Ed Batista

32 People Who Have My Attention

I was talking recently with a friend who's considering where to focus his time and energy as he builds his coaching and consulting practice. He's seeking not only to support his own efforts, but also to connect with a community of like-minded people working on leadership, professional development, personal growth and related issues.

Our conversation led me to reflect on the people who command my attention in this regard, people who who consistently maintain my interest through their combination of...

1. thoughtful writing
2. in a personal voice
3. with a sense of community
4. and a well-designed web presence.

I came up with the list below of 32 people (alphabetized by first name) who fulfill these criteria, and after sharing it with my friend I thought I'd post it here to express my thanks for all they do to contribute to my own learning and development. It's not intended to be an exhaustive list--I know I'll regret leaving someone off--and there's nothing special about 32; these are just the first people who came to mind in this process, and I preferred that to randomly choosing 25 or 50 or whatever:

1. Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton)

London-based de Botton is...a working philosopher? I don't really know what to call him, but I know I've benefited from his guidance.

2. Anne Kreamer (@AnneKreamer)

NYC writer Kreamer's It's Always Personal: Navigating Emotion in the New Workplace deftly balances first-person experience with recent research.

3. Annie Murphy Paul (@anniemurphypaul)

Murphy Paul is amazingly productive writer based in New Haven, CT whose articles, posts and tweets have a particular focus on how we learn.

4. Art Markman (@abmarkman)

Markman is a prof of psychology and marketing at UT Austin, whose work explores thinking, decision making and motivation.

5. Bill George (@Bill_George)

George is a former Fortune 500 CEO who's carved out a second career teaching leadership at HBS. 

6. BJ Fogg (@bjfogg)

Fogg is a Stanford prof and tech industry consultant whose expertise is in "creating systems to change human behavior."

7. Brene Brown (@BreneBrown)

Brown is a prof at the University of Houston whose talk on vulnerability has been seen nearly 1 million times and still makes me cry.

8. Bret Simmons (@drbret)

Simmons is a prof at the B-school of the University of Nevada, Reno who integrates topics like personal branding into his courses on leadership and organizational behavior.

9. Dan Oestreich (@DanOestreich)

Oestreich is a coach and consultant based outside Seattle who's one of the very best writers we have on the subjects of leadership and organizational life; it was a privilege to be interviewed by him.

10. David Rock (@davidrock101)

Rock is a coach based in NYC who's studied the implications of neuroscience for leadership and coaching, resulting in such useful tools as his SCARF Model.

11. Daniel Coyle (@DanielCoyle)

Journalist Coyle writes about talent, performance and motivation, with a particular interest in endurance sports.

12. Doug Sundheim (@DougSundheim)

Sundheim is a consultant and coach in NYC and the author of the recently-published Taking Smart Risks, which encourages us to consider the costs of playing it safe.

13. Eric Pennington (@epicliving)

Pennington is a consultant and coach in Columbus, OH whose personal voice is a hallmark of his writing.

14. Eugene Eric Kim (@eekim)

Kim recently left Groupaya, the Bay Area consulting firm he co-founded, to explore new horizons.

15. Halley Bock (@HalleyBock)

Bock is CEO of the Seattle coaching and consulting firm founded by the great Susan Scott, whose Fierce Conversations taught me much.

16. Kelly McGonigal (@kellymcgonigal)

McGonigal is a psychologist and lecturer at Stanford whose work focuses on translating findings from medicine and neuroscience into strategies for personal development.

17. Maria Konnikova (@mkonnikova)

Konnikova is a writer in NYC who's pursuing a PhD in psych at Columbia.

18. Mark McGuinness (@markmcguinness)

McGuinness is a coach in London--and a poet--who specializes in working with creative professionals and who's inspired me for years.

19. Michael Bungay Stanier (@boxofcrayons)

Bungay Stanier is an inspiring Toronto-based coach, consultant and author whose focus is helping people and organizations "do great work."

