In my first few years as CEO at Pure Software, I managed the technology well. But I was still pretty miserable at the people part of leadership. I was conflict-avoidant. People would become upset if I addressed them directly with a problem, so I would try to work around issues when they arose.

I trace this personality trait back to my childhood. When I was a kid, my parents were supportive, but we didn’t talk about emotions in our house. I didn’t want to upset anyone, so I avoided any difficult topics. I didn’t have many role models for constructive candor, and it took me a long time to get comfortable with it.

And, more telling, when does our typical pattern of equanimity get so quickly and readily disturbed?

For many, that place where we’ve come to think we belong has become stultifying; it’s where we are small, unseen, unsure, and unwilling to claim our strengths, our capacities, our courage, our leadership. We are frozen by the belief that it’s just too dangerous to reach into the black bag and grab hold of the disowned, dismembered parts of ourselves.

All Loyal Soldiers then have one basic task: to keep us safe from the wars that raged in our childhood. No matter how awful these strategies have come to make us feel as adults, they were brilliant in their own ways.

Power in the hands of one afraid or unwilling to look in the mirror perpetuates an often silent, always seething violence in the workplace. Worse still, when a leader leads from his or her shadow, the dismembering havoc is perpetuated down the line until the company, the tribe, the community simply assumes this is how life must be.

Our brains, tuned for novelty and danger, catch fire when stimulated by the wonders of new technology and the stresses of the workplace. Compared to those two things, the subtle currents of our positive relationships, so important to our well-being, are likely to be overshadowed. If our relationships—both at work and at home—are going to thrive in this new work environment, we have to elevate and care for them. We are the only ones who can. If we don’t, and if the Harvard Study still exists in eighty years, then when today’s youngest generation reaches their 80s and the interviewers ask if there was anything they regret about their lives, they might look back, as some of our First Generation participants did in their comments quoted earlier in this chapter, and realize that something crucial has been lost.