Self deception is good? December 3, 2009
I’ve been investigating lies and lying of late (in case you didn’t notice the other posts). In doing so I discovered some very interesting research on self-deception.
Such interesting research that it fits into many different areas. From life, sports, business and other pursuits. And the research hints at top performers often ’self-deceive’ more than others.
Psychologist by the name of Joanna Starek discovered that swimmers who lie to themselves swim faster than those who do not. (Link to the research).
The document hints at much of the other evidence out there that ’self-deception’ helps with stress, depression, happiness, and more.
Above all, this shows that the ability to focus on your goal, ignoring any other information that goes against that goal, makes it more likely to reach your goal.
So what do you think? Is self-deception needed for success? Does it help at all from your perspective?
Thanks to Radiolab for the links.
Four tips on how to motivate a new team. June 3, 2009
Getting everyone in a new team, group, company or organization to work together is a challenge but not impossible. To give you some of the ideas I use, let me start with a metaphor to get a point across.
As a teacher, I teach to specific individuals. Even in a full class, I teach to the individuals. If the individuals get my point, I move on. If half of them do, I restate the case till they all do. Sometimes I even intentionally confuse the ones that get it, to help them learn a different thing.
In short, I have my learning outcome. I know what responses I want from the students. The students also have their out outcomes for learning. As the instructor, I have to match those two up.
Now, just for a moment, consider a team or company a class. How do I navigate through each individual’s needs, wants and desires to reach my corporate outcome? It takes time and attention (your and theirs!). If they don’t want to belong, then you’re kind of stuck. You can’t make anyone learn something they don’t want to learn. In either case you either have to make them want it, ignore them, or expel them from the team. Having a disruption in a new team can be unrecoverable. In an established team, the team itself usually deals with it naturally.
So some specifics as I appreciate them.
1. Ask the team. You might not use everything they tell you, but you have to take the team ‘pulse’.
Ask the individuals within the team a few specific questions.
“Is the team helping you do what you want?”
“What are you trying to do?”
“What do you most value about the team?”
“Other than yourself who do you think the team finds is the most beneficial member?”
“Who do you think the team finds the least beneficial member?”
2. Give the team clear instructions. So many times I’ve watched highly effective teams self destruct because they were given a wishy-washy goal.
These instructions can also be about how to act as a team. Instructions on WIIFT (What’s In It For Them), what they have to do (both individually and as a team), how they contribute, what ‘contribute’ actually means and more.
3. Be an example for the team. They will follow your lead, not knowing anything else to do. If you stifle creativity, you’ll get less of it and the team will begin to stifle it itself. If you foster creativity, it will grow and be nurtured by the team.
4. Following on from point #3, if you notice the team moving in a direction you don’t want, be the example that moves them in the other way. This can be the toughest of all because most of the time we don’t notice the direction the team is heading until it’s already halfway there.
What other tips to motivate a new team can you think of? Comment below!
Accept the events you cannot control April 20, 2009
And that was just the day to day work – it says nothing of the occasional angry and abusive interactions I’d have with other people. One particular memorable occurrence, not long before I finally snapped, is one of the database admins storming up to my desk within minutes of my arrival.
“Why haven’t you done the changes I’ve asked for?” He demanded.
“What, no hello?” Too early and I’d not yet had my morning coffee.
He looked at me as if I was the only one with the bad attitude. “I put the changes through weeks ago, they are still not done!”
“Ok, slow down. Which changes specifically?” Yes, I talked like that even way back then.
“Don’t give me that, you know the ones I’m asking about.”
I was tired from another late night, lacked caffeine, had not yet read my list of important outstanding tasks and this fellow was acting as if my job revolved around him. I rubbed my forehead.
“I don’t.” I replied, attempting to calm him down some, but it was the wrong thing to say.
“Don’t give me that!” He yelled, “This is the second time I’ve come to remind you.”
Now I didn’t recall the first time, I’d forgotten other things in recent weeks. “Did you send me an email last time?” I asked calmly.
“No! You said you’d take care of it.” He replied indignantly.
“Send me an email and I’ll get to it.” I said turning to my monitor and put on a pair of headphones. He stood for a few seconds with him mouth open and then stormed off in a huff.
