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An opportunity presents itself. It's intriguing, but you're not sure if you should take it. So frame it this way:
1) What will this allow me to do that I can't do now? (And what am I willing to give up in exchange?)
2) What will this prevent me from doing that I would miss? (And what am I not willing to give up?)
Photo by Petros Pevel. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
Whitney Johnson and Tara Mohr recently co-authored Women Need to Realize Work Isn't School, a powerful call to action containing five straightforward guidelines that challenge women to re-think their approach to professional success:
1. Figure out how to challenge and influence authority.
2. Prepare, but also learn how to improvise.
3. Find effective forms of self-promotion.
4. Welcome a less proscribed, full of surprise, career path.
5. Go for being respected, not just liked.
It's a brilliant piece of writing, and I intend to refer to it regularly in my work with clients and students at Stanford (where today the MBA Class of 2012 is just 39% women).
I want to augment Johnson and Mohr's perspective with two points: First, while I firmly agree that these five issues affect women more often and more severely than men, they certainly affect men as well. In my own professional development I've wrestled with each of these issues, and while I had an easier path as a man, it was nevertheless an intense struggle. (And it still is--I'm not suggesting that I've permanently resolved these issues for myself, just that I've addressed them and made what feels like meaningful progress over the years.)
And as I reflect on my male clients and MBA students, my sense is that every one of them is coping with one or more of these issues. From my perspective Johnson and Mohr have identified a critical set of universal challenges we all face in professional life, and they're shining a necessary spotlight on the unique difficulties faced by women in surmounting them.
Second, while these strategies point out the ways in which women can often undermine themselves and suggest useful alternatives, my experience as a coach tells me that simply knowing what we should do is rarely sufficient motivation on its own. In order to take effective action, we have to acknowledge and address the emotions that get stirred up by the prospect of doing so.
Any of us--women and men--who wrestle with the issues above can use Johnson and Mohr's call to action as a starting point to begin to understand the mental models that hold us back. And yet I suspect that sustained progress will depend on our willingness to understand ourselves at an even deeper level--for example, how our emotions affect our reasoning and decision-making or our performance under stress.
When we find ourselves acting in opposition to Johnson and Mohr's guidelines, it's likely that emotional factors are at play. Habitually deferring to authority, failing to improvise, rejecting appropriate credit for our performance, turning down surprise opportunities, focusing on being liked while failing to command respect--these are all professional missteps with a profound emotional dimension to them. Even as we're making such a misstep, we know it's the wrong thing to do, but somehow it feels better, safer, less risky to make the suboptimal choice.
So once our awareness has been raised and we know what we should do, our fundamental struggle in addressing these issues may be acknowledging and overcoming the anxiety, the embarrassment, the shame, the fear that well up when we contemplate taking that bold step. This is the complex and difficult work of self-coaching: engaging ourselves, understanding ourselves, and ultimately accepting ourselves even as we strive to do better.
Photo by Renato Ganoza. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
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."
As I wrote last month, decades of studies have shown that goals are useful spurs to action, but recent research also shows that goals can have unintended consequences, such as diminishing the fulfillment we derive from an activity. My solution to this paradox is "to think of a goal as a powerful tow rope--it can jumpstart a stalled effort and give me a boost, but it can also drag me off course or even out of control. So it's essential to hold on to it lightly and let go of it readily."
Some of my most important goals involve daily activities: Each day I aspire to 1) wake up well-rested from a good night's sleep, 2) get some exercise, 3) meditate, 4) develop myself as a coach through some form of study or practice, and 5) do a little writing, typically on a coaching-related topic.
I've been tracking whether or not I fulfilled these daily goals since May 2011 (except exercise, which I've tracked since March 2008, and writing, which I added last June), so the end of 2012 is an interesting opportunity to see how I've done over the past year. But before I jump to the data, I want to note my appreciation for critics of tracking like Zen Habits' Leo Babauta, who wrote in November...
When you track a metric, such as hours or dollars or miles, you are saying that’s more important than all the things that can’t be measured. You put that in the forefront of your head as the thing that must be improved, at the cost of all else. What about relationships and joy? Are those less important?
