When the going gets tough, I write haiku. Personal haiku, political haiku, random haiku - I find it soothing to take something overwhelming and pack up all its punch in only 17 syllables. This week, I’ve been seeing the effects of fear everywhere I look, including the mirror. These 6 haiku are as much for me as for my clients and friends. Hope you enjoy them.

#1
Can’t do this, Can’t do
that. Start, stop, start, stop. Afraid.
That’s no way to lead.

#2
Start strong, keep going.
Shadows follow, never lead.
They cannot catch you.

#3
Do too little, do
too much, gossip, distance, blame.
Anxiety sucks.

#4
Tired? Stuck? Fear has
you. Get up! Energy comes
from movement, not thought.

#5
Wanting to rush through
I slow down. Key points I miss
now bite me later.

#6
Natural to push,
threaten, shout in times like these.
Counterproductive.

After the exciting beginning comes the inevitable complication. Isn’t that the way? It’s the hero’s journey. It’s always the hero’s journey.

After you resolve the initial complication comes the really big complication: The collaborative organizational change project where you realize that you’d underestimated just how little your managers know about sharing leadership. Oops. The new car that doesn’t fit in the garage. Oh, no! You don’t have time to do it the way you’d envisioned it. Uh-oh. You fall a little less in love with the whole idea. If the really big complication is really, really big, you reach a decision point: declare it a failure and end it, pretend it’s working and find someone to blame, or figure out how to move forward. This latter option always involves transformation. Of you, the hero.

I’m pretty sure this is the really big complication: When we realize we’re about to be inconvenienced. Mightily.

Many change projects founder here. We start arguing for the problem (”they’ll never…” “we should have realized…”) or decide that something was wrong with the whole idea (”well, THAT was a mistake”).

It’s as though no one has read The Two Towers. Do you remember it? It’s the middle book in JRR Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. Reading it is like being flayed alive. The fellowship is split, the initial pact spoiled, flaws and hidden agendas revealed. All the fun is gone and all seems lost. The book details - excruciatingly - the separate journeys of the characters. There are long marches through barren landscapes, deprivation, hunger, terror, attacks and remarkable encounters. Everyone undergoes a transformation. Destroying the ring is that big an idea, that compelling a purpose.

Whatever you’re involved in may not be as big as destroying an evil ring. But I bet it’s important. The middle of anything is always like The Two Towers. The mistake we make is thinking that something is wrong because it’s no longer easy or simple. We pull back and then wonder what’s wrong with them. We get tired.

The middle of anything is about recommitting to it. Not to what’s wrong with it, but to the ideal behind it - to the purpose. It’s fine to change the details, or lop off entire sections. It’s fine to scale back. Just don’t equate the discomfort with being wrong or failing. Don’t panic. You’re not failing. This is normal. You just look for the next toehold and lean into it. This is how you find out the true nature of what you’ve committed to. And how committed you are. And to what. Is your commitment to the way you initially decided to do it, and now that that’s not working, you’re outta there? Or is there something bigger that still holds you and enables you to re-vision your involvement. The only way to fail at this point is to quit.

My ukulele was no different. I bought it to have fun, to enjoy its beautiful sound. I was seduced by that sound. I conveniently underplayed the nerve damage in my left hand that’s kept me from playing guitar for the last 16 years, although I’ve tried many times, and been to many physical therapists. I’d been a classical guitar major in college, and I’ve never stopped missing that sound. I thought: The uke only has 4 strings - surely I can play it.

And, for two weeks, I could: I dove right into difficult jazz and classical arrangements because that’s what I loved. It was fun, it was easy, it was…OUCH! My left elbow was on fire. Physical therapy seemed a logical next step, but not for treatment. I needed a decision: Can this left hand be rehabilitated, or do I need to learn to play with my other hand?

Ada Wells, an extraordinary PT, tested the pincer grip in my left hand. I failed miserably and the fire in my elbow intensified. My right hand passed the test easily, with no pain. Now my decision was: What do I want to do?

Took me a couple of days to decide, but I committed to making those sounds I love, and let go of the way I thought I’d get it. I restrung the uke and started learning to play left-handed. I’m quite a bit further from my goal of making sounds I enjoy, but I’m noticing something unexpected. I used to love playing guitar; in college, and later as a music therapist, it became my job and much of the pleasure drained out of it. Now that that I’m a beginner again, I can let go of all that performance pressure. Mostly I sound terrible, but what can you expect?

