Ed Batista

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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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.

 

Self-Monitoring

There's an emerging body of research which suggests that the ability to "self-monitor" has a significant affect on our relationships and professional prospects, particularly for women (cf. "Overcoming the Backlash Effect: Self-Monitoring and Women's Promotions," by Olivia O'Neill of George Mason and the GSB's Charles O'Reilly and "What’s Good for the Goose May Not Be Good for the Gander: The Benefits of Self-Monitoring for Men and Women" by the GSB's Frank Flynn.)

And a few months ago when I shared a link to the O'Neill/O'Reilly paper, a friend of mine replied, in essence, "Interesting--and just what does 'self-monitoring' look like in practice?"  Which prompted me to take a closer look at the research.

The concept of self-monitoring in both papers cited above (and in much related research) is based on a  13-question instrument developed by psychologists Richard Lennox and Raymond Wolfe.  This instrument was first defined in the June 1984 issue of the "Journal of Personality and Social Psychology"--here's an abstract, although the full article is behind the APA's paywall.  (Boo, academic publishing!)

The first 7 items in the instrument refer to one's "ability to modify self-presentation":

1) In social situations, I have the ability to alter my behavior if I feel that something else is called for.

2) I have the ability to control the way I come across to people, depending on the impression I wish to give them.

3) When I feel that the image I am portraying isn't working, I can readily change it to something that does.

4) I have trouble changing my behavior to suit different people and different situations.

5) I have found that I can adjust my behavior to meet the requirements of any situation I find myself in.

6) Even when it might be to my advantage, I have difficulty putting up a good front.

7) Once I know what the situation calls for, it's easy for me to regulate my actions accordingly.

And the final 6 items in the instrument refer to one's "sensitivity to expressive behaviors of others":

8) I am often able to read people's true emotions correctly through their eyes.

9) In conversations, I am sensitive to even the slightest change in the facial expression of the person I'm conversing with.

10) My powers of intuition are quite good when it comes to understanding others' emotions and motives.

11) I can usually tell when others consider a joke to be in bad taste, even though they may laugh convincingly.

12) I can usually tell when I've said something inappropriate by reading it in the listener's eyes.

13) If someone is lying to me, I usually know it at once from that person's manner of expression.

While I assume we'd all readily agree that the ability to "modify our self-presentations" and to "sense the expressive behaviors of others" are essential interpersonal skills, it can be challenging to determine how we might improve our skills in these areas without a clearer sense of just what those vague phrases mean.  So I find it helpful to see these concepts broken down into such specific behaviors. 

I don't know for certain whether this clarity actually supports our efforts to improve in these areas, or even the extent to which conscious intent makes a meaningful difference; perhaps some of these skills are simply innate, and I'd love to see further research on this.  But my experience as a coach certainly suggests that intention and attention matter a great deal with regard to any type of behavior.  I fully accept the premise that self-monitoring has a significant effect on our relationships, and I suspect that a clearer understanding of the behaviors that comprise self-monitoring, active intention to express those behaviors, and periodic reflection on our effectiveness all contribute to improved interpersonal experiences.

UPDATE: This post prompted a friend of mine to ask whether excessive self-monitoring leads to inauthentic behavior--for my response, see my follow-up post on Self-Monitoring and Authenticity.

Photo by impetus2. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons!

William James on Habit

The hell to be endured hereafter, of which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.  Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.  We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone.  Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its never so little scar.

William James, Psychology: Briefer Course, Chapter X

I recently finished James' deeply thought-provoking 1892 masterpiece, and one of the highlights is his chapter on Habit.  While I read James' literal comments on brain function with some caution--after all, he was born 149 years before the first successful fMRI study--I still find him a great source of wisdom on matters both psychological and philosophical.  And even if aspects of James' analysis have been superseded by a century of advances in neuroscience, his 19th-century perspective helps me understand today's research more fully.  (Having been introduced to James through such secondary sources as Robert Richardson's outstanding intellectual biography and Alain de Botton's Status Anxiety, I decided to read the "Briefer Course" in its entirety as a sort of historical foundation for a collection of neuroscience and cognitive psychology books I'm planning to read later this summer.)