Then there are other problems with tracking and measuring everything:
I agree with Babauta's fundamental perspective--we need to spend our lives being fulfilled by doing what we love, and chasing numbers is a recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction, not fulfillment. But his rejection of tracking is similar to his rejection of goals, and it evokes a similar response from me: Any data derived from tracking our activities should inform our choices, not dictate them, and we should hold onto it lightly and let go of it readily, just as we would a goal that's become counter-productive.
The pursuit of my goals noted above is its own reward, and I don't make choices to "improve" the numbers related to those goals. When I don't achieve these goals in a given day, or when the numbers dip over a period of time, rather than feel bad about my "failure," I get curious about the choices I've been making. Perhaps I needed to prioritize other activities, and those choices were the right ones.
But I'm also well aware of the tendency for things that are "urgent but not important" to consume time and attention, often pushing things are are "important but not urgent" off my calendar. My dawning awareness of this dynamic is one of the factors that got me started tracking my daily exercise in the first place.
So while I'm grateful to Babauta and others for helping me to clarify how I want to use this data--and how I don't want to use it--I still find the process of tracking valuable. With that said, how'd 2012 go?
I got a good night's sleep 60% of the time, and I feel great about that simply because I've known for years that my sleep hygiene was poor but never did anything about it. Tracking provides me with just enough motivation to pay attention to--and actually honor--my need for sleep.
I exercised 87% of the time, up from 81% in 2011. And I'm very happy about that--not because I'm driven to "improve," but because I love to exercise, and these figures represent an ongoing commitment to take care of myself in the midst of a very demanding schedule.
I meditated 67% of the time, and I'm ambivalent about that figure. It was just 45% for the last six months of 2011, so from one perspective there's "progress"--but a closer look shows surprising variation on a quarterly basis: 59% in Q1, 85% in Q2, 74% in Q3 and just 51% in Q4. Why such a steep decline when I do find the practice rewarding? Why am I meditating less while exercising more? Curious--and something to think about in 2013.
I worked on my professional development 65% of the time, and I feel just fine about that. It's easy to get sucked into the immediate demands of my work as a coach--primarily because I love what I do--but tracking this metric reminds me of the importance of stepping back from day-to-day responsibilities to stretch myself in other ways.
I started tracking daily writing just last summer, and I wrote 25% of the time during the last 7 months--but that ranged from 90% in June to 0% in September and October. That variation reflects my demanding Fall Quarter schedule at Stanford, and while I write better when I take time off during the year, being dormant for several months was too long, and next year I'll look for ways to keep some momentum going during my busy period.
Photo by David Boté Estrada. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
When do goals support our growth and development? When do they get in the way? And how can we tell the difference?
In a post on self-coaching and goal-setting last July, I wrote that "goals encourage us to work harder and longer, and when they're difficult to achieve they push us even more"--a proposition backed up by decades of research, much of it by Edwin Locke of the University of Maryland and Gary Latham of the University of Toronto. But by no means are goals always a good thing--as Locke and Latham wrote in 2006 in New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory [PDF], at times it's more effective to focus on what we'll learn during the course of an activity than on any performance outcomes we're seeking to achieve. Further, goals actually contribute to lower performance when they're so daunting that we perceive them as "threats" rather than "challenges."
Recent research on goals highlights their complex impact on our behavior. In July Ayelet Fishbach of the Booth School of Business and Jinhee Choi of the Korea University School published When Thinking About Goals Undermines Goal Pursuit, which inspired Christian Jarrett's How Goals and Good Intentions Can Hold Us Back. Building on Fishbach and Choi's research, Jarrett urges us to be mindful of the unintended consequences of goal-setting:
Focusing on goals fires up your intentions to engage in the activities that will help you achieve those goals. But there's a major downside. Stay focused on your goals and you spoil your experience of the activities you'll need to pursue. In turn, that makes it far more likely that you'll drop out early and fail to achieve the very goals that you're so focused on.
Jarrett goes on to discuss Fishbach and Choi's paper at length and concludes:
[T]he lessons from this research seem clear. By all means visualize your goals to help get yourself started in the first place, but once you're underway, try to let your long-term mission fade a little into the background. Revel in the process and you're more likely to make it to the finishing line...
