The Battle Between Success and Compassion By Vicki Zakrzewski

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The complexity of care

Changing our view of care

1. Start by reflecting on the care you give and receive in your life—or lack thereof—in order to bring to conscious awareness how much care impacts you. Examine how you care for yourself and how you and your loved ones—including your pets—care for each other. Then expand this view to include the care between you and a stranger on the street, the grocery clerk, and/or a difficult work colleague. Now broaden your view of care to examine care at a societal level, from business practices to childcare options to equity to gender roles to political systems.

Did you find yourself getting emotional at any point in this reflection? For example, did a situation that lacks care make you feel angry or scared or sad? If so, why? Kegan and Lahey state that underlying every challenging situation or behavior is an “emotional ecology” that we must explore in order to understand where our potential limitations lie, and their book outlines a very specific and in-depth process to do so. Only when these limitations that have been driving our actions without us realizing it are brought to conscious awareness can we start to change them.

And once you’ve identified these limiting behaviors, Kegan suggests that instead of trying to defend them, admit them with all “their embarrassing glory”. I would also recommend practicing self-compassion, realizing, as self-compassion expert Kristin Neff posits, that you’re not alone. All of humanity struggles with challenging internal constructs. 

2. Ask yourself if there is enough at stake to warrant a change. According to Kegan and Lahey, the process of transformation at this depth can be very challenging, so we have to be sure that we’re willing to try. They have found that people are motivated to change for several reasons, including: if they don’t change, something or someone they love will be harmed; not reaching a goal has become impossible to live with; or there is “deep discrepancy” within themselves.

For instance, a teacher or parent who learns that at the root of a child’s anxiety and panic is the child’s belief that he or she is loved and accepted only when academically successful may be motivated to make some radical changes in his or her own behavior and beliefs.

3. Test out new ways of being. Once you have identified a core limitation, then Kegan and Lahey recommend trying another mode of behavior that acts against this limitation. For example, if you responded with anger to a bullying situation similar to the one described above—anger that was perhaps motivated by your own experience of being bullied—you might try acting compassionately towards the bully and see what happens. If you notice a positive change, then keep doing it.

The reward for all this inner work, according to Kegan and Lahey, is a release from the anxiety caused by the denial of our unconscious emotions, beliefs, and habits. “You [will be able to] scan the world,” write the authors, “for more promising possibilities and bring to your own living a deep restfulness that you may never before have known.” 

By examining and shifting our beliefs and practices of care, we may find that our relationships with ourselves, our loved ones, our colleagues, strangers on the street, and perhaps the rest of the world are transformed into something we could never have imagined—and we may become more successful and happier as a result.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a begger; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.” And I would add that part of that restructuring includes ourselves.