10. Invent a moment to be silly with them (even if it’s just a sound effect).
11. Highlight things you like about the person you are with.
12. Detail things the other person did that you liked.
13. If you thought of someone when doing something enjoyable or meaningful, tell that same person afterward.
14. Share knowledge that you think they would be interested in.
15. Tell jokes at no one’s expense.
16. Be open-minded when they share something that is weird or unusual about themselves.
17. Reveal compelling insights such as what you crave, envy, regret, mourn, or dream.
18. Express whatever positive sentiments they brought out now and later.
Amidst the gush of inclusion and belonging, don’t forget to help fellow allies satisfy their need for uniqueness. Help group members feel comfortable deviating from the group by explicitly welcoming them to do so. Affirm the value of deviance in groups. Remind them that dissenters protect the group from making ill-conceived plans, and that they improve the group’s performance by introducing unique solutions and novel ideas. Don’t just offer a welcome mat to dissenters. By actively probing what unique value each member brings to the group, you will normalize the power of dissent. Build into the culture a set of genuine questions for each group member: What do you believe, read, and think about that most people don’t? How do your views, philosophies, and values differ from other people of the same sex, race, age, and political party?
Asking people to contemplate how they differ from the rest of the group prompts them to break out and do their own thing. Another strategy is to encourage small but noticeable gestures of deviance. Think of Silicon Valley CEOs heading to a Senate hearing in blue jeans and a cotton hoody rather than a suit and tie. Think of the female Harvard Business School professor who lectures in an expensive, well-tailored outfit with a single touch of defiance: red Converse sneakers. Encourage public expression of unusual personal preferences for music, books, and podcasts. Instill a culture in which people regularly seek out diversity of thought as an integral part of decision-making.
THE BIG IDEA
To bind a group of allies together, it pays to consider the psychological needs of individuals. By helping people develop a sense of belonging and their own uniqueness, we can help them flourish and thus sustain their interest in contributing as allies. Maintaining this balance is not a one-time effort. You have to keep at it, paying attention to changes in individual behavior, the group’s norms, and the group’s success or failure.
BOLDLY GO WHERE NO ONE HAS GONE BEFORE
Silver-haired readers of this book might remember that pivotal moment in television history when the Starship Enterprise’s dashing Captain Kirk and beautiful Lieutenant Uhura shared an on-screen kiss. The year was 1968, the show Star Trek. The actors involved—the White William Shatner and the Black Nichelle Nichols—crossed the racial divide, boldly going where no television show had gone before. Today most people wouldn’t think twice about an interracial kiss. But back then, with the fires of the civil rights era burning, it was hugely provocative. Just a year earlier, the Supreme Court had ruled against sixteen Southern states in a case that questioned the legality of interracial marriages. The potential for a backlash against the show was real, especially in the South.
How did the two actors muster the courage to go through with the kiss? A number of Shatner’s friends urged him on. Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek’s creator and producer, was also enthusiastic about the kiss. As a less established actress and a Black woman, Nichols had more to lose. Yet no less a figure than Martin Luther King, Jr., advised her to stay on the show and make out with Captain Kirk (who can resist a guy in a tight, futuristic uniform?). Here, at some length, is how she recalled the conversation:
He said, “You cannot leave. Do you understand? It has been heavenly ordained . . . You have changed the face of television forever because this is not a black role, it is not a female role, anyone can fill that role. It can be filled by a woman of any color, a man of any color. It can be filled by another Klingon or alien . . . This is a unique role and a unique point in time that breathes the life of what we are marching for: equality. Beside, you’re fourth in command,” and I’m thinking nobody told me that, you know . . . “Besides, Nichelle, you have no idea the power of television. This man has shown us in the 23rd Century what started now, this man has created a reality, and because it’s in the 23rd Century and you are the chief communications officer, fourth in command of a Starship going on a five-year mission where no man or woman has gone before, it means that what we are doing today is just the beginning of where we’re going, just how far we’re going. You cannot leave. Besides, Star Trek is the only show that my wife, Coretta, and I allow our little children to stay up late and watch, and Nichelle, I can’t go back and tell them this, because you are their hero.”
