Ed Batista

Spending Attention

Focused attention is our most precious resource, because 1) it's extremely taxing on our intellectual and emotional capabilities, 2) it can have a amazingly powerful effect on its object, and 3) it can't be subdivided. (We can pay continuous partial attention to multiple objects simultaneously, but we can truly focus on only one object at any given moment.)

Much of what I do as a coach and as an experiential educator at Stanford involves nothing more than devoting my full attention to another person. This is somewhat easier in a one-on-one coaching session with a client or student, and it's somewhat harder in a group setting, but under any circumstances it's a challenging task that's almost always worth the effort.

Why is it challenging? Because even when we're one-on-one, we're bombarded by sensory stimuli and an endless stream of emerging thoughts and emotions that constantly draw our focus inward. The running dialogue we maintain with ourselves exerts an almost irresistible pull on our attention, and it's impossible to ever completely shut it off. And in any group setting not only does the complexity of the data stream increase exponentially, but our awareness of being observed by others who are beyond the sphere of our attention heightens our self-consciousness and adds another layer to our self-talk.

Why is it worth the effort? Because we're so rarely the object of another person's truly focused attention, devoting our full attention to someone can be a novel experience for both of us that in and of itself stimulates something useful in the interaction. The other person feels seen, heard, recognized, validated, appreciated or challenged in ways that partial attention never generates. And as we momentarily quiet our inner voice, we suddenly become aware of so many things that we missed before--not only about the other person and our environment, but also about ourselves. The subtler, more elusive thoughts and feelings that are usually drowned out by the louder currents can now be heard.

How do we do it? Three suggestions:

First, make the distinction between spending time with someone and spending attention on someone. We like to think that our time is precious, but compared to attention, time is cheap. And it's cheap because we can spend time without expending any real effort, and because continuous partial attention allows us to multi-task, flitting among low-intensity activities. So spending time with someone isn't the same thing as spending attention on them (and we're fooling ourselves if we think they won't be able to tell the difference.)

Second, respect how draining it can be to focus our attention for any length of time, and recognize our limits. Devoting our full attention to someone is hard work, and not the sort of work that can be accomplished through sheer force of will. Our reserves of attention are rapidly depleted, and that process accelerates when we're tired or stressed. Sometimes we just don't have it in us to focus our attention, and we have to learn to set boundaries and communicate them clearly and gracefully.

Third, practice. Focusing our attention, like any form of mental control, is a learnable skill. And while we can't simply force ourselves to pay attention for any sustained period, we can increase our stamina in order to pay attention for greater lengths of time and to shorten the recovery period between distractions. But note that many factors in contemporary life pull us in just the opposite direction. Entire industries have been developed to heighten our sense of distraction and keep us in a state of perpetual unrest, and we have to work actively to resist their pull.

Photo by Ed Yourdon. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons

Emotional Mountaineering (The Three Tasks of Coaching)

If I were to distill the work that I do as a coach and experiential educator down to its essence, it would consist of helping people perform three tasks:

1) Learn to access our emotions more fully, express emotions to others more effectively, and allow ourselves to become emotionally "flooded."

2) Learn to manage ourselves more effectively, interact productively with others and make better decisions while experiencing strong emotions.

3) Learn to de-escalate strong emotions when flooded and find efficient and healthy ways of soothing ourselves.

There's an obvious arc to this emotional journey, one that involves pushing ourselves to reach new heights, navigating those peaks under difficult conditions, and safely returning to lower altitudes. Looked at from this perspective, coaching (and experiential learning more generally) can be seen as emotional mountaineering. I help my clients and students make this journey by traveling alongside them and experiencing it with them--I suppose I'm an emotional sherpa :-)

This metaphor may make sense if you've done meaningful work with a coach or in an experiential learning environment--and if not, I imagine it prompts some questions:

Why so much emphasis on emotions?

The huge gap between the role emotions actually play and how they're commonly understood would be amusing if it didn't have such negative consequences. The popular view is that emotions are irrational impulses that cloud our judgment, and we need to repress them in order for rational thought to prevail. But recent neurological research has made it quite clear that emotions are an essential element in the reasoning process. As USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio wrote in 1994 in his influential book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain,

[H]uman 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... Emotion, feeling and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. [p xvii]

More specifically, emotions allows us to make decisions much more efficiently than would be possible through logic alone. Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux of NYU notes in The Emotional Brain that the neurological pathways that process emotions are literally twice as fast as those that process cognitions.