Chapter X opens with a concise neurological definition of habit:

An acquired habit, from the physiological point of view, is nothing but a new pathway of discharge formed in the brain, by which certain incoming currents ever after tend to escape. [Emphasis original]

James continues with a discussion of the "physical basis" of habits, namely "pathways through the nerve-centres":

Plasticity, then, in the wide sense of the word, means the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence, but strong enough not to yield all at once.  Each relatively stable phase of equilibrium in a structure is marked by what we may call a new set of habits.  Organic matter, especially nervous tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of plasticity of this sort...

[Neurological] currents, once in [the brain], must find a way out.  In getting out they leave their traces in the paths which they take.  The only thing they can do, in short, is to deepen old paths or to make new ones; and the whole plasticity of the brain sums itself up in two words when we call it an organ in which currents pouring in from the sense-organs make with extreme facility paths which do not easily disappear.

James then moves on to the "practical effects of habit"--it "simplifies our movements, makes them accurate, and diminishes fatigue," and also "diminishes the conscious attention with which our acts are performed."  In addition, James notes, habits "depend on sensations not attended to...sensations to which we are usually inattentive; but that they are more than unconscious nerve-currents seems certain, for they catch our attention if they go wrong."

Having concluded his physiological analysis, James turns his attention to the "ethical and pedagogical importance" of habit, and here's where James' genius makes him as relevant as ever more than a century later.  Even if we view James' comments on brain and neural function as mere metaphor, they provide a meaningful foundation for a compelling argument on how best to cultivate useful habits (and why such a concept even matters):

The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.  It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund.  For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we should guard against the plague...

In Professor [Alexander] Bain's chapter on "Moral Habits" [from The Emotions and the Will, 1875]...two great maxims emerge from his treatment.  The first is that in the acquisition of a new habit, or the leaving off of an old one, we must take care to launch ourselves with as strong and decided an initiative as possible.  Accumulate all the possible circumstances which shall re-enforce the right motives; put yourself assiduously in conditions that encourage the new way; make engagements incompatible with the old; take a public pledge, if the case allows; in short, envelop your resolutions with every aid you know...

The second maxim is: Never suffer an exception to occur till the new habit is securely rooted in your life... Continuity of training is the great means of making the nervous system act infallibly right...

A third maxim may be added to the preceding pair: Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.  It is not in the moment of their forming, but in the moment of their producing motor effects, that resolves and aspirations communicate the new 'set' to the brain...

No matter how full a reservoir of maxims one may possess, and no matter how good one's sentiments may be, if one have not taken advantage of every concrete opportunity to act, one's character may remain entirely unaffected for the better.  With mere good intentions, hell is proverbially paved...

A tendency to act only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain 'grows' to their use...

[I]t is not simply particular lines of discharge, but also general forms of discharge, that seem to be grooved out by habit in the brain.  Just as, if we let our emotions evaporate, they get into a way of evaporating; so there is reason to suppose that if we often flinch from making an effort, before we know it the effort-making capacity will be gone; and that, if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time.  Attention and effort are, as we shall see later, but two names for the same psychic fact.  To what brain-processes they correspond we do not know.  The strongest reason for believing that they do depend on brain-processes at all, and are not pure acts of the spirit, is just this fact, that they seem in some degree subject to the law of habit, which is a material law.  As a final practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we may, then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.  That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test. [All emphasis original]

That last passage in particular makes my heart beat just a little quicker--I'm motivated to rise to James' challenge, and I'd like to think that I do in such small, healthy habits as going to the gym or meditating when I don't really feel like it, or getting up earlier than usual to do some heavy reading.  Of course, I'm all too aware of how often I fall short, and how easily I can fall prey to unhealthy habits--not getting enough sleep, wasting time online, even avoiding a difficult conversation I need to have.  But my increasing awareness in recent years of the power of any habitual behavior--of the many ways in which both healthy and unhealthy habits reinforce and perpetuate themselves--is what sparks my interest in James' perspective in the first place.

I'm reminded of Don't Break the Chain, one of most effective--and simplest--motivational tools I've ever found.  I first began using DBTC to track my workouts in March 2008, a process that's helped me make regular exercise one of my most deeply rooted habits.  Here's my "Exercise" calendar for the last three months (as of July 12)--each red block represents a day I worked out:

Earlier this year I began to using this same tool to track other habits I was trying to cultivate (or break).  For example, here's my "Sleep" calendar for the same time period--each blue block represents what I'd call a good night's sleep, preferably a solid 7 hours:

As you can see, the habit of a healthy sleep pattern hasn't yet taken root in my life.  But if awareness alone is insufficient to motivate change and inculcate new habits, it's a necessary first step, and at least now I have some data at my disposal to nudge me down that path.  (It's also striking how motivated I am to do the right thing in order to earn the reward of "checking off" a day on my calendars--another manifestation of the power of habit.)

