Take a look around at the critical situations facing we human beings, and it’s sobering. Maybe that’s why most of us don’t like looking too closely. It becomes overwhelming. “Can’t you talk about something else,” is how my mother often phrases this sense of overwhelm. The implication being that not talking about it makes it disappear.

An absurd rationale, of course, but one that’s rather common in our addicted-to-positivity society. In the science of psycho-socio-pathology elaborated at the International Society of Analytical Trilogy where our program originates, this is called an Inversion.

Seeing problems is a negative. You have to make lemonade with that mountain of lemons, after all. Problem? what problem? What we’ve got here is a heaven-sent opportunity, not a problem at all. That’s the common parlance.

But to really solve the problem, we have to forget about the inverted dictums of the motivational literature. There it is written that we need to forget the past and look to the future – exactly the polar opposite of what we should be doing. Real leaders, in truth, need to look very hard at the reasons we’re in the mess we’re in.

Freedom and Leadership, today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

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