This isn't to say that our emotions never lead us astray; of course they do, particularly strong negative emotions such as fear or anger--see below. LeDoux calls the emotional pathways in the brain a "quick and dirty processing system," one whose signals can readily be misinterpreted. But if we habitually repress our emotions we never improve our ability to discern the signal from the noise, to determine which emotional responses are helpful in a given set of circumstances and which are counterproductive.

Feeling our emotions more fully also allows us to express them more effectively with others. Emotions are the levers of influence, and our ability to inspire, comfort, motivate, or threaten is dependent on our ability to tap into and convey the right emotions in the right way at the right time.

All this work is challenging enough when we're calm and reflective; it's infinitely more difficult when we're hurt, angry, upset or excited--this is why it's important to allow ourselves to become emotionally "flooded," so that we can practice these skills under duress.

What do you mean by "flooding"?

"Flooding" is a term employed by the social psychologist and therapist John Gottman to describe the condition of heightened emotional arousal that creates a sense of overwhelm, typically occurring when we're subjected to criticism or feel attacked in some way.

We experience flooding as a host of physiological symptoms--such as rapid heart rate, elevated blood pressure, shallow breathing, or sweaty palms--that result from increased levels of certain neurotransmitters in the brain, most notably adrenaline and cortisol. These are the biological markers of a "threat response," or what's often called a "fight-or-flight" reaction, that usually accompany strong negative emotions.

Executive coach David Rock has made an extensive study of the implications of recent neuroscience research for organizational life, and his work highlights three findings with special relevance here: First, our brains respond to social situations that we perceive as threatening in the same way that we respond to literal threats to our physical safety. Second, we experience these social threats most frequently at work. And finally, when we're experiencing a threat response our capacity for analytic thought, creative insight and problem-solving is substantially diminished.

This cognitive impairment is one of the primary reasons for popular misconceptions about the role of emotions noted above; we've all made bad decisions while in the grip of a threat response. But rather than seeking to suppress our negative emotions--an effort that rarely works and often leads to higher stress levels--we're much better served by strategies that allow us to both 1) reframe situations so that we experience them as less threatening in the first place and 2) increase our level of comfort with strong emotions and our ability to manage ourselves while flooded.

This is why it's so important to allow ourselves to feel strong emotions and even become flooded in the safe confines of a coaching session or experiential learning environment, where we can step slightly outside our comfort zone without putting ourselves at risk.

So what does this look like in practice?

To be clear, the majority of my conversations with clients and students are upbeat and even lighthearted. I'm a firm believer in the value of focusing on the positive, doing more of what's working, and seeking greater levels of happiness and fulfillment to support our professional effectiveness. And my own effectiveness as a coach depends on establishing a foundation of safety, trust and intimacy, whether on a one-on-one basis in a coaching engagement or among the members of a group in other settings.

But it's important that we also make room for a wide range of emotions in order to be able to do the work outlined above. This means very different things for each of us, of course, and I don't take a one-size-fits-all approach. I try to find the right balance of challenge and support that's called for in every relationship, but a common theme is a willingness to take some risks in order to learn and grow, and this inevitably involves stepping into some stronger emotions--from amusement to elation, from annoyance to anger, from embarrassment to shame, from disappointment to grief.

My experience in thousands of coaching sessions and group meetings over the years is that as we expand the range of emotions we can express in these safe settings, we increase our ability to make effective use of emotion in "the real world," where the risks are higher and the returns are greater. To return to the mountaineering metaphor, by pushing ourselves to new heights we become more sure-footed under stress and increase our trust in our ability to return safely.

Thanks to Mary Ann Huckabay, Carole Robin and Scott Bristol.

Photo by Mitch Barrie. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

A Challenge To Leaders: Help Others Self-Coach

The Leadership Case for Self-Coaching

Helping people learn to self-coach is central to my approach to coaching. This isn't a noble ideal; it's a result of the fact that I see my clients and students for just 1% of their working hours--the remaining 99% of the time they're coaching themselves through every decision and interaction, and my effectiveness as a coach is reflected in their effectiveness at self-coaching.

A similar dynamic exists in almost all organizations today, especially in fields comprised of knowledge workers, in Peter Drucker's phrase. Knowledge workers rarely, if ever, perform a task under the direct supervision of a leader or manager; time spent together by superiors and subordinates is almost always dedicated to reviews of work already completed or planning for work yet to be done. This reflects the impact of knowledge work on traditional org chart relationships and workplace hierarchies. As Drucker writes in Management Challenges of the 21st Century,

[K]nowledge workers are not subordinates; they are "associates." For, once beyond the apprentice stage, knowledge workers must know more about their job than their boss does--or else they are no good at all. In fact, that they know more about their job than anybody else in the organization is part of the definition of knowledge workers...