20. Nilofer Merchant (@nilofer)

Merchant is a Bay Area corporate director and author who addresses a wide range of business topics with an emphasis on innovation and culture.

21. Nir Eyal (@nireyal)

Eyal is an entrepreneur (and Stanford GSB alum) who now consults to tech companies and writes about product design, the power of habit and user engagement.

22. Oliver Burkeman (@oliverburkeman)

Burkeman is a British journalist based in NYC whose recent book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking is simply brilliant.

23. Pam Fox Rollin (@PamFR)

Fox Rollin is a coach (and Stanford GSB alum--and a friend!) here in the Bay Area and the author of 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role.

24. Richard Winters (@drrwinters)

Winters is an ER doctor--and an leadership coach to other physicians--based in Fresno, CA.

25. Stephanie West Allen (@idealawg)

Denver-based West Allen is a former attorney who now consults to the legal field and writes on mediation, mindfulness, neuroscience and related issues.

26. Scott Eblin (@ScottEblin)

Eblin is a coach and consultant focused on leadership development, with a longtime practice in Washington DC and a new home base in LA.

27. Tara Sophia Mohr (@tarasophia)

Mohr is a San Francisco coach and author (and Stanford GSB alum) whose practice focuses on helping women fully achieve their aspirations.

28. Thaler Pekar (@thaler)

Pekar is a NY-based communications consultant who helps people harness the power of narrative to tell their own stories more effectively.

29. Tom Peters (@tom_peters)

Peters is a well-known management thinker (and Stanford GSB alum); what you may not know is how effectively this longtime author makes use of social media.

30. Vickie Gray (@adaptivecoach)

Gray is a coach based in Nova Scotia whose practice focuses on Agile development and whose insights are relevant in any field.

31. Wally Bock (@wallybock)

Bock is an indefatigable blogger and ghostwriter in Charlotte, NC who has plenty of good advice for fellow writers.

32. Whitney Johnson (@johnsonwhitney)

Boston-based investor and author Johnson translates her business acumen into insights on personal growth, innovation and leadership.

Photo by dpika. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Leading Is an Act of Love

I'm working with a leader who isn't as motivated as he'd like to be. He's doing a perfectly fine job, but it's not truly meaningful to him--it's just a job. [1] Although there's nothing tragic about this person's situation, I'm reminded of Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. [2] Writing under circumstances that were indeed tragic, Frankl identifies three ways in which we can discover meaning: "(1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. The first, by way of achievement or accomplishment, is quite obvious. The second and third need further elaboration." [3]

No one's suffering here, thankfully, so I can set aside Frankl's third option--but his discussion of the second path to meaning offers advice that I find both profound and practical:

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality.  No one can become fully aware of the essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features of the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true. [4]

That's a powerful definition of leadership. To fulfill Frankl's vision of helping others realize their fullest potential, we have to see that potential within them. And to see that full potential, we have to truly understand them--we have to "become aware of their essence." And to do that, we have to love them.

Love is a big word and a frightening one, and we often hesitate to use it in the professional realm, at least in any meaningful way. I suspect that the problem lies with our narrow definition of the term--we hear "love" and automatically think of romantic love, or familial love, and it seems embarrassing or even inappropriate to apply the term to our professional relationships. But in the best of those relationships it's love we feel--not romantic love or familial love, but love nonetheless, and as leaders our ability to summon and express that love can be a powerful force.

I've had the privilege of working with a number of good, very good and truly great leaders in my life, both in my 15-year career before becoming a coach and since 2006 with my clients and students. The good ones are passionate, but it's not quite love. The very good ones do feel love--for their team, for the work, for life--but they can't quite bring themselves to say it out loud and fully express the feeling. The great ones feel it, and everyone around them knows it and benefits as a result.

