2. The Fear of Being Embarrassed

3. The Fear of Feeling Inferior

We’ll look at them next time on Read Wild.

Thanks for reading!

~Coach Morgan

You can try it in 3 minutes here:

If you’ve read Think Wild you’ll know that “Shift Your Stress Response” is one of the Mental Growth Tactics that can help us bring more of our best self to tough situations. But this meditation has more uses (and more research behind it) than just as a stress-shifting tool.

I first learned about Loving Kindness Meditation from my sister (She’s an occupational therapist and very cool human), when she was reading Love 2.0 by Barbara Fredrickson. It’s a fantastic book, packed with tons of research (since Dr. Fredrickson is a leading researcher, that comes as no surprise). But here’s what you need to know to snack on the research, and be ready to take a tiny brave action to get some value out of it for yourself today.

What Loving Kindness Meditation Is

Loving kindness meditation is a mindfulness practice that uses intentional phrases combined with visualization to tap into warm and caring feelings, aiming and amplifying them so that those feelings resonate. Most practices aim both inward and outward.

Lovingkindness Meditation follows the following pattern:

1. Prime yourself for positive emotions.

We do this by bringing someone to mind who you already have warm, kind, or affectionate feelings for.

2. Use intentional phrases to direct your mind and emotions toward others.

We use a set of mindful wishes to focus our own feelings and send them out toward someone else. By putting words to the feeling, we sharpen our connection with

3. Visualize others receiving your intention and emotion.

We see ourselves as actually connecting in some, non-tangible but sincere way with the other person, reaching them with our intention.

4. Join together with others in receiving the intention and emotion.

We broaden the target of our mindful intention to include people we may or may not have naturally warm feelings toward, or expand to include a person or group of people we don’t know very well. We draw close to them by wishing the same good things for them that we wish for the person we love, that we wish for ourselves.

If you search for loving kindness meditation, you’ll see some variations on the wording. But the underlying phrases are always something like…

What Loving Kindness Meditation Does

Like all mindfulness practices, visualizing others and focusing our intent on them in a moment of meditation draws us into the present moment. Becoming fully present helps us step free of time pressure, anxiety, and all the world’s demands on our attention. This is calming, grounding, and restorative in itself.

Add to that, this type of mindfulness is so powerful because it harnesses what Dr. Fredrickson calls “Tiny engines of our positivity system.” Certain emotions set off positive effects for our biology, showing up in how we feel as well as shifting how our cells behave in the minutes and months to come.

In the short term, we tend to feel some measure of these impacts when we practice loving kindness meditation:

1. Improved sense of ourselves

2. Optimistic feelings toward ourselves and / or others

3. Increased connectedness to others, reduced loneliness / isolation

4. Boost to our personal power / agency (that confidence we have that we can help make good outcomes happen in the world).

Over time, our sense of hope and goodwill tends to expand, improving our ability to access optimism for ourselves and broadening our social resources toward others.

Most of the good things we do for our health take a long time to make a difference. But some things — like this mindfulness practice — offer us a sudden jolt off the track of distraction and disconnection, and crash us deeper into who we are, who we can be.

In Love 2.0, Dr. Fredrickson shared the shocking test results, capturing how the cellular age of participants who practiced this form of meditation for a period as short as six months reduced. Their cells got younger.

Dr. Fredrickson talks about her “broaden and build theory of positive emotions” and how what we often trivialize as “momentary good feelings” have dramatic and lasting impacts on our physical, mental, and emotional resourcefulness. If what survives is the “fittest,” we need to wake up to how positive emotions make us more fit…and find ways to fit more positive emotions in our daily lives so we can be strong, flexible, and ready to live wild and brave.

Be Brave: 3 Minute Challenge

At Wild + Brave, we love taking tiny brave actions on the wild ideas we discover. So today’s tiny brave action challenge is this: follow along with the guided lovingkindness meditation and practice priming and sending warm emotion to others and to yourself. Or go rogue! Use the phrases on your own, sending them to whoever you choose.

Whatever the reason, I think Substack is where I’ll try new ideas on for size, to keep them lightweight, hope-fueled, and fun.

December’s new idea is an informal book club open to anyone who wants to have a little more community and more ease in using and enjoying new ideas. I’m going to run it through Stubstack, so just do a free subscription here to get Book Club updates, quotations, and easy-to-use insights pulled from the books we’re reading.

This Book Club is For Humans Who:

• like new ideas

• want more positive community

• want to be reading more in a lightweight way

• want to use what they already know more

Vote for Books:

Pick what you want us to read, and select all that you’re interested in so I can get a sense of what books might best serve the group. (Please use the “other” option to let me know about any other book you’re reading that you think I should check out! I’m always excited to get book recommendations!!)

