Belonging cues possess three basic qualities: 1. Energy: They invest in the exchange that is occurring 2. Individualization: They treat the person as unique and valued 3. Future orientation: They signal the relationship will continue
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death. ANAÏS NIN, AMERICAN DIARIST
“I am not what has happened to me,” taught Carl Jung. “I am what I choose to become.” But choosing requires knowing. It requires knowing how what happened to us influences the choices we made and continue to make. Again and again I ask my clients, “How are you complicit in creating the conditions of your lives that you say you don’t want?”
Now, success depended on his ability to interpret and absorb the unwritten rules of the court; to be able to follow the precepts of ‘courtesie’ (‘courtesy’, or quite literally ‘how to behave at court’).
The Second Amendment is one sentence. It reads in its entirety: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
The only core element of the ritual that was virtually universal in the twelfth century was dubbing. Derived from the French word ‘adouber’ (to arm), this meant literally to invest someone with a weapon, in most cases by belting (or girding) a sword to his body. For men like William, it seems to have been the receipt of these two objects, the knightly belt and sword, which signified their transformation into knights. The dubbing might be followed by one final act – the ‘collée’ – a form of ritualised blow to the body that could vary from a light, almost genteel, tap on the shoulder, to a forceful cuff to the head. Its origins and meaning remain obscure, one theory suggesting that the strike was supposed to remind a warrior of his duties, another arguing that this symbolised the last blow a knight would receive without retaliation. It would be a century before the ‘collée’ was typically delivered to the shoulder with the flat of a sword blade – the classic image of ‘dubbing’, now immortalised in modern imagination and still enacted by the English monarchy when conferring a knighthood.
Learning to lead ourselves is hard because in the pursuit of love, safety, and belonging, we lose sight of our basic goodness and twist ourselves into what we think others want us to be. We move away from the source of our strengths—our core beliefs, the values we hold dear, the hard-earned wisdom of life—and toward an imagined playbook listing the right way to be.
The second surprise is that Jonathan succeeds without taking any of the actions we normally associate with a strong leader. He doesn’t take charge or tell anyone what to do. He doesn’t strategize, motivate, or lay out a vision. He doesn’t perform so much as create conditions for others to perform, constructing an environment whose key feature is crystal clear: We are solidly connected. Jonathan’s group succeeds not because its members are smarter but because they are safer.
Managing transition involves not just whopping financial deals but the simple process of helping people through three phases:
1. Letting go of the old ways and the old identity people had. This first phase of transition is an ending and the time when you need to help people to deal with their losses.
2. Going through an in-between time when the old is gone but the new isn’t fully operational. We call this time the “neutral zone”: it’s when the critical psychological realignments and repatternings take place.
3. Coming out of the transition and making a new beginning. This is when people develop the new identity, experience the new energy, and discover the new sense of purpose that makes the change begin to work.
Because transition is a process by which people unplug from an old world and plug into a new world, we can say that transition begins with an ending and finishes with a beginning.
Once you understand that transition begins with letting go of something, you have taken the first step in the task of transition management. The second step is understanding what comes after the letting go: the neutral zone. This is the psychological no-man’s-land between the old reality and the new one. It is the limbo between the old sense of identity and the new. It is the time when the old way of doing things is gone, but the new way doesn’t feel comfortable yet.
Overall Pentland’s studies show that team performance is driven by five measurable factors: 1. Everyone in the group talks and listens in roughly equal measure, keeping contributions short. 2. Members maintain high levels of eye contact, and their conversations and gestures are energetic. 3. Members communicate directly with one another, not just with the team leader. 4. Members carry on back-channel or side conversations within the team. 5. Members periodically break, go exploring outside the team, and bring information back to share with the others. These factors ignore every individual skill and attribute we associate with high-performing groups, and replace them with behaviors we would normally consider so primitive as to be trivial. And yet when it comes to predicting team performance, Pentland and his colleagues have calculated nothing is more powerful. “Collective intelligence is not that different in some ways than apes in a forest,” Pentland says. “One [ape] is enthusiastic, and that signal recruits others, and they jump in and start doing stuff together. That’s the way group intelligence works, and this is what people don’t get. Just hearing something said rarely results in a change in behavior. They’re just words. When we see people in our peer group play with an idea, our behavior changes. That’s how intelligence is created. That’s how culture is created.”
This one is tempting because small changes are easier to assimilate than big ones. But one change after another is trouble. It’s better to introduce change in one coherent package.
Science has recently discovered, however, that the amygdala isn’t just about responding to danger—it also plays a vital role in building social connections. It works like this: When you receive a belonging cue, the amygdala switches roles and starts to use its immense unconscious neural horsepower to build and sustain your social bonds. It tracks members of your group, tunes in to their interactions, and sets the stage for meaningful engagement. In a heartbeat, it transforms from a growling guard dog into an energetic guide dog with a single-minded goal: to make sure you stay tightly connected with your people. On brain scans, this moment is vivid and unmistakable, as the amygdala lights up in an entirely different way. “The whole thing flips,” says Jay Van Bavel, social neuroscientist at New York University. “The moment you’re part of a group, the amygdala tunes in to who’s in that group and starts intensely tracking them. Because these people are valuable to you. They were strangers before, but they’re on your team now, and that changes the whole dynamic. It’s such a powerful switch—it’s a big top-down change, a total reconfiguration of the entire motivational and decision-making system.” All this helps reveal a paradox about the way belonging works. Belonging feels like it happens from the inside out, but in fact it happens from the outside in. Our social brains light up when they receive a steady accumulation of almost-invisible cues: We are close, we are safe, we share a future.
keep reminding yourself that it isn’t enough to change the situation. You also have to help people make the psychological reorientation that they must make if the change is to work.
Researchers discovered that one particular form of feedback boosted student effort and performance so immensely that they deemed it “magical feedback.” Students who received it chose to revise their papers far more often than students who did not, and their performance improved significantly. The feedback was not complicated. In fact, it consisted of one simple phrase. I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know that you can reach them. That’s it. Just nineteen words. None of these words contain any information on how to improve. Yet they are powerful because they deliver a burst of belonging cues. Actually, when you look more closely at the sentence, it contains three separate cues: 1. You are part of this group. 2. This group is special; we have high standards here. 3. I believe you can reach those standards. These signals provide a clear message that lights up the unconscious brain: Here is a safe place to give effort.
If, on the other hand, the change is already under way, you can find out about losses much more quickly. Simply ask people. “What’s different, now that we have a new X?” “When we did X, what did you have to give up?” “What do you miss since we changed X?”
Of course, threshold moments don’t only happen on day one; they happen every day. But the successful groups I visited paid attention to moments of arrival. They would pause, take time, and acknowledge the presence of the new person, marking the moment as special: We are together now.
Don’t argue with what you hear. In the first place, it will stop the conversation, and you won’t learn any more. In the second place, loss is a subjective experience, and your “objective” view (which is really just another subjective view) is irrelevant. Finally, you’ll just make your task more difficult by convincing people that you don’t understand them—or, worse yet, that you don’t care what they feel and think.
