It’s 7:18 am.  I’ve been awake since 3-ish, on and off, and up since 5:30.  Why?  In part, because today (Friday) is the day that I knew I needed to get up and put electronic pen to paper for this essay, which is due to post on Sunday.  Crunch time is upon us and my most effective intrinsic motivator (my self-imposed deadline) has finally gotten me on this computer.  Beau has given up trying to jump up on my lap for morning snuggles.  Mommy is focused.

As we discussed last time in the first essay around motivation, even though I love to write and get enormous satisfaction from it, I still require a bit of motivation to actually do it.  I’ve been writing this essay in my head over the two weeks—I’ve even jotted down notes to remind me of points I want to make—but sitting down and actually drafting and editing rarely seems to happen until the deadline is upon me.  That’s the motivator I’ve discovered I need.

We talked about motivation in general last time, intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation, and more deeply about personal motivation through the examples of my own struggles.  This time, I want to talk more about motivating others, as well as how lessons on motivating others can give you some insights into motivating yourself.

There is a huge body of work on motivating others, particularly in the workplace.  I’m sure most of you reading this have been to at least one training class on this topic.  Not surprisingly, there is no consensus on what actually works.  This is because we are talking about motivating people, not, say, carbon atoms.  I’m a chemist so you know you’ll get science analogies!  If I want to “motivate” a carbon atom to bond with, say, an oxygen atom, I know how to do that.  A carbon atom is a carbon atom is a carbon atom.  And the reaction is well studied and will work every time since I can control the conditions to my liking.  Unlike carbon atoms, all people are different and even if I COULD control conditions to my liking, each person will respond to different sources of motivation.  Frustratingly, even the same person will respond differently depending on the context.  For example, fear can be a powerful motivator but circumstance is critical.  If you fear for your life, you will be motivated to do extraordinary things.  You may even be highly motivated if you fear for your job.  But if a manager chooses to regularly motivate his staff through fear and intimidation coupled with the threat of firing them, he will get the bare minimum effort he requires and even that only for a short period of time.  I am fond of saying that the difference between a good organization and a great organization is the discretionary effort put in by people.  Few choose to put in consistent, excellent extra effort out of fear.  Shame is another poor choice of motivation.  It might get you one action out of a particularly reluctant colleague (and make you feel better for an instant), but likely the trust in that relationship will be gone.  If you choose to use shame, it had better be worth it.  If you consistently use shame, don’t expect to be a manager for long.

There is a lot of controversy over the use of incentives for motivation, be it in the workplace or with, say, kids.  I was subjected to a segment on financial incentives during a leadership training program in which the takeaway was “financial incentives never work so don’t bother proposing them to us.”  My belief is that well crafted financial incentives do indeed work, but only in the right context.  If the work environment is toxic, if no one believes in the mission of the business (or has no idea what it is), and if the reward is really small compared to the effort, then I agree that financial incentives won’t work.  Nor will dangling days off, or a big celebration event, or any other “reward” that requires the recipient to actually appreciate the workplace and their co-workers.  Get your culture right, first.

Peter Diamandis, of X-Prize fame, is one of the most annoyingly optimistic people I’ve ever met and he has some good thoughts on getting that culture right.  I subscribe to his blog, geared towards entrepreneurs who want to do really big things.  I am not one of those people, but I appreciate his perspectives and how his thinking challenges me out of my relentless incrementalism.  In a recent blog, he talked about employee motivation.  For workers to be motivated to do great things, he says, they need three things from you and the culture you create in your company: 1) Autonomy—the freedom to work within a framework that is not overly restrictive; 2) Mastery—the opportunity and support to get better and better at what they do; and, 3) Purpose—self-explanatory, but which I will dig into more below.  If you create an environment in which your employees have these three things, he says (and I agree), they will do Great Things.  The devil, of course, is in the details.  Creating this kind of culture and maintaining it clearly fight against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  It takes a lot of work and a lot of nurturing, which is why it doesn’t happen that often.