A recent post on Liz Strauss’s Successful-Blog got me thinking about giving feedback. She poses the question: “What do you do when someone asks your opinion of their blog, and you think that it’s really bad?” We’ve all had this experience on some topic or other, and it can be an awkward moment. It’s so easy to wound with our words, and yet it can feel so awful when we don’t tell someone the truth.

My most painful memory of this comes from an incident early in my career. I was managing my first organizational change project and was in way over my head. The goal was to get physicians involved with information technology (IT). This was long before IT was cool. IT was considered an annoyance. This was when email was brand new and most people were still afraid of it. Let’s say that physicians were not, um, bought in to the relevance of information technology in the practice of medicine.

One doctor on the project was just past retirement age, and excited about this project. He was given a central role on the physician team, and then ignored. It became clear to me he was being given something to do while being excluded from the real action. It was clear to him, too. And, I could see something he couldn’t: That he was not respected by his peers, which made him less than ideal for a key role on the project. We spend a fair amount of time together (as I was being excluded too, we were often thrown together), and one day, he turned to me, his face as open as a child’s and said: “Will you please tell me what’s going on? I know I’m being given busywork. If I’m not the right person for this project, I wish someone would tell me. Will you tell me?”

I’d like to say that my heart melted with compassion and I found the courage to say all I’ve written above in a clear, loving way.

I would so like to say that.

Instead, I froze. Deer-in-the-headlights froze. Eventually, I stammered, “I don’t know,” and looked at the floor. He looked even more miserable. The moment passed and we moved on to an increasingly awkward relationship. Eventually, he left the project.

It’s been 15 years, and I’ve never forgotten his face or how I failed to give him what he asked me for: The kindness of telling him the truth. Up until that moment, I had these two things be mutually exclusive, and I lurched between honesty and kindness. Ever since that moment, I think they are entwined. Kindness isn’t served by lying, and being honest need not be cruel.

I’ve spent the intervening years - all 15 of them - learning how to bring both truthfulness and kindness to giving feedback. I’ve found that this is facilitated by making sure the feedback is useful to the other person. Useful, honest and kind is the braid that makes feedback strong, worth both giving and receiving.

So, I was ready for Liz’s question. Here’s what I wrote in response:

In the scenario you painted, Liz, they asked for my feedback. That means I’d give it to them, but like this:

1. Tell me what you’re wanting to accomplish with your blog - purpose, tone, audience, future plans.

2. In light of that, here’s what’s working and you should continue/build on.

3. And, in light of #1, here’s what needs changing because it isn’t serving your purpose.

4. Here are some blogs to look at that have a similar purpose for some models of what works.

It’s them asking for feedback that gives me permission, and it’s #1 that gives me my boundaries and helps me keep my unwanted advice in check - not to mention my judgements. Having them tell me their goal sets up the boundaries ahead of time and keeps me truthful, constructive *and* kind.

And, if anybody sees that doctor, would you let him know I’m finally ready for him?

Sit down and get comfy, because today’s post is all about focus. Your mission is watch this 90-second video and follow the instructions therein.

And the Answer is…
How did that go? Not too difficult was it? You just had to focus tightly enough so you could see only what the white team did. In the book, The Open Focus Brain, that’s called narrow, objective focus. It’s the mode we do most of our work - really most of our life - in: We focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else. Pretty soon, we think what’s in our field of vision, or our belief system, is all there is. We’re convinced there are no other options. I don’t know about you, but I had trouble seeing the moonwalking bear the second time too, even though I was focusing on it. I just couldn’t believe it was there. Now, after a little practice, I can’t not see the bear.

How this looks in real life
I was at a wedding over the weekend, and the bride and groom were from wildly different backgrounds. I’ll give you a snapshot of what I mean: She sings opera and teaches classical voice; he’s gone to The Soup and Burning Man from the beginning. Got the picture?

At the reception, a woman both stylishly dressed and tastefully adorned in glittering, real rocks sidled up to another, similarly adorned woman and said in a clubby, confidential tone, “You must be a friend of the bride’s.” To which woman number 2 responded, “Oh no - I met the bride only recently but I’ve known the groom for years. We studied middle eastern frame drumming together.” The conversation faltered and woman number 1 drifted away.