And while clearly a number of complex, interlocking factors are at work here, I do find James' perspective on habit a compelling explanation for my various successes and failures at sustaining healthy habits and breaking unhealthy ones.

(As I mentioned above, I read the "Briefer Course" as a precursor to a set of contemporary books on neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and I hope to refer again to James as I work through them, particularly on the topics of attention, emotion and volition.  But hopefully this discussion has shed some light on why I find James such a superb intellectual companion, and why I look to him for guidance and encouragement.)

Happiness, Excellence and Boundaries: A Framework for Leaders (Part 2 of 3)

This is Part 2 in a 3-part series of posts based on a workshop I developed and presented to a group of leaders in Los Angeles in June.  Here's Part 1, on Happiness (which includes a discussion of this series' fundamental premise), and here's Part 3, on Boundaries.

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II. Excellence, Signature Strengths and Strategic Quitting

Peter Drucker and Managing Oneself

Peter Drucker was one of the 20th century's foremost organizational thinkers, and his work has had a substantial influence not only on my approach to executive coaching but also on my own personal and professional development. Drucker's brilliant essay Managing Oneself, which I discussed earlier this year, was first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1999 and highlights the importance of focusing on our strengths:

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.

I find Drucker's article a valuable resource in helping my clients and students make decisions about their careers because it encourages us to answer three challenging questions:  What are my strengths?  What do I value? and Under what conditions do I do my best work?

I believe all three questions are equally important, but at the moment I want to focus on the first.  So ask yourself: What are my strengths? Where could 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?

Martin Seligman and Signature Strengths

We can begin to address these questions by returning to the work of psychologist Martin Seligman (discussed previously in Part 1 of this series) and his concept of Signature Strengths. 

In seeking to understand the components of mental health Seligman and his colleagues identified six fundamental virtues which he describes as "the core characteristics endorsed by almost all religious and philosophical traditions [which, taken together,] capture the notion of good character."  These virtues are as follows--I've added definitions from Seligman in parentheses where I find them useful:

1.Wisdom and Knowledge

2. Courage ("The open-eyed exercise of will toward…worthy ends that are not certain of attainment.")

3. Love and Humanity

4. Justice

5. Temperance ("The appropriate and moderate expression of your appetites and wants.")

6. Transcendence ("Emotional strengths that reach outside and beyond you to connect you to something larger and more permanent.")

As Seligman notes, these six virtues "are unworkably abstract for psychologists who want to build and measure these things.  Moreover, for each virtue, we can think of several ways to achieve it, and the goal of measuring and building leads us to focus on these specific routes."  So he and his colleagues also  identified 24 traits associated with happiness, meaning and fulfillment--the practical means by which we exercise the primary virtues--which he calls strengths.  These traits share three characteristics:

• Like the primary virtues, these strengths are ubiquitous, valued by almost every culture around the world.
• The 24 strengths are learnable, meaning that they're not innate and can be developed.
• Finally, the strengths are voluntary, meaning that they're not automatic reflexes and must be intentionally exercised.

Here's a list of the 24 strengths that Seligman organizes in clusters under each of the primary virtues:

Wisdom and Knowledge

1. Curiosity / Interest in the World

2. Love of Learning

3. Judgment / Critical Thinking / Open-Mindedness

4. Ingenuity / Originality / Practical Intelligence / Street Smarts

5. Social Intelligence / Personal Intelligence / Emotional Intelligence

6. Perspective

Courage

7. Valor and Bravery

8. Perseverance / Industry / Diligence

9. Integrity / Genuineness / Honesty

Humanity and Love

10. Kindness and Generosity

11. Loving and Allowing Oneself to Be Loved

Justice

12. Citizenship / Duty / Teamwork / Loyalty

13. Fairness and Equity

14. Leadership

Temperance

15. Self-Control

16. Prudence / Discretion / Caution

17. Humility and Modesty

Transcendence

18. Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence

19. Gratitude

20. Hope / Optimism / Future-Mindedness

21. Spirituality / Sense of Purpose / Faith / Religiousness

22. Forgiveness and Mercy

23. Playfulness and Humor

24. Zest / Passion / Enthusiasm

Most of these traits are self-explanatory, but I refer you to Seligman's book Authentic Happiness for complete definitions that help to explain why he frequently buckets multiple traits as a single "strength."

