Distancing
How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions
By L. David Marquet
Category: Communication Skills | Reading Duration: 21 min | Rating: 4.7/5 (58 ratings)
About the Book
Distancing (2025) explores how stepping outside our immediate perspective leads to better decision-making and clearer thinking. It introduces psychological distancing techniques that help us become our own coaches, allowing us to overcome personal biases and make wiser choices, both personally and professionally.
Who Should Read This?
- Business leaders who need to make high-stakes decisions without being clouded by ego
- Professionals looking for practical techniques to gain clarity during stressful situations
- Anyone navigating major life transitions or career choices
What’s in it for me? Experience the power of stepping outside yourself.
We’ve all been there before – that high-stakes moment where everything feels personal, your reputation on the line, your future hanging in the balance. It’s that suffocating feeling when stress narrows your vision – and when defending your ego becomes more important than seeing clearly. It’s a universal human experience, this trap of self-consciousness that clouds our judgment precisely when we need clarity most. But don’t worry – you’re not alone in this struggle.
From surgeons to students, we all face moments where our sense of self becomes our greatest obstacle. In this Blink, you’ll discover a powerful psychological framework that explains why you sometimes make your worst decisions when the stakes are highest, and more importantly, how to break free from this pattern. You’ll learn practical techniques used by world-class negotiators, Fortune 500 executives, and peak performers to step outside themselves and access a clearer, wiser perspective – one you already possess but rarely tap into. By the end, you’ll have developed the ability to coach yourself through challenges, see situations from revealing new angles, and make decisions your future self will thank you for.
Chapter 1: Hidden costs of self-consciousness
In 2013, Captain Lee Kang-Kuk was piloting Asiana Flight 214 from Seoul to San Francisco with over 300 passengers aboard. The experienced 45-year-old pilot was transitioning from smaller aircraft to the massive Boeing 777, undergoing evaluation for certification on the larger plane. Under more pressure than usual and visibly stressed, something went catastrophically wrong during landing. Despite the presence of visible warning lights, Captain Lee descended rapidly toward the runway.
Rather than pulling up and circling for another approach – standard protocol in such situations – he kept descending, resulting in a crash that killed three people and injured nearly 200 others. Under stress and with his reputation on the line, he had developed dangerous tunnel vision, becoming fixated on the question “How do I land this plane? ” rather than asking the more critical question: “Should I land this plane? ” This tragedy illustrates the dangerous limitations of what psychologists call the immersed self. By default, we view everything through our own perspective and ego. We filter events and experiences through the lens of how they affect us personally.
When our sense of self feels threatened, whether by stress, evaluation, or potential failure, we instinctively move to defend our ego structure and self-image. This psychological defense mechanism, while natural, can be profoundly distracting and distorting. The evolutionary roots of this kind of self-awareness originally helped our species survive by making us conscious of social dynamics and threats. However, this adaptive capacity has an unintended consequence: it can create excessive focus on protecting the self, leading to tunnel vision precisely when we need broad perspective most. When operating from this state, part of our mental resources shifts away from dealing with the actual situation toward defending our identity and reputation. This psychological phenomenon becomes even more pronounced when we consider how social pain registers in our brains.
In fact, neurological research demonstrates that feelings of social exclusion activate identical brain regions as physical injury. Remarkably, over-the-counter pain medication like Tylenol can reduce both types of pain, highlighting their neurological similarity. However, unlike physical pain, social and emotional wounds can be re-experienced repeatedly as our memory replays painful events. These haunting recollections keep us trapped in cycles of self-protection and narrow thinking.
Fortunately, the immersed self isn’t our only option. We also possess access to what researchers call the distanced self – a psychological state that offers a fundamentally different way of processing challenges and making decisions. Let’s take a closer look.
Chapter 2: Stepping outside your story
In 1985, Intel co-founders Gordon Moore and Andy Grove faced a paralyzing decision. Their company had built its reputation on memory chips, but the business landscape was shifting dramatically as microprocessors gained momentum. Meanwhile, IBM had entered their memory chip territory, intensifying competition. This begged the question: should they abandon their core business and embrace this emerging technology?
The founders felt trapped by their emotional investment in Intel’s origins. The breakthrough came when Grove imagined what would happen if they were replaced by an outsider. He asked himself what a new CEO brought in by the board would do in their situation. The answer struck him immediately – any replacement would absolutely exit the memory chip business and pivot to microprocessors, no questions asked. Armed with this clarity, they successfully led Intel into the microprocessor business, through one of the most important strategic transitions in corporate history. This story perfectly illustrates the power of the distanced self – our ability to step outside our immediate perspective and view situations more objectively.
