I was recently asked to help a team prepare to tackle some challenging work more effectively. I was motivated to say yes for professional and personal reasons, but I didn't fully think through the necessary conditions for success, and I made some critical errors in planning and delivery. In a word, I failed.
It wasn't a complete failure--I'm confident that some learning occurred--but I certainly failed to live up to my own standards for success. I've reflected on what I could have done differently, and I've learned a lot--but perhaps the most valuable thing I've learned is the extent to which I've developed a growth mindset. As Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck notes,
In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their
intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time
documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them.
They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort.
They're wrong.
In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can
be developed through dedication and hard work--brains and talent are just
the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a
resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.
The relevance here is that I'm not interpreting this failure as a character flaw or a fundamental inability to do good work. I'm fully aware that I take on projects like this all the time, and most of them turn out quite successfully. This isn't to say that I'm ducking responsibility for my failure or ignoring it in any way. I'm very clear about the mistakes I made and what I'll do differently going forward.
I'm reminded that in 2011 Jonah Lehrer reviewed a study by Michigan State's Jason Moser that applied Dweck's concept of mindset while assessing the neurological processes involved in learning from mistakes:
It turned out that those subjects with a growth mindset were
significantly better at learning from their mistakes... Most interesting,
though, was the EEG data, which demonstrated that those with a growth
mindset generated a much larger [error positivity] signal, indicating increased
attention to their mistakes… What’s more, this increased...signal was
nicely correlated with improvement after error, implying that the extra
awareness was paying dividends in performance. Because the subjects were
thinking about what they got wrong, they learned how to get it right...
Moser's study suggests that a growth mindset allows us to pay more attention to our mistakes because we're less upset when confronted with the evidence of those mistakes, which allows us to study them more closely and learn more as a result. In the case of my own recent experience, the outcome is that I'm able to calmly assess my failure, learn from it and move on. I'm disappointed, to be sure, but I'm not upset about it in a way that might have negatively affected other projects or aspects of my life.
By no means am I suggesting that I've mastered this process--it doesn't take much work to envision a failure that would be extremely upsetting. But at the same time it's worth noting that the work I've done over the years has resulted in a greater sense of resilience and an increased capacity to face up to--and learn from--my failures.
Photo by Mikel Ortega. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
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 essence of training is to allow error without consequence. - Orson Scott Card*
With this definition in mind, how often do we have the opportunity to truly train--to test our skills in a setting where errors are "without consequence" Not often enough, if your life is anything like mine.
But even when our errors do have consequences, we can needlessly increase the pressure we feel to avoid making any mistakes at all--which not only makes it harder to learn from our mistakes but may actually undermine our performance.
I'm not suggesting that we become cavalier about making mistakes, but as I wrote last year, "those of us who learn best from our mistakes...don't view mistakes as personal defects, and [our mistakes] don't carry such a negative emotional charge. I'd suggest that those of us who hold a growth mindset are able to forgive ourselves for mistakes and let go of (or at least mitigate) any feelings of shame or humiliation. This forgiveness allows us to continue to focus on the mistake that much more intently, without losing confidence in ourselves, and as a result to learn from it more effectively." As always, our mental models exert a tremendous influence on our view of ourselves and on our experience in the world.
I recently had a coaching session with a client in which she talked about "letting go" of feelings of fear and pressure that had been discouraging her from speaking candidly at work, and as a result she "found [her] voice." She decided to take some risks and be more direct and assertive, and in the process she realized that (among other things) a fear of miscommunicating had been holding her back, and her candor and forthrightness were not only welcome but also a valuable source of leadership for her team.
To be clear, this was no "I'm mad as hell!"-style rant; this was a thoughtful effort to communicate more openly and honestly. It was also a deliberate effort to worry less about miscommunicating, and the result was a rich learning opportunity. And it was also a brilliant example of self-coaching using heightened self-awareness to intervene and take action.
So what mistakes are we worried about making right now? What feelings or assumptions are causing us to play it (too) safe? How could we let go of them--or at least temporarily suspend our belief in them? What risks would we take if we did? And what might we learn in the process?