This story shows two sides of the same coin. One side is me not taking on someone elses responsibility, the other is the DBA being emotionally attached to and effected by my lack of attentiveness.
Both of us describe one key aspect of being in control of your stress. And that key is accepting events that are outside of your control.
For example, no matter how hard you try, you can’t control another human (or even pet)! You can influence them, ask them, plead, yell, scream and complain, but you can’t control them. That database admin would have loved to control me; instead I just made his life more difficult and stressful.
You can control your own thoughts, emotions, choices, influence and behaviour. You can’t control consequences of your actions, other people’s reaction, or the responses to your influence. That DBA had no idea I’d respond the way I did, and wasn’t able to keep himself calm.
If you are trying to control things out of your control you begin to feel directly responsible for other people’s actions. You are constantly trapped thinking their actions are your responsibility, but having no ability to change their behaviour. This is a sure path to a short and stressful life.
That’s all well and good, but how do we let these things go? There is an aspect of artistry to this act: How much do we change ourselves, and how much do we change the world?
Primarily it’s a mental shift and difficult to teach directly. To get that mental shift, the easiest way (at least to start) is to focus entirely on exactly the things you can control. I.e., yourself.
With practice, you can change your emotional responses directly. You can only ever change other people’s emotional responses via influence. The main way we influence anyone is verbally (at least in the beginning). If you could only talk, what would you say to get the result you wanted from someone else? How do you respond? Think about the story above, what would you have done as the DBA to get me to respond differently? (Some tips: I don’t respond to threats, yelling or whining. I sometimes respond to bribes, begging and pleading.) Write your responses in the comments below – there are no incorrect (or even correct) responses, so feel free.
The next step, once you achieve this mental shift, is to fully appreciate that your emotions can be directly seen and experienced by the person you’re speaking to. Being in control of your own emotional response dramatically improves your influence! But I’ll leave details for how to do that for a later date.
P.S. If the DBA in the story happens to be reading this, I hope he accepts my sincere apologies.
How to keep a positive attitude March 19, 2009
Sometimes life gives us lemons. As the old saying goes; make lemonade. While it’s easy to say that while you look at a table overflowing with lemons, it’s sometimes hard to think of making lemonade.
The main asset in remembering to make lemonade is keeping a positive attitude. Regardless of the stress of the situation if you keep a positive attitude you can get better results.
Keeping that positive attitude under difficult situations might be a challenge. Actually, because of today’s busy lifestyle constantly trying to throw us off balance, it might be easier to think of it as regaining or recovering our lost positive attitude. Here are a few tips that can keep help.
1. Say thank you. You, like me, might remember a birthday where your parents didn’t give you the present you wanted, but instead wrapped up underwear and socks. For added embarrassment, you opened all your presents while family and friends looked on. Even though this wasn’t much of a gift, or you didn’t get what you truly wanted, you still say ‘thankyou’.
When you say ‘thankyou’ you don’t have to accept the ‘gift’.
When you say ‘thankyou’ your mind (thanks to years of training) begins to think of how and where to use this gift.
2. Smile for no reason. This releases ‘feel good’ chemicals that, well, make us feel good.
Make others smile and laugh. This in turn naturally makes us smile. If you don’t believe me, walk down a street and smile at the strangers walking towards you. Most of those that notice will smile in return. Even in the most unfriendly cities you’ll still get some responses.
And even if you fake a laugh, this usually becomes funny in itself. Try it yourself with a friend.
3. Forgive others. Forgiveness is a funny thing. It is never about the other person. It’s never about you accepting that what was done to you is ok. It’s not even about making the other person feel better or stopping punishing them (when really it’s just punishing yourself). Forgiveness is simply about allowing you to release the attachment you have to a past event.
4. Hang around positive people. That doesn’t mean dropping all your negative friends, just limiting the time you spend around them. If you only know negative people, you need new friends!
5. Focus on the positive. That doesn’t mean ignoring the negative, just not reliving the negative. At the end of the meeting or day, remember what was good.
If you must focus on the negative, set a short time limit and do it with 100% commitment. No more than 10 minutes is ever needed.
