Ed Batista

On the Shortness of Life

I'm not well-read in the classics, but a few pieces have been important sources of meaning to me over the years--most notably Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. There are a number of concepts in Stoic philosophy that I find relevant in my work as a coach--and in my personal life: acceptance of limitations and failure, resilience in overcoming challenges, humility in success.

In my ramblings I've come across a number of references to Seneca's essay, On the Shortness of Life, and the other day I decided to finally look it up and read the whole thing.

Damn--talk about a wake-up call. It really stirred me up, and while it's too early to say just what impact it'll have on my life, it's safe to say I'll be re-reading it. A few of the passages I found most striking are below, and you can find the complete text at the Forum Romanum. (Also, here's a longer series of excerpts [PDF].)

“On the Shortness of Life,” Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Translated by John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library, London: William Heinemann, 1932

1. The majority of mortals, Paulinus[1], complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born for a brief span of life, because even this space that has been granted to us rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an end just when they are getting ready to live... It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it...

3. ...No one is to be found who is willing to distribute his money, yet among how many does each one of us distribute his life! In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal... What, then, is the reason of this? You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last... You will hear many men saying: "After my fiftieth year I shall retire into leisure, my sixtieth year shall release me from public duties." And what guarantee, pray, have you that your life will last longer? Who will suffer your course to be just as you plan it? Are you not ashamed to reserve for yourself only the remnant of life, and to set apart for wisdom only that time which cannot be devoted to any business? How late it is to begin to live just when we must cease to live! What foolish forgetfulness of mortality to postpone wholesome plans to the fiftieth and sixtieth year, and to intend to begin life at a point to which few have attained!...

7. ...[E]verybody agrees that no one pursuit can be successfully followed by a man who is busied with many things...since the mind, when its interests are divided, takes in nothing very deeply, but rejects everything that is, as it were, crammed into it. There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living: there is nothing that is harder to learn... It takes the whole of life to learn how to live, and—what will perhaps make you wonder more—it takes the whole of life to learn how to die...

8. I am often filled with wonder when I see some men demanding the time of others and those from whom they ask it most indulgent. Both of them fix their eyes on the object of the request for time, neither of them on the time itself; just as if what is asked were nothing, what is given, nothing. Men trifle with the most precious thing in the world; but they are blind to it because it is an incorporeal thing, because it does not come beneath the sight of the eyes, and for this reason it is counted a very cheap thing—nay, of almost no value at all...

9. Can anything be sillier than the point of view of...those who boast of their foresight? They keep themselves very busily engaged in order that they may be able to live better; they spend life in making ready to live! They form their purposes with a view to the distant future; yet postponement is the greatest waste of life; it deprives them of each day as it comes, it snatches from them the present by promising something hereafter. The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy, which depends upon the morrow and wastes today… All things that are still to come lie in uncertainty; live straightaway!...

20. And so when you see a man often wearing the robe of office, when you see one whose name is famous in the Forum, do not envy him; those things are bought at the price of life. They will waste all their years, in order that they may have one year reckoned by their name[2]... Meantime, while they rob and are being robbed, while they break up each other's repose, while they make each other wretched, their life is without profit, without pleasure, without any improvement of the mind. No one keeps death in view, no one refrains from far-reaching hopes; some men, indeed, even arrange for things that lie beyond life—huge masses of tombs and dedications of public works and...ostentatious funerals. But, in very truth, the funerals of such men ought to be conducted by the light of torches and wax tapers,[3] as though they had lived but the tiniest span.

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[1] When this essay was written—around A.D. 49—Paulinus was praefectus annonae, the official who managed Rome’s grain supply, and an important civic figure. He is believed to have been a close relative of Seneca's wife.

[2] The Roman year was dated by the names of the two annual consuls.

[3] i.e., as if they were children, whose funerals took place by night

Photo by kris krüg. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

White Bears and Car Crashes (Thinking About Thinking)

The ability to be aware of--and influence--what we're thinking about is a critical self-coaching skill. We need to focus our attention on what's important and devote less of it to what's irrelevant, a task that's more difficult when we're stressed or distracted. And yet efforts to actively suppress thoughts can actually be counterproductive--so what CAN we do?

Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner is known for his work on mental control, among other topics, and in response to the question, "How do people control their own minds?" he writes:

The simple strategy of directing attention can often be helpful, as people can stop thoughts, concentrate, improve their moods, relax, fall asleep, and otherwise control their mental states just by trying to direct their thoughts. These strategies of mental control can sometimes backfire, however, producing not only the failure of control but the very mental states we are trying to avoid. [Emphasis mine]

Wegner's insights on mental control emerged from his research on thought suppression, a concept he illustrates with the image of a white bear, inspired by a line from Dostoyevsky: "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute." Wegner writes:

People who are prompted to try not to think about a white bear while they are thinking out loud will tend to mention it about once a minute... It seems that many of us are drawn into what seems a simple task, to stop a thought, when we want to stop thinking of something because it is frightening, disgusting, odd, inconvenient, or just annoying. And when we succumb to that initial impulse to stop, the snowballing begins. We try and fail, and try again, and find that the thought is ever more insistent for all our trying. 

Why does this matter so much? Neuroscientist and psychologist Ian Robertson offers one very practical reason in his book Mind Sculpture:

We have to inhibit the billions of bits of irrelevant information assailing our senses in order to concentrate on the fragments of information which are crucial for us at a particular point in time.

This difficulty in suppressing the irrelevant causes particular problems with driving in older people. Whereas older people are more vigilant, careful and generally less error prone, they tend to make more mistakes at busy road junctions. At such complicated traffic intersections, everyone--young and old--is faced with a barrage of lights, signals and speeding streams of traffic. Some of this information is critically important for deciding when and what to do next, while much of it is irrelevant. For instance, the roaring trucks on the motorway overhead may be noisy and intimidating, but they...are quite irrelevant to the taks of managing to turn here. A young driver will be much better able to "screen out" this irrelevant distraction than an older driver, and so will be better able to focus attention on the lights and traffic which are important for surviving this particular turn. [pp 114-15]

My goal here isn't to promote safer driving among the aged (although as a 45-year-old who logs more than 300 miles most weeks, perhaps it should be). These issues have relevance in a much broader context: All of us, young and old, drivers and pedestrians, face the interpersonal equivalent of a busy intersection at work almost every day.

We're in a fast-paced meeting, for example, with a full agenda, allies and adversaries around the table, and massive amounts of information (both literal data and emotional signals) flying around the room. How do we focus our attention in order to achieve our goals most effectively?

As Robertson notes, inhibition is crucial here--wasting attention on the equivalent of a noisy but irrelevant truck roaring overhead could result in an ill-timed turn. However, as Wegner notes, we can't simply compel ourselves to ignore such distractions, or we actually risk becoming fixated on them. And if we're stressed, or tired (or just getting older), it'll be even more difficult to focus our attention where it's needed most.

So what do we do? In October 2011 health journalist Lea Winerman covered a presentation by Wegner at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, in which he described several effective strategies for mental control.

In-the-moment, Wegner recommends that we 1) minimize multi-tasking, which diminishes our cognitive load, frees up finite working memory and increases our ability to focus, or 2) identify an "absorbing distractor" that will prevent us from becoming fixated on a more problematic focal point.

Over time, Wegner recommends that we build our capacity to resist distraction in the following ways: 1) commit to address unwanted thoughts at some designated time--as Winerman notes, chronic worriers who set aside 30 minutes a day during which they were free to worry experienced less anxiety during the rest of their day, or 2) practice meditation and mindfulness techniques.

