Power Posing

This article by James Clear summarizes the research of Amy Cuddy, a Harvard University researcher, who studies body language. It includes a link to Cuddy's original article on what she calls Power Poses and her TED talk. Check it out!

Seeing Challenges, Not Threats

Tomorrow you’re going to give a presentation to your most important client. Or you’re going to face the toughest player in a tennis tournament. Or your manager just handed you a critical project. How do we react when faced with these challenging situations? Most of us would feel a tightening in our stomach or the blood in our veins run cold. Yet, there are others who are unfazed by these situations. Why? What makes them different? This article, The benefits of seeing a “challenge” where others see a “threat”, sheds some light on this.

As the title suggests, “viewing a situation as a challenge will lead you to perform much better than viewing the same exact situation as a threat.” The article describes studies on why some people thrive on pressure while others dread it. It comes down to how a person perceives the challenge relative to their abilities.

People who are preparing for an event that they construe as a threat find the entire process far more demanding and stressful, while those who are preparing for a challenge end up performing much better.

The article shows that we can be taught how to prepare for this.

People can be trained to actively and intentionally engage in reconstrual; in fact, this process is one of the hallmarks of cognitive behavioral therapy. This model and its effects may rest on the assumption that people are prone to consistently construe situations in one way or the other based on their resource assessments, but that doesn’t mean that this tendency is immutable. If you actively re-frame stressful situations as challenges and your elevated heart rate as excitement (or “efficient effort mobilization”), you can improve your health, well-being, and performance level, all at the same time. [Emphasis added.]

In other words I think we can tell ourselves that we’re looking forward to the challenge rather than dreading it. We can tell ourselves that we welcome the opportunity to show what we can do. Yes, it’s a form of “faking it until we make it.” And, yes, there are limitations to when this works. For instance I can’t fool myself into thinking we can, say play star quarterback in the NFL. Nonetheless, I do believe in our normal daily environment we can improve our performance by self-talking ourselves into looking at it as an opportunity to excel, not a threat to fail.

I’ve tried it before important presentations or meetings and before key tennis matches. I do believe this has helped me perform better by keeping me loose and relaxed. Anyway, the article starts off with a quote about how gymnast Aly Raisman handles pressure.

You ask [Aly Raisman] about feeling the pressure and she says, ‘I don’t really feel it,’ and you know, I think it’s because she labels it something different in her head. Some kids feel anxiety, feel pressure, she feels excitement. It’s just how you label that.

I’d say it’s more than just labeling a situation. It’s how you visualize the outcome. When I know I’m heading into a potentially stressful meeting or encounter I’ll take a few seconds to stop, close my eyes and visualize a positive outcome. I think it helps because doing this keeps me relaxed as opposed to tensing up. I also think it shifts the focus from internal (“I hope I don’t screw up and look bad!”) to external (keeping my focus on the outcome and on the person I’m dealing with).

One last point. I think framing situations as challenges instead of threats helps us reach “flow.” Flow is a concept identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. See this Wikipedia entry on flow. We reach a flow state when we’re completed absorbed by a task, when the challenge of the task stretches our abilities but without overwhelming us. If it doesn’t challenge us to stretch the activity bores us. If it’s too daunting it intimidates us. I think Aly Raisman and other people who calmly face challenges believe they’re up to the task or they’ve labeled the task as a challenge, not a threat.

The Science of Productivity

This short article, The Science of Productivity by Gregory Ciotti, covers a lot of bases and gives good advice (I think) based on recent research on our the brain works. Ciotti leads off with the finding that willpower is a limited resource and "can be used up in it's entirety!" So it's important to manage this limited resource with the techniques in this article.

Before continuing I should note also the work of Jonathan Haidt who shows that there is a reason why we run out of gas with willpower: the subconscious mind, based on the oldest part of  the brain, represents thousands or millions of years of evolution while the conscious, rational part of our mind came much later. Haidt likens the relationship between the two as an elephant being directed by a rider. The evolutionary momentum of the ancient elephant can often over-power or out-last the will of the rider.