[Further,] once our projects are underway, not only should we beware choosing to stay too focused on our goals, we must also guard against the detrimental effect of outside reminders.
In October the New York Times' Alina Tugend interviewed a number of researchers, including Gary Latham, for an article titled Experts' Advice to the Goal-Oriented: Don't Overdo It:
It’s not that goals are bad, [Latham] said, but that problems arise when the values that underlie them and the process to achieve them are skewed.
Tugend also talked with the University of Arizona's Lisa Ordóñez, who in 2009 co-authored Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting, in which a medical metaphor is used to emphasize the potency of goals' influence and their undesirable side effects:
[W]e argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects nongoal areas, distorted risk preferences, a rise in unethical behavior, inhibited learning, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision. We offer a warning label to accompany the practice of setting goals.
Despite these concerns, in Tugend's article Ordóñez takes the same position as Latham:
"It's not that goals are bad," said Professor Ordóñez... "We’re just saying be careful." [Emphasis mine]
It's critical that we integrate the findings of Fishbach, Choi, Ordóñez and their colleagues into our understanding of goals and modify their use accordingly. But I'm concerned that a misreading of this research is leading us to throw the baby out with the bathwater and abandon goals entirely.
In addition to Christian Jarrett's essay noted above, in 2010 Zen Habits' Leo Babauta proclaimed that the best goal is no goal, and this month he took the "Pro" position in a debate with Tim Ferriss on whether goals suck. Just a few days ago Peter Bregman urged his readers at HBR.org to Consider Not Setting Goals in 2013, a post in which he cites the "Goals Gone Wild" paper and Tugend's NYT article. And just a few hours ago, Babauta tweeted that "Harvard Business Review adopts my no-goals philosophy," with a link to Bregman's post.
Jarrett, Babauta and Bregman all make excellent, nuanced points about the complexity of goals and their unintended consequences--but their headlines (which may not have been written by them, of course) paint a much more simplistic picture, and reductive comments like Babauta's tweet only get amplified in our 140-character world. (It's been re-tweeted or favorited 45 times already as I write this.)
To be clear, I've been heavily influenced by the research on goals' undesirable side effects, and I've altered how I use them in my personal life and in my coaching practice as a result. I continue to find goals a helpful source of motivation when getting started, but I also watch carefully for signs of their counter-productivity. I've come to think of a goal as a powerful tow rope--it can jumpstart a stalled effort and give me a boost, but it can also drag me off course or even out of control. So it's essential to hold on to it lightly and let go of it readily.
Thanks to my colleague Collins Dobbs for the pointer to Bregman's post.
Photo by Gail Foss. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
Some recent work with clients and students and several personal experiences have me thinking about the opposing forces of resistance and motivation that we feel when we're on the brink of a meaningful decision. The tension between these forces can result in uncertainly and paralysis--we don't know whether to heed our resistance and hit the brakes or tap into our motivation and step on the gas, so we drift along and let things happen.
When we're stuck this way, it can be helpful to explore the underlying sources of our resistance and motivation and assess their utility: Are these factors useful to us or not? And in this process it's critical to recognize that resistance and motivation both have "shadow sides," unhelpful dimensions that are likely to lead us astray and need to be challenged.
Useful sources of resistance include healthy prudence, trusted intuition, satisfaction with our present situation and a need for rest or calm. Unhelpful sources of resistance include simple lethargy or inertia, a lack of confidence or resilience, and excessive caution or risk-aversion. All these factors tend to slow us down and encourage us to opt out and say no.
Useful sources of motivation include healthy ambition, aspirational goals, a drive to overcome obstacles and a sense of determined "grit." (For more on grit, see research by Penn's Angela Duckworth.) Unhelpful sources of motivation include unchecked drives, unchallenged beliefs that tell us we "must" do something, compulsions and social pressure. All these factors tend to speed us up and encourage us to opt in and say yes.
I'm not suggesting that there's a simple or foolproof way to locate the "utility threshold" and readily distinguish between the helpful and unhelpful forms of resistance and motivation; it's a complex and subjective process. But a good starting point is simply stepping back and reminding ourselves that these forces come in both flavors, and sometimes we need to tap into and unleash our motivation--step on the gas--while at other times we need to respect and heed our resistance--hit the brakes.
