Ed Batista

Skin in the Game

 

Work that's truly rewarding requires that we that we commit ourselves fully to the endeavor. We have "skin in the game," you might say, like an investor who's putting his own capital on the line. In this sense, coaching my clients and students isn't just (or even) a job, it's a highly personal experience in which I take real risks in the service of meaningful gains. And I suspect the same is true for you and your work, in one way or another.

But while having skin in the game allows us to do our best work, it also exposes us to risk. When we succeed it's all the more gratifying, and when we struggle, it's all the more disheartening. And I've had some challenges over the past week that have led me to reflect both on how I manage my response in the moment and on how I recover from setbacks over time. While I've written before about learning from mistakes and continue to apply those lessons, I've also found myself relying on the following simple guidelines:

1) Own Up To It

I'm not afraid of making mistakes; I've learned that perfection is damning evidence that I'm playing it safe, aiming too low and doing a disservice to my clients and students. But I still feel the sting of embarrassment and shame when I do make a mistake, and my first impulse in response to those emotions is to reject them and distract attention from their source. And yet I've also learned that I need to resist that impulse, not only to walk my talk as a coach, but also simply to grow as a person.

I've seen and experienced this dynamic over and over again: When we screw up as leaders (or in any differentiated authority role), the most important step we can take is to acknowledge reality, to admit our mistake, to own up to it. No matter what else we want to say, no matter what other factors influenced our actions, everything starts with that acknowledgment--and no real progress will be made until it occurs.

This week I became impatient during a group exercise and forcefully interrupted a student, who felt angry and hurt as a result. Thankfully, she felt enough trust in me to express those emotions, and I was able to hear her and express my embarrassment, which allowed her to hear why I had become impatient in the first place. It wasn't my most skillful moment as a coach, but it was a successful repair that allowed the two of us to move forward.

2) Ask For What You Need

I'm used to being a source of support and guidance for other people--it's probably the fundamental quality that led me into coaching. But while that role is deeply fulfilling to me, it's also a potential trap. Getting stuck in a support role can make it hard to understand internally and to communicate to others just what I need when I'm struggling myself. But this makes it all the more important to slow down, look inside, and articulate what I need.

I know I'm no exception in this regard. The best leaders and mentors I've known are people who put others' needs before their own, who make sure their troops are fed before they sit down to eat. But the very best of them are also able to step out of that pattern and to ask for help. I'm not particuarly good at this, but I'm learning.

Tonight Amy asked me if there was anything she could do to help me cope with the dark mood that had descended upon me, and initially my mind was blank. "No," I said, "I can't think of anything." But I kept at it and realized that I didn't want her to do anything--I didn't want encouragement or problem-solving. I just wanted empathy--I just wanted her to say, "I'm sorry; that sounds really shitty." I don't need to hear that often, or for long--but when I need it, I really need it, and it's really helpful.

3) Take Care of Yourself

This is deceptively easy in principle, and damn hard in practice--by definition people with skin in the game thrive on challenges, and when things get tough we get excited.  That attitude helps me overcome obstacles, but it also leads me down some blind alleys. The paradox with coaching--and, I believe, with any meaningful work that's intellectually and emotionally challenging--is that it doesn't necessarily yield to sheer effort. When I'm struggling as a professional I can't just muscle through it, and sometimes I need to do just the opposite--ease up, lower my stress levels, take care of myself.

I've learned from people like Bill George, who's "meditated regularly for thirty years, not as a religious or spiritual practice, but as a personal discipline to relieve stress." I've also learned from hard experience that when I let work push exercise off the my daily schedule--once a regular response in times of struggle--I condemn myself to a cycle of overstress and underperformance. I'm also (finally) listening to recent research on the importance of sleep, not only for effective performance but also for long-term health.

The past few days I've been unusually tired, and rather than push myself beyond that limit, I've listened to my body and have gone for walks rather than hitting the gym, or have simply meditated instead. I've also prioritized sleep over work--like leaving this post undone last night and coming back to it this morning. Finally, I have allowed work to push regular sessions with my own coach off the calendar, a situation that'll be rectified this week.

4) Keep Calm and Carry On

I'm only half-joking--I deeply believe in the power of mindset to shape our reality and, subsequently, our performance. Having skin in the game means that we're subject to high highs and low lows, and it's important to keep those experiences in perspective. In part that ability is a function of life experience--I first read this quote from David Bradford 6 years ago, and it's stuck with me:

If you live long enough, you realize that you can fall off the horse and get back on again... Failure is inevitable, and what's important is how you handle it, not how you avoid it.

