FIVE TIPS FOR (FINALLY) GETTING YOUR NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION RIGHT by Dan and Chip Heath

The Heath brothers apply the principles spelled out in their book, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, to keeping New Year's Resolutions. Check out their latest newsletter.

The five tips are listed below. The newsletter expands on each tip.

1. Don't be ambitious.

2. Watch for bright spots.

3. Make simple tweaks in your environment.

4. Rely on planning, not willpower.

5. Publicize your resolution.

Choke: What The Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To - A review

Have you ever choked? Double faulted a key serve in a tennis match? Muffed an easy three-foot putt? Froze during an important presentation to a key client? If you like most people you could say yes to one of these answers. However, we know some people who don’t choke, who stay cool under the heat of pressure. Is there something they do differently than us? Do we do something different when we’re under pressure than we do when there is no pressure? This is what Sian Beilock, associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago, tries to answer in her book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.

Beilock starts off by making a key distinction. “Choking is not simply poor performance, however. Choking is suboptimal performance. It’s when you – or an individual athlete, actor, musician, or student – perform worse than expected given what you are capable of doing.”

Like a number of recent books Choke relies on research on how the brain works using the latest imaging technology, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. The fMRI can’t read what is happening within individual neurons and synapses. It measures blood flow which is related to brain activity and identifies which parts of the brain light up when we’re stressed as opposed to when we’re not.

Beilock explains that understanding how and why we choke relies on knowing how our procedural memory works which “is implicit or unconscious. … You can think of procedural memory as your cognitive toolbox that contains a recipe that, if followed, will produce a successful bike ride, golf putt, baseball swing, or fully operating cell phone.” When we take on a new skill we start off consciously learning the key motions. As we become more proficient the details of the mechanics of technique our brain hands off executing these techniques from the conscious to the unconscious or our procedural memory. As a result once we become proficient in a skill our performance actually declines if we usurp our procedural memory by consciously trying to control our action.

This is what happens when we choke. We start to think about the technique of our serve and double fault. Or we start thinking about the mechanics of putting only to push the putt wide when we normally would make easily when there is no pressure. Instead of letting our subconscious execute the shot or the putt we try to steer it consciously only to choke.

When we become too conscious of how we doing something we also use up our working-memory which “involves the ability to hold information in mind (and protect that information from disappearing) while doing something else at the same time.”

So what can we do to lower our chances of choking? Are there ways of keeping us engaged with our procedural memory and not sucking up the precious resources of our working-memory? Beilock provides research showing that practicing that adds pressure similar to what you’d experience during competition will help. “Practice can actually change the physical wiring of the brain to support exceptional performance.” This also shows that we’re not stuck with a set amount of working-memory. We can expand it with the right kind of practice.

Another tactic would be to reinterpret your body’s response to a tense situation. Instead of thinking “I don’t handle pressure well. I’m tight and might make a mistake” you would say to yourself “I’m excited about facing this challenge.”

Beilock offers some other tips as well. These include taking time before starting the activity to reaffirm your self-worth by taking a few minutes to write about your many interests and activities. Map out your complexities: draw a diagram of what makes you a multi-faceted person. Meditate. And perhaps the most counter-intuitive tip: write about your worries. You would think we should not focus on what worries us but Beilock’s research shows that writing out your worries actually helps to relieve them!

All of this is fine for athletics but what about preventing choking in business or other non-sport activities? Some of Beilock’s tips are the essentially the same: meditate, write down thoughts you want to avoid, focus on a three strong talking points and think about the journey, not the outcome.

For interviews work up “a few well-rehearsed sentences about why you are the right person for the job, this first impression can help set the tone for your interview and for what is taken away from the meeting. … Providing a schema for interpreting a meeting at the outset, then, can help guide others’ memory of you.” I’d say this approach also works for presentations.

Beilock admits that brain research is fairly young and that future research might reveal more strategies for dealing with choking. Nonetheless Choke offers some good suggestions to ensure we don’t choke.

Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard - Review

The Heath brothers did it again. Earlier I reviewed their book Made To Stick dealing with how to create memorable messages. It stuck with me, becoming one of my favorites because the Heaths have the ability to condense their massive research into easy-to-remember principles. In Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard they’ve aimed their same approach at change. Specifically, how do we change things in our lives? Almost all of us have tried to change something in our lives. Losing weight. Getting into better shape. Not procrastinating. But many of us even if we change we often slip back into our former habits. Why? Is there a way we can follow to increase the stickiness of change? The Heath brothers say there is.

The Heaths observe: “All change efforts have something in common: For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently. … successful changes share a common pattern.”

Before getting into the details of this common pattern Chip and Dan first tackle the nature of the key element of change: our brains. They rely on the work of Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis (reviewed here). Haidt’s research lead him to conclude that the emotional side of our brain is like an Elephant while our rational side is similar to a Rider who tries to rein in the elephant and seems to be the leader. However the Rider’s ability to control the elephant is tenuous because the Rider is so small relative to the Elephant. The roots of our emotional mechanism are deep in our ancestry while the rational part of our brain evolved only recently in terms of our total history.

