4

Locate the Bait

What we gain when conversations lose

We’ll begin this chapter with another story from Jason:

When I came to MIT in 2005 to pursue a PhD, I joined a group of graduate student advocates. We put together a little manifesto about “what MIT should do” on sustainability, collected dozens of signatures from faculty, and handed them off to the administration. We asked for a meeting with the president of MIT so we could present our demands in person. We felt pretty cool.

When we heard back from the president’s office, however, we were told that they didn’t know what to do with our proposal: we had no clear “asks,” and they didn’t know how to interpret what we were requesting.

To be honest, we didn’t know either, but it was easier to stew in frustration and demonize the administration. We decided that “they” didn’t get it, weren’t taking us seriously, and didn’t really want to do what “they” should do.

After the failed petition, our next approach was to push for an event with more focus: one in which we could force the administration to publicly commit to “walking the talk” and making the campus more energy efficient.

As we started planning the event, however, we ran into what felt like more roadblocks. At one point, I was in a conference room with fellow student advocates and university administrators. The conversation felt contentious—us pushing, them pushing back. They weren’t willing to commit. I felt stuck.

What keeps conversations stuck? One way to describe this situation is that Jason and his friends encountered a roadblock—a barrier that someone else erected in their path, an obstacle to be broken down or overcome by force of will and political power. We ask ourselves questions like, How do we overcome resistance when people are blocking our efforts? Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is a classic in this vein, assuming a powerful opponent and an insurgent group.¹

We can, however, use a different metaphor, one that focuses on our own role in getting ourselves stuck. We have found it useful to think of stuck conversations as involving a pitfall, or a hidden trap. We stumble into it when we are on our journey to create a better world, with our particular background conversation and way of being. At the center of this metaphor is the bait in the trap, something so delicious that we grasp on tight. We enjoy the bait but bear the cost of being stuck.

The bait is the next fundamental source of inauthenticity we want to explore. Only when we identify the bait and let go of it, can we climb out of the trap and find a pathway around it.² Here’s how it happened in Jason’s story:

In the conference room, Elsa Olivetti spoke up—she was a graduate student who had been at MIT for a few years. “It seems like your approach here is ‘we think someone should do something.’ My approach in these situations is usually ‘we’re here to help.’ ”

Her words affected me powerfully because I did experience her as positive and helpful. I stepped back, took a deep breath, and tried on that conversation with myself—“we’re here to help.”

I gulped and felt myself tense up at the prospect of a new approach. Taking on “we’re here to help” would mean having to actually do the work. I might get overloaded. I might fail to have a real impact. Of course, these were exactly the risks we had been asking the administration to take! In that moment, I saw just how much we had enjoyed feeling self-righteous and getting off easy.

At the same time, it was clear that our current approach was not helping us achieve our stated goals. We were stuck. So I took on “we’re here to help” and let it guide my thinking and conversation. Almost immediately, the conversation shifted. We started asking questions instead of just arguing our points. We learned that graduate students around campus were quietly doing some very cool stuff that we could help boost. Our event ended up being the MIT Generator series, where students pitched hands-on projects on campus sustainability that we could execute together.

The response from the senior administration was powerfully supportive. Students spawned dozens of projects, and MIT took a few more steps on a long journey toward a comprehensive energy and climate change strategy.

Let’s apply the pitfall metaphor to the MIT story. Jason was stuck, spending time in conversations without making any progress. His background conversation was, “I want the administration to take sustainability seriously, but they don’t get it.” Jason’s way of being was self-righteous and frustrated. The bait was enjoying getting off easy, feeling like a righteous underdog, and placing the responsibility on the MIT administration. Jason got to feel certain that “we get it and they don’t.” Until he let go of that bait, there was no way to chart a new course. With his friend’s help, he started to see a new pathway: “How can we be helpful and coordinate the great efforts of students, staff, and faculty toward a sustainable campus?”

Our goal is to help you identify your own pitfalls, but we recognize this can be tricky because so much is hidden. The cost of being stuck is buried beneath the brush. We may not even admit that there is a cost: we’ll see our lack of progress as someone else’s fault, a roadblock someone has put in our way. The problem does not seem to be a way of thinking that we have chosen—it appears to be the truth. The bait is often something we don’t admit we want, either to others or to ourselves. Even if we see all this, it takes vulnerability to say that we have created our own trap. It takes even more courage to surrender the bait and face the risks of moving into unfamiliar territory.

