The Power of the Herd (60 page)

“Vulnerability,” I replied, thrilled that she had made the connection. “Until I met Mocha, I thought that vulnerability was a more complex emotion that only humans had. I thought it was related to the ego, the part of us that hates to step outside of established habits and social controls, all those boxes we create to make life manageable and keep others moving according to predictable patterns.”

Somehow the fact that horses could experience this potentially embarrassing emotion made it easier for Jenna to analyze her own strange response to success in the round pen. “You know,” she said quietly, “when I saw myself as more powerful than my own mother with that horse, I knew that everything was going to change. I wouldn't have any more excuses.”

Jenna realized that she was, first of all, worried about how her family relationships would change if she developed her own strength and autonomy. “I'm the little girl in my family,” she emphasized. “It's irritating sometimes, but I guess some part of me still likes it. I never had to do anything first. And if I had a hard time making a decision, someone else always had an opinion. Most of the time, it was easier to follow their advice.”

“And you could blame someone else if it didn't work out, right?”

Jenna nodded sheepishly. “I never really had to be afraid of people, either,” she continued. “If anyone teased me on the bus, Stan or Charlie put a stop to it, fast. And my oldest brother, Dan, he was quite a star on the high school football team. Even though they all graduated before me, everyone remembered my brothers. No one dared give me a hard time or their ass would be grass, if you know what I mean.”

“Things must be different now at college,” I said. Jenna nodded, a bit more pensively this time.

“The first major decision I ever made on my own was to go to a school that no one else in my family ever went to,” she said. “I was excited to be on my own, but it wasn't what I thought it would be. I know I'm not in any danger. Jeez, I'm not even that far from home. But the other girls in my dorm seem so petty, so gossipy. I really don't like who I become when I'm with them. I guess I don't know how to fit in.”

“What if it's not about compromising who you are to fit in?” I asked. “What if it's about leading your own life and finding kindred spirits along the way?”

“But how can I lead anyone, even just me, when I don't really know who I am or where I'm going, and everyone around me seems to know more than I do?”

“I'm pretty sure, Jenna, that you'll be asking this same question over and over again for the rest of your life —
if
you're willing to really live it.”

Jenna's story is the opening scene of a new hero's journey, one in which people who've had their basic needs met many times over are being asked to redefine power and lead change in the world. Because we must tap resources we don't know we have, expanding our limited palette of habits and preconceived notions, reinventing ourselves and our ways of relating to each other, we stumble, quite predictably, into the murky quagmires of vulnerability, where the vast majority of us panic, scrambling frantically back to solid ground. We don't know who we are and where we're going. As a result, we resist this calling, literally fearing our own power, looking for excuses to shrink back into a childlike existence where all our decisions are easy and often made for us.

Despite the presence of poverty and economic instability throughout the world, the middle class enjoys a level of personal safety and comfort that kings would have envied just a few hundred years ago. Yet we often act as if we're one step away from annihilation whenever we step outside the box. To various degrees, most of us are “barn sour,” a term characterizing horses who don't want to leave their confining yet comfy stalls and rigid, predictable feeding, training, and turn-out schedules.

Vulnerability, that feeling of being cracked out of a protective (yet most certainly limiting) shell, activates a directionless, free-floating fear. As with Mocha, whose eyes rolled back into his head when he was first turned loose on pasture, the body's inclination is right on target. The threat is not
out there.
It's
inside.
In
looking for an external enemy, we lose sight of how safe we actually are, creating needless dramas, tapping into the ghostly presence of pioneers who came before us, people who really
did
have to worry about lions, bears, gun-toting outlaws, and royally pissed-off natives.

A century before I landed at Apache Springs, the original developer of that ranch, Tom Gardener, went to bed every night with a rifle by his side, and not because he was some paranoid fanatic. At one point, he was holed up for days inside the original ranch house that would become one of our staff residences, fighting off Apaches lined up on a nearby hill. Complaining that he was tired of raising cattle and horses for the Indians who stopped by on regular raids, Gardener negotiated with them, becoming one of the few settlers to form a private treaty with local tribes, offering to give them a percentage of everything he raised — if they would stop trying to take it by force.

From the Apache perspective, of course, Gardener had settled in
their
desert oasis. For hundreds, maybe thousands, of years, the on-site spring was a rest stop for tribes migrating through southern Arizona. As a result, Old Tom's treaty would always be tenuous. When Gardener and Cochise met on the road to a nearby town, the mistrust and resentment both men had experienced in skirmishes with “the enemy” rose between the rugged settler and the fierce, dignified Native American leader. An argument ensued, whereupon the proud Apache shot his equally proud and feisty rival. Gardener managed to grab his rifle as he leapt off his horse and rolled into a nearby thicket of spindly desert trees, where he began shooting back, successfully encouraging Cochise and his party to get on with what was, for everyone involved, a fairly typical day. (Though it took a while to heal, Gardener survived this near-death encounter with the legendary chief.)

Some instructors who stayed at the original ranch house thought that our interpersonal difficulties were related to ghostly presences from the past stirring up trouble. Several said they could hear Old Tom Gardener tromping through the kitchen at night. On more than one occasion, clients staying in residences at our newly remodeled barn said they saw a tall Native American man in traditional dress lurking about, insisting it couldn't have been an illegal immigrant passing through. And while I felt nourished by this old place, hiking alone in the moonlight and milling around with my horses late into the night, other staff were most definitely spooked — whether they were seeing apparitions or not. Were they simply projecting their own vulnerability-based fears onto an environment rich with Wild West history? Or were the ghosts of cowboys and Indians past wreaking havoc with our comfortable, insulated lives?