A personal note on that last strategy: Although I've found meditation difficult at times, I persist in the practice because my own experience is consistent with Wegner's recommendation. For me meditation isn't a means to some sort of blissed-out, stress-free state--it's a workout, and a very hard one some days. My (utterly simple) practice is inspired by Jon Kabat-Zinn: Get still, notice what I'm thinking about (and how it makes me feel), let go of that thought (and those emotions) and bring my attention back to what it feels like to breathe. Within seconds, I'm thinking about something else again, and the cycle repeats itself over and over for 15 minutes. Not easy, and not particularly fun--as I said, it's a workout--but I'm exercising my capacity for self-awareness and my ability to direct attention, and after nearly two years of ongoing practice I do feel more able to focus on what matters and minimize distractions--fairly important tasks if I want to finish a book on this stuff.

Thanks to Oliver Burkeman's The Antidote for (among other things) introducing me to Daniel Wegner's work on mental control.

Photo by David Wall. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Self-Coaching and Harvard Business Review Press

Exciting news! I've signed a contract with Harvard Business Review Press to write a book on self-coaching. I worked with Editorial Director Tim Sullivan last year to transform my rough framework into a more comprehensive proposal, and ultimately he and his colleagues gave the idea a thumbs-up. (I'm grateful to Tim for his ongoing support and to Grant McCracken for introducing us in the first place.)

I wrote at length about what I mean by "self-coaching" last June, but in brief it's a self-directed process that allows us to be more effective and feel more fulfilled in our professional lives by drawing upon tools and concepts from executive coaching, social psychology, neuroscience, and other disciplines. Self-coaching is not intended to replicate the experience of working in-person with a coach, but self-coaching resources can be of use to people currently working with a coach, people who have worked with a coach in the past, and the much larger number of people who may never have the opportunity to work directly with a coach.

One further note: Self-coaching doesn't mean solitary coaching. As I wrote in another post last June, "While self-coaching is an effort we initiate as individuals, it's not a solitary experience that occurs in isolation from our social relationships. Self-coaching involves not only working with ourselves (as both coach and client), but also transforming key people in our lives into members of our self-coaching team, even if only for a single interaction. By compelling us to make aspects of our inner dialogue public and to engage others as we engage ourselves, self-coaching can be an intensely social experience."

My manuscript for Harvard is due September 2014--which seems both a long ways off and just around the corner--but I'll continue to explore these ideas here rather than take the process offline. After 8 years (!) of blogging I've found that writing in public is the best way to hold myself accountable and actually get the work done, with the added benefit of inviting others into a dialogue that results in better work than I would have accomplished on my own.

I took a longer-than-usual break from writing this fall because of a particularly busy calendar, and I expect to return to a more regular writing schedule this year. In the meantime, you can see the overall framework and links to key posts on my Self-Coaching page, but note that it's very much a work-in-progress. (For example, my initial perspective on goal-setting has continued to evolve over the last few months.) Or just follow me on Twitter, where I announce new posts and occasionally share pictures of baked goods.

Doug Sundheim on Taking Smart Risks

Perhaps the highest praise I can give to Doug Sundheim's Taking Smart Risks is that the book challenged me to assess how I've been playing it safe and where I should be taking some smart risks of my own, and those reflections will have a meaningful impact on my professional and personal journeys.

A coach and consultant based in New York, Sundheim's been writing about risk for years; I first encountered his work in a 2006 post on The Gift of Risk that I found inspiring. But with this new book he lays out a comprehensive framework for looking at risk and provides an assortment of tools to help individuals and organizations take on the right risks at the right time. (Full disclosure: While I don't know Sundheim personally, we've become acquainted through our work and shared interests, and he provided me with a review copy of his book.)

The most useful and thought-provoking ideas I encountered in Taking Smart Risks are right up front in the first three chapters, which comprise Part One: Reframing Risk. Sundheim highlights the inherent value of risk-taking:

In my work as a leadership and strategy consultant, this is a theme I hear often. Money is important, but a sense of accomplishment, growth, and self-knowledge is what really drives leaders, teams and organizations to take risks.

When you play it safe, staying in the comfort zone for too long, you don't feel these things. You stagnate. And that puts everything at risk. [p 4]

Citing the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Abraham Maslow, Frederick Herzberg and others, Sundheim notes that...

Over the past 60 years, professionals from the fields of psychology, philosophy and adult development have recognized the need to engage in meaningful challenges as a primary driving force in living a satisfying life... [Y]ou need to get out of your comfort zone regularly if you want to enjoy life. That's because the real reward for leaving your comfort zone never lies in what you achieve by doing it; it lies in the process of doing it... [p 5]

And as the section's subtitle implies, Sundheim emphasizes the importance of framing on our perception of risk, citing Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's classic research on prospect theory and loss-aversion bias [PDF]. Sundheim writes:

We're naturally more averse to the costs of taking risks than to those of not taking risks because of the time frames in which we experience each cost.

We experience the costs of taking risks immediately. Discomfort and uncertainty show up as soon as we engage in the risk... Conversely, we experience the costs of avoiding risks further in the future. Low growth, lack of accomplishment and limited fulfillment take time to manifest... In short, we have more trouble imagining what a lack of accomplishment will feel like in five years than what discomfort will feel like in five hours. [p 23]

Sundheim encourages us to challenge this bias by focusing our attention not only on the potential gains a given risk may yield but also on the potential costs that may be incurred by playing it safe, and he provides several straightforward but effective tools for doing so. I regularly ask clients and students to do a simple cost-benefit analysis when facing a difficult decision, so I particularly liked Sundheim's modification of this concept, which asks us to identify--in this order--A) the benefits of a given risk, B) the costs of that risk, C) the benefits of avoiding the risk, and D) the costs of avoiding the risk, and then uses that data to help us determine how our framing of the risk is affecting our ability to move forward.

But Sundheim's aware that while reframing risk is essential in getting unstuck and avoiding paralysis, it's likely insufficient to sustain action on its own, and he goes on to outline five principles that minimize the downside of any given risk:

At the core of smart risk taking is something I call derisking, or removing as much uncertainty as you can at every stage of a risk... Through years of coaching and consulting, I've found that smart risk takers consistently do five things well to derisk whatever they're up to...

[1] Find something worth fighting for... Finding something worth fighting for (I call it a SWFF) is the process of identifying and clarifying why risk taking is important to you in the first place. Smart risk takers understand that their emotional commitment to whatever they want to see happen is more than half the battle of getting it...

[2] See the future now... Seeing the future now is the process of clarifying what exactly the big ideas mean in terms of real objectives, plans and intended results...

[3] Act fast, learn fast... [T]est pieces of your hypothesis rapidly so that you can learn what will and won't work before you put too much on the line. Inherent in testing ideas rapidly is seeing failure as a necessary step in the process, not an unfortunate result of it...

[4] Communicate powerfully... Smart risk takers assume that communication is going to break down (because it always does) and plan accordingly...

[5] Create a smart-risk culture. Risk-taking, especially in an organizational context, is rarely an individual endeavor. Members of a team or larger group need to share the same mindsets and values about expected behavior... [pp 36-7]

These concepts form the core of Sundheim's approach, and the rest of the book explores each of them in depth in subsequent sections. The first of these--Part Two: Find Something Worth Fighting For--is most relevant to me in my work as an executive coach, and I expect to refer back to it regularly. I love Sundheim's concept of a SWFF, particularly given his emphasis on values and emotion, two topics I discuss with almost all of my clients and students.

