Ed Batista

Give It To Me Straight (Effective Feedback)

As an executive coach and an experiential educator, every day I collaborate with or observe people giving and receiving feedback. In a number of settings I work with groups whose purpose is improving members' leadership and interpersonal skills, and the primary tool we use is feedback. And a common trait shared by almost every one of the hundreds of people I've worked with over the last eight years is a desire to hear direct, candid feedback. I literally hear people say "Give it to me straight" in almost every group.

But this simple request turns out to be more complicated than it sounds at first. Feedback is one of the most powerful—and one of the fastest—ways to learn how to be more effective in our interactions with others, particularly when it’s honest and straightforward. But effective feedback doesn’t happen spontaneously; it’s critical to learn how to give—and receive—feedback in a way that’s effective in a particular context.

What “Give it to me straight” actually means in practice will vary widely from one relationship to another, and will change within every relationship over time. And an irony I’ve observed over thousands of feedback conversations is that when we first say “Give it to me straight,” we think we’re talking about negative feedback because we imagine that criticism will be painful to hear, but it turns out that truly heartfelt positive feedback can be equally hard to handle. Many people I’ve worked with are actually more uncomfortable receiving direct, candid praise than being criticized.

Giving and receiving feedback effectively are learnable skills, and while the five concepts discussed here may serve as helpful guidelines, it’s important to recognize that we can improve our facility with these skills only by actually trying them out. We can—and should—start in low-risk situations, such as an experiential role-play, a coaching engagement or a friendly relationship. But real growth will require us to get out of our comfort zones and to risk making mistakes when the stakes are higher.

1) Feedback and Social Threat

Most of us find the prospect of a feedback conversation daunting at the best of times, even in the context of a friendly relationship. Hearing someone say “Can I give you some feedback?” is almost guaranteed to elevate our heart rate and raise our blood pressure. These are common signs of a threat response, a cascade of neurological and physiological events that occur when we encounter a situation that we perceive as threatening. Neuroscientists have determined that we respond to threatening social situations in the same way that we respond to actual threats to our physical safety and have coined the term “social threat” to describe these experiences. David Rock is an executive coach who’s made an extensive study of recent neuroscience research to understand its implications for organizational life, and he developed the SCARF Model to characterize interpersonal situations that are likely to trigger a social threat.

SCARF stands for status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness (i.e. the extent to which we perceive others as members of our social group) and fairness. Whenever our status, certainty, autonomy or perception of fairness is diminished, we're more likely to experience a social threat. And an encounter with someone we perceive as unrelated is also more likely to trigger a social threat.

Given these factors, it’s unsurprising that a feedback conversation can be so stressful. Someone presuming to give us feedback is (at least momentarily) occupying a high-status position, and we may feel “demoted” as a result. We don’t know what feedback we’re about to get, so we’re immediately put in a state of uncertainty. Despite our discomfort, we’re likely to feel obligated to listen, so we have less autonomy. These factors are at play in almost every feedback conversation, and if we feel less connected with the other person or if we don’t believe their feedback is fair, then we’re certain to experience the conversation as a social threat.

A threat response predisposes us to act quickly on limited information, and while this classic “fight or flight” behavior is well-adapted to literal threats to our physical safety, it often serves us poorly in interpersonal situations that we perceive as threatening. When we’re in the grip of a threat response, our ability to understand complex information and respond to it thoughtfully is seriously compromised. We seize on what we believe to be the most important data and take action on that basis. While this set of responses surely served us well in our evolutionary environment, it undermines our ability to safely navigate challenging interpersonal situations—such as feedback conversations.

So when we’re preparing to give someone feedback, it’s critical to avoid triggering a social threat. Pay keen attention to the potential for any aspect of the conversation to impact the other person, including such factors as timing, duration, physical location and proximity.

