Why Successful People Don’t Believe in Comparisons

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“Comparison is the death of joy.”
– Mark Twain

I don’t mean to say successful people don’t believe in comparison, as in they don’t believe it exists. Rather, the most successful people reframe comparison as learning opportunities instead of competition.

Named the “next Pelé” and going pro at the age of 14, Freddy Adu, was hailed by Major League Soccer as the savior of the game. Within a few short years, Adu became the definition of unrealized potential. After being drafted by DC United, and having a lackluster season, Adu knocked about in leagues from Portugal to Monaco to Greece to Turkey, then back again to the MLS. He currently plays for the Las Vegas Lights Football Club, and is still searching for his footing on the field.

“I’m not going to lie, that stuff bothers me. It hurts.” Adu told Goal USA in an exclusive interview. “In the end, I can’t control what people say. It wasn’t my choice or decision to be compared to Pelé when I came into the league.”

“What has happened is I’ve gotten to the point where I’m basically scared of failure right now. That’s the honest truth.”
– Freddy Adu, soccer player

Alissa Quart learned to read at 3 years old. At 7 she had written a novel. By 17 she was winning creative writing competitions. As she writes in her book Hothouse Kids, her father cultivated a strong sense of academic expectation, and as a result she writes that she developed a feeling of failure when she didn’t live up to the demands. She was constantly compared to, and expected to, outperform her peers.

“Designating children as gifted, especially extremely gifted, and cultivating that giftedness may be not only a waste of money, but positively harmful.”
– Alissa Quart, author Hothouse Kids

Believing we are gifted, or special, is comparing ourselves to others. When we tell ourselves that we are somehow endowed with special gifts or skills, we are comparing our skills to our peers, and it only serves to denigrate either ourselves or someone else. It’s the very nature of comparisons.

When we compare ourselves to others, we create a sense of superiority and pride within ourselves, and contempt for another. Even worse, we can develop schadenfreude, a sense of pleasure and joy at the misfortune of others.

These thoughts are the domain of the fixed mindset – the belief that our skills, our intelligence, our capacity for invention or creativity is limited and fixed. When we believe that our skills are fixed we lock ourselves into a comparative hierarchy that only serves to further limit or potential.

Inversely when we adopt a learner mindset, we see those as more talented as opportunities to learn. The “genius effect” is when we see another as having greater skill and are inspired by it. When inspired, with an open mind, we study that talent, we are fascinated by that skill. We become transfixed by the talent we see and work to break it down into chunks we can recreate ourselves.

“If you were to visit a dozen talent hotbeds tomorrow, you would be struck by how much time the learners spend observing top performers. When I say ‘observing,’ I’m not talking about passively watching. I’m talking about staring — the kind of raw, unblinking, intensely absorbed gazes you see in hungry cats or newborn babies.”
– Daniel Coyle, author The Talent Code

When you see an amazing presentation, an incredible athletic performance, an astonishing work of art, don’t compare yourself, instead study it, be inspired by it. Break it down, deconstruct it, figure it out, and then make it your own. That’s the art of the learning mindset.

To learn about how a learning mindset can change your life and your work see:

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) is a Washington Post bestseller! You can order a copy for yourself.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: shawn@mindscaling.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Why the Best Leaders Reward Defiance

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In 1959 the Revolutionaries finally forced the Cuban president, and United States ally, Fulgencio Batista into exile. Fidel Castro and his insurgency had taken over. Two years later, John F. Kennedy, the golden boy in the White House, initiated the Bay of Pigs invasion. Surrounded by advisors and cabinet members who believed Kennedy could not possibly make a mistake, Kennedy heard not one objection before launching the failed invasion.

The ill-conceived, poorly-executed, and completely bungled operation to invade Cuba and take over lasted only 6 days, and was an international embarrassment to the United States.

From 1996 through 2001 Enron had been named by Fortune Magazine as “The Most Innovative Company in the World.” Innovative indeed. In 2001, Enron CEO Jeff Skilling, former CEO Ken Lay, along with top executives, cooked the books by underreporting debt, and inflating profits. They are in prison now.

Enron had been consistently ranked near the top in quality of management, talent, and innovative products and services. According to one top executive, “We got to the point where we thought we were bullet proof.”

