Remember, guiding principles are those bright stars that help us navigate our lives; they are our deeply held values, our fundamental commitments, that we reach for when the togetherness forces are strong and threaten to pull us away from being the person we want to be.
~The Leader’s Journey podcast
I love social media. I know it can be problematic but still, I love it. I love seeing what my friends had for lunch and what their kids are up to but I also really love running across people and ideas and resources I would never have found on my own. I love the implicit conversation between different points of view (the comments section, not so much).
But as our society becomes more divided and polarized, I’ve been revisiting a set of guiding principles that I named for myself in the early days of Facebook. They include:
- Look for the complexity
- Wait for the dust to settle and the facts to emerge
- No hot takes
- Honor real-life relationship
- Say what you see from where you sit. Invite others to do the same.
When I realize that I haven’t followed one of my GPs, I take a post down. So many posts have barely seen the light of day before they’re deleted.
This process – and many others – has helped me to think about guiding principles in ways that line up with the important family systems work of Dr. Roberta Gilbert in The Cornerstone Concept and from whom I’m borrowing here.
A guiding principle isn’t just any strongly held opinion or core value or social norm. In family systems theory, guiding principles emerge from the crucible of sorting through our beliefs, assumptions, relational pressures and family traditions.
In Dr. Gilbert’s words, “There are many principles that have been handed to us. Life being what it is, during childhood most of these have to be agreed with, relatively unthinkingly. If we are heading toward relative emotional maturity, in adulthood, this will have to change. One of the great tasks for the adult is to stop adopting whatever is told us unthinkingly. We must think through for ourselves what we do and do not believe. We need to create principles for ourselves that we believe in enough to live by them.”
Here are some ways of thinking about the process of defining our guiding principles:
Stop.
To begin this work, we must step back from the “hot mess” of emotion, peer pressure, groupthink and social norms, no matter how familiar and comfortable they may be.
Instead, we take ourselves up to the balcony where we can take an observer position. From there, we can look beyond what we say we believe and watch what we actually do, especially when we and others are highly anxious.
Think.
Guiding principles may be influenced by emotion but they are, by definition, rooted in fact and reason.
As a human, I hold my biases and my reactive opinions with great passion; even when I’m faced with facts to the contrary, I want to hold on tighter. Below my awareness, I often think the way I do because I want to think that way – not because it aligns with reality but because it makes me feel less anxious or makes me feel closer to my social group.
The process of defining our guiding principles requires that we use research and logical thought to shine a bright light on our assumptions and our thinking so that we can see if they withstand the light of day. It requires that we expose ourselves to other ways of thinking and play devil’s advocate even with our favorite biases.
It’s helpful that just the process of thinking helps to dispel the anxiety being stirred up by our pesky nervous systems and helps us to pay attention to our best reasoning.
Try.
In this stage, we adopt a guiding principle as our own and “try it on and try it out.” This means that the principle now guides our actions in the complexities of real life–in fact, the higher the anxiety the better.
Test.
As we look at our experimentation with our guiding principle, we might ask ourselves:
- What happens when I live according to that principle?
- Does it hold up under the complexity of real life?
- Does it line up with reason and knowable facts?
- Does it reinforce a sense of my basic self: “This is who I am?”
Repeat.
Defining and testing our guiding principles is a lifelong project.
Even the guiding principles we are most fond of must be subjected to new and changing information and more complex reasoning as it becomes available.
A guiding principle that can’t change with better information is not a guiding principle; it’s fundamentalist dogma.
These days, I’m re-thinking and re-testing my guiding principles about social media. For one thing, I increasingly understand more about how algorithms shape my exposure to ideas and therefore my perspective than I used to; I’m also more aware of how being more online means being more out of touch with local reality.
I don’t know if where I will land will be different from where I started but I know that the process of defining my guiding principles, thinking them through, testing them in real life and then starting all over again is part of what it means to be fully human.