So, let’s talk about one particular aspect of that environment: purpose.  In my leadership life, I tried to always be clear with the organization about what our high level business goals were (sales, profitability, scientific excellence and differentiation, etc.).  Once they were stated, I’d work with individuals to connect their particular goals and responsibilities to those business goals.  This “line of sight” in goal setting helps to instill that sense of purpose.  If you understand how your efforts contribute to the larger goals, that is a piece of the motivation puzzle.  Of course, you have to believe in the mission of the business and the worthiness (and achievability) of the goals, as well.  Plus, you need feel trust in and from your workmates to believe that you are not toiling in vain.  This is when financial incentives tied to workplace achievement work.  They work because those extrinsic motivators provided by leadership inspire you to access your intrinsic motivators—pride in your work and your own sense of accomplishment.  That is what gets the job done.

And this brings us full circle, back to motivating yourself in your personal life.  Thanks to a great comment by a reader in response to Part I of this essay, I was reminded of the connection between how I have motivated others in the workplace and how I might better motivate myself—this connection to higher level goals.  It’s easier in the workplace, because those higher levels goals are discreet and measurable and time bound.  And you expect to achieve them!  In your personal life, those higher level goals are aspirational.  You don’t really expect to fully achieve them; your goal is to continually move toward them or at least take actions that are consistent with that aspiration.  I am talking about goals like “I want to be able to grow old maintaining my physical and mental health well into old age” and “I want to treat everyone with whom I cross paths with kindness and compassion” and, for my fellow Jewish tribesmen out there, “I want to embrace my responsibility toward tikkum olam—healing the world”.  Those are big, hairy aspirations.  How do I tie organizing recipes and shelf contents to THAT? 

There’s a clue to that in something I wrote earlier, in Living the Second Quadrant, about living with intention.  This means choosing to do things that are important to me, not just reacting to what others wanted from me or mindlessly doing less important things because they were in front of me and/or easy.  The “how” I do that, this motivational piece, must then be tied to what I consider those high level aspirational goals.  Sounds like a lot of work and that’s the rub.  There’s that Second Law of Thermodynamics, again—nature tends towards increasing chaos and we have to put work into reversing that inclination.  I’m ok with that, as long as I believe in what I’m working towards.  I’m starting to articulate that better.  I’ve got work to do.

I started thinking about motivation during spin class last week. It was at that point in the class when I was no longer in a state of flow and was just trying to get through the last 15 minutes. The instructor began an 8 minute journey of pain that involved 40 second sprints followed by a 20 second “rest” period during which you increased your gear so that the next 40 second sprint would be tougher. I was thinking to myself, as I turned up the gear for the fourth time in as many minutes, that I really need an instructor. I could never motivate myself to do this on my own. My memory went back to the time that I was working out twice weekly with a trainer. I was always amazed that I would just do whatever he told me to do. There was one time he was late to our session.  I had done my warm up and thought, “Well, Sean often starts me off with burpees so why don’t I do a set a burpees?” But I hate burpees. So, I didn’t do them. Just as I was trying to decide on some exercise less unpalatable to do while I waited, Sean came in the door and said, “Burpees.  Go!”  And I immediately started doing burpees.

Motivation is a tricky thing. It’s wrapped up in priorities, which we have discussed at length before, but is a separate beast. When I asked Siri to define motivation, she returned this from Dictionary.com: “The reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way.  The general desire or willingness of someone to do something.”  Reasons, desire, willingness.  Alright, that resonates. So, when you really want to do something (priorities) or HAVE to do something (responsibilities), how do you summon that desire and willingness? And if you are trying to motivate someone else, how do you find those triggers that summon desire and willingness in them?