I think she wasn’t ready to see the moonwalking bear. Like me with the video, she couldn’t believe in it.

Practice makes permanent
It seems like magic, but seeing the bear and being able to count the white team’s passes is a matter of practice. To practice expanding your focus so it can encompass more complexity, try “accessing your ignorance” (thanks to Edgar Schein) Instead of going into every situation looking for confirmation of what you know to be so, include what you don’t know in your awareness. Better yet, court it.

Try this
1. Walk up to the people you don’t know in a room and start an awkward conversation based on what you don’t know about them. Ah, c’mon - it’s fun!

2. Talk to the CEO and ask an ignorance-based question. Here’s one that always works, because you can’t know the answer unless you read minds: “What question do you wish someone had asked/would ask you?” You can’t know what question the CEO would love to answer, or wonders about, so it’s an ignorant question, not a stupid one.

3. Watch the video again (and again) and widen your focus so you can see the bear as you count the white team’s passes.  It took me three tries to count 13 passes and see the bear’s entire dance.  Tensing up to do it didn’t work - I succeeded by relaxing and allowing myself to see it all.  It felt great.

4. Your suggestion is welcome - what have you done to shift your focus and see something differently?

This week has been full of interesting conversations. First Liz Strauss got me thinking about what is it I really do for clients. I think what I really do is make people shiny. Then we shine up the team together, which shines up the organization. It’s mostly a matter of reconnecting with our brilliance and making it visible to one another.

This means I have to keep myself shiny and bright, which means I need a little help from my brilliant friends and colleagues.

So a few days later, I’m talking to Marjorie Weingrow. She directs the SAGE Scholars program at UC Berkleley, a fabulous, inspiring program I’m looking to get involved with. We were musing about deeply embedded prejudices and how we all have them. Whether we want them or not. No matter how much work we’ve done to eliminate them. All of us. Every dang one of us.

Prejudice: It’s not just for white men anymore. It may be the most equal-opportunity thing about us.

Marjorie and I got to talking about the legion of things that can set us off: race and gender, sure; ethnicity and religion, check; but, wait - there’s so much more! What about more subtle, less obvious things: the way someone looks, or talks, or the position they hold in an organization? What about the way you don’t seem to listen to me when I talk to you? What about the way I dim myself slightly to be in your presence because you’re an executive?

You snub me in the hallway and I decide you’re a snob. I start ignoring you - Ha! I’ll show you!

You wear a black suit, and talk fast using big words, so I decide you’re an empty suit. I start talking you down behind your back - I must warn others about your callow ways!

You grew up in the American South, England, Pakistan, the wrong side of the tracks, with a silver spoon in your mouth. We all know what that means. No? Then let me fill you in…

Here’s the thing though: When I start reacting to one tiny aspect of you, I can start to mistake it for all of you. Pretty soon I’m interacting not with you, but with my assumptions about you. There you are, shining in the way only you can, and I can’t see a thing but my belief about executives or union members or people who wear black. You may be reaching out to me, you may be asking as clearly as you can, but I don’t respond. I can’t hear you - I can only hear your suit, your title, your status.

I have the most trouble with this when it’s triggered by something so tiny it barely registers - a loud speaking voice, a mannerism or gesture. But register it does - then it worms around in me to the point where I don’t dare question my assumptions about you, because they’re all I’ve got. Soon, I’ll have no choice about how to react to you. As a result, I get smaller, dimmer.

Yuck. Or, more accurately, STUCK. And we all do it. I sometimes think it’s the one thing we have in common with everyone we meet. The one thing we can count on.

One of these tiny, potentially wormy assumptions popped up the other day. I mentioned I lived in a houseboat to a client. What I meant as throw-away comment brought our conversation to a full stop:

“A houseboat? I thought you lived in a gated community.”

Which is true, just not in the way she meant it: “Well, yeah - we keep the gate locked so no one wanders onto the docks and falls through them. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

Silence, then laughter. I got to tell her how funky houseboat living is, and why I love it. She got to tell me how surprised she was, and how delighted. Our conversation got more spacious, and our relationship more real and powerful. We got shiny with each other.

When he was very young, my older brother used to wake up each morning and vow to start his life over as a new, improved version of himself: Someone kinder, smarter, and more moral. He was so earnest, so sincere, so handsome, so doomed.