Disrupting the status quo sucks up a great deal of psychic energy, not to mention other resources. It’s so much easier when we have friends by our side, urging us on, supporting us, listening to our fears and concerns, sharing our pain. Not only do we achieve more—we find ourselves happier and more fulfilled because of these relationships. Still, as important as friends are for principled insubordinates, they only take us so far. Rebels also have to keep themselves in the game. How do you manage your own psychology knowing you face a long, arduous, uncertain path ahead? You develop some good old-fashioned resilience, that’s how, using powerful techniques revealed by science.
RECIPE STEPS
1. Get some allies to help you. With people on your side who complement your skills, strengths, and viewpoints, you can enhance your capabilities and off-load some of the effort when defying the status quo.
2. Build trust with your allies by making yourself vulnerable. Trust emerges as we share adversity with others. If you wish to enlist allies to your cause, tackle difficult challenges and share painful moments together. Shared pain serves as social glue.
3. When creating alliances, attend to the dual, opposing psychological needs of individuals in groups. Help people feel certain that they belong in the group and also are valued for expressing their uniqueness. Clarify that deviating to make the group better (not conformity) is what characterizes an ideal group member. Regularly attend to both of these psychological needs and you will fire up people’s motivation to express unique contributions.
CHAPTER 6
Build Mental Fortitude
How to handle the negative emotions and pangs of rejection when rebelling
We touched on how difficult it is to rebel, but if you want a sense of the sheer psychological strength required, you would do well to talk to Martha Goddard. Back in the 1970s, many police officers had no clue how to react when a rape survivor stepped forward to report a crime. Instead of providing survivors with a safe haven, police dismissed them and handled physical evidence so shoddily that they compromised criminal cases. In the course of investigations, officers would cut off survivors’ shirts with scissors, contaminating the evidence. Investigators accidentally destroyed useful DNA samples from hair, sweat, and semen. After making a woman remove her shirt and underwear, police gave her a paper-bag gown to wear on the drive home in a police car—broadcasting the incident to onlookers in the survivor’s neighborhood. Hospital emergency rooms were hardly better, treating survivors coldly. The situation was so bad that many women advised friends not to bother visiting a police station or hospital after they’d been raped because it would only cause more trauma.
As a frontline worker helping homeless teenagers, Goddard heard heartbreaking stories about the mistreatment of rape survivors in legal and medical settings. So she did something about it. As clinical psychologist Dr. Dean Kilpatrick, a rape victims’ advocate at the time, told me, Goddard in 1976 “worked with law enforcement, prosecutors, and medical experts to develop a standardized rape kit that was designed to collect evidence in a standardized way that was mindful of the needs of rape victims.” A comb to collect loose hair. Nail clippers to remove substances buried under fingernails. Swabs to smear orifices for foreign fluids. Plastic tubes for blood samples. Plenty of bags and plastic envelopes to store salvaged details from bodies and clothes. The advantage of a rape kit is “all the materials required for the collection of evidence are [at] hand prior to commencing the examination . . . the contents act as a prompt for inexperienced practitioners.” As a 1978 New York Times article observed, the kits were “a powerful new weapon in the conviction of rapists in Illinois.”
Powerful, but not universally welcomed. The men in charge shrugged. What business did she have telling them how to do their work? To convince police and health care workers to adopt rape kits, Goddard worked seven days a week visiting individual police precincts and hospitals. Goddard tried raising money to further spread the word and advocate on survivors’ behalf, but nobody in Chicago would open their checkbooks. That is, except for the very last person you’d expect: Playboy founder Hugh Heffner. Say what you will about the Hef, but he forked over $10,000 through the Playboy Foundation, his company’s nonprofit arm. He opened his office space, allowing Goddard’s recruited volunteers to create a rape kit assembly line there. Regarding Heffner as an enemy, feminists were outraged. “I took a lot of flak from the women’s movement—but too bad,” Goddard said. “Boy, was I roasted for that. But I gotta tell you if it was Penthouse or Hustler, no. But Playboy? Please, give me a break.”