That said, emotions are at the heart of so many of the dynamics discussed by Sundheim--our fear of failure, the power of enthusiasm, how to manage difficult conversations--and while he touches on this emotional dimension numerous times, I wanted to explore that topic even further whenever it arose. This stems from my understanding of research on the importance of emotions in reasoning and decision-making, as well as my belief that we're much more effective at navigating complex situations--such as taking smart risks--when we acknowledge and address the emotional aspect of our experience. But I recognize that Sundheim had to put some boundaries around his subject matter for practical reasons, and I appreciate the extent to which he does discuss emotion, a critical topic that's all too often ignored in books aimed at business readers.

Sundheim's conclusion offers encouragement to the aspiring risk-taker:

When done intelligently, risk taking never leaves you empty-handed. Even in failure, the experience provides critical learning for the future. The key is to start moving. Your path forward becomes clear once you're walking on it, not before...

I'm reminded--and not for the first time while reading Taking Smart Risks--of George Patton's (perhaps apocryphal) advice: "A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan next week."

Marcus Aurelius, 3,000 Years and the Present Moment

Today I talked with a client about mortality (among a number of topics) and how we reflexively seek to protect ourselves from the dread and fear evoked by death. I talked with another client about how focusing on the immediate present--being "in the moment"--is helping him navigate a profound personal and professional transition. And tonight, reflecting on these conversations, I was reminded of a passage from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations that I've found both bracing and comforting:

Even were you to live three thousand years or thrice ten thousand, remember that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing. Thus the longest and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present is equal for all, and what is passing is therefore equal: thus what is being lost is proved to be barely a moment. For a man could lose neither past nor future; how can one rob him of what he has not got? Always remember, then, these two things: one, that all things from everlasting are of the same kind, and are in rotation; and it matters nothing whether it be for a hundred years or for two hundred years or for an infinite time that a man shall behold the same spectacle; the other, that the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss; for it is the present alone of which either will be deprived, since (as we saw) this is all he has, and a man does not lose what he has not got. [Book II, Chapter 14]

This passage means even more to me in light of R.B. Rutherford's introduction to the Oxford edition: "...Marcus was writing for himself, and seems to have had no thought of making his reflections available to a wider audience in his own lifetime or thereafter... At the end of the day, the emperor would record a few reflections and admonish himself to observe certain precepts and ethical rules which he might have neglected in the course of the day." [pp ix-x] Marcus wasn't rebuking anyone else; he was counseling himself. (You might even say he was self-coaching.)

I was thinking along these lines before my conversations with my clients today. I just turned 45, and while I'm physically active I feel the limitations of age, and I can't do everything I want to do. More seriously, Amy recently had a health issue that turned out to be manageable through medication but which gave us a scare until it was diagnosed. So I've been wrestling with my own perspective on mortality, and my own feelings of dread and fear.

At times like this I find the passage above comforting because I accept Marcus' assertion that "the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss." I may well live another 45 years (although 3,000 seems unlikely), and I may die tomorrow, and in both cases I'll lose the exact same thing: the present moment.

And I find this passage bracing because, having accepted this assertion, I have to acknowledge that the present moment, this moment, is all I truly have. I can step forward and do something meaningful with it, or (as I so often do) I can sit back and let it pass by. Time to step up.

Photo by Martin Fisch. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Significance Junkies

Writer and comedian Seth MacFarlane--the creator of the animated series Family Guy--was recently interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air.  Here's the very last question they discussed:

Terry Gross: One more question, and I know you've been asked this a lot, but, on September 11th you were supposed to be on that plane that was supposed to fly from Boston to L.A. but instead was hijacked and flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center, and you were late, your travel agent gave you the wrong time, so you missed being on that catastrophic flight.  Do you ever think of the rest of your life as being this kind of gift, because you, you just, it could have all ended for you that day?

Seth MacFarlane: One of my favorite quotes by Carl Sagan is that we are as a species, and as a culture, we are significance junkies.  We love attaching significance to everything, even when there really is no significance and something is just a coincidence, and this is a perfect example to me of something, you know, really, in all honesty, not to sound cold, but, you know, I don't think of it that way.  I, I think of it as, you know, I'm living the same way in 2011 as I was in 1999, and the reason for that is that, you know, I had missed a lot of flights for being late, I'm a perpetually late person, you know, every flight that takes off, you gotta figure somebody's missing the flight or somebody's late, and on top of that, you know, who knows how many times a day we have similar close calls as the one that I had, you know?  I mean this morning, crossing the street, if I had crossed five minutes later I would have been hit by a car.  I, I, who knows?  So, in my case, you know, obviously the day itself was a tragedy and a disaster, but if we're just talking about my case, um, it doesn't strike me as something that I am attaching an unbelievable amount of significance to because of those reasons, because I, I've missed a bunch of flights.

In 1997 Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan co-authored The Demon-Haunted World, a "passionate plea for scientific literacy," according to Publishers Weekly, and one of the book's last chapters, titled "Significance Junkies," addresses the many ways in which we misinterpret statistics and willfully substitute magical thinking for clear-headed understanding.  One example they cite is the common attribution of "hot" and "cold" streaks and other aspects of athletic performance to quasi-mystical sources:

We seek meaning, even in random numbers.  We're significance junkies... So what?  What's the harm of a little mystification?  It sure beats boring statistical analyses.  In basketball, in sports, no harm.  But as a habitual way of thinking, it gets us into trouble in some of the other games we play. [p 349]

Sagan's use of the term "junkies" is apt; we crave significance just as any addict craves their drug of choice.  And when it's not readily available, we invent it--we imagine significance all around us.  This is harmless entertainment when we're talking about certain topics--but as Sagan and Druyan suggest, it can also pose a real problem.

Why am I talking about this on a site focused on executive coaching and change management?  Because I think one of the areas where our "significance addiction" does pose a real problem is in our working relationships, particularly when we're in a leadership role.

Our craving for significance leads us to see meaning in randomness, to hear signals instead of noise.  We mistakenly believe it's all about US--that people are thinking about US, noticing US, responding to US--when, from their perspective it's really all about THEM--and they're thinking about something else, noticing someone else, and responding to a whole host of factors, ranging from what they ate for breakfast to the state of their retirement portfolio.

We matter less than we think we do, and the universe is more random than we want it to be--and those can be painful truths to accept.  (Sagan and Druyan open their "Significance Junkies" chapter with an epigram from mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré:  "We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.")

We crave significance and invent meaning not because we're stupid, but because we're brilliant; it hurts like hell to admit our insignificance, and we find consolation in endlessly inventive delusions of relevance.  But it's really not all about us, and once we realize that we can enter into a different kind of conversation with the people around us.  Instead of simply assuming that our actions are the basis for their reactions, we can get curious about what they really are thinking about and noticing and responding to.  It may be humbling, but we'll undoubtedly learn a lot in the process.

I'm all too aware of a paradox at the heart of this post: While it's never entirely about us, sometimes, in part, it truly is about us, particularly when we're in a leadership role, and something we said or did innocuously has had a significant and unintended impact on someone else.  I'm certainly not suggesting we ignore that dynamic--increasing awareness of our impact on others is at the heart of my work as a coach.  But I would draw a distinction between improving our ability to discern when we've had an impact on others on the basis of observed behavior, and letting go of the assumptions and imaginary scenarios that spring from our craving for significance.

