My Council of Counsel; Three Thoughts on a Constructive Conversation with the Voices in My Head
Finding guidance in amongst the internal criticism.
The Diamond Dogs
I’m in the middle of re-watching Ted Lasso.
It’s the kind of programme that you can re-watch and pick up new insights with every watching — some of that is because the writing is so rich, and some of that is because the show meets you where you are in the moment, and you’re seldom in exactly the same place twice.
For the uninitiated, and who don’t know what Ted Lasso is about — find your way to watching it, immediately.
It’s a story about a fish-out-of-water coach who uses the power of quirky wisdom, goodness, and kindness to help his team transcend the sport they’re playing and become better versions of themselves.
One of the story threads throughout the show is a construct around The Diamond Dogs; a small, tight-knit group of the coaching and admin staff that convene specifically for the purpose of thrashing out a personal issue or simply getting something off a chest.
No doubt, it’s a great writing trope — a common setting where a story is progressed and delved into further, or resolved.
But more importantly, it’s a great model for using the wisdom of the group.
A small group of individuals with a concern for one another’s wellbeing. Not necessarily anything like subject matter experts, but also not afraid to offer some input, or share a different perspective.
A group whose sole purpose for existing revolves around care for one another.
On Purpose, With Ceremony
Throughout Ted Lasso, the Diamond Dogs are summoned to ‘mount up’ when a problem, issue, or topic is identified. The group creates a ceremony about coming together for the express purpose of being Diamond Dogs — and that is sometimes as simple as one of the characters shifting an existing conversation by saying “Diamond Dogs, mount up”.
The Dogs then howl, and the group is convened — everyone knows that they now have an express purpose. The context has shifted, it’s no longer idle chit-chat. The group is in session. The group has a purpose.
Once that purpose has been transacted; once the problem has been laid out and discussed, and input and advice have been given and received, the Dogs ‘dismount’, again with ceremony, and the individuals in the group go about their day.
Two things occur — the Dogs are only the Dogs around their purpose, and the Dogs only become the Dogs with ceremony.
Otherwise, they’d just be another bunch of friends shooting the breeze.
My Dogs are Scattered
Like many, I’ve lived a fairly dis-located adult life. I’ve lived and worked in seven different towns and cities around the world, and in each of those I’ve collected friendships and acquaintances. Like many, I suspect, that some of those friendships have had a profound impact on me and have been a source of invaluable and timely counsel.
Some of that counsel has been accidental, something said in passing that has shifted my perspective. Some have been very much purposeful — in response to the soliciting of advice, and at other times carefully and thoughtfully given in the form of an unsolicited intervention.
The nature of my dis-located life has meant that my ability to convene a Diamond Dog-like advisory panel is very difficult. The people I now count as trusted advisors are literally scattered across the world, and so I connect with them when and as needed, and one-on-one rather than as a group.
My Council of Counsel
In addition to my trusted friends and advisors, I’ve also accumulated a quiver of go-to advice sources. Writings, podcasts, TV shows, and movies that inspire, inform, and instruct. Sources of wisdom that jangle my interiority. The kind of prompting that I think helps me become a better version of the self that I’m trying to be. The direction in moments of choice helps me line up with the course I’m supposed to be on.
As I began to recognise the pattern of this more virtual kind of advice and the value of the collected insights and perceptions, I started to categorise and collate the wisdom that spoke most resoundingly to my values, purposes, and aspirations.
Over time, I saw that the collected wisdom came from a few specific sources, or at least specific kinds of sources. Each of those sources either had an inherent persona, or they leaned themselves for a persona to be formed around them.
About four years ago, when I had time on my hands, I allowed myself to delve deep into these sources and construct their respective personas. I created for myself a virtual entity, my own committee of wisdom, my own imagined personal advisory board. I convened my Council of Counsel.
My Council of Counsel is the group of useful and intentional inner voices that I actively consult to shape my thoughts, reactions, responses, motivations, and beliefs.
Each voice has a role and a purpose. When I convene the Council, my attention to these ‘meetings’ entails that each voice is given space and attention and that each voice has his say.
There are definitive meetings, where the Council is in session, and there are moments in time, where the Council is also in session. The degree to which the Council delivers its collective Counsel, quickly and succinctly, determines my own effectiveness in being able to process the issues of life, both big and small.
By process I mean staying aware of and attending to, how life rises and falls, ebbs and flows, and comes and goes. Realistically, the convening of the Council isn’t always routine or consistent. There are seasons where I get caught up in the debris and hubris of life, and forget that the Council exists. I tend to fair not so well in these seasons.
I don’t have any limit on the number of seats at the Council, as there may well be a need to add personas to the Council.
For now, the Council has four members. Their roles are carefully considered, to complement where my cognitive and behavioural gaps are. Like actual persons, I believe the Council members and their roles have grown and morphed over time as I attend to the purpose and collective strength of this group.
