Ed Batista

Emotional Speed Bumps

A major theme in my practice is emotion regulation--helping clients better manage their inner emotional experience, and then articulate and express what they're feeling in ways that allow them to accomplish their goals more effectively. [1] Much of that work involves down-regulating strong negative emotions: anger, fear, grief.

But sometimes we're tripped up not by strong emotions, but by weak ones. We're not enraged, just annoyed. We're not terrified, just worried. We're not overwhelmed, just sad. These weak feelings rarely lead us to take significant steps that trigger profound remorse, but they often cause us to feel stuck in some way, making it more difficult to obtain a desired outcome or resulting in expenditures of time or effort that we later regret.

I've come to think of these feelings as "emotional speed bumps"--they create a slight barrier between us and a goal or a preferred activity, raising the necessary activation energy just enough that we fail to move forward. And in the process, while held in place, we fall prey to unproductive impulses--nothing catastrophic, just poor uses of our attention--or we procrastinate on a task that can be deferred, perhaps indefinitely, when we would have been better off addressing it.

Something--or someone--evokes annoyance, or worry, or sadness, and although these feelings aren't strong enough to derail us, they do disrupt us and distract us. We avoid that task at the top of our to-do list. We don't send that important message or have that tough conversation. We don't get up off the couch and take a walk or go to the gym. Instead, we pursue something easier. We find something on our to-do list that makes us feel "productive." We spend a little too much time on social media. We watch one more episode, or have one more drink, or go for one more level in the game. There are no tragedies here, no great losses--but eventually, at some point, we look back and wish we'd done things a little differently. What helps? Raising our awareness and taking action.

Raising Our Awareness

While awareness is rarely sufficient to drive change on its own, it's the necessary first step. You may already feel self-aware in some important ways--for example, you may have a clear sense of your strengths and weaknesses, your values, and the conditions under which you do your best work. [2] But that big-picture perspective doesn't necessarily translate into in-the-moment awareness of low-intensity emotions.

Some of those feelings may be right on the margins of consciousness--in which case they can still affect your behavior. [3] In this context it's important to distinguish between regulation and suppression. The former involves decoupling feelings and subsequent reflexive behavior, while the latter essentially entails pretending that we're not feeling what we're feeling. We can suppress emotions for brief periods of time, and, in some circumstances--such as a dire threat to our physical safety--this is a useful strategy. But we can't suppress emotions for long, and even making the attempt can be counter-productive. [4]

The key is increasing our conscious awareness of low-level feelings so that we can be intentional about the resulting behavior. There's no simple solution, but there are several practices that enable us to be more attuned to our emotions and to be more deliberate about our subsequent choices. A cheesy acronym I like--the only one I use in my practice--is getting MESSy:

• Mindfulness: The goal of mindfulness here isn't stress reduction, but simply being more effective at noticing what we're feeling.
• Exercise: Regular physical activity attunes us to the physiological manifestations of emotion and allows us to sense an emotional response sooner.
• Sleep: Ample research shows that when we' re not well-rested our ability to sense and regulate emotion is impaired.
• (Reducing Chronic) Stress: Chronic, low-level stress diminishes our ability to regulate emotion, and there are often stressors we can minimize with some modest changes in our daily routines. [5]

Taking Action

We often assume that our attitude determines our behavior, and that we act as we do because of underlying feelings. But this view of ourselves poses a challenge when a "speed bump" lies between our current state and a preferred alternative. We may conclude that our feelings are keeping us from engaging in desirable behaviors (or compel us to engage in undesirable behaviors), and somehow we're helpless bystanders, prisoners of our own psychology. We know we should act differently, but we don't feel like it.

However, rather than being a one-way causal relationship, it's a two-way street: While our attitude obviously informs and influences our behavior, our behavior also informs and influences our emotions in a dynamic and cyclical process. To be clear, we can't simply will ourselves out of profound dysfunction caused by strong negative emotions. But we do have much more power than we typically realize to consciously choose behaviors that will affect our attitude and influence the "speed bumps" that can get in the way of our goals and objectives. [6]

This shouldn't be interpreted as a command to "Stop whining and suck it up." Occasionally, yes, that's exactly what we need to hear, but such dictates are often counter-productive--even when we're just talking to ourselves. Rather, the key is to avoid relying on willpower, a finite and unreliable resource [7], and instead construct a robust and predictable set of routines that will make it more likely we'll follow our intentions, take action, and thereby influence our feelings. [8]

William Faulkner supposedly said, "I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes at 9:00 every morning." [9] He didn't wait until he felt like writing--if it was 9:00, it was time to write. You may not require such a rigid schedule, but one of the values of a predetermined routine is that it makes it easier to follow through with commitments we've made (to others or ourselves), whether or not we feel like it. Another writer, Steven Pressfield, contrasts the "amateur," who works when they feel like it, with the "pro," who has a very different point of view:

When we turn pro, everything becomes simple. Our aim centers on the ordering of our days in such a way that we overcome the fears that have paralyzed us in the past. We now structure our hours not to flee from fear, but to confront it and overcome it. We plan our activities in order to accomplish an aim. And we bring our will to bear so that we stick to this resolution. This changes our days completely. It changes what time we get up, and it changes what time we go to bed. It changes what we do and what we don't do. It changes the activities we engage in and with what attitude we engage in them. It changes what we read and what we eat. It changes the shape of our bodies. [10]

 

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Footnotes

[1] For more on emotion regulation:

• The Tyranny of Feelings
• Attitude and Behavior
• The Smoke Detector Principle (Why We Overreact)
• To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions

[2] From Peter Drucker's Managing Oneself:

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

[3] For example, see Effects of subconscious and conscious emotions on human cue–reward association learning (Noriya Watanabe and Masahiko Haruno, Scientific Reports, 2015)

[4] For more on the impact of suppressing emotions:

• Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive and social consequences (James Gross, Psychophysiology, 2002)
• Consequences of Repression of Emotion: Physical Health, Mental Health and General Well Being (Jainish Patel and Prittesh Patel, International Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research, 2019)

[5] For more on these MESSy practices:

• Mindfulness
  • Don't Just Do Something, Sit There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)
  • Changing Our Brains, Changing Ourselves (Lea Winerman interviewing Richard Davidson, American Psychological Association Monitor, 2012)
• Exercise
  • Get Moving! (Exercise for Busy People)
  • Walking lifts your mood, even when you don't expect it to (Christian Jarrett, BPS Research Digest, 2016)
• Sleep
  • There's a Proven Link Between Effective Leadership and Getting Enough Sleep (Nick van Dam and Els van der Helm, Harvard Business Review, 2016)
  • Sleep-Deprived Leaders are Less Inspiring (Christopher Barnes, Harvard Business Review, 2016)
• (Reducing Chronic) Stress
  
  • How to Make Stress Your Friend [14-minute video] (Kelly McGonigal, 2013)
  • Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being (Linda Graham, 2013)

[6] Adapted from Attitude and Behavior

[7] Against Willpower (Carl Erik Fisher, Nautilus, 2017)

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

[9] Quote Investigator

[10] Turning Pro: Tap Your Inner Power and Create Your Life's Work, page 72 (Steven Pressfield, 2012) I discuss Pressfield's work further in Leadership as Professional Practice.

 

Photo by Andrew Rivett.

Why Some Entrepreneurs Don't Know When to Quit

People mistakenly think it was the storm that caused the problem. It wasn't the storm that caused the problem; it was the time.

~Martin Adams, Mount Everest climber [1]

The sort of individual who is programmed to ignore personal distress and keep pushing for the top is frequently programmed to disregard signs of grave and imminent danger... In order to succeed you must be exceedingly driven, but if you're too driven you're likely to die.

~Jon Krakauer [2]

1. Introduction

In May 1996, eight people died on Mount Everest when they were caught in a storm as they descended from the summit. As professors of management Jeffery McMullen and Alexander Kier note, the avoidable disaster resulted from the unexpected decision by two expedition leaders to continue climbing when they should have abandoned their goal and turned back hours earlier:

In their pursuit of the summit both [Rob] Hall and [Scott] Fischer violated their turnaround times, which are optimal stopping points set to ensure that climbers have enough time to return to a point of safety before significant changes in the environment such as darkness or severe weather can occur. [3]

McMullen and Kier cite journalist Jon Krakauer, a climber on one of the expeditions who later wrote about his harrowing experience:

At Hall's suggestion, the two guides had agreed that "Anybody who wasn't within spitting distance of the summit by 2:00pm had to turn around and go down." But, adds Mountain Madness guide Neal Beidleman, "For whatever reason, it didn't happen..." Given Hall's conservative, exceedingly methodical nature, many of his colleagues have expressed puzzlement at this uncharacteristic lapse of judgment. [4]

Despite the unusual setting, McMullen and Kier believe the Everest disaster holds some important lessons for entrepreneurs, who, like expedition leaders, must decide at regular intervals whether or not to persist in a risky pursuit. While my clients aren't mountain climbers--at least not professionally--most of them are founder/CEOs, which means that they're also attempting something difficult that has a high likelihood of failure. You have to be an optimist to launch an entrepreneurial venture, and as I've written before, "there's a positive correlation between optimism and effective leadership, in part because the optimistic leader has a contagious effect on others, rendering success more likely." [5]

And yet the events on Everest tragically underscore a related concept that I've also noted previously: "There's a point at which unbridled confidence is merely a wish, and optimism becomes magical thinking, which can be particularly dangerous for a leader. Neuroscientist Richard Davidson notes that the risks of excessive optimism include resistance to negative data and failure to learn from experience." [6]

But why does this happen? Why did the experienced guides on Everest display such poor judgment? Why do some leaders persist in failing efforts past the point when they should quit?