But "life experience" is in a way just shorthand for mindset--having failed, and struggled, and simply made mistakes for many years now, I'm no longer up-ended when this occurs. I may be responsible for these events, and I expect to hold myself accountable for them, but I don't view them as intrinsic character flaws.

This isn't to say I'm not subject to grey moods and feelings of frustration or even despair, and when those feelings strike I think it's healthy to acknowledge them. But where I once might have gotten stuck in those moods for longer than was useful, I now find it possible to feel them and let them go, a process that's supported by all the steps mentioned above and also by writing posts like this.

Photo by gingerpig2000. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Carpe Diem (RIP, Moss Room)

Seize the day. We all support the sentiment, of course, but the complete line from Horace makes it much more compelling:

Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future.

I'm certainly more motivated to do something today when I admit that tomorrow might not come. And the message of this post is: Don't wait. Do it today. You might not have another chance.

If that's sufficient motivation for you, great--you may not need to read any further. What follows is a discursive, even self-indulgent piece of writing intended to preserve some beautiful memories that will serve to remind me why it's so important not to wait when an opportunity presents itself.

In February 1946, George Orwell published an essay in the Evening Standard titled "The Moon Under Water":

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights...

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its "atmosphere."

Orwell goes on to describe his pub in great detail, down to the color of the crockery and the terms of endearment used by the barmaids. What matters most to him, though, is the way these characteristics add up to a warm, welcoming environment. I'm so enchanted by Orwell's vision of this "great, good place" that my heart always sinks at his sudden revelation, even though it comes as no surprise:

But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.

That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don't know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities...

But, to be fair, I do know of a few pubs that almost come up to the Moon Under Water. I have mentioned above ten qualities that the perfect pub should have and I know one pub that has eight of them. Even there, however, there is no draught stout, and no china mugs.

For the past two years Amy and I have enjoyed our own Moon Under Water--not in idealized form, but an actual place, a restaurant called the Moss Room. It opened in the basement of the newly revamped California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park in 2008, but we only discovered it in 2010 after Amy went there for lunch with colleagues.

A unique combination of factors made the Moss Room so special to us: It was within walking distance of our apartment in the Richmond, and even on a cold, rainy night walking up to Golden Gate Park is a lovely experience. The physical space was enchanting, starting with the after-hours entrance at the side of the museum that made the place feel like a speakeasy, a feeling that grew as you took the stairs below-ground. And the food was routinely outstanding--I can honestly say that I loved every single dish I ever had there, and we ate there a lot.

But the primary reason we loved the Moss Room was the people--manager and sommelier Kristen Capella, bartender Robert Baker, servers Tuni and Ashley and host Katherine (whose last names we never learned), and "new" manager Rafael Jimenez Rivera, who took Kristen's place late last year after she was asked to help open AQ downtown. They were all spectacularly great at their jobs. Kristen was such a master of her wine list that after our first visit we never ordered a bottle again--we just asked her to pick for us, and she inevitably found the most fascinating wines that perfectly complemented our meal. Robert was, bar none (heh), the best bartender I've ever had the pleasure of patronizing, and his passion for the history and art of his craft informed every drink. Tuni, Ashley and Katherine made us feel truly appreciated and cared for. We usually sat at a table of Tuni's--#50, at the far right in the picture above--and she was always candid (and right) about the menu's strengths and weaknesses on a given night, and uncanny in her ability to both predict and remember our likes and dislikes. And all of them were simply engaging, interesting people who made a really good restaurant a great one.

To be clear, Amy and I love eating out, and eating and drinking at the Moss Room was a very pleasurable experience. But we also discovered the Moss Room at a particularly important time in our lives. Amy's dad and a student of mine passed away in 2009, and we spent the next year in a state of grief and shock, compounded by a number of additional personal struggles. We were emerging from that period when Amy first visited the Moss Room, and it was an incredible gift to find this little community--one that also happened to serve amazing food and cocktails--just a short walk from our home. It was a respite, a place to let go of our cares and learn to relax and have fun again.

You'll notice that I've been using the past tense--last month, just after Christmas, we learned that the Moss Room was going to close, immediately, and that New Year's Eve was going to be its final night of operation. From a business perspective, I wasn't entirely surprised--it's an offbeat, out-of-the-way location, and many nights it was well under capacity--but from a personal perspective I was stunned. I actually cried.

