Only 4 more newsletter issues to go before Art of Gig wraps up on April 30th!
Let’s try an exercise. Pick a three-word phrase to describe your current posture, the way you are present in your environment. One word for how you take in input, one for how you process it, and one for how you are pre-disposed to translate it into output.
Here is a table of cue words to choose from, but feel free to find your own. Try to stick to three words, but you can use phrases or compound words if you must.
For example, lately I feel I’ve been adopting a posture of blinkered, relaxed, invention. I’m not really paying much attention to the environment, I’m feeling pretty relaxed, and my output is mostly stuff I’m making up, rather than a response to the environment — ie invention.
If you find this exercise hard, here is an alternative way to approach it — in which of the many situations you routinely find yourself in these days, do you feel most naturally present? The situation need not be comfortable or pleasant, but you must feel naturally present in it.
Now pick the three words that describe that.
The reason I’ve been thinking about postures is that I think, on a day-to-day level, my entire approach being an indie consultant boils down to moving fluidly and naturally through a wider range of postures than I did as an employee.
It’s almost a mind-and-body expression of the “free” in “free agency.”
I can adapt to the situation, mood, and moment in a way that feels natural. I don’t have to ever adopt a stifling posture enforced on me by the situation that feels like it’s at odds with the one I instinctively want to adopt.
I don’t have to be “on,” I can just be.
This doesn’t mean all postures are pleasant. But a posture can definitely feel natural and unpleasant at the same time.
The phrase “comfortable in your own skin” is really what I’m getting at. Even if you’re uncomfortable in the situation, and find the feelings induced by it unpleasant or awkward, your posture is natural and allows you to be comfortable in your own skin. You own your presence in the situation.
This is a subtle thing. For example, if you are trying to learn golf and the swing feels awkward and unnatural, that’s not what I’m talking about.
In that situation, you’re still comfortable in your own skin because you’ve chosen the challenge of learning to swing a golf club, and are comfortable in your skin, even if you’re not comfortable with the mechanics of golf swings.
But if you have to pretend to enjoy golf when you don’t, because you’re in some sort of cartoon, old-fashioned business meeting on the golf course, and would rather be somewhere else, that’s an unnatural posture.
Free agency rarely feels like being in a straitjacket or otherwise forced into an unnatural posture, involving alien patterns of input, processing, and output that feel imposed. It rarely feels like your actions are a result of distortionary effects of the environment rather than choices you’ve made about how to be present.
By contrast, as an employee, I had s narrower range of postures available to me, and half the time, the posture I was forced to adopt by the situation didn’t feel like the natural one I’d adopt on my own. My postures felt somehow “edited.” They weren’t entirely my own. I couldn’t entirely trust them.
I remember in particular, the one time I had to actually wear a suit and tie. At that point, I hadn’t worn a suit in years, and had gained a bit of weight, so I was very uncomfortable in the one suit I owned.
The funny part? The event was an awards ceremony. I was getting an award.
One way to think of it is: a typical job involves having to put on a “game face” for work too much of the time. Only after decades, if you either find a very secure niche for yourself, or if you rise to the top, can you feel comfortable.
As a free agent, I don’t really have a “game face.” I just bring my regular face to every situation, and mostly my natural responses are also the appropriate ones. If I feel like I can’t bring the right posture to the situation, I reschedule the situation or get out of it.
A large part of feeling comfortable in your skin is letting your mind and body flow into whatever posture feels like a natural fit to the circumstances you’re in. This kind of comfort also tends to promote the fastest learning and growth, since you’re letting the unconscious intelligence of your mind and body lead, and trusting your intuitions.
A posture is really an unconscious mind-and-body decision-making formula that is simple enough to stick to even when your judgement is seriously compromised. Like when you’re drunk, sleep deprived, stressed, or temporarily depressed.
A natural posture is your chosen strategy in firmware form. It is efficient. It is compact.
Strategy in action is periods of confused action punctuated by posture resets (the firmware being flashed, if you like). Postures embody evolving strategies in periodically updated, compressed, formulaic ways. Your situation awareness and sense of current options get bundled with what your unconscious idea of what you think you’re doing, and show up in the stance you adopt in preparation for whatever is coming next.
In Boydian terms, postures are embodied orientations.
If you watch a martial arts contest (any form) you’ll notice that the action unfolds that way: bouts of confused sparring that may be more or less chaotic depending on the skill of the fighters, punctuated by posture resets. Sparring increases entropy. Posture resets periodically lower it again.
Strategy really is about the sequence of postures you reset to in the brief lulls between chaotic action. No plan survives first contact with the enemy or market. The fog of war descends and everything gets confused and mixed up. But things don’t stay that way continuously. You get brief periods of respite. Periods when you can do posture resets.
And the faster you can do those resets — “fast transients” in Boydian terms — the more generally effective you will be.
But if the environment imposes awkward and unnatural-feeling constraints on you so you can’t let your mind and body flow into the postures that feel natural, your evolving strategy gets heavily compromised.
Or put another way, it forces your thinking to be higher energy, and higher dimensional, increasing the chances of mistakes and failure. You have slower transients, and distorted orientations.
A posture is a pattern of potential wired to inputs and outputs. On the input end, posture determines how likely you are to notice particular changes in your environment. On the output end, it determines how quickly and how well you are likely to react to them.
Free agency allows you to flow much more naturally through postures appropriate to situations. Jobs, on the other hand, rarely do. You have to be “on” and aware of the difference between the posture you unconsciously want to adopt, and the posture the social/professional situation is forcing on you. You have to censor your natural reactions, and substitute unnatural ones. There is a significant cost to breaking from what’s expected of you.
In a way, your mind and body constitute a marketplace of micro-behaviors trying to sort themselves out in an emergent way, by flowing from one posture equilibrium to the next. Imposed situational factors can have stronger or weaker distortionary effects. So free agency is really a kind of “free as in markets.”
Free agency isn’t entirely an escape from posture-flow distortion, but it is a very significant loosening of the regulatory strait jackets imposed by typical jobs on typical people. That’s why we use phrases like “feeling trapped” or “feeling stifled” when describing the factors that lead to quitting jobs.
Your mind and body are being prevented from flowing through the natural postures they gravitate to as the environment changes. Things you’re learning and thinking and feeling aren’t being allowed to find expression in postures that encode your evolving unconscious intelligence at its best. Your orientations and transients are being continuously messed with, and it is too exhausting to resist. So you give up, and cede agency to the organization. You allow yourself to be “house broken.” You “stay in your lane.” It’s a relief to finally give up and just go with the flow. The energy draw drops.
The cost? You’re no longer learning and growing as fast as you could be.
Of course, there’s a chance you’ll find that perfect job where your natural posture flow exactly fits the demands of the role. But the chances are low.
Free agency is no guarantee of finding and staying in a fluid posture-environment-fit, but your chances are much better.
Note: This newsletter will be shutting down on April 30th, 2021, and the archives published as an eBook.
To simplify the shut down, new subscriptions have now been turned off and existing subscriptions have been paused. Existing subscribers will still be able to access the paywalled archives until the list shuts down in May. The rest of you will have to wait for the ebook.