2) Just Enough Emotion

Despite the risk of triggering a social threat inherent in any feedback conversation, one reason interpersonal feedback is such an effective way to learn is because it has the potential to evoke meaningful emotions in the first place. While the strong negative emotions that result from a social threat have the potential to inhibit learning and block communication, emotions play an essential role in our reasoning process. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio wrote 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. Emotion, feeling and biological regulation all play a role in human reason. [p xvii]

In addition, emotional experiences resonate more strongly with us and stick more effectively in our memories. As neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux notes, “There is both an upside and a downside to the fact that emotional states make memories stronger. The upside is that we remember our emotional experiences to a greater extent than non-emotional ones. The downside is that we remember our emotional experiences to a greater extent than non-emotional ones.”

So while we have to guard against the risk of triggering a social threat when giving feedback, it’s essential to make effective use of emotion in any feedback conversation, and this means expressing just enough emotion ourselves to trigger sufficient emotion in the other person without going too far. If we express too much emotion, we may trigger a social threat, provoking a hostile or defensive reaction, and ending the dialogue or damaging the relationship. But if we fail to express enough emotion, we significantly diminish the impact of our feedback, resulting in an ongoing cycle of ineffective conversations.

The right balance of emotion is highly situational and will differ widely not only across interpersonal relationships but also according to the issue under discussion, the timing of the conversation, and many other factors. Our ability to find the balance that’s right for any given conversation will depend on our understanding of the other person and our relationship with them as well as on our ability to regulate and express our emotions effectively.

3) Build the Relationship

As noted above, when we feel less connected to another person, an interaction with them is more likely to trigger a social threat. When we need to give feedback to someone who differs from us—not only according to demographic categories, but also as a function of our respective roles—it’s important to be able to establish a sense of relatedness with that person to minimize the risk of social threat. And this work is much more effective when it’s done over time, across a series of interactions, rather than in a desperate—and transparent—attempt to soften the blow before delivering critical feedback.

John Gottman, a social psychologist who’s one of the world’s leading researchers on marriage and relationships, notes that the likelihood of a successful conclusion to a difficult conversation is critically dependent on what he calls “the quality of the friendship” in the relationship, and he defines friendship by the existence of seven factors:

1. Feeling known by the other person.

2. A “culture of appreciation” that nurtures mutual fondness, admiration and respect.

3. Sensitivity and responsiveness to even the most minor bids for attention.

4. The degree of mutual influence.

5. Accepting that some problems are intractable and can’t be solved right now.

6. An awareness that inside those intractable problems is often a deeply personal dream, and a willingness to share those dreams.

7. The creation of shared meaning.

Gottman’s research focuses on married couples and others in committed partnerships, and I’m not suggesting that our working relationships need to rise to that level of intimacy to be successful. But I am suggesting that Gottman’s guidelines for gauging “the quality of the friendship” apply to any relationship, and that they can direct us in our efforts to connect with others, particularly when we’re working across role boundaries and other dimensions of difference.

Finally, Gottman’s research also shows that the ratio of positive to negative interactions in a successful relationship over time is 5:1, even during periods of conflict. This ratio doesn’t apply to a single conversation, nor does it mean that we’re obligated to pay someone five compliments before we can criticize them. But it does emphasize the importance of positive feedback over time as a means of building a successful relationship. (Note that we can run into problems with positive feedback as well.)

4) Play Fair

A certain way to derail a feedback conversation is to trigger a social threat (and a subsequent defensive or hostile reaction) by providing feedback that the other person perceives as unfair or inaccurate. The difficulty is that the concepts of “fair” and “accurate” are inherently subjective. In Chapter 2 of The Interpersonal Dynamics Reader [PDF], David Bradford and Mary Ann Huckabay use the metaphor of “the net” to explain this dynamic:

Most of us act like amateur psychologists in that we try to figure out why others act as they do. If you interrupt me (a behavior) and I feel annoyed (the effect on me), I try and understand why you would do that. So I make an attribution of your motives (it must be that you are inconsiderate)…

As common as this attribution process is, it also can be dysfunctional. Note that my sense-making is a guess. That is my hunch as to why you act the way you do. I am “crossing over the net” from what is my area of expertise (that I am annoyed at your behavior), to your area of expertise (your motives and intentions). My imputation of your motives can always be debated, (“You don't listen.” “Yes, I do.” “No you don't.”) whereas sticking with my own feelings and reactions is never debatable. ( “I felt irritated by your interruption just now.” “You shouldn't feel that way because I didn't mean to interrupt you.” “Perhaps not, but I feel irritated nonetheless.” ) [pp 4-5, emphasis added]

