Ed Batista

Add It Up (A Look Back At My 2012 Goals)

As I wrote last month, decades of studies have shown that goals are useful spurs to action, but recent research also shows that goals can have unintended consequences, such as diminishing the fulfillment we derive from an activity. My solution to this paradox is "to think of a goal as a powerful tow rope--it can jumpstart a stalled effort and give me a boost, but it can also drag me off course or even out of control. So it's essential to hold on to it lightly and let go of it readily."

Some of my most important goals involve daily activities: Each day I aspire to 1) wake up well-rested from a good night's sleep, 2) get some exercise, 3) meditate, 4) develop myself as a coach through some form of study or practice, and 5) do a little writing, typically on a coaching-related topic.

I've been tracking whether or not I fulfilled these daily goals since May 2011 (except exercise, which I've tracked since March 2008, and writing, which I added last June), so the end of 2012 is an interesting opportunity to see how I've done over the past year. But before I jump to the data, I want to note my appreciation for critics of tracking like Zen Habits' Leo Babauta, who wrote in November...

When you track a metric, such as hours or dollars or miles, you are saying that’s more important than all the things that can’t be measured. You put that in the forefront of your head as the thing that must be improved, at the cost of all else. What about relationships and joy? Are those less important?

Then there are other problems with tracking and measuring everything:

• It takes time to measure and track--that’s valuable time you could have spent doing or living.
• It creates a mindset that we must always improve, always measure, always manage things, always strive for better, better, better. What about learning to be happy with yourself? What about focusing on joy and compassion and people you love? When does the improving stop? Are we ever satisfied? And is that the point of living--to improve endlessly, to always make things better, and never be happy with where we are?
• It’s stressful to measure and track a lot of things, and it’s disappointing if those numbers don’t go up, or don’t go up as much as we’d hoped.
• We have to choose what to measure, and how do we know we’re choosing the right thing? Why is that thing the only thing that matters? It’s a narrowing way of looking at life.
• It doesn’t improve happiness. It doesn’t make us content. It doesn’t keep us in the moment.

I agree with Babauta's fundamental perspective--we need to spend our lives being fulfilled by doing what we love, and chasing numbers is a recipe for perpetual dissatisfaction, not fulfillment. But his rejection of tracking is similar to his rejection of goals, and it evokes a similar response from me: Any data derived from tracking our activities should inform our choices, not dictate them, and we should hold onto it lightly and let go of it readily, just as we would a goal that's become counter-productive.

The pursuit of my goals noted above is its own reward, and I don't make choices to "improve" the numbers related to those goals. When I don't achieve these goals in a given day, or when the numbers dip over a period of time, rather than feel bad about my "failure," I get curious about the choices I've been making. Perhaps I needed to prioritize other activities, and those choices were the right ones.

But I'm also well aware of the tendency for things that are "urgent but not important" to consume time and attention, often pushing things are are "important but not urgent" off my calendar. My dawning awareness of this dynamic is one of the factors that got me started tracking my daily exercise in the first place.

So while I'm grateful to Babauta and others for helping me to clarify how I want to use this data--and how I don't want to use it--I still find the process of tracking valuable. With that said, how'd 2012 go?

I got a good night's sleep 60% of the time, and I feel great about that simply because I've known for years that my sleep hygiene was poor but never did anything about it. Tracking provides me with just enough motivation to pay attention to--and actually honor--my need for sleep.

I exercised 87% of the time, up from 81% in 2011. And I'm very happy about that--not because I'm driven to "improve," but because I love to exercise, and these figures represent an ongoing commitment to take care of myself in the midst of a very demanding schedule.

I meditated 67% of the time, and I'm ambivalent about that figure. It was just 45% for the last six months of 2011, so from one perspective there's "progress"--but a closer look shows surprising variation on a quarterly basis: 59% in Q1, 85% in Q2, 74% in Q3 and just 51% in Q4. Why such a steep decline when I do find the practice rewarding? Why am I meditating less while exercising more? Curious--and something to think about in 2013.

I worked on my professional development 65% of the time, and I feel just fine about that. It's easy to get sucked into the immediate demands of my work as a coach--primarily because I love what I do--but tracking this metric reminds me of the importance of stepping back from day-to-day responsibilities to stretch myself in other ways.

I started tracking daily writing just last summer, and I wrote 25% of the time during the last 7 months--but that ranged from 90% in June to 0% in September and October. That variation reflects my demanding Fall Quarter schedule at Stanford, and while I write better when I take time off during the year, being dormant for several months was too long, and next year I'll look for ways to keep some momentum going during my busy period.