Photo by Ella's Dad.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Coaching, Advice and Feedback

Good coaches understand how important it is not to provide too much advice or feedback to clients.  A fundamental tenet of coaching is that the client already has the answers that are right for him- or herself, and the coach's primary role is to ask the challenging, provocative or supportive questions that will allow the client to discover those answers within.

But this isn't to say that coaches should never offer advice or feedback--there are times when it's essential to do so, and withholding such information from the client would be as unhelpful as providing too much.  The key is finding the right balance, both over the course of each individual coaching relationship, and in any given conversation.  Below are excerpts from three texts that have had an important influence on me as a coach, particularly in the context of my work at Stanford, where one of my primary roles over the last five years has been helping MBAs develop coaching skills to support their effectiveness as leaders and managers.

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From Co-Active Coaching (2nd edition), by Laura Whitworth et al, one of the primary texts in Stanford's Leadership Fellows Program (and for many years in our Leadership Coaching and Mentoring course, which was integrated with the Fellows program this year and which provided the basis for the new Fellows curriculum):

Opinions and Advice

The urge to give good advice and to be helpful is so strong that it is sometimes nearly unmanageable.  This is another case in which self-management is a judgment call, not a rule to follow.

We emphasize that clients are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole and that they do have the answers or know how to find them.  Still, at times it may seem pointless to withhold your knowledge or experience when it is clearly relevant and could spare clients time, money and effort.  As long as you are conscientious about framing the conversation as your experience and encouraging clients to find their own best way while exploring a number of alternative pathways, your experience will be seen as one more potential course of action and not the "expert's" way.  In short, don't make it a rule that you will never share an opinion or a bit of advice.  Self-management is a context of discretion, always in the client's best interests.

This discretion also extends to sharing your personal story.  Most of the time, it's best to keep your personal story to yourself... In almost all cases, it is inappropriate and a waste of the client's time for you to share your personal story.  We say "in almost all cases" quite intentionally, because there may be times when a little of your story will be important in building trust and relationship with a client.  The fact that you are human, not just an anonymous impersonal resource will contribute toward building a strong, co-active relationship. [p 112]

Asking Permission

One of the most important techniques the coach uses to remind clients that they are in charge of the coaching direction is to ask permission: "May we work with this issue?" "Can I tell you what I see?" ""Would you like some feedback on that?" [emphasis mine]  When the coach asks permission, it demonstrates that clients have power in the relationship.  It demonstrates, too, that the coach knows the limits of his or her power in the relationship.  Asking permission is a sign of self-management on the coach's part and allows clients to take responsibility for managing their relationship and their work.  Clients are honored when you ask permission; their boundaries are respected.  This is especially important when the issue you'd like to work on is unusually intimate or make make clients uncomfortable: "May I tell you what I see about the way you've been handling this?" [p 114]

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From The Coaching Manager: Developing Top Talent in Business, by James Hunt and Joseph Weintraub, the other primary text in the Leadership Fellows Program:

The Coaching Mirror

Self-assessment based on personal reflection alone may not be enough to help employees clearly see how they are doing and what they need to learn to improve their performance.  Feedback is a component of coaching episodes.  it may be one of the most difficult aspects of coaching.  We suggest that coaching managers have the goal of building a "mirror" in which employees can see themselves more clearly.  Feedback isn't meant to create change, it is meant to inform. [emphasis mine] [p 27]

Observing What is Important, Effectively

...Observational data are the best data of all.  The coach watches the coachee and, ideally, pays attention to what the coachee did and said, without interpreting the meaning, at least initially.  In this critical way, the coach is especially valuable to the coachee, serving as the coachee's eyes and ears and being in position to offer the coachee fairly accurate feedback.

Unfortunately, even with firsthand data, observer bias quickly becomes a problem.  Feelings about the individual being coached; a tendency to identify od "dis-identify" with that person; recent memories of great or terrible performance; race, gender and cultural and personal style difference between the coach and coachee; these can all make it harder for the coaching manager to focus on what the individual employee is actually saying or doing.  The coaching mirror is built from data, not inference... The most important point, however, is to acknowledge that such bias exists and is a potential problem for all of us.  [p 29]

Providing Balanced and Helpful Feedback

Feedback represents the coach's view of the gap between an individual's performance and what improved performance might be like, if indeed there is a gap.  (In the case of a strong performer, the gap might be "upside down," meaning that the coachee doesn't appreciate that he or she possesses a particular strength.)  Feedback serves as a source of information to coachees, helping them assess the gap between desired and current performance.  Ideally, feedback holds up an accurate mirror to coachees, so they can see themselves and take ownership of their actions or results. [emphasis mine]  Once coachees have defined learning issues or goals and offered self-assessments of their effectiveness in relation to those areas ("I think I need to be better at..."), feedback alone may be enough to help them improve their performance...

In addition to the problems associated with building a useful coaching mirror, there are other barriers to the effective use of feedback.  Simply put, nice people don't like to criticize... However, feedback should always be delivered in a way that will maintain the dignity of the coachee, particularly if it is critical information.

When coaching managers deliver feedback, a caring attitude is essential.  If coachees define learning goals, they are allowing themselves to be vulnerable to the process of receiving feedback.  They have let their defenses down, at least with regard to particular learning needs.  It is the coach's job to halp maintain an individual's sense of comfort, to the highest degree possible, so their collaborative efforts can continue.

However, this does not mean that such feedback can't be critical.  Indeed, it often has to be critical.  According to our interviews, coaching managers find that to withhold critical feedback as a means of supporting an employee is often seen as gratuitous.  In a coaching friendly environment, critical feedback is taken less personally, particularly if it is directed at the learner's actual goals. [pp 29-30]

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From Helping: How to Offer, Give and Receive Help, by Edgar Schein, one of the most useful books I've ever read in this field--I've been meaning to write a review for ages--and a book that Prof. Carole Robin calls the "third, unofficial text" in our Leadership Fellows curriculum:

Feedback as an Essential Helping Process

Feedback, by definition, is information that helps one reach goals by showing that the current progress is either on or off target.  If it is off target, that feedback automatically triggers corrective action... Feedback is essential to the helping process when the client asks how to remain on track.  In this sense we are all seeking and using feedback throughout every day of our lives to ensure that what we intend comes to pass.  But the information we seek, especially when we explicitly ask for help, is only useful if it is relevant to our target.  The helper must be sure what the target is that the client is aiming for, and, therefore, must engage in humble inquiry before offering feedback...

Feedback is generally not helpful if it is not asked for.  ...[T]he helper must first identify what problem the client is trying to solve before it becomes possible to provide help.  When a colleague, boss, friend or spouse unilaterally decides to give advice or feedback, it is likely that not only will the message be misunderstood, but the other person will be offended and insulted.  I have seen this over and over again in performance appraisal where the boss says something like "You need to be more assertive in meetings" and the subordinate has not idea to what the boss is actually referring.  That leads to a second principle.  Feedback not only needs to be solicited, but it needs to be specific and concrete.

...If feedback is to be helpful, it must occur in the context of a review of action, something the group has done together where specific behavior can be referred to and analyzed... By referring to specific events that both parties can remember, there is at least a chance of meaningful learning, but note how crucial it is to redefine the norms of deference and demeanor for these things to be said at all and to be heard as constructive instead of punishing.

If we combine these two points, the potential for effective feedback would be even higher if in the after-action review the leader asked members to start with their own questions about their own performance in order to solicit feedback... By giving the initiative to those seeking feedback, there is a greater likelihood that they can hear it because it relates to something they want help with.  It turns the situation explicitly into a helping relationship around common team goals...