First, let’s talk a bit about types, or sources, of motivation.  Sources of motivation are either intrinsic or extrinsic.  “Intrinsic” means the source comes from within you.  “Extrinsic” means the source is external to you.  Ideally, extrinsic motivation awakens some source of intrinsic motivation.  Afterall, you still need to make the choice to act.  No one can MAKE you do anything you don’t want to do.  They can, however, provide a stimulus that causes you to CHOOSE to do something that, without that stimulus, you would not choose to do.  Based on that external stimulus, you run a quick cost/benefit analysis and decide that the consequences of not responding to that extrinsic motivator are not worth it (negative consequences) or that the benefits of responding are indeed worth it (positive consequences).  Regardless, you are making a choice to act or not act.  Own that.  (See:  Hot Button of Personal Accountability/Not Playing the Victim.)

Back to exercise as an example.  We have established that I am basically a lazy person.  When it comes to exercise, I need extrinsic motivation.  There are some things I will do on my own, like long walks listening to podcasts or moderate treadmills stints watching videos or reading eBooks.  However, these are rarely very strenuous workouts.  If I want to work out hard (spin, lifting) or go through a routine (stretching, yoga) I need an instructor or at the very least a workout partner.  I just do.  It is not a failing that I am not one of those people who motivate myself to workout hard.  It is an understanding of what type of motivation I need to do strenuous workouts.  Afterall, I can motivate myself to put myself in front of that instructor.  I just prefer to have them make the decisions of what exercise I do next, or the accountability of keeping up with a workout partner.  It’s taken me years to figure this out about myself.  Yet, while I have figured out the exercise thing, I’m still figuring out what kind of motivation I need to do other things that I want to do—or at least things that I want to have completed.

Even writing, something that I really enjoy, requires some type of motivation.  What works for me is a deadline.  This is why I will never write a book, unless I can motivate myself to break down that enormous task into a zillion little deadlines (or find an editor who will do that for me).  I write to a deadline, whether it’s my self-imposed every-two-week blog post deadlines or publishing deadlines for the articles I write for Lab Manager Magazine.  I rarely sit down to actually type until a few days before said deadline, which is why my writing is usually limited to 1200-1500 words.  Oh, I’ll compose in my head for days or weeks, but the actual task of writing doesn’t happen until that date-driven motivation pops up.

What I have a really hard time with is motivation around small personal or household tasks.  This drives Trish absolutely nuts.  Take a guess at how long I’ve been “promising” to organize the stacks of recipes I’ve been collecting?  Or organizing the shelves lining the wall beside our basement steps.  Or any number of little tasks around the house.  It’s not like I don’t have the time.  It’s not like I haven’t made a zillion lists (and I do love a list).  It’s not like I don’t get enormous satisfaction when I complete one of those tasks—when I take Trish on a tour through some little task I’ve completed, I’m like a child showing off an “A” on a class assignment.  I haven’t found the right intrinsic motivator yet for those things and I don’t think it would be good for our marriage if I asked Trish to be the source of extrinsic motivation.  I know that my activation barrier is around my paralyzing perfectionism.  I know that when I DO actually start something that I finish it to reasonable satisfaction.  But I just.  Can’t.  Get.  Myself.  To start.  It’s important to note, here, that Trish does not have this issue.  In fact, one could say she has the opposite problem.  When she gets a task into her head, she cannot sit still until it is done.  She will drive herself to exhaustion.  And there is usually an injury involved, a bandage or two, and some blood.  That is not my goal, either.  There must be some happy medium.

This had been an issue throughout my working life as well.  I’m sure my former co-workers who are reading this are rolling their eyes.  They could probably comment on the techniques they developed to motivate me to do things they needed me to do, be it a capital expenditure justification document or a conversation with someone or a phone call.  I probably should not let Trish know this, but I think what worked best was putting me in a position of personal and/or public embarrassment if I didn’t complete the task.

