Ed Batista

Catalysis (Self-Coaching and Self-Intervention)

Catalysis: An acceleration of the rate of a process or reaction, brought about by a catalyst, usually present in small managed quantities and unaffected at the end of the reaction. A catalyst permits reactions or processes to take place more effectively or under milder conditions than would otherwise be possible. - Catalysis.org

At some level self-coaching is all about change. Changing how we spend our time so we're more fulfilled, and changing our behavior so we're more effective. Doing more of what's working in our lives, and doing less of--or stopping entirely--what's not working. We may even want to change the direction of our lives in a more comprehensive way, and all large changes result from a series of smaller ones.

Catalysts alter the rate of change in a reaction, and the catalysts in a self-coaching process are 1) the ongoing conversations with ourselves we've set in motion through self-engagement, 2) the goals that we’ve identified and clarified for ourselves, and 3) the heightened perception of our in-the-moment responses and the fuller understanding of ourselves we've obtained through increased self-awareness. Note that each of these elements has a social component as well: By inviting the people who matter to us into these ongoing conversations, we enrich the dialogue; by sharing our goals with them, we increase our level of commitment; and by asking for their feedback, we see ourselves from their perspective and understand ourselves in new ways.

All of these catalysts can serve to make change easier--they can increase our willingness to change, or they can lower our resistance to change. Catalysts also change the conditions under which change is possible--we don’t need to wait until we're under duress or facing difficulties that might force change upon us. We can act sooner, at the moment of our own choosing, "under milder conditions."

The changes that occur in a self-coaching process take the form of an endless series of pivotal moments when we intervene and take action (or choose NOT to act). On occasion these interventions are Large, Dramatic Gestures, but far more often they're small, quotidian steps--little things we do on a daily basis, or even many times a day, to nudge ourselves in the direction of our goals.

A concept I find particularly useful in this context is Kurt Lewin and Edgar Schein's 3-stage change process (which I've discussed a number of times on this site.) In this model we start in a "frozen" state, automatically following our existing behavioral patterns; we "unfreeze" under the appropriate conditions, and our patterns are altered; and we then "refreeze" and enter a new state of automaticity.

Self-coaching first involves becoming aware of our automatic behavior patterns and seeing all those moments when we choose not to intervene--when we simply obey our impulses to do (or NOT do) something. With the support of the catalysts noted above--and the people who've been a part of our self-coaching process--this awareness allows us to then consciously intervene and make different choices. We can take action, when previously we would have sat back. Or we can sit back, when previously we would have taken action. These interventions take the form of momentary, tactical acts of what we might call self-regulation, and taken as a whole they comprise a larger, strategic process of self-management.

A timely example of this process at work: While I was writing this post Amy and I got into a fight--the details are beyond irrelevant, as they usually are, but suffice to say it was my fault initially, and then we each made it worse. As John Gottman's research makes clear, couples in successful long-term relationships continue to fight, and what's critical is that they learn how to fight effectively--they can fully express anger and frustration, but even in the heat of the moment, they're able to manage themselves, de-escalate the conflict, and eventually bring the fight to a close.

Amy and I have had plenty of practice over the course of our 26 years together, and in this fight what allowed us to turn the tide, recover and re-connect with each other was our respective ability to intervene in our automatic behaviors. At critical moments, we both felt tempted to say something that we knew would have made things worse--and yet would have felt SO good to say. But we didn't just give voice to those thoughts and feelings, nor did we stifle them entirely--we worked hard to find a way to express them that did some justice to our perspective while minimizing their potential to further inflame the other. At other moments I just wanted to disengage--a common ploy that Gottman calls "stonewalling," which allows one party in a conflict to feel less stressed while tending to increase the stress of the other party--but I resisted that impulse and stayed present. And finally, eventually, we talked ourselves off the ledge and even had a conversation to assess how and why things went wrong.

I'm not holding up my marriage or myself as a paragon of perfection here--there's plenty I can do to be a better husband and a better person, and I know that what I learned in this experience won't prevent our next fight from happening. But it's a meaningful example to me of self-intervention at both a tactical and a strategic level. In the moment, both Amy and I intervened with ourselves on multiple occasions to tactically self-regulate--in this case, to resist impulses to say or do things which sprang from automatic behavior patterns and yet which would have been counterproductive. And I believe that intervening repeatedly over time allows us to strategically self-manage: to change our patterns, to identify and adopt new, more effective behaviors, and ultimately to internalize these patterns so that future interventions require less effort or conscious intent.

