🎮How Do We Play the Right Status Games? 🎮

🔥Welcome to Volume #00095!🔥 I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey. If you enjoy the newsletter, please share it with your friends. 🎮How Do We Play the Right Status Games? 🎮 A perfectly pressed smile framed my lips. My mouth hung in that pose as my head nodded vigorously. I wrecked of Yes, Yes, Yes. I blew out the air of pressed laughter. The laugh and smile didn't feel fake or forced, but I didn't find anything funny or entertaining. Then a lightning bolt of recognition hit me. I recently re-read Keith Johnstone's book Impro, where he reminds us that status games are life. Our new CEO sat in the center of the conference room. I flanked him on his left, and my colleagues filled the room. We all mirrored each other in our responses and reactions. We were primed for these responses, as we all dressed in suits on a random Tuesday because we heard the CEO didn't like golf shirts. He sat in the middle in his golf shirt (we got bad intel), and laughter emanated from all sides as he told some not-very-funny or entertaining story. We genuflected to his position of power and attempted to win sway with the emperor. We all flapped around, complimenting him with our body language and reactions. The status game played out in the windowed conference room. Status games aren't necessarily good or bad. We showed that we were on the team and on board, ready to be led. We showed that we cared and were ready and willing to help. Once you start noticing status games, it is hard not to see them. When the realization stuck, I struggled to force laughs and enjoy the game. I switched to the head nodding and leaning forward into the conversation. I felt my body shifting and hovering on the table. At that moment, all I thought about was how goofy we all were, playing for prestige and power. We Have to Play Status Games Again, status games aren't necessarily good or bad. We play them constantly in our culture, team, and tribes. At times it's consciously, and at other times we are entirely unaware. We play high status and low. It depends on the context and the situation. The question for us is, what status games are we playing? What status games do we want to play? Like infinite and finite games, we want to play status games that help create the world we want. Clamoring for a CEO's attention and good graces with smiles and head nodes is not the game I want to play. Supporting the CEO in our mission, bringing good energy to people, empowering people, and creating success are the status games I want to play. Using Status to Serve How do we take our status to empower others? How do we use status to create the right success? How do we use the status that people afford us to help unlock their best? We get to sit in the seat of the CEO all the time. As parents, leaders, co-workers, and advisors, we can pick the proper status games to play. The status we celebrate is the status that drives us. We need to use it wisely. 📓Things to Think About📓 Irinia Flionova on Career Shock Change is the constant, and when volatility picks up, the odds of career shock (positive or negative) increase. In research literature, Jos Akkermans and his colleagues define a career shock as “a disruptive and extraordinary event that is, at least to some degree, caused by factors outside the focal individual’s control and that triggers a deliberate thought process concerning one’s career.” In a nutshell, something happens outside your control zone, ranging from natural disasters to a substantial conflict with institutional culture. Next, this unplanned event forces you into deep reflection followed by a change of behavior (learning new skills) or taking action (searching for a new job). Irinia offers her REAL approach to dealing with it. REAL stands for recognizing, exploring, accepting, and learning. We start with noticing the change. Then we explore our inner world (coaches make great partners for this part) as we deal with the change. We then accept where things stand and reflect on what we learned from the process. Stone Skipping Champion Outside magazine looks at the stone-skipping champion of the world, Kurt Steiner. Becoming the best meant an obsessive perfection mind state that included many life challenges. It’s an interesting story of existence and a driving desire to do one thing and do it extremely well. Kurt Steiner is the world’s greatest stone skipper. Over the past 22 years, he has won 17 tournaments in the United States and Europe, generating ESPN coverage and a documentary film. In September 2013, he threw a rock that skipped so many times it defied science. This year he hopes to smash records on both sides of the Atlantic, giving him a platform for sermonizing about a sport he believes is nothing short of a means for the redemption of mankind—“a legitimate path to an essential inner balance,” he says. Being the stone-skipping champion means living a weird existence. Kurt has only sourced rocks from Lake Erie, whose 13,000-year-old basin is crammed full of the kinds of wafer-thin, Devonian-shale chunks that cause skippers to swoon. To find rocks, Kurt combs the lake for about an hour, appraising the stones like a diamond merchant. One in three he picks up makes it into his five-gallon bucket. Ideally, it weighs between four and seven ounces, has a smooth, flat bottom, and measures between a quarter-inch and five-sixteenths of an inch thick. Once he’s gathered 60 pounds’ worth—around 200 rocks—he sits on a crate and sorts the rocks into four rows of descending weight, arranged left to right. Everything is ultimately an art and when done well is poetry. “There is so much poetry,” Ohmer said as the three of us sat the bar. “Because you find that stone, then you’ve thrown it in the river and it’s gone. You’ve pursued this endeavor until you have it all figured out. And then you hand it over to the world and see what comes of it.” Kurt needed a rival to push him, who he also pushed. Doing things ourselves is hard; finding a challenger takes us to places we never imagined. He reminds us of the power of others. A few weeks later, Russ died. It “hurt Kurt a lot,” Paul Fero, Kurt’s friend, told me. “Kurt has told me flat out that he would have never done what he did, throwing the 88, without Russell. Russell was a counterbalance, something to shoot for. They kept each other going. They both kept each other striving for more.” 📕Books to Read📕 The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It by Will Storr This book reminded me of reading Impro and insipred the piece about status games. Will offers many antidotes and powerful ideas. My favorite story was about the power of rivalry. Steve Jobs hearing from a senior executive, who he clashed with, at Microsoft about how they solved tablet computing and were doing it with pens. By pushing it in Jobs’ face, Steve turned around and wanted to design a tablet useing fingers, just to prove this guy wrong. That is how we got the Ipad. Key Ideas: * Life is a game, and we can’t help but play. At the same time, there is no finish line or promised land. We never win the game, and it only continues. * We care about connection and rank. Always remember that as a member of a group or when leading * We live in a world of rules, both cultural and tribal, that include rewards and punishments for both adults and children (these get encoded in rituals, myths, and culture) * Three Games of Status * Dominance - mafias and armies * Virtue - religion and institutions * Success - corporations and sporting events (competence games) * We want to play games of success that is based on competence and creating things * When we change the rules, we change the players… why design and the status games we decide to play are so important * The most successful leaders have the least compliant followers —> they give people agency, allow them to disagree, and to push things where they need to go * Successful leaders t… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit themiddleway.substack.com