What Are My Signature Strengths?

Seligman and his colleague Christopher Peterson devised a questionnaire that allows us to determine which of these traits are most important to us, known as the VIA (Values in Action) Survey of Character Strengths.  The complete, 240-question version of this survey is available online through the VIA Institute on Character and the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center, which are both associated with Seligman.  A 48-question paper version is also available in Authentic Happiness, although it actually takes more time to complete than the longer online version because you have to score it yourself.  (I've completed all three, and I find the online versions more useful.  Registration with an email address is required at both sites, but it's a simple, straightforward process, and I've never received any spam from either organization as a result.)

These surveys rank the 24 strengths in order of their importance to us, but Seligman encourages us to also assess them qualitatively in order to be able to apply them most effectively.  He writes:

Look at the list of your top five strengths.  Most of these will feel authentic to you, but one or two of them may not be the real you...

I believe each person possesses several signature strengths.  These are strengths of character that a person self-consciously owns, celebrates, and (if he or she can arrange life successfully) exercises every day in work, love, play and parenting.  Take your life of top strengths, and for each one ask if any of these criteria apply:

• A sense of ownership and authenticity ("This is the real me")
• A feeling of excitement while displaying it, particularly at first
• A rapid learning curve as the strength is first practiced
• Continuous learning of new ways to enact the strength
• A sense of yearning to find ways to use it
• A feeling of inevitability in using the strength ("Try and stop me")
• Invigoration rather than exhaustion while using the strength
• The creation and pursuit of personal projects that revolve around it
• Joy, zest, enthusiasm, even ecstasy while using it

If one or more of these apply to your top strengths [as reported by the survey], they are signature strengths... Herein is my formulation of the good life: Using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of your life to bring abundant gratification and authentic happiness.

Seth Godin and Strategic Quitting

While I find Seligman's definition of the good life useful because it supports my sense of agency in the process of attaining fulfillment and happiness, I can also find that same quality overwhelming, particularly when things aren't going well--and when I may be susceptible to feeling that a lack of fulfillment or happiness is a deficiency on my part, as if I just weren't trying hard enough.

I'm reminded of another quote from Drucker's "Managing Oneself":

[M]ost people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties.  By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths?  How do I perform?  and, What are my values?  And then they can and should decide where they belong.

Or rather, they should be able to decide where they do not belong... [Emphasis mine]

Drucker is pushing us to recognize that there are many careers and jobs that are not a good fit with our strengths, our values or the conditions under which we do our best work--and we need to be able to close doors, limit options and move forward in order to find those places where we do fit.  Given that many of my clients and students are making or considering a career transition and are looking to expand, not limit, their options, this concept can be both scary and liberating.

But what if you know you're in the right job, in the right career, on the right path...and you're still feeling unhappy or unfulfilled?  Perhaps rather than making a BIG change, you could make some little changes.  This leads me to the concept of "strategic quitting," a term from Seth Godin's 2007 book The Dip that I first discussed a few years ago.  Godin writes:

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.  Reactive quitting and serial quitting are the bane of those that strive (and fail) to get what they want. And most people do just that.  They quit when it's painful and stick when they can't be bothered to quit...

Strategic quitting is a conscious decision you make based on the choices available to you.  If you realize you're at a dead end compared with what you could be investing in, quitting is not only a reasonable choice, it's a smart one...

Coping is what people do when they try to muddle through... The problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance... All coping does is waste your time and misdirect your energy.  If the best you can do is cope, you're better off quitting.  Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else...

Quit the wrong stuff.  Stick with the right stuff.

I find Godin's framework a useful parallel to Drucker's on a smaller scale.  Where Drucker is helping us chart our life by choosing (and rejecting) careers and jobs, Godin is helping us plan our days and weeks by sticking with (and quitting) projects, responsibilities, ventures.

In both cases they're encouraging us to focus--to focus our time, energy and attention on areas where we can deliver excellence.  In my experience most of us are over-committed, spreading ourselves too thin, and failing to deliver excellence where it really counts.  We're coping, when we should be quitting.  But what Drucker and Godin are saying is that only excellence matters. Improving from incompetence to mediocrity is worse than useless, because time and effort expended in those areas are being stolen from areas where excellence is within our grasp.

I find it liberating to think along these lines, not only in my professional life but also in my personal life.  Where can I deliver excellence?  Where should I expect excellence in return?  And how can I focus my time and energy to make this as likely as possible?