 

2. Escalation of Commitment

The technical term for such behavior is "escalation of commitment," defined by McMullen and Kier as "the proclivity of decision makers to maintain commitment to a losing course of action, even in the face of quite negative news." [7] Behavioral psychologists Katy Milkman and Theresa Kelly provide further context on this phenomenon:

Escalation of commitment is a risk whenever a decision maker (a) commits resources to a course of action (thereby making an "investment") in the hope of achieving a positive outcome and (b) experiences disappointing results. Invested resources may take any form from time, money, and labor to mental and emotional energy... While there are many situations where the best course of action is to commit further resources to a failing investment, the term escalation of commitment describes only those situations where objective evidence indicates that continuing with an investment is unwise, and yet an individual chooses to invest further in spite of this. [8]

Research on escalation of commitment indicates that the primary cause is the powerful drive to maintain consistency between our past commitments and present behavior (and to appear consistent in the eyes of others), as well as the corresponding drive to minimize the cognitive dissonance we experience when our commitments and behavior are inconsistent (or are perceived as such by others.) [9] In psychologist Robert Cialdini's widely-cited work on influence, he identified this need for consistency as a "central motivator" of human behavior:

Once we have made a choice or taken a stand, we will encounter personal and interpersonal pressures to behave consistently with that commitment. Those pressures will cause us to respond in ways that justify our earlier decision... The drive to be (and to look) consistent constitutes a highly potent weapon of social influence, often causing us to act in ways that are clearly contrary to our own best interests... Once an active commitment is made, then, self-image is squeezed from both sides by consistency pressures. From the inside there is a pressure to bring self-image in line with action. From the outside, there is a sneakier pressure--a tendency to adjust this image according to the way others portray us. [10]

Milkman and Kelly expand upon the manifestations of our drive for consistency and related psychological factors that contribute to escalation of commitment:

Self-justification theory... Feeling personally responsible for an investment that turns sour intensifies the threat associated with failure and increases a decision maker's motivation to justify the original choice to herself. Negative feedback on a past investment decision calls the validity of the original decision into question and is dissonant with a decision maker's natural desire to see herself as competent. Many decision makers attempt to eliminate this conflict by convincing themselves that their failing ventures will turn around if they simply invest more resources. To do so and succeed would prove that their original choice was valid and eliminate the "cognitive dissonance" created by the initial negative feedback.

Confirmation bias. Biased information processing is one way that decision makers reduce the dissonance that arises when their positive self-perceptions conflict with evidence that past investments are under-performing. After committing to a choice, people are far more likely to notice and overweight evidence that supports their decision and ignore and underweight evidence that does not. Furthermore, decision makers actively seek information that confirms the validity of their decisions...

Loss aversion... Research on prospect theory has demonstrated the the disutility caused by losses is greater than the utility obtained from equivalent gains... Negative feedback on an investment frames the decision about whether to continue with the current course of action as a decision about whether to accept a loss or to take steps to prevent locking it in...

Impression management... 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. Further, people tend to punish decision makers for inconsistency. [11]

Entrepreneurs are as subject to these psychological drives and biases as anyone else, and yet a hallmark of entrepreneurship is a willingness not only to commit resources to risky ventures, but also to rapidly withdraw them when necessary. [12] The most effective entrepreneurs aren't heedless daredevils--they're keenly aware that they may need to abandon their immediate objectives in order to retain the ability to pursue their long-term vision. Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former Theranos CEO who was recently convicted of fraud and now faces up to 20 years in prison, once said, "The minute that you have a backup plan, you've admitted that you're not going to succeed." [13] But that's not entrepreneurship--that's merely empty rhetoric that leads directly to escalation of commitment.

So why might entrepreneurs in particular might fall prey to this dynamic, and what conditions make that outcome more likely? Why do some entrepreneurs--typically known for their adaptability--find it so hard to quit? To answer these questions it's necessary to understand two psychological concepts that have significant implications for entrepreneurs.

 

3. Mindset Theory of Action Phases and Regulatory Focus Theory

The Mindset Theory of Action Phases, first developed by psychologist Peter Gollwitzer, suggests that in setting and pursuing a goal there are two fundamentally distinct ways of thinking, gathering data, and processing information ("mindsets"). [14] Up until the decision to pursue a goal has been made, while goal-setting, we adopt a deliberative mindset, but once a goal has been selected and we've decided to pursue it, we adopt an implemental mindset. Gollwitzer notes key distinctions between the two mindsets in the realms of "cognitive tuning" (i.e. the information we tend to focus on), the degree of bias imparted to the information under consideration, and "open-mindedness" (i.e. receptivity to new information):

3.1. Mindset Theory of Action Phases

	Deliberative Mindset (Pre-Decision / Goal-Setting)	Implemental Mindset (Post-Decision / Goal Pursuit)
Cognitive Tuning	Focus on whether a goal is feasible and desirable via pros vs. cons and cost-benefit analysis.	Focus on where, when and how to accomplish the goal.
Biases	Information related to the feasibility and desirability of a goal is analyzed impartially. Accurate judgment of control.	Optimistic analysis that overestimates feasibility. Chosen goal seen as more desirable. Increased sense of control over events.
Open-Mindedness	Enhanced receptivity to all sources and types of information. Avoids dismissing information prematurely.	More selective information processing. Filters information based on relevance to the goal.

 

Regulatory Focus Theory, first developed by psychologist E. Tory Higgins, extends the basic "hedonic principle"--the idea that people approach pleasure and avoid pain. [15] Higgins suggests that there are two different types of motivation, which spring from two fundamental but distinct human needs: nurturance and security. When seeking nurturance we adopt a promotion focus, in which we strive to fulfill our aspirations and maximize accomplishments, but when seeking security we adopt a prevention focus, in which we strive to fulfill our responsibilities and maximize safety:

3.2. Regulatory Focus Theory

	Promotion Focus	Prevention Focus
Contributing Factors	Nurturance needs. A focus on ideals. Gain vs. non-gain situations.	Security needs. A focus on duties and obligations. Loss vs. non-loss situations.
Consequences	Sensitivity to positive outcomes. Approach as strategic means. Insure against errors of omission.	Sensitivity to negative outcomes. Avoidance as strategic means. Insure against errors of commission.

 

A more specific body of research has explored the implications of these concepts for entrepreneurial behavior. Studying the Mindset Theory of Action Phases, professors of entrepreneurship Servane Delanoë-Gueguen and Alain Fayolle have found that aspiring founders experience a mindset shift that enhances their commitment to the venture:

[Founders] become committed to their start-up goal and engage in a set of goal-directed actions...with the objective of launching their business... At this point, individuals pass a psychological Rubicon and reach a level of commitment at which giving up their project becomes less likely. [16]

In another study, professors of entrepreneurship Matthew Lynch and Andrew Corbett suggest that successful entrepreneurs regularly move from one mindset to another, depending on the circumstances and their immediate needs:

The cognitive shift from [deliberative] to implementative [mindsets] and back...is an ongoing process inherent in entrepreneurial action, and continues as the entrepreneur evaluates the opportunity... This shift of orientation within the entrepreneurial mindset is critical as flexibility with these cognitive mechanisms is often the determinant between failure and growth of the venture. [17]

Similarly, Higgins, the originator of Regulatory Focus Theory, and professors of management Joel Brockner and Murray Low, propose that entrepreneurs must alternate between a promotion focus and a prevention focus at various stages of the venture's development:

Rather than suggesting that one regulatory focus orientation is more likely to be associated with entrepreneurial success than the other, we suggest that both promotion and prevention foci are necessary for entrepreneurial success. For certain aspects of the entrepreneurial process (e.g., generating ideas with the potential to be successful), greater promotion focus is necessary. For other aspects of the entrepreneurial process (e.g., doing the "due diligence" when screening ideas), greater prevention focus is necessary. [18]

To clarify, there's no single mode--deliberative or implemental mindset, promotion or prevention focus--that characterizes entrepreneurial behavior. Entrepreneurs move from one mindset to the other and from one focus to the other over the course of their journey--and the most successful entrepreneurs are able to make such moves repeatedly as the environment evolves and new information emerges.

But under certain conditions entrepreneurs can find it difficult to shift from one mode to another as needed--and this is what may have caused the 1996 Everest disaster. The events on the mountain vividly illustrate the potential consequences of escalation of commitment, and McMullen and Kier suggest that it occurred because the expedition guides found themselves stuck in an implemental mindset with a promotion focus--and that being trapped at the intersection of these modes poses a risk for every entrepreneur.

 

4. Escalation of Commitment and Entrepreneurship

McMullen and Kier's assessment of the joint influence of the Mindset Theory of Action Phases and Regulatory Focus Theory on entrepreneurial behavior portrays four quadrants, which they label "eager goal-setting," "cautious goal-setting," "eager goal pursuit," and "cautious goal pursuit." [19] They note that each quadrant is characterized by strengths and weaknesses--and the key weakness of "eager goal pursuit" is escalation of commitment:

4.1. Joint Influence on Entrepreneurial Behavior

	Promotion Focus	Prevention Focus
Deliberative Mindset	Eager Goal-Setting: Strength: Alert to opportunities to replace the goal. Weakness: Sets unfeasible goals.	Cautious Goal-Setting: Strength: Careful planning. Weakness: Difficulty getting started.
Implemental Mindset	Eager Goal Pursuit: Strength: Alert to opportunities to achieve the maximal goal. Weakness: Escalation of commitment	Cautious Goal Pursuit: Strength: Vigilant to threats to the minimal goal and avoids unnecessary risks. Weakness: Over-cautious.

 

So while the adoption of an implemental mindset and a promotion focus enables an entrepreneur to remain undaunted by obstacles and persist in the face of long odds, it also increases the likelihood of escalation of commitment. The distinguishing factor, McMullen and Kier suggest, is what psychologists Veronika Brandstätter and Julia Schüler call an "action crisis," defined as the "phase of goal striving when setbacks have accumulated and failures in making progress towards one's goal are becoming highly visible...the phase in which the individual has already invested a great deal into his/her goal, encounters recurring difficulties, and finally is caught between further goal pursuit and disengagement." [20]

While an action crisis is an unpleasant experience for an entrepreneur, it serves an essential purpose by compelling them to assess the viability of their venture in the current environment. Research by Brandstätter and Schüler shows that people experiencing an action crisis return to a deliberative mindset, triggering a cost-benefit analysis that shifts the emphasis from how to accomplish their goal back to whether the goal should be pursued at all. [21]

But the challenge for the entrepreneur, according to McMullen and Kier, is that the adoption of an implemental mindset and a promotion focus is likely to forestall the onset of an action crisis. As a result they remain stuck in "eager goal pursuit," and this is what leads to escalation of commitment. What does this look like in practice? McMullen and Kier discuss four contributing factors:

Lack of Contingency Planning

Exit strategies prepare the entrepreneur for appropriate disengagement from goal pursuit, and thus minimize any future losses from a delayed reaction to environmental changes. However, the proactive behavior of planning for negative contingencies is practically eliminated by [eager goal pursuit.] By emphasizing the opportunities as opposed to the threats hidden by uncertainty, [eager goal pursuit] foregoes contingency planning, allocates attention toward efforts to avoid missed opportunities, and ensures that the entrepreneur responds to any opportunities revealed in the future by a changing environment. This can lead potentially negative outcomes to be overlooked and contingency plans to be ignored for best-case scenarios. [22]