Photo by David Boté Estrada. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Babies, Bathwater and Goal-Setting

When do goals support our growth and development? When do they get in the way? And how can we tell the difference?

In a post on self-coaching and goal-setting last July, I wrote that "goals encourage us to work harder and longer, and when they're difficult to achieve they push us even more"--a proposition backed up by decades of research, much of it by Edwin Locke of the University of Maryland and Gary Latham of the University of Toronto. But by no means are goals always a good thing--as Locke and Latham wrote in 2006 in New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory [PDF], at times it's more effective to focus on what we'll learn during the course of an activity than on any performance outcomes we're seeking to achieve. Further, goals actually contribute to lower performance when they're so daunting that we perceive them as "threats" rather than "challenges."

Recent research on goals highlights their complex impact on our behavior. In July Ayelet Fishbach of the Booth School of Business and Jinhee Choi of the Korea University School published When Thinking About Goals Undermines Goal Pursuit, which inspired Christian Jarrett's How Goals and Good Intentions Can Hold Us Back. Building on Fishbach and Choi's research, Jarrett urges us to be mindful of the unintended consequences of goal-setting:

Focusing on goals fires up your intentions to engage in the activities that will help you achieve those goals. But there's a major downside. Stay focused on your goals and you spoil your experience of the activities you'll need to pursue. In turn, that makes it far more likely that you'll drop out early and fail to achieve the very goals that you're so focused on.

Jarrett goes on to discuss Fishbach and Choi's paper at length and concludes:

[T]he lessons from this research seem clear. By all means visualize your goals to help get yourself started in the first place, but once you're underway, try to let your long-term mission fade a little into the background. Revel in the process and you're more likely to make it to the finishing line...

[Further,] once our projects are underway, not only should we beware choosing to stay too focused on our goals, we must also guard against the detrimental effect of outside reminders.

In October the New York Times' Alina Tugend interviewed a number of researchers, including Gary Latham, for an article titled Experts' Advice to the Goal-Oriented: Don't Overdo It:

It’s not that goals are bad, [Latham] said, but that problems arise when the values that underlie them and the process to achieve them are skewed.

Tugend also talked with the University of Arizona's Lisa Ordóñez, who in 2009 co-authored Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting, in which a medical metaphor is used to emphasize the potency of goals' influence and their undesirable side effects:

[W]e argue that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored. We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects nongoal areas, distorted risk preferences, a rise in unethical behavior, inhibited learning, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation. Rather than dispensing goal setting as a benign, over-the-counter treatment for motivation, managers and scholars need to conceptualize goal setting as a prescription-strength medication that requires careful dosing, consideration of harmful side effects, and close supervision. We offer a warning label to accompany the practice of setting goals.

Despite these concerns, in Tugend's article Ordóñez takes the same position as Latham:

"It's not that goals are bad," said Professor Ordóñez... "We’re just saying be careful." [Emphasis mine]

It's critical that we integrate the findings of Fishbach, Choi, Ordóñez and their colleagues into our understanding of goals and modify their use accordingly. But I'm concerned that a misreading of this research is leading us to throw the baby out with the bathwater and abandon goals entirely.

In addition to Christian Jarrett's essay noted above, in 2010 Zen Habits' Leo Babauta proclaimed that the best goal is no goal, and this month he took the "Pro" position in a debate with Tim Ferriss on whether goals suck. Just a few days ago Peter Bregman urged his readers at HBR.org to Consider Not Setting Goals in 2013, a post in which he cites the "Goals Gone Wild" paper and Tugend's NYT article. And just a few hours ago, Babauta tweeted that "Harvard Business Review adopts my no-goals philosophy," with a link to Bregman's post.

Jarrett, Babauta and Bregman all make excellent, nuanced points about the complexity of goals and their unintended consequences--but their headlines (which may not have been written by them, of course) paint a much more simplistic picture, and reductive comments like Babauta's tweet only get amplified in our 140-character world. (It's been re-tweeted or favorited 45 times already as I write this.)

To be clear, I've been heavily influenced by the research on goals' undesirable side effects, and I've altered how I use them in my personal life and in my coaching practice as a result. I continue to find goals a helpful source of motivation when getting started, but I also watch carefully for signs of their counter-productivity. I've come to think of a goal as a powerful tow rope--it can jumpstart a stalled effort and give me a boost, but it can also drag me off course or even out of control. So it's essential to hold on to it lightly and let go of it readily.

