Work that's truly rewarding requires that we that we commit ourselves fully to the endeavor. We have "skin in the game," you might say, like an investor who's putting his own capital on the line. In this sense, coaching my clients and students isn't just (or even) a job, it's a highly personal experience in which I take real risks in the service of meaningful gains. And I suspect the same is true for you and your work, in one way or another.
But while having skin in the game allows us to do our best work, it also exposes us to risk. When we succeed it's all the more gratifying, and when we struggle, it's all the more disheartening. And I've had some challenges over the past week that have led me to reflect both on how I manage my response in the moment and on how I recover from setbacks over time. While I've written before about learning from mistakes and continue to apply those lessons, I've also found myself relying on the following simple guidelines:
1) Own Up To It
I'm not afraid of making mistakes; I've learned that perfection is damning evidence that I'm playing it safe, aiming too low and doing a disservice to my clients and students. But I still feel the sting of embarrassment and shame when I do make a mistake, and my first impulse in response to those emotions is to reject them and distract attention from their source. And yet I've also learned that I need to resist that impulse, not only to walk my talk as a coach, but also simply to grow as a person.
I've seen and experienced this dynamic over and over again: When we screw up as leaders (or in any differentiated authority role), the most important step we can take is to acknowledge reality, to admit our mistake, to own up to it. No matter what else we want to say, no matter what other factors influenced our actions, everything starts with that acknowledgment--and no real progress will be made until it occurs.
This week I became impatient during a group exercise and forcefully interrupted a student, who felt angry and hurt as a result. Thankfully, she felt enough trust in me to express those emotions, and I was able to hear her and express my embarrassment, which allowed her to hear why I had become impatient in the first place. It wasn't my most skillful moment as a coach, but it was a successful repair that allowed the two of us to move forward.
2) Ask For What You Need
I'm used to being a source of support and guidance for other people--it's probably the fundamental quality that led me into coaching. But while that role is deeply fulfilling to me, it's also a potential trap. Getting stuck in a support role can make it hard to understand internally and to communicate to others just what I need when I'm struggling myself. But this makes it all the more important to slow down, look inside, and articulate what I need.
I know I'm no exception in this regard. The best leaders and mentors I've known are people who put others' needs before their own, who make sure their troops are fed before they sit down to eat. But the very best of them are also able to step out of that pattern and to ask for help. I'm not particuarly good at this, but I'm learning.
Tonight Amy asked me if there was anything she could do to help me cope with the dark mood that had descended upon me, and initially my mind was blank. "No," I said, "I can't think of anything." But I kept at it and realized that I didn't want her to do anything--I didn't want encouragement or problem-solving. I just wanted empathy--I just wanted her to say, "I'm sorry; that sounds really shitty." I don't need to hear that often, or for long--but when I need it, I really need it, and it's really helpful.
3) Take Care of Yourself
This is deceptively easy in principle, and damn hard in practice--by definition people with skin in the game thrive on challenges, and when things get tough we get excited. That attitude helps me overcome obstacles, but it also leads me down some blind alleys. The paradox with coaching--and, I believe, with any meaningful work that's intellectually and emotionally challenging--is that it doesn't necessarily yield to sheer effort. When I'm struggling as a professional I can't just muscle through it, and sometimes I need to do just the opposite--ease up, lower my stress levels, take care of myself.
I've learned from people like Bill George, who's "meditated regularly for thirty years, not as a religious or spiritual practice, but as a personal discipline to relieve stress." I've also learned from hard experience that when I let work push exercise off the my daily schedule--once a regular response in times of struggle--I condemn myself to a cycle of overstress and underperformance. I'm also (finally) listening to recent research on the importance of sleep, not only for effective performance but also for long-term health.
The past few days I've been unusually tired, and rather than push myself beyond that limit, I've listened to my body and have gone for walks rather than hitting the gym, or have simply meditated instead. I've also prioritized sleep over work--like leaving this post undone last night and coming back to it this morning. Finally, I have allowed work to push regular sessions with my own coach off the calendar, a situation that'll be rectified this week.
I'm only half-joking--I deeply believe in the power of mindset to shape our reality and, subsequently, our performance. Having skin in the game means that we're subject to high highs and low lows, and it's important to keep those experiences in perspective. In part that ability is a function of life experience--I first read this quote from David Bradford 6 years ago, and it's stuck with me:
If you live long enough, you realize that you can fall off the horse and get back on again... Failure is inevitable, and what's important is how you handle it, not how you avoid it.
But "life experience" is in a way just shorthand for mindset--having failed, and struggled, and simply made mistakes for many years now, I'm no longer up-ended when this occurs. I may be responsible for these events, and I expect to hold myself accountable for them, but I don't view them as intrinsic character flaws.
This isn't to say I'm not subject to grey moods and feelings of frustration or even despair, and when those feelings strike I think it's healthy to acknowledge them. But where I once might have gotten stuck in those moods for longer than was useful, I now find it possible to feel them and let them go, a process that's supported by all the steps mentioned above and also by writing posts like this.
Photo by gingerpig2000. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
The concept of boundaries comes up regularly in my work with clients and students, and in my own life as well. A client resents feeling obligated to respond to emails after a certain hour in the evening. A student wants to insure that family activities don't overwhelm her plans for graduation. And I often need to decompress quietly for 20 minutes after getting home before engaging in conversation. At the heart of all of these issues is a boundary, in one form or another.