A closing thought: By choosing to illustrate this process with an example of an unwanted conflict, I don't want to give the impression that self-intervention is only about resisting automatic impulses and NOT doing something. On many occasions it's just the opposite--we need to overcome our inertia, get off our asses and DO something. More on that in a future post.

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 christian.senger. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Coaching and the Cult of Done

In 2009 Bre Pettis and Kio Stark wrote "The Cult of Done Manifesto," a lean 163-word tract that has rightfully been celebrated around the web. I find it both professionally relevant and personally inspiring, and I also think it's an apt metaphor for the coaching process. [1,2]

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.

In Kurt Lewin and Edgar Schein's 3-stage change process, we start in a "frozen" state, automatically following our existing behavioral patterns ("not knowing"); we "unfreeze" under the appropriate conditions, and our patterns are altered ("taking action"); and we then "refreeze" and enter a new state of automaticity ("completion"). [3] All three states have their place; as exciting and rewarding as can be to change, we can't exist sustainably in an "unfrozen" state, and we need to return to a more predictable set of behavioral patterns. Coaching is about recognizing when our established patterns no longer serve us, taking action to initiate change [4], and returning to a revised set of patterns that help us achieve our goals more effectively.

2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.

We're always works in progress; we're never finished products. Accepting that we are drafts helps us accept ourselves, with all our flaws and foibles, without getting stuck. I'm not suggesting that we ignore those shortcomings, but rather that we not let them hold us back from taking active steps toward our goals. Coaching is about looking at life through the lens of the experiential learning process, and from that perspective everything we do is an experiment. [5]

3. There is no editing stage.

But this leads to a paradox: "Everything is a draft," and yet "there is no editing." So even if we look at life as a series of experiments, there are no rehearsals--we're live, every moment of every day, and we never truly get a moment back. We only have one shot at it. This creates a tension that can be exhilarating or paralyzing, and coaching is about how to live productively within this tension.

4. Pretending you know what you're doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you're doing even if you don't and do it.

We're our own worst critics, and we rarely think we know "enough"--often because we're comparing ourselves to someone who knows "more," and we don't want to be accused of hubris. But in many cases if we wait until we know "enough" we'll miss a meaningful opportunity to contribute what we can, and no "expert" is going to come along and save us--we're it. Coaching is about accepting that we're good enough now [6], and realizing that when we lack confidence in our abilities our behavior shapes our attitude. [7]

5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.

Decide for yourself if a week's time is the right sell-by date for an idea; personally, I let a lot of things gestate for much longer. But I agree with the underlying point when things are going slowly, and we're not making progress toward a goal, picking up momentum is key. Coaching is about generating and maintaining forward progress by abandoning imaginary ideal states, addressing practical realities, navigating around obstacles and finding new paths toward our goals.

6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.

It's about the journey, not the destination, and there's no finish line until we're truly finished. (That's not to say we shouldn't celebrate milestones along the way.) Coaching is about letting go of our attachment to an outcome while remaining deeply invested in the process. [8]

7. Once you're done you can throw it away.

So don't build a castle, put up 1,000 tents. [9] Coaching is about rapid-prototyping our lives, experimenting with a range of options, discarding the failures and doubling down on the ones that show promise.

8. Laugh at perfection. It's boring and keeps you from being done.

Perfection is worse than boring; it's stagnation. Perfection rarely motivates, and it often demotivates. It keeps us from accepting "good enough" and making it better. Coaching is about rejecting ideal visions of the perfect--the perfect day, the perfect job, the perfect life, the perfect self--and seeing "the perfect" for what it really is: the enemy of the good. [10]

9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.

Stepping up and taking action will always expose us to risk, and so we often choose to play it safe, staying on the sidelines and critiquing the efforts of others. But more often than not the greatest danger we really face is just the risk of embarrassment. Coaching is about overcoming that fear, taking action, and getting our hands dirty.

10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.