I've covered the limits of willpower in the review of Roy Baumeister's book, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

Ciotti then talks about the role of "deliberate practice," a concept coined by Anders Ericsson who studied the practice habits of world-class violinists versus others. The key difference in how they practiced is that the top performers spent more time working on the hardest tasks, not just practicing on what they're already doing well.

This leads to Ciotti's key point: "discipline is best maintained through habits, not through willpower." From there he goes on to offer additional advice on how to break up practice sessions, break up projects into manageable, bite sized steps using an Accountability Chart and planning your next day's work the night before. He also shows how we fool ourselves into thinking we can multi-task when research shows that people who try to do more than one thing at a time actually accomplish less.

If there is a theme I'd say Ciotti recommends breaking things into small steps: from taking the first step on a project to breaking the project into small steps to taking breaks every 90 minutes or so.

Read the whole thing. It’s well worth reading.

The 50 Best Social Psychology Books on Persuasion, Influence and Understanding Your Brain

The 50 Best Social Psychology Books on Persuasion, Influence and Understanding Your Brain

This is an interesting list of books. I've read 19 of them, seven of which fall in the top ten, so I'd say it's likely I'd like most of the other books he recommends. In case you're interested, I've read the following books on his list.

2.) Influence: Science and Practice

3.) Yes! (50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be Persuasive)

4.) Thinking, Fast and Slow

5.) Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard

8.) Stumbling on Happiness

9.) Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

10.) Predictably Irrational

11.) Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation

12.) Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

23.) The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say About Us

29.) Mindfulness

30.) Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

32.) Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving

34.) What Makes Your Brain Happy (and Why You Should Do the Opposite)

35.) Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain

38.) Blink

44.) The Tipping Point

46.) How to Win Friends and Influence People

47.) Strangers to Ourselves

What's Wrong With Self-Help Books? - The Daily Beast

Megan McArdle has some interesting observations in What's Wrong With Self-Help Books? - The Daily Beast. If I can fairly summarize her thesis this attitude towards self-help books stems from intellectuals’ elitism: they are so intelligent and above it all that they don’t need to heed the pedestrian advice offered in these books. She could be right.

I also think there is a strain of anti-individualism and determinism behind this sentiment too. If I could put this attitude in words it would be: How dare you think that you can help yourself in this crazy, complicated world? It’s too complicated for you to grasp and you’re fighting a futile battle against over-powering forces. You need the advice of your superior intellectual elite and the solace of the collective. It takes a village to raise a child, doesn’t it? I believe we can affect the wisdom of the decisions we make and the path we chart by reading the advice of some authors then making our own well-informed choices. My goal isn’t to defend that position here. It would take a book (or books) to do that.

Do some (or many) self-help books over simplify? Sure! Are some based on anecdotal as opposed to scientific studies? Yep. Are some just plain wrong? Of course. I’m not saying you blindly accept anyone who manages to get published. There are good self-help and bad self-help books, just as there are good or bad books in philosophy, history, politics, economics, and so on. And we naturally tend to pick authors who share our basic beliefs. A Christian will tend to read books written by a Christian self-help author and avoid an atheist’s screed. And vice versa.

I’d love to be able to spell out criteria for choosing the wheat out of the chaff but I’d say if it can be done it’s a job for someone far smarter than me. Maybe it’s a job for one of our intellectual elite! Just kidding. My goal is here is to simply note this bias against self-help books and offer an observation on the reason behind it.

Saving the New Year - Megan McArdle

This post by Megan McArdle doesn't at first glance appear to fall in the category of self-development and yet I feel it's worth sharing for her basic advice. 

Saving the New Year - Megan McArdle - Business - The Atlantic

The important thing is to pay yourself first. Savings should be the first thing you do, not the last. After you've saved, then you budget your consumption. I won't tell you what to cut, because when you confront your new, slightly leaner budget, you'll be perfectly able to calculate what's no longer worth the money to you. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that after a few weeks or a few months of initial pinch, you won't remember that you miss the money much.

Practical Wisdom: The Master Virtue | The Art of Manliness

This article nicely handles the subject of practical wisdom.

Practical Wisdom: The Master Virtue | The Art of Manliness