As Carol Dweck describes in her book Mindset, when advisors to the former CEO of General Motors, Alfred P. Sloan, were in unanimous agreement over a decision, he would say to them, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement…”

Irving Janis, of Yale University, coined the term “Groupthink” and published a book under the same name in 1972. In his research groupthink most easily occurs when three circumstances are present:

  • A strong, persuasive group leader
  • A high level of group cohesion
  • Strong external pressure to make a good decision

Here is a small, yet simple, practice to avoid groupthink, and to spur ingenuity and innovation.

Reward Creative Defiance
David Packard, cofounder of Hewlett-Packard, had a favorite story of a junior engineer who was asked to abandon work on a new type of monitor he was working on. Instead of dropping the project, the young engineer instead took the monitor to show to customers, and developed an enthusiastic support base for his innovative idea, which convinced the company to proceed developing the product. The company made over thirty-five million dollars on sales of that monitor, and the engineer was awarded a medal “for extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty.”

One more example…
In the early 1990s, Howard Behar, former President of Starbucks, was then acting as vice president of sales and operations to help expand Starbuck’s store locations. Dini, one of his store managers in Santa Monica, showed Howard a new drink their store invented. Howard agreed the drink was excellent, but the management team back in Seattle was hesitant to adopt it, and asked Dana to stop making it.

Howard called her up, and privately told her to keep making it and monitor sales. That was the birth of Starbucks’ Frappuchino®, which turned out to be one of their most popular—and profitable—drinks.

Creativity, and innovation often occur more rapidly when people are encouraged – rewarded even – by their acts of constructive defiance.

Go. Try something new. Take a risk. What would you do if you were not afraid?

To learn about how questions can drive Innovation and Transform Mindsets see:

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Better Decisions Begin with More Beautiful Questions

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Recently our family traveled to the Virgin Islands for a vacation. Our daily choices were pretty much reading, swimming, hiking, and sunsets. And snorkeling in beautiful warm water with beautiful, strange creatures.

Almost every day we would pick a beach, pack a lunch, towels and swimming gear, and head off on a small adventure. And each time our daughter Annie (10) went in the water, her eyes got wide, and she got excited about the fish, and coral, and turtles. She would come up gasping for breath, and ask questions. So many questions. Mostly questions I couldn’t answer.

Four year olds will ask roughly 300 questions a day. Yet we know from research that constant questioning likely drops off as kids gets older. Parents can get exasperated by the questions, and then kids grow up and take a job, and then their bosses get annoyed by the questions. Instead of listening, the boss will say “That’s not how we do things around here.”

It turns out that the creativity of American kids has been slowly declining over the past few decades. Researchers have been tracking it since the late 1950s.

Back in the 1950s Ellis Paul Torrance developed something he called a “Torrance Test” which is a series of creativity tests in which participants are asked to think of different ways to use objects (“How many ways can you use this paper clip?”), or compose different solutions to situations (“If your school closed, how would you complete your education?”) or hypothesize circumstances (“What happened when the cow jumped over the moon?”)

Questions are the basis of innovation, the basis of personal change. More beautiful questions drive quality, and excellence, and demand more beautiful answers.

“Without a good question, a good answer has no place to go.”
– Clayton Christensen

Try this three-part process, developed by Warren Berger, to move from stuck to unstuck, from stagnant to inventive.

First ask Why?
Second only to Thomas Edison for naming patents, Edwin Land was the Steve Jobs of the 1940s. Brilliant, inventive, and constantly curious, the two-time Harvard dropout was on vacation with his family in New Mexico when he decided to gather his family for a photograph using a contemporary film camera. Land took the picture, and then his daughter asked to see it. He explained about dark rooms, and processing film, and so forth.

His daughter asked, “Why do we have to wait? You already took the picture.”

Next ask What If?
Land once described to Steve Jobs how he envisioned the Polaroid completely, before he ever embarked on the process, “I could see what the Polaroid camera should be. It was just as real to me as if it was sitting in front of me before I had ever built one.” The exercise here is to see the potential, the possibility, in your mind. Don’t ask How, that comes next. In this phase, ask only “If it were possible, what would it look like?”

The question Land asked was, “What if you could somehow have a darkroom inside a camera?”