6. Talk to yourself in positive terms. Harder than it sounds, but as a quick introduction start with eliminating the words: can’t, won’t, should, but, try. You will be more positive by simply removing these words.
Personally, when the world gives me lemons, I make margaritas. The best margaritas are made with lime, but when all you have is lemons…
How do you make decisions? March 18, 2008
If you are like most people, you don’t know the process you go through to make a decision. It happens quickly, naturally, and without our awareness.
The easiest ways to discover how you make a decision, is to take 4 of your friends out to dinner.
When you are handed a menu, place it closed in front of you and watch your friends. Notice how one might ask what someone else is going to have. Notice another might read through every item. Another might glance at the menu and close it. The fourth will do something different.
Once they have made their choice, pick on one of your friends with these questions. (I’ll leave the decision of which one to pick up to you, but if you’ve worked with me before, you’ll know my selection criteria).
“What have you chosen?” Listen closely to the answer. They will likely tell you everything about their decision process. Once they finish, ask:
“What made you choose that?” And again listen to their answer.
If you’re lucky, they’ll say something like “I looked through the menu till I found the dish I had before,” or “I opened the menu and picked the first thing I noticed.” If you’re unlucky, they’ll give you a long rambling story about their childhood. Both will tell you how they made that decision.
Now comes the real challenge. Pick up your menu and use their method to choose food for yourself. This doesn’t mean choose the same dish (although you might). If they choose something they have had before, then you do the same. If they choose the first thing they see, do the same.
Doing this can give you a powerful insight into your own decision method (and might have you eating something new – always a bonus!).
So after doing this, what does that get you?
- It gives you skills to notice someone else’s decision method. This in itself is useful for sales, negotiation, business or making your partner happy because if you know how someone makes a decision, simply give them the information they need to make the decision you want.
- You get insight into your own process. Even though you are only choosing what to eat, the chances are this is the same process you go through to pick a car, house, shoes or a pen.
- You now have another way to make a choice. Chances are you may not like this new method – thats ok, you don’t have to use it. You can keep it in your back pocket when you want a change, or are faced with a very difficult decision.
Notice how the people around you make decisions. Notice how you make your own decisions.
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Decisions, Group Dynamics, Learning, Management, Motivation, Negotiation, Persuasion, Psychology, Sales
The reason to control stress February 12, 2008
Stress may be triggered by external events such as having a short timeframe, being yelled at by a customer, or giving an important presentation. It is your interpretation of the event or situation that will ultimately cause you to feel the mental and physical stress or anxiety.
Now, not all stress is bad stress. Stress is a part of everyday life. In the right amount, stress helps you focus better and achieve what you want. Stress can help you be more alert, motivated, and gain a competitive edge. However, non-stop stress is debilitating and will interfere with performance. In the worst situations, it can even kill you!
Stress occurs as a response to an event that you view as threatening. Imagine driving your car at 200 KPH on a windy road. Under the right amount of stress, you switch on your full potential. Under too much stress you crack under the pressure.
The sooner you can recognize the signs stress, the faster you can react and keep in under control.
So, how do you know when you need to hit the kill switch on stress?
There are three main areas where changes can occur under stress: (1) Physical, (2) Mental or Emotional, and (3) Behavioral.
Physical changes when under stress may include dry mouth, tense muscles, pounding heart rate, cold or clammy hands, headache, sweating, and a feeling of butterflies in the stomach. You probably feel these to some extent if you have an important presentation. These are the signs that your body is ready for the challenge.
Mentally you feel stress when you begin to worry excessively about results, make poor decisions, have a limited attention span, make mental errors, and are forgetful.
Other behavior signs of stress include talking faster than normal, biting one’s nails, restlessness, hyperactivity, insomnia, distractibility, and trembling.
By themselves, these signs may not even slow you down. These signs can stay around, and compound. This starts a chronic stress situation, you will seem tired, restless, and feel out of control. If this continues, more problematic physical issues might start.
The important lesson is that you can learn when helpful stress turns into harmful stress and be able to cope effectively. Bring that harmful stress back under control and be able to perform at your best. The key for you is to be aware of these signs and make the adjustments needed when you feel anxiety, tension, or stress. You can learn the skills needed to keep the balance, relax when you want, and stop the overwhelming stress.