Thanks to my colleague Collins Dobbs for the pointer to Bregman's post.

Photo by Gail Foss. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Hit the Brakes or Step on the Gas? (Resistance and Motivation)

Some recent work with clients and students and several personal experiences have me thinking about the opposing forces of resistance and motivation that we feel when we're on the brink of a meaningful decision. The tension between these forces can result in uncertainly and paralysis--we don't know whether to heed our resistance and hit the brakes or tap into our motivation and step on the gas, so we drift along and let things happen.

When we're stuck this way, it can be helpful to explore the underlying sources of our resistance and motivation and assess their utility: Are these factors useful to us or not? And in this process it's critical to recognize that resistance and motivation both have "shadow sides," unhelpful dimensions that are likely to lead us astray and need to be challenged.

Useful sources of resistance include healthy prudence, trusted intuition, satisfaction with our present situation and a need for rest or calm. Unhelpful sources of resistance include simple lethargy or inertia, a lack of confidence or resilience, and excessive caution or risk-aversion. All these factors tend to slow us down and encourage us to opt out and say no.

Useful sources of motivation include healthy ambition, aspirational goals, a drive to overcome obstacles and a sense of determined "grit." (For more on grit, see research by Penn's Angela Duckworth.) Unhelpful sources of motivation include unchecked drives, unchallenged beliefs that tell us we "must" do something, compulsions and social pressure. All these factors tend to speed us up and encourage us to opt in and say yes.

I'm not suggesting that there's a simple or foolproof way to locate the "utility threshold" and readily distinguish between the helpful and unhelpful forms of resistance and motivation; it's a complex and subjective process. But a good starting point is simply stepping back and reminding ourselves that these forces come in both flavors, and sometimes we need to tap into and unleash our motivation--step on the gas--while at other times we need to respect and heed our resistance--hit the brakes.

Self-Coaching Session at Flixster

Yesterday I had the chance to give a talk on self-coaching to a group at Flixster, and a modified version of my slide deck is above. Thanks to the awesome Hannah Knapp and her colleagues for a great experience--I really enjoyed it.

The Layer Cake of Working Life

In my work with a client in recent weeks, it occurred to me that he was seeking to effect change at several different levels in his professional life, and it was important for us to be clear about which level he was addressing in any given moment. Thinking further along these lines, I realized that we're always working on multiple levels--work life as a layer cake--and a clearer understanding of what each level encompasses (and what we can and can't do there) would provide a useful conceptual framework.

Working my way down from the top of the graphic above...

At the Structural level are the big-picture circumstances of our working lives: Our career path, our professional identity, our organizational affiliations and all the other ways in which we might answer the question, "So what do you do?"

At the Contextual level are those factors related to our current situation: Our specific role and (in some cases) job description, our explicit and implicit responsibilities, and the obligations and expectations we bring to our reporting relationships (up, down and sideways).

At the Interpersonal level are the issues that arise within every unique configuration of individuals: Our relationships with our peers, superiors and subordinates, not only one-on-one, but also in any permanent or temporary groups.

Finally, at the Internal level is our intrapersonal response to all of the above: The mental models, attitudes and beliefs we use to interpret and make sense of our professional lives (and selves); the emotions that accompany and underlie these conceptions; and any self-coaching practices we employ to influence these responses.

So how can we put this framework to, uh, work?

One guideline is "start low." As we move up from Internal to Structural, the scope of change that can be effected gets "bigger" (in a sense) but the degree of immediate personal control that we can exert gets correspondingly "smaller." So when change is desired it may be useful to start at the Internal level to see what we can accomplish on our own. Perhaps nothing needs to change other than our own mental models, beliefs or emotional state.

Starting low also insures that we don't "skip a step" and drag unresolved issues along with us in the process. For example, we may need to change careers to find fulfillment--a big Structural shift--but if the root of our unhappiness actually lies at the Internal or Interpersonal layer, we'll eventually encounter the very same problems again in our new role.

Finally, it's useful to remember that we're always evolving on all levels at once, and changes on any one level will inevitably affect the others. Change in ourselves will affect our interpersonal relationships. Changes in our relationships will affect how we fulfill our roles and responsibilities. And changes in those contextual factors will affect our fit with our organizations and our professional identities. 

