CHAPTER 15

The Method

Nelson Mandela is widely regarded as one of history’s great leaders—enough that if the Nobel Committee hadn’t awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize, you would have said that they messed up, not him. Yet before winning the prize and becoming the father of a nation, he advocated violence. Many considered him a terrorist. What led to his development into a historic man of peace? What can we learn from that development?

Mandela was born in 1918 in a rural area of South Africa, where the white minority held political power. He was the first in his family to go to school. In 1941, he ran away to Johannesburg, where he became a lawyer and entered politics. He joined the African National Congress (ANC), a group promoting African unity and opposing European imperialism, and began moving up its ranks.

In 1948, the white-only South African government legislated apartheid—racist policies severely limiting the rights and freedom of nonwhites. The ANC and Mandela radicalized in response, joining with South Africa’s Indian community to implement Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent civil disobedience. The government responded with repression and violence. In response, Mandela, continuing to rise as an ANC leader, promoted violent action, although targeting only military and industrial targets, not civilian targets, which he considered terrorism.

After several times capturing and trying him, the government imprisoned him and his conspirators for life in 1964. He spent the next 27 years in prison, much of that time in an 8-foot by 7-foot cell with no plumbing, sleeping on the floor. The state did what it could to break him, including forced hard labor, repeated solitary confinement, and allowing him only one visitor and one letter every six months.

His accomplishments from prison would sound unbelievable except that they happened. As the nation’s conflict grew increasingly polarized and violent, with global support on both sides (notably, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher supporting the apartheid government), Mandela emerged as a global leader. As one illustration of his influence, his seventieth birthday saw a tribute concert in London, watched by 200 million viewers worldwide supporting him. Despite mere reference to him being outlawed in South Africa, by the 1980s he negotiated from prison with South African presidents P. W. Botha and F. W. de Klerk.

Over the next several years he negotiated his unconditional release in 1990. He then soon met with Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth, Pope John Paul II, Fidel Castro, and other global leaders across the political landscape. Internally, he navigated increased factionalism, conflict, polarization, and violence to lead negotiations leading to South Africa’s first free election, mostly on the ANC’s terms. People who met him overwhelmingly remarked that he acted without bitterness, vengefulness, or hatred. His Nobel Peace Prize came in 1993.

In May 1994, at the age of 75, with 63 percent of the vote, Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black president in an inauguration televised to one billion people. To help reconcile the divided nation, he appointed former president de Klerk to Deputy President and instituted the Truth and Reconciliation Committee to expose and start moving past the nation’s violent and racist past. In other words, he put the former apartheid leader—his former jailer—in a top position and granted amnesty to many who enforced it.

A prominent example of how he gained widespread support was by supporting the national rugby team that infamously symbolized apartheid power. Nonwhite South Africans despised the team and the international rugby community had protested and banned them since the 60s. With apartheid over, South Africa hosted the World Cup. In a highly visible and unexpected display, Mandela wore the team jersey to the final. On anyone else the jersey would have remained loathed by nonwhites and perhaps be seen as a token gesture to whites. Instead, when the team came from behind to beat its archrival, New Zealand, his actions helped make the victory for the nation instead of for the white elite.

These are the achievements of a historic master leader, qualitatively more effective and mature than before prison. Of course he developed in prison, but how? What resources did he have? What changed? How did he transition from angry, violent, confrontational, and polarizing to effective, peaceful, magnanimous, and gracious? How did he influence government leaders from prison? How did he learn to navigate and lead groups with conflicting interests, serving them while keeping himself at the forefront? How did he come to work productively with the groups he proposed bombing before without anger? How did he sustain support from allies worried he might sell them out?

What are you reading this book for if not to learn to lead groups to goals while keeping yourself at the forefront, even without institutional authority? If you’ve joined good companies and left bad managers, you’ve labored under managers who didn’t appreciate you and discouraged you. Mandela’s “managers” imprisoned him. He still led them and got their jobs. Still, he was human, like you. While his circumstances made his actions global, his leadership skills would apply anywhere, including in situations you face. If he could lead a president from prison, you can lead your manager.

Most histories recount the observable results of his transformation, but as leaders, our goal is to grow and develop ourselves, not just learn facts. Can we learn to grow like he did? Do we need 27 years in prison for it?