Vote for the Next Book

Here are the books I’m considering at the moment:

Teams: Getting Things Done with Others by David Allen and Edward Lamont

The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good for You and How to Get Good at It by Kelly McGonigal

How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times by Chris Bailey

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity by Stefan Klein

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life by Susan David

Start With Purpose

As I prepare to invite friends to read with me, I’ve got Teams: Getting Things Done with Others front of mind. I’m currently reading this book which applies David Allen's classic work Getting Things Done to a multi-person setting (any family, partnership, or professional team qualifies). As I work through Teams, I’m reminded in each chapter how PURPOSE guides the whole productivity process.

So, as I start this book club — however informal — I want to start with purpose.

The Purpose of the READ WILD BOOK CLUB:

• I want to make it easier to get value from what we already know

• I want to build on old information with new, easy-to-use ideas.

• I want others who see things differently to broaden my thinking and chip away at my blind spots.

• I want more community…and to take action together.

Truly, creating community can be tough. Not only are we all busy, there’s something unnerving that happens when we try to make time for others: we become consumers of community.

The consumer mindset seems to be creeping into a lot of our relationships. When we feel time scarcity, we tend to scrutinize where our minutes are going to try to optimize our return. ROI — Return on Investment — is top of mind for us when we’re feeling the pressure of time. But that leads us to a cost-benefit analysis focusing on short-term returns instead of long-term effects.

We all have things that impact our cost-benefit ratio of time investment. So for me, a book club helps us get more value with low-intensity, no-stress approach to connecting more and thinking together.

It’ll be an experiment, and hopefully we’ll all have some fun with it.

So I camped 15 minutes from my house.

True, I live ankle-deep in wild Florida. On walks around my home, I regularly see alligators, bobcats, bald eagles, and exotic water birds, so I don’t have to go far to get out in nature. My close-to-home campsite was a sandy escape shaded by palm trees and slash pines. The understory here is rough and delicate at the same time. Lacy ferns and pointy yucca, squatty plants with palm tree-style leaves covered in a crumbling layer of pine needles, knitted together by trailing vines.

My campsite in Koreshan State Park had all the necessities… Plus, traveling with a rooftop tent always leaves me feeling a bit extra. There’s nothing like waking up on top of the world or watching the campfire from above my FJ Cruiser.

They’re right that you can’t go back. Recreating any of my past adventures is a tricky goal, even without managing a major life change. I remember my 72-day camping trip to reach 30 National Park Visits for my 30th birthday. By nature, it was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. But thankfully, I had a different goal this week. Instead of trying to get “back to camping,” I wanted to explore what camping could be like for me in this present moment, with hyperacusis.

Lately, I’ve been learning a lot about presence. I reviewed some of the research on how we can prime our confidence using our bodies or by focusing on a wild idea. And as I’ve chewed on the lessons, a new thread has emerged.

Contentment.

I’ve started to notice the role contentment plays in being present. How in some ways, we’re never really available to the joy that is right now if we are striving for, reaching for, or feeling cut off from our sense of enough. When I’ve tried to travel in order to feel free, I never achieve it. But when I notice the freedom already present in my life, I become available to that free feeling, and it makes it all the way inside.

There have been times when I felt like I managed “on my own,” but on this trip, I was able to enjoy the support and camaraderie of help. We use the buddy system a lot at Wild + Brave, and this time camping, I leaned into it.

This time I had help setting up my campsite, and a phone-a-friend option in case the setting was too loud for me to endure all night. (Spoiler alert: one night of noise is my current limit!) The comfort of knowing I had a backup plan, and friends to rescue me meant I could take tiny, brave, experimental steps and be present to whatever happened.

As it turned out, I enjoyed several crackling fires, lots of coffee, some biking and hiking, and even got some fun pictures of my book Think Wild to use in holiday marketing this year.

I’ve learned to breathe through the discomfort of sensory overload to allow my attention to move away from the feelings of pain in my ears and attach to other stimuli. I survived a whole night of loud road noise echoing through the scrub pines and the adorable voices of children scream-singing from a neighboring campsite. 😂

I had the satisfaction of making it through a night…and also the safety of spending my second night “camping” back in my bed at home.

Never, in all my travels, could I imagine I would need a break from the buzz of cicadas and the occasional barks of dogs. That I would need a time-out to recover so that I could go back to my campsite and soak up some more adventure time.

I didn’t recapture the carefree delusion of total independence I had half a decade ago, traipsing across North America in my FJ Cruiser. Instead, by God’s grace, life with hyperacusis has made me available to the satisfaction, belonging, and joy that comes when you give and receive help, when you savor the safety and peace in a love-filled home. When you realize that this moment in front of you has beauty, joy, and hope threads in it. Threads you can weave into a wild and brave life, come what may…all with a little help from your friends.

It was a different sort of trip for me. But I’m proud to say I’ve made room for change, and what I’ve found in the process of acceptance is a level of satisfaction I’ve never felt before.

When changes arrive along your life’s adventure, may you have the supernatural grace to come into the present moment, to receive love and friendship in new ways, and little by little, may the joy of each ordinary day dawn in your heart so that you can feel satisfied even when your life is a work-in-progress.

Thanks for thinking with me,

~Morgan

PS: Let me know how you like Substack. Is this a good place to share Wild Ideas?