Insufficient Risk Monitoring

Entrepreneurs commit to a particular goal assuming a certain level of risk exposure... However...entrepreneurs can find their assumptions violated by unanticipated negative changes in the environment... Upon recognition of these negative changes, an action crisis emerges in which the entrepreneur must evaluate whether the expected return is worth the increased risk exposure. Before such a decision can be made, however, one must become aware of the need to make it. Unfortunately, this awareness is delayed by the implemental mindset's allocation of attention toward volitional concerns [i.e. how to accomplish the goal] and away from motivational concerns [i.e. whether to accomplish the goal] caused by these unanticipated negative changes in the environment... Thus, forgoing contingency planning is likely to delay an action crisis because of increasing, but unmonitored, risk exposure from a deteriorating environment. [23]

Delayed Negative Feedback

An uncompleted goal prevents production costs from being treated as sunk because they are mentally categorized as investments rather than expenses until evidence overwhelmingly disconfirms the likelihood that they will produce the expected return... If commitment grows with time spent in goal striving, then anything that delays awareness of negative feedback is likely to encourage escalation. For example, sunk costs and time invested are costs of abandonment that grow from delay, further increasing the desirability of outcome attainment for decision makers who do not want to appear wasteful. Additionally, experience is likely to increase over time, making the entrepreneur more likely to believe that he or she can overcome negative feedback and succeed, thereby increasing the likelihood of escalation. [24]

Gain-Loss vs. Net Wealth Framing

Upon having an action crisis, cautious goal strivers are more capable than eager goal strivers of reclassifying the costs of goal pursuit from unrealized to realized losses because their cautious goal striving encourages the use of a net wealth frame used in decision-making as opposed to the gain-loss frame encouraged by eager striving. A gain-loss frame emphasizes what is lost if the entrepreneur fails to achieve the desired outcome... In contrast, a net wealth frame considers these costs in the context of what might also be lost in the entrepreneur is wrong in his decision to consider goal pursuit both in the moment...and over time. [25]

 

5. What Can Entrepreneurs Do?

The fundamental dilemma for any entrepreneur is that their propensity for "eager goal pursuit" is both a source of strength and a potential weakness. The very attitude that will enable them to resist the urge to give up when the going gets tough may also lead them into an unstoppable escalation of commitment. The dogged pursuit of their immediate objectives may then result in catastrophic losses that preclude them from finding alternative means of achieving their overarching vision.

Sadly, this is what happened to Rob Hall and Scott Fischer on Mount Everest in 1996. Presumably caught in the grip of "eager goal pursuit," they ignored or downplayed the deteriorating weather conditions, remained determined to lead their expeditions to the summit on May 10, and ultimately ignored their turnaround time. Among the most experienced mountaineers in the world, both men died in a storm described by Jon Krakauer as "nothing extraordinary; it was a fairly typical Everest squall. If it had hit two hours later, it's likely nobody would have died." [26]

So if you're an entrepreneur pursuing an ambitious, high-risk venture, what can you do to avoid escalation of commitment? How might you capitalize on your capacity for "eager goal pursuit" while minimizing the possibility that you won't know when to quit? There's no single solution, but the research under discussion here and my work with founder/CEOs over the years suggest a number of potential steps:

Assess the Situation

All entrepreneurs can be subject to escalation of commitment, but certain situational factors can heighten the risk, as highlighted by psychologists Milkman and Kelly [27]:

• Personal responsibility. "An individual is more likely to commit additional resources to a bad investment if she was the one who originally endorsed it." To what extent do you feel personally responsible for the selection, pursuit and achievement of this goal?
• Sunk costs. "The more resources that have been spent on an investment, the more likely a decision maker is to escalate commitment." What costs--not only time, money, and labor, but also mental and emotional energy--have you invested in this goal?
• Proximity to completion. "The closer a project is to completion, the more likely decision makers are to exhibit escalation of commitment." How long have you been pursuing this goal? How close do you think you are to completion?
• Exogenous explanations for failure. "Escalation of commitment is also more pronounced when past investment failures can be blamed on unforeseeable, exogenous events... Any opportunity to blame a setback on an exogenous source helps a decision maker maintain his positive self-concept and the belief that his original decision was valid, increasing the risk of escalation of commitment." What unforeseen events have affected your venture? To what extent do you hold them responsible for the challenges you currently face?

Expand Your Self-Awareness

While an implemental mindset and a promotion focus may increase your determination to pursue your goals, one of the means by which this occurs is through a systematic distortion of the information you pay attention to, the information you ignore, and how you interpret that data. Greater self-awareness in the following areas can help you determine whether the specific distortions you're experiencing are a competitive advantage--or a source of danger:

• Attention management. A theme in my practice is that a leader's attention is their most precious resource--and yet it's both hard to direct and easy to waste, particularly when we're anxious or under stress. What observations can you make about where your attention is being directed, and why?
• How you think. As I've noted before, "leaders generally need longer blocks of uninterrupted time, free from distractions, to think creatively and to augment logical reasoning with intuition and inspiration." What do you know about the conditions that enable--and detract from--your ability to do your best thinking?
• Decision-making. Physician and psychologist Pat Croskerry has highlighted a range of factors that enable us to make better decisions. [28] How well do you understand the factors that help--and hinder--effective decision-making for you?
• Cognitive biases. The distortions induced by "eager goal pursuit" are a form of cognitive bias, a type of mental shortcut that we employ when problem-solving. What biases and heuristics can you identify in your own thinking?

Plan Ahead (and Embrace the Action Crisis)

As McMullen and Kier note, escalation of commitment occurs not at a single moment, but over the course of an extended period of time and is a consequence not of a single act (or a momentary failure to act), but of a series of steps that build upon each other:

The groundwork for escalation is often established long before the actual decision is made... Whether a decision to disengage or persist is made (cost-benefit analysis), depends on when that decision is made--i.e. how early a threat is detected (risk assessment)--which in turn depends on how that decision is made--by predetermined rules or in situ (contingency planning)--which ultimately depends on what information is cognitively accessible to the decision maker (the mindsets employed to manage environmental uncertainty). [29]

Assessing the situation and expanding your self-awareness are best undertaken well before they become necessary, but they remain useful at any point in the journey. And yet it's important to realize that the cumulative impact of a failure to engage in these efforts early on may be to delay an "action crisis"--that crucial juncture when "setbacks have accumulated and failures in making progress towards [your] goal [have become] highly visible." As noted previously, the value of this all-too-painful moment is that it shifts you out of "eager goal pursuit," causing you to stop asking how to achieve your goal, and compels you to ask whether you should continue. In addition to the steps above, you can prevent the deferral of an action crisis via the following:

• Slow down. A theme in my practice is the idea that "The impulse to hurry should often be interpreted as a signal to slow down"--and yet note that the state of "eager goal pursuit" can leave us feeling frantically behind, exacerbating the tendency to rush headlong toward the goal. What regular routines or habitual practices compel you to slow down and take stock?
• Seek out objective viewpoints. As Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel, once wrote, "People who have no emotional stake in a decision can see what needs to be done sooner." [30] Do you have trusted advisors who are invested in your personal well-being without being attached to the venture's success or failure?
• Prepare for cognitive dissonance. As I've noted before, entrepreneurs often experience cognitive dissonance because they must maintain "two very different views of the world... They must be exuberant optimists, portraying a compelling vision of a successful future... [And they] must also be keenly aware of the nearly endless list of risk factors and things that could go wrong." What helps you manage the uncomfortable feelings that result from this dissonant state?
• Learn from failure. Yet another theme in my practice is the inevitability of failure, in entrepreneurship and in life, which presents all of us with the same challenge: "See our failures clearly and acknowledge our contributions to the outcome. Study them closely to ensure we don't repeat the same mistakes. And remain sufficiently resilient to keep trying, sometimes over a period of years, while also knowing when to quit and abandon efforts that are unlikely to yield results." In what ways might you put these ideas into practice?

If you're an entrepreneur wrestling with the profoundly difficult question of whether or not to continue on the path, I truly wish you the best.

 

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Footnotes

[1] The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest, page 261 (Anatoli Boukreev and G. Weston DeWalt, 1997)

[2] Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster, page 233 (Jon Krakauer, 1997)

[3] Trapped by the Entrepreneurial Mindset: Opportunity Seeking and the Escalation of Commitment in the Mount Everest Disaster, page 667 (Jeffery McMullen and Alexander Kier, Journal of Business Venturing, 2016). Thanks to Ethan Mollick for the reference to this compelling paper.

[4] Krakauer, pages 261 and 273.

[5] The Traps We Set for Ourselves. For more on optimism and leadership, see Dispositional Affect and Leadership Effectiveness: A Comparison of Self-Esteem, Optimism, and Efficacy (Martin Chemers, Carl Watson, and Stephen May, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2000) and Impact of Leadership Style and Emotion on Subordinate Performance (Janet McColl-Kennedy and Ronald Anderson, The Leadership Quarterly, 2002).

[6] Ibid. For more on the psychological consequences of excessive optimism, see The Emotional Life of Your Brain: How Its Unique Patterns Affect the Way You Think, Feel, and Live--and How You Can Change Them (Richard Davidson and Sharon Begley, 2012)

[7] McMullen and Kier, page 664.

[8] Escalation of Commitment (Katherine Milkman and Theresa Kelly), pages 256-259 in the Encyclopedia of Management Theory (Eric Kessler, editor, 2013)

[9] For more on escalation of commitment, in addition to the McMullen & Kier and Milkman & Kelly papers cited above see Knee-deep in the Big Muddy: A Study of Escalating Commitment to a Chosen Course of Action (Barry Staw, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1976), The Escalation of Commitment to a Course of Action (Barry Staw, The Academy of Management Review, 1981), and Escalation of Commitment in Individual and Group Decision Making (Max Bazerman, et al, Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1984)

[10] Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, pages 57-77 (Robert Cialdini, 2006, 2nd edition)

[11] Milkman and Kelly.

[12] "A Perspective on Entrepreneurship," page 9 (Howard Stevenson, Chapter 1 in New Business Ventures and the Entrepreneur, 1998, 5th edition)

[13] Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes: 'Avoid Backup Plans' (Deborah Petersen, Inc., 2015)

[14] Mindset Theory of Action Phases (Peter Gollwitzer, Chapter 25 in Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology, Volume One, Paul van Lange, Arie Kruglanski and E. Tory Higgins, editors, 2012). Also see Action Phases and Mind-Sets (Peter Gollwitzer, Chapter 2 in Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foundations of Social Behavior, Volume Two, E. Tory Higgins and Richard Sorrentino, editors, 1990)

[15] Beyond Pleasure and Pain (E. Tory Higgins, American Psychologist, 1997). Also see Promotion and Prevention: Regulatory Focus as a Motivational Principle (E. Tory Higgins, Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 1998)

[16] Crossing the Entrepreneurial Rubicon: A Longitudinal Investigation, pages 1058-1059 (Servane Delanoë-Gueguen and Alain Fayolle, Journal of Small Business Management, 2019)

[17] Entrepreneurial mindset shift and the role of cycles of learning, page 11 (Matthew Lynch and Andrew Corbett, Journal of Small Business Management, 2021)

[18] Regulatory focus theory and the entrepreneurial process, page 203 (Joel Brockner, E. Tory Higgins and Murray Low, Journal of Business Venturing, 2004)

[19] McMullen and Kier, page 672.