What’s super frustrating is that I know all the tricks.  I know that if there is something you are dreading that you should do that FIRST.  Get it out of the way.  I know that I do my best work of any kind in the morning hours—I’m writing now at 9:30 am.  I know that allowing myself some time to do something fun and/or mindless will absolutely keep me from ever tackling whatever it is that I want to motivate myself to do.  And I know that sometimes I just need to give myself a little grace and try again tomorrow.  No epiphanies, here.  No fancy wrap-up sentences that describe how I’ve tackled this issue.  Like most personal growth, it’s just going to be a forever journey, a daily battle.  What I can commit to is to keep trying to get better.  Writing about it like this will help me for a little bit.  I now, at least, feel a bit of public accountability over those recipes and those shelves.  I will NOT share with you what else is on that list!

I’m not sure which is tougher:  motivating yourself or motivating action in others.  I will tell you that I’ve found it a lot easier to motivate others within the structure and hierarchy of the work environment than in my personal life.  Incentives help sometimes.  Simply applying what works on you usually does not.  We’ll tackle that next time.

Yes, this is the third time that I’m writing about coping energy.  It’s been quite the humbling month, as evidenced by the fact that this essay is posting a week late, after the one before it was half a week late.  Anyone who knows me knows that I really don’t like missing deadlines or being late—even if no one but me cares.

Ever since I retired and then started this blog, I’ve been very proud of myself.  Thinking about all these life and leadership lessons as I’ve been writing about them had gotten me feeling something like a mountain climber summiting a peak.  The peak, in this case, is Maslow’s hierarchy and I guess I convinced myself that I had reached that rarified air of self-actualization.  At the tender age of 59 I had reached enlightenment and could now calmly pontificate from the top of the mountain and spread my wisdom.  My life was now a joyful string of days full of calm, happiness, rainbows, and unicorns.  Yeah, no.  My humbling lesson over this past month is that I have not reached some enviable skill of managing life’s stressors.  It’s that I had managed to remove a good number of the stressors I’d dealt with throughout my life through a combination of good fortune, retirement, and a life partner that I thank the Universe for every day.  And when a series of unforeseen and uncontrollable stressors came flooding back, I found that my ability to roll with the punches just wasn’t there.  So, we’re going to talk about coping energy AGAIN.

I just reread my first two essays on this topic.  You can find the first part here and the second part here.  I could have benefited from reading them these last few weeks.  What happened?  Well, it started on September 1^st when the remains of Hurricane Ida, smashing up against a cold front, spawned a number of tornados in our area, including an EF2 that spun 130 mph winds right through our neighborhood.  RIGHT THROUGH.  That’s what my last essay was about.  The disruption was more than the power outage and the debris.  It was the constant irritation of the sound of the generators and chain saws and wood chippers.  It was the PTSD of going around the area and seeing everything changed.  It was the Y being closed and not wanting to do any other type of exercise and eating takeout and being thrown totally out of our routine.  It was trying to celebrate both of our birthdays and being happy and joyous but feeling exhausted the whole time while trying to hold it together.  It was navigating the 20^th anniversary of 9/11 in the middle of all that, which had me reliving all the horror, distress, and disorientation of those days.  All of this messed with my sleep, which is messed up enough as it is, and just aggravated the whole situation.  I had a hair trigger moodiness.  I was exhausted.  And I couldn’t really explain why I was feeling so off balance.

Then I had to get on a plane and fly to Atlanta for a family visit.  I love seeing my family!  What I dislike is the travel to Atlanta—on a good day.  This time, I had to deal with my stressed-out mood which meant a pit in my stomach every time I thought about any aspect of the trip.  Tropical Storm Nicholas had decided to park its tropical self west of Georgia, which meant a rainy forecast the whole time I was there.  That meant I was going to have to navigate “driving” around town in the rain—“driving” around Atlanta being some cross between the Indy 500 and a demolition derby.  To top it off, my sister’s car had taken in some water during a recent flash flood, so there was always the little concern in the back of my mind that something electrically kerflooey might happen at any point. 