Over time, Goddard’s relentless pursuit of justice for female survivors of sexual abuse paid off. Some two dozen Chicago-area hospitals were using rape kits by the end of 1978. By 1980, health care workers were using them in thousands of hospitals across the country. A one-stop package for preserving DNA that officers, detectives, medical professionals, and prosecutors could use to produce a database matching individuals arrested for criminal activity with rape kit evidence. “Marty Goddard was a true pioneer in the anti-rape movement,” Dr. Dean Kilpatrick said, as “the rape exam was transformed from something that many women described as nearly as bad as the rape itself to something that treated women humanely and gathered the evidence needed to identify suspects and support a criminal prosecution.” Summing up the impact of Goddard’s work, he noted, “Marty deserves incredible credit for having the courage, fortitude, and persistence to make this very important thing happen in the face of much opposition.”
Rape remains extremely hard to prosecute in the United States, with fewer than a quarter of survivors reporting. But if Goddard hadn’t stayed the course, fighting the good fight year after year, visiting all of those police stations and hospitals and knocking on Hugh Heffner’s door, rape survivors would receive less justice than they do today. Bear in mind, Goddard operated in an era when terms like “date rape” and “marital rape” didn’t yet exist, and when the behaviors they describe went unprosecuted. It was a time when police officers, prosecuting attorneys, and even judges defended rape by arguing that “there are many sexually frustrated men who do not have a nonviolent way of satisfying their sexual desires” and “women who are raped dress or behave in a seductive manner.” Somehow, Goddard managed to persevere in this unsympathetic environment, fighting the good fight even when she felt tempted to give up or scale back her efforts. How do people like her do it? How can you stay in the game over the long term as a rebel, taking bold risks and persevering in the face of emotional distress caused by persecution, ostracism, loneliness, and unanticipated setbacks?
Virtually all mental health interventions developed in recent decades proceed on the assumption that the best way to respond to distress is to minimize it. If you’re a rebel struggling in the face of adversity, you go to a therapist or undertake some other intervention in hopes of obtaining some kind of relief that allows you to function better. More recently, psychologists have argued that trying to reduce distress can cause more suffering. As they point out, distress is a human experience and not inherently bad. What’s bad is the avoidance of and unwillingness to experience distress. When worried about an impending deadline, we procrastinate and scroll through social media. When sad or lonely, we comfort ourselves by gorging on food. When overcome by pangs of regret, we spend hours mulling over what might have been, failing to live in the present moment. Too often, our strategies for coping with distress, while possibly effective in the moment, distance us further from the life we want, causing us more distress over time.
How can you learn to withstand distress so that it doesn’t drag you down? One powerful solution is to cultivate what scientists call “psychological flexibility.” When bad shit goes down, the psychologically flexible person doesn’t freak to the point of breakdown. Rather, she takes steps to quickly recover and make progress anew. She shifts promptly away from managing the pain she feels to driving assertively toward her goals. Sounds good, you say, but how the hell do I do that? Glad you asked.
THE BIG IDEA
To withstand distress better, cultivate your new secret weapon: psychological flexibility.
DIG THE DASHBOARD
A powerful tool you can use to become more psychologically flexible is—wait for it—the Psychological Flexibility Dashboard. Weaving together a number of evidence-based strategies, the Dashboard is a simple, four-step process of reflection that prepares you to deal effectively with the inevitable adversity you’ll confront as a rebel. In the face of an emotionally intense situation, you can use the Dashboard to break down your experience of the situation, process overwhelming feelings of distress, short-circuit unhelpful ways of handling these feelings, and inspire yourself to take courageous action. Making sense of short-term hardship, you can turn back toward your larger purpose and pursue it with renewed vigor.
In summary form, the Dashboard looks like this:
(STEP 2) “What unwanted thoughts, feelings, memories, and bodily sensations am I experiencing?”
(STEP 1) “What and who is important to me?”
ESCAPING PAIN