To be sure, these associates are "subordinates" in that they depend on the "boss" when it comes to being hired or fired, promoted, appraised and so on. But in his or her own job the superior can perform only if these so-called subordinates take responsibility for educating him or her...  In turn, these "subordinates" depend on the superior for direction. They depend on the superior to tell them what the "score" is. [pp 18, 20]

Because knowledge workers require (and desire) little or no direct supervision and typically know more about the work to be done than their leaders and managers, effective leadership has come to look a lot like coaching--which is one of the primary reasons that the new business school curriculum we've rolled out at Stanford over the past decade puts so much emphasis on coaching, interpersonal skills and experiential learning.

And just as my effectiveness as a coach is expanded dramatically by my ability to help others self-coach, leaders can enhance their effectiveness by helping people learn to coach themselves. "Coaching" doesn't need to be a formal activity that occurs between a superior and a subordinate in specially designated conversations, but rather can be a means by which knowledge workers guide themselves through day-to-day activities and over the span of their careers.

Self-coaching can't replace the experience of working directly with a personal coach like myself or being actively coached by a manager, but those opportunities are time- and resource-intensive experiences that are constrained by an organization's budget for coaching and a leader's availability. Effective self-coaching can augment an organization's investment in coaching by outside professionals and internal leaders alike. Further, helping people self-coach is a natural fit with knowledge work's emphasis on self-management and flat hierarchies.

So what does this look like in practice? Here are three principles to bear in mind:

1. Meta-Work (Meta-What?)

Helping someone learn to self-coach primarily means coaching them in a transparent way, so they're aware of the steps being taken and can replicate them later, both on their own and with others--a process I refer to as "meta-work." As I wrote in 2006, meta-work is any effort we undertake in order to work more effectively. Meta-work occurs whenever we step back from a task to ask ourselves "Why do we do this task this way?" or even "Why do we do this task at all?"

In a self-coaching context, meta-work involves leaving time at the end of a conversation to debrief the conversation itself and understand why it was helpful (or why it wasn't), and identifying specific aspects of the leader's coaching approach (both in any given conversation and over the arc of the relationship) so that the other person can apply those techniques on their own. Note that this isn't extra work added to the leader's plate--it's work to be done by the other person with the leader. Our responsibility as a leader is to manage the agenda so that the immediate issues under discussion don't consume all the available time.

2. More Questions, Less Advice

Our first helping impulse is typically to offer advice, and this is particularly true when we're in a leadership role because our mental models of leadership often involve "knowing the answers." And at times effective coaching requires providing some direct advice or feedback. But it's much more useful in a coaching context to ask questions, especially at the outset. As longtime MIT professor Edgar Schein writes in Helping,

The first intervention must always be what I am calling humble inquiry, even if the inquiry is merely careful observation and listening in the first few minutes of the encounter. The critical point is not to stereotype the situation even if it looks like something familiar. [pp 66-7]

Schein notes that the first trap for a "helper" in any helping relationship is dispensing wisdom prematurely; it's essential to defer offering advice or answering questions and shift the responsibility for providing answers back to the person seeking help.

The rationale here is threefold: First, we're more likely to follow up on ideas that we generate ourselves; even when we're accept advice we believe to be sound, we're less likely to act on it. Second, by definition knowledge workers have more information at their disposal than their leaders, and questions will help surface that information more effectively than advice. And finally, while providing answers may make us feel useful in the short run, over time it inhibits the other person's ability to find answers for themselves; asking questions is a much more effective way to help others learn to self-coach.

3. Empathy, Empathy, Empathy

Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who consults to corporate clients, makes the strategic case for empathy in Chief Culture Officer:

In the twentieth century, the corporation was so large it created its own weather system. General Motors, IBM and Coca-Cola could shape the world to their will. And in this world it was enough to be really analytically smart. Now we have to know the world outside the corporation. We have to know worlds alien to our own. We have to know worlds that proceed according to other assumptions.  Without empathy, these worlds are opaque to us. [p 128]

This is even more important at the interpersonal level; without empathy--the ability not only to understand another person's thoughts but also to vicariously experience their emotions--their world remains alien and opaque to us. Empathy makes coaching possible.