Finally, a fourth point is that feedback works best if it is descriptive rather than evaluative... By making a judgment on what you should have done, the helper is taking on the expert or doctor role.  By making a descriptive observation, the helper stays in the inquiring process consultant role, which allows elaboration and explanation on the client's part.

To summarize thus far...feedback works best if it is solicited rather than imposed, if it is concrete and specific, if it fits into a shared goal context, and if it is descriptive rather than evaluative...

...When I think of helping conversations that have gone wrong, in almost every case I discover that what I said was either unsolicited, too general, judgmental or related to some goal of mine rather than to what the other person was trying to do. [pp 117-122]

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Photo by Erich Ferdinand.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

Why do emotions have such a significant impact on our choices and decisions?  Aren't we better off relying on logical reasoning?  Shouldn't we try to control our emotions and minimize their impact? 

Emotions are a important factor in my work as an executive coach and Leadership Coach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.  At times emotions are the explicit subject of discussion, as in Stanford courses such as Interpersonal Dynamics (aka "Touchy Feely"), or with clients who are working with me to address sources of frustration or unhappiness in their careers or professional relationships.  Even when that's not the case, emotions are always implicit in any issue that a student or client might raise with me, and they readily spring to the surface given the opportunity.  (One of the simplest--and most useful--steps I can take as a coach is to say, "It seemed as through you felt a strong emotion just now," and then give the person some space to talk about what they're feeling.)

My work with my clients and students has made it clear to me that emotions play an essential role in helping us decide, both at the micro-level in any given situation and at the macro-level as we chart our course through life.  Seeking a deeper understanding of this dynamic led me to the work of Antonio Damasio, a Portuguese neuroscientist who's been based in the US for the past 35 years, and whose 1994 book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain is a landmark in contemporary neuroscience.  (I recommend the 2005 Penguin paperback; all of my quotes from and links to the book refer to that edition.)

Historically the elegant process of logical reasoning has been viewed as a function of our disembodied mind, an activity conducted in a highly evolved part of our brain that exists for this express purpose.  It was assumed that the brain structure responsible for reasoning was distinct not only from the body itself but also from the "lower" regions of the brain that govern other aspects of biological function.  But all of this, Damasio argues convincingly, is entirely wrong:

I propose that human reason depends on several brain systems, working in concert across many levels of neuronal organization, rather than on a single brain center.  Both "high-level" and "low-level" brain regions...cooperate in the making of reason.

The lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same ones that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings, along with the body functions necessary for an organism's survival.  In turn, these lower levels maintain direct and mutual relationships with virtually every bodily organ, thus placing the body directly within the chain of operations that generate the highest reaches of reasoning, decision making, and, by extension, social behavior and creativity.  Emotion, feeling and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. [p xvii]

Note that in Damasio's view emotion and feeling are not in opposition to reason but provide essential support to the reasoning process.  The passage above also alludes to Damasio's second topic, the physiological roots of emotional expression:

[T]he essence of a feeling may not be an elusive mental quality attached to an object, but rather the direct perception of a specific landscape: that of the body...

I propose that the critical networks on which feelings rely include not only the traditionally acknowledged collection of brain structures known as the limbic system but also some of the brain's prefrontal cortices, and, most importantly, the brain sectors that map and integrate signals from the body.

I conceptualize the essence of feelings as something you and I can see through a window that opens directly onto a continuously updated image of the structure and state of our body... By and large, a feeling is the momentary "view" of a part of that body landscape. [pp xviii-xix]

Damasio restates these themes concisely later in the book:

The action of biological drives, body states and emotions may be an indispensable foundation for rationality.  The lower levels in the neural edifice of reason are the same that regulate the processing of emotions and feelings, along with global functions of the body proper such that the organism can survive.  These lower levels maintain direct and mutual relationships with the body proper, thus placing the body within the chain of operations that permit the highest reaches of reason and creativity.  Rationality is probably shaped and modulated by body signals, even as it performs the most sublime distinctions and acts accordingly. [p 200]

The research that led Damasio to these conclusions began at the University of Iowa in the 1970s and '80s, where he found himself perplexed by certain victims of accidents, tumors and other sources of brain trauma.  In these unusual cases the victim's faculties remained generally intact despite their experiences, and yet their lives were falling apart.  They performed well on any test measuring their intelligence and critical thinking abilities, and yet outside the lab they made one bad decision after another, or found themselves paralyzed and unable to make a decision at all.

On the basis of his research into these cases and a series of novel experiments comparing the victims of brain trauma with "normals," Damasio formulated the hypotheses he lays out in Descartes' Error and his research appears to have stood up over the past 17 years.  In his 2005 preface he notes that, "today this idea [that emotion assists the reasoning process] does not cause any raised eyebrows..."

However, while this idea may not raise any eyebrows today among neuroscientists, I believe it's still a surprise to the general public.  We're trained to regard emotions as irrational impulses that are likely to lead us astray.  When we describe someone as "emotional," it's usually a criticism that suggests that they lack good judgment.  And the most logical and intelligent figures in popular culture are those who exert the greatest control over their emotions--or who seem to feel no emotions at all.

Damasio's title refers to the separation of mind and body implied in Rene Descartes' assertion, "I think therefore I am," first articulated in Discourse on the Method (1637).  Descartes elaborated on this concept in Principles of Philosophy (1644), in a passage quoted by Damasio:

[T]his "me," that is to say, the soul by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from body...and even if body were not, the soul would not cease to be what it is. [p 249]

Damasio writes in response:

This is Descartes' error: the abyssal separation between body and mind...the suggestion that reasoning, and moral judgment, and the suffering that comes from physical pain or emotional upheaval might exist separately from the body.  Specifically: the separation of the most refined operations of mind from the structure and operation of a biological organism. [pp 249-50]

This concept of "Cartesian dualism" has had a profound effect on the Western worldview.  One of its implications is that we tend to see emotion and reason not only as distinct spheres but also as forces working in opposition to each other.  Further, we prize the reasoning that occurs in our disembodied minds while we often view our emotions and their many physiological manifestations as less important.  Damasio writes:

[W]e usually conceive of emotion as a supernumerary mental faculty, an unsolicited nature-ordained accompaniment to our rational thinking.  If emotion is pleasant, we enjoy it as a luxury; if it is painful, we suffer it as an unwelcome intrusion.  In either case, the sage will advise us, we should experience emotion and feeling in only judicious amounts.  We should be reasonable.

There is much wisdom in this widely held belief, and I will not deny that uncontrolled or misdirected emotion can be a major source of irrational behavior.  Nor will I deny that seemingly normal reason can be disturbed by subtle biases rooted in emotion... Nonetheless, what the traditional account leaves out is [this]... Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior. [emphasis original, pp 52-53]

The implications for the victims of brain trauma in the cases studied by Damasio are clear; physical damage to their brains resulted in a significant reduction in their ability to experience emotion, which profoundly diminished their capacity to reason and make decisions.  The implications for the rest of us are not nearly as straightforward, but I suspect that the ability to experience our emotions more vividly and more rapidly allows us to make more effective use of them in the reasoning process.

And while emotions can certainly lead us astray, when they do it's not the inevitable by-product of their fundamental unreliability or irrationality, but a specific, localized error.  (It's a bug, not a feature.)  In certain situations of course we need to manage a given emotional response in order to minimize its counterproductive impact.  But that approach should be taken on a case-by-case basis, not as a general principle.  In this regard Damasio's research bolsters my empirical experience as a coach and leads me to conclude that dampening our emotional responses and distancing ourselves from them as a rule can only undermine the quality of our decision-making and result in worse choices.