[20] Action crisis and cost-benefit thinking: A cognitive analysis of a goal-disengagement phase, page 544 (Veronika Brandstätter and Julia Schüler, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2012)

[21] Ibid, page 550.

[22] McMullen and Kier, page 677.

[23] Ibid, pages 678-679.

[24] Ibid, page 679.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Krakauer, page 354.

[27] Milkman and Kelly, pages 257-258.

[28] The theory and practice of clinical decision-making (Pat Croskerry, Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, 2005)

[29] McMullen and Kier, pages 677, 679.

[30] Only the Paranoid Survive, page 92 (Andy Grove, 1996)

 

For Further Reading

To expand your self-awareness:

• Attention Surplus Disorder (Anxiety and Distraction)
• How to Think (More on Open Space and Deep Work)
• Pat Croskerry on Effective Decision-Making
• When Heuristics Go Bad

To prepare for and embrace the action crisis:

• The Importance of Slowing Down
• Investment vs. Attachment
• The Cognitive Dissonance of the CEO
• The Ruling Out of Possibilities (On Failure)

 

Photo by Rick McCharles.

Make Feedback Normal. Not a Performance Review.

I first expressed this idea in 2015 during a webinar I conducted for the Harvard Business Review [1], and apparently it continues to resonate with people. [2] The slide above from my webinar is based on a passage in the HBR article that preceded it:

We should strive to create a culture in which feedback conversations are less stressful for all members of the organization. Among other steps, this involves giving and receiving feedback more frequently so that it becomes a normal aspect of organizational life, making it OK to both postpone feedback conversations until a better time, and ensuring that senior leaders walk the talk by offering and inviting direct feedback on a regular basis. [3]

One reason why this concept struck a chord is our continued reliance on traditional performance reviews, despite a growing body of research suggesting that such practices not only fail to have the desired effect, but may even be counter-productive. [4]

I don't think reviews are going to disappear, in part because they serve a number of purposes other than motivating learning and growth, such as creating a predictable calendar for discussions about compensation and career progression, or documenting poor performance as prelude to a termination. In this regard they are similar to interviews, which are deeply flawed as predictors of a successful hire and yet will undoubtedly continue to play a role in the hiring process. [5]

But the persistence of performance reviews need not prevent you from "making feedback normal" in your organization. What might that look like in practice? It's a topic I've explored numerous times over the years:

Make feedback less stressful:

• When delivering feedback, be mindful of subtle steps that might inadvertently trigger a sense of threat in the recipient.
• When receiving feedback, note that how your perceive or frame the experience will affect your stress level.
• Over time, build stronger relationships with the people who'll provide and receive feedback in your organization.

Build a feedback-rich culture as a leader:

• Foster an increased sense of safety and trust.
• Balance critical feedback with heartfelt appreciation.
• Seek out opportunities to give--and receive--feedback in public.
• Ask for feedback from your employees.

Build a feedback-rich culture from the middle:

• Cultivate support among senior leadership.
• Make a case that better feedback supports better business results.
• Ask for feedback from leadership.

Deliver more effective critical feedback:

• Clarify your motivation and intentions.
• Acknowledge and question your need for control.
• Be behaviorally--and emotionally--specific.
• Ask how you're contributing to the problem.

 

---

Footnotes

[1] Making Feedback Less Stressful (Harvard Business Review Webinar)

• HBR webinar (1-hour video)
• HBR's summary of my remarks (8-page PDF)
• Webinar slide deck

[2] "Make feedback normal. Not a performance review." on Twitter.

[3] Make Getting Feedback Less Stressful (Originally published at Harvard Business Review)

[4] David Rock and his colleagues at the NeuroLeadership Institute have been making thoughtful critiques of traditional performance review practices for nearly a decade:

• Give Your Performance Management System a Review (David Rock, Harvard Business Review, 2013)
• Kill Your Performance Ratings (David Rock, Josh David and Beth Jones, strategy+business, 2014)
• Why More and More Companies Are Ditching Performance Ratings (David Rock and Beth Jones, Harvard Business Review, 2015)
• Why Performance Management Needs to Become Feedback Management (David Rock, Your Brain at Work, 2019)

[5] Daniel Kahneman on Conducting Better Interviews

 

For Further Reading

Coaching and Feedback Tools for Leaders

 

Relating to Our Inner Critics

A theme in my practice is helping a client renegotiate their relationship with their inner critic, and I've developed a set of principles that guide our work together on this topic:

• Our inner critic has our best interests at heart.
• And until now they've served us well.
• But our life has changed since they first emerged, as have we.
• So their guidance is increasingly unhelpful.
• But efforts to banish them will generate fierce resistance.
• The solution: Renegotiate the relationship.

What do I mean by all this? And how can we put these ideas into practice?

Our inner critic has our best interests at heart.

We often apply disapproving labels to our inner critic such as "gremlin" or "saboteur." There can certainly be value to this approach, not only because it allows us to establish a sense of distance from this aspect of ourselves and view it more objectively, but also because it helps us envision and personify our inner critic, which is helpful in engaging it in a dialogue. But a problem with these labels is that they presume an antagonistic relationship, and in my experience the opposite is far more common: Our inner critic desperately wants us to succeed. It may be hopelessly misguided or tragically inept, but rather than deliberately seeking to undermine us, it has our best interests at heart. By assuming good intentions, we can engage our inner critic far more productively.

And until now they've served us well.

The paradox is that until our inner critic became an obstacle to be overcome, it served a useful purpose in our lives. It motivated us to raise our aspirations and do better work. It encouraged us to shake off complacency and try harder. It protected us from embarrassing oversights and fateful missteps. This was often unpleasant, of course--inner critics aren't known for their subtlety or tact. They probably used harsh language or employed crude tactics, such as reminding us of the cost of failure and stoking our fears and anxieties. But in the initial stages of our life and career when our inner critic first emerged, this may have been the only way we knew how to motivate ourselves.

But our life has changed since they first emerged, as have we.

And yet we're no longer at the outset of our life and career, nor are we the same person we once were. The irony is that our inner critic may have played a significant role in this evolution. By motivating, encouraging and protecting us in an earlier era, our inner critic enabled us to tackle new challenges and alter our circumstances, and in the process we became a different person. We're more capable and thus more confident. We feel a greater sense of agency and control. We're less fearful and anxious. Our inner critic may even go silent for while--until, suddenly, they come roaring back to life. If we've grown used to their absence, this can be profoundly confusing and alienating: Who is this critical voice in my head, and why are they so negative?

So their guidance is increasingly unhelpful.

This is the root of the problem: Inner critics aren't particularly flexible or responsive to change. They emerged in response to a particular set of challenges at a particular time in our life, and they developed their motivational repertoire in that context. But even as they enabled our own evolution, their limited perspective has prevented them from evolving in turn. This is entirely predictable--our inner critic is, of course, an aspect of our own personality that we differentiated from our conscious self at a time of need to serve a specific purpose. Having done so, we relied upon our inner critic to play their part in the pursuit of our own growth and development. We valued the results they helped to bring about, but we didn't like how they made us feel, and so we kept our distance whenever possible, leading them to stagnate.

But efforts to banish them will generate fierce resistance.

The dilemma that although our inner critic works for us, they have lifetime job security. Any attempts to fire them will be futile and counter-productive. This is a function of our inner critic's lack of sophistication, noted above. They can't grasp that we've evolved to the point where their guidance is no longer needed, and thus they interpret efforts to dislodge them as signs that we're about to make a grave mistake. Red alert! they shriek in protest. The more we try to ignore them, the more agitated they become. This is usually the point at which a client raises the issue with me.

The solution: Renegotiate the relationship.

The starting point in this process is exploring the points above. They're not all equally valid for everyone, of course--we're dealing in metaphors and archetypes here. But I've found most of them resonate with people in one way or another, which normalizes their struggle and allows them to relax. And once we've acknowledged that our inner critic has our best interests at heart and has served us well, but their approach is increasingly out-of-date and unhelpful, we can stop fighting our inner critic and begin collaborating with them. Rather than demonize our inner critic for its shortcomings, we can adopt a more compassionate stance toward them--which, of course, means being more compassionate toward ourselves. Our inner critic is doing the best it can--as are we.

Most inner critics emerge as authority figures--when personifying our inner critic, many of us see or hear a parent, a teacher, an athletic coach, an early manager. So it's understandable that in a previous era our inner critic took charge, and we deferred to them. They claimed the seat at the head of the table, and we assumed that they deserved it. But today that arrangement no longer meets our needs. Rather than try to exclude them altogether, we can invite them to take their rightful place. Rather than feel hectored and oppressed by them, we can appreciate their efforts on our behalf. Rather than seek to ignore them, we can engage them on our own terms. Someday we may even be able to thank them for their service and convince them to take some well-deserved time off.

 

---

For Further Reading

Doing the Work (Reflection, Journaling, Dialogue)

The Traps We Set for Ourselves

Why Change Is Hard

The Obstacle Is The Way

Stop Trying to Be "Good Enough" by "Getting Better"

 

Photo by Craig Oppenheimer.

Confusing Motion with Progress

Confusing motion with progress is an all-too-common mistake, and I see countless versions of it in my practice (and in my own life):

• The busy person who craves more free time but feels anxious when they see open space on their calendar. [1]
• The mid-career professional consumed by the sense that they're behind and need to catch up. [2]
• The leader of a growing organization who continues to think that they add value by doing more. [3]
• The leader whose business is succeeding but who nevertheless breaks things in order to "fix" them. [4]
• The former leader who's sold their company or hired their successor and is now struggling to find a sense of purpose. [5]

The challenge is that in the early stages of our career there's often very little difference between motion and progress. Our managers and the organization at large set our strategic priorities and provide some amount of tactical guidance. There's always a lot to be done, and the relative importance of various tasks may not differ all that much, so we need to dive in and keep going. And we have ample room to grow and improve in almost every area, but we may know relatively little about where our greatest strengths lie. Under these circumstances motion is progress, and so we never learn to tell the difference.