There were other things going on, too, that I just don’t want to share.  The details are not important.  What matters is that I kept getting pinged by one stressor after another combined with a change in my schedule that kept me mentally and emotionally off balance for the first three weeks of the month without a break.  I did not handle it well.  Stuff that normally did not bother me much turned almost incapacitating!  I was teary all the time and had to keep going off by myself to let that emotion out.  I just wanted to sleep all the time, but I couldn’t sleep at night.  I wasn’t exercising.  I ate Very Bad Food and lots of it, which also left me feeling lethargic.  I slid very far, very fast.  I had no coping energy and was not able to regain any reasonable amount until these last few days.  That humbled me big time.

I thought I had conquered the coping energy challenge!  I thought I had developed the skills to catch myself, to maintain perspective, to practice effective self-care, and keep my coping energy reserves full (or at least not totally empty).  Instead, I found myself back in those old patterns of short temper, thinking only about myself and my own needs, making poor choices, and just feeling like I was drowning.  I disappointed myself and that made everything worse.  I felt like a failure.

Trish, members of my family, and friends who have seen me during this time were all kind of puzzled by this behavior.  It just didn’t seem that bad to them.  None of the stressors by themselves were enough to knock me off kilter.  Driving around Atlanta is never fun but I used to be able to do it without feeling like I was going to throw up when I got behind the wheel.  It was the combination and the unrelenting barrage—sort of like a boxer weakened by blow after blow.  He could withstand any individual hit just fine, but after so many so quickly, he went down for the count.

So, here’s what I’ve learned though all of this.  When someone tells you about things that are stressing them and sapping their coping energy, don’t try to fix it.  If they want your suggestions for solutions, they will ask you.  What they want is for you to listen, to really hear them, to validate that the situation sucks, and to know that you care.  Look, I’m a problem solver.  Most of us are.  We’ve spent our careers doing that and it’s hard to resist the urge to fix something or someone.  I’m telling you, resist that urge!  I did not want all the well-meaning suggestions that came flooding in.  I knew I could right the ship.  I just needed to vent about the storm and hear from others that, yeah, the storm is rough.  I am reasonably good at asking for what I need, although sometimes I need to reach a breaking point and that ask comes with tears.  (Very effective for getting what you need, by the way.)  Others may indeed need a little prodding, but ask gently.  Ultimately, if the person feels safe and supported, they WILL ask for what they need.  And if you are the one struggling, let yourself struggle a bit and then take one little step forward.  Don’t beat yourself up but don’t get stuck.  And ask.  For.  Help.  Just having Trish take me to the airport instead of driving myself made a world of difference.

I’m mostly out of the storm, now, as evidenced by the fact that I can write about it.  A visit from a dear friend helped to fill me back up.  The bathroom scale has fortunately not moved appreciably and my eating is reverting to the mean.  I’m still looking forward to getting back into regular exercise.  I’m going to work on the hubris.  I’m not invincible.  I don’t have all the perfect techniques to avoid a crash.  I learn a little more each time I go through a difficult period, which is why the difficult times are so important.  This time, I am reminded of the importance of pushing myself outside of my comfort zone a little more frequently so that I am better able to handle unexpected upsets more easily.  And I will work even harder to have that compassion for others whose coping energy is sapped for whatever reason.  “We are here to get it right, not be right.”

We spend our entire lives negotiating, and for the most part we hate it.  I, personally, hate negotiating for a variety of reasons.  For one, it always seems combative and I dislike conflict.  Related, I always fear that I’m being taken advantage of or that I’m leaving something on the table.  And finally, if I want to avoid those first two feelings, I need to do a lot of homework.  Since we’ve already established that I’m a basically lazy person, it is understandable that I dislike negotiating.