One last note: The boundaries between these levels are extremely amorphous and are by no means clear or discrete. I'm not suggesting that desired changes fall neatly into one level and not another. But hopefully this model allows us to more accurately diagnose where change would be most useful and to target our efforts accordingly.

Marcus Aurelius, 3,000 Years and the Present Moment

Today I talked with a client about mortality (among a number of topics) and how we reflexively seek to protect ourselves from the dread and fear evoked by death. I talked with another client about how focusing on the immediate present--being "in the moment"--is helping him navigate a profound personal and professional transition. And tonight, reflecting on these conversations, I was reminded of a passage from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations that I've found both bracing and comforting:

Even were you to live three thousand years or thrice ten thousand, remember that no one loses any other life than this which he is living, nor lives any other than this which he is losing. Thus the longest and the shortest come to the same thing. For the present is equal for all, and what is passing is therefore equal: thus what is being lost is proved to be barely a moment. For a man could lose neither past nor future; how can one rob him of what he has not got? Always remember, then, these two things: one, that all things from everlasting are of the same kind, and are in rotation; and it matters nothing whether it be for a hundred years or for two hundred years or for an infinite time that a man shall behold the same spectacle; the other, that the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss; for it is the present alone of which either will be deprived, since (as we saw) this is all he has, and a man does not lose what he has not got. [Book II, Chapter 14]

This passage means even more to me in light of R.B. Rutherford's introduction to the Oxford edition: "...Marcus was writing for himself, and seems to have had no thought of making his reflections available to a wider audience in his own lifetime or thereafter... At the end of the day, the emperor would record a few reflections and admonish himself to observe certain precepts and ethical rules which he might have neglected in the course of the day." [pp ix-x] Marcus wasn't rebuking anyone else; he was counseling himself. (You might even say he was self-coaching.)

I was thinking along these lines before my conversations with my clients today. I just turned 45, and while I'm physically active I feel the limitations of age, and I can't do everything I want to do. More seriously, Amy recently had a health issue that turned out to be manageable through medication but which gave us a scare until it was diagnosed. So I've been wrestling with my own perspective on mortality, and my own feelings of dread and fear.

At times like this I find the passage above comforting because I accept Marcus' assertion that "the longest-lived and the soonest to die have an equal loss." I may well live another 45 years (although 3,000 seems unlikely), and I may die tomorrow, and in both cases I'll lose the exact same thing: the present moment.

And I find this passage bracing because, having accepted this assertion, I have to acknowledge that the present moment, this moment, is all I truly have. I can step forward and do something meaningful with it, or (as I so often do) I can sit back and let it pass by. Time to step up.

Photo by Martin Fisch. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

I Love Myself (Self-Coaching and Acceptance)

I love myself.

Three words that couldn't be simpler to understand and more difficult to express. An MBA student at Stanford said this in a small group in our Interpersonal Dynamics class (aka Touchy Feely) a few years ago, and hearing him say this had a profound impact on the rest of us.

He didn't say this in a self-aggrandizing or boastful way, nor was he comparing himself to anyone else. And he certainly wasn't saying that he was perfect or no longer needed to grow and change. He was merely saying, in the most straightforward way possible, that he deeply appreciated his good qualities, he forgave himself for his shortcomings, and even while he aspired to improve he also fundamentally accepted himself.

The ability to accept ourselves, to feel compassion for ourselves, to love ourselves is ultimately one of the most important skills to cultivate in self-coaching. The decision to seek coaching, whether from a personal coach or in a structured self-coaching process, grows out of a desire for change. We want something to be different, and while we may initially be focused on some external aspect of our lives, we typically come to realize that meaningful change will require us to change as well.

An inability to accept the need to change ourselves severely limits our ability to change our experience in the world. And yet at the same time, an inability to accept and love ourselves--right now, as we are, with all our flaws and foibles intact--condemns us to an endless cycle of dissatisfaction. The most profound coaching imaginable can't overcome this obstacle; we need to validate ourselves.

But the paradox is that those of us who are most open to change and theoretically capable of self-coaching may eventually struggle with the process because we find it so difficult to love and accept ourselves. We're quick to find fault with ourselves, eager to identify opportunities for growth, and ready to change--but we can't stop, and the process goes on and on. We're never done.

By emphasizing the need to validate ourselves, I'm not suggesting that the self is the only source of validation. Any number of external factors contribute to this desired outcome, from healthy relationships to sufficient social status and material rewards, and in their absence the work of accepting ourselves will be more difficult.