Seeing our failures and mistakes as learning opportunities is a crucial step in any effort to change and grow. [11] We will screw up, over and over, and every time we do our embarrassment and shame will threaten to overwhelm us. Hall of Fame baseball player Willie Stargell said, "My success is the product of the knowledge extracted from my failures," and coaching is about managing the emotions that spring from our failures and stepping up to the plate again (and again, and again). [12]

11. Destruction is a variant of done.

Sometimes we have to stop what we're doing, head off in a completely different direction, and start from scratch. But that's a costly process to repeat too often, and we may be better served by making more subtle and organic changes. Coaching is about recognizing when we can grow and when we truly need to take a leap.

12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.

The distance between nothing and something (no matter how flawed) is infinite. In comparison, the distance between that actual something and some theoretical perfection is barely noticeable. [13] Coaching is about doing something, even if it's just a "ghost of done," and using that as the foundation for further action.

13.Done is the engine of more.

And ultimately coaching is about being more fulfilled and more effective. This isn't to say that we need to rely exclusively on a personal coach to achieve these goals; while coaches like me can play a unique and valuable role in the process, we can also learn to self-coach in a wide range of circumstances (and even those of us working directly with a coach will ultimately coach ourselves most of the time.) [14]

Thanks to Bre Pettis and Kio Stark for the inspiration.

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Footnotes

[1] Bre Pettis and Kio Stark

[2] The Cult of Done Manifesto (Bre Pettis and Kio Stark, Medium, 2016, original 2009)

[3] Why Change Is Hard

[4] Building Blocks (A Tactical Approach to Change)

[5] Experiential Learning

[6] Stop Trying to Be "Good Enough" by "Getting Better"

[7] Attitude, Behavior, Cognitive Dissonance, and Authenticity

[8] Investment vs. Attachment

[9] Don't Build a Castle; Put Up 1,000 Tents

[10] Voltaire and Patton on Perfection

[11] On Learning From Mistakes

[12] Willie Stargell quote cited in "“I Think the Cure Is Worse than the Disease”: The Importance of Realistic Expectations and Self-Compassion" (Robert Brooks, 2011)

[13] Measuring the Infinite

[14] The Art of Self-Coaching

Photo by Andrew Hurley. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

 

Self-Development 2.0

Yes, I know, calling anything "2.0" these days is evidence of 1) lazy writing and 2) possible bullshit. I will cop to the laziness, but hear me out before you call bullshit.

A revolution is coming in the world of coaching, career planning, health and wellness, and personal growth, and I'm excited to find myself in the middle of it. Social-oriented startups like HealthRally, Joyo, Lift and Qrew are building tools that will help people not only do a better job of pursuing their self-development goals, but also leverage the power of their personal and professional communities in the process.

Research suggests that we're more likely to accomplish our goals when we...

• Clarify our goals and get specific.
• Communicate our goals openly with others.
• Break down our goals into actionable steps.
• Cultivate daily habits that support those steps.
• Celebrate small victories.
• And obtain support from people we care about.

The tools and services being developed by the companies above allow you to do all these things, in one way or another, and to recruit your friends, family and colleagues as coaches, cheerleaders and advisors.

As someone who's increasingly focused on self-coaching these days, I think this movement is incredibly important (and also just a lot of fun.) Interestingly, this feels like familiar territory for me. In the '90s I became aware of the potential for technology to transform how nonprofits deliver services, raise money and promote awareness, which led me to business school at Stanford and then to my stint as the first executive director of the Nonprofit Technology Network. A few years later I was bowled over by Seth Goldstein's prescient analysis of the power of user-generated metadata to take personalization to new levels of utility (and creepiness), which led to a brief tenure as executive director of AttentionTrust, a role I left to dedicate myself to coaching.

There's a community here that's waiting to be organized, and I'd like to help it along. I've formed a Self-Development 2.0 Meetup, and I'm going to hold the first get-together in San Francisco sometime in July. Watch this site and look for tweets tagged #selfdev for more.

Full disclosure: I've gotten to know the founders of Joyo, and the founder of Qrew is a former student of mine. I think very highly of them, I've met with them to discuss their businesses, and I may get formally involved at some point in the future, although I'm not today.

Photo by familymwr. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Perception, Understanding, and Self-Awareness

The intellectual life of man consists almost wholly in his substituting a conceptual order for the perceptual order in which his experience originally comes.