As Bradford and Huckabay make clear, by “crossing the net” and guessing at the other person’s motives and intentions, we succeed in creating a plausible explanation that helps us understand their behavior, but we run the risk of being wrong. Even if we guess right in most circumstances—and we typically do—the challenge in the context of a feedback conversation is that the cost of being wrong is triggering a social threat in the other person and derailing the conversation.

The solution identified by Bradford and Huckabay is to “stay on our side of the net” and stick with what we know for certain—our response to the observed behavior—and avoid making any guesses about the other person’s motives and intentions. This minimizes the risk that our feedback will be perceived as unfair or inaccurate.

5) Give It To Me Straight?

While an increased emphasis on interpersonal feedback in many groups and organizations can provide us with more opportunities to test and improve our abilities to give and receive feedback effectively, it can also have some unintended consequences. A “feedback-rich” culture can be one in which people feel compelled to participate in feedback conversations even when they’re not truly prepared to do so. Feedback givers can feel an unjustified sense of authority and objectivity, failing to realize that feedback says as much about the giver (what we notice, what we comment upon, how we say it) as it does about the recipient. Feedback recipients can feel obligated to change in response to critical feedback, even when it conflicts with their better judgment.

So while I’m a confirmed believer in the benefits of feedback, I also encourage people to stop and think carefully when stepping into a feedback conversation, particularly before responding to a request to “Give it to me straight.” While it’s important to provide honest and direct feedback in response to such a request, it’s also important to consider the overall context—including the surrounding group or organizational culture—in order to meet such a request effectively.

Update/Postscript: I'm reminded of my recent comment to Whitney Johnson: "At the heart of every piece of critical feedback is a dream of a better way to interact with each other." This helps explain my emphasis on the emotional aspects of feedback conversations--when we're unhappy or upset with someone and want them to change, the purpose of any critical feedback we might deliver is to turn that "dream of a better way of interacting" into reality. But if we simply "give it to them straight" and fail to effectively manage the emotions evoked by the conversation--either by repressing them or by venting them full-force--we're much less likely to achieve that goal.

Thanks to Carole Robin, David Bradford, Mary Ann Huckabay and Scott Bristol for introducing me to many of these concepts and for the opportunity to explore them further while working with them at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Photo by rick. 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.

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.

Let's Get Weird (Unusual Events and Creativity)

Doug Sundheim recently pointed to some interesting research by Simone Ritter et al on the benefits of weird experiences:

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.)

Photo by Christopher Michel. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Why I (Keep Trying To) Meditate

Photo by Holly Ford Brown.

I'm not a very good meditator--in fact, I'm terrible at it.  I say that tongue-in-cheek, knowing full well that striving to be a "good" meditator is an exercise in absurdity--but what I mean is that I find meditation difficult, I regularly avoid doing it, and yet I persist in the practice.  Why?

Two of my standing goals are to exercise and mediate daily.  I track goals like this using a simple tool called Don't Break the Chain, and looking back at the last six months of 2011, I can see that I exercised exactly 75% of the time--138 days of out of 184.  But during that same span I meditated just 45% of the time--83 days.  See what I mean?  Not very good :-)

But in truth I know that my resistance to meditation is an indicator that it's a healthy practice for me, and the fact that it's difficult for me to do it daily is one of the primary reasons I keep at it.  I'm not saying I should force myself to do all the things I resist doing.  Helping people deconstruct a rule like that--a powerful mental model, by the way--is something I do in my coaching practice, and I strive to do the same in my own life.

Rather, I'm saying that there are some specific steps that occur in the meditation process that are valuable for me to experience precisely because of my resistance to the practice.  So what are those steps?  What happens for me in the meditation process?

I see it as a four-stage cycle:

1. Stillness
2. Awareness
3. Choice
4. Discipline

(Here's a 2-slide PowerPoint [60 KB] of the graphics below.) 