But as much as I'll miss the Moss Room, I've made peace with its abrupt disappearance from my life because Amy and I seized an opportunity not only to have one last meal there but also to thank the people we knew. As Christmas approached, we felt so grateful for everything they had done for us that we decided to get them presents. Nothing big--just something to express our appreciation and let them know that they had made a small but meaningful difference in our lives. We stopped in to drop off the gifts and to have a quick cocktail--I don't remember why, but we weren't planning to stay, and almost left. But at the last minute we said, what the hell, we won't get a chance to come back until after New Year's, let's stay. So we did.

It was an amazing meal, as expected. Robert's cocktails were perfect, and Tuni was incredibly indulgent and extra dishes turned up in between courses, and we just couldn't have been any happier. I'd be upset if we'd missed that last meal, that last chance to say goodbye to the Moss Room, even though we didn't know that was what we were doing at the time. But I'd be much more upset if we'd missed that chance to say "Thank you" to the people who made that experience--and so many like it--possible for us.

I know we'll continue to see Kristin at AQ, and we'll surely see Robert at his next bar, and hopefully we'll cross paths with Tuni and Ashley and Katherine again. But we'll never have the Moss Room again--that little community will never be re-assembled. So the simple lesson I've learned is: Stay for dinner; there may not be another meal--and thank someone who deserves it; you may not get another chance to let them know how you feel. 

Adult Thumb-Sucking

Lately I've been paying closer attention to the steady, low-level urge I often feel to check my phone for emails, texts, tweets and other notifications. I can justify this urge with any number of "good" reasons: I keep my phone on silent so it won't interrupt a coaching session, and I might have missed something important. A client or student may need to reach me, and I want to be responsive to them. Amy may have texted me about something pressing, and... Etc.

Those reasons are all true, and yet they don't fully explain my behavior. I've realized that this urge--and my almost automatic response to obey it--has a more emotional, less cognitive explanation: When I feel a little anxious or bored, I can check my phone, and if something new is there, my anxiety is eased and my boredom is relieved. It's a form of adult thumb-sucking.

There are times when this urge disappears, such as when I'm in a coaching session with a client or student, or when I'm in a meaningful conversation with Amy or a friend.  And there are times when this urge is almost overpowering, such as when I'm in a dull meeting or making awkward small talk, or when I'm struggling with a difficult piece of writing.

All behavior is adaptive, so it's unhelpful to simply characterize this urge as "bad" and strive to quash it without understanding 1) what I'm adapting to, 2) how that adaptation serves me (and how it leads me off course), and 3) when I should follow it (and when I should resist it).

I'm clearly adapting to a set of inner drives that are important parts of my makeup. I'm usually highly attuned to my social environment, particularly signals that suggest another person's need for support or engagement, and this allows me to be an effective coach (and husband and friend) but can also generate anxiety when I want to connect but am unable to.  I'm also typically a quick thinker who needs a lot of stimulation to avoid boredom--which is one reason why I find it difficult to meditate and yet keep trying.

Checking my phone obviously helps me adapt to these drives, and this adaptation serves me in many ways. Clients and students often express appreciation for my responsiveness, and note that they feel respected and cared for as a result. At times I can get a lot of work done on multiple fronts simultaneously. And I stay connected with a number of people who are important to me as a result.

But compulsively checking my phone leads me off course in a number of ways as well. In the moment, it tells the people in my physical presence that I'm less interested in them than I am in my virtual network, which can undermine my relationships. It contributes to unrealistic expectations regarding my availability and responsiveness. It  disrupts my concentration when I'm struggling to think through difficult work, requiring me to switch contexts and rapidly adjust from one mode of working to another. And perhaps most importantly, I suspect that there's a neurological impact, resulting in diminished impulse control in general.

As noted above, when I'm fully engaged in a coaching session or conversation I don't feel this urge at all and have no need to resist it. But I believe there are a number of situations in which I'd be well served to do so, both interpersonally and in my writing and other reflective work. It's not difficult to manage this urge when I'm coaching--my dedication to my craft helps me focus on the people in front of me and keep any conceptual distractions at bay. The real challenge is when I'm writing, reading or doing other work alone--it's always tempting to set aside any conceptual challenges I face in order to deal with the "real" issues posed by a client or friend (or Twitter follower.)

Photo by syauqee. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Why I (Keep Trying To) Meditate

Photo by Holly Ford Brown.