In addition, Damasio's description of the physiological roots of emotions suggest that our ability to be in touch with our feelings bears some relation to our ability to, quite literally, feel.  I suspect that being in touch with ourselves physically allows us to be in touch with ourselves emotionally.  Some anecdotal but quite vivid evidence of this is the common experience I've had of working with people who were momentarily unable to describe their emotions.  I would ask them to scan their bodies and conduct a mental inventory of what they literally "felt," both inside and out, and invariably the acknowledgment of physical "feelings" make it possible for the person to access and discuss their emotions.

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To provide some context for these assertions, I'll ask and (try to) answer a series of questions based on my understanding of Damasio's work.  (Note that you can find an extended series of quotes from Descartes' Error following my conclusion below if you'd like more specifics.)

Where do emotions come from?

Emotions are evoked by perceived or imagined stimuli that generate a wide range of physiological responses--body states, as Damasio calls them--that in turn generate sets of mental images associated with those body states.  For example, if you're walking in the woods and come across a bear, your perception of the bear's large bulk, possibly moving quickly toward you, will result in a series of physiological changes.  Your pulse and respiration will quicken, your blood pressure will rise, your pupils will dilate, and adrenaline and other neurotransmitters will be released.  Your brain senses these physiological responses, generates a host of mental images associated with this collective body state, and you experience the feeling you know as "fear."  Note the sequence--the unconscious physiological responses precede the conscious awareness of the feeling.

Damasio makes an important distinction between primary or early emotions, which are innate or "hard-wired" (and are thus essentially universal) and secondary or adult emotions, which derive from experience and acquired knowledge (and are thus highly individualized.)  Encountering a bear in the woods and feeling fear is an example of a primary emotion.  While Damasio points out that that we're probably not born with an innate "bear fear" per se, we are "wired to respond with an emotion, in preorganized fashion, when certain features of stimuli in the world or in our bodies are perceived," [p 131] and evolution has likely hard-wired us to fear large, fast-moving predators encountered in a dark space.  We don't need to learn to fear the bear; we come with that emotional response "pre-programmed."

But we do learn the much more complex responses that Damasio calls secondary emotions.  These responses are based on our experiences, particularly in childhood and adolescence, although the process of developing secondary emotions continues throughout our entire lives.  We learn these emotions as we associate certain stimuli with positive or negative outcomes, although it's obvious that the process of making these associations is by no means foolproof.  (We're particularly prone to biases rooted in statistical errors.)

As a devoted reader of William James, I find it noteworthy that Damasio's concept of primary emotions derives directly from James' work in the 19th century, and his concept of secondary emotions addresses a crucial shortcoming in James' theory.  Damasio writes, "...I believe William James seized upon the mechanism essential to the understanding of emotion and feeling.  Unfortunately, and uncharacteristically for him, the rest of his proposal [falls short]..." [p 129]  James, Damasio continues, "gave little or no weight to the process of evaluating mentally the situation that causes the emotion.  His account works well for the first emotions one experiences in life, but it does not do justice to" the much more complex emotions we experience subsequently. [p 130]

What purpose do emotions serve?

Emotions evolved to support our survival.  The primary (or innate) emotions can be seen as a complex form of biological regulation, an extension of the instinctive drives and impulses that support survival at an even more fundamental level.  But while those deeper forms of biological regulation operate automatically and typically beyond our conscious control, emotions allow us to make choices about how we'll express them and what we'll do in response.

What is reasoning?

Reasoning is the judicious consideration of a set of alternatives, the imagination of a series of possible outcomes, and the application of logic to determine which alternative will yield the best possible outcome.  If we view these behaviors along a spectrum, from biological drives to primary emotions to secondary emotions to reasoning, we can see a decrease in automaticity and an increase in conscious choice.

What role does emotion play in reasoning?

Reasoning is an extremely taxing mental activity, consuming vast amounts of such finite resources as our attention and working memory.  Even when we have these resources in abundance, reason is extremely time-consuming.  The process described above of identifying alternatives, imagining outcomes, and determining which alternative is most likely to yield the best outcome can readily take more time than we have available to make even the simplest of decisions.  And when we're under stress or when the stakes are high, the amounts of attention and working memory at our disposal may decrease, making it even more difficult to reach a decision.

Emotions serve as an automatic biasing mechanism that can have a substantial effect on the reasoning process--usually, but not always, helping us make better decisions more quickly.  Secondary emotions involve a learned set of associations between the mental images evoked by certain stimuli and a corresponding set of positive or negative outcomes.  When we experience a given set of mental images and the physiogical responses that comprise the emotion that we associate with those images, we "mark" the images in such a way that subsequent exposure to the same or similar images leads us to expect that a similar outcome is likely.  So emotions are a form of prediction, telling us what positive or negative outcomes are likely to result from certain alternatives.

Obviously this form of prediction isn't perfectly accurate, but it need not be to serve a useful purpose.  Emotions play a critical role in the reasoning process simply by allowing us to rule out many alternatives that would likely lead to a negative outcome and to focus on those that would likely lead to a positive outcome.  With the range of theoretical alternatives reduced, we can employ our resource-intensive reasoning strategies on a much smaller set of options, thereby saving a tremendous amount of time.

Emotions also enhance our finite capacities of attention and working memory by heightening our perception and recollection of particularly good or bad options, rendering them more vivid and easier to recall in the mind.

Emotions can obviously mislead us and undermine the reasoning process, but that's likely due to defects in our individual experience of developing secondary emotions, the process by which we create associations between certain stimuli and positive or negative outcomes.  This process continues throughout our lives, but our experiences in childhood and adolescence are key in forming our secondary emotions.  It is likely that when our emotions interfere with reasoning rather than support it, this is due to inaccurate or irrational associations made during our formative years.

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In Conclusion

My reading of Descartes' Error leaves me more convinced than ever of the important role emotions play in helping us make good choices, in circumstances ranging from fleeting interactions to the most momentous life decisions.  This is not to say that our emotions are always "right" or that we should mindlessly follow their lead.  As Damasio writes,

Knowing about the relevance of feelings in the processes of reason does not suggest that reason is less important than feelings, that it should take a backseat to them or that it should be less cultivated.  On the contrary, taking stock of the pervasive role of feelings may give us a chance of enhancing their positive effects and reducing their potential harm. [p 246]

But that said, it's clear to me that the ability to access, interpret, and act upon our emotions is essential if we are to make good choices that will allow us to be more fulfilled and effective.  And I suspect the process of exploring our emotions more fully will allow us to better understand, compensate for and correct those times when inaccurate or irrational emotions lead us off course.

My sense of the importance of the body has also been greatly reinforced by Damasio's work.  While personal experiences long ago led me to reject traditional mind/body dualism and to recognize the interplay between the two, I failed to appreciate the depth and the complexity of the relationships that unify our mental and physiological systems into a single, organic whole.  I suspect that a heightened sense of body awareness and a greater sense of closeness with our physical selves can play an important role in the process of getting in touch with our emotions, and can thereby support our ability to make good choices.

Finally, I'm struck by the importance of attention (a concept that keeps reoccurring in my life, albeit in wildly different contexts).  As Damasio notes, attention is a crucial element in the reasoning process, not only in the form of our ability to focus on something, but also in the corresponding ability to tune out everything else.  As I wrote two years ago in a discussion of David Rock's thinking on neuroscience, coaching and leadership, "the ability to stop or minimize active conscious thinking and 'quiet our minds' is an important problem-solving skill."  My experience with meditation over the past few months has reinforced my sense that our capacity for attention is highly dynamic and can be increased through conscious effort, just as we can enhance our ability to access and experience our emotions.

