Overcoming Paralysis - An excerpt from Cultivating Transformation: Leadership Lessons from a Prison Cell

“…In my professional life after prison, I realized that the way to help people overcome paralyzing fear was not to give them reasons to be unafraid. Had that worked, I would never have gone to prison in the first place. The people I supervised and trained did indeed have to perform well. In the advocacy arena, people have to compete for jobs. No one gets paid to change the world unless they can perform under high pressure. It was my job as a leader to help them experience the pressure without freezing. 

This is the paradox of leadership, parenting, coaching, or any other worthwhile endeavor. You don’t take away the pressure from anyone. If the mission is worth doing, it’s worth doing well, which means we must rise to the challenge. We have to be able to see what we are doing well or not. We have to work, prepare, practice, and deliver. Everyone, even people with histories of trauma and mental illness, have the capacity to hold that pressure, and I wasn’t there to save them. Instead, I focused on creating an environment where the pressure was appropriate to the job at hand, not existential. 

No Shame

The first and foremost practice is to create an environment hostile to shame. I make it clear to everyone I supervise and train that their mistakes and failures mean nothing about them as people, their values, or their worth…”

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