If you’d like to know more, you can join in the survey, and then read more about stress reduction methods.
Technorati Tags: Business, Change, Psychology, Stress
Ways to boost your confidence August 13, 2007
The words you use might be wimp, spineless, shy or fearful. Other people always seem to be able to tell that you are lacking in confidence and walk all over you, take advantage or just ignore you. And it feels like, after each individual event they build together to make a huge barrier to your success.
This vicious cycle goes on. You try something, forcing yourself past the wall of past failures, but fail and get humiliated, so it makes it harder to try again. Because you don’t try next time, the wall becomes higher and thicker and more difficult to overcome.
Some helpful people might just tell you to “Stop being a wimp and get over it”. As if it’s easy to entirely change who you are. That’s what it feels like; that you’d have to change everything about yourself in order to feel like tackling the world’s challenges.
Confidence, like everything else in life, is a skill that needs to be practiced. When you lose confidence it can genuinely feel awful, and for many people might feel like there is nothing you can do to change it. It’s a common statement, “I just don’t have the confidence to do that.” As though we can walk into a shop and buy a kilo of confidence.
Everyone has times when we feel we can do anything, conquer any fear, take on any project, deal with any problem. The skill of confidence comes in when the situation start to become difficult. Thats when our confidence can start to be eroded.
Confidence may take a while to build, and it can be undermined or lost in a second. All it takes is for something to remind us of that wall and we feel wrong-footed, embarrassed or demoralized. It might be something that reminds us of a past failure or previous time we lost confidence. Think back in your own history, is there a certain situation that you always lack confidence in? It often only takes one episode where you feel humiliated or weren’t sure what to do next, and suddenly your confidence is shattered in that event and possibly future ones as well.
Evaluate what trips you up and what doesn’t
There will be some situations that undermine your confidence and some that boost your confidence. Take a piece of paper and divide the page in two. On the right side make a list of the times and places where you know you feel more confident. You might want to start with listing things you do well. If you know you’re a good listener, for example, you probably feel relatively confident when you take on the listening role.
On the other side of the paper make a list of the times and places where you don’t feel confident. Meeting new people, confrontations, giving a presentation, making decisions, etc.
Now we combine the two sides to create a whole. Pick one or two parts on the right hand side of the paper that you could use to improve your confidence in situations on the left hand side. Let’s say you don’t feel very confident meeting new people, but you do feel confident as a good listener. Get a new page and write these two things on the same line. The left side is again “I’m not confident meeting new people.” and the right is “I’m a confident listener.” In between these two statements combine them into one sentence using the word ‘but’. Now read that whole new sentence aloud. Writing it like this and then reading it changes your experience and understanding. Many people have said this alone is enough to fill them with confidence.
Given that above example, people love to talk about themselves, so you only need to get them started (and every good listener knows how to ask good questions) and they’ll be off. Then you can listen to your heart’s content because you know you’re good at it. This then in turn increases your confidence of situations that previously sapped your confidence.
There will be many other possible times and places where you can borrow one skill to help you overcome a deficit in another. Even combining two or three to become a whole lot more confident much more quickly than you think possible.
Repetition is the mother of skill
If you put yourself into those times and places where you naturally have confidence more often, you will increase your experience and bolster your confidence, not just in these situations but also into the rest of your life. If you’re good at riding a bike, go on more bike rides.
Confidence is just like a muscle. You have to use it to develop it. Unlike a muscle however, you don’t have to spend any extra time lifting weights or going to the gym. You can build it throughout your daily activities by consciously focusing on improving your existing confidence.
If you do have a bad day, and your confidence has been undermined, focus your attention on the parts of your day where you did have confidence. Dwelling on the bad does not help. If you get stuck, use the above evaluation sheet to help focus on the good.
And there’s nothing wrong with every once in a while deliberately avoiding situations that do stop you. There’s nothing so confidence-undermining as consistently forcing yourself in situations where you know you’re vulnerable.