It starts with Stillness, which sounds easy and yet can be quite hard for me.  My mind is always in motion, and I'm constantly thinking and planning ahead.  I'm tracking an endless list of ideas and to-dos, and while I find this stimulating, it also creates a lot of noise.  (The last time I re-committed myself to regular meditation, in early 2011, I described the experience as feeling "mentally itchy.")  Meditation allows (and compels) me to just be still.

The next step is Awareness.  In the stillness I can see where my attention goes and sense what I'm feeling (both emotionally and physically) much more clearly.)  Note that I'm not saying that I "clear my mind" or "think of nothing" or anything like that.  My mind's still working away, and thoughts and emotions continue to rush through me, but I'm much more aware of them. 

The next step is Choice.  The awareness of my thoughts and emotions that comes with the stillness allows me to be more intentional, and to focus my attention and make use of my emotions in ways that better support my goals.  This isn't to say that I'm always seeking to consciously influence my cognitive and emotional processing; that's neither possible nor desirable.  But even the ability to simply notice what I'm thinking about and feeling allows me to choose to filter out the noise and focus on more meaningful cognitive and emotional signals.

The final stage of the process is Discipline.  And while I use that word deliberately, I want to be careful to avoid the negative connotation that can often accompany it.  Jon Kabat Zinn notes that our minds will constantly wander during meditation, just like a puppy wandering away while being paper-trained, and we need to treat ourselves just as would treat the puppy--not harshly, but compassionately, with firmness and with care.  Because the cycle described here repeats not just from day to day but many, many times in the course of a single meditation session, and the act of noticing that my mind has wandered and is speeding up again, slowing it down and returning to a sense of stillness is itself a useful form of disciplined practice.

I'm not off to a great start in 2012--I've meditated just 6 times in 15 days.  But writing this post has helped clarify the value I derive from the practice and inspires me to do it even more.  Many thanks to Bill George, whose discussion of his own meditation practice has been highly motivating.

Two concluding thoughts: First, there's an extensive and growing body of research demonstrating the psychological, physiological and performance benefits of meditation.  That's a post for another day, but for now I'll express my continued thanks to David Rock for pointing me in that direction.

And finally, I'm reminded of the master's dictum: If you don't have time to meditate once a day, then meditate twice.  I'm all too aware that as I get busier and have less time to meditate, I tend to cycle faster and need to put on the brakes all the more.  I'm not saying I live by that credo, but it's an aspiration.

High-Performance Communication

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!

Photo by Alexander Lyubavin.

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Printer-Friendly Version (PDF, 274 KB), requires Adobe Reader

Contents

1) Excellence

2) Safety, Trust, Intimacy

3) Happiness

4) The SCARF Model

5) Soft Startups

6) Talking About Feelings

7) Powerful Questions

8) The Problem with Positive Feedback

9) Taking Risks

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1) Excellence

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?

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2) Safety, Trust, Intimacy

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.

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3) Happiness

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.

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4) The SCARF Model

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.

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5) Soft Startups

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.

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6) Talking About Feelings

Photo by malias.

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.

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7) Powerful Questions

Photo by Erik Charlton.

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.

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8) The Problem with Positive Feedback

Photo by Aaron Matthews.

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. 

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9) Taking Risks

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.

Photo by Justin Ornellas.

The Meaning of Mindset

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.

Learning from Mistakes

What is a mistake?  When we make a mistake, what do we think that says about us?  How do we feel about ourselves?  And how does that framing affect what we learn from the experience?

In a recent article for Wired Jonah Lehrer discussed a soon-to-be-published study by Michigan State's Jason Moser that provides a neurological basis for understanding why some of us learn from mistakes more effectively than others:

[T]here are two distinct [neurological] reactions to mistakes… The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is…mostly involuntary, the inevitable response to any [mistake].

The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. It occurs when we pay attention to the error, dwelling on the disappointing result. In recent years, numerous studies have shown that subjects learn more effectively when their brains demonstrate two properties: 1) a larger ERN signal, suggesting a bigger initial response to the mistake and 2) a more consistent Pe signal, which means that they are probably paying attention to the error, and thus trying to learn from it.