~William James [1]

James biographer Robert Richardson has described the pioneering psychologist as mounting "a lifelong protest on behalf of experience," [2] and James' emphasis on the importance of our immediate sensory perceptions has a parallel in the self-coaching process. While a key step in effective self-coaching is an attitude and an ongoing process of self-engagement [3], this isn't an end in itself; the intended result is an increased sense of self-awareness. I use this term to mean both a heightened in-the-moment perception of our physiological and emotional responses to a situation and a developing understanding of who we are and how we operate as individuals based on those responses.

Perception

Note that our physiological and emotional responses are deeply intertwined. [4] An emotion often generates a set of physiological responses that we may perceive before we're even aware that we're having an emotional experience, and what we feel physically often provides important clues to what we're feeling emotionally. When working with someone who's having difficulty naming the emotions they're feeling in the moment, I may ask them to do a mental scan of their body--literally, what do they feel?--and the physical can often be a helpful avenue into the emotional.

It can also be useful simply to expand our lexicon. The "emotional vocabulary" [5] I often share with clients and students lists eight primary emotional states: angry, caring, embarrassed, excited, happy, inadequate, sad, scared--and 52 synonyms. Note that this list shouldn't be construed as a definitive list of basic emotions. Psychologist Paul Ekman defines the six basic emotions as anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise, while the late Sylvan Tompkins believed there are eight: anguish, disgust, fear, joy, interest, rage, shame, and surprise. [6] But whether we're scanning our physiological responses or naming our emotions, the goal is a heightened ability to sense ourselves in the moment and then to make sense of those perceptions.

Understanding 

Self-coaching is a form of experiential learning [7] and if perceiving ourselves more acutely in the moment is a form of reflecting on our experiences, then the act of understanding ourselves more fully as a result of those perceptions is a form of conceptualizing those experiences and distilling them into generalizable principles.

Arriving at this understanding--a set of conceptions about ourselves as individuals that we believe in and can act upon--is a subtle, iterative and complex process. We need to hold this understanding provisionally and modify it repeatedly based on new data. We can't jump to conclusions, get locked into an unhelpful mindset [8], or cling too tightly to our mental models about ourselves. [9]

For example, I've come to realize that at times I can act, speak and even move quickly, a dynamic that's exacerbated when I'm stressed, excited or just keenly interested in something. This is fine when I'm working alone, but it can make it difficult for others to stay connected with me, which undermines my ability to achieve my goals in any collaborative experience, particularly when speaking before an audience. I can talk too rapidly for people to follow what I'm saying, or my mind races ahead of my mouth, and I may not even finish my sentences, leaving my listeners trailing behind.

This heightened self-awareness has helped me tremendously as a public speaker. Today I'm much more aware of the emotions I feel before speaking--nervous anticipation, excitement, even fear--and of the physiological responses that are the signatures of those emotions in me--a tingling in the pit of my stomach, sweaty palms, a burst of energy. And while I once interpreted those perceptions as signs of my ineptitude, I've developed a different understanding of myself--I care deeply about my work, I want my listeners to have a good experience, and as a result I put a lot of pressure on myself to do well. [10]

I don't want to lose this feeling of urgency entirely--the elevation that comes with mild stress can be both enjoyable and extremely productive. But I've had to learn how to sense its presence, regulate it, and manage how I express it in order to be more effective. I've also learned that I can overdo that self-regulation and self-management--it's important to find a happy medium.

My work with clients and students almost always involves increasing their self-awareness in both of the dimensions described above--perception and understanding--and it's not unusual for them to express some frustration that their newfound awareness doesn't immediately translate into change. In my experience as a coach, awareness is insufficient to motivate change on its own, but change rarely occurs without it. [11]

 

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Footnotes

[1] Some Problems of Philosophy (William James, 1910. Available in Writings: 1902-1910.)

[2] William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Robert Richardson, 2006)

[3] Conversations with Ourselves

[4] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[5] Vocabulary of Emotions [PDF]

[6] For more on basic emotions, see Chapter 5 in Joseph LeDoux's The Emotional Brain. The list above, which I've adapted from one originally developed by David Bradford, Mary Ann Huckabay and Carole Robin at Stanford, is simply one that works well for me as a coach.

[7] Experiential Learning Revisited

[8] The Meaning of Mindset

[9] Corn Mazes and Mental Models

[10] Stagefright and Public Speaking

[11] Building Blocks (A Tactical Approach to Change)

Updated March 2021.