Either way, it didn't much matter. All of us needed to pull on our boots,
muster up a bit of courage, get our butts out the door, and act like the pioneers we all imagined ourselves to be. It was at this point that the idea of
emotional
heroism first entered my mind, and I began to research the history of innovative leadership in earnest. Along the way, I realized that it was much easier for our ancestors to face death with an actual enemy than it was to feel the fragile uncertainty underneath their most cherished yet unproductive behaviors and interpersonal habits.

At that moment I understood the difference between clients and staff who panicked in response to the instability of innovation and those who more easily endured and adapted to the challenges associated with it. Regardless of variations in age, background, education, philosophy, and personality, those who had the hardest time invariably showed a
low tolerance for feeling vulnerable.

It takes courage to feel vulnerable, even when this feeling rises through an intensely positive experience. The temptation to run back to the barn can be overwhelming. And yet, this uncomfortable emotion carries an important message. It tells us we need to strengthen our ability to experiment, to dream, to adapt — to finally work up the nerve to kick up our heels and enjoy life, play the fool, and find genius in disguise. A much more inventive, empowered spirit emerges when we develop a higher tolerance for vulnerability.

As we gain confidence in taking chances, we recognize vulnerability as a friend. It encourages us to rise above old patterns, teaching us to adjust fluidly not only to what
is
but also to what
can be,
allowing us to dance with the constantly shifting currents of a life lived artfully, consciously — and, ultimately, joyfully. Because when vulnerability is no longer seen as the enemy, we can embrace it for what it truly is: the gateway to freedom and self-mastery.

From a social-intelligence perspective, however, there's one additional adjustment we need to make for everyone to finally “get along” and move forward: we must give up the age-old habit of using others' vulnerabilities against
them.

This particular nuance was brought to my attention by Patrick Lencioni. In his 2002 bestseller,
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable,
he cites vulnerability as a major ingredient in developing trust between coworkers. While there are several definitions for the word
vulnerability
in the dictionary, I was shocked to see that a corporate leadership researcher was using this term in much the same way I was, though I didn't come across this book until I was searching for hints on how to deal with my own dysfunctional team in 2006.
In this sense, we're not talking about the physical vulnerability we would experience encountering a mountain lion while jogging down an isolated desert trail. We're talking about that psychological vulnerability people seem equally reluctant to face, even though they're not literally in danger of injury or death. The vulnerabilities Lencioni cites include
“weaknesses, skill deficiencies, interpersonal shortcomings
, mistakes, and requests for help.”

His understanding of trust is also enlightening, especially for those of us working in innovative fields. Yet even in the most mundane, business-as-usual scenarios, the importance of this concept is significant: “Trust lies at the heart of a functioning, cohesive team,” Lencioni emphasizes. Yet most people evaluate trustworthiness as “the ability to predict a person's behavior based on past experience.” This limited definition creates a major block to building emotional and social intelligence. After all, as executive coach Marshall Goldsmith emphasizes in
What Got You Here Won't Get You There,
“the higher you go, the more your problems
are behavioral.”

A significant catch-22 came to light in working through the difficulties my own team was experiencing. People who displayed unproductive or even destructive behavior couldn't change their ways without further unnerving coworkers who needed people to act predictably in order to trust them! To make matters worse, I noticed that certain intelligent, otherwise sensitive and well-meaning staff members who craved structure and predictability were unable to tolerate feeling vulnerable without going into a serious flight-or-fight mode. This became the ultimate hurdle in mending past difficulties, changing old habits, learning new interpersonal tools, and going back to “grazing” because
people with a low tolerance for vulnerability felt justified in using others' vulnerabilities against them,
sometimes by deriding them secretly behind their backs, sometimes by shaming them publicly. This, of course, created labyrinths of mistrust in all possible directions.

Lencioni emphasizes that
“in the context of building a team, trust is the confidence
among team members that their peers' intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, team members must get comfortable being vulnerable with one another.” To even imagine taking such a risk, however, people must “be confident that their respective vulnerabilities will not be used against them.” This goes against the legitimate survival impulses we develop in a culture where predatory dominance remains the rule rather than the exception in many business, educational, and social settings. “Achieving vulnerability-based trust is difficult because in the course of career advancement and education, most successful people learn to be competitive with their peers, and protective of their reputations.
It is a challenge for them to turn those instincts off for the good of a team, but that is exactly what is required.”

Building on Lencioni's insights into this issue, I realized that for people to work together, recognize their own hurtful behaviors, and change them — while increasing trust, no less — the human race needed to do some serious emotional-strength training with the specific goal of increasing
everyone's
tolerance for vulnerability. From managers, coworkers, family members, and teachers to religious and political leaders,
people with an aversion to feeling vulnerable have trouble collaborating with others, staying on task, recognizing and changing their own unproductive behavior, experimenting, and taking the constructive risks that lead to innovation.

How we deal with vulnerability can either promote or inhibit success. However, it's essential for all of us to avoid using someone's low tolerance for vulnerability against him or her. Instead, we must learn how to evaluate our own and others'
current
tolerance for vulnerability and gently, progressively, raise it, in much the same way we helped Mocha move from a ten-by-ten-foot stall, to a twenty-by-twenty-foot corral and, finally, to a five-acre pasture that allowed him to reclaim his natural herd-based instincts while retaining the expertise he learned as a finely trained show horse.