At its core leading is an act of love. It's the ability to love those around us in a way that allows us to understand them, to see their full potential, and to enable that potential to be realized. Can we lead this way 24/7? Can we live this way every day? No--at least I certainly can't. There are plenty of days when love is the furthest thing from my mind, and it's all I can do to be civil. But I've experienced it often enough to know how effective I am when I feel it--and even more so when I'm able to convey it to those around me.

Returning to the leader noted above, having considered his struggle to find a deeper source of meaning in his work, I asked him: What form of love might you feel for your people? How might you tap into it and express it? What might you see in them as a result? And what might you do then?

 

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Footnotes

[1] The Work and The Job

[2] Man's Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl, 1946) Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who spent the years 1942-45 in four different Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz. By the end of the war his pregnant wife, his parents and his brother had been murdered; among his immediate family, only he and his sister survived.

[3] Ibid, page 111

[4] Ibid, pages 111-12

Photo by Björn Falkevik.

Women, Men, Work and Emotion

Whitney Johnson and Tara Mohr recently co-authored Women Need to Realize Work Isn't School, a powerful call to action containing five straightforward guidelines that challenge women to re-think their approach to professional success:

1. Figure out how to challenge and influence authority.

2. Prepare, but also learn how to improvise.

3. Find effective forms of self-promotion.

4. Welcome a less proscribed, full of surprise, career path.

5. Go for being respected, not just liked.

It's a brilliant piece of writing, and I intend to refer to it regularly in my work with clients and students at Stanford (where today the MBA Class of 2012 is just 39% women).

I want to augment Johnson and Mohr's perspective with two points: First, while I firmly agree that these five issues affect women more often and more severely than men, they certainly affect men as well. In my own professional development I've wrestled with each of these issues, and while I had an easier path as a man, it was nevertheless an intense struggle. (And it still is--I'm not suggesting that I've permanently resolved these issues for myself, just that I've addressed them and made what feels like meaningful progress over the years.)

And as I reflect on my male clients and MBA students, my sense is that every one of them is coping with one or more of these issues. From my perspective Johnson and Mohr have identified a critical set of universal challenges we all face in professional life, and they're shining a necessary spotlight on the unique difficulties faced by women in surmounting them.

Second, while these strategies point out the ways in which women can often undermine themselves and suggest useful alternatives, my experience as a coach tells me that simply knowing what we should do is rarely sufficient motivation on its own. In order to take effective action, we have to acknowledge and address the emotions that get stirred up by the prospect of doing so.

Any of us--women and men--who wrestle with the issues above can use Johnson and Mohr's call to action as a starting point to begin to understand the mental models that hold us back. And yet I suspect that sustained progress will depend on our willingness to understand ourselves at an even deeper level--for example, how our emotions affect our reasoning and decision-making or our performance under stress.

When we find ourselves acting in opposition to Johnson and Mohr's guidelines, it's likely that emotional factors are at play. Habitually deferring to authority, failing to improvise, rejecting appropriate credit for our performance, turning down surprise opportunities, focusing on being liked while failing to command respect--these are all professional missteps with a profound emotional dimension to them. Even as we're making such a misstep, we know it's the wrong thing to do, but somehow it feels better, safer, less risky to make the sub-optimal choice.

So once our awareness has been raised and we know what we should do, our fundamental struggle in addressing these issues may be acknowledging and overcoming the anxiety, the embarrassment, the shame, the fear that well up when we contemplate taking that bold step. This is the complex and difficult work of self-coaching: engaging ourselves, understanding ourselves, and ultimately accepting ourselves even as we strive to do better.

Photo by Renato Ganoza. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.

Setting the Table (Difficult Conversations)

We know it's going to be a difficult conversation because we keep putting it off. We know it's going to be difficult because we feel unsettled when we think about it. We know it's going to be difficult because we're not sure it's going to end well. What can we do to make it easier and increase the likelihood of success?