I believe Mandela explained his transformation best in several statements. Although stated at different times, I believe they combine with the Unit 3 exercises to show how anyone can grow as he did, without prison.

In his words, “Before I went to jail, I was active in politics as a member of South Africa’s leading organization—and I was generally busy from 7 a.m. until midnight. I never had time to sit and think.”

We all know the lure of working hard without first thinking, which takes patience and doesn’t produce immediate results. Working long hours can make us feel productive without meaningful results. We don’t distinguish between our feelings of accomplishment and actual accomplishment or between our feelings of effectiveness and actual effectiveness. Feeling accomplished and effective, however unjustified, reinforces our self-righteousness.

He also said, “I was a young man who attempted to make up for his ignorance with militancy.”

The ignorance that led to his militancy wasn’t of facts, history, the law, or anything external. It was of himself and how to understand and influence others. When he learned what worked, he used it, dropping the militancy in favor of understanding, empathy, and compassion, rooted in self-awareness.

These first two statements illustrate a common condition among people with more aspiration and conviction than experience: low self-awareness, leading to self-righteousness and ineffective action.

Then he began to learn the importance of knowing himself:

The first thing is to be honest with yourself. You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself. . . . Great peacemakers are all people of integrity, of honesty, but humility.”

And how did he learn about himself? “Prison life, fortunately, I spent a lot of years, about 18 years with other prisoners, and, as I say, they enriched your soul.

How many of us would describe 27 years of imprisonment and forced hard labor as enriching our souls? Note the commonality in his experience in prison with those in the videos from chapter 14—Victor Frankl, Jean-Dominique Bauby, and Mark Zupan. They made up for physical constraints by increasing their mental freedom and flexibility.

Mandela, again: “I realized that they could take everything from me except my mind and my heart. They could not take those things. Those things I still had control over. And I decided not to give them away.”

He sounds like Victor Frankl, suggesting a common pattern: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

I believe Mandela is saying that his self-awareness came from knowing, in his words, his mind and heart—or, in my words, his emotional system. With everything else taken away and decades to reflect, he could learn them.

I believe this next statement illustrates his mastery of using his emotional system, not just knowing it:

The human body has an enormous capacity for adjusting to trying circumstances. I have found that one can bear the unbearable if one can keep one’s spirit strong, even when one’s body is being tested. Strong convictions are the secret of surviving deprivation. Your spirit can be full even when your stomach is empty.

Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, and Mandela spent time in prison and suffering. As King said in his “I Have A Dream” speech, “Unearned suffering is redemptive.” They led others—tens of millions of people, including presidents and kings—from what seem like powerless positions from an authoritarian perspective. We want to be able to lead others independent of authority, through empathy, compassion, passion, understanding, and so on. Unit 4: Leading Others will show how. First, as these leaders say, you need self-awareness, humility, self-control, and so on.

Do you need prison to gain this self-awareness? Do you need to suffer?

I believe the answer is no.

Most leaders who use civil disobedience trace their practice to Henry David Thoreau—whom King, Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, and others named as an important influence. He wrote about it in his essay Civil Disobedience. During the Mexican-American War of 1846–48, which many considered unjust, he chose not to pay the poll tax, which he felt supported slavery and the war. He didn’t oppose government in general, so he still paid taxes for roads, schools, and so on. The government jailed him in response.

You can see his transformation from one night:

I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did nor for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me. . . . In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand on the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body; just as boys, if they cannot come at some person against whom they have a spite, will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was half-witted . . . and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.

Note his emotions: confidence in himself and pity for the state and his townsmen. You see the same pattern later leaders had: Their confining his body led to him creating mental freedom. He also wrote,

Under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons . . . the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.

In the words of The Model, he changed his beliefs about jail walls and where freedom lay, creating productive emotions he wanted, which created emotional reward. With that transformation, he didn’t suffer. He seemed more amused.

These great leaders were as human as you and I. Their experiences didn’t create new abilities. They revealed the human abilities they already had and that you have, too.

Mandela spent 27 years in prison. Thoreau spent one night.