In my work with a client in recent weeks, it occurred to me that he was seeking to effect change at several different levels in his professional life, and it was important for us to be clear about which level he was addressing in any given moment. Thinking further along these lines, I realized that we're always working on multiple levels--work life as a layer cake--and a clearer understanding of what each level encompasses (and what we can and can't do there) would provide a useful conceptual framework.
Working my way down from the top of the graphic above...
At the Structural level are the big-picture circumstances of our working lives: Our career path, our professional identity, our organizational affiliations and all the other ways in which we might answer the question, "So what do you do?"
At the Contextual level are those factors related to our current situation: Our specific role and (in some cases) job description, our explicit and implicit responsibilities, and the obligations and expectations we bring to our reporting relationships (up, down and sideways).
At the Interpersonal level are the issues that arise within every unique configuration of individuals: Our relationships with our peers, superiors and subordinates, not only one-on-one, but also in any permanent or temporary groups.
Finally, at the Internal level is our intrapersonal response to all of the above: The mental models, attitudes and beliefs we use to interpret and make sense of our professional lives (and selves); the emotions that accompany and underlie these conceptions; and any self-coaching practices we employ to influence these responses.
So how can we put this framework to, uh, work?
One guideline is "start low." As we move up from Internal to Structural, the scope of change that can be effected gets "bigger" (in a sense) but the degree of immediate personal control that we can exert gets correspondingly "smaller." So when change is desired it may be useful to start at the Internal level to see what we can accomplish on our own. Perhaps nothing needs to change other than our own mental models, beliefs or emotional state.
Starting low also insures that we don't "skip a step" and drag unresolved issues along with us in the process. For example, we may need to change careers to find fulfillment--a big Structural shift--but if the root of our unhappiness actually lies at the Internal or Interpersonal layer, we'll eventually encounter the very same problems again in our new role.
Finally, it's useful to remember that we're always evolving on all levels at once, and changes on any one level will inevitably affect the others. Change in ourselves will affect our interpersonal relationships. Changes in our relationships will affect how we fulfill our roles and responsibilities. And changes in those contextual factors will affect our fit with our organizations and our professional identities.
One last note: The boundaries between these levels are extremely amorphous and are by no means clear or discrete. I'm not suggesting that desired changes fall neatly into one level and not another. But hopefully this model allows us to more accurately diagnose where change would be most useful and to target our efforts accordingly.
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough." Lewis Carroll
All coaching, including self-coaching, takes place within a context defined by our personal values and our vision for ourselves. If self-coaching is a plan--a sequence of steps to help us effect positive change in our lives--then our values and our vision are the Big Picture--a source of meaning and purpose, and the underlying rationale for the changes we seek to make.
Overview and Timing
It's not necessary--or even desirable--to fully explore our values and vision at the very start of the self-coaching process. These are large, complex topics that take time and effort to address, and at the beginning of a change effort it may be more important to simplify: Break things down into components, build momentum with small victories, and scale up as needed.
But I'm not saying that a sense of direction is irrelevant. The passage above from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is often misquoted as, "If you don't know where you're going, then any path will do," and the whole point of a structured self-coaching process is clarifying just which paths we should pursue now.
I am saying that while self-coaching is an active and iterative experiential learning process, once we've determined our immediate goals and begun moving in a general direction, we must also insure that as we assess our progress, we also make time at regular intervals to pull up and observe the view from a higher perspective. Chris Argyris' concept of double-loop learning is highly relevant here; exploring our values and vision is a means of identifying and updating the assumptions and mental models that have been influencing and supporting (or undermining) our day-to-day self-coaching efforts.
While we have to determine for ourselves when and how often this work at a higher level should be done, we need to be mindful of two diametrically opposed but equally dangerous traps: 1) Doing too much, too soon, and 2) Doing too little, too late.
We may have a tendency toward one extreme or the other that we should bear in mind--or we may find them both tempting at different points in the process. I can get stuck at the outset of any project by indulging in an excess of high-level thinking as a respectable form of procrastination, but I can also build up a sense of momentum once I get started that feeds on itself and makes me reluctant to slow down enough to do any high-level thinking. (As much as I admire the Cult of Done, I also know how important it is for me to stop and experience some stillness every day.)