You can’t get away from it, though.  You negotiate terms of a job.  You negotiate to buy a car.  You negotiate ALL THE TIME with your partner on everything, including “little” daily things like chores around the house, what’s for dinner, and what you watch on TV.  Back in the day when I used to travel a lot for business, I regularly paged through those inflight magazines they used to put in seatback pockets.  Those magazines were riddled with advertisements geared to the business traveler and invariably there were several on negotiating skills.  A famous one had in bold letters across the top:  You don’t get what you ask for; you get what you negotiate.  The inference, of course, is that blindly just asking for what you wanted or needed was a fool’s errand.  You must get confrontational and NEGOTIATE—take them for all they’ve got!  It’s not surprising, then, that most people treat negotiating like a war game.  Or just a war.  It is about winning.  It is about getting what you want and making the other guy give up more than he really wanted to give up.  And then I learned about BATNA.  The concept is not revelatory so much as being intentional about applying it.

BATNA is an acronym for Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement.  Your BATNA is the minimum you will accept.  Your walkaway point.  It’s what you will have if you can’t come to an agreement with the other party.  By definition, you’re ok with that outcome.  Maybe not happy, but you can live with it.  Let’s say you are at a street fair and you walk up to a vendor selling windchimes.  You love windchimes.  Who doesn’t?  You select a set, look at the price tag and think, “Yeah, no.  Too expensive.”  You have a price point in your head.  If the seller agrees to it, you have yourself a new set of windchimes.  If not, you walk away.  Your BATNA, in this case, is “I don’t have a new set of windchimes.”  That’s acceptable to you.  Now imagine that your best friend, who has a big birthday coming up, tells you about this FABULOUS set of wind chimes she saw at a street fair a while back and she is kicking herself for not buying them.  She had even snapped a picture and sent it to you and you could see it was the SAME vendor and SAME set of windchimes.  Now your BATNA is different.  You REALLY want to get those windchimes.  You will probably accept a higher price because the value to you (to please your friend) is much higher.

I learned about the concept of BATNA at a mini-MBA intensive short course that was geared toward R&D managers.  It was revelatory for all of us.  Now there was a logical approach to negotiating that we could navigate and it was not a war simulation.  You “just” had to understand your BATNA and the BATNA of the person you were negotiating with!  If there was an overlap, then you could find agreement.  If not, you both accepted your respective BATNAs and moved on.  Simple, right?  Well, we’re only halfway through the essay so of course it’s not that simple!

Let’s start with understanding your own BATNA.  Sometimes it can indeed be simple.  When I bought my last car, I had to decide if I was going to trade in my old car with the dealer or sell it separately.  I didn’t want to deal with a private sale, so I went to a couple of those places that buy your car and got a quote.  Both gave me EXACTLY the same quote.  After I had negotiated the price of my new car (that’s another, longer story) we discussed a trade.  I had decided that if they matched the quotes I had gotten, I would trade in my car with them.  Why?  My BATNA was not about maximizing the value I could get from my old car.  It was about minimizing hassle.  I’m sure I could have gotten significantly more money if I pursued a private sale, but I didn’t want the bother.  If the dealer wouldn’t match the other offers, then it was minimal additional hassle for me to go to one of those car buying places.  If the dealer DID match their offer, then I would get the same monetary value with even LESS hassle.  They matched.  I drove my new car home that day. 

Other times, knowing your BATNA is not so straightforward and this is why being intentional about understanding your BATNA is so important.  In the example above, I could have tried insisting on a retail price for my trade because I might have felt that I should get the Blue Book price.  Anyone who is a car dealer has, I’m sure, dealt with the “but my car is worth so much more than that” customer.  I didn’t do that because I understood the trade-off between the price I could get for my car and the hassle associated with getting that price and I intentionally chose to value low hassle over high price.  Deciding on a new job or moving to a new home are good examples of more complex BATNA calculations.  There are a lot more factors to consider than just the salary or the housing costs.  There are many, many factors in determining your BATNA that have to do with what truly makes you happy or at least content.  Teasing out those factors requires a really authentic look at yourself and honestly accepting what you know works for you and what doesn’t.  How many of us have made unfortunately bad choices because we established our BATNA based on what we wished represented our true desires instead of accepting what we really want?  That doesn’t mean you can’t make a bold choice aimed at broadening who you are, but you need to make that choice purposefully and accept the work it will take to make that happen.  If you are not purposeful about it, you end up putting yourself in the situation and hoping that you will suddenly find yourself happy in a context you’ve never been happy in before.  How well does that usually work?  This theme of authenticity is so critical!  Yes, Brené Brown seems to work her way into all of my essays.