While I encourage you to read Descartes' Error in full, in the section below I've included a series of quotes from the book that discuss his hypotheses and the underlying neurological and physiological processes that they're based on in greater detail.  While Joseph LeDoux's The Emotional Brain is next up on my reading list, Damasio's The Feeling of What Happens will follow shortly thereafter, and I'm eager to get to it.

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William James on Habit

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.  Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.  We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.  Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.

William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, Chapter X

I recently finished James' deeply thought-provoking 1892 masterpiece, and one of the highlights is his chapter on Habit.  While I read James' literal comments on brain function with some caution--after all, he was born 149 years before the first successful fMRI study--I still find him a great source of wisdom on matters both psychological and philosophical.  And even if aspects of James' analysis have been superseded by a century of advances in neuroscience, his 19th-century perspective helps me understand today's research more fully.  (Having been introduced to James through such secondary sources as Robert Richardson's outstanding intellectual biography and Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety, I decided to read the "Briefer Course" in its entirety as a sort of historical foundation for a collection of neuroscience and cognitive psychology books I'm planning to read later this summer.)

Chapter X opens with a concise neurological definition of habit:

An acquired habit, from the physiological point of view, is nothing but a new pathway of discharge formed in the brain, by which certain incoming currents ever after tend to escape. [Emphasis original]

James continues with a discussion of the "physical basis" of habits, namely "pathways through the nerve-centres":

Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.  Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.  Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort...

[Neurological] currents, once in [the brain], must find a way out.  In getting out they leave their traces in the paths which they take.  The only thing they can do, in short, is to deepen old paths or to make new ones; and the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words when we call it an organ in which currents pouring in from the sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear.

James then moves on to the "practical effects of habit"--it "simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue," and also "diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed."  In addition, James notes, habits "depend on sensations not attended to...sensations to which we are usually inattentive; but that they are more than unconscious nerve-currents seems certain, for they catch our attention if they go wrong."

Having concluded his physiological analysis, James turns his attention to the "ethical and pedagogical importance" of habit, and here's where James' genius makes him as relevant as ever more than a century later.  Even if we view James' comments on brain and neural function as mere metaphor, they provide a meaningful foundation for a compelling argument on how best to cultivate useful habits (and why such a concept even matters):

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.  It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.  For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague...

In Professor [Alexander] Bain's chapter on "Moral Habits" [from The Emotions and the Will, 1875]...two great maxims emerge from his treatment.  The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.  Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolutions with every aid you know...

The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life... Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right...

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.  It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain...

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.  With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved...

A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their use...

[I]t is not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of discharge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain.  Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time.  Attention and effort are, as we shall see later, but two names for the same psychic fact.  To what brain-processes they correspond we do not know.  The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on brain-processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law.  As a final practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.  That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. [All emphasis original]

That last passage in particular makes my heart beat just a little quicker--I'm motivated to rise to James' challenge, and I'd like to think that I do in such small, healthy habits as going to the gym or meditating when I don't really feel like it, or getting up earlier than usual to do some heavy reading.  Of course, I'm all too aware of how often I fall short, and how easily I can fall prey to unhealthy habits--not getting enough sleep, wasting time online, even avoiding a difficult conversation I need to have.  But my increasing awareness in recent years of the power of any habitual behavior--of the many ways in which both healthy and unhealthy habits reinforce and perpetuate themselves--is what sparks my interest in James' perspective in the first place.

I'm reminded of Don't Break the Chain, one of most effective--and simplest--motivational tools I've ever found.  I first began using DBTC to track my workouts in March 2008, a process that's helped me make regular exercise one of my most deeply rooted habits.  Here's my "Exercise" calendar for the last three months (as of July 12)--each red block represents a day I worked out:

Earlier this year I began to using this same tool to track other habits I was trying to cultivate (or break).  For example, here's my "Sleep" calendar for the same time period--each blue block represents what I'd call a good night's sleep, preferably a solid 7 hours:

As you can see, the habit of a healthy sleep pattern hasn't yet taken root in my life.  But if awareness alone is insufficient to motivate change and inculcate new habits, it's a necessary first step, and at least now I have some data at my disposal to nudge me down that path.  (It's also striking how motivated I am to do the right thing in order to earn the reward of "checking off" a day on my calendars--another manifestation of the power of habit.)

And while clearly a number of complex, interlocking factors are at work here, I do find James' perspective on habit a compelling explanation for my various successes and failures at sustaining healthy habits and breaking unhealthy ones.

(As I mentioned above, I read the "Briefer Course" as a precursor to a set of contemporary books on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and I hope to refer again to James as I work through them, particularly on the topics of attention, emotion and volition.  But hopefully this discussion has shed some light on why I find James such a superb intellectual companion, and why I look to him for guidance and encouragement.)

Pam Fox Rollin on 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role

So you've just landed your first leadership role--congrats.  Or perhaps it's not your very first opportunity to lead, but you've moved into a more high-profile and demanding role within (or atop) your organization--great.  What the hell do you do now?

A resource you'll find helpful is 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role (the latest entry in the 42 Rules series), by my friend and colleague Pam Fox Rollin.  (Disclosure: Pam asked me to read the book and provided me with a copy of the manuscript, which mentions me in the acknowledgments.  While Pam and I are friends, if I didn't think I could be objective about her work I wouldn't have written this post.  I certainly want Pam and the book to do well, but not at the expense of my own credibility.)

I was first introduced to Pam through the network of Stanford MBAs working as executive coaches and organizational development consultants while making my own transition from management into coaching.  I've greatly appreciated Pam's insights and encouragement over the past 6 years, and the book feels like a conversation with her--high-energy, thought-provoking and enthusiastic, but also informal and easygoing.

Pam organizes her 42 rules into seven chapters:

1. Set Yourself Up for Success: How to prepare for your new role before it starts and how to hit the ground running once it begins.
2. Map the Terrain: Major issues you're likely to encounter in your new environment in the first few weeks.
3. Show Up Wisely: How to better understand yourself, and how to insure you're presenting yourself effectively.
4. Start Your Wins and...
5. Create Your Management System: Tactical tips and hands-on advice for new leaders.
6. Stay Smart: How to keep growing as you settle into your new role.
7. Set You and Your Team to Thrive: Insuring sustainable success over the long-term.

While the book's greatest strength is its detailed guidance and advice, I found this structure a really useful framework that helped me refer back to specific rules and other concepts in the text.  As you look over this list of chapter titles, you may be thinking to yourself, "Hey, this isn't rocket science--I already know this stuff."  And that's precisely why Pam's book is so useful: These are the basic steps that we often ignore when starting a new job, either because we assume we'll address them in the ordinary course of events or because we get caught up in "urgent" responsibilities that "require" our immediate attention.  Pam's overarching point--the whole premise of the book--is that when stepping into a new leadership role it's essential that we be intentional and systematic about the little things, that we never assume they'll take care of themselves, and that we take a longer-term view at the outset, prioritizing what's important over what's urgent.

I also appreciate the balance Pam stikes between building upon the latest leadership research while making her own original contributions.  Her extensive footnotes--all too often absent from current management literature--direct you to sources for original research or further reading, and highlight connections between Pam's work and that of other writers and theorists.  Even better, a page on Pam's site includes resources related to each chapter and direct links to additional articles and research--it's an open-minded approach that makes Pam's own work all the more relevant.  (Two additional elements that aren't in the book but would have been fantastically valuable are a bibliography and a subject index--perhaps they'll be added to Pam's site or will make it into the second edition.)