But it's important to recognize that no amount of external validation will ever be enough until we're able to accept and love ourselves. No amount of love and care from others, recognition or status, accomplishments or money will ever suffice on their own. They may serve as useful building blocks in the process, but self-acceptance is the mortar that binds them all together and holds the others in place when one of them is diminished or lost.

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This is the last of 8 recent posts outlining a framework for a structured self-coaching process. I'm currently writing more comprehensive chapters on each topic, which will include additional information on self-coaching exercises and activities, the role that people in our lives can play in our self-coaching efforts, and the implications of recent neuroscience research for self-coaching.

For an overview of my self-coaching framework, see A Self-Coaching Guide for Leaders at All Levels.

For all my posts on this topic, see my Self-Coaching category.

Photo by Gideon Tsang. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons

The Big Picture (Self-Coaching, Values and Vision)

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don’t much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn’t matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you’re sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough." Lewis Carroll

All coaching, including self-coaching, takes place within a context defined by our personal values and our vision for ourselves. If self-coaching is a plan--a sequence of steps to help us effect positive change in our lives--then our values and our vision are the Big Picture--a source of meaning and purpose, and the underlying rationale for the changes we seek to make.

Overview and Timing

It's not necessary--or even desirable--to fully explore our values and vision at the very start of the self-coaching process. These are large, complex topics that take time and effort to address, and at the beginning of a change effort it may be more important to simplify: Break things down into components, build momentum with small victories, and scale up as needed.

But I'm not saying that a sense of direction is irrelevant. The passage above from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is often misquoted as, "If you don't know where you're going, then any path will do," and the whole point of a structured self-coaching process is clarifying just which paths we should pursue now.

I am saying that while self-coaching is an active and iterative experiential learning process, once we've determined our immediate goals and begun moving in a general direction, we must also insure that as we assess our progress, we also make time at regular intervals to pull up and observe the view from a higher perspective. Chris Argyris' concept of double-loop learning is highly relevant here; exploring our values and vision is a means of identifying and updating the assumptions and mental models that have been influencing and supporting (or undermining) our day-to-day self-coaching efforts.

While we have to determine for ourselves when and how often this work at a higher level should be done, we need to be mindful of two diametrically opposed but equally dangerous traps: 1) Doing too much, too soon, and 2) Doing too little, too late.

We may have a tendency toward one extreme or the other that we should bear in mind--or we may find them both tempting at different points in the process. I can get stuck at the outset of any project by indulging in an excess of high-level thinking as a respectable form of procrastination, but I can also build up a sense of momentum once I get started that feeds on itself and makes me reluctant to slow down enough to do any high-level thinking. (As much as I admire the Cult of Done, I also know how important it is for me to stop and experience some stillness every day.)

Exploring Our Values

A dilemma we face when discussing "values" is that their definitions can be so subjective--and when we arrive at a definition that's true for us, we still have to determine just what it means to actually live that value. Here's a simple exercise to reach an actionable definition of your core values:

• Create a list of words that you think of as values that have some meaning to you. Don't worry about what that meaning is at this point.
• Keep writing until the words stop flowing freely. Don't worry about how many words are on the list.
• Take each word in turn and think of a story that demonstrates that value in action, preferably an actual event you experienced or observed. Don't write out the entire story, but jot down a few notes so that you can readily reflect back upon it.
• Having illustrated each value this way, ask yourself:

What intrinsic rewards are the result of this value?  In what ways does it fulfill me or create a sense of meaning in my life?

What extrinsic rewards--what forms of status or compensation--am I willing to sacrifice on behalf of this value?

How important is this value to my self-identity?  How different would my life have to be for me to abandon this value?

• Use the answers to these questions to narrow your original list of words down to no more than five--and preferably three.  Consider the results your core values.

Another approach is to use a values-based assessment that incorporates a set of pre-defined values and relies on a questionnaire to determine which values are most important or meaningful to us. These tools offer a number of advantages, but as with any instrument, it's important to recognize that even the best results need to be weighed against our personal experience and shouldn't be accepted as universal truths.

An assessment I've used and recommend frequently is the Values in Action Survey of Character Strengths (VIA), developed by Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson, which helps us to identify the values from which we derive the greatest meaning. The complete, 240-question version of the VIA is available through the VIA Institute on Character and the University of Pennsylvania's Positive Psychology Center. For more on the VIA and Seligman's work on values and meaning, see the Signature Strengths section in Part 2 of my Happiness, Excellence and Boundaries series.