Photo by Andrea.

Conversations with Ourselves

Self-coaching starts with self-engagement, which entails both a fundamental attitude toward ourselves and an ongoing process of engaging ourselves in conversation.

The attitude involves:

• Seeing ourselves as a work-in-progress and being open to learning and growth. [1]
• Adopting a mindset about ourselves that supports these goals. [2,3]
• And obtaining some critical distance in order to observe and reflect upon our experiences. [4]

The process will take different forms for each of us and will evolve over time, but the essential features include:

• A consistent commitment. Activities we participate in on a regular basis typically have greater impact than those we conduct intermittently. We're likely to get more value from walking a mile a day than from walking seven miles on Saturday, just as we're likely to benefit more from meditating for 10 minutes a day than from meditating for an hour on Sunday. This isn't to say that all such practices must occur daily, but it's important to find the rhythm that best suits each practice, and then take steps to turn that rhythm into a habitual pattern. [5]
• An active dialogue. The key here is rendering our abstract thoughts more concrete via some form of writing. I don't prescribe any particular format, because it's important for each individual to decide what works best: a weekly review, a few words at the end of the day, sporadic essays, a private diary or a website like this. But there's ample research that supports the value of journal writing in any form. [6]

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This may sound like a lot of work and either narcissistic or isolating. As for the work, coaching certainly requires effort, and self-coaching is no different. But while self-coaching does involve the pursuit of intentional practices, as they become more integrated into our routines the level of deliberate effort required to sustain them diminishes. For better and for worse, we are creatures of habit. [7]

As for concerns about narcissism and isolation, effective self-coaching requires us to be candid about our faults and shortcomings, to actively solicit feedback from others, and to be open to their influence. We have to navigate the perpetual tension between clear-eyed self-assessment and empathetic self-acceptance. And while self-coaching is a self-directed process, it's also profoundly social. It's not a solitary experience that occurs outside our relationships, but, rather, one in which we share aspects of our personal reflections and inner dialogue with others, who become members of our "coaching team, even if only for a single interaction. [8]

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Footnotes

[1] Learning How to Learn

[2] The Meaning of Mindset

[3] Setbacks, Mindset, and the Fundamental Attribution Error

[4] Perception, Understanding, and Self-Awareness

[5] Building Blocks (A Tactical Approach to Change)

[6] The Value of Journal Writing

[7] Conscious Competence in Practice

[8] Self-Coaching is SOCIAL

Updated March 2021.

Photo by Lian Xiaoxiao.

Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups

Study after study has shown that teams are more creative and productive when they can achieve high levels of participation, cooperation, and collaboration among members. But interactive behaviors like these aren't easy to legislate. Our work shows that three basic conditions need to be present before such behaviors can occur: mutual trust among members, a sense of group identity (a feeling among members that they belong to a unique and worthwhile group), and a sense of group efficacy (the belief that the team can perform well and that group members are more effective working together than apart)... At the heart of these three conditions are emotions. Trust, a sense of identity, and a feeling of efficacy arise in environments where emotion is well handled, so groups stand to benefit by building their emotional intelligence. [1, emphasis mine]

The passage above from Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven Wolff's "Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups

I've written before about the critical importance of safety, trust and intimacy as foundations for a group's capacity to support learning and change, and Druskat and Wolff's work confirms this perspective. [2]

Much of my work with leaders involves helping them establish mutual trust, group identity and group efficacy in various settings: among their executive teams, within functions, and across the organization as a whole. And in my experience as a coach I've found that groups that establish these conditions not only perform more effectively but also provide members with a greater sense of meaning and fulfillment, a critical advantage given that extrinsic rewards such as compensation or status tend to have diminishing impact over time.

It's simply more intrinsically rewarding to participate in such a group--a critical factor whenever the extrinsic rewards of group participation are unclear. Finally, as a coach I deeply appreciate Druskat and Wolff's framing of emotion not as a "necessary evil" but as a fundamental component of any human system. Even through emotionally intelligent individuals and groups must work to regulate their emotions in order to express them most effectively--see below--that's not at all the same as suppressing those emotions.