When we achieve psychological distance from ourselves, we escape the limitations imposed by our ego and gain access to clearer thinking. It’s like becoming your own coach, able to see what someone advising you from the sidelines might recommend. Distancing unlocks several cognitive benefits: First, it enables higher-level thinking focused on principles rather than immediate concerns. Second, it provides broader perspective on complex situations. And third, it creates sharper focus on what truly matters. As we’ll see, developing a “coach” persona provides an accessible entry point for achieving this mental shift.
You can develop this skill by creating distance across three key dimensions. Self-distance involves imagining being someone else entirely. Spatial distance means viewing your situation from a different vantage point. And finally, temporal distance requires considering different time frames. In essence, distancing means being someone else, somewhere else, or sometime else when evaluating your situation. In the case of Moore and Grove, the necessity of moving to microprocessors had been obvious to industry outsiders long before they recognized it themselves.
Their emotional attachment to Intel’s founding product had created blind spots that prevented them from seeing what seemed clear to external observers. The message here is clear: distancing often reveals solutions that were already apparent to outside observers but remained hidden by our self-immersion. And throughout the rest of this Blink, we’ll explore specific techniques that will help you create this transformative distance.
Chapter 3: The power of switching personas
Grove and Moore achieved distance by imagining what a replacement CEO would do in their situation. This mental shift exemplifies one of the most accessible ways to create the distanced self – stepping into a different identity entirely. A fascinating psychological study demonstrated this in action, in what researchers dubbed the Batman Effect. When four-year-old children were divided into two groups and asked to complete challenging tasks, those who imagined themselves as Batman showed markedly improved performance compared to their peers.
This simple act of adopting a heroic persona helped the children step outside their immediate perspective and access greater focus and determination. This research points to another powerful distancing technique you can add to your arsenal: adopting alternative personas to escape the limitations of our immersed self. When we’re trapped in our own perspective, switching to a different identity can unlock clearer thinking and better decision-making. One effective approach is imagining how your replacement would handle your situation, just like the Intel founders did. What would someone brand new in your position do? How would they approach decisions without the baggage of past failures, office politics, or emotional attachments?
This mental exercise helps you let go of accumulated assumptions and see possibilities that your invested self might miss. Similarly, whenever you return from vacation or time off, try adopting the mindset of someone starting fresh. Rather than immediately diving back into old patterns and perspectives, approach your work environment with the curious, unencumbered view of a newcomer. This simple shift can reveal inefficiencies and opportunities that familiarity has made invisible. However, the most powerful persona you can develop is your inner Coach. Unlike other temporary identities, your Coach becomes a permanent resource you can access during crucial moments.
Your Coach has your back while seeing straight through your self-deceptions and rationalizations. Creating this persona requires deliberate development. Consider their personality traits, communication style, and core values. Your Coach might be modeled after a real person like Nelson Mandela, known for his wisdom and principled perspective, or even a fictional character whose qualities you admire. The key is making them vivid and distinct from your everyday self. When facing important decisions, mentally inhabit this Coach persona.
Physically step away from your normal environment or position to signal the mental transition – this spatial movement reinforces the psychological shift. From this distanced perspective, ask yourself what your Coach would notice about your situation. What questions would they pose? What advice would they offer?
After consulting your inner Coach, deliberately return to yourself. Document the insights gained from this exercise and identify which actions align with your Coach’s perspective. This process creates a bridge between distanced wisdom and practical implementation, helping you benefit from clearer thinking while remaining grounded in your actual circumstances. By developing and regularly consulting your Coach persona, you create a reliable method for escaping tunnel vision and accessing the broader perspective that leads to wiser decisions.
Chapter 4: Taking a birds-eye view
William Ury is a professional negotiator who has worked on international nuclear risk reduction protocols between the United States and Russia. He uses a powerful technique for managing high-stakes situations. When negotiations become intense and emotions run high, Ury pauses and imagines himself stepping onto a balcony, looking down at the situation unfolding below. This balcony perspective represents a form of spatial distancing – literally imagining yourself observing a situation from a distant, elevated viewpoint, like a fly on the wall.
The technique works by shifting your focus away from ego concerns and towards greater context and awareness. The balcony technique can be employed either before entering a stressful situation or during the moment itself. Simply imagine observing yourself from this elevated perspective as you navigate the challenge. Many people discover they feel more at ease and focused on the actual task, experiencing a greater sense of spaciousness and possibility. It’s a technique that’s proven effective across diverse fields – from surgeons to cricket players. But spatial distancing can be used in other contexts, too.