What I love about him is how smart he was, even then. No matter how forcefully he declared his intention, no matter how deeply he meant it, he never achieved it. It’s tempting to think that’s because he wasn’t good enough or strong enough or disciplined enough.

But I think the opposite is true. I think that he never became that improved version of himself because he didn’t need to. He already was that. The proof is in the resolution: because he was so moral and so good, he wanted to be better. His desire to start over in order to be a better person was a manifestation of how good he already was, not a deficiency he had.

In some of us, the mind won’t be convinced of this. Instead, it hijacks all that goodness and began to blackmail us with the fear that we’ll never be good enough.

It’s exhausting, being nattered at like that. It’s exhausting to keep working at something that never feels done. Our self-improvement takes on a driven, haunted quality.

When we overuse any strength, it becomes a weakness. Self-improvement can be a fetish, something we just can’t get enough of, even though it never satisfies. Which makes me wonder: Are we being too hard on ourselves? How do you know when you’ve arrived at “good?” How do you know that you left “good” in the first place?

According to Will Bowen, author of A Complaint-Free World, 4-8 months is the average time it takes to go 21 consecutive days without criticizing, complaining or gossiping. Which makes sense because, every time you mess up, you’ve got to go back to day 1. I accepted the complaint-free challenge on Nov 5, 2007, 3 months ago. And I promised to report back to you, my faithful readers.

I haven’t yet made it 21 days; 4 days in a row is my record (although I’m back to day one since I started paying attention to the primaries and the candidates). Here’s how it’s gone so far:

At first I feared becoming someone who spouted politically correct phrases oddly devoid of meaning, a sort of stepford human, a walking corporate memo, an optimiton. When I achieved a complaint-free day, it would be followed by a negative eruption the next morning over something trivial. For instance, I’d wake up and moan “Oh great, it’s raining.” Before accepting the challenge, this was something I never did, as I’m not much of a talker in the morning.

I was stunned at how often I complained. I was very, very focused on that 21-day goal, but not at all sure I could achieve it. Perhaps it would help to clearly define the terms. I spent a great deal of energy discerning the difference between a complaint and stating a preference, and the precise definition of gossip (current favorite: “hearing something you like about someone you don’t”). I wondered if it was legal to think the complaint but not say it.

From there I got…quiet. For days at a time, I couldn’t think of a thing to say, a way to say it, or a reason to figure either of those out. Life was a silent retreat. Some days I didn’t even leave the house. At gatherings someone would ask me about the purple bracelet and, after I explained, they’d edge away, muttering about how they couldn’t talk to me. I knew just how they felt.

Alone with my thoughts, I started noticing how relentlessly self-critical they were. Nothing I did was good enough for me. Whatever it was, I was doing it wrong.

It was about this time my therapist suggested I treat going complaint-free as an experiment: “You don’t know how this is going to come out. Just see where it goes.”

That got the inner critic off my back. I began to wonder what it would be like to be someone who didn’t want to complain or criticize. Someone like the Dalai Lama who, when asked why he wasn’t bitter about having lost everything to the Chinese, replied: “Having taken everything from me, shall I also give them my mind?”

It seemed to me that the Dalai Lama wasn’t just countering each negative in his life with a sunny, positive affirmation, nor was he hiding in the house. He was doing something else, something much more muscular. But what?

This was the right question to ask, apparently, as it ushered in a new stage which I’d have to call personal growth on crack. I’ve never been more aware of my thoughts, my emotions and the utter uselessness of believing I know how anyone’s story should turn out, including my own. This makes it easier to leave all that alone and just be present with the person I’m talking or listening to. And, what a relief!

It started with noticing how the temptation to complain, criticize or gossip stemmed from fear. Once I saw that my inner critic was terrified, he became much easier to befriend. When that was working better, I started losing interest in all things negative. Which is when the resources started showing up. Things I hadn’t asked for. Things I wouldn’t have known to ask for. Like the conversation on how one tiny negative cancels a positive every time on Liz Strauss’s blog.

Two lines in her original post riveted me:

“…when we hold a negative thought we’ve already chosen sides.
Even the tiniest negative makes it about me, not about where we might go.”

And, her response to a comment of mine about how for me, negativity is always the result of fear, made a light-bulb go off:

“Any time that I start to put a negative spin on things, it’s because I’m turning over power and control to someone other than me. I’m making them more, larger, better, bigger, and important than I am.