Science journalist Daniel Goleman popularized the term "emotional intelligence" the 1990s, and Druskat and Wolff draw on his work  it to define what it means for a group to be emotionally intelligent:

A team with emotionally intelligent members does not necessarily make for an emotionally intelligent group... Creating an upward, self-reinforcing spiral of trust, group identity, and group efficacy requires...a team atmosphere in which the norms build emotional capacity (the ability to respond constructively in emotionally uncomfortable situations) and influence emotions in constructive ways...

[In Emotional Intelligence] Goleman explains the chief characteristics of someone with high EI; he or she is aware of emotions and able to regulate them--and this awareness and regulation are directed both inward, to one’s self, and outward, to others. "Personal competence," in Goleman’s words, comes from being aware of and regulating one's own emotions. "Social competence" is awareness and regulation of others' emotions.

A group, however, must attend to yet another level of awareness and regulation. It must be mindful of the emotions of its members, its own group emotions or moods, and the emotions of other groups and individuals outside its boundaries. [3]

Druskat and Wolff identify an extensive set of norms that 1) create awareness of emotions and 2) help regulate emotions at the individual, group and cross-boundary levels. Laid out in a table on page 87 of the original HBR article, this list is a great resource. In addition to some basic truisms ("Take time away from group tasks to get to know one another.") it includes a number of more challenging concepts ("Assume that undesirable behavior takes place for a reason. Find out what that reason is. Ask questions and listen. Avoid negative attributions.")

The critical question that Druskat and Wolff leave unaddressed, however, is how to motivate people to actually do any of this often difficult work when the costs will be paid by individuals now (not only in the form of time and effort, but also in feelings of self-consciousness or discomfort), while any potential benefits will be enjoyed by the group later. Asking people to read an HBR article and telling them that "study after study has shown that they'll be more creative and productive" probably isn't going to cut it.

I don't mean to be flippant--it's a real dilemma that I face as an experiential educator and as a practitioner in industry. I try to leverage what I know about joyful learning to get a group pointed in a helpful direction, but ultimately the group's ability to develop the norms that support emotional intelligence is dependent on individual members' emotional investment in the group experience itself.

This process may start with some social pressure or even outright coercion--for example, strongly urging or even mandating members' attendance at group events early in its life-cycle. If those initial group experiences create a sense of emotional investment, then it becomes much easier to encourage individual members to identify and establish norms that will support the group's collective emotional intelligence. But if those initial experiences fail to trigger an emotional investment, then appeals to enhanced productivity will likely fall on deaf ears, and increased levels of social pressure or coercion will create a backlash.

I don't know what will happen to the group I describe above, but I do know that they've successfully begun the process of transforming from a collection of emotionally intelligent individuals to an emotionally intelligent group, and the feelings of trust, safety, intimacy, identify and efficacy that characterize such a group will serve as an essential foundation to help them achieve their goals.

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Appendix: Group EQ Workshop

Pre-Reading

• Safety, Trust, Intimacy
• Safety, Risk, Learning and Growth,
• Let's Get Weird (Unusual Events and Creativity)

Exercise 1: Positive Attributions

Have the group focus for several minutes on one member at at time, relying on individuals to volunteer rather than going in a circle. Use a timer to stay on track. During each round the other members express out loud any positive attributions that come to mind as they reflect on this person. Designate a note-taker, if there's no facilitator, who types up in real time the list of words and phrases shared for each person and then emails the entire list immediately to the full group. Allow a few minutes for the members to review this list, and then have an open discussion about the emotions evoked in the process of sharing, receiving, and reviewing these attributions.

Exercise 2: Vulnerability Stories

Have each member share a personal story with the group that brings up some form of vulnerability, ranging from embarrassment to shame. Each person has 4 minutes to relate their story--pick the time depending on the size of the group and use a timer to stay on track. Focus less on the events and more on the feelings being evoked. Then the group has 2 minutes to share any responses to the story.

Exercise 3: Group Norms

Have group members complete this Group Norms Worksheet. In an open space that's sufficiently large to accommodate the group, create a spectrum on the floor with 7 points that corresponds to the dimensions on the worksheet. (Curve the line so that the endpoints are visible to each other.) Then have members share their individual responses non-verbally by arraying themselves along the spectrum. Progress slowly from one dimension to the next, allowing sufficient time for members to observe where they're positioned relative to others in the group. It's generally best to run through the entire set of norms to generate data and then debrief afterwards. In a larger group, pre-assign partners so members can focus on another person, and begin the debriefing process in 1:1 conversations among these pairs before moving on to a full group discussion.

