In the high-stakes world of nuclear submarines, clarity can be a matter of life and death. Retired U.S. Navy Captain David Marquet knows this firsthand. He transformed the USS Santa Fe from the worst-performing submarine in the fleet to the best, not through traditional command-and-control, but by empowering every crew member to lead.
In his latest book, Distancing: How Great Leaders Reframe to Make Better Decisions, Marquet explores how leaders can gain perspective by mentally stepping out of themselves.
“Psychological distancing means the ability we have as human beings to imagine we are not ourselves,” Marquet explains. “Broadly speaking, it just means moving psychologically further away from that sense that things happen to me, I’m being scrutinized, I need to prove my performance. It’s about experiencing the world from behind and through your eyeballs.”
Our default perspective, Marquet notes, often blinds us. “Your brain isn’t feeding you the truth. It’s feeding you a curated reality based on what it thinks will make you feel more comfortable about your life. It wants you to feel good about the decisions you made yesterday and last year. We can imagine ourselves as someone else, and we can ask that question, but we rarely do it, because it takes a tiny bit of energy.”
He breaks distancing into three powerful modes: be someone else, be somewhere else, and be sometime else.
“When you’re being someone else, you’re not judging you. You’re not making evaluations and you trick your brain into thinking it’s not making evaluations on me, on my past decisions,” Marquet says.
Spatial distancing, or being somewhere else, shifts perception in subtle but important ways. “Psychologists ask people to recount traumatic stories from the perspective of a fly on the wall. Less anxiety, less emotional reactivity. It’s your brain’s natural medicine for dealing with trauma. But we don’t evoke it deliberately.”
Finally, being sometime else brings the future into the present. “You think of your future self as a different person. Your distant self is your more ideal self, and it’s also, if it’s on the far side of the decision, and you’re looking back, it frames it as regret… In today’s world… there’s no reason not to… live life, do big things, be bold.”
Marquet shares practical applications. Leaders can journal in the third person, or even silently coach themselves through challenges: “Athletes can say, I can do it, or you can do it, or David can do it. When you say you can do it, people have less perceived pain for the exertion level, and they have better performance than when they say, I can do it.”
He warns against common cognitive traps, particularly escalation of commitment. “Once I start something I start to filter reality to support that the decision was good. These are public cases everyone knows about, but it happens all the time in subtle ways, where we stick, ‘Oh, that’s my idea, so obviously I’m gonna be supportive of that.’”
Yet, distancing isn’t about detachment. “It takes energy to assume the perspective of someone else. Distancing is sort of like a workout. You gain a different perspective of the world, and then go back to being yourself.”
Teams can also benefit. Marquet recalls guiding a medical company in pricing a new skin cream. Instead of discussing, then voting, he had each leader write their price privately, revealing the full spectrum of perspectives. “There was more variability in the group than the CEO thought. We never would have heard the perspective if we just said, ‘Oh, we’re going to talk.’”
Distancing also cultivates humility. “Distancing helps shed your ego. Ego isn’t like, ‘Look at me beating my chest.’ It’s our brains curating reality and filtering away things that are unpleasant. It’s about shining a spotlight on things that are gonna tell us, ‘Oh, you’re good, you’re right, you’re on track, you’re doing well.’”
The principle applies across life, not just in boardrooms or submarines. Marquet reflects, “If you get cut off in traffic tomorrow, is it gonna matter? No. You don’t want it to matter, and it shouldn’t matter.”
To start practicing today, Marquet advises a simple exercise: “Think about a decision from another person’s perspective and ask yourself, ‘What would that person advise me to do?”
By stepping out of themselves—mentally and emotionally—leaders can access clarity previously obscured by bias, ego, and circumstance. In Marquet’s view, distancing is not a theoretical exercise, but a practical tool for better decisions, stronger teams, and, ultimately, a more intentional life.