As I've written before, my former colleague Michael Gilbert has had a big influence on how I view the concept of boundaries, and here's a passage from his 2008 post Good Fences that I refer to often:
In regard to this exploration of "work-life balance," what's clear in our discussion is that we have been using the word "balance" when what we really seem to mean is "boundaries." Boundaries keep things in their place. Balance suggests the same amount of two things on either side of a scale. Boundaries keep one of those things from oozing past the edge of its platter and taking over the other side...
Boundaries and integration go together. Maybe it's just the biologist in me, but it seems that good boundaries are what make integration work. Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through and keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives. Bad boundaries lead to either being overwhelmed or withdrawal. Good boundaries lead to wholeness and synergy.
But it's essential to realize that boundaries don't simply spring into existence fully formed. They emerge, they evolve, they erode--they're dynamic features of our lives that we build up and maintain piece by piece, through countless small steps and interactions. In my work with clients and students over the years and in my own efforts to create boundaries that support fulfillment and effectiveness, I've come to see 4 key steps in this process:
1) Identify
The very first step is identifying the need for a boundary (or a better boundary) in the first place, and this can be a lot harder than it sounds. The very act of identifying the need for a boundary can raise all sorts of anxieties, self-judgments and other complex feelings: What does it say about me that I want a boundary here? What will it cost me? How will it affect the other people involved? But as difficult as this step might be, nothing else can happen until we take it.
2) Accept
Once we've identified the need for a boundary at a conceptual level, we have to truly accept it at a deeper emotional level. We have to acknowledge and deal with all those feelings that are generated by the idea of the boundary; we have to answer the questions above (and any others that arise along similar lines) and come to terms with our responses. More often than not, this involves challenging the mental models and assumptions that cause us to question or resist our desire for a boundary.
3) Establish
Having fully accepted the boundary, we need to take action and establish it effectively by communicating it to others in a manner that will A) maximize the likelihood of winning their support and B) overcome resistance when that support isn't forthcoming. This step probably feels the riskiest--it's certainly the point at which we can derail the process both by holding back and by coming on too strong. Here's where good communication skills are critical (and I've also found Susan Scott's "Mineral Rights" framework extremely helpful.)
4) Maintain
Finally, note that all boundaries are subject to erosion over time and must be actively maintained. We don't establish them once; we re-establish them over and over, in ways that adjust to our changing needs and circumstances. This may involve having similar conversations with multiple people--or it may involve having the same conversation several times with one person to insure that it truly sinks in and sticks. The key is recognizing that boundaries aren't static features of a landscape, but dynamic aspects of our relationships, our personal lives and our organizations.
Photo by Ryan McDonald. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
Much of my work as a coach involves helping people wrestle with an important decision. Some of these decisions feel particularly big because they involve selecting one option to the exclusion of all others when the cost of being "wrong" can be substantial: If I'm at a crossroads in my career, which path should I follow? If I'm considering job offers, which one should I accept? If I'm being asked to relocate, should I move to a new city or stay put?
And while I've written before on the conditions that support good decision-making and firmly believe that we can improve the quality of our decisions by following those guidelines, I'm also reminded of a comment made by Scott McNealy--a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its CEO for 22 years--during a lecture I attended while I was in business school at Stanford: He was asked how he made decisions and responded by saying (I'm paraphrasing, but his point was crystal clear):
It's important to make good decisions. But I spend much less time and energy worrying about "making the right decision" and much more time and energy insuring that any decision I make turns out right.
That comment has stuck with me for over a decade and continues to influence me today. Before we make any decision--particularly one that will be difficult to undo--we're understandably anxious and focused on identifying the "best" option because of the risk of being "wrong." But a by-product of that mindset is that we overemphasize the importance of the moment of choice itself and lose sight of the importance of everything that follows. Merely selecting the "best" option doesn't guarantee that things will turn out well in the long run, just as making a sub-optimal choice doesn't doom us to failure or unhappiness. It's what happens next (and in the days, months and years that follow) that ultimately determines whether a given decision was "right."
Another aspect of this dynamic is that our focus on making the "right" decision can easily lead to paralysis, because the options we're choosing among are so difficult to rank in the first place. How can we possibly determine in advance what career path will be "best," or what job offer we should accept, or whether we should move across the country or stay put? Obviously, we can't--there are far too many variables and little or no data to work with. But the more we yearn for an objective algorithm to rank our options and make the decision for us, the more we distance ourselves from the subjective factors--our intuition, our emotions, our gut--that will ultimately pull us in one direction or another. And so we get stuck, waiting for a sign--something--to point the way.
I believe the path to getting unstuck when faced with a daunting, possibly paralyzing decision is embedded in McNealy's comment, and it involves a fundamental re-orientation of our mindset: Focusing on the choice minimizes the effort that will inevitably be required to make any option succeed and diminishes our sense of agency and ownership. In contrast, focusing on the effort that will be required not only helps us see the means by which any choice might succeed, it also restores our sense of agency and reminds us that while randomness plays a role in every outcome, our locus of control resides in our day-to-day activities more than in our one-time decisions.
