I was taken aback the first time someone suggested to me that the Social Lens Framework I use with my clients might be used for personal transformation. “Oh, I don’t do that,” I said. “I work with people to change norms for all of society. That usually means thinking about movements and organizations, not individuals.”
But ever since that person suggested it, the role of individual consciousness in changing norms has stuck in my head. And of course now I’m a coach who mostly works with leaders one on one to advance their social impact. So while it’s safe to say I’m never just thinking about an individual, what makes individuals follow or resist social norms is always on my mind.
And here’s a sentence that would make the personal transformation crowd happy: I think a lot of it is about liberation.
Here’s what I mean. Everyone I work with is trying to change some sort of social norm. And it doesn’t take very long to realize that the people who are most serious are the ones who are changing some norm they are very much tied up with. Even if it’s their job, it’s personal. Even if it’s not a norm they themselves follow, it’s influencing the lives of everyone around them.
I don’t think this is just because changing the norms of distant groups smacks of old-style imperialism. Trust me, there are folks trying to do that — they just don’t hire me. And most of the time, they’re not actually that good at creating social change, because they don’t understand the groups they hope to influence.
Yet here’s the rub: when you're inside a norm, you don't understand it perfectly either. It’s like staring at the sun. That’s why you need a lens: some sort of tool that makes all the information you’re receiving comprehensible. But when it is, it isn’t just useful data — it’s a revelation.
I’ll use a personal example. I have been thinking a lot lately about the social norms of masculinity. It’s a culture I’m very much tied up in as a man who recently lost his father and is now raising a son.
Over the past three years tending to those relationships took up a huge percentage of my energy. Besides feeling tired a lot of the time, it took a secondary toll: I felt guilty about not spending more of my time “at work.” Never mind that I’m a solopreneur who never stops checking my e-mail no matter how serious an away message I set. Some part of me always seems to be nagging at me telling me to stop playing in the park with my son and get back to work.
One of the Social Lenses I use with clients is configuration: the categories that shape our world and how they fit together. Configuration is hard to use but also powerful, because once a configuration is revealed, you start seeing how it shapes everything around you. Judgments of good vs. bad are often configurations, and it feels like I fell right into a very masculine one. The configuration of “work” vs. “play” tells us that only the time we spend on work really counts toward our value. I would have claimed not to believe in that norm, but I find it has nevertheless influenced the way I think. And I’m thinking about how to change that.
In the same way, I think many of the norms that we most need to change are closer to our hearts than we think. Problems of racism, inequality, climate change — these aren’t just things being done somewhere else by some enemy army. They’re mixed up with all the things we think of as normal life. But maybe when we decide to change what normal life is for us as individuals, we are starting to take on those problems too.
What social norms in your personal life do you want to break free from? Share your story so we can all learn from each other.