The Confidence Cycle
Losing confidence can be a vicious cycle. You lose a little bit of confidence, and then because of that you do something wrong which chips away another bit of confidence. This in turn causes another error and we are suddenly plummeting towards jagged rocks.
Of course, I’m being a little extreme here, it’s not always like that. In fact you can reverse this cycle so that anything that happens can make you even more confident. Everyone has some areas of their life where they’re really confident, or at least confident enough. This is when those lists of qualities and skills come in when we look at the Confidence Cycle.
This is how it works: when you are confident, you try new things, and the more you try the better you get. Like public speaking, for instance. Any good presenter will tell you that the more they get out there in front of an audience, the more confident they feel about handling whatever happens. NOT that they feel less nervous (some people, no matter how practised they are, never learn how to be calm on stage), just that they know what to expect and also feel able to deal with the unexpected. If they get unbalanced they have enough experience to get themselves upright again.
But without confidence you won’t try new things. Where do you begin?
The one and only place you can begin is to practise. Practice for success. That means to practice just above your current level so that even if you make mistakes you are successful overall. This might mean you practice where no one will necessarily notice or where you are not in the spotlight.
For example, if you feel you have zero confidence speaking in front of a group, don’t start practising in front of a group. All you are doing in practicing zero confidence. Practice in front of the mirror first. Then practice in front of a trusted friend. Do this until you can do it with confidence. It might feel false and embarrassing, but practising with an audience of one friend is very different than going into the lion’s den of an audience of strangers.
Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance
Alongside practise goes preparation. Whatever the situation is you can prepare for all manner of eventualities. For example, one of the training drills I give to everyone that I train in public speaking is to give a 5 minute talk. During that 5 minute talk they are to make at least 3 obvious ‘errors’. These errors might be dropping a whiteboard marker, tripping, forgetting a major point of their talk, or anything else. This gives them the ability and experience of dealing with something going wrong. Before something like that would undermine their confidence and set them up for more errors. Now it builds their confidence because they have direct experience of dealing effectively with these errors.
Whatever you choose, remember to practice for success. Doing something correctly once is much better than doing something one hundred times wrong.
If you found this article useful you might also like to read how to build self-confidence.
Technorati Tags: Business, Change, Learning, Motivation, Psychology, Self-Confidence, Stress
Business and leadership is about removing limits July 20, 2007
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.”
~ Albert Einstein
These limits might be your own, limits of those around you, limits of the industry or even limits of humanity.
A good example of this is the Medicine industry. Working towards removing the limits of illness, sickness and accidents (genetic deformities etc). Think of Cochlear implants as a specific example – removing the limits placed on individuals thanks to genetics or accidents.
It is not the development of some new gizmo that makes one company profit, it’s removing limitations. A superb example for this is the blog you are reading right now. The boom in blogs over the last few years has been because it is so easy – anyone can, within 5 minutes, have a running blog. Five years ago, you needed knowledge and experience to achieve the same result.
Henry Ford made the car. But that’s not what made him wealthy and the car such a common item. It was the Ford company consistently focusing on removing the production limitations. Little by little making it easier and cheaper to produce.
You can hold this idea for yourself every day. Focus on removing limits in what you do and how you do it. Maybe something as simple as having to open a drawer each time you need a pen. Removing that physical limitation can help your day. Maybe it’s something bigger like using a filing cabinet for your documents, or using GTD (Getting Things Done) method of time management or getting into work early to miss the traffic. When you remove or avoid a limit, your productivity increases. Removing these limits for yourself means not only being more effective with work, but also reducing your stress.
Businesses grow and improve through removing limits. Some common examples are automatic printing of invoices, just in time production runs to remove warehousing limits, and mobile phones removing the need to be near a land line. Fedex’s whole premise is to remove the time limits for delivering packages.
And I think the number one job of a leader is to remove limits of the business and their team. That’s not to say the leaders will be able to achieve zero limits, there will be contextual limits, budget limits and more. The limits leadership remove are the limits that constrain the workers within the business and also external situations that limit the business itself. These limits might be cash flow problems, team cohesion, client retention etc. Removing those limits might be a strategy change, responding to customers, or sliming the operations.