So while I certainly support using any available data to rank our options in some rough sense, ultimately we're best served by avoiding paralysis-by-analysis and moving foward by 1) paying close attention to the feelings and emotions that accompany the decision we're facing, 2) assessing how motivated we are to work toward the success of any given option, and 3) recognizing that no matter what option we choose, our efforts to support its success will be more important than the initial guesswork that led to our choice.
Addendum: My thinking on this topic has been heavily influence by GSB professor Baba Shiv, an expert in the neuroscience of decision-making:
A good decision is one in which the decision maker is happy with the decision and will stay committed to the decision, Shiv says. [My emphasis] And that’s where emotions come in: They’re mental shortcuts that help us resolve trade-off conflicts and...happily commit to a decision. "When you feel a trade-off conflict, it just behooves you to focus on your gut."
And furthermore:Rick Lane's comment prompted some further thinking on the process of getting "unstuck," which I'll quote from my response to him: I'm all too aware that when we're deeply stuck and paralyzed by a decision, we need something more than a conceptual understanding of decision-making to get us moving again. I return to the power of emotion, and I think that the combined hope for a better future and the pain of our present "stuckness" must overcome the combined fear that we'll make the wrong choice and the pain that often accompanies tough choices, particularly when a choice will hurt or disappoint someone.
Photo by Conor Ogle. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
I'm doing a workshop on High-Performance Communication with the executive committee of the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab, a great organization that supports entrepreneurs and startups. To help the committee members prepare for our session, I've compiled the following series of extracts from my writing over the past few years. Many thanks to the social psychologists, neuroscientists, business thinkers and fellow coaches cited below whose work has informed my own. And thanks to VLAB--I'm looking forward to working with you!
Most of my clients and students are seeking to be more effective and fulfilled as professionals, and a resource to which I've referred people for years is Peter Drucker's Managing Oneself, primarily because of his perspective on excellence:
One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence. And yet most people--especially most teachers and most organizations--concentrate on making incompetent performers into mediocre ones. Energy, resources, and time should go instead into making a competent person into a star performer.
So we need to ask ourselves: What are my strengths? Where can I improve from first-rate performance to excellence? Where should I be focusing my energy, resources and time? Just as important, where am I wasting effort trying to improve from incompetence to mediocrity?
Every group serves as an implicit learning laboratory in which we come to come to understand how our interactions with others support (or undermine) our efforts to achieve our goals.But some groups are more effective than others at helping the members learn, increase their awareness and adapt their behavior as needed, and the group’s levels of safety, trust and intimacy are key factors in determining its effectiveness in this regard.
Every group's experience is rooted in a set of initial conditions: How and why were we assembled? What will our first meeting be like? What will we discuss there? These initial conditions form the foundation for all subsequent layers of the group dynamic.
The foundational qualities that define a group are the levels of safety, trust and intimacy: Safety = A belief that we won't get hurt. Trust = We mean what we say and we say what we mean. Intimacy = A willingness to make the private public.
When safety, trust and intimacy are established, they support the actions that lead to greater success as a group: experimentation, risk-taking and a willingness to be vulnerable.
When we feel able to experiment, take risks and make ourselves vulnerable, our ability to learn, to increase our self-awareness (and our awareness of others) and to change our behavior in order to achieve our goals more effectively increases dramatically.
The process of building one layer upon another occurs in a unique context—so in addition to asking whether learning and change are taking place, we also need to assess how the group's context supports (or inhibits) the development of the underlying layers in the group experience.
So we need to ask...
How will the group's initial conditions support or inhibit the establishment of safety, trust and intimacy?
At each step of the group's subsequent development, are we increasing or decreasing the levels of these qualities?
What factors in the group experience support the development of these qualities? And what factors inhibit these qualities?
A final point regarding feedback: While excessive delicacy and indirectness inhibit learning, the degree of candor in a group must be calibrated to the group’s current levels of safety, trust and intimacy. Feedback attuned to these qualities can increase their presence in the group by stretching the group’s capacity for direct discussion. But feedback that fails to take these qualities into account can actually lead to less safety, trust and intimacy than before and undermine the group’s ability to learn and change.
A fundamental premise of mine is that organizational success starts with leaders who feel a personal sense of happiness and fulfillment. Not all successful organizations are led by happy people, and not all unsuccessful organizations are led by unhappy people (although I suspect the correlation is higher in the latter case), but I believe that, all else being equal, happy people make better leaders, and happy leaders build better organizations. Research shows that we have a substantial degree of control over our levels of happiness and fulfillment, and we exercise that control most effectively through small-scale, consistent intentional activities, not through large-scale changes in our life circumstances.
Sonja Lyubomirsky is a social psychologist whose research on happiness resulted in this graph. The image conveys three of the most important (and surprising) findings from recent work in this field:
1) Half of our happiness is attributable to a "genetic set point" inherited from our parents and similar to other genetically influenced predispositions, such as weight. So those of us with low happiness set points will have to work harder to achieve and maintain happiness, while those of us with high set points will find it easier to be happy under similar conditions.