But at later stages of our career--and particularly when we're in a leadership role--things often look dramatically different. It's now our job to set strategic priorities, and we may have very little help. There's even more to be done, and even more people are competing for our time and attention, but now there's a massive gap between tasks that are truly important and those that are merely urgent. [6] And we still have room to grow and improve, but at this point, as Peter Drucker has noted, "It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence." [7]

So what can we do? There's no ready-made solution, but there are a few steps we can take in the right direction:

• Slow down. When motion = progress, slowing down feels like an unaffordable luxury. We have work to do! But when that equation falls apart--as it inevitably does--if we lack the capacity to slow down we invariably move with great speed in the wrong direction.
• Do the work. Take the time to reflect. Render our thoughts and feelings more tangible by writing them down in a format that's useful to us. Engage in a candid conversation with someone we trust who knows how to really listen.
• Get ready. Make room in our lives for acceptance, for compassion, for wisdom. When motion no longer automatically translates into progress, these are the qualities that will make all the difference.

This may sound simple, and these steps are certainly easy to grasp in principle. But they can be fiendishly difficult to put into practice, and in my experience most of us look for shortcuts. We don't slow down. We don't do the work. We don't get ready. And we're woefully unprepared when life changes. We just keep racing around the track faster and faster. Plenty of motion, very little progress.

 

---

Footnotes

[1] Open Space, Deep Work and Self-Care

[2] The Trap of Competition

[3] How to Scale: Do Less, Lead More

[4] Playing with Matches (On Feeling Needed as a Leader)

[5] You Quit. You're Free. Now What?

[6] Importance vs. Urgency

[7] Peter Drucker on Excellence, Careers and Planning

 

For Further Reading

The Importance of Slowing Down

Doing the Work (Reflection, Journaling, Dialogue)

When We Are Ready, The Practice Will Be Waiting

 

Photo by Robert Couse-Baker.

The Legitimacy of Loss

All day, every day, I talk with leaders about the challenges they're facing, and over the past ten months a series of themes have emerged in these conversations. At first there was a tremendous amount of uncertainty: Were we facing a modern-day plague, or were such concerns completely overblown? When it turned out to be a serious pandemic, there was initially a degree of chaos and overwhelm, and then a sense of resolve as people responded to the crisis and rose to the occasion. Still later came a grim determination as it became evident that a return to any semblance of normalcy would take many months of sustained effort. By no means did all my clients experience these states in a uniform sequence, but I certainly observed this progression from one chapter to the next across the scope of my practice.

And over the past few weeks yet another chapter appears to be unfolding. Many people who had previously managed to remain highly productive are finding it harder to focus and stay motivated. Others who've historically prided themselves on their resilience are feeling surprisingly demoralized. And still others who've always been able to function effectively in hard times are suffering from the effects of sustained stress, in some cases for the first time in their careers. This isn't the majority of my clients, but it's a material percentage, and these themes have cropped up with regularity in conversations with clients since the beginning of the year.

I attribute some of this to dashed hopes. Some thought that the successful vaccine trials at the end of the year might signal the approach of the end of the pandemic, only to see that possibility retreat into the distance as the difficulty of vaccination production and distribution on a global scale was made fully apparent. There's also a connection to the social and political environment. While there's reason to hope that new leadership in the U.S. will lead to some improvements, it seems likely that we're entering into a era of heightened unrest and discord. Even as we acknowledge that change is necessary, the prospect of pursuing change in the midst of polarization and violence is daunting. [1]

But I also believe something else is happening here, something much more personal: People are not grieving their losses.

To be clear, I'm using "loss" in the broadest possible sense of the term: Anything that has been taken from someone as a result of the pandemic. Most of my clients are CEOs, and most of the rest are in similarly senior roles. In any number of ways they enjoy privileges that have insulated them from the worst effects of the pandemic--and this is true for me as well. We've been able to continue working remotely. We've been able to minimize our risk of infection. We've been able to invest in efforts to improve our quality of life, from better workspaces to exercise equipment. In some cases (myself included), we've even been able to relocate to new homes that are better suited to life under these conditions. So to a great extent we haven't experienced loss in the form that so many others have.

Relatively few of us have had someone we know personally die from the virus or suffer grievous and lasting harm. Relatively few of us have had our financial prospects dim because we lost our jobs or our businesses were shuttered. Relatively few of us have had to abandon dreams and plans in order to survive under pandemic conditions. By and large, our losses and our suffering have been far less severe--but that's not to say that we haven't experienced loss or that we haven't suffered.

We enjoyed these privileges and this insulation from loss before the pandemic, but the current environment has heightened our awareness of them, which has had a number of consequences. One is a growing willingness to interrogate the societal arrangements that have led to such disparate outcomes and that have left so many people vulnerable to loss of life and livelihood. Another is an expanded capacity to put our own losses and suffering in perspective--to recognize that so many things we viewed as "problems" in the past were merely petty annoyances, and that so many things we view as "problems" today pale in comparison to the far worse difficulties faced by others.

And yet if the recent themes I'm observing in my practice are any indication, a commitment to societal change and a greater capacity for perspective-taking are insufficient in enabling many of us to overcome the challenges of the present moment. We can and should strive for a more just and equitable world--but having spent seven years at the outset of my career working for organizations that served low-income and homeless families, I'm keenly aware that such efforts are the work of a lifetime. And we can and should seek to put our personal experiences into perspective--but perspective-taking doesn't mean ignoring or dismissing our sense of loss and suffering, just as the vital and necessary work of emotion regulation doesn't mean emotion suppression.

I have suffered serious losses over the years, and I've learned something about grief. [2,3] Grief is a necessary step in the process of letting go of a loss and healing from suffering. When we fail to grieve, we stay stuck, holding on to what has been taken from us and revisiting our suffering over and over again, which is ultimately exhausting. Just as efforts to suppress an emotion can be counter-productive and actually heighten the emotion, a failure to grieve can prolong the sense of loss.

With this in mind, one way of interpreting what I'm seeing in my practice in this latest chapter is that people are failing to grieve their losses. In some cases this may simply be a form of denial--a passionate belief that life will return to normal and a refusal to accept any of the costs of the pandemic as permanent. But in many others I suspect that people who enjoy the privileges that I share with my clients believe that their losses are somehow illegitimate because they are lesser, and that grieving their losses would be unseemly or inappropriate when so many have suffered far worse.

This is a form of perspective-taking, and it's essential that we recognize the disparities in the pandemic's impact. But it's equally essential to mourn our own losses in the process, large and small. The gravity of the current environment doesn't cancel out any individual's pain or sadness. Both are true. All losses are legitimate. All suffering is legitimate. Our loss and suffering may be lesser, and we will need to put them in perspective, just as we will need to surmount them to rise to the challenge of the present moment, but we can mourn them all the same. As my wise friend Sage Cohen once wrote, "Grief can be the path to grace if that is what you choose." [4]

 

This post is the fifth in a series on coping in the current environment:

• Part 1: Pockets of Agency
• Part 2: Aggression, Panic, Paralysis, Denial
• Part 3: Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy
• Part 4: Wounded Creatures
• Part 5: The Legitimacy of Loss
• Part 6: Risk Calculus and Social Norms

---

Footnotes

[1] My thinking on the social and political environment (and the likelihood of sustained unrest and discord) has been shaped by the historian Peter Turchin, who wrote in Nature in 2010:

The next decade is likely to be a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe... In the United States, we have stagnating or declining real wages, a growing gap between rich and poor, overproduction of young graduates with advanced degrees, and exploding public debt. These seemingly disparate social indicators are actually related to each other dynamically. They all experienced turning points during the 1970s. Historically, such developments have served as leading indicators of looming political instability... In the United States, 50-year instability spikes occurred around 1870, 1920 and 1970, so another could be due around 2020.

The accuracy of Turchin's predictions a decade ago has led me to pay even more attention to his ideas, and I've found these works influential:

Return of the Oppressed (Aeon, 2013)

War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires (2007)

Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (2016)

That said, Turchin has his critics, and this recent assessment of his work includes a thoughtful challenge to his methodology:

The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse (Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, 2020)

[2] Mourning Ends, Grief Need Not

[3] I Will Miss You So Much, My Friend

[4] @sagecohen

 

Photo by Jim Choate.

Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy

We should never have the desire to compose music or create mathematical systems, or to adorn our homes, or to be well dressed if our stomachs were empty most of the time, or if we were continually dying of thirst, or if we were continually threatened by an always impending catastrophe...

~Abraham Maslow [1]

Part 1: Maslow's Hierarchy

Although the eminent psychologist Abraham Maslow first developed his theory of human motivation in the 1940s, it remains highly relevant as we seek to understand the impact of the current environment on our lives today. [2] Maslow's ideas and the humanistic psychology movement that he influenced have been subject to criticism over the years, but I continue to find this body of knowledge a source of profound insight in my work as a coach with senior leaders. [3]

Maslow, born in Brooklyn in 1908 to Russian immigrant parents, had a deeply unhappy childhood, which he ascribed in part to being the only Jewish family in his neighborhood. But a happy marriage at age 20 and a brilliant academic career in psychology transformed him, and returning to New York to teach in 1937, Maslow was a charismatic and popular professor, known as "the Frank Sinatra of Brooklyn College." [4] A 33-year-old father of two, Maslow wasn't drafted for military service in World War II, but he was deeply affected by the country's efforts in the fight against Fascism, which led to an emotional experience as he observed a parade of soldiers:

As I watched, the tears ran down my face. I felt that we didn't understand--not Hitler, nor the Germans, nor Stalin, nor the Communists. We didn't understand any of them... It was at that moment that I realized that the rest of my life must be devoted to discovering a psychology for the peace table... I wanted to prove that human beings are capable of something grander than war and prejudice and hatred. [5]

The result was what Maslow called "a positive theory of human motivation," with an emphasis on what can be learned not from unwell people under the care of psychotherapists (the focus of most research at the time) but from healthy and high-functioning people. "The most important concerns of the greatest and finest people in human history must all be encompassed and explained." [6] Maslow's core concept was a "hierarchy of needs," organized according to their "prepotency" or their ability to command our attention and influence our behavior. This hierarchy begins with physiological needs, such as hunger, thirst and sleep:

Undoubtedly these physiological needs are the most prepotent of all needs. What this means specifically is that in the human being who is missing everything in life in an extreme fashion, it is most likely that the major motivation would be the physiological needs rather than any others. A person who is lacking food, safety, love, and esteem would most probably hunger for food more strongly than for anything else. [7]