(I've also taken Scott Bristol's Life Journey Map and have found it tremendously useful, but it can be accessed only by people working with a registered coach or consultant. I have not taken the Clifton/Gallup StrengthsFinder, but it's been recommended to me, and I plan to take it soon.)

Defining Our Vision

Our personal values serve as the foundation for our vision for ourselves. I want to acknowledge that the concept of a "vision" is inherently fuzzy and consequently susceptible to abuse. We've all read dozens of "vision statements" full of noble, high-minded words that are routinely ignored. Most of them are empty exercises that ultimately serve no purpose except to breed cynicism. But any good tool can be misused, and I want to rescue this concept from airless committees, rehabilitate it, and put it back in the hands of active individuals.

I also want to distinguish between a vision and a goal. Goal-setting is a critical step in the self-coaching process, one that I recommend addressing at the outset to provide both direction and motivation for the work that follows. But even our most ambitious goals are dynamic components of a larger, more comprehensive vision for ourselves. We can and should feel free to simply identify a goal and begin moving toward it--goals motivate us, and difficult goals motivate us even more under the right conditions. By driving action they serve an essential function in self-coaching. But our vision for ourselves should be more deeply rooted, more enduring, and should be the product of deeper, more far-reaching reflection.

Truly great [professionals] understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change, between what is genuinely sacred and what is not.  This rare ability to manage continuity and change--requiring a consciously practiced discipline--is closely linked to the ability to develop a vision.

This quote is from Jim Collins and Jerry Porras' Building Your Company's Vision, a classic Harvard Business Review article aimed at motivating leaders to identify a vision for their organizations--a novel concept in 1996. I've adapted their method for defining a vision for use in coaching and have found it extremely helpful in my work with individuals. (Toward that end, I've substituted "professionals" for "companies" in the passage above.) According to Collins and Porras, a vision consists of two interrelated elements:

• Our Core Ideology: What we stand for and why we exist, lasting qualities that in some cases will never change over the course of our lives. Comprised of 1) our core values, our essential and enduring tenets; and 2) our core purpose, our reasons for being as professionals.

• An Envisioned Future: What we aspire to become, achieve, or create--a goal that will change only at long-term intervals. Comprised of 1) an audacious goal that looks beyond our current capabilities and environment; and 2) a vivid, engaging and specific description of what it would be like to achieve this goal.

For more on defining a vision, see the exercises in my post on Developing Your Professional Vision.

For an overview of my self-coaching framework, see A Self-Coaching Guide for Leaders at All Levels.

For all my posts on this topic, see my Self-Coaching category.

Thanks to Thaler Pekar for her thoughts on The Trouble with Values and the importance of stories.

Photo by Mohamed Muha. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

The Essence of Training

The essence of training is to allow error without consequence. - Orson Scott Card*

With this definition in mind, how often do we have the opportunity to truly train--to test our skills in a setting where errors are "without consequence" Not often enough, if your life is anything like mine.

But even when our errors do have consequences, we can needlessly increase the pressure we feel to avoid making any mistakes at all--which not only makes it harder to learn from our mistakes but may actually undermine our performance.

I'm not suggesting that we become cavalier about making mistakes, but as I wrote last year, "those of us who learn best from our mistakes...don't view mistakes as personal defects, and [our mistakes] don't carry such a negative emotional charge. I'd suggest that those of us who hold a growth mindset are able to forgive ourselves for mistakes and let go of (or at least mitigate) any feelings of shame or humiliation. This forgiveness allows us to continue to focus on the mistake that much more intently, without losing confidence in ourselves, and as a result to learn from it more effectively." As always, our mental models exert a tremendous influence on our view of ourselves and on our experience in the world.

I recently had a coaching session with a client in which she talked about "letting go" of feelings of fear and pressure that had been discouraging her from speaking candidly at work, and as a result she "found [her] voice." She decided to take some risks and be more direct and assertive, and in the process she realized that (among other things) a fear of miscommunicating had been holding her back, and her candor and forthrightness were not only welcome but also a valuable source of leadership for her team.

To be clear, this was no "I'm mad as hell!"-style rant; this was a thoughtful effort to communicate more openly and honestly. It was also a deliberate effort to worry less about miscommunicating, and the result was a rich learning opportunity. And it was also a brilliant example of self-coaching using heightened self-awareness to intervene and take action.