Exploring Our Values
A dilemma we face when discussing "values" is that their definitions can be so subjective--and when we arrive at a definition that's true for us, we still have to determine just what it means to actually live that value. Here's a simple exercise to reach an actionable definition of your core values:
- What intrinsic rewards are the result of this value? In what ways does it fulfill me or create a sense of meaning in my life?
- What extrinsic rewards--what forms of status or compensation--am I willing to sacrifice on behalf of this value?
- How important is this value to my self-identity? How different would my life have to be for me to abandon this value?
Another approach is to use a values-based assessment that incorporates a set of pre-defined values and relies on a questionnaire to determine which values are most important or meaningful to us. These tools offer a number of advantages, but as with any instrument, it's important to recognize that even the best results need to be weighed against our personal experience and shouldn't be accepted as universal truths.
An assessment I've used and recommend frequently is the Values in Action Survey of Character Strengths (VIA), developed by Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson, which helps us to identify the values from which we derive the greatest meaning. The complete, 240-question version of the VIA is available through the VIA Institute on Character and the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center. For more on the VIA and Seligman's work on values and meaning, see the Signature Strengths section in Part 2 of my Happiness, Excellence and Boundaries series.
(I've also taken Scott Bristol's Life Journey Map and have found it tremendously useful, but it can be accessed only by people working with a registered coach or consultant. I have not taken the Clifton/Gallup StrengthsFinder, but it's been recommended to me, and I plan to take it soon.)
Defining Our Vision
Our personal values serve as the foundation for our vision for ourselves. I want to acknowledge that the concept of a "vision" is inherently fuzzy and consequently susceptible to abuse. We've all read dozens of "vision statements" full of noble, high-minded words that are routinely ignored. Most of them are empty exercises that ultimately serve no purpose except to breed cynicism. But any good tool can be misused, and I want to rescue this concept from airless committees, rehabilitate it, and put it back in the hands of active individuals.
I also want to distinguish between a vision and a goal. Goal-setting is a critical step in the self-coaching process, one that I recommend addressing at the outset to provide both direction and motivation for the work that follows. But even our most ambitious goals are dynamic components of a larger, more comprehensive vision for ourselves. We can and should feel free to simply identify a goal and begin moving toward it--goals motivate us, and difficult goals motivate us even more under the right conditions. By driving action they serve an essential function in self-coaching. But our vision for ourselves should be more deeply rooted, more enduring, and should be the product of deeper, more far-reaching reflection.
Truly great [professionals] understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change, between what is genuinely sacred and what is not. This rare ability to manage continuity and change--requiring a consciously practiced discipline--is closely linked to the ability to develop a vision.
This quote is from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras' Building Your Company's Vision, a classic Harvard Business Review article aimed at motivating leaders to identify a vision for their organizations--a novel concept in 1996. I've adapted their method for defining a vision for use in coaching and have found it extremely helpful in my work with individuals. (Toward that end, I've substituted "professionals" for "companies" in the passage above.) According to Collins and Porras, a vision consists of two interrelated elements:
For more on defining a vision, see the exercises in my post on Developing Your Professional Vision.
For an overview of my self-coaching framework, see A Self-Coaching Guide for Leaders at All Levels.
For all my posts on this topic, see my Self-Coaching category.
Thanks to Thaler Pekar for her thoughts on The Trouble with Values and the importance of stories.
Photo by Mohamed Muha. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
The goals we set for ourselves have a significant influence on our performance, and this is as true for self-coaching as it is for any other meaningful task. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham are two of the world's leading researchers on goal-setting, and in 2006 they summarized the results of roughly 400 studies conducted over the course of 25 years in a short, pithy article, New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory [PDF]:
So long as a person is committed to the goal, has the requisite ability to attain it, and does not have conflicting goals, there is a positive, linear relationship between goal difficulty and task performance.
So when we're A) committed, B) able and C) unconflicted, we owe it to ourselves to aim really high. I'm not suggesting that these conditions are easily met. Two out of three, sure, but meeting all three can be a high bar. And, as noted below, at times aiming too high is counterproductive, particularly when we perceive a difficult goal as threatening. The key is aiming just high enough.