Now ask How?
To answer “What if you could have a darkroom inside a camera?” Land had to draw upon everything he knew in chemistry, engineering, optics, and mechanics. He sought out his colleagues, friends and researchers to mine their knowledge. He reached deep into his network, described his vision, and enlisted anyone with expertise willing to contribute.

The How part has many many questions, such as “How do we do this in color?” and “How do we make it lighter?” and “How do we keep the chemicals from evaporating?”

Why is about seeking to understand. What if is about envisioning possibilities. How is about doing, executing, and creating. Too often we start with How or What. Don’t start with How, start with Why.

And if you can take a few F-bombs, and colorful language, here is Louis CK on kids and questions. Amusing. Here is the Louis CK video. Enjoy.

To learn about how questions can drive Innovation and Transform Mindsets see:

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

Snap Out of the Trance of Unworthiness

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The 13-year old boys walked off the field kicking dirt and shaking their heads. Aiden anguished, “If Ben’s shot had gone in, it would have been a totally different game.”

In the first few seconds of the game, immediately after kick-off, the boys had a fast break down the right side, and suddenly Ben was in control of the ball sprinting alone at the goalie. His shot missed, barely, and there was a collective “Oooooh” from the stands as the ball went wide.

After that, the game slowed down, and eventually they lost 0-2.

According to Dr. Daniel Amen, we have thousands of little negative thoughts each day. Thousands. It’s because in any given situation, negative events and emotions have a greater impact on us than positive ones. It’s unfortunate, but true. It’s why negative political campaigns have a greater influence on the emotions and decisions of voters than positive campaigns.

This negativity bias can be triggered by small interactions and sometimes hold fast in our minds for a long time. A colleague recently mentioned to me that she can’t stand someone else we both know. I was surprised, and asked why, since he seemed like such a nice person. She explained that once, years ago, he ignored her ideas at an important meeting.

According to Jonathan Haidt, psychologist at NYU, “Over and over the mind reacts to bad things more quickly, strongly and persistently than to equivalent good things.”

When we are in a negative mental state we also close down intellectually and creatively. We lose our attention span, and our ability to think holistically and systemically.

According to positive psychology researcher Barbara Fredrickson, positive emotions have the inverse effect. Positive emotions deepen our attention, and widen our intellectual and social connections. In other words, choosing positive emotions in the face of distressing events will lead us to becoming more generous, thoughtful, and intellectually curious.

“Positivity transforms us for the better. This is the second core truth about positive emotions. By opening our hearts and minds, positive emotions allow us to discover and build new skills, new ties, new knowledge, and new ways of being.”
– Barbara Fredrickson, Ph.D.

Here’s an idea from Dr. Daniel Amen, on how to switch your thinking. When an automatic negative thought pops into your head (I suck, my work sucks, he never listens to my ideas, etc..) do this: Write it down, ask yourself if it’s true, then challenge and discard that idea. It’s an effective tool used in counseling and can help shift your thinking.

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

A Mental Trick to Achieving Your Big Goals

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O, the places you will go! In this season of graduation and change, anything is possible.

We’re told from a very young age we can do anything we set our mind to. Olympic gold medal winner Seth Wescott once signed a poster for our son, and wrote on it, “Go big! Live your dreams.”

Sometimes our dreams are accomplished, and sometimes they go unfulfilled, for years and even decades. Remember the movie, Up, in which it took a lifetime to get to Angel Falls?

angelfallsWe have dreams and aspirations, whatever they may be. And that’s good. But the strange thing is, the more idealized our dreams are, the more unlikely and demotivating they become.

For example, those enrolled in a weight reduction class, who most earnestly envisioned fantastic weight loss, and a brand new body, had the least amount of weight loss six months, and one year later. And later regained most of what they lost.

In the study, researchers Gabriele Oettingen and Thomas Wadden asked the participants at the beginning of the study to finish hypothetical scenarios. For example,

You have just completed a year long weight loss program. Tonight you have made plans to go out with an old friend whom you haven’t seen in about a year. As you wait for your friend to arrive, you imagine ….

Those who fantasized about a transformed body, and significant weight loss, turned out to be the least likely to be successful after 17 weeks and 52 weeks. Oettingen found other examples of how grand fantasies sabotaged goals: College graduates who dreamed of excellent future jobs, had fewer offers, and submitted fewer applications, than those who had lesser aspirations.