The good news is that we all fall into pitfalls, and we often find a pileup in there! We can poke fun at ourselves when we realize we are all in this together. Jason and his fellow activists fell into a pattern we call “someone should.” It takes a lot of forms: the government should, business should, my brother-in-law should; “they” should. It’s such a tempting pitfall when complex issues and lots of relevant actors are involved. Claiming “someone should” allows us to pretend we’re making a contribution while we’re merely judging and criticizing others.

You got yourself stuck

The first step is to simply recognize when you are stuck and take responsibility for getting unstuck. “Stuck” is a relative term—we can only be stuck relative to where we want to go. Identifying pitfalls is about making you effective in reaching your goals.

Take a cold, clear look at the consequences of being stuck. What are you giving up in terms of your goals and aspirations? If you weren’t stuck, where could you go? If you succeeded, what could be available for the world? These are costs of being stuck.

And there may be other costs, or collateral damage. When we create an atmosphere of disrespect, domination, or disillusionment, it can have lasting impacts on the vitality of our relationships. For example, we shared a story in the preface about Michaela, who had not eaten a meal with her mother in more than a year because of ongoing conflicts about obesity and unhealthy eating choices.

You may have an explicit goal to create flourishing around you. But if people are hurt, annoyed, or agitated by your approach, how likely are they to listen to your message? Are you creating relationships that will sustain you through your quest for a better world? Are you cultivating opportunities for others to be authentic around you?

Confronting the costs of being stuck is necessary if we are going to muster the courage and energy to take a clear look around and to get ourselves unstuck.

Pitfalls: Background conversations that get us stuck

The second step is to recognize that you are not the only one getting stuck and to look for patterns. As we pointed out in chapter 3, our ways of being are shared. The same is true of our background conversations, which we often inherit from others in our group, organization, or movement. Once we identify the conversations that get us stuck, we can flag them in our lives and avoid recurring pitfalls going forward. To help you in this analysis, we offer a table of pitfalls in the sustainability discourse. Your movement’s pitfalls may be similar to these or more specific to your cause.

We have a few caveats:

• The pitfalls we identify in table 3 are not comprehensive. They’re merely common examples drawn from our own recurring struggles and those of the people we’ve worked with.

• Pitfalls often occur together. One executive we worked with said that he skipped from one pitfall to another and to another, cycling and recycling through the pitfalls without moving forward.

• The pitfalls may not be perfectly accurate descriptions of your situation. The question is, can they point you toward your own background conversation and bait? Once you identify your own pitfalls, you have an opportunity to create a new conversation.

Table 3 A few common pitfalls

So why are these pitfalls so sticky? Why are these conversations popular when they don’t produce the results we want? It’s helpful to understand the bait if we want the freedom to avoid the pitfall.

Identifying the bait helps you get unstuck

A Sufi story tracing back to fourteenth-century central Asia, called “How to Catch Monkeys,” illustrates this idea of bait. A hunter captures a monkey by placing a cherry in a bottle. The monkey reaches into the bottle and grasps the cherry, and his fist is too large to extract unless he lets go of the cherry. He will not let go, so he is trapped.³ Videos on the Internet show a similar practice among African hunter-gatherers in the present day.⁴

In conversations about improving the world, the bait is not a cherry in a bottle. We are not literally in a trap. And yet the situation is the same: we grasp something rewarding, and we forget that we have a choice to let it go. What is that reward?

First, it is important to understand what the bait or reward is not. It is not achievement of our long-term objectives for a better future. It is not the satisfaction of a job well done. It is not delight in a healthy relationship that opens up new possibilities. These may be real commitments for you, and they may be exactly what you strive for in your advocacy. That is great. However, bait is about the other commitments you don’t know you have that get you stuck in unproductive conversations.

Most bait is not “nice.” As tempting as it is to say that we pursue only enlightened goals, the bait is usually something more ego focused. In our workshops, when reflecting on a specific conversation that got stuck, people often put forward a rosy picture of their bait as a first-pass reflection:

• “Knowing I’ve made a difference”

• “Saving time and being efficient”

• “Preserving my friendship”

Upon more reflection, each of these participants scratched beneath the surface. It turned out that “Knowing I’ve made a difference” was about being superior and dominating the other person. When they let that go, they created the space to be helpful and make a difference. “Saving time” was really about avoiding the vulnerability of difficult conversations. “Preserving friendship” was about staying safe from conflict; ironically, this was undermining a chance for intimacy.