I regularly help clients prepare for a difficult conversation: firing an employee, sharing critical feedback with a colleague, resisting an unreasonable superior, having a heart-to-heart with a friend who's struggling. And I believe they're well-served by what I call setting the table: considering all the tactical steps and logistical factors that might help (or hinder) their efforts. I see five aspects to difficult conversations, and within each one there are a number of questions we can ask in order to prepare. I'm not suggesting that you need to answer all of the questions below, and you may lack the ability to determine some of the answers. But we can become so distracted by the challenge of a difficult conversation that we fail to consider the many ways in which we might prepare, and it's often helpful to simply pause and remind ourselves of our options before we take action.

1. Relationship

• Who is this person to me, and who am I to them?
• What is our status relative to each other, both formally and informally?
• What authority or influence do I have over them?
• What authority or influence do they have over me?
• How will these factors affect my invitation (or my request or my command) to speak with this person?
• Are we engaged in an ongoing dialogue, or will this conversation be something new for us?
• How will that affect their response to the conversation?
• How do I want this conversation to impact the relationship? Deepen it? Challenge it? End it?

2. Timing

• When should the conversation occur? What time of day? What day of the week?
• Am I rushing things to get it over with?
• Am I dragging my feet in the hope that the issue will be resolved before I need to deal with it?
• What will I and the other person be doing immediately before and immediately after the conversation?
• What timing will allow both myself and the other person to be in the best possible frame of mind for this conversation?
• What if the other person initiates the conversation before I expect it to occur?
• What are the pros and cons of deferring? What are the pros and cons of seizing the moment?
• If I choose to defer, how can I do so gracefully? If I choose to seize the moment, what do I want to bear in mind?

3. Duration

• How much time should I allot for the conversation?
• Is that a realistic assessment, or is that how much time I hope it will take?
• Do either of us have a hard stop at the end of this conversation?
• Do we need to keep track of time? If so, can I share that responsibility with the other person, or is it mine alone?
• How much of a buffer should I leave between the figural "end" of the conversation and the literal moment either of us will need to move on to our next obligation?
• What if the conversation goes much better (or worse) than I expect?
• How good (or bad) will it have to be for me to ignore my schedule in order to continue the conversation?

4. Place

• If we're meeting in person, where should the conversation occur?
• If we're meeting virtually, should it be via video or phone?
• If we're meeting virtually, where should I be located, and where should the other person be located (and can I influence their location)?
• Would a formal setting like an office or a sit-down restaurant provide some useful social constraints, or would it feel too stifling?
• Would an informal setting like a cafe or at home be helpfully relaxing, or would it feel too unbounded?
• If there's a location in which this conversation would normally take place, will that predictability be comforting or stultifying?
• Should it be on my turf, or their turf, or on neutral ground?
• How much privacy will we need?
• Will the presence of other people be helpful or distracting?
• What other environmental factors might be in play?
• Will any visual distractions be in my line of sight or theirs?
• Will ambient noise affect the conversation?
• Will there be any physical discomforts that could make it hard to focus?
• If any of these factors change in the middle of the conversation, what am I prepared to do to deal with them?

5. Space

• If we're meeting in person, how should we be oriented toward each other?
• Should we be across a table, or next to each other, or on adjacent sides?
• Should there even be a table? Should we even be seated?
• What would it be like to hold the conversation while taking a walk together?
• What proximity is optimal, given the relationship and our respective preferences for personal space?
• How close is too close? How far is too far?
• Would I be better served by increasing or decreasing that distance?
• Would it be comforting or inappropriate to touch the other person?
• If it would be comforting, am I prepared to reach out to them?

 

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For Further Reading

Better Working Relationships

The Communication Funnel

Pick Up the Phone

Better Conditions for Working Remotely

Intent vs. Impact (When Communication Goes Awry)

How to Deliver Critical Feedback

Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful

Learning to Yield (Navigating Difficult Conversations)

Updated June 2021.

Photo by Didriks.

White Bears and Car Crashes (Thinking About Thinking)

The ability to be aware of--and influence--what we're thinking about is a critical self-coaching skill. We need to focus our attention on what's important and devote less of it to what's irrelevant, a task that's more difficult when we're stressed or tired. And yet efforts to actively suppress thoughts can actually be counterproductive--so what can we do?