The Heaths go on to say the Elephant often wants a quick payoff with minimal effort while the Rider plans for the future. “When change efforts fail, it’s usually the Elephant’s fault, since the kinds of change we want typically involve short-term sacrifices for long-term payoffs.” This ties into their advice later in the book.

The Heaths’ reach three conclusions about trying to switch using sheer will power and self-control.

1. “Self-control is an exhaustible resource.” Meaning, our Elephant can wear out our limited supply of self-control.
2. “What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.” When we give up we might write it off as being just lazy when we’re really wearing ourselves out.
3. “What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.” If we don’t have a clearly defined and visualized end point we won’t know our ultimate goal.

These conclusions lead to their framework for change.

1. “Direct the Rider. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction.”
2. “Motivate the Elephant. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion. … So it’s critical that you engage people’s emotional side – get their Elephants on the path and cooperative.”
3. “Shape the Path. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem. … When you shape the Path, you make change more likely, no matter what’s happening with the Rider and Elephant.”

For each of these parts of the framework Switch lays out advice on how to accomplish them. For instance, in directing the rider we can find the bright spots to help our motivation, script the critical moves to clearly define key steps and point to the destination. To motivate the elephant we find the feeling associated with our goals, find ways to shrink the change to make them less daunting and, for managers and leaders, help your people grow. (This ties into having a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset.) To shape the path we can tweak our environment, build habits and rally the herd.

Once we follow the path laid out by the Heaths they tell us how the “keep the switch going.” They point out that we use a positive approach instead of punishment, citing the results of animal trainers who “set a behavioral destination and then use ‘approximations,’ meaning that they reward each tiny step toward the destination. … We need to be looking for bright spots – however tiny! – and rewarding them.”

Ultimately Switch shows that there is a lot more to changing than sheer will power and repeating positive affirmations. Change requires a variety of tools and techniques that help the Rider chart a course and keep the Elephant reasonably in line.

Bottom line: I highly recommend Switch. Following it advice will help make change easier when change is hard.

Off Balance On Purpose - review

Over the years I’ve been an advocate of trying to live in balance. Dan Thurmon in his book Off Balance on Purpose: Embrace Uncertainty and Create a Life You Love claims that searching for balance is futile and ultimately undesirable. Why? Because Thurmon contends achieving balance is impossible. He uses a number of metaphors hinging on circus entertainment: the tightrope walker, the juggler and the unicyclist. In all cases he points out that balance ultimately produces stagnation because balancing doesn’t create forward movement, only swinging movements through a center point.

While we could quibble whether there is a difference between balancing that is static versus dynamic I think Thurmon ultimately makes a valid point. I like his observation how jugglers look up at their target rather than looking down at the feet or how tightrope walkers look at their destination, not down at their feet.

“Keep looking up” is a mantra that reminds us to rise above the outward distractions and imposed definitions of what is important and decide for ourselves what really matters.

…

Your pattern is driven by your purpose. … [r]emember that jugglers don’t look at their hands. They look up at their targets. Only by looking up and taking in the full magnitude of what is happening in your life can you being to grasp the pattern and see your purpose.

Thurmon’s book doesn’t hang just on where we focus our attention but also on “letting go”.

Successful people (and expert jugglers) shift their focus and energy from one action to the next, disengaging from the objectives that are, for the time being, beyond their immediate grasp or control.

The center portion of the book relies on juggling as the main metaphor. In this case we’re juggling the five spheres of our life: work, relationships, health, spiritual growth and personal interests. After explaining the various relationships between two of each of these spheres Thurmon proceeds to give ideas how to achieve progress in more than one area at the same time.

In each sphere Thurmon poses several questions to help you focus on what is important in each. He then offers ideas for strengthening the relationships in each pair of spheres. For instance, work-relationships, work-health, work spiritual growth, work-personal interests, relationships-health, relationships-spiritual growth, relationships-personal interests, health-spiritual growth, health-personal interests, and spiritual growth-personal interests.

Once these relationships are identified Thurmon suggests how we can recognize potential collisions between these spheres as we’re juggling them. They are:

• Identify and remove what doesn’t fit.
• Calibrate your instruments.
• Reduce clutter.

The success I am talking about … is multidimensional. It is state of being. A complete success spans the five spheres: work, relationships, health, spiritual growth, and personal interests. These are all wrapped into one exquisite work of art called ‘your life.” … To do this, you have to look up, just like an expert juggler does, and see the big picture. … True satisfaction and life enjoyment can come only from making forward progress in all of these areas.

1. You are here because of your past choices and actions.
2. The past is over.
3. You control what happens next.

In the final section Thurmon switches to the unicycle to make the point about idling in which the rider maintains balance by pedaling back and forth on one spot. To more forward the unicyclist has to lean forward. The key to making progress without falling on your face is to find the right amount of lean. This ties into the concept “flow” that I’ve mentioned before: by challenging yourself you grow while becoming absorbed. The key is to find a “balance” between your abilities and the challenge. If the challenge is too low boredom sets in while a challenge that is too high for our abilities creates anxiety.

This tends to support the point I made at the beginning about dynamic balancing, which results from forward movement, versus static balancing. Overall I agree with Thurmon’s analogy of juggling the five areas of life (work, relationships, health, spiritual growth and personal interests) versus balancing just the work and personal aspects.