(Yeah, Me Too)

Six years ago I wrote about a book that had me questioning how long, how often, and in how many ways my own mind was working against me. It was called Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps by Jennifer Garvey Berger. I recommended it to everyone I knew, wrote about it in a blog in 2020, and it’s still popping up in my life more often than most things I’ve read.

Over the past 6 years, life has …  happened. A global pandemic, the ‘great resignation,’ AI upending every industry on the planet, political polarization that’s making our collective head spin, and economic uncertainty that’s become something of a permanent condition.

I kept watching smart, well-intentioned leaders fall into the same five Mindtraps Berger wrote about in 2019. Even if they had read the book, knowing about a trap and escaping one are very different sports.

I’m revisiting this because, if anything, the world has gotten more complex, more unpredictable, and more unforgiving of the mental shortcuts our ancient brains love to take.

A Quick Recap of the Five Mindtraps

On the surface, Berger’s premise is simple: our brains evolved for a world that no longer exists. Eons ago, we were slow, clawless creatures who needed to make fast decisions to survive. We knew who was after us, we knew who was with us, and we knew what we could control (and what we couldn’t). All of it served us beautifully on the savanna (or jungle, depending on where we were).

In today’s complexity and context, these same instincts become the traps that keep us stuck.

The Rightness Trap. That feeling of I know I’m right is an emotion, not a cognitive process. And yet we mistake it for one all the time. Instead, when you feel most certain that you’re right, get curious; ask yourself: What am I missing? What would change my mind?

The Simple Story Trap. We love a clean narrative: hero, villain, beginning, middle, end. It’s satisfying, but it’s also wildly incomplete. The next time you’ve decided someone is the villain in your story, ask yourself what the story looks like from where they’re standing. Spoiler: they’re probably the hero in their version.

The Agreement Trap. Raise your hand if you’ve ever sat in a leadership meeting where everyone nodded along with a decision and then nothing changed. Yep. We’re wired to seek belonging through agreement and in doing so, we sand off all the rough edges where the real ideas live. Healthy conflict and debate is necessary, so invite it.

The Control Trap. This one is personal. The desire to grip the steering wheel tighter when things feel chaotic is almost irresistible. But in complexity and uncertainty, there is no steering wheel, there are only experiments. And the leaders I see thriving right now are the ones who’ve made peace with their lack of influence over control, are comfy with not knowing the outcome, and who ask what conditions can I help create to hopefully get the outcome I want? rather than how do I force this outcome?

The Ego Trap. The sneakiest of the five, and Berger calls it the ‘master switch’ for good reason. We’ve worked hard to become who we are, and that investment makes us resist becoming someone new; it prevents us from evolving. I see this constantly in leadership transitions: brilliant people clinging to the identity that got them here, even when it’s no longer serving them. The question that opens the door: Who do I want to be next?

What’s Changed in Six Years

The Mindtraps haven’t changed at all, but the stakes have. 

The pace of change has made the Rightness trap more dangerous, because the world you were right about last year may not be the world you’re operating in today. 

The Simple Story trap is more seductive than ever in a world of social media echo chambers and 24-hour news cycles that reward the cleanest, most dramatic narrative.

And in a world demanding continuous reinvention, the Ego trap may be the single biggest limiter of leadership effectiveness I encounter.

Your Escape Routes

The same questions Berger suggests still hold up beautifully:

• What do I believe, and how could I be wrong?
• How might this conflict actually deepen the relationship?
• What can I help enable? And what could enable me?
• Who do I want to be next?

These aren’t one-time questions, ask and answer them over and over again. Only practice can rewire your operating system. 

If you haven’t read Garvey Berger’s book yet,it’s worth every minute. And if you have, maybe it’s time to read it again. Six years of living will give it a whole new meaning.