In other words, if you complete the sentence “I want a better world but . . .“ the bait is not the better world. It is not your stated objective. It is, as Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey describe, a “hidden competing commitment.”⁵ The bait is concealed, nestled away in the framing of the problem and our way of being in that context.

When we coach people, understanding the bait is often the most challenging part of identifying a pitfall. This is partly because it’s uncomfortable to confront. Saying we want one thing while also quietly wanting another is a very basic form of inauthenticity. The good news is that we’ve found that most forms of bait in conversations toward a better world can be distilled down to just four words: “right,” “righteous,” “certain,” and “safe.”⁶ You can try them on to see what fits.

Bait usually involves right, righteous, certain, and safe

Let’s explore these four basic kinds of bait.

Getting to be right is nice. We have spent every year of our schooling getting rewarded for knowing the right answer. Maybe we were the ones who got the gold stars, the good grades, and the approving nod from parent and teacher, and we felt secure and valued in the world. Or perhaps we never got those things, so it’s all the more rewarding when we do get to feel right, smart, knowledgeable, and correct.

Feeling righteous is tasty as well. When we’re the righteous ones, we get to (mis)quote Mahatma Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Often we’ll make some kind of sacrifice: Stop eating red meat? Take a low-paying job at a nonprofit when all our buddies are going into finance? Now we’re set! Of course, it’s a lot easier to feel like a saint when we can point to a sinner. And we have plenty of bad guys to choose from.

Feeling certain is particularly cozy because being uncertain is so uncomfortable. If we’re going to sacrifice red meat to be green, do we want to wonder whether vegetable-based meat substitutes have a similar or even greater environmental footprint? We’d rather believe that “this is the right thing and everyone should do it.” On the flip side, if we decide that climate change is a scam, feeling certain saves us the effort of having to ask tough questions about our actions.

Feeling safe is the bait that most often appears when we consider conversations we avoid having because of how we think they might go. Sure, making a change in the world might require us to get other people on board. But think back to that list of perceived traits of a typical environmentalist, in chapter 3. Do we really want to risk someone calling us a crazy, self-righteous tree hugger (or whatever the equivalent is for advocates within your movement)? Remember that time you asked your boss, neighbor, parent, or team for something you cared about, and someone shut you down? It stings! It would be a lot safer to keep our concerns to ourselves and maybe enjoy the occasional gripe session with like-minded advocates.

One of the best ways to stay safe is to justify to yourself why taking action will never work. Too often we choose being right and righteous over taking effective action because it keeps us safe. But staying safe is a sucker’s prize for not being effective.

Now, you may not recognize yourself in this image of the withdrawn activist, quietly being right in the corner. You may say, “I don’t keep myself safe; I have no problem standing up and telling people what we need to change. I constantly get shot down, but I keep standing up.” We’ve joked about it this way: “I would love to be a savior, but I will settle for being a martyr.”

This is a fair description of us in our early stages of activism, like the MIT campaign described earlier. What we learned was that being a martyred activist, while it appeared courageous to some, was actually a way of keeping ourselves safe from investing the time and energy needed to solve problems.

The hidden nature of the bait creates the inauthenticity in this whole situation. We don’t walk around telling people that our goal in life is to be right, righteous, certain, and safe. We tell everyone that we want a better world! The reality is that we want both. And nothing is wrong with wanting both. People are complicated. We run astray by pretending we are simple.

Map out your pitfall

Now that you have learned a little more about background conversations, being stuck, and bait, along with ways of being, let’s take a moment to revisit your own situation.

The very act of naming a pitfall may help you see a pathway out of it. We have seen this happen in our workshops. We’ll hear a chuckle, and then a participant will say, “Well, I’m not going to use that strategy anymore!” This may well be your experience. If you realized that you have been staying safe by avoiding conversations, you may also feel some anxiety. This is because you have become aware that you now want to make a jump.

This may, however, not be your experience. Often, it takes a bit more courage to truly let go of the bait, a bit more energy to pull yourself out of the trap, and a bit more imagination and planning before you are ready to try something new.

In the next chapter, we offer a key to this next step: getting clear on what we really want and daring to share it with ourselves and others. When we can articulate something we want more than we want the bait, we can let it go.