When a team is in denial about something — a business reality, an objective that isn’t working — and nobody is willing to feel the helplessness, something fascinating happens: one person starts holding it for the entire team. That person begins feeling more helpless, and the rest of the team rejects them for it. When that person leaves, a new person starts holding it. The helplessness cycles through the team rather than being processed.
If the whole team collectively feels helpless but doesn’t process it — “oh my gosh this is never gonna work” without actually feeling through it — the result is learned helplessness, collapse, and burnout. People use anxiety to motivate themselves because they won’t feel the helplessness, which leads to psychological burnout that lasts years.
But a team that isn’t scared of the feeling of helplessness pivots faster. They feel it, then they pivot. They confront difficult things easily and happily because they know that by feeling the helplessness, they’ll move into truth and a better way forward very quickly.
“It’s like oh cool I get to feel helpless because I know the other side of that I’m going to have a clear vision of how to move forward.”
This applies equally to families: Joe shares a moment with his daughter where they both sat in helplessness about how he’d raised her, cried together, and the pattern she was struggling with simply released.
Related Concepts
- Fear hot potato
- Shame hot potato
- Burnout is sustained adrenaline depletion
- The feeling being avoided underneath ‘I’ve got this’ is helplessness
- The freedom is in wanting to feel helpless again
- Helplessness is the most potent ingredient of fear