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The late Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner was known for his work on mental control, and in response to the question, "How do people control their own minds?" he responded:

The simple strategy of directing attention can often be helpful, as people can stop thoughts, concentrate, improve their moods, relax, fall asleep, and otherwise control their mental states just by trying to direct their thoughts. These strategies of mental control can sometimes backfire, however, producing not only the failure of control but the very mental states we are trying to avoid. [1, emphasis mine]

Wegner's insights on mental control emerged from his research on thought suppression, a concept he illustrated with the image of a white bear, inspired by a line from Dostoyevsky: "Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute." Wegner wrote:

People who are prompted to try not to think about a white bear while they are thinking out loud will tend to mention it about once a minute... It seems that many of us are drawn into what seems a simple task, to stop a thought, when we want to stop thinking of something because it is frightening, disgusting, odd, inconvenient, or just annoying. And when we succumb to that initial impulse to stop, the snowballing begins. We try and fail, and try again, and find that the thought is ever more insistent for all our trying. [2]

Why does this matter so much? Neuroscientist and psychologist Ian Robertson offers a vivid illustration:

We have to inhibit the billions of bits of irrelevant information assailing our senses in order to concentrate on the fragments of information which are crucial for us at a particular point in time.

This difficulty in suppressing the irrelevant causes particular problems with driving in older people. Whereas older people are more vigilant, careful and generally less error prone, they tend to make more mistakes at busy road junctions. At such complicated traffic intersections, everyone--young and old--is faced with a barrage of lights, signals and speeding streams of traffic. Some of this information is critically important for deciding when and what to do next, while much of it is irrelevant. For instance, the roaring trucks on the motorway overhead may be noisy and intimidating, but they...are quite irrelevant to the task of managing to turn here. A young driver will be much better able to "screen out" this irrelevant distraction than an older driver, and so will be better able to focus attention on the lights and traffic which are important for surviving this particular turn. [3]

But the risk of a car crash is just one danger we face if we're unable to avoid distraction and manage our attention effectively. We encounter the equivalent of a busy intersection every day in fast-paced meetings with full agendas and with our devices constantly streaming massive amounts of data in our direction. In these settings how do we focus our attention in order to achieve our goals most effectively?

Inhibition is crucial here--wasting attention on the equivalent of a noisy but irrelevant truck roaring overhead could result in an ill-timed turn. But we can't simply compel ourselves to ignore such distractions, or we may risk becoming fixated on them. And if we're stressed or tired, it will be even more difficult to focus our attention where it's needed most.

So what steps can we take? Health journalist Lea Winerman covered a presentation by Wegner at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association [4], in which he described several strategies for mental control, both in the moment and over time:

Minimize distractions in the moment by...

• Eliminating multi-tasking, which diminishes our cognitive load, frees up finite working memory and increases our ability to focus. [5]
• Identifying an "absorbing distractor" that will prevent us from becoming fixated on a more problematic focal point.

Build capacity to focus attention over time by...

• Address unwanted thoughts in some designated period during the day. (Winerman notes that chronic worriers who set aside 30 minutes during which they were free to worry experienced less anxiety.)
• Committing to a mindfulness practice, such as meditation. [6]

A note on mindfulness: Although I can find meditation difficult, I persist in the practice because my own experience is consistent with Wegner's recommendation. For me meditation isn't a means to a stress-free state--it's a workout in attention management, and like any workout it can be taxing. My simple practice is inspired by Jon Kabat-Zinn: Get still, notice what I'm thinking about (and how it makes me feel), let go of that thought (and those emotions) and bring my attention back to what it feels like to breathe. Within seconds, I'm thinking about something else again, and the cycle repeats itself over and over for the duration of my meditation session. It's not easy and not particularly fun, but I'm exercising my capacity for self-awareness and my ability to direct attention, and a consequence of that workout is that I'm better able to focus on what matters and minimize distractions.