2) A surprisingly small amount of our happiness—just 10 percent—is determined by our life circumstances. Lyubomirsky writes:
[O]nly about 10 percent of the variance in our happiness levels is explained by differences in life circumstances or situations--that is, whether we are rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, beautiful or plain, married or divorced, etc. If with a magic wand we could put [a group of people] into the same set of circumstances (same house, same spouse, same place of birth, same face, same aches and pains), the differences in their happiness levels would be reduced by a measly 10 percent... An impressive body of research now shows that trying to be happy by changing our life situations ultimately will not work.
3) Finally, the remaining 40 percent of our happiness is determined by our behavior--intentional activities that we might call "happiness strategies." This is the core of Lyubomirsky's research: We can't alter our genetic set points, and changes in life circumstances don't have a lasting impact on our happiness, but we can increase and sustain our happiness through intentional activities. Lyubomirsky describes twelve "evidence-based happiness-increasing strategies whose practice is supported by scientific research," which include several that involve interpersonal communication:
Expressing Gratitude: Counting your blessings for what you have (either to a close other or privately, through contemplation or a journal) or conveying your gratitude and appreciation to one or more individuals whom you've never properly thanked.
Practicing Acts of Kindness: Doing good things for others, whether friends or strangers, either directly or anonymously, either spontaneously or planned.
Nurturing Social Relationships: Picking a relationship in need of strengthening and investing time and energy in healing, cultivating, affirming and enjoying it.
Learning to Forgive: Keeping a journal or writing a letter in which you work on letting go of anger and resentment toward one or more individuals who have hurt or wronged you.
David Rock is an executive coach who for many years has been exploring the field of neuroscience and its implications for management, coaching, and organizational life, and his SCARF Model provides a framework for understanding how our brains respond to perceived threats and rewards. Rock writes:
[T]wo themes are emerging from social neuroscience. Firstly, that much of our motivation driving social behavior is governed by an overarching organizing principle of minimizing threat and maximizing reward (Gordon, 2000). Secondly, that several domains of social experience draw upon the same brain networks to maximize reward and minimize threat as the brain networks used for primary survival needs (Lieberman and Eisenberger, 2008). In other words, social needs are treated in much the same way in the brain as the need for food and water...
The SCARF model involves five domains of human social experience: Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness.
Status is about relative importance to others. Certainty concerns being able to predict the future. Autonomy provides a sense of control over events. Relatedness is a sense of safety with others, of friend rather than foe. And fairness is a perception of fair exchanges between people.
These five domains activate either the 'primary reward' or 'primary threat' circuitry (and associated networks) of the brain. For example, a perceived threat to one's status activates similar brain networks to a threat to one's life. In the same way, a perceived increase in fairness activates the same reward circuitry as receiving a monetary reward.
As this graphic illustrates, threat responses are usually much more powerful than reward responses, and thus we move away from threats more quickly and more vigorously than we move toward rewards. So it's not enough to give equal emphasis to rewards in our leadership, management and communication practices--our brains' disproportionate response to perceived social threats implies that we need to put a much greater weight on efforts intended to generate a reward response, and take great pains to avoid triggering a threat response.
How do you initiate a difficult conversation? Going in with guns blazing rarely results in a successful outcome. Social psychologist John Gottman coined the term "soft startup" to describe the process of initiating a tough discussion gently and compassionately:
1) Start with something positive that conveys your intent to reach a successful resolution--but note that this doesn't mean inventing something nice to say. If you're struggling for words, simply saying that you want to have this conversation because you care about the other person and your shared goals can be helpful.
2) Use statements beginning with "I" that express your perspective and feelings, rather than statements beginning with "you" that focus on the other person. (And don't assume that your perspective is the only possible truth.)
3) Don't make assumptions about the other person's perspective. They may not even be aware that there's a problem, or it may not be their fault--and they may be happy to help solve it if they're approached in the right way.
4) Be direct. State your request clearly, firmly and politely--while being sure to also acknowledge any concessions that are granted.
This is just the beginning of the process, of course, and you'll need a number of additional skills in your communication repertoire to succeed. But Gottman's research shows that a soft startup is a crucial step in resolving disagreements successfully.
We know that talking about our feelings--a process neuroscientists call affect labeling--has a powerful impact on our ability to manage difficult emotions and, in turn, on our relationships...but why? What happens when we do?
Stephanie West Allen has written about "the neuroscience research showing that labeling your feelings can quiet your brain and increase impulse control," most notably a groundbreaking article by Matthew Lieberman, Naomi Eisenberger et al, Putting Feelings into Words (PDF):
Putting feelings into words has long been thought to be one of the best ways to manage negative emotional experiences. Talk therapies have been formally practiced for more than a century and, although varying in structure and content, are commonly based on the assumption that talking about one's feelings and problems is an effective method for minimizing the impact of negative emotional events on current experience...
Recent neuroimaging research has begun to offer insight into a possible neurocognitive mechanism by which putting feelings into words may alleviate negative emotional responses... [T]hese results suggest that putting feelings into words may activate [brain regions associated with emotional processing], which in turn may dampen the response of the amygdala [a brain region associated with negative emotion], thus helping to alleviate emotional distress...
In summary, this study provides the first unambiguous evidence that affect labeling...produces diminished responses to negative emotional images in the amygdala and other limbic regions...
These findings begin to shed light on how putting negative feelings into words can help regulate negative experience, a process that may ultimately contribute to better mental and physical health.