But what happens to [a person's] desires when there is plenty of bread and when [their] belly is chronically filled? At once other (and higher) needs emerge and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism. And when these in turn are satisfied, again new (and still higher) needs emerge, and so on. This is what we mean by saying the basic human needs are organized into a hierarchy of relative prepotency. [8, emphasis original]

As indicated by the first passage above, the basic needs that emerge once physiological needs are met are the following:

• Safety: "Security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, from anxiety, and chaos; need for structure, order, law, limits; strength in the protector... [The safety needs] may serve as the almost exclusive organizers of behavior, and we may then fairly describe the whole organism as a safety-seeking mechanism." [9]
• Belongingness and Love: "If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle already described will repeat itself with this new center. Now the person will feel keenly, as never before, the absence of friends, or a sweetheart...or children. [They] will hunger for affectionate relations with people in general... Now [they] will feel sharply the pangs of loneliness, of ostracism, of rejection, of friendlessness, of rootlessness." [10]
• Esteem: People "have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, usually high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect, or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others. These needs may therefore be classified into two subsidiary sets. These are, first, the desire for strength, for achievement, for adequacy, for mastery and competence, for confidence in the face of the world, and for independence and freedom. Second, we have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige (defining it as respect or esteem from other people), status, fame and glory, dominance, recognition, attention, importance, dignity or appreciation. [11]
• Self-Actualization: "Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what [they], individually [are] fitted for... What a [person] can be, [they] must be. This need we may call self-actualization... This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one idiosyncratically is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming. The specific form that these needs will take will of course vary greatly from person to person. [12]

Often inaccurately displayed as a pyramid--an image never used by Maslow himself--the hierarchy of needs is better represented as a ladder, as discussed in a thought-provoking 2019 paper that reinforces the value of Maslow's work while rejecting its customary presentation:

The depiction of the [hierarchy of needs] as a pyramid, with horizontal lines demarcating the different levels, makes it difficult to imagine that people can be simultaneously striving to satisfy a number of different needs. When one is on a ladder, multiple rungs are occupied by the feet and hands, and other rungs may be leaned on as well. The ladder as thus described is far closer to Maslow’s original thinking. [13]

So although higher needs emerge as lower ones become fulfilled during the course of our growth and development, we're always working to address multiple sets of needs simultaneously on various "rungs" of the ladder, a point Maslow makes explicitly:

[It is a] false impression that a need must be satisfied 100 percent before the next need emerges. In actual fact, most members of our society who are normal are partially satisfied in all their basic needs and partially unsatisfied in all their basic needs at the same time. A more realistic description of the hierarchy would be in terms of decreasing percentages of satisfaction as we go up the hierarchy of prepotency. For instance, if I may assign arbitrary figures for the sake of illustration, it is as if the average citizen is satisfied perhaps 85 percent in [their] physiological needs, 70 percent in [their] safety needs, 50 percent in [their] love needs, 40 percent in [their] self-esteem needs, and 10 percent in [their] self-actualization needs. [14]

---

Part 2: Tumbling Down

Why does this matter? More specifically, why does it matter today? It matters because in the current environment many people aren't moving up the ladder, they're moving down, and I see a version of this in my coaching practice. Most of my clients are CEOs, and all of them are high-status professionals for whom work fulfills many different needs, which is also true for the vast majority of their employees. And from the perspective of my clients and their colleagues the current environment has created a profound sense of unease as needs that had been largely fulfilled long ago are now making themselves felt again, in some cases for the first time in years:

• People who were pursuing a degree of self-actualization through work feel that such an accomplishment is beyond their grasp as more pressing needs occupy their energy and attention.
• Feelings of esteem are eroded as businesses struggle and people feel less capable of achieving their professional goals, and sense their reputation or status suffering as a result.
• The relationships and sense of community that people enjoyed at work have frayed in the absence of in-person contact or as a consequence of relocations and layoffs. (I've coached more CEOs through layoffs in the past six months than I did in the past decade.)
• The ineffective response to the pandemic, as well as increased levels of political polarization and social unrest, have led to a diminished sense that the world is a secure or predictable place and undermined faith in collective institutions.
• A heightened awareness of the risks of infection and violence has left people feeling physically vulnerable, while also making it harder to achieve consistent sleep or exercise regularly.

To be clear, my clients are keenly aware of the privileges they enjoy that made it possible to move up Maslow's ladder in the first place. I feel this myself, as I've been able to move my coaching practice online and minimize my own risk of infection, when many people I know have had their businesses severely impacted or must expose themselves to potential infection in order to earn a living. But while acknowledging that others are suffering more deeply may help us put our own suffering in perspective, it doesn't make our suffering irrelevant. I'm certainly seeing a great deal of suffering in my practice, and Maslow highlighted one of its sources:

We tend to take for granted the blessings we already have, especially if we don't have to work or struggle for them. The food, the security, the love, the admiration, the freedom that have always been there, that have never been lacking or yearned for tends not only to be unnoticed but also even to be devalued or mocked or destroyed. This phenomenon of failing to count one's blessings is, of course, not realistic and can therefore be considered to be a form of pathology. In most instances it is cured very easily, simply by experiencing the appropriate deprivation or lack, e.g. pain, hunger, poverty, loneliness, rejection, injustice, etc. [15]

If a failure to appreciate our blessings is a form of pathology, a more realistic appraisal may well be a step toward psychological health--but that doesn't make it less painful, particularly when the the process of moving down the ladder is accompanied by a number of stressors, as Maslow acknowledges:

Living at the higher need level means greater biological efficiency, greater longevity, less disease, better sleep, appetite, etc... Higher need gratifications produce more desirable subjective results, i.e. more profound happiness, serenity, and richness of the inner life. Satisfaction of the safety needs produce at best a feeling of relief and relaxation...[and] a greater value is usually placed upon the higher need than upon the lower by people who have been gratified in both. [16]

So moving down the ladder to address gaps in needs that were previously addressed can have a substantial psychological and physiological impact. Life is harder, it's less fulfilling in the process, and there's a sharpened sense of loss for the higher needs that were once met or becoming fulfilled. Further, the changes we're experiencing at societal and global levels are eroding our individual ability to pursue basic needs effectively, no matter what our personal circumstances:

The actualization of a person's real potentialities is conditioned upon...all those factors now called "ecological," upon the "health" of the culture, or the lack of it, upon the world situation, etc. Growth toward self-actualization and full-humanness is made possible by a complex hierarchy of "good preconditions." These physical, chemical, biological, interpersonal, cultural conditions matter for the individual finally to the extent that they do or do not supply [them] with the basic human necessities and "rights" which permit [them] to become strong enough, and person enough, to take over [their] own fate. [17]

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Part 3: Climbing Back Up

So what can we do? My previous posts in this series offer some suggestions: Seek out and create pockets of agency in which we can experience a greater sense of control. And heighten our awareness of our emotional state, take action to regulate our threat response, and accept the inevitable limits on our control (because those pockets will extend only so far.)

And Maslow himself offers another starting point: Gratitude. Counting--and truly appreciating--the blessings we enjoy but have so often taken for granted. A few years ago I wrote a "gratitude checklist" that begins as follows:

I'm alive.	☐
I'm not in pain.	☐
I can think clearly.	☐
I can see, hear, and walk.	☐
I'm warm and well-nourished.	☐
I'm protected from the elements.	☐

All of which relate to the very first rung of Maslow's ladder, our physiological needs. Being grateful for these things sounds absurdly easy, but it's actually quite difficult, and Maslow explains why: the blessings we enjoy tend "not only to be unnoticed but also even to be devalued or mocked or destroyed." They vanish from our consideration as we move up the ladder to focus on higher needs, and it feels beneath us somehow to be attending to them again. It is, in a word, humbling to be compelled to acknowledge that these needs matter.

Yet that is a path to gratitude, if we're willing to take it. And in this context being attuned to suffering--others' and our own--can play a meaningful role in helping us count--and appreciate--our blessings. Over the past few days I've been monitoring a wildfire in Napa and Sonoma Counties as it advanced on Santa Rosa, just 15 miles from the farm where I live. Knowing people are losing their homes so close to mine makes me realize more fully what it would mean to not be protected from the elements, to not be warm or well-nourished.

A colleague is suffering from mobility issues, and a family member is in the late stages of dementia, and they make me realize more fully what it would mean to not see, hear or walk, to not think clearly. I'm just emerging from six weeks of constant back pain, the result of an old injury and new stress, and I'm vividly aware of what it means to be in pain--and how truly thankful I am that this latest episode is ending. And having lost one of my best friends to an accident just before the pandemic descended on the U.S., I'm acutely aware of the value of life and grateful for my own, even--and especially--in the current environment.

So gratitude can be found even when we tumble down to the lowest rung of Maslow's ladder--but where do we go from there? The point of gratitude isn't to lower our aspirations (and Maslow would suggest that it's not possible to do so, as he believed that all of the needs described in his hierarchy had an instinctive basis.) How do we begin to climb back up? We must reach out to others.

Maslow notes that our physiological needs are inherently self-centered--we rely on others to help meet our needs for food, housing, or medical care, but the process of fulfilling them is focused on our individual experience of satiation, shelter, or health. But all our other needs can be fulfilled only by working in collaboration with others to help them meet their needs:

To some extent, the higher the need, the less selfish it must be. Hunger is highly egocentric; the only way to satisfy it is to satisfy oneself. But the search for love and respect necessarily involves other people. Moreover, it involves satisfaction for these other people. [18]

Our needs for safety are truly met only when those around us also feel safe. Our needs for belonging and love are fulfilled only by enabling others to feel that they belong, to feel that they are loved. Our needs for esteem are founded upon the reciprocal exchange of esteem with others. And our needs for self-actualization invariably involve helping others become their best selves.

The challenge is that when we've tumbled down a few rungs on the ladder we tend to feel vulnerable and self-protective, and that's understandable. We may need to steady ourselves and heal for a time before we're ready to reach out. But bear in mind that we'll climb back up again only in partnership with others--and sometimes we'll be in a position to offer help, and sometimes we'll need to ask for help ourselves. This will require connection. And vulnerability. And courage.

 

This post is the third in a series on coping in the current environment:

• Part 1: Pockets of Agency
• Part 2: Aggression, Panic, Paralysis, Denial
• Part 3: Tumbling Down Maslow's Hierarchy
• Part 4: Wounded Creatures
• Part 5: The Legitimacy of Loss
• Part 6: Risk Calculus and Social Norms

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Footnotes

[1] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 24 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)

[2] Maslow first published "A Theory of Human Motivation" in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Review in 1943. This paper remained essentially intact as a foundational chapter in his first and most influential book, Motivation and Personality, not only in the 1st edition of 1954, but also in the 2nd edition of 1970, which was published shortly before Maslow's death. A revised 3rd edition was published in 1987, and it includes some worthwhile additions by psychologists James Fadiman, Robert Frager and Ruth Cox, but I consider the 2nd edition a more definitive presentation of Maslow's views, and the passages quoted above are from that volume.