 

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Footnotes

[1] Mental Control and Ironic Processes (Daniel Wegner, a summary of The Handbook of Mental Control, edited by Wegner and James Pennebaker, 1992)

[2] Thought Suppression (Daniel Wegner, a summary of White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control, 2nd edition, 1994)

[3] Mind Sculpture: Unlocking Your Brain's Untapped Potential, pages 114-115 (Ian Robertson, 2000)

[4] Suppressing the "white bears" (Lea Winerman, Monitor on Psychology, Volume 43, No. 9, October 2011)

[5] You're Not Multi-Tasking, You're Half-Assing (2016)

[6] Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People) (2017)

For Further Reading

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking (Oliver Burkeman, 2012)

Many thanks to Oliver Burkeman for introducing me to the work of Daniel Wegner.

Updated July 2018.

Photo by flickrfavorites.

Connect and Control (Managing Difficult Relationships)

Almost all of us have to grapple with important professional relationships in which 1) the lines of authority are complex and tangled, 2) the emotional signals and other interpersonal cues are hard to decipher, and 3) there's an interdependence between the two parties that can generate both excitement and resentment, depending on the circumstances.

One process that I've found useful in helping my coaching clients decide how best to manage these difficult relationships is clarifying how they might both connect with the other person and, in contrast, control the other person. I'm not suggesting that it's a 50/50 alternative: In my experience as a coach and certainly in the annals of management literature (cf. Daniel Goleman's Leadership that Gets Results, just as one starting point) connecting with other people is a far more productive and sustainable approach. That said, the ability to control others effectively is a critical managerial and interpersonal skill, particularly in a crisis.

I'm also not suggesting that we face a binary choice: We typically need to make use of both approaches in any given relationship to meet our goals (and a failure to meet those goals may suggest that we're relying on one approach at the expense of the other.)

There's a temporal dimension to these choices as well. Sometimes we're faced with an opportunity to act in-the-moment, and we need to be prepared to quickly employ a range of tactics suited to the situation. And no matter what the present situation, we should also take the long view, considering what strategies to apply over time during the course of the relationship.

The 2x2 grid above is an admittedly oversimplified depiction of this interpersonal landscape, but I find it a helpful way to convey these concepts quickly. The examples in each category above aren't intended to be definitive or exhaustive; they're simply ones that come up frequently in my discussions with clients and students.

So when considering how to improve a difficult relationship, we might start by asking ourselves...

• What steps could I take to connect with this person?
• What could I do in-the-moment in a given interaction that might develop or strengthen the connection between us?
• What long term strategies might I apply over time that would create further opportunities for connection?

But it's also important to ask ourselves...

• If need be, what steps could I take to control this person?
• If need be, what could I do in-the-moment in a given interaction that might tilt the balance of power between us?
• If need be, what long terms strategies might I apply over time that would create further opportunities to do so?

I want to re-iterate that this isn't a 50/50 alternative--in most relationships, most of the time, we'll be most effective at achieving our interpersonal goals through connection. But it's magical thinking to believe that all difficulties can be resolved that way, and we put ourselves at a serious disadvantage if we can't exert control when necessary. It's also magical thinking to believe that control will yield sustainable success--with the requisite power, authority, oversight and time, we can extract compliance from anyone, but it'll last only as long as our stores of those precious resources.

So it may also be worth asking...

• Which approach feels more comfortable or natural to me? How do I feel about the alternative approach?
• Do I feel capable of switching between approaches as needed, or do I overuse one or the other?
• If I tend to rely on connecting strategies and avoid controlling ones, am I failing to step into my authority, make use of my power and assert control when needed?
• If I tend to rely on controlling strategies, am I failing to acknowledge my vulnerability, build trust and connect with others when needed?