What kinds of questions do you usually ask? We're often drawn to yes/no questions--they're simple and direct. But when simplicity and directness aren't our only goals, yes/no questions can be problematic. They surface a minimum of new information because they don't invite the other person into a dialogue and they constrain the boundaries of the conversation.
When we do move beyond yes/no questions, we tend ask why? questions, such as "Why did you do that?" or "Why did you do it that way?" But why? questions can be heard as "What the hell were you thinking?" and provoke defensiveness.
Scott Ginsberg has developed a list of 62 useful questions, along with a one-line explanation of why they work, and and here are the 20 I find most powerful:
1) How are you creating…? Proves that someone has a choice.
2) How could you have…? Focused on past performance improvement.
3) How do you feel…? Feelings are good.
4) How do you plan to…? Future oriented, process oriented, action oriented.
5) How do you want…? Visualizes ideal conditions.
6) How does this relate to…? Keeps someone on point, uncovers connections between things.
7) How else could this be…? Encourages open, option-oriented and leverage-based thinking.
8) How might you…? All about potential and possibility.
9) How much time…? Identifies patterns of energy investment.
10) How often do you…? Gets an idea of someone’s frequency.
11) How well do you…? Uncovers abilities.
12) How will you know when/if…? Predicts outcomes of ideal situations.
13) If you could change…? Visualizes improvement.
14) If you stopped…? Cause-effect question.
15) Is anybody going to…? Deciding if something even matters.
16) What are you doing that…? Assesses present actions.
17) What are you willing to…? Explores limits.
18) What can you do right now…? Focuses on immediate action being taken.
19) What did you learn…? Because people don’t care what you know; only what you learned.
20) What else can you…? Because there’s always options.
Notice the structure of these questions. They're almost all how? or what? questions, which encourage the other person to take a moment and look inside before answering. They can certainly be challenging--"What can you do right now?" is hardly a softball--but they're also non-judgmental, which minimizes any defensiveness. Just as important, they're not leading--they don't suggest that there's a "right" answer--which encourages the other person to answer thoughtfully and honestly, rather than framing an answer to please you.
Positive feedback frequently fails to have the desired impact and can even make many of us feel uncomfortable. But isn't praise supposed to make us feel good? What's going on, and what can we do about it?
When we have bad news to deliver, we often try to soften the blow by beginning and ending with something positive, a practice that I distinguish from the "soft startup" principle discussed above. Soft startups begin with a positive statement that conveys our intent to reach a successful resolution and helps avoid triggering a threat response in the other person. In contrast, "sandwiching" critical feedback between superficial praise eventually causes people to hear anything positive as a hollow preamble to the real message. Rather than feeling genuinely appreciated, they're waiting for the other shoe to drop. So while I do advise beginning difficult conversations with a soft startup, those comments must be authentic and relevant to the issue at hand.
Like any currency, positive feedback can become devalued or can be perceived as counterfeit. Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes have noted that praise can be a "'dissatisfier.' Like a salary, it is less likely to motivate when it's given out than demotivate when it's expected but withheld." So the solution isn't to withhold praise--when it's expected (or even just hoped for), it's absence can be a powerful corrosive. Rather, we need to insure that the positive feedback we do deliver is consistently perceived as meaningful, authentic and heartfelt.
Finally, we need to take some responsibility as feedback recipients. We often resist the validation that comes with positive feedback precisely because we want it so badly. The depth of that desire makes us incredibly vulnerable--so much so that we're willing to avoid any validation in order to insure that we're never embarrassed by our hunger for it or--even worse--by falling prey to inauthentic validation from manipulators or phonies. When we say we want candid feedback, we typically expect that it's going to be hard to hear criticism--and it can be--but it can be even harder to hear (and truly acknowledge) real praise. If we blindly react to praise with (in Peter Vajda's words) "skepticism, dis-belief, arm's-length appreciation,and/or embarrassment," that's going to make the giver feel awkward, if not resentful, and it's going to keep us from developing a stronger relationship. As always in interpersonal communication, it's a two-way street.
Phil Stutz is a psychiatrist based in Hollywood who has mentored and collaborated with therapist Barry Michels, and in a recent interview Stutz discussed the pair's innovative approach to helping their clients overcome obstacles by embracing risk:
The risk you take has a feedback effect on the unconscious. The unconscious will give you ideas and it wants you to act on them. The more courage you have when you act, the more ideas it will give you.
In my own experience, when I've quelled my fears and pushed myself to take meaningful risks, the reward has been a renewed sense of passion, a clearer sense of purpose, and a deeper connection with life. This concept evokes for me the feeling of standing at a cliff's edge, anticipating the thrill to come if I take the leap, but held back by fear--of a crash landing, of unanticipated difficulties, of the shame that would accompany failure. But Stutz's framing encourages me to see that my fear--and my courage--can be self-reinforcing through their influence on my unconscious, and that taking a bold leap can be a powerful way of breaking fear's grip and unleashing my courage.
I recently bought these smiley-face stickers, which are produced by a company called Teacher Created Resources, and this message on the back of the package caught my attention:
Imagine the great things you can do with these fantastic stickers!
Reward Success!
Encourage Progress!
Notice Accomplishment!
Restore Confidence!
Compliment Effort!
Decorate Completion!
Recognize Good Conduct!
Observe Exellence!
Honor Attempt!