The other, even tougher, part of the BATNA equation is understanding the BATNA of the negotiating party.  In addition to forcing yourself to take an authentic look at the situation from your own perspective, you now need to put yourself in the shoes of the other party and tease out what is truly important to THEM.  In a business setting, this involves sleuthing around the other party’s business model and financial position.  If you are negotiating project deadlines with a co-worker from a different function, you have a much better chance of finding agreement if you take the time to understand their business function and how their needs intersect with yours.  If your idea of negotiating a timeline is, “This is when I need it.  Period,” then don’t expect a lot of cooperation. 

While business negotiating often involves personal agendas, negotiating with the people in your private life is ALL about personal agendas.  When you are negotiating a vacation with your spouse, it involves understanding what they like to do and not do, as well as knowing the range of their travel preferences and what their breaking points are.  Surely there will be negotiating room between your two BATNAs.  If not, you have a different problem.  Understanding someone’s BATNA is synonymous with expressing empathy.  And expressing empathy means being able to be non-judgmental and accepting that someone else’s preferences are just as valid as your own.  It’s pretty easy, though, to forget about diversity of preference when we’re negotiating with someone.  Our way is the way that makes the most sense for us, therefore it should be the right way for everyone, right?  Your BATNA should never be everything you could possibly want.  Compromise is not a dirty word if you can be honest about your BATNA and keep an open mind about someone else’s.  So, the next time you’re negotiating with someone or arguing righteously about some topic, take a moment to step back and ask not only “what is my own BATNA” but also “what’s your BATNA”.  You just might find some common ground.

During my last couple of years working, I had the great luck to work with a Regulatory Services business that Intertek owned.  I say “great luck” for a couple of reasons: 1) this is a fascinating business that I knew very little about and I learned so much in my time working with them; and, 2) I had the pleasure of getting to know several fascinating people, including the person who inadvertently helped me write this essay and to whom it is dedicated.

This Regulatory Services business is a consultancy that assists companies in navigating a range of regulations often focused on public health.  The part of the business I worked most closely with was Chemical Services, which helps companies understand the regulations associated with chemicals in their products and how to comply with said regulations.  I had worked with this type of business in my earlier days as a bench chemist when I was developing specialty chemicals used in Industrial paints and coatings.  I, of course, felt that because I had this cursory exposure to the industry that I was “knowledgeable”.  Unsurprisingly, I found out very quickly that I was not.  Or, rather, that I knew just enough to be dangerous.  We’ve touched on this topic before.  Thanks to Karen, I know much more.  Which only seems to make me more dangerous.

The Principals in this business were very kind and patient with me.  Maybe it was because the business is located in Canada and Canadians are pathologically nice.  Maybe it was just because they were incredible people.  During one of my early trips, my host planned a half day of hookey with me.  We spent the morning in the office outside of Toronto, filling my brain.  At lunch time, we took off and headed south.  We drove through the adorable town of Niagra-on-the-Lake.  Had lunch; did a little shopping.  We drove through wine country (alas, no tastings) and down to the Canadian side of Niagra Falls (clearly more beautiful than the American side).  Karen and I talked all along the way about a zillion things, including more about the business and building my understanding.  It was during this trip that Karen fed me that immortal line that titles this essay: A chemical in and of itself is not safe or dangerous.  It’s the dose that makes the poison.  Depending on the characteristics of the chemical and how it interacts with human systems, a “safe” dose can vary.  Determining that dose, both in the acute and chronic sense, is a difficult undertaking and fraught with conflicting interpretations.  It just ain’t that simple.