When I endow that someone with humanity, life becomes easier again.”

It took me the better part of a day to metabolize this thought and the cascade that followed. The upshot is this: Stuck people stick people. When I’m stuck, it’s because I’m not endowing myself with humanity. I’m too busy holding myself to some impossible standard to extend you the possibility of being human.

I love this idea of humanity making life easier. So, my current plan is to endow myself with enough humanity that I’ll have plenty to give away. I’m punching my ticket and letting myself into the human clubhouse, warts and all. And. I’m leaving the door open so you can join me.

I’m imagining for some of you, this is already easy. I could use your help. How do you make it OK for yourself and others to be human?

You know how there seems to be a lot of complaining in meetings? Like when someone proposes an idea, someone else discounts it, pointing out everything that is wrong with it? Or, when trying to resolve a situation that’s really stuck, the finger-pointing can get quite intense? The recriminations can even begin to sound a little crazy: “You never do any work.” “You’ve never bothered to show up on time,” and so on. Perhaps my least favorite interpersonal situation involves gossip: talking about a group or person who isn’t present. “Ain’t it awful how…”

The typical strategies involve taking the high road: inviting the complainer to make a proposal of their own, enforcing ground rules about how to talk about the situation (focus on the problem not the person), pick up the phone and get the gossipee on the line. These are excellent strategies and I use them all the time.

But when a person, dyad or group is really, really stuck in their story of victimhood, injury and powerlessness, I invite them to lean into it and hold nothing back. I want to hear how awful it is. Except they have to do it while keeping their tongue pressed against the back of their bottom teeth.

It’s called talking funny, and it’s impossible to do this for very long without laughing. It’s impossible to stay stuck when you’re laughing. The cramp in your brain eases, and the thoughts start to flow. Your IQ rises like a balloon full of helium.

(You can test this right now. Go get your journal. Find a page full of self-pity. Now read it out loud, keeping your tongue glued to the inside of your bottom teeth. See?)

Possible uses: 1) Your company is about to fail and you’re out of ideas. Have a meeting to discuss the situation and have everyone talk funny. 2) Your co-worker has just conrnered you to complain about someone else. You say, “Tell me all about it, sweetie - but first put your tongue against your bottom teeth and keep it there.” 3) You’ve grown to hate your co-manager. You find yourself in a meeting and it all comes out. Let it rip - but plant that tongue first. 4) That other department just isn’t respecting you - they keep giving you impossible deadlines. Plant your tongue and let it rip.

After the laughter abates, you can get on with the real business at hand - you can resolve the conflict, plan the come-back or whatever else needs doing. You’ll have more oxygen in your brain and more brain cells to work with. It will be much easier and refreshing. Try it and let me know how it works for you.

When I first picked up a guitar in junior high, I loved everything about it: The way it looked, the way it nestled in my lap, and the way it sounded when I strummed that first chord. I couldn’t wait to get home, shut myself in my room and play until my mom knocked on my door to announce dinner.

Playing guitar was something I did in private. No one at school knew. No one was grading me, or demanding I spend 2 hours a night on it. I had no goal, and no performance date to practice for - it was just me, the guitar and the pleasure it gave me.

As a guitar major in college, my ego moved in to my practice room. I thought I needed its help. Everything I did was under scrutiny. I wasn’t practicing enough, I wasn’t serious, I wasn’t dedicated, I wasn’t talented enough, did I intend to perform it that way? The guitar went from being my source of joy to being my ball and chain.

My ego turned out to be quite the harpy. Fueled by the terror of failure, I found myself thinking I should be practicing all the time. Like when I was eating, or sleeping, or in the shower. No matter how well I played something, it wasn’t good enough. No matter how long I practiced, it wasn’t long enough. I still loved everything about the guitar, and the music I was learning was heaven.

The problem was the clipboards. Each time I performed, my teachers would listen for the first few lines, then start scribbling their feedback on the clipboards they carried. My ego became more frenzied and insistent.

Which must be why I came home with a banjo kit in my junior year. I’d never built an instrument before, and I didn’t know much about the banjo, but I loved its mahogany neck and shell. I decided to oil finish it, sanding against the porous grain to fill it particle by particle. My father came into the basement to help, but could not fathom why I was using such a laborious method. I wanted to feel the mahogany grow smooth in imperceptible increments, and watch it take on luster one lumen at a time. He wanted to finish it in an afternoon. He left muttering and shaking his head.

