Hi, I'm Joe Crosby. And in this video, it's my pleasure to talk to you about self differentiated leadership. Now to understand this model of leadership, you have to begin with Dr. Marie Bowens concept of self differentiation. There are three core elements to self differentiation. The first is the capacity to separate your thoughts from your emotions or feelings. Now, that might sound like a simple thing, but in emotionally intense situations.

It's easy for these to become what Bowen called fused. So that for instance, I think I'm being judged in a harsh manner. I immediately have emotions triggered by that defensiveness fear, anger, the emotions start to run my thinking, so that everything I now focus on with my cognitive brain is like my defense. Or I'm hyper alert to further criticism. So in a moment like that the thoughts in the feelings have become fused together. The next thought triggers the next feeling and so on.

It's it's important to be able to calm your system, take a deep breath, and separate out. Okay, so I think this is what was said or done. Here's what I'm feeling. Now, what do I want to do? Because I don't have to be driven by either my thoughts or my feelings if I start thinking about them in a more careful way. So right away When you start separating and thinking and differentiating, you become more thoughtful, calmer, and less reactive.

So that's part of what Mr. Bowen is trying to convey in this theory. The second is to be able to separate the past from the present. So we are wired, we have the hippocampus, right in the in the primitive brain area, in our brain structure. The hippocampus has all the emotional memories from the very beginning from when the time when you were a very small and dependent being. And you were dependent of course on larger people, whoever took care of you at that point. The most difficult moments are stored in the hippocampus just in terms of emotional memory.

So the in the present you If there's a moment, for instance, with an authority figure where you start to feel like a little child, you think they're talking down to you, the feelings are triggering the thoughts, then that's a moment where the emotional intensity will go way up, because you're being flooded by past memory, past emotional memory that has perhaps only a small amount to do with the present experience and with the person you're with. So anytime you have intense emotion, it's wise to take a deep breath and try to separate Well, what's this really got to do with the current situation with this current person with me and my reactions to them, and how much of this has to do with stuff I'm carrying from the past, or perhaps even past experiences with that very person. I may have had an experience where I've developed some mistrust.

Now, am I going to carry that into every future interaction with that human being? I don't have to. But it's only going to shift if I'm conscious about it and try to separate or differentiate the past from the present. However, as the person being in the present, how do I want to be? The third is separating self from other. Again, if there's fusion, then let's say I come home and my spouse is mad and I am mad that they are mad you.

It's fusion of emotionality. I can hopefully take a deep breath and not get wrapped up in a emotive response, but rather make sure that I at least give the other space to convey whatever they think they need. Need to convey and then start where I want to start. Rather than just being reactive to the other. You made me mad. That's a reactive statement that's fusion of self and other that's blaming the other for your own emotional state.

Differentiation is taking responsibility for where I am understanding where the other is. But not either absolutely rejecting it out of a reactive instinct or absolutely caving into it. I fusion of self and other leads to groupthink leads to passivity in relationships or leads to the the opposite extreme of complete rejection. If I only defined myself by rejecting something else, I'm still fused with other thing I haven't actually found my own path in life. Okay, so that's the simple concepts of self differentiation, which I hope you get actually takes, I think a lifetime. human relationships have their own tendency towards staying the same.

That's where homeostasis is, is when the tendency of systems to stay the same. It's like a thermostat. And I in one organization that I worked in, I was part of the leadership team. When a new person came in from outside the organization to be part of that team. They would often say something like, well, you know that we did things this way where I was, and I don't think it you know, I think that makes more sense than what I see here. And there would be a moment of silence a moment which you Marie Bowen would say was the emotional field being activated through the entire room, you know how you're in a group and people, suddenly things become lighter and the whole group is lighter, things become more chance.

The whole group is more tense. We are more wired together emotionally than many people have come to believe. So juke there's the moment of emotional intensity, there's a moment of silence in the meeting. There's a freeze moment. And then somebody says something like to the to the new member of the management team. Well, you just don't understand how we do things around here.

Something like that. Or you just don't have experience with our type of organization. Essentially a defense and you In that moment of small tension, you know, maybe big tension, but there's tension. There is the unintended, unspoken invitation for the new person to get into line with the program and stop making waves. And so that is the emotional field in action. You know, once the moment passes, if the person's compliant, you things calm down again, or perhaps they persist long enough for people to calmly start to join them and understand them.

Of course, that would be the ideal. So there's this whole theory of it being a self in a system, differentiating yourself in a system. How do you truly be yourself in whatever relationships you're in? That's what self differentiation is about.