The overall goal is to allow the group's members to have set of emotional experiences together, which typically triggers a sense of investment in the group, while also illustrating various skills necessary to both express and regulate emotions effectively.

Revised May 2020.

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Footnotes

[1] Building the Emotional Intelligence of Groups, page 83 (Vanessa Urch Druskat and Steven Wolff, Harvard Business Review, March 2001)

[2] Safety, Trust, Intimacy

[3] Druskat and Wolff, page 82

For Further Reading

Safety, Risk, Learning and Growth

Let's Get Weird (Unusual Events and Creativity)

Living in the Tension (Self-Assessment and Self-Acceptance)

1) If we don't ask ourselves "How could I have done better?" we don't learn, and we don't grow.

2) If, at some point, we don't STOP asking how we could have done better & simply accept our performance (& ourselves), we're trapped, paralyzed by our inability to let go and move forward.

3) We have to live in the perpetual tension between (cold-eyed) self-assessment & (warm-hearted) self-acceptance.

I met with a prospective coaching client a few weeks ago, a woman who was referred to me by a former client with whom I did some particularly meaningful work. Even though I firmly believe that coaching is a highly personalized service, clients need to trust their instincts when choosing a coach, and (without a doubt) I'm not the right coach for everyone, I wanted this meeting to go well because of my relationship with my former client. In a way, I didn't want to let him down.

And the meeting with the prospective client went...fine. We had a thoughtful conversation about the issues that were leading her to consider coaching, and I appreciated her candor and her eagerness to actually have a coaching conversation rather than just talk about coaching.

But ultimately it felt that we weren't quite clicking, and although we parted very amicably, I wasn't surprised not to hear back from her. Not surprised, but a little disappointed with myself. Looking back on our conversation, I could identify several key moments when my desire to "do well" actually led me astray--a classic example of bad coaching, driven by my attachment to a "successful" outcome.

It's been useful to reflect back on that conversation and consider what I would do differently, and I've learned quite a lot as a result. But it's also been important to let go and move on. I'm still disappointed--I think I could have been a good coach to this person, although I have to defer to her judgment on the matter--but at this point further reflection would be unhealthy rumination.

I'm not suggesting it's easy to draw that line--it's damn hard, especially for a perfectionist like me. But I arrived at the tweets that led to this post after realizing that I was ruminating--and expanding on those thoughts in this post has been a helpful way to balance my desire to learn from my failures with a sense of self-acceptance.

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 West Point Public Affairs. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Let's Get Weird (Unusual Events and Creativity)

My colleague Doug Sundheim recently pointed to research by a team of Dutch and American psychologists on the benefits of weird experiences:

Comparisons with various control groups showed that a diversifying experience--defined as the active (but not vicarious) involvement in an unusual event--increased cognitive flexibility more than active (or vicarious) involvement in normal experiences. [1]

I'm always cautious about premature (and potentially spurious) interpretations of brand-new research, and yet practitioners like me can't sit around and wait for the scientists to get everything completely sorted out. At the same time, these findings resonate deeply with my own empirical experience as a coach.

In my work at Stanford and with clients I often lead people through workshops, classes and other experiences intended to expand their perspective and get them thinking differently on a range of topics. Whenever possible, I begin these sessions with some type of exercise that's designed to (gently) shake people up in one way or another.

For example, I'll have the group stand in a circle and ask them to sort themselves by height, with the tallest person on my left and the shortest person on my right. When they're done, I'll ask them to re-sort themselves by birthday, with the person born closest to January 1st on my left and the person born closest to December 31st on my right. And then I'll ask them to, say, re-sort themselves by "blue," with the "most blue" person on my left and the "least blue" person on my right. Someone in the group always asks what I mean by "blue," and I always tell them it's up to them to decide--there's no right answer.

People typically find this a mildly weird way to begin a workshop--not so weird that it's alienating or off-putting, but just weird enough that it confounds their expectations and heightens their interest. (It also gets them up and moving, which I find always helps.)