That lesson clearly had a big impact on me.  It is partly about risk assessment and, in fact, this essay is a good companion to the one I wrote a few months ago on risk.  It’s a follow on that I’ve been mulling over since that writing.  This idea of “how much of something makes it a bad thing” is an idea we wrestle with daily in all aspects of our lives.  It’s further complicated by the companion question of “is the risk worth it?”  As I wrote in that essay on risk, it’s a wonder that we aren’t paralyzed daily by indecision, but we usually take these quickie risk assessments in stride. 

The aspect of this subject that I’ve been ruminating on a lot lately is this idea that some thing or person or idea is not—cannot be—all good or all bad.  It’s the dose that makes the poison.  In the realm of toxicology, Karen spoke about a few ways of looking at this.  There is the classical S-shaped response curve where something is not dangerous until you reach a critical threshold level—this is what most of us think about when we think of something as a “poison”.  There is the proverbial Goldilocks dilemma—where too little of something is bad and too much is bad, but there is a sweet spot in the middle.  Exposure to oxygen is a good example.  And there is even an instance, called hormesis, where something is beneficial in smaller doses, no more beneficial but not dangerous at some intermediate level, and then toxic above a threshold. Exercise and alcohol are good examples here.

Why am I bringing all this up (besides the fact that I love discussing this kind of thing with Karen)? Well, we’ve had a lot of mental whiplash over this past year of pandemic as the pace of new information has caused changes in the guidance we’ve gotten from experts on how to best protect ourselves and squash the spread of the virus.  (Their often-poor risk communication has not helped.)  I think as Americans (as humans?) we like to have nice, clear cut, unchangeable answers on how to address serious problems.  Mask are good or masks are worthless; the vaccines are safe or they are not; the virus lives on surfaces or it doesn’t; it’s safe to open schools or it’s not.  We just don’t like “It depends” as an answer even though we know, realistically, that’s the case most of the time.  It doesn’t help that we have the companion problem of “if a little of this is good, then a lot must be better!”  If you believe wearing masks helps reduce spread of the virus, then you want to see everyone in a mask everywhere all the time.  And if you think they don’t really help, then you never want to see one anywhere on anyone.  Absolutism helps reinforce our beliefs but it’s the dose that makes the poison.  “Never” and “always” are dangerous words.

Think about sunshine.  Nothing feels better than warm sun on winter-tired skin in springtime.  Doctors even tell us we need sunshine to manufacture Vitamin D!  But spend more than, say, 15 unprotected minutes in direct, strong sun and your skin begins to burn.  (OK, for me it’s 15 minutes; for Trish it’s about an hour.)  That doesn’t mean I should spend zero time in the sun because I will burn.  It means I need to limit the time and/or wear sunscreen.  Think about that one friend or family member who you love dearly but who drinks too much or talks too loudly or keeps bringing up that topic.  It doesn’t mean you never want to see them; it just means you can’t spend too much time together (classic risk management!).  It’s the dose that makes the poison.

I’ve struggled mightily lately with how to put this thinking to work in evaluating our societal conflicts, be they over the pandemic, racial injustice and inequality, or even (ick) politics.  My risk assessment is going to be different than yours. Remember that there are two components of this analysis:  the intrinsic danger/hazard/toxicity of what you are considering, matched against your assessment of the probability of exposure.  We often miscalculate on both!  How can I effectively respect your context and still remain true to mine?  It’s a lot of work to challenge your own assumptions and see the world through someone else’s eyes and experiences.  Even in the data-driven world of toxicology, it can be difficult to put the health risks of certain chemicals into effective safe ranges of exposure.  In our ever-fractured world, we are quick to condemn products or people or even ideas over an instance of negative impact—irrespective of the balance of good vs. bad or the probability of negative impact or even the time and context of said negativity.  We have zero tolerance (ok, now I’m getting into engineering).  But zero tolerance never works.  It’s the dose that makes the poison.