*This quote is from Card's Ender's Game, his award-winning 1985 sci-fi novel. Card is known both as a likely source of inspiration for J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and for his socially conservative politics. I don't share those political views, but it's still an awesome quote.
Comparisons with various control groups showed that a diversifying experience--defined as the active (but not vicarious) involvement in an unusual event--increased cognitive flexibility more than active (or vicarious) involvement in normal experiences.
I'm always cautious about premature (and potentially spurious) interpretations of brand-new research, and yet practitioners like me can't sit around and wait for the scientists to get everything completely sorted out. At the same time, these findings resonate deeply with my own empirical experience as a coach.
In my work at Stanford and with clients I often lead people through workshops, classes and other experiences intended to expand their perspective and get them thinking differently on a range of topics. Whenever possible, I begin these sessions with some type of exercise that's designed to (gently) shake people up in one way or another.
For example, I'll have the group stand in a circle and ask them to sort themselves by height, with the tallest person on my left and the shortest person on my right. When they're done, I'll ask them to re-sort themselves by birthday, with the person born closest to January 1st on my left and the person born closest to December 31st on my right. And then I'll ask them to, say, re-sort themselves by "blue," with the "most blue" person on my left and the "least blue" person on my right. Someone in the group always asks what I mean by "blue," and I always tell them it's up to them to decide--there's no right answer.
People typically find this a mildly weird way to begin a workshop--not so weird that it's alienating or off-putting, but just weird enough that it confounds their expectations and heightens their interest. (It also gets them up and moving, which I find always helps.)
I think that what happening here is related to Hans Selye's concept of eustress: modest levels of stress improve performance, and weird or unexpected experiences are modestly stressful. Such experiences push us slightly outside our comfort zone, and we can't go on auto-pilot anymore. We're a little nervous, a little excited, and we really have to pay attention to figure out what's going on and what might happen next.
However, as Doug points out, "We often think we've gotten out of our comfort zone, when we really have only stretched it a bit." I suspect that there's a neurological basis for this--perhaps we acclimate to the heightened emotions triggered by weird experiences and other sources of discomfort, so we need to readjust what we define as our "comfort zone" (and what we mean by "weird") to re-enact those emotions.
That's certainly been my experience with regard to improv. I wouldn't call myself a skilled improv player--in addition to the brief exercises I use to open workshops, I only participate in an extended session once or twice a year--but I've done enough of it that it's no longer "weird" to me, and it's well within my comfort zone. So if I'm truly going to reap the benefits of the dynamics uncovered by Ritter's reseach, I'm going to have to get much, much weirder. (Burning Man, here I come.)
I've written before about the concept of joyful learning, and Annie Murphy Paul recently wrote about what I'd call "joyful teaching" in her Psychology Today post on The Protégé Effect.
Students enlisted to tutor others, these researchers have found, work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively. In what scientists have dubbed "the protégé effect," student teachers score higher on tests than pupils who are learning only for their own sake.
And just why are these student teachers so dedicated?
Above all, it's the emotions elicited by teaching that make it such a powerful vehicle for learning. Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas. Don't know that word? I had to learn it myself: "Pride and satisfaction that is derived from someone else’s accomplishment."
I see this dynamic in effect every year in my work with the Leadership Fellows at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The Fellows, a select group of 66 second-year students, are each assigned to 6-person "squads" of incoming first-year students, and together they work through a series of experiential exercises in our Leadership Labs. The Fellows are acting as coaches and guides, not, strictly speaking, as teachers, but they're no less invested in their students' learning. They absolutely feel chagrin when their squad struggles with an exercise, and they're bursting with nachas when their squad succeeds.