This allows me to do some strategic quitting--or even better, not to start misguided efforts in the first place--and substantially increase the return on my personal investments.  And even when I can't quit outright, I'm better able to set boundaries that put projects and activities in perspective and prevent them from hogging resources (most significantly, my finite time and energy) that they don't deserve.

And the real payoff comes when I bring my signature strengths to bear on the process of strategic quitting.  By understanding not only what skills I possess but also which skills I find particularly fulfilling to exercise, and then by focusing my time, energy and attention on activities where those skills are called upon--and by quitting those activities where they're NOT called upon--I find that I experience Seligman's definition of the good life more readily and with less effort.

Next Steps and Questions to Consider

• Take the VIA Survey of Character Strengths, online at the VIA Institute on Character or the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center, or on paper in Seligman's Authentic Happiness.
• What are your Signature Strengths, and which ones are most meaningful to you?
• How can you make more effective use of your strengths to deliver excellence?
• Where are you merely coping rather than succeeding?
• How do these efforts correspond with your scores on the Strengths Survey?
• What strategic quitting can you do?
• Commit to employing your three most meaningful Signature Strengths more intentionally for three weeks and assess their impact.

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Again, here's Part 1 of this 3-part series, on Happiness (which includes a discussion of the series' fundamental premise), and here's Part 3, on Boundaries.

Continued thanks to my colleagues Mike Allison, Andrea Corney, Carole Robin, Lisa Schwallie and Ricki Frankel.  And many, many thanks to Peter Drucker, Martin Seligman, and Seth Godin--their work has made it possible for me to be of much greater service to my clients and students, and I'm tremendously grateful.

Happiness, Excellence and Boundaries: A Framework for Leaders (Part 1 of 3)

This is Part 1 in a 3-part series of posts based on a workshop I developed and presented to a group of leaders in Los Angeles in June.  (Here's Part 2, on Excellence, and here's Part 3, on Boundaries.)  The underlying concepts discussed here originate with social psychologists Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi; business thinkers Peter Drucker, Seth Godin and Michael Gilbert; and executive coach Susan Scott, and I'm deeply grateful to them for their influential and important work.

Thanks to my colleague Mike Allison for the opportunity to spend time with a group of people whose growth and development he's been supporting for the past few years, and many thanks to the members of that group for welcoming me into their community.  Thanks also to my Stanford colleagues Andrea Corney, Carole Robin, Lisa Schwallie and Ricki Frankel--the five of us worked together developing what eventually became Taking Stock and Moving Forward, an elective taught by Carole to second-year students at the Graduate School of Business.  I'd already been working with the concepts touched on in these posts for several years (and in this series I often revise passages from my earlier work), but the experience of collaborating with that team was incredibly educational and furthered my understanding immensely.

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Fundamental Premise

Happiness: 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.

Excellence: Leaders cultivate excellence in our organizations by striving for it ourselves. We achieve excellence most readily by focusing on our strengths and making the most of them, not by focusing on our weaknesses and seeking to overcome them.  In order to employ this approach, we first need to identify our "signature strengths," the traits that are most meaningful to us and in which we find the most fulfillment, and then we typically need to do some "strategic quitting," letting go of certain responsibilities or tasks in order to focus on others where excellence is obtainable.

Boundaries: The demands of leadership and the dynamic nature of work today inevitably make the concept of "life/work balance" seem out of reach--but "boundaries," not "balance," should be our goal.  Good boundaries allow leaders to live an integrated life, fulfilling our organizational responsibilities while insuring that our other needs are met as well.  But we can’t establish boundaries alone—we need to collaborate and communicate with others, a process that requires us to step into difficult conversations more effectively.

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Part I. Happiness and Intentional Activities

Martin Seligman and Positive Psychology

The field of psychology has, for the most part, focused on mental illness and its causes.  These efforts have met with success—we can effectively treat and in some cases fully cure most forms of mental illness.  But a consequence of this approach is that we know relatively less about mental health and its causes.

Beginning in the late 1980s and '90s, a number of psychologists recognized this gap in our understanding and turned their attention to the study of mental health, happiness and other forms of high functioning.  Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania was a leader in this group, and he's often credited as the father of "positive psychology," as this field of research came to be known.