So what mistakes are we worried about making right now? What feelings or assumptions are causing us to play it (too) safe? How could we let go of them--or at least temporarily suspend our belief in them? What risks would we take if we did? And what might we learn in the process?

*This quote is from Card's Ender's Game, his award-winning 1985 sci-fi novel. Card is known both as a likely source of inspiration for J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and for his socially conservative politics. I don't share those political views, but it's still an awesome quote.

Photo by tracy the astonishing. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Aim High...Enough (Self-Coaching and Goal-Setting)

The goals we set for ourselves have a significant influence on our performance, and this is as true for self-coaching as it is for any other meaningful task. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham are two of the world's leading researchers on goal-setting, and in 2006 they summarized the results of roughly 400 studies conducted over the course of 25 years in a short, pithy article, New Directions in Goal-Setting Theory [PDF]:

So long as a person is committed to the goal, has the requisite ability to attain it, and does not have conflicting goals, there is a positive, linear relationship between goal difficulty and task performance.

So when we're A) committed, B) able and C) unconflicted, we owe it to ourselves to aim really high. I'm not suggesting that these conditions are easily met. Two out of three, sure, but meeting all three can be a high bar. And, as noted below, at times aiming too high is counterproductive, particularly when we perceive a difficult goal as threatening. The key is aiming just high enough.

My Personal Goals

Among the goals I've set for myself are 1) exercise, meditate and write every day, and 2) eat and drink moderately and get 7 hours of sleep on a regular basis (in my case, 70% of the time). I strive to achieve the first set on a daily basis because I'm committed, able and unconflicted--no counter-goals stand in my way. My target for the second set is lower because while I'm certainly committed and able, I do have some conflicting counter-goals: While a reasonably healthy diet and decent sleep hygiene are important to me, I also derive a lot of pleasure from good food and drink, and I often stay up late to read or work or just to have fun. So in the former case I have some stretch goals that push me to accommodate them, and in the latter case I have some easier goals that accommodate me.

So how am I doing? I wrote about exercise the other week in a post on self-assessment; I'm only at 85% for 2012 so far, but I hit 92% in Q2 and 100% in June--pretty good! Meditation: I'm at 72% for the year, 85% for Q2 and 97% for June--again, a positive trend. I only started tracking writing in June: 90% for the month, a respectable start. A moderate diet: I'm at 65% for the year, 68% for Q2 and 60% for June--room for improvement, but not bad. And a good night's sleep: 54% for the year, 53% for Q2 and 40% for June--obviously, something needs to change here. But on the whole, I'm pretty damn happy. (As I've noted before, I use Don't Break the Chain to track my daily activity, and at the end of the month I just transcribe the results into a spreadsheet.)

Goals and Performance

How do our goals affect our performance? Locke and Latham identify 4 factors at work:

[1] High goals lead to greater effort and/or persistence than do moderately difficult, easy, or vague goals. [2] Goals direct attention, effort, and action toward goal-relevant actions at the expense of nonrelevant actions. [3] Because performance is a function of both ability and motivation, goal effects also depend upon having the requisite task knowledge and skills. [4] Goals may simply motivate one to use one’s existing ability, may automatically "pull" stored task-relevant knowledge into awareness, and/or may motivate people to search for new knowledge.

So goals encourage us to work harder and longer, and when they're difficult to achieve they push us even more. Goals compel us to prioritize and avoid spending time and energy on irrelevant tasks, suggesting that they help us triage and distinguish between relevant and irrelevant tasks by attaching importance to the former and devaluing the latter. Goals obviously aren't a panacea, and we're unlikely to achieve them if we lack the necessary knowledge and skills. But even when those qualities aren't in abundance, goals help us make the most of what we have while spurring us to learn more and enhance our skills.

I certainly see the impact of goal-setting when I look at my progress with regard to meditation. In February 2009 I wrote, "I fully appreciate the importance of...meditation...But I still can't bring myself to actually do it on a regular basis." Then in May 2011 I got serious and decided to try meditating daily; as of January of this year, I was making a go of it, but still had difficulty: "Looking back at the last six months of 2011...I meditated just 45% of the time." And now I meditate just about every day; I'm highly motivated to do it, I prioritize it over uses of my time, and I find it much easier to do, which I take as some sign of increasing skill.