I suggest that you need zero nights. I believe you need to develop yourself, which takes work, but not that you have to suffer. Learning The Model or creating your equivalent gives you self-awareness, and practicing The Method, which this chapter’s exercise has you do, gives you the skill to change yourself without prison or suffering. I believe you need to master transforming yourself to transform others consistently and effectively. You need to act, not just know facts. Doing The Method enables that mastery. Your first time doing it may not transform you into the father of a nation. Your achievements depend on your outside circumstances, after all, but you will begin developing the skills, should the circumstances arise. You’ll more likely start leading yourself, then your coworkers, your managers, people outside your organization, and so on. Still, there are plenty of national and global problems needing effective leadership to solve. No matter what challenges you want to take on, if they are meaningful, then creating MVIP for yourself and your teams will prepare you to address them. You will see the same mastery in nearly every effective leader. It’s why the simple instruction “know thyself” has stood the test of time and why no leader calls self-awareness unimportant.

Your route to mastery, like Mandela’s, is the same as for the musician who asked how to get to Carnegie Hall: “Practice, practice, practice.”

The Method Exercise

What to Practice for Personal Mastery

In chapter 14, we passively considered the human emotional system. This time, we’ll work with it actively. What better way to work with something than to use it to improve our lives? Since everyone’s emotional system is similar, learning about the one we have most access to—our own—teaches about everyone’s.

Our goal is awareness of and skills with both our emotional system and everyone else’s.

What to Watch

First watch the following two-part videos on The Method, based on my in-person course:

http://spodekacademy.com/bookcourse-videos

Then do the exercise described at the end of the first video, which I describe below.

What to Do

The exercise is to do The Method, as described in depth in the videos and briefly illustrated here, in a situation that matters to you. I recommend doing it with a group of two to four people if you can, but it also works if you do it solo.

First, choose a situation in your life you’d like more emotional reward from. It can be the one from chapter 14 or a different one, ideally something you can change in the time you plan for this exercise (for most, about a week).

0.Know your emotional system, which you learned about in chapter 14.

1.Write out that situation’s environment, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors (which you already did if you use one you wrote in The Model exercise) and your constraints that you won’t or can’t do in such situations.

2.Conceive of new emotions you could have in such situations. I recommend thinking of how you think your role models would feel in similar situations or using your imagination.

3.Conceive of environments, beliefs, and behaviors that will create the new emotions without triggering what you won’t or can’t do.

4.Implement the new environments, beliefs, and behaviors.

When the environments, beliefs, and behaviors synchronize to create the emotion you want and you feel emotional reward, indulge in that feeling to help motivate you to do it again. When they don’t, try to acknowledge it and move on to avoid discouraging yourself.

Example

I used to eat a lot of chips, pretzels, ice cream, and other foods that made me feel unsatisfied, guilty, and out of control. Some hurt my mouth because they were so sugary or salty. It took me years to change my diet to where I’m happy with it, eating a lot more fresh fruits and vegetables. The change could have happened a lot faster had I followed The Method.

If I could go back in time and choose my eating habits, in step 1, I would write the following:

Environment: My home, between meals.

Belief: The standard American diet is healthy. Preparing fresh produce is complicated.

Emotion: Craving, guilt.

Behavior: Snacking on pretzels, chips, ice cream, and such; buying products like them.

I would put some constraints on spending, not eating meat, preparation time, and complication to prepare food.

In step 2, I might take a cue from people who seem to enjoy food and feel satisfied from it:

New emotion: Satisfaction and joy

Then my target would have been emotions I like instead of what I used to imagine of fresh produce: confusion.

In step 3, I would have benefited from someone like me today suggesting the following:

Environment: My home, between meals.

Belief: The American diet is unhealthy. Preparing fresh produce is simple and delicious with experience.

Behavior: Snacking on fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables; buy them and not packaged foods until I learn the basic skills of shopping for and preparing fresh produce.

In step 4, I would have done what I came up with in step 3. In fact, I did, but the transition took years. I love my current diet, but the transition could have taken weeks and given me years more of joy and satisfaction and less of craving and guilt, saving money and time in the process.

Changing a snacking habit isn’t the biggest life change you can imagine, but the point of this chapter’s exercise is to practice on something simple but meaningful. Some first applications that people choose include being more punctual, waking up earlier, interrupting others less, improving first impressions, exercising more, and things like that. Advanced applications include improving relationships with managers, improving relationships with parents, managing anger, and more complex, long-lasting changes, but I recommend developing experience and skill by practicing in simpler areas before advancing to them.

