Welcome back to this week’s Sunday Story ! Speaking of Stories, I was so excited to be able to join Campus Living Centres for their fall training conference where I was honoured to share one of our stories as the closing keynote. If you have an event coming up that you need a keynote for, give us a shout!
This week we’re continuing our Leadership Road Trip series. If you want to catch up, part one is here, and part two is here. The gist of this series is that the team here at Authentik regularly takes long road trips to the back of beyond in a custom-modified vehicle that has a shower, a fridge, and more. We can live out of it indefinitely with gas and groceries every few days, and we love to see the world this way. And seeing the world this way has taught us some key leadership lessons, and this week we’re here to tell you that getting stuck is part of the fun.
And we get stuck a lot. The nature of our trips is that we’re often going places where if there were roads, they may not have been travelled in years or decades. Mud, sand, and snow never stop us - we pop the truck into 4-wheel-drive, and most of the time we get through to the other side and the adventure continues. But sometimes, that’s not the case - sometimes, we get stuck. The wheels spin, and there’s no forward movement.
This is also one of the most dangerous parts of our adventures. Recovering a 6,000-pound vehicle bogged in mud is no trivial matter; there’s a lot of weight that’s being moved, and that means things can break. A big risk for us is breaking the vehicle - then we’re potentially really stuck, not just in mud but on the side of the mud-pit in the middle of nowhere with a broken down car. The other major risk is equipment failure - hauling a heavy vehicle with a winch rope means that rope is under extreme tension, and when a winch rope snaps it causes a lot of damage. Of course, getting stuck is the definition of “Type 2 fun”, and I’ll expand on that idea a bit because it truly does apply to your leadership.
Type 1 fun is the kind of fun that is fun while you are doing it. Splashing in the water at a warm, sunny beach would be type 1 fun. A rollercoaster at a theme park is type 1 fun. Ice Cream with your grandma at the park is type 1 fun. These are all things that are fun while you are experiencing the thing.
Type 2 fun on the other hand is the opposite - it isn’t fun when you’re doing it. Examples of type 2 fun would be climbing a mountain or skiing across Antarctica - things that are an absolute slog, sometimes a potentially deadly one, and are only fun in hindsight when the adventure is finished and a person is re-telling the stories to others.
Getting stuck is the definition of type 2 fun.
And you’re going to get stuck in your leadership practice all the time. Leaders are constantly faced with tricky situations, where instead of moving a literal weight it’s a metaphorically massive challenge to get this heavy situation out of your way. Leaders often get stuck dealing with conflict (we can help you with that!), but they can also get stuck on a technical challenge or with crafting the right strategy to address a challenge. I don’t know of a single leader in the world who has not gotten stuck from time to time.
Here’s the thing with getting stuck - either during an off-road adventure or during your leadership: Your attitude is what will make the difference between this being a disaster, or being an incredible part of your story. If you see getting stuck in a negative light, that negativity will frame the entire problem, and your focus will be on the negative consequences that are a result of your stuck-ness. Your team won’t have the strategy. The conflict will fester and get worse. The technical challenge will remain unsolved. Focusing on these aspects isn’t focusing on the right things, and instead of finding a way out, you’ll end up staying stuck. But you can’t stay stuck as a leader - the adventure must continue, after all.
This is where I tell you to choose your attitude, but let’s be real: what I’m actually telling you is to gaslight yourself a little bit. Yes, that’s generally regarded as a bad thing, but the key thing here is “a little bit”. When you’re stuck, and you’ve got that voice in your head telling you “Oh man, we are stuck good…this means we’re not going to get that problem solved in time”, argue back with a “Yeah but we’re going to have a great time getting this thing sorted out and unstuck, won’t we?”. At first, this will feel like highly unnatural forced optimism, and you may find that internal voice arguing right back against your gaslighting. Keep the argument alive, though, and don’t give in.
What you are doing when you are arguing with yourself in this fashion is you are creating a divide in your psyche; your pitting one half of your mind against the other, from which there can only be one victor. Your negative self is telling you the problems. Your adventure self - the one who knows getting stuck can be type 2 fun - is telling you that solving the problems is gonna be an amazing story to tell later on. And this divide in your mind is worthy of stoking and keeping alive while you work on the problem.
Because you know what one of the best feelings in the world is?
Getting unstuck.
When then 4x4 finally breaks free from it’s muddy or snowy prison, after you’re tired, sweaty, cut hands, sore muscles, and filthy dirty, and you have achieved what appeared to be impossible, the feeling of satisfaction is one of the most fulfilling and rewarding emotional experiences a person can have. And, in your leadership, when you finally get the thing unstuck, you’ll have a similar feeling.
So, going back to this internal divide you’ve created in your mind - between the voice whose focusing on being stuck versus the voice that is focusing on the fun of getting unstuck - once you do get unstuck, that feeling immediately supercharges that voice in your head that helped focus on the type-2 fun. That voice then gets the knock-on dopamine that comes from being right about something.
And, here’s the superpower version of this: Tell the story of getting unstuck. Every time you do, you borrow a bit of that dopamine and get that delightful hit of accomplishment and type 2 fun all over again.
So yes, this week’s Sunday story is about how you can, over time, convince yourself that getting stuck - an objectively miserable experience - is actually incredibly fun. And I know it works because…well, it worked for me and lots of people I’ve shared this with. I used the approach above and now, going out and getting stuck - or digging into leadership challenges like transformations - are my version of a wonderful time.
Getting stuck doesn’t mean you’re making mistakes. It means you’re doing cool stuff, and having a grand adventure, and life is too short to not have grand adventures. And, my experience tells me that if you aren’t getting stuck from time to time as a leader, odds are good you aren’t growing and challenging yourself as much as you should be.
So go get stuck, and embrace some type 2 fun!
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