Lesson: Conscious Leadership with Diana Chapman

Step #4 Right: Letting go of being right

Just before this interview I had a client who called late. She called and she was apologetic. She immediately said, "I'm sorry I'm late. I hope I haven't upset you." So she has already decided that she's right, that she was wrong to call in late, and she's not actually really available to be with me because she is over there just basically shaming herself for being late. In that moment, being right cost her being able, instead, to be present to even just find out how am I. If she were just present she would know I wasn't upset. She calls when she calls. In this case, maybe sometimes I might be angry and that anger is intelligent and we could say, "Welcome, anger" and what do we get to learn from the anger. There would be no controlling the situation and she'd get to just learn something about the cost of coming on when she came on.

Being right keeps us from being available to learn. Being right keeps us from seeing possibilities that we could never have seen before. Being right keeps us in a smaller version of ourselves because a lot of us hold stories like, "I'm right that I'm not a very good speaker. I'm right that am good at these things and not good at these things." We really limit ourselves a lot by our stories that we tell each other about what we're right about.

What I love about letting go of being right is there's just so much more possibility about who we get to be, what our relationships get to be, what our creations get to be, and then obviously there are all these other things about, "If I'm right, I usually have to hold on to my breath again. I'm constricted. It's causing disease."

Depression is a big cost to being right for a lot of people. I used to hold this story. "I'm right that my dad should get me more," and I used to really believe that, so I'd have this disconnection from my dad that was not necessary at all. When I really looked at that and said, "Is that really true that my dad doesn't get me," when I questioned that I started to see, "Oh, my gosh, that's not true at all. My dad gets me in all kinds of ways."

When we're right we tend to only look for the evidence to validate our righteousness and ignore all the other content that shows us that there's something else that's going on. Even the way we perceive what's happening around us can radically change when we let go of being right. What had been some tension for myself and my relationship with my father for 20 years shifted in a matter of 10 minutes by me just questioning one righteous belief that my father doesn't get me. Just shifting that around and looking at how the opposite could at least be as true, which is one of our commitments, I started to see all kinds of things about my father getting me and about how sometimes I don't get me and sometimes I don't get my father, and I could start to see, "Wait a minute. There's a lot more going on here than I had seen before," and all of this sudden I got this close connection to my father that I hadn't had in a long time, all because of holding onto being right.