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

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

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

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

I see it as a four-stage cycle:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abbotts Lagoon, One Year Later

Amy and I have been to Point Reyes many, many times over the last few years.  Given all we've been though we've needed a regular spot to slow down and recharge, and I can't imagine anyplace better.  I recently realized that I have a number of pix from our most recent trips that never got a second look, and it's been good to revisit them.

Last November we spent a day at Abbotts Lagoon, one of our favorite spots on the planet.  You start out along a wide path that winds between pastures to the south and scrubland to the north.  Plenty of deer, flocks of birds--that's the two smudges above--and cows in the distance.

Eventually you pop out of the grassy fields onto sprawling, endless dunes.  You slog across the sand, but if feels like you're never going to reach the surf.

Until you're suddenly there.

Nearly a year later--that's too long.

A Little Housecleaning

This morning I finished some long-overdue housecleaning around here.  I'm always tinkering with the site, but it's been five years since my last full-on redesign.  This latest round wasn't quite that drastic--some of the changes aren't all that obvious, and there's still some work to be done--but hopefully the result is a slightly cleaner, livelier and easier-to-use site.

Just for my own record-keeping, here's what's changed:

• Nav Bar, Search Box and Banner
  
  • No more separate "Home" link in the nav bar, as I think people are sufficiently aware that a blog's banner image serves that purpose.
  • A larger search box, relocated to the lower right corner of the banner, to make it easier to locate and capable of handling longer queries without scrolling.
  • Resized the banner to accommodate these changes and provide some empty space to set off the search box.

• Feeds, Tweets and Pix
  
  • No more separate link for email subscriptions--it didn't seem to justify the high-profile real estate, and I reconfigured my Feedburner landing page to continue to provide a link to that service.
  • Links to my social networks clustered below my feed link on the left-hand sidebar, along with a Twitter feed that displays my most recent tweet.  This recognizes Twitter's unique role among my networking tools, provides a connection to the range of topics I tweet about, and brings some energy to the site during periods when I take a break from regular posting.  (The Twitter feed appears to be a little buggy, so you may or may not see a tweet.)
  • A thumbnail of the most recent pic I've uploaded to Flickr and a link to my photostream.  This provides a connection to my physical world and brings a little more life and color to the site.  (I'm using the Flickr uploader on my laptop and PhotoSync on my phone.  I'm still sorting out the  photo-sharing connections among my various networks, so bear with me if something looks amiss.)

• Archives, Categories and Thanks
  • A link to my full archives and list of categories moved to the top of the right-hand sidebar, just below the search box.
  • A drop-down menu linking to my "main categories," the topics that are currently of greatest interest to me.
  • Behind the scenes, a streamlined list of categories--I removed 10 or so that no longer served a meaningful purpose.
  • I created a separate "Thanks To..." page and linked to it, rather than maintain separate links in the right-hand sidebar.  I want to continue to express my appreciation to various people, but this seemed like a better way of doing it.

And here's what remains to be done, the next time I'm so motivated:

• While I'm happy with the visible results, a lot of the underlying code is pretty ugly.  I'm not a web designer, I just play one in my spare time, and I'm certain that I'm violating all sorts of sound coding and design principles.  Hopefully no one who knows what they're doing will peek behind the curtain.
• I'd love to smarten up the "Main Categories" drop box and make it a little more stylish.
• While I remain a huge fan of TypePad and a very loyal user, I'm not thrilled with the comment functionality, and I'd prefer to implement something like Disqus that's more social-media oriented.  I gave it a shot, but couldn't make it work--maybe sometime in the future.
• I'm ambivalent about my home-grown banner, which I stitched together myself over 5 years ago when I formally launched my coaching practice.  OTOH, it feels like me--colorful, engaging, a little quirky--and I've grown attached to it.  OTOH, who knows?  I just may be ready for a change.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with it.  Some day I'm sure I'll need to grow up and bring in the professionals, but nearly 7 years after getting started with TypePad, I'm still having fun rolling my own.

Photo by U.S. Army Environmental Command (Really!)  Yay Flickr and Creative Commons

Phil Stutz on Taking Risks

What holds us back at the edge of the cliff?  What might happen if we took that leap?

Phil Stutz is a psychiatrist based in Hollywood who has mentored and collaborated with therapist Barry Michels, and Stutz was interviewed earlier this year in an extensive New Yorker article by Dana Goodyear that discussed the pair's innovative approach to helping their clients overcome creative blocks, fear of failure and feelings of worthlessness.  I found many of their concepts provocative and even inspiring, particularly Stutz's embrace of 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.