My Personal Goals
Among the goals I've set for myself are 1) exercise, meditate and write every day, and 2) eat and drink moderately and get 7 hours of sleep on a regular basis (in my case, 70% of the time). I strive to achieve the first set on a daily basis because I'm committed, able and unconflicted--no counter-goals stand in my way. My target for the second set is lower because while I'm certainly committed and able, I do have some conflicting counter-goals: While a reasonably healthy diet and decent sleep hygiene are important to me, I also derive a lot of pleasure from good food and drink, and I often stay up late to read or work or just to have fun. So in the former case I have some stretch goals that push me to accommodate them, and in the latter case I have some easier goals that accommodate me.
So how am I doing? I wrote about exercise the other week in a post on self-assessment; I'm only at 85% for 2012 so far, but I hit 92% in Q2 and 100% in June--pretty good! Meditation: I'm at 72% for the year, 85% for Q2 and 97% for June--again, a positive trend. I only started tracking writing in June: 90% for the month, a respectable start. A moderate diet: I'm at 65% for the year, 68% for Q2 and 60% for June--room for improvement, but not bad. And a good night's sleep: 54% for the year, 53% for Q2 and 40% for June--obviously, something needs to change here. But on the whole, I'm pretty damn happy. (As I've noted before, I use Don't Break the Chain to track my daily activity, and at the end of the month I just transcribe the results into a spreadsheet.)
Goals and Performance
How do our goals affect our performance? Locke and Latham identify 4 factors at work:
[1] High goals lead to greater effort and/or persistence than do moderately difficult, easy, or vague goals. [2] Goals direct attention, effort, and action toward goal-relevant actions at the expense of nonrelevant actions. [3] Because performance is a function of both ability and motivation, goal effects also depend upon having the requisite task knowledge and skills. [4] Goals may simply motivate one to use one’s existing ability, may automatically "pull" stored task-relevant knowledge into awareness, and/or may motivate people to search for new knowledge.
So goals encourage us to work harder and longer, and when they're difficult to achieve they push us even more. Goals compel us to prioritize and avoid spending time and energy on irrelevant tasks, suggesting that they help us triage and distinguish between relevant and irrelevant tasks by attaching importance to the former and devaluing the latter. Goals obviously aren't a panacea, and we're unlikely to achieve them if we lack the necessary knowledge and skills. But even when those qualities aren't in abundance, goals help us make the most of what we have while spurring us to learn more and enhance our skills.
I certainly see the impact of goal-setting when I look at my progress with regard to meditation. In February 2009 I wrote, "I fully appreciate the importance of...meditation...But I still can't bring myself to actually do it on a regular basis." Then in May 2011 I got serious and decided to try meditating daily; as of January of this year, I was making a go of it, but still had difficulty: "Looking back at the last six months of 2011...I meditated just 45% of the time." And now I meditate just about every day; I'm highly motivated to do it, I prioritize it over uses of my time, and I find it much easier to do, which I take as some sign of increasing skill.
Effective Goals
Locke and Latham also identify 4 factors that influence our goals' effectiveness:
The key moderators of goal setting are [1] feedback, which people need in order to track their progress; [2] commitment to the goal, which is enhanced by self-efficacy [defined as "task-specific confidence"] and viewing the goal as important; [3] task complexity, to the extent that task knowledge is harder to acquire on complex tasks; and [4] situational constraints. With regard to the latter, Brown, Jones, and Leigh (2005) found that role overload (excess work without the necessary resources to accomplish a task) moderates goal effects; goals affected performance only when overload was low.
So effective goals will generate feedback on our progress, heighten our sense of commitment, relate to complex tasks and be supported by the resources we need to accomplish those task.
While I have only one month of data on my commitment to write daily, it's noteworthy to me that I hit 90%--not perfect, but good enough to make me happy. My effectiveness at achieving this goal was clearly affected by the feedback I get on my writing from a range of sources: Twitter followers, various links, and, perhaps most importantly, the friends and colleagues who take the time to express their support. The more I write, the more important writing is to me--it's certainly something I'm deeply committed not only as a means of self-expression but also as one of the best ways I know to improve as a coach. While I find writing deeply fulfilling, it's also one of the hardest things I do--fulfilling doesn't always mean fun when it comes to demanding work. Finally, in fairness, I usually have more time for writing in June because of the end of the academic year at Stanford--let's see how I do in October. So obviously a constellation of factors enhanced this particular goal's effectiveness in my life, and hopefully I can keep them in place going forward.