Our ultimate goal should be not only the ability to draw upon both approaches, but also the ability to do so dynamically, so that we're not stuck in one mode or the other in a given interaction (or in the relationship as a whole) but can shift as needed, adjusting to changing circumstances.

Self-Coaching and Harvard Business Review Press

Exciting news! I've signed a contract with Harvard Business Review Press to write a book on self-coaching. I worked with Editorial Director Tim Sullivan last year to transform my rough framework into a more comprehensive proposal, and ultimately he and his colleagues gave the idea a thumbs-up. (I'm grateful to Tim for his ongoing support and to Grant McCracken for introducing us in the first place.)

I wrote at length about what I mean by "self-coaching" last June, but in brief it's a self-directed process that allows us to be more effective and feel more fulfilled in our professional lives by drawing upon tools and concepts from executive coaching, social psychology, neuroscience, and other disciplines. Self-coaching is not intended to replicate the experience of working in-person with a coach, but self-coaching resources can be of use to people currently working with a coach, people who have worked with a coach in the past, and the much larger number of people who may never have the opportunity to work directly with a coach.

One further note: Self-coaching doesn't mean solitary coaching. As I wrote in another post last June, "While self-coaching is an effort we initiate as individuals, it's not a solitary experience that occurs in isolation from our social relationships. Self-coaching involves not only working with ourselves (as both coach and client), but also transforming key people in our lives into members of our self-coaching team, even if only for a single interaction. By compelling us to make aspects of our inner dialogue public and to engage others as we engage ourselves, self-coaching can be an intensely social experience."

My manuscript for Harvard is due September 2014--which seems both a long ways off and just around the corner--but I'll continue to explore these ideas here rather than take the process offline. After 8 years (!) of blogging I've found that writing in public is the best way to hold myself accountable and actually get the work done, with the added benefit of inviting others into a dialogue that results in better work than I would have accomplished on my own.

I took a longer-than-usual break from writing this fall because of a particularly busy calendar, and I expect to return to a more regular writing schedule this year. In the meantime, you can see the overall framework and links to key posts on my Self-Coaching page, but note that it's very much a work-in-progress. (For example, my initial perspective on goal-setting has continued to evolve over the last few months.) Or just follow me on Twitter, where I announce new posts and occasionally share pictures of baked goods.

Doug Sundheim on Taking Smart Risks

Coach and consultant Doug Sundheim has been writing about risk for years. [1] But in Taking Smart Risks: How Sharp Leaders Win When Stakes Are High Sundheim lays out a comprehensive framework for looking at risk and provides an assortment of tools to help individuals and organizations take on the right risks at the right time.

The most useful and thought-provoking ideas I encountered in Taking Smart Risks are laid out in the first three chapters, which comprise "Part One: Reframing Risk." Sundheim highlights the inherent value of risk-taking:

In my work as a leadership and strategy consultant, this is a theme I hear often. Money is important, but a sense of accomplishment, growth, and self-knowledge is what really drives leaders, teams and organizations to take risks. When you play it safe, staying in the comfort zone for too long, you don't feel these things. You stagnate. And that puts everything at risk. [2]

Sundheim cites the the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Abraham Maslow, Frederick Herzberg and others in highlighting the necessary role that risk plays in our growth, development and pursuit of meaning:

Over the past 60 years, professionals from the fields of psychology, philosophy and adult development have recognized the need to engage in meaningful challenges as a primary driving force in living a satisfying life... You need to get out of your comfort zone regularly if you want to enjoy life. That's because the real reward for leaving your comfort zone never lies in what you achieve by doing it; it lies in the process of doing it. [3]

And as the section's subtitle implies, Sundheim emphasizes the importance of framing on our perception of risk, citing Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's classic research on prospect theory and loss-aversion bias:

We're naturally more averse to the costs of taking risks than to those of not taking risks because of the time frames in which we experience each cost. We experience the costs of taking risks immediately. Discomfort and uncertainty show up as soon as we engage in the risk... Conversely, we experience the costs of avoiding risks further in the future. Low growth, lack of accomplishment and limited fulfillment take time to manifest... In short, we have more trouble imagining what a lack of accomplishment will feel like in five years than what discomfort will feel like in five hours. [4]