I think that what happening here is related to Hans Selye's concept of eustress: modest levels of stress improve performance, and weird or unexpected experiences are modestly stressful. [2] Such experiences push us slightly outside our comfort zone, and we can't go on auto-pilot anymore. We're a little nervous, a little excited, and we really have to pay attention to figure out what's going on and what might happen next.

However, as Doug points out, "We often think we've gotten out of our comfort zone, when we really have only stretched it a bit." I suspect that there's a neurological basis for this--perhaps we acclimate to the heightened emotions triggered by weird experiences and other sources of discomfort, so we need to readjust what we define as our "comfort zone" (and what we mean by "weird") to re-enact those emotions.

That's certainly been my experience with regard to improv. I wouldn't call myself a skilled improv player--in addition to the brief exercises I use to open workshops, I only participate in an extended session once or twice a year--but I've done enough of it that it's no longer "weird" to me, and it's well within my comfort zone. So if I'm truly going to reap the benefits of the dynamics uncovered by Ritter's reseach, I'm going to have to get much, much weirder. (Burning Man, here I come.)

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Footnotes

[1] Diversifying Experiences Enhance Cognitive Flexibility (Simone Ritter, et al, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2012), cited in Creativity: Why You Should Seek Out Unusual or Downright Weird Experiences (Jeremy Dean, PsyBlog, 2012). Thanks to Doug Sundheim for the reference.

[2] The Nature of Stress (Hans Selye, 1982)

[3] Doug Sundheim

For Further Reading

The Icebreaker Effect: Singing Mediates Fast Social Bonding (Eiluned Pearce, Jacques Launay and Robin I. M. Dunbar, Royal Society Open Science, October 2015)

Pride and Pratfalls: Recounting Embarrassing Stories Increases Creativity (Elizabeth Wilson, Leigh Thompson and Brian Lucas, International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation, September 2019)

Team Video Gaming for Team Building: Effects on Team Performance (Mark Keith, et al, Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 2018)

(Thanks to Ethan Mollick for these references.)

Revised February 2021.

Photo of Burning Man by Christopher Michel.

Truth, Power and Communication

1. Any power we have distorts what others choose to tell us and what we choose to hear.

2. The more power we have relative to someone else, the more distortion in the dialogue.

3. Any unpleasant truths we hear from someone with less power than we have are Precious Gifts, and should be treated accordingly.

4. All that said, feedback is not a gift.

 

Photo by Robbie Grubbs.

Joyful Teaching with Stanford's Leadership Fellows

I've written before about the concept of joyful learning, and Annie Murphy Paul recently wrote about what I'd call "joyful teaching" in her Psychology Today post on The Protégé Effect. 

Students enlisted to tutor others, these researchers have found, work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively. In what scientists have dubbed "the protégé effect," student teachers score higher on tests than pupils who are learning only for their own sake.

And just why are these student teachers so dedicated?

Above all, it's the emotions elicited by teaching that make it such a powerful vehicle for learning. Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas. Don't know that word? I had to learn it myself: "Pride and satisfaction that is derived from someone else’s accomplishment."

I see this dynamic in effect every year in my work with the Leadership Fellows at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The Fellows, a select group of 66 second-year students, are each assigned to 6-person "squads" of incoming first-year students, and together they work through a series of experiential exercises in our Leadership Labs. The Fellows are acting as coaches and guides, not, strictly speaking, as teachers, but they're no less invested in their students' learning.  They absolutely feel chagrin when their squad struggles with an exercise, and they're bursting with nachas when their squad succeeds.

And I'm in a similar relationship with the 11 Fellows who are assigned to me in my role as a Leadership Coach. I help them learn to employ coaching skills and techniques, not to train them for a career in coaching but rather to prepare them to be better leaders and managers in any number of fields they might enter after business school. When they struggle with the extremely challenging task of coaching a diverse, newly formed group of students, I empathize deeply--and when they succeed, I couldn't be happier or more proud. It's an extremely emotional experience, and the research cited by Paul in her post only confirms my sense that these emotions are powerful intrinsic motivators, both for myself and for our Fellows--and reinforces Paul's point that a key to promoting learning is ensuring that the learners are also teachers.

We're about to say goodbye to the 2011-12 Fellows, and I'll truly miss them--at the same time, I'm eager to get started with the 2012-13 Fellows in a few months. The cycle continues.

Photo by Nathan Russell.