Effective Goals

Locke and Latham also identify 4 factors that influence our goals' effectiveness:

The key moderators of goal setting are [1] feedback, which people need in order to track their progress; [2] commitment to the goal, which is enhanced by self-efficacy [defined as "task-specific confidence"] and viewing the goal as important; [3] task complexity, to the extent that task knowledge is harder to acquire on complex tasks; and [4] situational constraints. With regard to the latter, Brown, Jones, and Leigh (2005) found that role overload (excess work without the necessary resources to accomplish a task) moderates goal effects; goals affected performance only when overload was low.

So effective goals will generate feedback on our progress, heighten our sense of commitment, relate to complex tasks and be supported by the resources we need to accomplish those task.

While I have only one month of data on my commitment to write daily, it's noteworthy to me that I hit 90%--not perfect, but good enough to make me happy. My effectiveness at achieving this goal was clearly affected by the feedback I get on my writing from a range of sources: Twitter followers, various links, and, perhaps most importantly, the friends and colleagues who take the time to express their support. The more I write, the more important writing is to me--it's certainly something I'm deeply committed not only as a means of self-expression but also as one of the best ways I know to improve as a coach. While I find writing deeply fulfilling, it's also one of the hardest things I do--fulfilling doesn't always mean fun when it comes to demanding work. Finally, in fairness, I usually have more time for writing in June because of the end of the academic year at Stanford--let's see how I do in October. So obviously a constellation of factors enhanced this particular goal's effectiveness in my life, and hopefully I can keep them in place going forward.

Other Factors

Three additional points from Locke and Latham:

[1] Sometimes specific, difficult goals do not lead to better performance than simply urging people to do their best.

When tackling a new, complex task, focusing on a performance outcome may cause us to prioritize the goal and lose sight of the bigger picture, i.e. why we set the goal in the first place. In these cases, it may be preferable to identify learning goals which put the emphasis on acquiring the skills needed to achieve a given task.

[2] Assigning hard goals may not be effective when people view those goals as threatening.

When we see a difficult goal as a "challenge," we focus on the possiblity of success and the utility of effort. However, it's also possible to see a difficult goal as a "threat," which shifts our focus to the possibility of failure and undermines our performance. As always, our mindset is a critical factor.

[3] Goal progress and goal importance [can be] strong predictors of feelings of success and well-being.

But in the relevant study cited by Locke and Latham, only people "who perceived their goals as difficult to obtain" reported these positive feelings. In the right circumstances, stretch goals just feel good.

Escalation of Commitment

One final topic related to goal-setting that I'll touch on briefly: There's some fascinating research on the "escalation of commitment," a phrase coined by Barry Staw in his classic 1981 paper, The Escalation of Commitment to a Course of Action [PDF], which explored why people continue to follow failing courses of action when they would have been better off cutting their losses. (Theresa Kelly and Katherine Milkman also have an entry on the topic [PDF] in the upcoming "Encyclopedia of Management Theory.")

Most of this research understandably focuses on "vicious cycles"--the dynamics that reinforce our commitment to failure--because we (mistakenly) assume that when things are going badly and getting worse, we'll stop and choose another path. (We often don't.) But there's also value in understanding how these dynamics can be applied to support effective goal-setting and reinforce our commitment to success. The dimension that seems most relevant to goal-setting is what Erving Goffman called "impression management" in his 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Kelly and Milkman write:

Impression management explanations of escalation behavior focus on a decision maker's need to justify her past choices to others. The outcome of an investment is rarely free from external scrutiny, and a decision maker may escalate commitment to her original investment to avoid admitting to others that the venture was a failure or that her decision was flawed. Such admissions might cause others to doubt her competence. Furthermore, people tend to punish decision makers for inconsistency... When a decision maker switches from her originally endorsed course of action, observers may take it as a sign of weakness or lack of confidence. Thus...she may choose to escalate commitment to avoid appearing inconsistent.

To be clear, Kelly and Milkman are focused on situations where "objective evidence indicates that continuing with an investment is unwise, and yet an individual chooses to invest further in spite of this," while I'm deliberately expanding the frame to consider how these same dynamics might be leveraged to help us create "virtuous circles" and achieve our goals more readily.

One obvious way I might take advantage of impression management: Write about my goals on a website with my name on it :-)

For an overview of my self-coaching framework, see A Self-Coaching Guide for Leaders at All Levels.

For all my posts on this topic, see my Self-Coaching category.

Note: Many other resources are available based on Edwin Locke and Gary Latham's research, most notably their 1990 book, A Theory of Goal-Setting and Task Performance (which I haven't read) and their 2002 paper, Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal-Setting and Task Motivation.

Photo by John Trainor. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.