Other Factors
Three additional points from Locke and Latham:
[1] Sometimes specific, difficult goals do not lead to better performance than simply urging people to do their best.
When tackling a new, complex task, focusing on a performance outcome may cause us to prioritize the goal and lose sight of the bigger picture, i.e. why we set the goal in the first place. In these cases, it may be preferable to identify learning goals which put the emphasis on acquiring the skills needed to achieve a given task.
[2] Assigning hard goals may not be effective when people view those goals as threatening.
When we see a difficult goal as a "challenge," we focus on the possiblity of success and the utility of effort. However, it's also possible to see a difficult goal as a "threat," which shifts our focus to the possibility of failure and undermines our performance. As always, our mindset is a critical factor.
[3] Goal progress and goal importance [can be] strong predictors of feelings of success and well-being.
But in the relevant study cited by Locke and Latham, only people "who perceived their goals as difficult to obtain" reported these positive feelings. In the right circumstances, stretch goals just feel good.
Escalation of Commitment
One final topic related to goal-setting that I'll touch on briefly: There's some fascinating research on the "escalation of commitment," a phrase coined by Barry Staw in his classic 1981 paper, The Escalation of Commitment to a Course of Action [PDF], which explored why people continue to follow failing courses of action when they would have been better off cutting their losses. (Theresa Kelly and Katherine Milkman also have an entry on the topic [PDF] in the upcoming "Encyclopedia of Management Theory.")
Most of this research understandably focuses on "vicious cycles"--the dynamics that reinforce our commitment to failure--because we (mistakenly) assume that when things are going badly and getting worse, we'll stop and choose another path. (We often don't.) But there's also value in understanding how these dynamics can be applied to support effective goal-setting and reinforce our commitment to success. The dimension that seems most relevant to goal-setting is what Erving Goffman called "impression management" in his 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Kelly and Milkman write:
Impression management explanations of escalation behavior focus on a decision maker's need to justify her past choices to others. The outcome of an investment is rarely free from external scrutiny, and a decision maker may escalate commitment to her original investment to avoid admitting to others that the venture was a failure or that her decision was flawed. Such admissions might cause others to doubt her competence. Furthermore, people tend to punish decision makers for inconsistency... When a decision maker switches from her originally endorsed course of action, observers may take it as a sign of weakness or lack of confidence. Thus...she may choose to escalate commitment to avoid appearing inconsistent.
To be clear, Kelly and Milkman are focused on situations where "objective evidence indicates that continuing with an investment is unwise, and yet an individual chooses to invest further in spite of this," while I'm deliberately expanding the frame to consider how these same dynamics might be leveraged to help us create "virtuous circles" and achieve our goals more readily.
One obvious way I might take advantage of impression management: Write about my goals on a website with my name on it :-)
For an overview of my self-coaching framework, see A Self-Coaching Guide for Leaders at All Levels.
For all my posts on this topic, see my Self-Coaching category.
Note: Many other resources are available based on Edwin Locke and Gary Latham's research, most notably their 1990 book, A Theory of Goal-Setting and Task Performance (which I haven't read) and their 2002 paper, Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal-Setting and Task Motivation.
Photo by John Trainor. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
Catalysis: An acceleration of the rate of a process or reaction, brought about by a catalyst, usually present in small managed quantities and unaffected at the end of the reaction. A catalyst permits reactions or processes to take place more effectively or under milder conditions than would otherwise be possible. - Catalysis.org
At some level self-coaching is all about change. Changing how we spend our time so we're more fulfilled, and changing our behavior so we're more effective. Doing more of what's working in our lives, and doing less of--or stopping entirely--what's not working. We may even want to change the direction of our lives in a more comprehensive way, and all large changes result from a series of smaller ones.