Comfort Struggle!
While it's slightly exhausting to read--so many! exclamation points!--I also find it inspiring. I'm reminded of the many wonderful teachers I've had, and I recall with gratitude the many ways in which they expressed not only their commitment to my learning but also their investment in me as a person. I hope I have a similar impact on my own clients and students, and while I trust in my abilities as a coach, I'm also prompted to wonder how I could do an even better job. It's important to me to go the extra mile, just like a teacher who might pay for these stickers out of their own pocket to augment their limited classroom supplies.
Finally, I see a clear parallel between the impact of a smiley face sticker on a child and the many small ways in which we can convey our support and caring to each other as adults. Research shows that activities such as expressing gratitude or practicing acts of kindness have a surprisingly large impact on our happiness. This research reinforces what I see in my work as a coach every day--the little things really do matter, and it's important to look for and step into opportunities to encourage progress, restore confidence, comfort struggle.
A friend sent me a link to the 2006 short film Validation, a 16-minute parable that wraps a conventional boy-meets-girl story around a novel idea: A parking lot attendant re-interprets his job description and rather than just stamp customers' tickets he truly validates them with heartfelt positive feedback. People respond so avidly that the line for validation stretches out of the parking lot. The attendant embarks on a global effort to spread the love, and widespread happiness ensues...except in his own life, because he can't win over the (improbably beautiful) driver's license photographer at the local DMV. He tries, fails, eventually succeeds. The End.
"Validation" did make me smile, as expected, and it also made me think. Validation is central to my work as a coach, and what the film gets right is how hungry we all are for it. But what the film gets wrong is that, despite this hunger, validation makes most of us feel very uncomfortable. We don't stand in line to get it--we run away from it. These two responses are interrelated, of course: We resist validation so much precisely because we want it so badly. The depth of that desire makes us incredibly vulnerable--so much so that we're willing to avoid any validation in order to insure that we're never embarrassed by our hunger for it or--even worse--by falling prey to inauthentic validation from manipulators or phonies. When we say we want candid feedback, we typically expect that it's going to be hard to hear criticism--and it can be--but it can be even harder to hear (and truly acknowledge) real praise.
I belong to a group of 12 people that meets for an evening once each month. We're all current or former facilitators in Stanford's Interpersonal Dynamics class (aka "Touchy Feely"), and most of us are professionally involved in helping people grow and develop in one way or another. We began last month's session with an exercise that involved one person volunteering, and then the rest of the group speaking up and sharing affirmative words or phrases that came to mind as we reflected on that person. In the abstract it sounds so simple and easy as to be meaningless--but in person it was surprisingly difficult.
I found the idea stimulating, and I volunteered to go second. And it was rewarding, at first. People said things like "direct," "genuine," "savvy," "loving," and "loyal," and that felt great to hear. But I soon grew so uncomfortable my palms began to sweat, and I actually felt embarrassed. Bear in mind that I was sitting comfortably with a handful of people I know well and trust implicitly. I honestly appreciated everything they said, and the whole process probably took less than 2 minutes. But even in those circumstances, I almost couldn't bear to be validated; it's no wonder that we usually find the experience practically traumatic.
I don't have a pat answer to this dilemma--it's been nearly 5 years since I first wrote about The Problem with Positive Feedback, and it's still an issue I wrestle with, both personally and in my work with clients and students. But I have learned that our refusal to accept validation, like all resistance, should invite our curiosity, not our collusion.
It's also noteworthy to me that had I asked the group to stop when I began to feel uncomfortable, I would have missed out on the most meaningful piece of feedback I got: One of the very last things someone said to describe me was "walks the talk." I can't think of any higher praise than that, and I feel a little surge of pride just remembering it. I also feel myself pulling back from sharing it here, as though I were boasting--but I'm not going to collude with that feeling. I do try to walk my talk, and while I certainly don't always succeed, it means a lot to know that I succeed often enough that people take notice.
Postscript: My friend and colleague Inbal Demri-Shaham, who led the exercise described above, was thoughtful enough to write down the list of words and phrases the group shared with each person. I brought my list home and put it up on the fridge, like a kid's report card. And, like a kid, I felt both proud and sheepish showing it to my wife the next morning. She enjoyed reading it, until she came to "savvy," which she mis-read as "sexy." "Sexy? What the hell???"
Writer and comedian Seth MacFarlane--the creator of the animated series Family Guy--was recently interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air. Here's the very last question they discussed:
Terry Gross: One more question, and I know you've been asked this a lot, but, on September 11th you were supposed to be on that plane that was supposed to fly from Boston to L.A. but instead was hijacked and flown into the north tower of the World Trade Center, and you were late, your travel agent gave you the wrong time, so you missed being on that catastrophic flight. Do you ever think of the rest of your life as being this kind of gift, because you, you just, it could have all ended for you that day?