My ego could not get a toehold either, and left me in peace. Eventually, I had a fine-sounding 5-string banjo all tuned up and ready to go. I had no goals for it. I told no one at school about it. Since I wasn’t concerned about learning to play it, I’d pluck on it a little before I went to sleep, just to enjoy the sound. Lights-out got later each night, but I always went to bed grinning.

I don’t know how I knew to do it, but I’d built my ego a vacation home, right in the midst of all that pressure. A place my ego could wear plaid and do a terrible job splitting logs to burn in the big, smoky fireplace. A place where I could reach new depths as a banjo player. I loved it there.

I’ve been noticing the pressure building in my life over the last couple of years, so over the holidays, I built another vacation home for my ego: I’m using a kid’s book, Mark Kistler’s Draw Squad, to learn to draw. The rules are simple: 1. No erasers. 2. No pressure. 3. No results. When I get too wrapped up in drawing a perfectly straight line, I draw with my other hand. When I start going too slowly, focusing on getting it right, I switch from pencil to pen and draw twice as fast.

Just thinking about it makes me smile.

Happy New Year. It’s good to be back on my weekly schedule.

Does your ego have a vacation home? Tell me about it.

I love the most recent post on Ask a Manager. In it, Manager deftly mines the results of a Cornell study on incompetent people for excellent advice to managers. Bottom line: the incompetent are too incompetent to recognize their own shortcomings, so you must be explicit and specific with your feedback. I won’t repeat the rest of AaM’s post here. It’s excellent, short and well worth a read.

In fact, go read it now, then come right back. I want to tell you how to know when your feedback has hit the mark. After all, you don’t want to be heavy-handed or rude, and you do want to have an effect. Knowing about the normal response to feedback helps you gauge your own behavior. Knowing that you have to stick with it all the way through each of the responses below helps you not quit too soon.

(I’m indebted to the late Brendan Reddy and his partner, Chuck Phillips of Reddy-Phillips for the information that follows. Not only did they teach it in a seminar, they indavertently demonstrated it with each other right in front of us all, and had the good grace to laugh about it.) The person receiving the feedback responds in pretty much this order:

1. First, they reverse blame. The most famous public instance sounds like this “You should have spoken up sooner, Anita Hill.” Reversing blame means you use some sort of magical thinking to make the giver of feedback responsible for your behavior. In the world of work, it might be: “You didn’t tell me I was supposed to get that in this Thursday.”

2. They intellectualize or minimize the effect of their actions. “Well, how often does this happen, really?” “It’s no big deal.” “I don’t think anyone noticed.” “Studies show that .01% lead in drinking water is safe, so how big a deal is a momentary spike of 200? We caught it right away.”

3. They argue intent versus effect. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you in front of your boss and co-workers. I think that story about you and the diaper pail makes you sound more human.” Or, “That was your boss? Oh…I never meant to imply there was anything shady about that deal. You have to believe me.”

Of course they didn’t mean to – the fact is they did. Feedback is never about someone’s intent – they are the expert on that. It’s always about the effect they’ve had on you – and you are the expert on that. Validate their good intent, and separate it from the bad effect on you. Stick with it until you hear them say “I can see how that would have been embarrassing/might have ended your career here.”

4. They defend or agree with you. Which is the same thing. Defending goes like this: “That’s not what happened at all!” Agreeing sounds like this: “Yeah, I know. I always do that. I’m just not someone who can be on time.”

In either case, you get the feeling of elusiveness. There is no connection, no give and take. In the defensive reaction, there is rigidity or rejection and no interest in strengthening the relationship; in agreeing there is collapse and no interest in strengthening the relationship.

The situation would seem dire and you might give up right here if you didn’t know that the next predictable response to feedback is:

5. Listening/hearing. Listening always asks for more information or offers a paraphrase that shows they got it - really got it. And from that comes learning, a renegotiated agreement and a strengthened relationship.

I have this theory: I think when we get a strong reaction like any of the first four above, we begin to think we’re doing it wrong, and we stop. But that’s not necessarily so. Even when you’re doing it right, this is the path the brain takes on its way to learning. Who knew?