If you find yourself continually ruminating about a painful past event, the fly-on-the-wall technique can help. Rather than repeatedly experiencing the memory from within, imagine watching the event unfold from a distance, observing what the author calls the distant you. From this removed perspective, ask yourself: What is the distant you feeling, and why? If other people were involved in the situation, extend the same curious questioning to them – what might they have been experiencing – and what drove their actions? This approach can help break you out of stuck emotional patterns, enabling you to learn from difficult experiences and finally move forward. The technique works because it facilitates a crucial psychological shift from reliving to reconstruing painful memories.
When we relive a memory, we essentially experience it again as if it’s happening in the present moment. The same emotions resurface with potentially identical intensity, causing the memory to negatively affect us each time we recall it. Simply reliving an event often generates little learning or personal growth – we simply repeat the emotional experience without gaining new insights. Reconstruing an event, however, involves viewing it from another perspective entirely.
This distanced viewpoint helps you understand why things unfolded as they did, offering fresh perspective on everyone involved, including yourself. You may discover previously hidden motivations and dynamics that weren’t apparent when you were immersed in the original experience. This shift from reliving to reconstruing allows you to process and integrate difficult experiences rather than simply re-traumatizing yourself. Instead of being trapped in emotional loops, you can extract meaning from challenging situations and use that understanding to grow and move forward.
Chapter 5: Borrowing wisdom from tomorrow
Did you know that psychologists believe we view our future selves as almost different people? Brain imaging studies reveal that when we think about ourselves in ten years, our neural patterns mirror those activated when considering strangers. This psychological distance explains why we consistently make poor long-term decisions – we lack empathy for the person we’ll become. But don’t worry – it’s possible to overcome this bias.
Jeff Bezos demonstrated this when deciding whether to leave his lucrative Wall Street career to start Amazon. Rather than analyzing immediate pros and cons, he projected himself to age eighty and asked what he would regret not attempting. From that future vantage point, he could see that he’d regret never trying his internet bookstore idea. This mental time travel shifted his focus from fear of failure to avoiding regret. Looking backward from the future automatically highlights what we might miss rather than what we might lose today. It moves us closer to life’s end, which helps us prioritize what truly matters.
It puts present-day constraints and obstacles into perspective. And lastly, it aligns us with our long-term values. Let’s look at a technique to put this into practice: writing yourself a letter from the future. Pick a point in time in the future – say five, ten, or twenty years from now – from which you will write your letter. Describe your current situation, the decision you’re facing, and the various factors you’re considering. Include specific details about your circumstances, relationships, and concerns.
Next, mentally inhabit that future version of yourself. Imagine where you’re living, what you’re doing, and what matters most to you at that stage of life. From this perspective, write back to your current self as if you’re a wise friend who has lived through the consequences of this decision. And remember, you don’t need to be Nostradamus to use this technique. When you imagine being your “future self,” you’re actually just accessing different parts of your current values and priorities that get obscured by immediate concerns. When Bezos imagined himself at eighty, he wasn’t channeling some mystical future wisdom.
He was using the mental exercise to strip away the noise of his current situation – the comfortable salary, the year-end bonus, the social pressure – and focus on what he already knew mattered to him deep down: not living with regret about possibilities left unexplored. Practice this technique monthly with smaller decisions to build familiarity. The key is genuinely trying to stretch your imagination by inhabiting that future perspective, rather than simply projecting current anxieties forward. You might find your future self possesses a clarity your present self lacks – wisdom you don’t even know you have.
The main takeaway of this Blink to Distancing by L. David Marquet and Michael A. Gillespie is that we all have two psychological modes: the immersed self and the distanced self.
Final summary
When we’re immersed, we tend to focus on our identity and how to defend it in our present circumstances. The solution is learning to step outside ourselves through distancing techniques. One way to do this is to create an inner coach persona who can offer honest, supportive guidance without your emotional baggage. Another is to use the balcony perspective to observe situations from above rather than being caught up in them.
Finally, don’t forget to practice temporal distancing by imagining your future self looking back on current decisions. These techniques help you escape the limitations of your immediate perspective and access the wisdom you already possess. Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
About the Author
L. David Marquet is a former US Navy captain who graduated at the top of his Naval Academy class and commanded a nuclear submarine before becoming a global leadership consultant and speaker. He has authored several influential leadership books, including the bestselling Turn the Ship Around! and Leadership Is Language. Michael A. Gillespie serves as an associate professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, where he conducts research on organizational psychology, leadership, and psychological measurement.