Seth MacFarlane: One of my favorite quotes by Carl Sagan is that we are as a species, and as a culture, we are significance junkies. We love attaching significance to everything, even when there really is no significance and something is just a coincidence, and this is a perfect example to me of something, you know, really, in all honesty, not to sound cold, but, you know, I don't think of it that way. I, I think of it as, you know, I'm living the same way in 2011 as I was in 1999, and the reason for that is that, you know, I had missed a lot of flights for being late, I'm a perpetually late person, you know, every flight that takes off, you gotta figure somebody's missing the flight or somebody's late, and on top of that, you know, who knows how many times a day we have similar close calls as the one that I had, you know? I mean this morning, crossing the street, if I had crossed five minutes later I would have been hit by a car. I, I, who knows? So, in my case, you know, obviously the day itself was a tragedy and a disaster, but if we're just talking about my case, um, it doesn't strike me as something that I am attaching an unbelievable amount of significance to because of those reasons, because I, I've missed a bunch of flights.
In 1997 Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan co-authored The Demon-Haunted World, a "passionate plea for scientific literacy," according to Publishers Weekly, and one of the book's last chapters, titled "Significance Junkies," addresses the many ways in which we misinterpret statistics and willfully substitute magical thinking for clear-headed understanding. One example they cite is the common attribution of "hot" and "cold" streaks and other aspects of athletic performance to quasi-mystical sources:
We seek meaning, even in random numbers. We're significance junkies... So what? What's the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses. In basketball, in sports, no harm. But as a habitual way of thinking, it gets us into trouble in some of the other games we play. [p 349]
Sagan's use of the term "junkies" is apt; we crave significance just as any addict craves their drug of choice. And when it's not readily available, we invent it--we imagine significance all around us. This is harmless entertainment when we're talking about certain topics--but as Sagan and Druyan suggest, it can also pose a real problem.
Why am I talking about this on a site focused on executive coaching and change management? Because I think one of the areas where our "significance addiction" does pose a real problem is in our working relationships, particularly when we're in a leadership role.
Our craving for significance leads us to see meaning in randomness, to hear signals instead of noise. We mistakenly believe it's all about US--that people are thinking about US, noticing US, responding to US--when, from their perspective it's really all about THEM--and they're thinking about something else, noticing someone else, and responding to a whole host of factors, ranging from what they ate for breakfast to the state of their retirement portfolio.
We matter less than we think we do, and the universe is more random than we want it to be--and those can be painful truths to accept. (Sagan and Druyan open their "Significance Junkies" chapter with an epigram from mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré: "We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.")
We crave significance and invent meaning not because we're stupid, but because we're brilliant; it hurts like hell to admit our insignificance, and we find consolation in endlessly inventive delusions of relevance. But it's really not all about us, and once we realize that we can enter into a different kind of conversation with the people around us. Instead of simply assuming that our actions are the basis for their reactions, we can get curious about what they really are thinking about and noticing and responding to. It may be humbling, but we'll undoubtedly learn a lot in the process.
I'm all too aware of a paradox at the heart of this post: While it's never entirely about us, sometimes, in part, it truly is about us, particularly when we're in a leadership role, and something we said or did innocuously has had a significant and unintended impact on someone else. I'm certainly not suggesting we ignore that dynamic--increasing awareness of our impact on others is at the heart of my work as a coach. But I would draw a distinction between improving our ability to discern when we've had an impact on others on the basis of observed behavior, and letting go of the assumptions and imaginary scenarios that spring from our craving for significance.
Photo by Ella's Dad. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
In the event of an emergency, secure your own air mask first before helping others.
This applies on the ground as well, and the greater our desire to be of service, the more important it is to take care of ourselves in order to be able help others most effectively.
It's a simple principle to grasp, but the challenge is knowing just what this looks like in practice, both over time and at any given moment.
So what's your equivalent of an air mask? What activities and practices are essential to your health, well-being and effectiveness? What steps are you taking to insure that they get on your calendar and stay there? And how do you create and maintain boundaries that insulate these activities from the demands made on your time by other pressing tasks? (A job made harder by the fact that these activities are usually important but not urgent.)
For example, I've learned that daily physical activity helps me reduce stress, clear my head, and stay mentally sharp. When I'm active on a regular basis I'm a much better coach and a much happier person, and the two are related. I use Don't Break the Chain to track how often I'm active, and here's what my exercise calendar looks from July 1st through October 14th:
That's about 65% over a 100-day period--not bad. But that long blank stretch from September 21st through October 9th jumps out at me--what happened? Initially I was just knocked out of my routine for a few days--no big deal. But that carried over into the beginning of Fall Quarter at Stanford, which was a particularly busy time for me this year. And then I caught a cold that was going around campus--always a sure sign that I'm working too hard and not taking care of myself.
While I believe I've done some good work with my students and clients over the last four weeks, I've also done some work that could have been better--and some of it was more stressful and less enjoyable than usual. Knowing what I need to do to take care of myself and tracking my efforts on that front via Don't Break the Chain ultimately helped me get back on track, but I still needed to make some difficult in-the-moment decisions to prioritize my personal needs over other responsibilities.
And it's at those moments that I find the air mask principle useful. There's always more work to do, there are always people I'd like to support in some way, and I can always find a reason to put others' needs ahead of my own. But if I do that indefinitely, I'll burn out--or pass out. No air mask, no oxygen. Bearing in mind that I can't help others effectively unless I'm taking care of myself helps me choose to put my needs first when necessary without feeling that I'm letting others down or failing to honor my commitments.
