Why I Don’t Play Miniature Golf
Musings on Competition and Conflict in the Workplace
Miniature golf is banned in my family. It was enjoyable when my kids were young, but somewhere between putting through a windmill and retrieving a purple ball from a pirates’ cave, my son and I began arguing over the score. If he made a shot in four strokes, he sometimes recorded three on the scorecard. He still denies this. He was only nine years old, but I couldn’t let it go.
I’d like to think I was teaching him a lesson — cheating is not allowed at any age. But in fact, it was my competitive brain that took over. I just can’t help myself. Board games, card games, annual Thanksgiving touch-football with friends ala the Kennedys, I always want to win.
Competition: the good, the bad, the ugly
I share this curse (or kinship) with Shonda Rhimes. She describes her competitiveness in Year of Yes as not “normal-people competitive, not friendly competitive, but scary-psychotic competitive.” I am not sure I would have described myself in this way until the last Thanksgiving football game when I focused on the quarterback: trash talking as we gained the lead and an up-in-his-face defense as he tried to catch a few touchdowns.
He is 6’1 and I am an average height girl. I even caught a pass that was out of my reach, lunging and stretching and partially dislocating my shoulder, which I didn’t even realize at the time as I continued to play since it went right back into place. I think this qualifies as scary-psychotic. And that family-friend annual football event — I don’t think we’re friends anymore.
Maybe my Capricorn sign is the culprit. Capricorns are ambitious, driven, and persistent. They want to be in control and love to win. And if it’s impossible to win, like the sprint and Olympic distance triathlons I sign-up for, then they settle for beating their own best time.
Case-in-point: even though I traveled cross-country by bicycle, I am not an athlete. I compete in these triathlons — and here I use the word compete lightly — to swim faster, cycle faster, and run faster than my last race. Just maybe, though, it is not my sign but a normal functioning of my brain.
A Harvard Business Review title recently grabbed my attention: Your Brain is Hooked on Being Right. No hyperbole here; hooked is the appropriate term. Author Judith Glaser explains:
“When you argue and win, your brain floods with different hormones: adrenaline and dopamine, which makes you feel good, dominant, even invincible. It’s a feeling any of us would want to replicate. So the next time we’re in a tense situation, we fight again. We get addicted to being right.”
Addicted to being right?
That defines the bulk of my career. But I never knew there was a chemical inducing factor. I operated out of fear: fear of making mistakes, fear of being wrong, fear of failing, fear of tarnishing my reputation, fear of losing power, fear of being labeled an imposter.
Later in my career, as I developed more confidence, my amygdala (the part of our brains responsible for fight or flight) took a backseat. I listened more. I understood there needn’t be a winner and a loser. There was power in right and right. Here’s a story:
I had been managing a project to bring customer relationship management to several business areas. We met with the stakeholders on a monthly basis. I was striving for transparency, for sharing updates, and for hearing concerns. But it turned out one of the stakeholders was expressing concern behind the scenes.
At first I became livid. How could he keep this information from me? We were colleagues in the same department. I became so obsessed with what I thought of as betrayal that I jerked open the tray of my desktop printer, grabbed a blank sheet, and wrote in large letters SAY WHAT YOU MEAN.
I displayed it on my desk in full view of anyone sitting across from me. This made for some interesting conversations as I vented on whomever entered my office. There was no doubt in my mind that I was right and he was wrong. I told everyone the story. I was careful not to use names.
There were lots of nodding heads and pursed lips, and a few “that’s not right.” Several days later a consultant, who later became a friend, gifted me a big red button. It was the kind that when you hit it it usually says, “that was easy.” Instead it said, recorded in his baritone Brazilian accent, “Say what you mean.” I loved it. I crumbled up the handwritten sign and proceeded to slam the button whenever someone entered my office. Here I am not too proud of myself.
But I was right, wasn’t I?
Except that the whole situation still didn’t feel good. I couldn’t imagine the Why behind what my colleague did? I tried making up scenarios but none of them rang true. That’s when I decided I would confront him. It was a casual conversation, just the two of us in my office; I was direct. When I said my piece, he replied, “I shared this with you already.”
What?
I tried to play back all the conversations we had had. I realized I hadn’t heard his concerns because he had been speaking in subtext. He thought he was sharing exactly how he felt when in fact it was hidden behind his dialogue the same way actors in a movie never really say what they mean.
Robert McKee, the screenwriting guru, would have clearly picked up on this. Paraphrasing McKee: Text is what a character says; text is the dialogue. Subtext, hidden below the surface, is what he or she actually means.
At this point, I wanted to kick myself. Literally.
I am a screenwriter. I know this. I should have known this. I even attended McKee’s widely popular Story seminar. I never thought my writing career and my corporate career were so intertwined. I was wrong.