And I'm in a similar relationship with the 11 Fellows who are assigned to me in my role as a Leadership Coach. I help them learn to employ coaching skills and techniques, not to train them for a career in coaching but rather to prepare them to be better leaders and managers in any number of fields they might enter after business school. When they struggle with the extremely challenging task of coaching a diverse, newly formed group of students, I empathize deeply--and when they succeed, I couldn't be happier or more proud. It's an extremely emotional experience, and the research cited by Paul in her post only confirms my sense that these emotions are powerful intrinsic motivators, both for myself and for our Fellows--and reinforces Paul's point that a key to promoting learning is ensuring that the learners are also teachers.
We're about to say goodbye to the 2011-12 Fellows, and I'll truly miss them--at the same time, I'm eager to get started with the 2012-13 Fellows in a few months. The cycle continues.
Photo by Nathan Russell. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
I've been back at Stanford since January 2007, so the current graduates are the fifth class of MBAs I've had the privilege of working with as a Leadership Coach. I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to get to know 35 people in particular--11 Leadership Fellows and 24 members of two T-groups in the school's Interpersonal Dynamics course, aka Touchy Feely. To all of you, I can't thank you enough for the experiences we had together this year.
Any fifth anniversary is a milestone, of course, and yet on a personal level the past year has been particularly meaningful for me. The passage of another year has eased the pain of losing Richard Wright, my father-in-law, and Roanak Desai, a former student, both of whom died in 2010. I'll always miss them, but I've made peace with their passing.
I'm also truly proud of the work that's been done over the past year by the Leadership Fellows I worked with and by my colleagues on Stanford's coaching staff and faculty to revamp the school's Leadership Labs and the Fellows program itself. The effort wasn't as daunting as the process of launching these courses back in 2007, but it was close. I was pushed to be a better coach and a better colleague, and although I stumbled constantly, someone was always there to help me up. And while I'm very grateful for everything I got out of the process personally, what's just as meaningful to me is the sense that we all made a long-term contribution to the school's ability to help students become better leaders.
Finally, facilitating T-groups in Touchy Feely is always uniquely rewarding, and I learn something new every time. This year I was gratified to see how effective I can be at simultaneously supporting and challenging others, and I was challenged myself to be more vulnerable and to worry less about "making mistakes." I came a long way in my understanding of diversity and my ability to work with people across many dimensions of difference, and I realized how much work I have yet to do in this area. And I was very lucky to be paired with two amazing partners, Erica Peng and Michael Terrell, who pushed me and allowed me to push back.
Despite--or because of--all of this ferment, the past school year was a tremendously productive time for me on this site, where I strive to share what I know (and continue to learn) about coaching not only with my students and clients, but also with anyone who might not have access to a personal coach or a graduate program in management. Below are links to 33 posts written from September 2011 through June 2012, all of which grew at least in part out of my work with those 35 members of the GSB's Class of 2012: Again, thank you all.
A brief follow-up on the theme of safety and trust I discussed last week: Very rarely (if ever) do we establish these qualities in a relationship in a single dramatic act. Much more often safety and trust are established over a series of interactions through countless tiny gestures. These gestures take the form of one person making some effort to connect--an emotional bid--and another person responding in any way that acknowledges that effort. Examples include:
I disclose something about myself, and you express interest or reciprocate.
I express curiosity about you, and you share something about yourself.
I display emotion in any way, and you acknowledge it.
I make a joke, and you laugh or smile.
I make small talk, and you respond.
Note that embedded in each exchange is the potential to "up the ante"--to respond to the small risk taken by the person who initially made the bid by taking a slightly larger risk in return. For example, in disclosing something about myself, I take a small risk, and you can simply acknowledge that risk by expressing interest, or you can meet that risk by disclosing something similar about yourself, or you can take a slightly larger risk by disclosing something more personal. Our mutual level of risk-taking determines the cumulative impact of these tiny gestures over time.
As these tiny gestures accumulate--as we put out emotional bids and they're met with a response--we build the trust that allows us to take greater risks. Having acknowledged each other, we become more candid and forthcoming. This involves greater candor in affirmation, self-disclosure and feedback (which is really just another form of self-disclosure.)
The next stage allows greater freedom to challenge and confront each other, as we feel sufficiently safe and trusting to express negative feelings and openly engage in conflict. But the process then folds back on itself, as the increased levels of safety and trust that come through conflict allow for even more meaningful expressions of appreciation, care and love.