[3] Humanistic psychology--and Maslow in particular--has been criticized for a lack of experimental data, a fault that Maslow himself acknowledged:

It is fair to say that this theory has been quite successful in a clinical, social and personological way, but not in a laboratory and experimental way. It has fitted very well with the personal experience of most people, and has often given them a structured theory that has helped them to have a better sense of their inner lives. It seems for most people to have a direct, personal, subjective plausibility. And yet it still lacks experimental verification and support. I have not yet been able to think of a good way to put it to the test in the laboratory. Part of the answer to this puzzle came from Douglas McGregor, who applied this theory of motivation to the industrial situation. Not only did he find it useful in ordering his data and his observations, but also these data served retroactively as a source of validation and verification for the theory. It is from this area, rather than the laboratory, that empirical support is now coming. [Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page xii. Maslow was a significant influence on McGregor, who was a professor of management at MIT and is best remembered today for his work on organizational culture.]

But Maslow makes a compelling counter-critique in "Problem Centering vs. Means Centering in Science," chapter 2 in the 2nd edition of Motivation and Personality:

By means centering I refer to the tendency to consider that the essence of science lies in its instruments, techniques, procedures, apparatus, and its methods rather than in its problems, questions, functions or goals... I do not wish to underplay method; I wish only to point out that even in science, means may easily be confused with ends... Means centering tends inevitably to bring into being a scientific orthodoxy... One main danger of scientific orthodoxy is that it tends to block the development of new techniques... Another, probably more important, danger of the orthodoxy fostered by means centering is that it tends to limit more and more the jurisdiction of science. Not only does it block the development of new techniques; it also tends to block the asking of many questions, on grounds that...such questions cannot be answered by currently available techniques... Means-centered orthodoxy encourages scientists to be "safe and sound" rather than bold and daring. It makes the normal business of the scientist seem to be moving ahead inch by inch on the well-laid-out road rather than cutting new paths through the unknown. It forces conservative rather than radical approaches to the not-yet-known. [pages 11-17]

I don't mean to suggest that humanistic concepts should be always be taken at face value. In its later stages in the 1960s and '70s the movement seemed to spawn a number of grandiose, even absurd ideas that are impossible to prove or disprove, defying any sort of scientific analysis. But as an executive coach I value Maslow's willingness to address complex, thorny, meaningful questions because his answers, provisional though they might be, offer me and my clients a rich set of ideas to explore in our efforts to solve real-world problems. In contrast, much contemporary research, although methodologically sound, does not. As Maslow added, "The journals of science are full of instances that illustrate the point, that what is not worth doing, is not worth doing well." [page 18]

[4] "The Influence of Abraham Maslow" (Robert Frager), Foreward to Motivation and Personality, 3rd edition, page xxxvii (Abraham Maslow, et al, 1987). Although Frank Sinatra is remembered today as an elder statesman performing jazz classics, in the mid-1940s he was a 30-year old pop idol whose appeal to teenagers was unprecedented.

[5] Ibid, page xxxviii.

[6] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 33 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)

[7] Ibid, pages 36-37.

[8] Ibid, page 38.

[9] Ibid, page 39.

[10] Ibid, page 43.

[11] Ibid, page 45.

[12] Ibid, page 46.

[13] Who built Maslow’s pyramid? A history of the creation of management studies’ most famous symbol and its implications for management education, page 91 (Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, John Ballard, Academy of Management Learning and Education, 2019). (Note that I'm precluded by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from linking directly to a freely-available version of this paper, but you can search for it on the Victoria University of Wellington's open access repository, which is located outside the U.S. and not subject to the DMCA.)

I highly recommend this informative and insightful paper to anyone with an interest in the history of psychology or management education. Bridgman, Cummings and Ballard show that the pyramid was applied to Maslow's hierarchy of needs many years after his initial paper in a now-forgotten business school textbook and a business-oriented magazine, whose most lasting contributions may have been this inaccurate metaphor.

They also argue convincingly that the use of the pyramid creates several problems: It suggests that people must fully satisfy needs at one level before moving to a higher level, and that satisfied needs are no longer motivational. This idea is rooted in the work of Douglas McGregor, who played an instrumental role in promoting Maslow's theory, but Maslow himself disagreed, as noted above. The pyramid is also often employed to illustrate a universal human hierarchy of needs that transcends culture, although Maslow claimed merely that it was "more universal" than alternative models and noted that culture plays an essential role in the process of translating needs into behavior.

The pyramid can also be used to bolster an elitist and exclusionary view of organizational life, with higher needs being viewed as the purview of senior management and beyond the grasp of ordinary employees, a theme that emerges in much of the management literature of the mid-20th century. The highly egalitarian Maslow did not associate self-actualization with material success, but he did view it as an exalted state, attainable only with great effort by those rare few who are fully committed to their growth and development. [See Chapter 11 in Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition.]

And the pyramid's vividness as a metaphor seems to have amplified the impact of Maslow's theory well beyond what would seem to be justified by any research, which Maslow himself acknowledged. In summary, the authors conclude, "Maslow did not say that the [hierarchy of needs] is unidirectional, that achieving higher levels makes you a superior being, that once a need is satisfied it no longer affects behavior, or that it applies to all people in the same way."

[14] Motivation and Personality, 2nd edition, page 54 (Abraham Maslow, 1970)

[15] Ibid, page 61.

[16] Ibid, pages 98-99

[17] Ibid, page xxv

[18] Ibid, pages 99-100

 

For Further Reading

Gratitude Checklist

Gualala (On Mortality and Gratitude)

The Fruit of Suffering

Not Every End Is a Goal (On Midlife Malaise)

How We Connect (and Why We Might Not).

Brené Brown, Vulnerability, Empathy and Leadership

Courage Isn't Confidence

 

Photo by US Army Africa.

Attitude and Behavior

We often assume that our attitude drives our behavior, and that we act as we do because of underlying thoughts and feelings. This way of understanding ourselves can pose a challenge when we perceive a conflict between the activities necessary to realize our goals and the thoughts or emotions associated with those activities at a given moment. We may conclude that our state of mind prevents us from engaging in desirable behaviors (or compels us to engage in undesirable behaviors), and as a consequence we feel like prisoners of our own psychology.

We're unhappy, so we sink into lassitude and indulge our sorrows. We're demotivated, so we work halfheartedly or don't work at all. We're annoyed or angry with someone, so we avoid them--or we stumble into a confrontation. We know we should act differently, but we don't feel like it--and our common beliefs regarding the causal relationship between attitude and behavior put the former firmly in control of the latter.

This isn't an entirely inaccurate picture. One of the most important functions of emotion is to interrupt conscious thought and orient us toward potential threats and opportunities, as the late psychologist Daniel Wegner noted:

It is clear that emotion should not be very susceptible to willful control. If we could turn off all our emotions, feel no pain, never laugh, not be gripped by fear or despair, stop being excited, and so on, we could easily end up dead... Emotions are built in by evolution, not to be tampered with, because hundreds of generations of humans before us have survived their friends or acquaintances who were able to shut down their emotions. Disgust keeps us from eating icky things; sadness helps us notice our losses; fear reminds us to run from predators; joy keeps us coming back to our friends and sex partners. It is good, in other words, that when we feel an emotional state, our normal purposes and interests succumb to an influence beyond our control. The priority of emotions over will is important for our survival because it allows our plans to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality. [1]

As a result, emotions are attention magnets [2], which alternately attract and repel us, and this elegant system, the result of millions of years of evolution, is a "feature" of human psychology, not a "bug." [3] This is consistent with what neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio have learned in recent decades about the role emotions play in logical reasoning. Rather than acting antagonistically, emotion and reason usually work together in concert to enable us to make good decisions and navigate the world successfully. [4] Usually--but not always.

The challenge is that emotions are a "quick and dirty" signal, in the words of neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux [5], which allow us to process vast amounts of information rapidly, but at the cost of occasional accuracy. Although "the priority of emotions over will" is necessary in order for us "to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality," in most instances our interpretation of "reality" is highly contingent and subject to any number of biases and distortions. [6] As noted above, we know we should act differently, but we don't feel like it--and at these times the power of our emotions may not serve us well. So what can we do?

We can start by replacing the simplistic framework above with a more complex view of human psychology. Rather than being a one-way causal relationship, it's a two-way street: While our attitude obviously informs and influences our behavior, our behavior also informs and influences our thoughts and feelings in a dynamic and cyclical process:

Psychologists and neuroscientists have struggled to determine the precise mechanisms by which this process occurs, [7] and there are limits to its efficacy. We can't simply will ourselves out of profound dysfunction caused by clinical depression, anxiety or trauma. But we do have much more power than we typically realize to consciously choose behaviors that will affect our attitude and influence the everyday emotions that can get in the way of our goals and objectives. And while science can't yet (and may never) identify the ways in which specific behaviors alter specific attitudes across the population at large, we can still apply the general principle and craft a set of experiments to best meet our individual needs.

An important element in this process is known as cognitive dissonance: When our attitude and our behavior are inconsistent, we experience discomfort and even distress, and we modify either our attitude or our behavior to reduce the inconsistency. The original research on the subject was conducted by Leon Festinger, who noted that "cognitive dissonance is a motivating state of affairs. Just as hunger impels a person to eat, so does dissonance impel a person to change his opinions or his behavior." [8]

So despite the power of our emotions, we need not allow our initial attitude to dictate our behavior. Instead we can leverage the power of cognitive dissonance by choosing to act differently, which in turn can shift our attitude. As Ignatius of Loyola put it nearly 500 years ago, "Perform the acts of faith, and faith will come." [9]

More recent research has helped us learn more about how this process works in the brain, with one team of neuroscientists concluding that people who behave in ways that are in conflict with their attitudes "change their attitudes to be more consistent with the counter-attitudinal behavior. Dissonance has been shown to be a negative emotional state accompanied by autonomic arousal; it has been shown that people change their attitudes and restore consonance to specifically reduce the negative affect." [10]

What does this look like in practice? While we can draw upon research from psychology and neuroscience, the limitations of this research require us to actively experiment in order to discover the specific behaviors that effectively alter specific attitudes for each of us as individuals. For example, the issues noted above occur commonly in my work with senior leaders--unhappiness and demotivation result in disengagement, or annoyance and anger result in avoidance or conflict--so I often talk with clients about experiments that involve the following:

• Engaging in a range of "happiness strategies," small-scale intentional activities that can improve our sense of subjective well-being.
• Committing to exercise routines, a mindfulness practice, and good sleep hygiene, all of which can enhance our capacity for emotion regulation and in some cases directly alter our moods.
• Actively journaling and talking about our emotions.