The power of right and right
After my colleague’s revelation, I reflected on what I could have done differently. Perhaps… asked more questions? Dug deeper to understand his motivations and his concerns? It was a learning experience for me. Not only did I vow to try and understand the subtext of conversations going forward, but I got off my high-horse and decided we were both right.
He had strived to tell me how he felt even though I hadn’t understood. The reptilian part of my brain could have argued my point or reverted to fleeing the challenge. I could have disengaged and simply agreed with him.
Instead I found a deeper connection that also has a chemical explanation. Judith Glaser, in her article goes on to explain:
“Luckily, there’s another hormone that can feel just as good as adrenaline: oxytocin. It’s activated by human connection and it opens up the networks in our executive brain, or prefrontal cortex, further increasing our ability to trust and open ourselves to sharing.”
Bingo.
I could shed my Capricorn ways, my chemical-induced addiction to being right, and focus instead on human connection. In the midst of my soul-searching reflection I practiced empathy for my colleague and for myself. We both had missed signals and opportunities.
I got better at applying this across the board… though don’t play a board game with me just yet!
This notion of right and right leads me to another thought on competition.
Operate from abundance
My parents’ generation and their scrappy working-class existence operated out of scarcity. They lived through the Great Depression and understood the meaning of loss. This placed a premium on job security.
My generation benefitted from this as we set our sights on higher-education and climbing the corporate career ladder. But we may also carry the scars of scarcity. Will my college education be good enough when others attended better schools? Will I be the one to climb the ladder of success attaining more prestige, power, money?
Viewing from this lens focuses on competition with colleagues on that “one” more rung up the ladder, or the “better” school. But what if we were to operate not from scarcity but from abundance? What if we internalized (i.e., truly believed) there is enough power, money, prestige, and promotions to go around?
How would our working life be different, as Maria Shriver shared in her 7 cardinal rules for life, if we:
“Don’t compare your life to others, and don’t judge them. You have no idea what their journey is all about.”
So we need huge doses of empathy in the workplace. We also need to build muscles, which leads me to conflict. Stay with me.
Conflict is good
It pains me to admit, considering the formidable student loans, that college doesn’t prepare a young adult for the workforce. Yes, many university courses require group work, and that group work is sometimes made uneven, by a slacker or a self-imposed boss.
These groups are a healthy playground for practicing the dynamics of interaction. But these relationships are temporary. What happens when the relationships are critical to success? When the slacker is your teammate in your new job? When the self-imposed boss is not really your boss but also a teammate?
And maybe even the perception of these personas is inadequate as learning the reasons behind the façade could illuminate that the “slacker” has low self-confidence and the “boss” is fueled by fear of failure.
Sometimes the playground to practice collaboration is available in junior high or high school. My daughter, now a 10th grader, has worked on social studies projects with her classmates since the 6th grade. Group projects are a chance to explore the dynamics of working together.
But when there is dissent or conflict, students typically figure out how to get the work done, often by just pseudo-agreeing — meaning not really supporting the direction but letting it go for the sake of the project. This happens in the workforce too, but conflict should not be ignored.
In fact, conflict often brings about better solutions. Ed Catmill, co-founder of Pixar, is the demigod on this one. In one of my favorite books, Creativity, Inc., he shares a quote from director Brad Bird:
“You need all the seasons. You need storms. It’s like an ecology. To view lack of conflict as optimum is like saying a sunny day is optimum. A sunny day is when the sun wins out over the rain. There’s no conflict. You have a clear winner. But if every day is sunny and it doesn’t rain, things don’t grow.”
I haven’t always embraced conflict.
In fact, I gravitated toward avoiding it. Conflict is uncomfortable. Conflict may lead to confrontation. Confrontation is not my thing. I like it better when it’s a sunny day and the waves are calmly lapping at the shore.
But when we ignore conflict, when we pseudo-agree, the rain clouds swell and the waves pick-up momentum often ending in confrontational crashes.
Over the span of my corporate career, I have built the muscles to embrace conflict. I have learned, sometimes in very painful ways, to speak my mind and confront bosses and staff alike. I have learned to encourage dissent even when it raises conflict. I have learned to collaborate with those that challenge me and those that hold vastly different opinions with vastly different experiences and backgrounds.
So I am not advocating to live in a workforce without competition or conflict — though maybe we can all avoid scary-psychotic competition.
I am advocating for respect and for sacred listening. For understanding and empathizing.
I want us to stop getting stuck on right vs. wrong and embrace the super-power of right and right. To stop getting stuck on us vs. them and embrace the super-power of we.
And perhaps the way we work will influence the way we live.