These larger, more complex interactions don't necessarily occur because of the many tiny gestures that preceded them, but they couldn't happen without them either.
I've written before about the importance of safety as the foundation for the risk-taking and experimentation that are essential precursors to learning and change. In any setting where we're seeking to grow and develop, it's essential that we feel safe with each other and trust each other. In the absence of safety, trust and emotional intimacy, our efforts to learn and grow will be severely hampered. And this applies everywhere--not only in explicit learning environments such as the classroom, a workshop or a coaching relationship, but also in our day-to-day organizational and personal lives.
But safety and trust aren't ends in and of themselves. The process starts with safety and trust, but it doesn't end there. The safer and more trusting we feel, the more risks we can take, the more we learn and grow. Ultimately safety and trust are valuable resources that become even more useful when we push (and extend) their limits.
Obviously there's a balance that must be maintained. Safety and trust are highly dynamic qualities, and the risks we take in service of learning and growth can strain or even damage the safety and trust that have been established up to that point. But if we cling too tightly to safety and trust once they've been established, we'll fail to take the risks that are necessary to support growth and learning.
I see this process in action every day in my work as a coach. A few months ago a client made a glancing reference to the fact that he and his wife had begun fertility treatments. This is obviously a highly personal topic, and potentially a sensitive one as well. Our conversation was focused on another issue at that moment, and I felt an impulse to respect his privacy and to let the remark pass without further comment. But I also realized that at some level this was an emotional bid, and that by making it my client had created an opportunity for us to connect--but in order to do so, I had to take a risk.
I paused the flow of our conversation and acknowledged the importance of the topic he had mentioned. I said that I knew the process was challenging and stressful, and I empathized with him and his wife. I also shared that while Amy and I have chosen not to be parents and are comfortable with that choice, at the same time I'll always feel a pang of regret that I won't experience fatherhood--an emotional bid of my own. The whole interchange took just a minute or two, and yet it left us feeling much closer and more trusting--and the key was making use of the safety we had established in our previous conversations to step into some small (but increasing) risks.
And it doesn't always go smoothly. Last week I participated in an exercise at Stanford that involved having our students focus on a tightly-kept personal secret, presented them with opportunities to share the secret or withhold it, and then assess how they felt at various points throughout the process. I'm purposely omitting details to respect the privacy of the class, but believe me when I say that it's an emotionally arousing experience that intentionally pushes the limits of the safety and trust we've established with our students. We've conducted this exercise for many years and found it extremely useful, but this year it was unusually intense for some students, who found the feelings it evoked difficult to manage. While it was important to acknowledge the challenge this experience presented for some students, and we'll assess the cause of this year's results, I remain convinced of the value of the exercise.
Powerful learning involves being challenged in fundamental ways, and at crucial moments we have to take the plunge and step into the risk. We may--and will--make mistakes by pushing too far, but it's also a mistake not to push at all. And yet one final point on that note: Even though I believe in the importance of pushing the limits of safety and trust to support greater learning and growth, I've also realized that I can't complacently rely on my own definition of "safety." We all have different comfort zones, and I need to be keenly attentive to the stress levels of my clients and students in challenging situations. This requires a heightened sense of empathy and a recognition that even--and especially--when pushing the limits of safety and trust, these qualities are the foundation of any learning relationship and are never to be taken lightly.
(Many thanks to my Austrian colleagues Joachim Schwendenwein and Liselotte Zvacek for pushing me to think further about the downsides of excessive safety and insufficient risk-taking.)
William Coleridge coined the phrase "suspension of disbelief" in 1817 to describe a state of mind in which readers would willingly ignore obvious untruths and fantastic elements in literature to allow themselves to enjoy the story. He called it a form of "poetic faith."
There's an alternative form of this mindset that applies not to works of fiction but to our own very real lives that I'd call the "suspension of belief." We believe to be true an enormous number of assumptions and mental models that exert a powerful influence on our self-image, on our sense of our own capabilities, on our perceived range of options, and ultimately on the lives we lead.