Here's a brief example of the type of the research conducted by positive psychologists, drawn from Seligman's 2002 book Authentic Happiness:

Fordyce Emotions Questionnaire

Question 1: In general, how happy do you usually feel?  Pick the one statement that best describes your average happiness.

10. Extremely happy (feeling ecstatic, joyous, fantastic)

9. Very happy (feeling really good, elated)

8. Pretty happy (spirits high, feeling good)

7. Mildly happy (feeling fairly good & somewhat cheerful)

6. Slightly happy (just a bit above normal)

5. Neutral (not particularly happy or unhappy)

4. Slightly unhappy (just a bit below neutral)

3. Mildly unhappy (just a bit low)

2. Pretty unhappy (somewhat "blue," spirits down)

1. Very unhappy (depressed, spirits very low)

0. Extremely unhappy (utterly depressed, completely down)

Question 2: On average, what percent of the time do you feel happy?  What percent of the time do you feel unhappy?  What percent of the time do you feel neutral (neither happy nor unhappy)?

The percentage of time I feel happy:

The percentage of time I feel unhappy:

The percentage of time I feel neutral:

Average responses from a sample of 3,050 American adults

I'm not drawing any particular conclusions from this specific set of data, but I do find it a useful introduction to the quantitative measures of happiness developed by positive psychologists, a body of research that underlies the findings discussed in the next section.

Sonja Lyubomirsky and Happiness Strategies

Sonja Lyubomirsky is a social psychologist who studied with Seligman, completed her Ph.D. at Stanford and now teaches at UC Riverside, where she has been researching happiness for a number of years.  Lyubomirsky's work culminated in the 2008 book The How of Happiness, which I discussed extensively in February 2009 and which includes the following graph:

This image conveys three of the most important (and surprising) findings from positive psychology research:

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.  (As the graph indicates, the other half of our happiness is attributable to a combination of life circumstances and intentional activities.)  Lyubomirsky writes:

The set point for happiness is similar to the set point for weight. Some people are blessed with skinny dispositions: Even when they're not trying, they easily maintain their weight. By contrast, others have to work extraordinarily hard to keep their weight at a desirable level, and the moment they slack off even a bit, the pounds creep back on.

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.  This framework fits with our current understanding of genetics in which the question of "Nature vs. Nurture?" has been supplanted by a model in which genes we possess are turned on or off by certain behaviors and factors in our environment.

2. A surprisingly small amount of our happiness—just 10 percent—is determined by our life circumstances.  Lyubomirsky continues:

[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.

Lyubomirsky notes that this finding runs contrary to many of our efforts to obtain happiness:

One of the great ironies of our quest to become happier is that so many of us focus on changing the circumstances of our lives in the misguided hope that those changes will deliver happiness… An impressive body of research now shows that trying to be happy by changing our life situations ultimately will not work.

Why do life changes account for so little? Because of a very powerful force that psychologists call hedonic adaptation…

Human beings are remarkably adept at becoming rapidly accustomed to sensory or physiologic changes. When you walk in from the bitter cold, the warmth of the crackling fire feels heavenly at first, but you quickly get used to it and may even become overheated… This experience is labeled physiological or sensory adaptation. The same phenomenon, however, occurs with hedonic shifts--that is, relocation, marriages, job changes--that make you happier for a time, but only a short time…

Human beings adapt to favorable changes in wealth, housing, and possessions, to being beautiful or being surrounded by beauty, to good health, and even to marriage…

Although we may achieve temporary boosts in well-being by moving to new parts of the country, securing raises, or changing our appearances, such boosts are unlikely to be long-lasting. The primary reason…is that people readily and rapidly adapt to positive circumstantial changes.

The implication is that almost all efforts to increase and maintain happiness through changes in life circumstances are doomed to fail. Even the most positive changes will eventually be taken for granted as we adapt to them, and their long-term impact on our happiness will be minimal.

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 thesis: 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.  She concludes:

If we observe genuinely happy people, we shall find that they do not just sit around being contented. They make things happen. They pursue new understandings, seek new achievements, and control their thoughts and feelings. In sum, our intentional effortful activities have a powerful effect on how happy we are, over and above the effect of our set points and the circumstances in which we find ourselves. If an unhappy person wants to experience interest, enthusiasm, contentment, peace and joy, he or she can make it happen by learning the habits of a happy person.

Twelve Happiness Strategies

The twelve activities described by Lyubomirsky as "evidence-based happiness-increasing strategies whose practice is supported by scientific research" include:

1. 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.