Catalysts alter the rate of change in a reaction, and the catalysts in a self-coaching process are 1) the ongoing conversations with ourselves we've set in motion through self-engagement, 2) the goals that we’ve identified and clarified for ourselves, and 3) the heightened perception of our in-the-moment responses and the fuller understanding of ourselves we've obtained through increased self-awareness. Note that each of these elements has a social component as well: By inviting the people who matter to us into these ongoing conversations, we enrich the dialogue; by sharing our goals with them, we increase our level of commitment; and by asking for their feedback, we see ourselves from their perspective and understand ourselves in new ways.
All of these catalysts can serve to make change easier--they can increase our willingness to change, or they can lower our resistance to change. Catalysts also change the conditions under which change is possible--we don’t need to wait until we're under duress or facing difficulties that might force change upon us. We can act sooner, at the moment of our own choosing, "under milder conditions."
The changes that occur in a self-coaching process take the form of an endless series of pivotal moments when we intervene and take action (or choose NOT to act). On occasion these interventions are Large, Dramatic Gestures, but far more often they're small, quotidian steps--little things we do on a daily basis, or even many times a day, to nudge ourselves in the direction of our goals.
A concept I find particularly useful in this context is Kurt Lewin and Edgar Schein's 3-stage change process (which I've discussed a number of times on this site.) In this model we start in a "frozen" state, automatically following our existing behavioral patterns; we "unfreeze" under the appropriate conditions, and our patterns are altered; and we then "refreeze" and enter a new state of automaticity.
Self-coaching first involves becoming aware of our automatic behavior patterns and seeing all those moments when we choose not to intervene--when we simply obey our impulses to do (or NOT do) something. With the support of the catalysts noted above--and the people who've been a part of our self-coaching process--this awareness allows us to then consciously intervene and make different choices. We can take action, when previously we would have sat back. Or we can sit back, when previously we would have taken action. These interventions take the form of momentary, tactical acts of what we might call self-regulation, and taken as a whole they comprise a larger, strategic process of self-management.
A timely example of this process at work: While I was writing this post Amy and I got into a fight--the details are beyond irrelevant, as they usually are, but suffice to say it was my fault initially, and then we each made it worse. As John Gottman's research makes clear, couples in successful long-term relationships continue to fight, and what's critical is that they learn how to fight effectively--they can fully express anger and frustration, but even in the heat of the moment, they're able to manage themselves, de-escalate the conflict, and eventually bring the fight to a close.
Amy and I have had plenty of practice over the course of our 26 years together, and in this fight what allowed us to turn the tide, recover and re-connect with each other was our respective ability to intervene in our automatic behaviors. At critical moments, we both felt tempted to say something that we knew would have made things worse--and yet would have felt SO good to say. But we didn't just give voice to those thoughts and feelings, nor did we stifle them entirely--we worked hard to find a way to express them that did some justice to our perspective while minimizing their potential to further inflame the other. At other moments I just wanted to disengage--a common ploy that Gottman calls "stonewalling," which allows one party in a conflict to feel less stressed while tending to increase the stress of the other party--but I resisted that impulse and stayed present. And finally, eventually, we talked ourselves off the ledge and even had a conversation to assess how and why things went wrong.
I'm not holding up my marriage or myself as a paragon of perfection here--there's plenty I can do to be a better husband and a better person, and I know that what I learned in this experience won't prevent our next fight from happening. But it's a meaningful example to me of self-intervention at both a tactical and a strategic level. In the moment, both Amy and I intervened with ourselves on multiple occasions to tactically self-regulate--in this case, to resist impulses to say or do things which sprang from automatic behavior patterns and yet which would have been counterproductive. And I believe that intervening repeatedly over time allows us to strategically self-manage: to change our patterns, to identify and adopt new, more effective behaviors, and ultimately to internalize these patterns so that future interventions require less effort or conscious intent.
A closing thought: By choosing to illustrate this process with an example of an unwanted conflict, I don't want to give the impression that self-intervention is only about resisting automatic impulses and NOT doing something. On many occasions it's just the opposite--we need to overcome our inertia, get off our asses and DO something. More on that in a future post.
For an overview of my self-coaching framework, see A Self-Coaching Guide for Leaders at All Levels.
For all my posts on this topic, see my Self-Coaching category.
Photo by christian.senger. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