Aspiration is good. Dreaming and fantasizing about future success gives direction to our energy, but not momentum. We need to add some intelligence to our motivational strategies. Here is a simple strategy Oettingen has found to work in many different goal settings.

How Does It Work?
First, identify a wish that is dear to you. Hold that in your mind. It should be a goal that is both challenging, yet possible to be self-fulfilled. In other words, it’s a dream that doesn’t require you to control external forces like the stock market or the weather. The goal here is to identify what is both challenging in your life, yet feasible.

Next, identify in your mind what is the best possible outcome of that specific goal. And here’s the reframing part: Instead of focusing on the end result, ask “What is it within me that stands in the way?” To put it another way, think of the obstacles that will occur along the path to accomplishing your goal, and what you can do specifically to counteract each obstacle.

The key here is to be specific about planning on doing specific actions when anticipated obstacles arrive. So tell yourself, “When obstacle X presents itself, I will do Y instead of what I usually do.”

What we are doing in this exercise is starting with the idealized future and then contrasting that with current reality. This is what Gabriele Oettingen calls Mental Contrasting. It’s the contrast between an envisioned goal, and the reality of how we currently confront obstacles that stand in our path to achieving these goals.

Why Does It Work?
The reason this technique of mental contrasting works is that our subconscious mind is lazy and prefers routine and habit. Left alone, we will likely fall into our familiar routines and ruts. By forcing ourselves to acknowledge realities and obstacles, and then visualize how we will deal with each roadblock, we create a mental plan of action for taking small, incremental steps toward our goals.

Another useful aspect of mental contrasting is that it helps us understand what to let go of. For example, our friend dreamed of owning a 42-foot school bus and completely renovating the interior to be a beautiful custom mobile home, complete with a kitchen, bedroom, storage, and more. He even purchased a bus, which then sat in his driveway for a few years tormenting him as a reminder of unfulfilled dreams.

But instead of languishing over an unfulfilled dream, he redefined the goal, and changed the path to achieve it. He sold the bus and bought a cool Mercedes utility van which he refurbished to travel in, and is now out smiling on the open road.

Dream big, and then hold that dream against the reality of how you deal with each obstacle along the way.

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

A Trick to Avoid Frustration and Stress

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Someone in a big SUV, talking on the phone, oblivious to everyone around them, just cut you off. How do you feel? Just today, in a meeting, your boss contradicted you, again. How do you feel?

That imbecile over in product management just got the promotion you wanted. How about now? The plane has just landed, and already, the guy behind you is talking loudly on the phone while you taxi to the gate. Now, how do you feel?

The world is uncertain. People are irrational. Traffic happens. Cell phone batteries sometimes die.

Here’s an idea: when we get annoyed, frustrated, angry, and miserable over events and circumstances in our lives, we are also being unfair to ourselves. By berating ourselves, we are being unethical and unjust to ourselves. And when we make ourselves miserable, we make the people around us miserable. Instead, be kind to yourself, and find the kindness in others.

It wasn’t the traffic, it was our reaction to the traffic. It wasn’t losing that big contract that made us dejected. Our expectation made us feel dejected and miserable.

Albert Ellis is regarded as one of the most influential psychologists of the 20th century. One of his signature ideas is called Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), which has been used to effectively to change the attitudes and behaviors of millions of people.

The promise of REBT is this: no matter how badly you sometimes think about yourself, and no matter how horrible others sometimes treat you, and no matter how awful our circumstances are…. we always have the power to change our feelings of hostility, despair, or stress. Always.

Dr. Ellis doesn’t go all zen meditative to the extent that he suggests you deny all of your feelings and emotions and view the world utterly impassively, like a robot. Not at all. REBT recognizes that caution, concern or suspicion, are normal emotions which are useful for making decisions. Yet allowing those emotions to turn into outright panic, dread or despair is not useful. It’s worse. It’s self-destructive.

Here’s a short version of how it works. First, imagine an unfortunate event occurring in your life. Let’s say, you break your leg badly and have to be in a wheelchair, and work through physical therapy for months. How do you think about this hypothetical circumstance?

Healthy concern or annoyance self-talk might sound like “Wow. What a bummer. I guess my weekly basketball game is on hold, but I can do many enjoyable and new things over the next few months.” Or “This sucks and is going to take some work, but I’ll have a little more time to work on my other projects.”