[The Moser study] applied a dichotomy first proposed by Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford. …Dweck distinguishes between people with a fixed mindset--they tend to agree with statements such as "You have a certain amount of intelligence and cannot do much to change it"--and those with a growth mindset, who believe that we can get better at almost anything, provided we invest the necessary time and energy. While people with a fixed mindset see mistakes as a dismal failure--a sign that we aren't talented enough for the task in question--those with a growth mindset see mistakes as an essential precursor of knowledge, the engine of education...

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 Pe signal, indicating increased attention to their mistakes… What’s more, this increased Pe 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...

...[U]nless we experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong--that surge of Pe activity a few hundred milliseconds after the error, directing our attention to the very thing we’d like to ignore--the mind will never revise its models. We’ll keep on making the same mistakes, forsaking self-improvement for the sake of self-confidence.

What I find most interesting and useful about Lehrer's analysis of this research is the connection it allows me to make between (on the one hand) the neurological evidence that people who devote more attention to their mistakes learn from them more effectively and (on the other hand) my own empirical experience as a coach that fixating on mistakes can be demotivating and lead to feelings of worthlessness, while focusing on successes can stimulate feelings of optimism and resilience, even (especially) in light of recent struggles.

Carol Dweck's research provides me with the missing link; the essential factor isn't the relative amounts of attention we devote to our mistakes and successes, but whether we're holding a fixed mindset or a growth mindset about ourselves and our capabilities.  In the former case, we view mistakes as manifestations of our intrinsic character, as de facto evidence of our unworthiness--and so focusing on our mistakes generates feelings of shame and embarrassment and undermines our self-confidence.  We go to great lengths to avoid these feelings under the best of circumstances, so it's no surprise that when we make a mistake while holding a fixed mindset, the very last thing we want to do is devote more attention to it--and so we lose the opportunity to learn from it.

But in the latter case, we view mistakes as external events, as unfortunate things that have happened.  This isn't to say that we're avoiding responsibility for our mistakes, or that we don't feel bad as a result.  As Lehrer notes, those of us who learn best from our mistakes actually have a bigger neurological response to a mistake.  But we don't view mistakes as personal defects, and they 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.

The underlying question then becomes: What can we do to cultivate a growth mindset that will allow us to focus on our mistakes without feeling shame or losing confidence?  Many of my experiences with clients and students (and myself!) suggest that the first step is simply acknowledging any shame and embarrassment we do feel in the aftermath of a mistake, both to ourselves and to those around us.  At the very least, getting those uncomfortable feelings out in the open tends to diminish their power and allows us to choose what to do with them, rather than feeling driven in some way to escape their covert influence.

I know that particularly when I'm in a leadership role two of the most important things I can do are 1) quickly admit a mistake once I've made one, and 2) own up to my resulting feelings of shame or  embarrassment.  This makes it much safer for those around me to do the same, and the group's potential to support learning increases dramatically.  (And it's one reason why I encourage leaders to embrace mistakes, failure and surprises.)  That's not to say I find this easy, even though I get plenty of opportunities to practice--but it is a value I try to uphold.

For a discussion of specific steps that support the process of learning from mistakes, see my 2009 post on the same topic, based on Robert Brooks and Sam Goldstein's The Power of Resilience.

Thanks to @DanielCoyle for the initial reference to Lehrer's article.

Photo by Alex E. Proimos.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damasio restates these themes concisely later in the book:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Damasio writes in response:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where do emotions come from?

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

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

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

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

What purpose do emotions serve?

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

What is reasoning?

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

What role does emotion play in reasoning?

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

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

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

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

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

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In Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Self-Monitoring and Authenticity

Can we self-monitor and remain authentic?  When does self-monitoring become inauthentic self-presentation?  And what do we mean by "authenticity" anyway? 