This quote evokes for me the feeling of standing at a cliff's edge, anticipating the thrill to come if I take the leap, but held back by fear--of a crash landing, of unanticipated difficulties, of the shame that would accompany failure.  But Stutz's framing encourages me to see that my fear--and my courage--can be self-reinforcing through their influence on my unconscious, and that taking a bold leap can be a powerful way of breaking fear's grip and unleashing my courage.

(I highly recommend not only Goodyear's article but also Michel's discussion of Stutz's deceptively simple stick figure "therapy drawings".)

Update: I was recently reminded of a similar post from just over five years ago: Doug Sundheim on Taking Risks

It's instructive to ask Sundheim's question--When in my life have I felt most alive?--and to realize that 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.

Clearly a theme that holds some ongoing meaning for me!

Photo by Justin Ornellas. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Boundaries, Not Balance

I've had several conversations recently that touched on the topic of boundaries--one person even called me a "role model" in this regard, which is the sort of thing that gets my attention.

So I'm reminded of some wisdom from my long-ago colleague Michael Gilbert that's had a big influence on me--here's a passage from his 2008 post Good Fences that's worth quoting again:

In regard to this exploration of "work-life balance," what's clear in our discussion is that we have been using the word "balance" when what we really seem to mean is "boundaries." Boundaries keep things in their place. Balance suggests the same amount of two things on either side of a scale. Boundaries keep one of those things from oozing past the edge of its platter and taking over the other side...

Boundaries and integration go together. Maybe it's just the biologist in me, but it seems that good boundaries are what make integration work. Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through and keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives. Bad boundaries lead to either being overwhelmed or withdrawal. Good boundaries lead to wholeness and synergy.

This concept is central to my life (and was the key theme of Part 3 in last year's series on Happiness, Excellence & Boundaries: A Framework for Leaders.)  I'm the first person to admit that I don't live a "balanced" life.  And I don't want a balanced life.  I love my work as an executive coach--it's immensely fulfilling, and almost all-consuming, and that's just fine with me.  I don't need a host of other activities to balance the amount of time and energy that I dedicate to my profession.

But I do need clear and firm boundaries that allow me to "let the right things through and keep the wrong things out" when that's most important to me.  So what do these boundaries look like in practice?  One example is the ability to block out time on my daily calendar to go to the gym or go for a run.  What matters to me most isn't the balance that comes from working out (although that's a meaningful by-product), but the boundary that's established when I commit that time to one purpose and prohibit others from encroaching.

Many of the MBAs I work with at Stanford and many of the leaders I work with in my private practice are people who share this mindset--they're passionate about their work, and they're never going to live balanced lives, and that's usually just fine with them.  But things won't be fine if they're unable to establish, manage and maintain the boundaries that allow them to live lives of "wholeness and synergy," as Michael would say.

Photo by David Ludwig.  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.)

I Found My Heart in San Francisco

Sometimes it's just obvious why certain people touch your heart.  A former student I know is spending much of this year pursuing personal projects and traveling before starting a new job at the beginning of 2011.

This week she's returning to San Francisco to celebrate her birthday, and here's what she wrote in her invitation:

Instead of receiving birthday presents, I would love to receive your wisdom in the form of answers to two questions:
 
"If I had three months of freedom, I would. . ." and
"When you finally move to San Francisco, make sure to. . ."

She's going to cover the walls of the party site in paper and have people write (graffiti?) their responses during the party.  Wow--what a beautiful idea.

My own responses to those questions?

If I had three months of freedom...I would find a cottage up in the hills of Inverness with a quiet garden and a view of Tomales Bay.  I'd spend each morning distilling what I've written here over the years into a narrative about coaching and change and growth; I'd spend each afternoon hiking the trails of Point Reyes; and I'd spend each evening cooking with Amy and looking up at the stars.

And when you finally move to San Francisco, spend as much time as you can in all the hidden wild corners of the city: Land's End, the Presidio, Tank Hill, Grand View Park, Golden Gates Heights Park, Fort Funston, the community garden at Fort Mason, the back side of Twin Peaks, Glen Canyon and the top of Strawberry Hill in the middle of Stow Lake.  These places (and more like them) touch my own heart so deeply and are ultimately what make me most happy to live here.

Happy Birthday!