The difference is that little “but” inserted where we add the positives and hopeful outcomes. A healthy reaction acknowledges circumstances and adjusts to anticipate optimistic outcomes and choices.

Next, look for should, must, and ought, in our self-talk. When we think, “My boss must never speak to me that way!” or “I should get that promotion. I deserve it!”, we are extending our own wishes and preferences to the behavior of others. And we can’t control the behavior of others. We can only control how we react and feel in the face of circumstances.

Should, must, and ought are absolute and rigid values. As Dr. Ellis writes:

“When you insist, however, that you always must have or do something, you often think in this way: “Because I would very much like or prefer to have success, approval, or pleasure, I absolutely, under practically all conditions, must have it. And if I don’t get it, as I completely must, it’s awful, I can’t stand it, I am an inferior person for not arranging to get it, and the world is a horrible place for not giving me what I must have! I am sure that I’ll never get it, and therefore can’t be happy at all!”
– Albert Ellis, Ph.D., from How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything. Yes, Anything!

When we think in these rigid ways we become anxious and self-pitying. Try instead Dr. Ellis’ prescription of self-talk that goes like this: “I would very much like or prefer to have success, approval, or comfort, but I don’t have to have it. I won’t die without it. And I could be happy (though not as happy) without it.”

The kinds of thoughts that create anxiety are those that demand success or approval, such as “I must impress everyone at the meeting because I’m smart.” or “This deal will propel me to the top of my team, so I have to win it!”

The advice is this: turn should, must, ought to, and have to statements into preferences instead of demands. Accept what is going on (WIGO) around you without feeling the need to control people and circumstances.

One of Dr. Ellis’ most famous quotes is:

There are three musts that hold us back: I must do well. You must treat me well. And the world must be easy.

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

No, Time is Not Money

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How would you answer these questions?

  • Would you prefer a less expensive apartment with a longer commute, or a more expensive apartment closer to work?
  • Would you buy a more expensive direct flight, or a less expensive flight with a layover?
  • Would you choose a job with a higher starting salary, which required more hours of your time?
  • Do you pay to park in the garage convenient to your destination, or park for free farther away?

These are a few of the questions Elizabeth Dunn and her colleagues at The University of British Columbia asked of participants to help understand how our priorities affect how happy we feel. In the study the authors found that those who prioritize time over money expressed a greater willingness to use their money to have more time, and often spend that time in more enjoyable activities.

The researchers enlisted a large sample of people (2303 students) to try to understand the how prioritizing time versus money affects our level of subjective well-being.

“Consistent with our hypothesis, participants who prioritized time reported higher subjective well-being compared to participants who prioritized money.”

Once the authors found that a large sample of university students who prioritize time over money were happier, they worried that sampling only college kids wasn’t a reasonable representation of the greater population. After all, college students don’t have to worry about money too much, right? It would make sense that they would care more about their time.

So next they enlisted over 1200 working American adults with wide social, ethnic, political, and financial diversity to replicate the study. Once again, they found a consistent correlation between valuing time over money, and an increased sense of well-being. Interestingly, those who valued time over money tended to also maximize their free time engaged in highly enjoyable activities such as socializing with friends, and exercising.

Toward the end of the research paper, the authors concede that these priorities likely change over time, as our life circumstances change, and more research needs to be done to understand whether time priorities become easier after financial obligations are met.

Here is one life hack Elizabeth Dunn offers that does work. Instead of our common behavior of “enjoy now, pay later” enabled by our credit banking system, Dunn suggests trying “pay now, consume later”. When you pre-pay for the lunch, the latte, or even the vacation, by the time you actually consume and experience it, it feels free and is more enjoyable.

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SmallActs-3DShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October, 2016. You can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

What’s Possible When We Are Not Afraid

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“The thing I fear most is fear.”
– Michel de Montaigne, 1580

Corruption, muggings, police brutality, whooping cough, tornados, and pandemics all rank in the top 25 of American fears of the last year. Dig a little deeper down the list and avian flu, pesticides, identity theft, and flesh-eating disease show up.