In some cases these beliefs are well-founded, but in others they're not. Or they were once accurate but are now long outdated and in need of revision. And what neuroscientists and social psychologists are discovering about the power of mindset even calls into question what we mean by "well-founded" and "accurate." What we believe to be true shapes our reality.
Much of my work as a coach involves helping clients and students let go of negative, self-limiting assumptions and mental models, and I've come to characterize this process as "suspension of belief." Efforts to actively disprove our beliefs often trigger defensiveness, causing us to dig in and cling to them all the harder. But if we sidestep the struggle over whether they're "True" or "False" and simply suspend our belief in them, a whole range of possibilities open up.
Without reaching any final conclusions regarding the validity of a given belief, we can temporarily suspend it, and "act as if" it we didn't hold it, or as if it had no hold on us. This can make it easier (and safer) for us to experiment with new behaviors that will test our assumptions and mental models and generate the data that's necessary to support any meaningful change. The key is suspending our belief in order to move from a conceptual debate over truth or falsehood into the realm of active, experiential learning.
Photo by sethoscope. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
Yesterday's post on setbacks and mindset (as well as last month's post on mental models) resulted in some further thoughts on just what we mean by "mindset," and I've provisionally arrived at the four definitions below. By no means are they mutually exclusive, and the overlap is intentional; each definition simply provides another way of looking at and making effective use of the central concept.
1) As I mentioned yesterday, mindset refers to the overarching idea that what we think--and particularly what we think about ourselves--influences how we perceive the world around us and how we experience that world. Our thoughts, perceptions, and emotions shape our reality. A perfect example of this is the placebo effect; quoting again from yesterday's post, recent research has shown that "A particular mind-set or belief about one's body or health may lead to improvements in disease symptoms as well as changes in appetite, brain chemicals and even vision..."
2) A second definition of mindset is the process of understanding cognitive biases and principles of neuroscience in order to leverage them and turn them to our advantage, rather than be buffeted about by them. Yesterday I wrote about a cognitive bias called the "fundamental attribution error"--ascribing causality to personal characteristics when causality actually lies with the situation--and how awareness of this bias and its impact on our mindset can allow us to cope more effectively with setbacks. I've also written about other heuristics that can lead us astray, such as availability bias--"the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind"--and affective errors--"the tendency to make decisions based on what we wish were true." Recent research on neuroscience and brain function provides additional insights into why we act the way we do, and one of the best examples is David Rock's SCARF model, which "captures the common factors that can activate a reward or threat response in social situations."
3) On a more personal level, a third definition of mindset is an awareness of our existing mental models, beliefs and assumptions, many of which are the result of past learning experiences and which may not have been re-examined or updated in the interim. Such awareness allows us to see how these concepts influence our actions and, if we choose, to update them to reflect our current circumstances and subsequent learning. In turn, this process allows us to make different choices based on more recent information and better suited to current circumstances. Last month I discussed the impact of my self-image as a public speaker: "I had trapped myself in my own mental model: believing I was a poor speaker led me to avoid speaking opportunities, which prevented me from ever improving. Today I still get nervous before a speech or presentation, but I view that response simply as a manifestation of my desire to do well, not as damning evidence of my ineffectiveness."
4) Finally, a very specific and highly useful definition of mindset is the idea at the heart of the work of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, who sees a pivotal distinction between a "growth" mindset and a "fixed" mindset. As I noted yesterday in a citation from Dweck's website:
In a fixed mindset, people believe their basic qualities, like their intelligence or talent, are simply fixed traits. They spend their time documenting their intelligence or talent instead of developing them. They also believe that talent alone creates success—without effort. They're wrong.
In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work—brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.
As I noted above, these definitions are intentionally overlapping; I'm not seeking to distinguish them as entirely separate concepts but rather trying to get sufficient clarity on the threads and themes woven into the concept of "mindset" in order to make use of all of them more effectively.
Photo by Alex Valli. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