Sundheim encourages us to challenge this bias by focusing our attention not only on the potential gains a given risk may yield but also on the potential costs that may be incurred by playing it safe, and he provides several straightforward but effective tools for doing so. I regularly ask clients and students to do a simple cost-benefit analysis when facing a difficult decision, so I particularly liked Sundheim's modification of this concept, which asks us to identify--in this order--A) the benefits of a given risk, B) the costs of that risk, C) the benefits of avoiding the risk, and D) the costs of avoiding the risk, and then uses that data to help us determine how our framing of the risk is affecting our ability to move forward.

But Sundheim's aware that while reframing risk is essential in getting unstuck and avoiding paralysis, it's likely insufficient to sustain action on its own, and he goes on to outline five principles that minimize the downside of any given risk:

At the core of smart risk taking is something I call de-risking, or removing as much uncertainty as you can at every stage of a risk... Through years of coaching and consulting, I've found that smart risk takers consistently do five things well to de-risk whatever they're up to...

[1] Find something worth fighting for... Finding something worth fighting for (I call it a SWFF) is the process of identifying and clarifying why risk taking is important to you in the first place. Smart risk takers understand that their emotional commitment to whatever they want to see happen is more than half the battle of getting it...

[2] See the future now... Seeing the future now is the process of clarifying what exactly the big ideas mean in terms of real objectives, plans and intended results...

[3] Act fast, learn fast... Test pieces of your hypothesis rapidly so that you can learn what will and won't work before you put too much on the line. Inherent in testing ideas rapidly is seeing failure as a necessary step in the process, not an unfortunate result of it...

[4] Communicate powerfully... Smart risk takers assume that communication is going to break down (because it always does) and plan accordingly...

[5] Create a smart-risk culture. Risk-taking, especially in an organizational context, is rarely an individual endeavor. Members of a team or larger group need to share the same mindsets and values about expected behavior... [5]

These concepts form the core of Sundheim's approach, and the rest of the book explores each of them in depth in subsequent sections. The first of these--"Part Two: Find Something Worth Fighting For"--is most relevant to my work with client and students. Sundheim's concept of a "SWFF" resonates with me, particularly given his emphasis on values and emotion, two topics I discuss regularly in my practice and the classroom.

Because emotions are at the heart of so many of the dynamics discussed by Sundheim--fear of failure, the power of enthusiasm, how to manage difficult conversations--I wanted him to explore that topic even further whenever it arose. This stems from my understanding of research on the importance of emotions in reasoning and decision-making, as well as my belief that we're much more effective at navigating complex situations--such as taking smart risks--when we acknowledge and address the emotional aspect of our experience. [6] But I recognize that Sundheim had to put some boundaries around his subject matter for practical reasons, and I appreciate the extent to which he does discuss emotion, a critical topic that's all too often ignored in books aimed at business readers.

Sundheim's conclusion offers encouragement to the aspiring risk-taker:

When done intelligently, risk taking never leaves you empty-handed. Even in failure, the experience provides critical learning for the future. The key is to start moving. Your path forward becomes clear once you're walking on it, not before. [7]

I'm reminded--and not for the first time while reading Taking Smart Risks--of George Patton's (perhaps apocryphal) advice: "A good plan violently executed today is far and away better than a perfect plan next week." [8]

 

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Footnotes

[1] The Gift of Risk (Doug Sundheim, Fast Company, 2006)

[2] Taking Smart Risks: How Sharp Leaders Win When Stakes Are High, page 4 (Doug Sundheim, 2013)

[3] Ibid, page 5.

[4] Ibid, page 23.

[5] Ibid, pages 36-37.

[6] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[7] Sundheim (2013), page 238.

[8] Patton and Voltaire on Perfection

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.