Sometimes these fears emerge into full-blown panics such as the Y2K millennium bug, which turned out to be non-existent. In 2008 many people believed the Large Hadron Collider would initiate a black hole which would consume the planet. In fact, just two weeks before the Hadron Collider was scheduled to start up, an esteemed chemist from the University of Tubingen filed a lawsuit to block the Hadron Collider experiments on the grounds that the ensuing black hole would violate the right to life of European citizens and pose a threat to the rule of law.

Autonomous swarms of intelligent drones, self-replicating nanotechnology, GMOs, environmental collapse, and child-snatchers all populate the realm of our collective fears today. And why not? In many ways we live in the most unpredictable era in human history. Never before have we seen such acceleration of technology, population growth, and scale of environmental change. Currently the DHS terror threat level is yellow (elevated). It has never, ever, been green (low) or blue (guarded). It’s a good time to be afraid. Or is it?

Today we are born healthier, live longer, with less chronic illness, more wealth, and higher IQs, then ever before. We are living at a time when awareness of the evils of chemicals, additives and preservatives are heightened more than ever before. With our organic, local, artisanal, hand-picked, kale and spinach green smoothies, we are aggressively trying to lower the toxicity of our food supply. But it wasn’t always that way.

Starting in 1935, Dupont adopted the slogan “Better things for better living through chemistry.” This was the same period when kids chased “The Fog Truck” that spread DDT throughout the neighborhoods. This was the also same time when nuclear war, Russian invasion, and the “red tentacles of communism” topped our list of fears.

Almost every measure of personal victimization has gone down over the last 40 years. Child abuse, sexual abuse, robbery, larceny, even bullying, are all down by over 50% since 1970. As horrifying as the notion is, the odds of a child being abducted and murdered today are have fallen to 1.5 million to one. And as scared as we are for our teenagers today, their actual likelihood of pregnancy, drug use, and running away from home are all down over the last few decades. And no, the reason our kids are safer is not helicopter parenting and tiger moms.

Yes, children do get abducted. And when they do, everyone, everywhere, knows about it instantly. Our emotion is visceral, but the actual threat to us is minimal.

In 2005, when 9/11 was fresh in our minds, researchers from Lawrence Livermore Labs conducted comprehensive statistical analysis on global terrorism. Compared to our lifetime likelihood of car crashes, drowning in backyard pools, or even being struck by lightening (1 in 79,000), they found the risk posed to us personally by terrorism falls in a range that actuaries would call “de minimis” or too trivial to merit concern.

We are full of strange hypocrisies. Nobody lights up like Eastern Europe, where average annual cigarette consumption can exceed half a pack a day. Yet they will march in the streets indignantly banning GMOs. Yes, genetically modified organisms might be dangerous, but compared to smoking…?

I’m not suggesting that our common fears are unfounded or non-existent, only that they are often irrationally exaggerated. I am suggesting that we should kill some of our fears. I believe that when we find ourselves in a place of discomfort and rising panic, we are at a moment of greatest opportunity for learning and progress.

As I describe in my upcoming book Small Acts of Leadership, when people overcome their phobias they tend to become more confident, effective, and often go on to make more audacious, and personally affirming, decisions. For example, people who overcame their fear of snakes, went on to try new things like ballroom dancing, skydiving, and even experienced higher salaries and promotions at work.

Go ahead. Start small. Kill a fear today.

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Screen Shot 2016-01-24 at 2.45.37 PMShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October but you can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

You. Put It in Your Work.

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Are you funny? Sarcastic? Witty? A dog lover? Maybe your passion is coaching youth sports. Or maybe it’s a cup of tea and a sci-fi novel on the couch. Maybe it’s Downton Abbey or maybe it’s The Walking Dead. Maybe it’s snowboarding with your kids. Whatever it is. Whatever gets your groove on, put it in your work.

People have passions and joys in their life, yet do stale, tired work. We get stuck trying to do the work we think someone else wants, instead of the work that inspires us. We get trapped thinking that if we hide who we are, we will fit in better, and be more likable. The opposite is true. When we conceal valuable parts of our identity we begin to feel alienated from those around us, and alienated from our work.

Some people come alive Friday night on the dance floor when the lights go down and the beats go up. And yet give boring, sad, sales presentations on Monday morning. They’re not boring, sad people, they just switched off their true self when the time came to work.