Another key to the importance of empathy can be found in the work of Brené Brown, a research professor at the University of Houston and best-selling author who's spent years studying the topics of vulnerability, courage, worthiness and shame. Brown defines shame as "the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging." Empathy, in turn, is "the antidote to shame."

The relevance for leaders in a coaching context is that almost everyone seeking help is experiencing some form of shame, even if it's just mild embarrassment--and the more serious the problem, the deeper the shame. Feeling and expressing empathy is critical to helping the other person defuse their shame or embarrassment and begin thinking creatively about solutions.

But note that our habitual expressions of empathy can sometimes be counterproductive. Michael Sahota, a coach in Toronto who works with groups of software developers and product managers, offers a concise synopsis of Brown's work on the traps we fall into when trying to express empathy: "My problem's bigger," "Look on the bright side," and leaping to problem-solving while ignoring the emotions generated by the problem.

The solution is to recognize these responses as traps, catch ourselves before we fall into them and instead truly empathize: Start with inquiry--see above, work to understand the other person's situation and--even more importantly--experience their feelings. We may not identify with their particular situation, and it may not evoke the same feelings in us, but we've surely had those feelings at some point. Tap into them and find a useful way to share them. All this is easy to write about and hard to do, but it's worth noting that recent research indicates empathy can be learned.

The ultimate value from a self-coaching perspective is that people who are met with empathy begin to feel empathy for themselves, a critical step in the process of effectively analyzing and learning from our mistakes.

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More on Self-Coaching:

Engaging Ourselves: Consistent self-coaching starts with self-engagement, which is both a fundamental attitude toward ourselves and an ongoing dialogue.

Goal-Setting: The goals we set for ourselves have a significant influence on our performance; that said, goals can support our growth and development, and they can also get in the way.

Self-Awareness: I define self-awareness as both a heightened in-the-moment perception of our physiological and emotional responses and a growing understanding of who we are as individuals based on those responses.

Taking Action: The changes that occur in a self-coaching process take the form of a series of moments when we intervene and act--or choose not to act.

Values and Vision: Self-coaching occurs in a context defined by our personal values and our vision for ourselves. (And when someone's values or vision diverge from that of the leader or their organization, it's critical to

Accepting Ourselves: Most high-achieving knowledge workers are their own worst critics, and a key coaching role leaders can play is helping people feel a sense of self-compassion.

Photo by crabchick. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

32 People Who Have My Attention

I was talking recently with a friend who's considering where to focus his time and energy as he builds his coaching and consulting practice. He's seeking not only to support his own efforts, but also to connect with a community of like-minded people working on leadership, professional development, personal growth and related issues.

Our conversation led me to reflect on the people who command my attention in this regard, people who who consistently maintain my interest through their combination of...

1. thoughtful writing
2. in a personal voice
3. with a sense of community
4. and a well-designed web presence.

I came up with the list below of 32 people (alphabetized by first name) who fulfill these criteria, and after sharing it with my friend I thought I'd post it here to express my thanks for all they do to contribute to my own learning and development. It's not intended to be an exhaustive list--I know I'll regret leaving someone off--and there's nothing special about 32; these are just the first people who came to mind in this process, and I preferred that to randomly choosing 25 or 50 or whatever:

1. Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton)

London-based de Botton is...a working philosopher? I don't really know what to call him, but I know I've benefited from his guidance.

2. Anne Kreamer (@AnneKreamer)

NYC writer Kreamer's It's Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace deftly balances first-person experience with recent research.

3. Annie Murphy Paul (@anniemurphypaul)

Murphy Paul is amazingly productive writer based in New Haven, CT whose articles, posts and tweets have a particular focus on how we learn.

4. Art Markman (@abmarkman)

Markman is a prof of psychology and marketing at UT Austin, whose work explores thinking, decision making and motivation.

5. Bill George (@Bill_George)

George is a former Fortune 500 CEO who's carved out a second career teaching leadership at HBS. 

6. BJ Fogg (@bjfogg)

Fogg is a Stanford prof and tech industry consultant whose expertise is in "creating systems to change human behavior."

7. Brene Brown (@BreneBrown)

Brown is a prof at the University of Houston whose talk on vulnerability has been seen nearly 1 million times and still makes me cry.

8. Bret Simmons (@drbret)

Simmons is a prof at the B-school of the University of Nevada, Reno who integrates topics like personal branding into his courses on leadership and organizational behavior.

9. Dan Oestreich (@DanOestreich)

Oestreich is a coach and consultant based outside Seattle who's one of the very best writers we have on the subjects of leadership and organizational life; it was a privilege to be interviewed by him.