In my work at Stanford my colleagues and I often demonstrate various coaching skills by coaching each other in short (10-20 minute) sessions in front of a class of students. We determine ahead of time who'll be coaching and who'll be getting coached, but nothing else is pre-prepared or scripted. It's all live--the "coachee" comes in with a real issue, and the coach does whatever they think will be useful for the coachee.
Last week I was coached in front of our new Leadership Fellows by my (brilliant) colleague Yifat Sharabi-Levine, and even though I expected something valuable to come from the experience, I was surprised by how provocative it turned out to be.
First, some background: Over the past few years I've become increasingly interested in the implications of neuroscience research for the practice of coaching and interpersonal effectiveness more generally. This summer I lined up a series of books on neuroscience and cognitive psychology that I planned to read, reflect upon and write about. I started with William James' Psychology: Briefer Course to provide a historical foundation and then jumped ahead 100 years to Antonio Damasio's Descartes' Error. So far, so good.
But then I hit Joseph LeDoux's The Emotional Brain, and the intense intellectual stimulation I experienced as a result was a double-edged sword. I took pages and pages (and pages) of notes, but ultimately stalled while trying to distill what I learned into a post I could publish here. (I'd come dangerously close to the same fate while writing my post on Damasio's book--and I finished it only by giving up on trying to edit it down to a reasonable length.)
Life's kept me plenty busy the past few months, but I certainly could have found the time to finish this essay--and yet I didn't. One might say the perfect had become the enemy of the good. But even this formulation, which I've found useful in getting "unstuck" many times, failed to help. And then the Fall Quarter started at Stanford, and I knew that any meaningful treatment of this material was going to have to wait. And that just pushed me past mild irritation into full-fledged anger at my failure to get this damn thing done. And then two useful things happened:
1) I realized that my perfectionism was not only crippling me as a writer but was also starting to affect me as a coach. As a writer, my perfectionism was preventing me from tackling a project because I didn't think it would be good enough--but who's going to miss one unwritten essay from me? I could let that slide for a long time. But as a coach, my perfectionism was taking me to task at a deeper level because I couldn't resolve the sort of issue I help clients and students with all the time, i.e. perfectionism. The irony doesn't escape me, but my perfectionism was telling me, "Coach, heal thyself!" and then judging me harshly for failing--and that bothered me.
2) And then I had this mini-coaching session with Yifat, which I went into knowing I wanted help on this issue but with no specific outcomes in mind. In a lovely and creative move, Yifat had me talk to my perfectionism, literally speaking to her hand, which she held out in front of me. I wanted to tell it "Back the fuck off!" and I did, speaking louder and louder as Yifat literally stepped away. And then I realized that I didn't want my perfectionism to leave--I just wanted to be in a different relationship with it. In our conversation I had metaphorically envisioned my perfectionism as a snarling dog, threatening me, keeping me cowering in the corner, practically paralyzed. And that's not sustainable--it's stressful and boring. But my perfectionism has also served me well in many ways over the years, and I don't want to part with it. I want to maintain it as an aspect of myself, but with a different relationship to the rest of me. I want it to be a partner who'll support me, who'll challenge me, who'll help me achieve great things. And I began to envision it transformed from a snarling dog into a happy companion.
This is hardly the first time I've wrestled with this issue--it's one of my perpetual challenges, and I've made progress on it in many areas of life. But this was an particularly important chapter in that story, and I'm eager to see what happens as a result. Thanks, Yifat--I'm very grateful.
Photos: Happy Dog by Meagan, Snarling Dog by Sini Merikallio. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons
In essence this suggests that before we can trust someone we must be assured of their motive, their reliability and their competence. (I first heard this formulation from Clinton Moloney of the Trium Group, but Charles Green substantially expanded my understanding of its origins.)
And while I continue to find this formula useful, in the context of my recent research on the neuroscience of emotions it strikes me as an entirely accurate but somehow insufficient "if-then" statement that implies that trust is the result of logic. But it's clear that we don't arrive at the conclusions that constitute trust through reasoning alone. Our logical assessment of someone's motive, reliability and competence is obviously crucial, but in many (and perhaps most) circumstances we're operating with imperfect data. At a certain point we can reason no further, and the decision to trust someone or not is made on the basis of our emotional response toward that person.
A recent exchange I had with Joel Peterson reinforced the emotional dimension of trust for me. Joel had discussed the importance of trust in a session at an Executive Education program at Stanford, and the group I've been coaching found his remarks highly compelling. I shared their response with him afterwards, and he said:
We tend to be so wrapped up in ourselves, so self-referencing, so insecure that we're driven, above all, to protect a fragile ego. If we can learn to let go, to feel safe, we can learn to trust, to be trustworthy and to move ourselves to better motivations.
The emotional content of Joel's response jumps out at me: Our reluctance to trust is rooted in feelings of insecurity and egotism, and our ability to trust is founded in feelings of safety and acceptance. The specific steps we take to we reach that place where we feel capable of trust is a post for another day, but at the moment I'm finding it helpful simply to highlight this emotional dimension in the hopes that it promotes the idea of emotional competence that I've been thinking about recently.
Photo by the U.S. Army. (Really!) Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
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Every group's experience is rooted in a set of initial conditions: How and why were we assembled? What will our first meeting be like? What will we discuss there? These initial conditions form the foundation for all subsequent layers of the group dynamic.
Sonja Lyubomirsky is a social psychologist whose 
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