2. Cultivating Optimism: Keeping a journal in which you imagine and write about the best possible future for yourself or practicing to look at the bright side of every situation.

3. Avoiding Overthinking and Social Comparison: Using strategies (such as distraction) to cut down on how often you dwell on your problems and compare yourself with others.

4. Practicing Acts of Kindness: Doing good things for others, whether friends or strangers, either directly or anonymously, either spontaneously or planned.

5. Nurturing Social Relationships: Picking a relationship in need of strengthening and investing time and energy in healing, cultivating, affirming and enjoying it.

6. Developing Strategies for Coping: Practicing ways to endure or surmount a recent stress, hardship or trauma.

7. 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.

8. Increasing Flow* Experiences: Increasing the number of experiences at home and work in which you "lose" yourself, which are challenging and absorbing.

9. Savoring Life's Joys: Paying close attention, taking delight, and replaying life's momentary pleasures and wonders, through thinking, writing, drawing, or sharing with another.

10. Committing to Your Goals: Picking one, two, or three significant goals that are meaningful to you and devoting time and effort to pursuing them.

11. Practicing Religion and Spirituality: Becoming more involved in your church, temple or mosque or reading and pondering spiritually themed books.

12. Taking Care of Your Body: Engaging in physical activity, meditating and smiling and laughing.

These aren't the only meaningful happiness strategies, but they're all evidenced-based and supported by the research of Lyubomirsky and her colleagues, and together they constitute a list sufficiently broad so that each one of us can find the set of activities that's right for us as an individual.

* A note on "flow": The concept of "flow" has been the primary research topic of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Cheek-sent-me-high).  When we chart our mental state during activities that present us with a varying level of challenge relative to our skill--see below--we find that when our skill is substantially higher than the challenge being posed, we become bored.  Conversely, when the challenge is substantially higher than our skill, we become anxious.  And when the two are relatively balanced, we find ourselves in a state of "flow," where we lose track of time and become fully absorbed in the activity.  This is the state we're referring to when we say we're "in a groove" or "in the zone."  While Csikszentmihalyi's research has shown a number of advantages to cultivating opportunities to experience flow, Lyubomirsky's work shows that more flow experiences result in greater happiness.

What Strategies Are Right for You?

All of the happiness strategies listed above are potential options for us, but it's essential to choose strategies that best address the sources of our unhappiness, that take greatest advantage of our strengths, talents and goals, and that can be adapted most readily to our needs and lifestyle. In determining which happiness strategies are best for us, we should consider the following factors:

"Naturalness": Some strategies simply feel "natural" to us, making it easier for us to stick with them.

Enjoyment: Some strategies provide us with intrinsic enjoyment and seem both interesting and challenging to us.

Value: We inherently value and identify with some strategies, and would practice them freely even when it's not enjoyable.

Guilt: Strategies that work best don't induce feelings of guilt, shame or anxiety.

Situation: Finally, strategies that work best aren't mandated by our immediate situation, but are more universally applicable and can be practiced in many different contexts.

The How of Happiness contains a "Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic," which Lyubomirsky developed based on the work of psychologist Ken Sheldon to help you select the strategies that are the best fit for you based on the criteria above.  Lyubomirsky offers a short online version of the diagnostic, but I find the full version much more useful, although it's a little more time-consuming to complete.  Here's a printer-friendly paper version of the diagnostic (PDF, 35 KB, requires Adobe Reader).

Note that the bulk The How of Happiness describes each of the 12 strategies in detail, including the specific activities that have the greatest impact on happiness as well as certain limitations and challenges associated with each strategy.  For a full understanding of how to implement these strategies most effectively, I highly recommend reading the complete book.

Next Steps and Questions to Consider

• Complete Lyubomirsky's "Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic" online or on paper.
• What strategies feel like the best fit for you?
• How might you implement them in your own life?
• Commit to three strategies for the next three weeks and assess their impact.

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Here's Part 2 of this 3-part series, on Excellence and here's Part 3, on Boundaries.  Again, thanks to my colleagues Mike Allison, Andrea Corney, Carole Robin, Lisa Schwallie and Ricki Frankel.  And many, many thanks to Martin Seligman, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and their colleagues--their groundbreaking research into these topics has made it possible for me to be of much greater service to my clients and students, and I'm tremendously grateful.

Photo credits: "Happiness" by babasteve.  "Excellence" by neal_mcquaid.  "Boundaries" by lemoncat1.  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.