Here's one rule each from most of the chapters noted above that I found particularly helpful:

Rule 5: Take Charge of Your Start

Pam points out that most official onboarding processes may provide some helpful logistical guidance but are inadequate when it comes to the things that really matter--relationships, culture, history.  Compounding the challenge is the fact that "anything unfamiliar takes substantially more brainpower... Expect your productivity to tank until your brain learns to [execute new routines] without attention from your tiny, precious pre-frontal cortex."

The solution is to write your own onboarding plan: Figure out who you should meet and get on their calendar, familiarize yourself with the surrounding culture, and do some due diligence on recent organizational history.

Rule 9: Figure Out What to Prove by When

Pam writes, "On no topic was there less agreement among the executives I interviewed," than on the question of how much time new leaders have to demonstrate their value.  Her response:

There's always something to prove, and faster than you'd like.  To keep focused rather than frantic, start with two categories and three time horizons:

• Categories: What does my team need to deliver?  What do I need to prove about me?
• Time horizons: immediate (typically one to two months), near-term (two to five months), first year (six to twelve months).

(I firmly agree with Pam on the importance of choosing the right time horizons.)

Pam also quotes OD strategist Bart Fisher:

Figure out if you need [to be] a firefighter or a weatherman.  Is it smoke because there's a problem, or fog because there's uncertainty?  If smoke, fight the fire.  If fog, take the time you need to figure out what's going on.

Rule 16: Get Over Yourself

Throughout the job search or promotion process, Pam writes, "you've been focusing on YOU.  However, focusing on yourself is a quick road to failure as a leader.  Now's the time to turn it around and focus on your team."  She identifies a short but compelling list of things you need to learn about each of your team members--you can't learn everything at once, but dedicate yourself to completing this list over time as you get to know everyone:

• What are you working on?
• What do you enjoy the most and the least about your job?
• What is going well on this team?  What's going less well?
• How could this group be even more successful?
• What do you do well?  What do you want to do more of?
• What do you do less well?  What do you want to do less of?
• What helps you be most productive?
• Where do you want to be professionally in five to ten years?  One to two years?
• What do you think you need to get there?

How many of these questions can you answer for your team right now?  Assuming you know less than you should about them, what regular practices can you put in place that will allow you to learn more?

Rule 20: Communicate Early and Often

"Human brains pay attention to what's recent, what's repeated, and what's communicated with passion and clarity," Pam writes, and as a result, she encourages the use of this framework for presenting issues and positions:

• Here's what I'm seeing
• Here's how I interpret it
• What am I missing?
• Here's what I think that means for us
• What do you think?

I'm reminded of a similar "leader-communication checklist" from Karl Weick's "Managerial Thought in the Context of Action" (which I first encountered in Gary Klein's "Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions"):

• Here's what I think we face
• Here's what I think we should do
• Here's why
• Here's what we should keep our eye on
• Now, talk to me

In both cases, there's a consistent emphasis on concision, transparency and curiosity.  Be concise--make your points quickly and get out of the way.  Be transparent--assume that people don't know your intentions or understand what you're seeing or how you're interpreting it, and fill in those gaps.  And be curious--once you've framed the conversation, it's about getting other people's candid input, not about getting them to agree with you.

Pam goes on to note that "Many leaders are reluctant to repeat themselves.  Consequently, they say it once or twice, maybe at a team meeting or in an email, intending their message to stand for all time."  But this approach runs up against the neural "hard-wiring" that Pam mentions at the outset.  Instead, she counsels, "When you care about something, say it often.  Even better, ask about it often."

Rule 27: Adjust Your Approach

"Lighten up on talking about 'your leadership style,'" Pam counsels, "and think more about what you could do that would be truly useful for your team members and colleagues."  She continues:

I've developed an easy model to help you remember three useful ways to be flexible to differences:

• Appreciate: always look for value in the differences people bring to teamwork...
• Adapt: sometimes adjust your behavior to help other people get what they need to be more productive...
• Adopt: occasionally draw on less-used/less-comfortable behaviors so you can be more effective...

Much of my work with MBA students at Stanford involves experiences that intentionally push them slightly out of their comfort zone in group settings.  This process allows them to recognize three things: First, we all have default interpersonal settings, ways of interacting with others that feel most comfortable to us.  Second, those default settings aren't fixed and in many cases can be easily adjusted with a little conscious effort (and honest feedback from others.)  Finally, any new or modified behaviors we adopt with the intention of improving interactions with others needn't seem unnatural or inauthentic; we can readily internalize them and build them into our repertoire, thus expanding our comfort zone.

This process comes to mind when reading Pam's advice about adjusting our leadership style to accommodate the needs of our team members, and I think it's particularly important for new leaders to be aware of their default behaviors and of their impact on others.

 Rule 35: Ferret Out Feedback

As we say regularly at Stanford in courses focused on interpersonal skills and leadership capabilities, feedback is a gift.  And yet, Pam writes, new leaders "can't count on informal feedback, as many people fear annoying anyone in power.  You may not even receive formal feedback, as review cycles are disrupted by job changes--including yours."  So Pam suggest that it's your responsibility to "Forge your own feedback channels" through the following steps:

• Ask.
  "What am I doing that's helping you accomplish X?"  "When am I a roadblock to you and your team?"  "How might I screw this up?"  "What issues or people should I be giving more attention?"  The higher up you are, the more you have to ask for it...
• Initiate it yourself.
  Don't wait for an annual process to receive upward feedback.  If you can't hire an executive coach, arrange for a trusted peer to interview your team and summarize key messages back up.
• Respond tremendously well.
  Fastest way to kill your feedback channel: downplay the feedback, even slightly, verbally or non-verbally.  [Emphasis mine--I think this is spot-on and tremendously important.]
• Make sure your team members are also getting feedback--from you and others across the organization... By showing your appetite for hearing feedback and using it well, you shift your company's culture from "pretending I know it all" toward "let's learn how to be more and more successful."

The single most popular elective at the Stanford Graduate School of Business is Interpersonal Dynamics (known universally as Touchy Feely), a time-intensive and emotionally demanding course that's taken by over 80% of each graduating class at the GSB.  Why do so many of our students take it, and why do so many alums--including me--call it the most valuable class we took in business school?  Because of the rich feedback you get from 13 peers over 10 weeks of intense interactions--it's an incredibly valuable asset that makes the investment in the experience well worth the effort.  But to Pam's point, you're going to have to ask for, initiate, and respond well to feedback in order to enjoy its benefits in your new leadership role.

I do have a few quibbles with the book.  As noted above, I really would have liked a bibliography--the footnotes are great, but a summary of all the references consulted would be a tremendous resource.  I haven't read other titles in the "42 Rules..." series, but while I'm glad it's providing Pam with a platform and a megaphone, it feels more like a marketing concept than an organizing principle that can be extended to any book-length topic.  Finally, I don't know anything about publishing margins, but I wish they'd invested just a little more in the quality of the actual paper and printing--I'm sufficiently old-school that I like to hang on to hard copies of books I enjoy, and I often make extensive notes in the margins, and that's easier to do with a book that's a bit more substantial.

But those concerns aside, I found 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role well worth my time, and I want to thank Pam for such a concise, well-organized and readily accessible book that offers new leaders a great deal of valuable guidance and advice.