What are the limits that are placed on you (or you place on yourself) that can easily be removed? What things limit the people around you that you can remove?
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Change, Leadership, Motivation, Productivity, Stress
The risks of Leadership July 3, 2007
When I was taught abseiling, the teachers drilled safety over and over again. Ensure you are always anchored, and to check all the major parts of your gear before jumping off. Go through the ABC’s. Anchor – Is your rope secured properly? Belt – Is your harness on correctly, buckle tight? Carabeena – are you tied in correctly?
The day I was learning, one person in the group, James, was learning how to train others.
During the middle of the day, after the beginners had just finished an intermittent level overhang, I watched Gary, our lead instructor, take the rope everyone had just finished using and intentionally tie a large knot about half way down. He then instructed James to tie off and begin abseiling down. James was naturally a little apprehensive. Gary had to spend several minutes convincing James that this was part of his testing.
Gary followed James down on a parallel rope. All the while James was very concerned about the knot, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to complete the jump.
As James approached the knot, he stopped about a meter above it, secured himself then began to untie the knot. Gary quickly stopped him. “That’s not the test. What happens if you can’t untie the knot, or there is some other obstruction?”
“I want you to continue all the way down, until the knot is hard against your figure 8″ (A figure 8 is the part that connects the rope to your harness).
“No,” said James. “I can’t get out from there if I do that.”
Again Gary was insistent. “Go down the rope until the knot is hard into your figure 8.”
James was beginning to get scared. He started stating that he’d never do that, stopping before an obstruction. Every excuse he came up with, Gary came up with another explanation and again told James to comply. All the while both of them were hanging ten meters above jagged rocks.
In the end, James reluctantly complied with the insistent requests. He then used his shoelaces as a method to climb his way back up the rope, disconnect from the rope and reconnect below the knot. Each step of the way he argued, resisted and complained.
This is a superb example one of the major problems leaders experience. The leader knows what needs to be done, and (sometimes) how to do it and then passes this onto the employee. Only to have the employee avoid doing the task, or doing it poorly.
While a leader may be completely comfortable with the given task, the employee may not be. And more importantly, as in the above example, the employee is the one taking the risks. If James fell during that test, Gary would be uninjured, James would be in hospital. The risk James experienced was vastly different that the risk Gary experienced. Yet Gary continued to insist that James followed instructions that were more and more dangerous.
Remember, what you find trivial, other may find difficult, even impossible. What can you do to help people around you through their fears? Who can you contact to help you through yours?
Coaching the Uncoachable June 9, 2007
As someone who regularly coaches professionally I read with interest Seth Godin’s discussion on coaching the uncoachable. While I agree with his point, one of the main presuppositions in the post is just plain wrong.
He describes some of the symptoms of uncoachability and almost all of them imply that coaching is about the coach, when in facts it’s really about the person being coached. These symptoms also point to failures within the relationship between the coach and coachee.
* Challenging the credentials of the coach
This is a requirement. Of course, the challenge should be in regards to understanding how the coach can help your performance, not as a methods of discrediting their suggestions.
* Announcing that you’re being unfairly singled out
If a coach offers you a suggestion, you are being singled out. The coach (we hope) is professional enough to see in your behaviour things that can be improved or modified. It makes very little sense for the coach to single someone else out for your mistake.
* Pointing out, angrily, that the last few times, the coach was wrong
Yep, the coach may have been wrong in the past, and may be wrong now. It’s not about the coach, it’s about you.
* Identifying others who have succeeded without ever being coached
Yep. Those other people are not you. If your results are as good, or better than the person you identify, then we can discuss this further.
* Resisting a path merely because it was one identified by a coach
This is just ridiculous behaviour. The coach is there for your benefit, your improvement or the benefit of your team. If you want to act like a two year old child, is it any wonder that the coach begins to treat you like one. This, of course, just increases the difficulty and tension felt by both parties. Luckily, this behaviour is very easy to deal with by a competent coach.
Does this mean you roll over and do whatever the coach says? Of course not. It does mean you have to stop treating the coach like a parent and more like a peer. While this might cause different conflicts with your coach for a time, a professional coach will (should!) be able to modify their own behaviour to match.
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