Distancing: How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions

WE can be too close, too present in a situation, to look at it constructively. Good decision-making occurs when we can step back and look at the situation from a broader, more objective perspective. We respond differently when we see differently.

Authors L. David Marquet and Michael Gillespie warn us in Distancing, “When excited, stressed, or threatened, we are pushed further into a state of self-immersion, a closed-in feeling of me-here-and-now, which narrows, filters, and distorts what we see, reinforcing our previously held beliefs.”

There are three ways we can step back and get some distance:

We can be someone else
We can be somewhere else
We can be sometime else

Be Someone Else

Being someone else is about learning to become your own coach. If you can see yourself as a coach might see you, you can uncover answers that you already have inside. It is distanced self-talk. This distanced self-talk “helps red helps reduce stress because it removes some of the emotional baggage that tends to cloud thinking, decreasing performance.”

A coach helps you to see your future self. Who do you want to be? How do you want to talk about this episode of your life?

When we imagine ourselves as someone else, we access the strengths of that alter ego and break out of any self-consciousness and attachments to our prior decisions.

Be Somewhere Else

Often referred to as going to the balcony, be somewhere else takes you out of the moment. Be a fly on the wall. Zoom out. Your inner coach gets you to focus on the situation and see the bigger picture. You mentally relocate yourself and see yourself in relation to your environment and your relationships.

If you find yourself thinking about how you look or what others might think of you, you’re doing it wrong. That means you’re still stuck in your own head. You have to dislodge yourself and really become that person on the balcony.

When we think about situations as being further away, we construe them less in terms of their lower-level, specific, concrete, and idiosyncratic features and more in terms of their essential, abstract, and more general qualities.

Be Sometime Else

Become your future self. “We need to distance ourselves from the me-here-and-now self in order to be true to our ideal self.”

The authors suggest three time horizons to consider given the situation: A day (near future), a year (mid-future), and a decade or end of life (far future).

Near future decisions ask “How much will this matter to me tomorrow? How will I feel about this in an hour? Or how important is it to respond to this right now?” These kinds of decisions have immediate consequences.

Mid-future time horizon is from six months to two years. Not for life-changing decisions. This time horizon “helps us shed the short-term concerns about practicality or convenience in favor of loftier ideals and values.” Here we ask questions like, “What would my one-year-from-now self want me to do now?” or “If another team were to do this in six months, what would we suggest they do differently?”

Far-future time horizon is for ten years or more. It provides the temporal space to imagine how you would need to be in terms of your ideals for the future. How do you want it to end? Write the end of your story now.

This approach helps us shed or better process our emotional baggage. Helps us discard our biases. It changes the nature of our fear of regret: We shift from fear of action to fear of inaction. We accept the risk of failure and become more concerned about the risk of not trying.

Distancing requires that you first recognize the need to pause. When you have a decision to make that would like you to push you into a self-immersed state, call the pause and determine one of the three distancing dimensions and give yourself time to pick your next move.

The immersed self is our default state. We are our primary point of reference, the protagonists in our own stories. We live inside our heads, stuck in a myopic first-person point of view wherein—problematically—our emotions cloud our thinking, and we are unable to separate our thoughts from our feelings.

When we focus on ourselves and our situation, we tend to catastrophize. We need to get out of our own head and focus on others. Our self-focus becomes our blind spot, and we become even more immersed in our narrow perspective. We live in the moment, unable to see other perspectives.

Using the tools provided, we can help ourselves to create distance and see a bigger picture. Our inner coach is always focused on moving forward, and by our example we can help others to do the same.

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