Currently, the Council consists of a wise sage, a dignified statesman, a bombastic counter-arguer, and a curious sceptic believer. Together, we have great imagined conversations, which are really just a construct to help me think more broadly.
Nothing New Under the Sun
The Council is not a new concept — a different name for a style of thinking and philosophy that is millennia deep.
The ancient Greeks associated humours — bodily fluids believed to determine a person’s physical and mental health — with the four basic elements; fire, water, earth, and air were expressed as choleric, phlegmatic, melancholic, and sanguine temperaments, respectively.
Noted 20th-century psychiatrist Carl Jung posited that we are expressions of what he called archetypes; the Self and its Shadow, the Persona, The Mother and Father, The Amina and Animus (the opposing sense of gender), the Hero and The Child, to name a few. Jung argued that we carry our archetypes in a complicated mix and that our behaviours and personalities are an expression of how the archetypes relate to us.
Tony Robbins uses a variant of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) as a tool within his teachings and work on personal development, specifically what is referred to as parts integration. Parts integration is a therapeutic technique that aims to resolve internal conflicts by integrating conflicting aspects or “parts” within an individual’s psyche and is often used as a therapeutic intervention to address limiting beliefs, inner conflicts, and self-sabotaging behaviours.
The Council Charter
Harnessing the voices in my head may sound like controlled psychosis. I have, however, found it a useful and accessible way to be able to connect with the wisdom that extends beyond my nature and try to close the gaps in my tendencies and cognitive biases.
On reflection, three principles that have helped me form the Council are;
1. It starts with values. The Council has to serve a value set. If the Council is an intrepid band of inner explorers, your values are their guiding stars.
What are values, though? I think every leadership ‘guru’ will have their own take on what values are, and what they represent. I think of values as exactly that — things, concepts, philosophies, beliefs, and behaviours that are valuable to us as individuals. A core set of attributes that, without which, your life would be stripped of meaning and its inherent richness.
I’ve always found values exercises — the kinds that are trolloped out in leadership training workshops — difficult. Maybe it’s because I’ve found that words we typically see in values list too constrictive. Maybe it’s because the time allotted within the exercise is too limited. Maybe it’s because the construct has been disingenuous.
So, over the years, I’ve become more patient with how I define my values, and in so doing, become more open to the values revealing themselves, as opposed to me frantically uncovering them. A little like stars in the night, the more you linger, the more you look, the more you see. And in seeing more, their clarity about those that are truly important is sharpened.
Prompts, though, are helpful in this more patient way of defining values. Whilst not a classic values exercise, the VIA Character Strengths survey has been helpful in uncovering and putting language to some of my core motivators.
Expanding language is another avenue that has helped me get a better grip on my value constellation. I live in New Zealand and grew up in Southern Africa. Both locations have rich, deep, and complex indigenous cultures that transcend Western thinking and language constructs. I’ve looked to those traditions to find different ways of explaining, defining, and expressing that which is most valuable to me.
3. It continues with personal expression. The Council is an expression of your personality.
I think of personality and character as two parts of the same tree. The expressive part of ourselves, our personalities, is what we see above the ground, trunk, branches, and leaves. All are affected by growth, seasonality, and the elements. The formative part of ourselves, our character shaped by our values, is the root system. Possibly deep, possibly broad, providing the essence of life, and interacting seamlessly with our expressive parts.
The expression of ourselves is such an important component of our being and one that we need to understand to be able to live a full, well-examined life.
Personality profiling tools get a bad rap, but I’m a firm believer, for many reasons. The top two of those are EQ fundamentals; self-awareness and social awareness.
Myers Briggs is considered the gold standard in personality profiling but is also clunky and hard to apply. Two similar and more accessible alternatives that I recommend using are 16 Personalities and Tendencies.
A deeper understanding of personality, and how it’s forming and re-forming over time helps me better define the personas on the Council, and critically the roles that they need to play to help leverage my strengths, and compensate for my limitations.
3. Valuable resonance and objective dissonance. My first iteration of the Council was, on reflection, a group of personas that just reinforced my inherent will. I missed the crucial point that the role of the Council is to challenge my thinking, to grow ideas, and to find the counterpoints.
The current Council is probably closer to a group that I think is the intersection of valuable resonance — the aptitude to grow and expand an idea or thought process, and objective dissonance — the ability to provide a view that is constructively counter to my thought processes, ideas, and decision making.
The Council isn’t just stacked with Yes ‘men’, or so I like to think. There is the ever-present danger that the Council is also an expression of my inherent blind spots, and so isn’t by any means infallible.
As I continue to continue, to grow, to find new things to mull over and make decisions on, I may need to reshape the Council. That shape will continue to be measured by equal measures of resonance and dissonance.
To say that the Council was my idea would be untrue. The idea was born out of a conversation with my most constant, most valued, and most loved source of counsel. My wife once suggested to me that the voices in my head are actually guides as much as they are critics and that I should engage in more of a conversation with them, rather than sit passively and continue to be spoken at.
Stellar advice. As always.