10. David Rock (@davidrock101)

Rock is a coach based in NYC who's studied the implications of neuroscience for leadership and coaching, resulting in such useful tools as his SCARF Model.

11. Daniel Coyle (@DanielCoyle)

Journalist Coyle writes about talent, performance and motivation, with a particular interest in endurance sports.

12. Doug Sundheim (@DougSundheim)

Sundheim is a consultant and coach in NYC and the author of the recently-published Taking Smart Risks, which encourages us to consider the costs of playing it safe.

13. Eric Pennington (@epicliving)

Pennington is a consultant and coach in Columbus, OH whose personal voice is a hallmark of his writing.

14. Eugene Eric Kim (@eekim)

Kim recently left Groupaya, the Bay Area consulting firm he co-founded, to explore new horizons.

15. Halley Bock (@HalleyBock)

Bock is CEO of the Seattle coaching and consulting firm founded by the great Susan Scott, whose Fierce Conversations taught me much.

16. Kelly McGonigal (@kellymcgonigal)

McGonigal is a psychologist and lecturer at Stanford whose work focuses on translating findings from medicine and neuroscience into strategies for personal development.

17. Maria Konnikova (@mkonnikova)

Konnikova is a writer in NYC who's pursuing a PhD in psych at Columbia.

18. Mark McGuinness (@markmcguinness)

McGuinness is a coach in London--and a poet--who specializes in working with creative professionals and who's inspired me for years.

19. Michael Bungay Stanier (@boxofcrayons)

Bungay Stanier is an inspiring Toronto-based coach, consultant and author whose focus is helping people and organizations "do great work."

20. Nilofer Merchant (@nilofer)

Merchant is a Bay Area corporate director and author who addresses a wide range of business topics with an emphasis on innovation and culture.

21. Nir Eyal (@nireyal)

Eyal is an entrepreneur (and Stanford GSB alum) who now consults to tech companies and writes about product design, the power of habit and user engagement.

22. Oliver Burkeman (@oliverburkeman)

Burkeman is a British journalist based in NYC whose recent book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking is simply brilliant.

23. Pam Fox Rollin (@PamFR)

Fox Rollin is a coach (and Stanford GSB alum--and a friend!) here in the Bay Area and the author of 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role.

24. Richard Winters (@drrwinters)

Winters is an ER doctor--and an leadership coach to other physicians--based in Fresno, CA.

25. Stephanie West Allen (@idealawg)

Denver-based West Allen is a former attorney who now consults to the legal field and writes on mediation, mindfulness, neuroscience and related issues.

26. Scott Eblin (@ScottEblin)

Eblin is a coach and consultant focused on leadership development, with a longtime practice in Washington DC and a new home base in LA.

27. Tara Sophia Mohr (@tarasophia)

Mohr is a San Francisco coach and author (and Stanford GSB alum) whose practice focuses on helping women fully achieve their aspirations.

28. Thaler Pekar (@thaler)

Pekar is a NY-based communications consultant who helps people harness the power of narrative to tell their own stories more effectively.

29. Tom Peters (@tom_peters)

Peters is a well-known management thinker (and Stanford GSB alum); what you may not know is how effectively this longtime author makes use of social media.

30. Vickie Gray (@adaptivecoach)

Gray is a coach based in Nova Scotia whose practice focuses on Agile development and whose insights are relevant in any field.

31. Wally Bock (@wallybock)

Bock is an indefatigable blogger and ghostwriter in Charlotte, NC who has plenty of good advice for fellow writers.

32. Whitney Johnson (@johnsonwhitney)

Boston-based investor and author Johnson translates her business acumen into insights on personal growth, innovation and leadership.

Photo by dpika. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Leading Is an Act of Love

I've been working with someone who's in a leadership role but isn't as motivated as he'd like to be. He's doing a perfectly fine job, but it's not meaningful, in the way we feel when a task truly inspires us. Although there's nothing tragic about this person's situation, reflecting on it I was reminded of Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. As I've noted before (under circumstances that were indeed tragic), Frankl identifies three ways in which we can discover meaning: "(1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. The first, by way of achievement or accomplishment, is quite obvious. The second and third need further elaboration."

No one's suffering here, thankfully, so at least in this context I can set aside Frankl's third option--but his discussion of the second path to meaning offers advice that I find both profound and practical:

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.  No one can become fully aware of the essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features of the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized.  Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities.  By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true...