After my recent post on Self-Monitoring, a good friend of mine wrote me:

My immediate response/question to the issue of self-monitoring, which I think is incredibly important and relevant, is how it intersects with building authentic and trusting relationships.  Can someone be so adept at self-monitoring, and have such strong intuition and sense of others' motivations and emotions, and thus adapt their behavior accordingly with every single interaction, that it could lead to questioning the authenticity of the self-monitoring individual--and thus an inability to build a truly trusting relationship?  Perhaps this is self-monitoring on steroids, which, like any behavior taken to its extreme, can actually be counter-productive at best and destructive at worst.  Or perhaps it is not self-monitoring at all but a true lack of an authentic self that is not defined in relation to others, or a highly evolved (devolved) mechanism for trying to bring others around to one's own actual self-interest.  Or perhaps it is merely manipulation at its finest.

My friend raises an important point--one that comes up regularly in my work as a coach, where I often help people determine how to develop and maintain more effective working relationships.  This process typically involves raising our level of self-awareness, learning more about how others perceive our default behavior, and modifying our behavior in response (when we decide its in our interest to do so.)  In some settings, such as Stanford's Interpersonal Dynamics course (aka "Touchy Feely"), this is one of the explicit and primary purposes of the experience, and students in that class always raise concerns about authenticity: If I'm consciously changing my behavior, am I being my authentic self?

Before I respond to my friend's concerns, let me address an underlying issue by asking what precisely do we mean by "authentic self"?  Further, how do we come to know this authentic self?  If we mean a sort of "elemental identity at the core of our personalities," you might say we have to discover our authentic self; it's revealed to our consciousness over time.  But I don't actually subscribe to this notion.  I think authenticity is a dynamic and subjective state of being that we phase into and out of, not a static feature of our internal landscape.

We're more or less authentic at any given moment, and it's in those experiences that we feel authentic that we are our authentic selves.  Of course, the dynamic and subjective nature of this state means not only that it's changing all the time, but also that our perspective on it is changing all the time.  How we define authenticity at one point in time may not be how we defined it in the past, or how we'll define it in the future.  So rather than discover our authentic selves, I believe we create our authentic selves.

We do so by trying out new behaviors and seeing how they fit with our self-concept, how they affect our relationships with others, and how they support our goals.  Most new behaviors feel inauthentic at first--I can't do this; it's not ME!  And if that feeling persists over time, we end the experiment and move on.  But my experience as a coach has made it clear just how often that feeling does not persist, and how capable we are of integrating the new behavior into our repertoire, expanding what it means to be authentic as we do so.  (My experience as a coach--and as a coaching client--has also highlighted the many obstacles we face in this process, from embarrassment to impatience.)

Returning to the concerns raised by my friend, I think it's helpful to view self-monitoring behavior along a continuum--say, from absent to "on steroids."  We've all encountered people who lack the ability to self-monitor effectively, and their clueless inability to adapt is cringe-inducing at best and downright traumatic at worst.  But we've also encountered people whose hyper-attentiveness to our responses causes us to doubt the truth of their self-presentation; we sense their intense desire to influence or please us, and we suspect there's more to the story that we're not being told.

I've worked with people who've given off this vibe before, and they've tended to be perfectionists with unusually strong drives to please others, particularly authority figures.  This isn't to suggest that these people aren't trying to manipulate us.  But to what end?  My experience suggests that they have an agenda that--to them--is worthwhile and even virtuous.  They simply fail to realize that the behaviors they're employing to pursuing that agenda cause the rest of us to question their motives and intentions.

My approach in these cases is to have a conversation (or series of conversations) in which I can 1) ask questions that will allow me to learn just what the other person's motives and intentions really are, and 2) share my reactions and responses to the specific behaviors I've observed.  Unfailingly, the issue isn't a lack of authenticity; rather, bad judgment, poor communication skills, and a set of mistaken assumptions have all combined to create a huge gap between intention and impact.

This isn't to say that truly inauthentic, unscrupulous, manipulative people don't exist--of course they do.  But when we encounter excessive self-monitoring in our daily professional lives, it's much more likely to be a by-product of well-meaning ineptitude.

(Many thanks to Scott Bristol, who's had a substantial influence on my thinking about authenticity, among other topics.)

Photo by rachelvoorhees.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.