But the precise nature of these activities can vary tremendously from one individual to the next, and figuring all this out takes work--and we're not always willing to invest the effort. All too often we want to be told what to do--we want a shortcut. I frequently see this response in students who are looking for universal laws derived from research--I have to remind them that as human beings they're far too complex to be accurately represented by any model, no matter how sound. [11] There are no algorithms, only heuristics.

Compounding the challenge, not only are our emotions not subject to willful control (a good thing, as Wegner reminds us), but a predictable set of problems are triggered when we seek to influence how we feel by deliberately engaging in desired behaviors (or refraining from undesired behaviors):

It feels taxing. We have two distinct ways of thinking, known as System 1 and System 2, [12] and psychologist Daniel Kahneman describes the former as operating "automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control," while the latter "allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it... The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration." [13] System 2 thinking is a finite mental resource, so we've evolved to experience it as taxing and fatiguing, which motivates us to preserve it for truly important activities. Efforts to direct our attention toward (or away from) certain activities or objectives consume System 2 processing, which is why this conceptually simple task can feel surprisingly difficult. There's no easy solution here, but a mindfulness practice can provide a "workout in attention management."

It feels phony. Deliberately engaging in behaviors intended to alter our attitude can evoke a sense of inauthenticity or can lead others to experience us as insincere, which runs counter to the emphasis contemporary culture places on "being yourself." To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we should suppress difficult emotions--but emotion regulation is not the same thing as suppression, and we make a serious error when we define "authenticity" as "ease." Author Brené Brown is often viewed as a champion of authenticity, but she rejects the idea that this means simply "being yourself": "Authenticity requires almost constant vigilance and awareness about the connections between our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. It also means staying mindful about our intentions. Real authenticity actually requires major self-monitoring..." [14] Active efforts to influence our attitude compel us to observe ourselves closely (or "self-monitor") and to experiment with new behaviors until they become integrated into our repertoires.

It feels forced. When this process feels taxing we can build up our psychological stamina, and when it feels phony we can reframe our understanding of authenticity--but it's essential to enter into the experience willingly, with a sense of agency and choice, rather than as a duty or obligation. The neuroscience research cited above notes that when people "attribute their counter-attitudinal behavior to payment or coercion...conflict between behavior and prior attitudes is reduced, and [they] experience less cognitive dissonance and do not change their attitudes." [15] We can't compel a change in attitude--we can only invite it by establishing psychological safety, by creating the right conditions, and by treating ourselves with compassion.

 

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Footnotes

[1] White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control, page 123 (Daniel Wegner, 2nd edition, 1994)

[2] To Stay Focused, Manage Your Emotions (Harvard Business Review, 2015)

[3] "It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature" Trite--or Just Right? (Nicholas Carr, Wired, 2018)

[4] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[5] The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life, page 163 (Joseph LeDoux, 1998)

[6] When Heuristics Go Bad

[7] For example, an influential study suggested that the act of smiling could stimulate feelings of happiness, but these findings later failed to replicate, and yet it now appears that the failure may have been the result of changes in the experimental conditions. The initial work on "power posing," which suggested that altering one's physical stance could induce heightened feelings of confidence, also failed to replicate, and it does appear that there were substantial flaws in the original research. However, the "power pose" researchers also highlighted problems with the replication efforts, although one of them subsequently retracted her support for the concept. While the ongoing "replication crisis" should give us ample pause before we take any single study at face value, I don't believe it renders social science invalid, and it's up to us to be more thoughtful consumers of research as we put it into practice. (Further thoughts on this here.)

[8] "Cognitive Dissonance" (Leon Festinger, Scientific American, October 1962, pages 93-94)

[9] Cited in From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, page 39 (Jacques Barzun, 2001)

[10] Neural activity predicts attitude change in cognitive dissonance (Vincent van Veen, Marie Krug, Jonathan Schooler and Cameron Carter, Nature Neuroscience, 2009)

[11] The Map Is Not the Territory

[12] Individual differences in reasoning: Implications for the rationality debate? (Keith Stanovich and Richard West, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Volume 23, Issue 5, October 2000)

[13] Thinking, Fast and Slow, pages 20-21 (Daniel Kahneman, 2013)

[14] My response to Adam Grant’s New York Times Op/Ed (Brené Brown, LinkedIn, June 5, 2016)

[15] Van Veen, et al.

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For Further Reading

Lyubomirsky's Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic

• For more on recent research on happiness and well-being, see Understanding "The Pie Chart" in The How of Happiness.

Get Moving! (Exercise for Busy People)

Don't Just Do Something, Stand There! (Mindfulness for Busy People)

A compilation of readings on sleep.

The Value of Journal Writing

Talking About Feelings

Self-Monitoring and Authenticity

Conscious Competence in Practice

Why Change Is Hard

Building Blocks (A Tactical Approach to Change)

Three More Horsemen (How We Self-Sabotage)

• For more on self-compassion, I recommend the work of University of Texas psychologist Kristin Neff.

Books on related topics:

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking (Oliver Burkeman, 2013)

How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life (Caroline Webb, 2016)

Peak Performance: Elevate Your Game, Avoid Burnout, and Thrive with the New Science of Success (Brad Stulbert and Steve Magness, 2017)

This is an extensively revised version of a post first published in 2010.

Photo by Steven Depolo.

It's Time to Stop Interviewing

While there's ample data on job interviews' poor ability to predict a candidate's success [1], the practice isn't going away any time soon. [2] But for most of my coaching clients--and for some of my MBA students--the era of interviewing in their lives is coming to an end. I don't mean that they'll stop participating in the process, but, rather, that they should begin to approach it from an entirely different perspective.

Up to a certain point in our careers, a job interview is often an exercise in fitting ourselves into a box, the size and shape of which is defined by the employer. We have a general understanding of the size and shape of the box--that's why we're interested in the job--but the precise details remain something of a mystery. And so the interview process consists largely of us gleaning additional clues about the size and shape of the box, while simultaneously proclaiming our ability to fit comfortably within it, no matter what we learn.

Later on, if we've landed the job and accepted the offer, we're not surprised that the employer wasn't entirely accurate about the size and shape of the box, in part because we weren't entirely accurate about our ability to fit into it comfortably. These inaccuracies need not be the result of deceit or dishonesty--it's simply that the information asymmetry inherent in the process means that neither party truly knows if it's going to be a good fit.

But when we contort ourselves to fit an employer's expectations of a candidate (or our imagined perceptions of those expectations), we perpetuate and even heighten that information asymmetry. By representing ourselves in this way, we increase the likelihood of false positives, in which one or both parties believe it will be a good fit, only to ultimately be proven wrong. As inefficient as this may be, there's an underlying logic here that makes sense early in our careers. At that stage of our professional lives, the cost of failing to win an offer for a compelling opportunity may seem quite high--and potentially much higher than the cost of finding ourselves in a job that's not a good fit.

And yet beyond a certain point, this calculus changes dramatically. The cost of taking a job that's not really a good fit becomes much higher than failing to obtain the offer in the first place. We may "win" the offer by successfully contorting ourselves to fit into the box (or at least convincing ourselves and our interviewers that it's a possibility), but in the process we've actually lost: We've lost time and attention we'll never regain. We've lost a chance to learn something useful about ourselves and the organization. And if we stick with this approach long enough, we lose the opportunity to understand who we really are and discover the work we're meant to do.

Most of my coaching clients are CEOs who expect to remain in their current position for the foreseeable future, but I do work with a number of clients through professional transitions. When this occurs, it often becomes apparent to my clients that they're past the point in their careers when there's any value to "winning" an offer by contorting themselves to fit into somebody else's box. At this stage my clients know that everyone involved in the process will gain the most if they simply show up as themselves, reduce the information asymmetry as soon as possible, and absolutely eliminate any chance of a false positive. This also shifts the power dynamic from one in which the company is interviewing the candidate to one in which both parties are interviewing each other.

To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we should show up at interviews with an obnoxious, take-it-or-leave-it attitude, or that we should be rigid and unyielding in what we require of prospective employers. Nor do I believe that there's one "perfect" job out there for us, and we should spurn anything that falls short. But in my experience the training we receive early in our careers to fit ourselves into other people's boxes far outlives its utility, and most of us wait far too long before realizing that it's time to stop interviewing this way.

The dilemma, of course, is that there's no single point in time when it's obvious that we should modify our approach to the process. You might object that this latter approach works for senior leaders who are sufficiently well-established and financially secure to walk away, and you don't feel like you're there yet. Fair enough--but when will you be? It's highly unlikely that any given professional milestone or accomplishment will automatically endow you with this attitude, and no one's going to tell you, "You're ready now--it's time." The only person who can make that call is you.

 

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Footnotes

[1] For more on the limitations of job interviews:

• The Utter Uselessness of Job Interviews (Jason Dana, The New York Times, 2017)
• Belief in the unstructured interview: The persistence of an illusion (Jason Dana, Robyn Dawes and Nathanial Peterson, Judgment and Decision Making, 2013)
• How to Take the Bias Out of Interviews (Iris Bohnet, Harvard Business Review, 2016)
• Stubborn Reliance on Intuition and Subjectivity in Employee Selection (Scott Highhouse, Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2008)

[2] Daniel Kahneman on Conducting Better Interviews

For Further Reading

Leadership and Authenticity

Cautionary Tales (Authenticity at Work)

Conform to the Culture Just Enough

Photo by Tim Evanson.

You Can't Steer a Parked Car

I didn't coin the title of this post, and I wish I could remember where I heard it first, because it does come up frequently in my coaching practice.

When we suspect we're not headed in the right direction, we often slow down and lose momentum, and sometimes we stall out entirely.

But it's very difficult--and perhaps impossible--to change direction when we're not moving at all.

The key is to move forward judiciously and thoughtfully, and to use the resulting momentum to adjust our trajectory in the process.

What does this look like in practice?

• Talk about it.
• Write about it.
• Talk about it some more.
• Get comfortable with vulnerability--it's unavoidable.
• Recognize that change consists of countless small steps.
• And remember that you're a work-in-progress, learning how to learn.

 

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Thanks to Ryan Caldbeck.

Photo by IwateBuddy.