Many students tell me that breaking down situations through The Model into environments, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors enabled them to describe difficult challenges, sometimes for the first time, without creating emotional intensity that complicates the conversation. As a result, they find themselves able to act calmly and productively, with subtlety and nuance, on issues they felt anxiety, shame, or other discouraging emotion about before. Then they find themselves able to receive helpful advice, find solutions they feel confident about, and act on them.

When people ask you for advice, you may also find it helpful to apply The Method to help solve their problems. Breaking down their issues into their environments, beliefs, emotions, and behaviors may help them calmly and productively, with more subtlety and nuance and less anxiety, shame, or other discouraging emotion.

Doing the exercise takes effort. If you’re not in jail or suffering, you have to impose the discipline yourself. You may feel awkward or even fake while doing it. Again, fake it ’til you make it. (That phrase is a strategy. Can you find its underlying belief?) You feel fake because you are changing something about yourself. By your old standards, the new you is fake. The point of The Method is to create a new you more consistent with your emotional system based on greater self-awareness. Some parts of you take time to catch up.

Beginning with self-awareness means sticking through that challenge, which will create more genuineness and authenticity for being more consistent with your emotions, by design.

Your first transformations may be hard, but experience will soon make later ones rewarding.

Stop reading. Put the book down and do the exercise.

Post-Exercise

In its book, HBR’s 10 Must-Reads on Leadership, Harvard Business Review included an article by Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas called “The Crucibles of Leadership.” Bennis and Thomas interviewed many leaders and found that they shared a common type of experience. They wrote,

We came to call the experiences that shape leaders “crucibles,” after the vessels medieval alchemists used in their attempts to turn base metals into gold. For the leaders we interviewed, the crucible experience was a trial and a test, a point of deep self-reflection that forced them to question who they were and what mattered to them. It required them to examine their values, question their assumptions, hone their judgment. And, invariably, they emerged from the crucible stronger and more sure of themselves and their purpose—changed in some fundamental way.

Do you need a crucible to lead? They imply you do, but offer no proof, only supporting examples. I suspect they didn’t know any other way to develop deep self-reflection than externally imposed trials and tests. Just because many effective leaders experienced crucibles—even if every effective leader did—doesn’t prove that you need one. You only need one counterexample to prove that you don’t.

I recommend finding counterexamples that work for you. For me, a personal hero is Steve Martin, whom I consider a leader beyond “just” being a comedian, actor, writer, musician, playwright, producer, entrepreneur, and more. He led by becoming the first comedian to tour nationally to sold-out arenas. As Comedy Central’s number six all-time greatest standup comic, he has influenced decades of performers—actors, musicians, writers, comedians, thought leaders, and more—not to mention his fans. Movies he directed, produced, and acted in have made the better part of a billion dollars. He won a Kennedy Center Honor, a Mark Twain Award, and an Honorary Academy Award.

His memoir, Born Standing Up, recounts someone who knew some things he liked and kept at them with discipline and diligence his whole life. He refined and developed his passions iteratively, but I don’t think he endured a crucible. I don’t mean to compare him with Nelson Mandela or others who went through crucibles. I only mean to show how one counterexample can change your model for what it takes to master leadership, or at least did with me. I would be overjoyed to achieve “only” at Steve Martin’s level.

In any case, what constitutes a crucible depends on the person’s beliefs. Someone born a Rockefeller might have so much material wealth and security that no one else would see them as having problems, let alone crucibles. But from their perspectives, they might still have to struggle. Siddhartha Gautama was born a prince yet went through struggles that led him to create his models and methods for personal development. His followers call him the Buddha and his practice Buddhism. Meanwhile, some people who live through what others consider great suffering consider their travails just regular parts of life. Use what works to help you develop and grow.

If you feel trapped and unappreciated at your workplace or in your relationships, you can consider your situation a crucible if seeing it that way helps, or not if it doesn’t. Just because you aren’t being physically tortured with hard labor or imprisoned doesn’t mean your pain isn’t as real to you as anyone else’s is to them. The point isn’t to compare suffering but to create a belief that helps you achieve your goals, in this case to help you become a leader.