Here’s a challenge. Take what you love and put it in your work. Yes, you might alienate a few people. You might turn some people off with your basketball analogies, or comparisons to cooking, or your stories about hiking in the Swiss alps. (Please no more cat videos.) But you will be understood. People will get you. They’ll understand where you’re coming from, what you value, and what you hold dear in your life. And because of that, they will respect and appreciate your work more.

What if writing good clean code is similar to your passion for gardening. What if building a marketing plan is a lot like a carefully planned hike with friends. And maybe killer graphic design is a lot like a great conversation with an old friend. Put it in your work.

Emerging generations are increasingly more assertive in expressing their identities, proudly, openly. And that’s a good thing. According to a recent study from Deloitte, when people within a diverse and multigenerational workforce begin to express their whole self at work, they begin to look past differences and start to focus on business results.

Millennials are refusing to check their identities at the doors of organizations today, and they strongly believe these characteristics bring value to the business outcomes and impact.
– Christie Smith and Stephanie Turner, Deloitte Leadership Center for Inclusion

When people within the organization become less concerned with concealing who they are, they start to become more interested, and active, in developing deeper and more meaningful collaborations with those across the organization to drive innovation and business results.

The result is an environment of psychological safety. In psychologically safe teams, members feel accepted and respected, and as a result feel safer to take risks, to be more audacious in their work.

Bring more of you to your work, and encourage those around you to also.

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Screen Shot 2016-01-24 at 2.45.37 PMShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion) will be out in October but you can pre-order a copy now.

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com

The Words You Use Can Change Your Life

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Our words matter. We can lose more weight, save more money, smile more, and make a greater impact on the world around us simply by changing the words we use.

The language we use counts. The words, phrases, and verb tenses we use affect the way we see the world and the decisions we make every day. The language we use interacting with other people doesn’t just impact them, it impacts our own thinking and behavior.

As Keith Chen illustrates in his research, languages around the world which are “tenseless” have societies in which people save more money for retirement, are less obese, smoke less, and use more condoms. In general they have healthier, and more stable, economies and cultures than those countries which use “tense-based” languages. As Chen points out, Chinese is a “future-less” language in that one can say, “Yesterday it rain,” “Now it rain,” “Tomorrow it rain,” which all sound very strange to an English speaker. Similarly in Finnish, the speaker would say, “Today it snows.” and “Tomorrow it snows.”

As a result of our English “futured” language, we interpret the future as more distant, more remote, and less immediate. So we make decisions which give less merit to our future self. Whereas in “future-less” languages, our current and future self are the same, and because they are the same we make more conscientious and thoughtful decisions to take care of our future self.

Here’s another example of how our language shapes how we think. In the Australian aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre language, they don’t use directional expressions such as “left”, “right”, or “forward”. Instead they use sixteen unique compass directional expressions equivalent to our “North”, or “Southwest” and even “North-northeast”. As a result they have a heightened sense of spatial awareness and an ability to navigate accurately even when in foreign and unknown territories.

Directional expressions such as left, right, or forward are all egocentric. That is, these directional expressions are relative to you, the individual, whereas North or Southwest are absolute directions, which force the individual to consider themselves in the context of where they are at the moment.

Using directional language which is not relative to which direction you are facing is an ego-less understanding of geography. As a result, Kuuk Thaayorre speakers have a much more refined sense of spatial orientation and direction.

And there are language shifts we can make in our everyday interactions that will make measurable differences. We can shift from the language of complaint to the language of commitment, shift from blame to responsibility, and shift from the language of helplessness to using words that focus on what we can control.

In their book Words Can Change Your Brain, authors Andrew Newberg, M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman demonstrate that the words we use can, quite literally, change our brains:

“As our research has shown, the longer you concentrate on positive words, the more you begin to affect other areas of the brain. …which changes your perception of yourself and the people you interact with.
A positive view of yourself will bias you toward seeing the good in others, whereas a negative self-image will include you toward suspicion and doubt. Over time the structure of your thalamus will also change in response to your conscious words, thoughts, and feelings, and we believe that the thalamic changes affect the way in which you perceive reality.”

If we are all making our own realities, let’s make it a good one.

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Screen Shot 2016-01-24 at 2.45.37 PMShawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. He is also the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes and his new book Small Acts of Leadership, (Bibliomotion, October 4, 2016).

Twitter: @gshunter
Say hello: email@gshunter.com
Web: www.shawnhunter.com