If that's not a powerful definition of leadership, I don't know what is. (It's a damn good definition of coaching as well.) To fulfill Frankl's vision of helping others realize their fullest potential, we have to see that potential within them. And to see that full potential, we have to truly understand them--we have to "become aware of their essence." And to do that, we have to love them.

Love is a big word and a frightening one, and we often hesitate to use it in the professional realm, at least in any meaningful way. I suspect that the problem lies with our narrow definition of the term--we hear "love" and automatically think of romantic love, or familial love, and it seems embarrassing or even inappropriate to apply the term to our professional relationships. But in the best of those relationships it's love we feel--not romantic love or familial love, but love nonetheless, and as leaders our ability to summon and express that love can be a powerful force.

I've had the privilege of working with a number of good, very good and truly great leaders in my life, both in my 15-year career before becoming a coach and over the last eight years with my clients and students. The good ones are passionate, but it's not quite love. The very good ones do feel love--for their team, for the work, for life--but they can't quite bring themselves to say it out loud and fully express the feeling. The great ones feel it, and everyone around them knows it and benefits as a result.

At its core leading is an act of love. It's the ability to love those around us in a way that allows us to understand them, to see their full potential, and to enable that potential to be realized. Can we lead this way 24/7? Can we live this way every day? No--at least I certainly can't. There are plenty of days when love is the furthest thing from my mind, and it's all I can do to be civil. But I've experienced it often enough to know how effective I am when I feel it--and even more so when I'm able to convey it to those around me.

Returning to the leader noted above, having considered his struggle to find a deeper source of meaning in his work, I asked him: What form of love might you feel for your people? How might you tap into it and express it? What might you see in them as a result? And what might you do then?

Photo by David Goehring. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Babies, Bathwater and Goal-Setting

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.

Self-Coaching Session at Flixster

Yesterday I had the chance to give a talk on self-coaching to a group at Flixster, and a modified version of my slide deck is above. Thanks to the awesome Hannah Knapp and her colleagues for a great experience--I really enjoyed it.

The Layer Cake of Working Life

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.

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.

I Love Myself (Self-Coaching and Acceptance)

I love myself.

Three words that couldn't be simpler to understand and more difficult to express. An MBA student at Stanford said this in a small group in our Interpersonal Dynamics class (aka Touchy Feely) a few years ago, and hearing him say this had a profound impact on the rest of us.

He didn't say this in a self-aggrandizing or boastful way, nor was he comparing himself to anyone else. And he certainly wasn't saying that he was perfect or no longer needed to grow and change. He was merely saying, in the most straightforward way possible, that he deeply appreciated his good qualities, he forgave himself for his shortcomings, and even while he aspired to improve he also fundamentally accepted himself.

The ability to accept ourselves, to feel compassion for ourselves, to love ourselves is ultimately one of the most important skills to cultivate in self-coaching. The decision to seek coaching, whether from a personal coach or in a structured self-coaching process, grows out of a desire for change. We want something to be different, and while we may initially be focused on some external aspect of our lives, we typically come to realize that meaningful change will require us to change as well.

An inability to accept the need to change ourselves severely limits our ability to change our experience in the world. And yet at the same time, an inability to accept and love ourselves--right now, as we are, with all our flaws and foibles intact--condemns us to an endless cycle of dissatisfaction. The most profound coaching imaginable can't overcome this obstacle; we need to validate ourselves.

But the paradox is that those of us who are most open to change and theoretically capable of self-coaching may eventually struggle with the process because we find it so difficult to love and accept ourselves. We're quick to find fault with ourselves, eager to identify opportunities for growth, and ready to change--but we can't stop, and the process goes on and on. We're never done.

By emphasizing the need to validate ourselves, I'm not suggesting that the self is the only source of validation. Any number of external factors contribute to this desired outcome, from healthy relationships to sufficient social status and material rewards, and in their absence the work of accepting ourselves will be more difficult.

But it's important to recognize that no amount of external validation will ever be enough until we're able to accept and love ourselves. No amount of love and care from others, recognition or status, accomplishments or money will ever suffice on their own. They may serve as useful building blocks in the process, but self-acceptance is the mortar that binds them all together and holds the others in place when one of them is diminished or lost.

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This is the last of 8 recent posts outlining a framework for a structured self-coaching process. I'm currently writing more comprehensive chapters on each topic, which will include additional information on self-coaching exercises and activities, the role that people in our lives can play in our self-coaching efforts, and the implications of recent neuroscience research for self-coaching.

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 Gideon Tsang. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons