I spent this past weekend visiting with dear college friends, reminiscing, laughing, and catching up. Of course, we’ve all changed over time. But back in the day we thought we were special, unique.
The term is chronocentrism. It’s the belief that our group, our cohort, at a particular moment in time is special, and poised on the brink of history, as if we are locked in a remarkable and magical moment. It’s pretty common for graduating classes to feel this way, or groups of employees at a company to feel this way when working together during a period of change or growth. During these times we solidify our values, deepen our identities.
It’s a good feeling and creates lasting bonds among the group that can persist for a long time. But it’s also important to move on. It may have been a watershed moment in your evolution, but who you are then is not who you will become.
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you have ever been.
– Dan Gilbert
Never believe that you are done learning, or done changing and evolving. The choices we make today will lead to who we become tomorrow.
En francais, “Qui n’avance pas, recule.” Which means, “Who does not move forward, recedes.”
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/dmitry-ratushny-412448-unsplash-e1533568715903.jpg13252000Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2018-08-06 11:30:202018-08-06 11:32:49Who Does Not Move Forward, Recedes
We have a new puppy. The kids named him Wallace, although he has immediately become “Wally”. Neighbors want to hold him, get a selfie with him. He is adorable. He also creates disasters everywhere around the house, chewing, shredding, drooling, peeing everywhere. He can be a wrecking ball.
He’s also learning more quickly than I expected. We have an older yellow lab named Penny who knows all the tricks of the house. She knows when mealtimes are, where to nap, where the walking trails are, and where the bathroom is (See Wally? It’s in the woods beyond the backyard, not in the living room).
Wally is picking up on all of this by following Penny’s lead. He’s not learning half as much from the humans. On walks, Wally follows right behind Penny and sniffs where she sniffs, stops where she stops.
Numerous studies demonstrate puppies (and chimps, and rabbits, and cats, and mice, …) all learn faster by imitating the behavior of older, more experienced members of their own kind. Here is a super cute video of an older dog teaching a puppy to walk down scary stairs:
The same is, of course, true in humans. Yet in the United States younger people don’t apprentice under masters nearly as much as they do in other countries around the world. Britain has been enjoying a renaissance of apprenticeships with their successful “Get In, Go Far” initiative.
Get In, Go Far matches younger aspiring learners with companies and opportunities to develop skills in their particular interest. And it’s not confined to skilled labor jobs like electrical or plumbing work. Get In, Go Far is matching younger people with apprenticeships in information technology, project management, marketing, computer science, teaching, and much more.
We conducted a leadership workshop recently with participants from around the world including Brazil, Spain, Germany, England, Poland, Philippines, Canada, and the United States. When the conversation turned to mentoring at work, everyone said they had strong mentorship and lots of opportunity to learn from masters at work. Everyone, except the participants from the United States. They said the philosophy at their US-based location was more “sink or swim” or “figure it out on your own.”
It’s time-consuming, and expensive to find, and keep, good talent. Retaining talented people requires constant care and respect for their development. Remember these two small truths about mentoring:
It’s not one to one. People in organizations can, and should, learn from many different people, in different settings, with different skills. You have your workout group, your monthly book group, your hiking friends, and your dinner club. You learn different things from all of those experiences. The same is true at work. Create variety. Diversify learning opportunities.
It’s a two-way interaction. Whatever your level of seniority, you have something to teach, something to share. Learning is an interactive process, not a consumptive process. You don’t get paired with a single master, like Obi-Wan, and metamorphose into a Jedi. You have an obligation to contribute. You’d be surprised what you know that others don’t understand yet.
Check out our new micro-learning series Raising Resiliency featuring bestselling author Jen Shirkani. Message me if you’re interested and we’ll send you a preview. Enjoy!
Shawn 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, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
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This may surprise you, but prior to the early 1970s the word “parenting” didn’t exist. The word parent was a noun, not a verb. A parent was something you are, not something you do. In the same way that we don’t child our parents, and we don’t husband our wives.
According to Alison Gopnick, a researcher at the University of California, in the 1970s we came to think of being a good parent as a problem to be solved, a skill to be developed. And if only we had the right manual, and the right set of skills, we could then excel at being a parent, in the same way we try to excel at our classes or our jobs.
The analogy she uses to illustrate her point is to imagine a carpenter and a gardener. The carpenter is exacting, measured, controlling the materials, bending them to her will, designing the results. The gardener creates an ecosystem, plants seeds, introduces fertilizer and diversity, and watches growth unfold. The gardener manages an environment, the carpenter presses resources into service of his vision.
In her research, Gopnick has found that parents in the United States and western Europe have, over the past few decades, gradually adopted practices to design outcomes for their children (in extreme, think Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother). In doing so, we have also increasingly removed the level of risk we allow children to take.
In 1971 80% of third-graders walked to school alone or with their friends. By 1990, it had dropped to 9% and today is even lower. Most parents will tell you the world is more dangerous than it was back then, but it’s not. There are fewer traffic accidents, fewer playground injuries, and fewer of the most horrifying of fears – abductions. The rate of classic abduction-by-a-stranger is less than one-hundredth of 1% of all missing children, which itself is less than .04%, and also trending down over the last few decades. I understand any number above zero is intolerable, but the chances of a child being kidnapped by a stranger are more remote than being hit by lightening or winning Powerball.
Alison Gopnick’s point is that as we attempt to remove risk from our children’s lives, we also remove their ability to solve problems, persevere through adversity, and deal with the inevitable uncertainties of life.
In a post-industrial world, exactly the skills that we need – innovation, creativity, risk-taking – are exactly the ones that we’re not encouraging in this very kind of narrow, competitive, academic parenting culture.
– Alison Gopnick, Ph.D.
Deep play – the kind that is unstructured, open and immersive – helps build critical thinking skills necessary for thriving later in life.
Kids then grow up and go to work. At our workplaces, most organizations set clear guidelines for behavior, and expectations for performance. Salespeople are expected to sell in a certain way. Programmers are expected to code using particular protocols. Marketing writers are expected to follow rules of copywriting, and product placement to drive customer influence. And everyone needs to keep track of what they do.
As a leader, instead of controlling people, try instead to change the environment and give opportunities for deep play by:
Changing the environment: schedule a walking meeting outside, meet at a different location, attend a conference or event with your team, ask your peers in other departments to flash mentor members of your team.
Pushing people to develop new skills: Encourage people to grow new capabilities by providing opportunities and encouragement to try new tasks, and take on new projects.
Giving autonomy: Define what needs to be done, not how to do it. Help team members envision best results, but let them decide how to accomplish the task.
Check out our new micro-learning series Raising Resiliency featuring bestselling author Jen Shirkani. Message me if you’re interested and we’ll send you a preview. Enjoy!
We’re doing the best work of our lives right now at Mindscaling, a company designing custom curriculum, and building beautiful online learning courses based on the work of best-selling authors. My new book Small Acts of Leadership, is a Washington Post bestseller! You can buy a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
Last summer, my son and I bicycled across America with two other dads and their teenagers. We published a new book about it called Chasing Dawn. I co-authored the book with my cycling companion, the artist, photographer, and wonderful human jon holloway. Grab a copy. I’ll sign it and send it to your doorstep.
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/anna-samoylova-535880-unsplash.jpg15482322Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2018-07-12 09:34:592019-01-10 10:52:36You Can't Control People. But You Can Control the Environment
Whatever you love to do, aspire to be, or dream of creating, keep at it.
Keep at it every day. Even if for just a bit. Think of it as your craft, something you need to stay close to, something that requires nurturing, like gardening or singing or cooking. If you don’t attend to it, you’ll lose your place, and lose your rhythm.
I went to boot camp this morning. It’s an exercise class I go to with my wife in the middle of the night at 5:15am. Or I used to go to. I haven’t been in weeks, and after I rubbed my eyes, and looked around during the warm-up I felt like I didn’t know half the people there. I turned to my friend Karen and whispered, “I haven’t been here for so long the clientele has turned over.” Even the warm-up routine was different. It’s called a routine, and it felt entirely new to me. That’s how long it had been. I had lost touch a little.
Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, says she writes a little bit every day, even if it’s only for 30 minutes. The novelist John Updike once said the best novels in the world were written less than an hour at a time. The National Cathedral in Washington D.C. was commissioned in 1907, and completed 83 years later in 1990. Which means it was started, and then completed over multiple professional lifetimes. To work on something that won’t be finished in your lifetime takes vision, and patience.
Think of your work, your dream, your aspiration as a verb, not a noun. In an interview we had recently with Aaron Hurst, author of The Purpose Economy, he talked about understanding our purpose as not a noun, but instead a verb. It’s an act of constantly becoming, not a destination.
It’s the same with all of our goals. If we want to become an athlete (noun), it happens through the constant, and diligent practice of exercising. If we want to write a book (noun), it happens through regular writing. And if we want to help build our communities, it happens one conversation at a time.
As we have learned from studies with Harvard researchers, making progress in work we find meaningful is the most powerful motivator of all. Money, praise, support, recognition, and vision are all important, but making progress has the biggest likelihood of triggering a feeling of a “great day.” The most common event triggering a “worst day” was a setback.
Focus on making incremental progress, identifying catalysts around you, and nourishing the progress of others. Uplifting others is also positive progress.
Have a look at our new micro-learning series Raising Resiliency featuring bestselling author Jen Shirkani. Message me if you’re interested and we’ll send you a preview. Enjoy!
Shawn 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, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
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Diane Vaughan is a social scientist who coined the term “normalization of deviance” to describe the way organizational cultures can begin to drift morally and then rationalize that drift over such a slow time horizon that they aren’t even aware of it themselves.
As she wrote about in her book The Challenger Launch Decision, Vaughan studied the infamous 1986 Challenger space shuttle explosion and discovered that faulty O‑rings, linked to the disaster, were identified as fallible long before the disaster occurred. Engineers knew they could fail, it had simply become “normal.”
“The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.”
– Steve Gruenter and Todd Whitaker
NASA, from the beginning of the space shuttle program, assumed that risk could not be eliminated, according to Vaughan, because the ability of the shuttle to perform in a real launch could only be mathematically predicted and tested in simulations. For that reason, the engineers expected anomalies on every mission, and disregarding danger signals, rather than trying to correct any problems, became the norm.
“Social normalization of deviance means that people within the organization become so much accustomed to a deviation that they don’t consider it as deviant, despite the fact that they far exceed their own rules for elementary safety.”
– Diane Vaughan
For example, after space shuttle Discovery launched on January 24, 1985, and then returned safely to earth, engineers performed an autopsy on the vehicle, which included carefully examining the O‑rings. In disassembling the Discovery’s O‑rings, the engineers discovered an alarming amount of grease that was blackened from exceedingly high pressure and temperature.
The O‑rings in the Discovery launch held but were more damaged than they had been in previous launches. Engineers calculated that the O‑ring temperature at the time of Discovery liftoff was approximately 58 degrees Fahrenheit. “[Challenger] could exhibit the same behavior,” the engineers reported after the examination. “Condition is not desirable, but is acceptable.”
They also recommended proceeding with the next launch of Challenger. In fact, they not only recommended proceeding with the next launch, engineers painstakingly argued their position regarding the tolerable O‑ring damage in a formal report. At the eleventh hour, only a day before the fatal launch, engineers Bob Ebeling and Roger Boisjoly contradicted themselves and strenuously argued to NASA officials that the O‑rings could stiffen and fail to properly seal the joints of the booster rockets because of the cold January temperatures.
These arguments were not persuasive to NASA officials because, after all, they had the original detailed engineering report stating that the risk was acceptable. It’s important to understand that the engineers were not simply acting or pretending that the damage was acceptable. Up until the engineers made their final plea to officials to halt the launch of Challenger only the day before, they actually believed that there was nothing wrong at all with that classification. “No fundamental decision was made at NASA to do evil,” Vaughan wrote. “Rather, a series of seemingly harmless decisions were made that incrementally moved the space agency toward a catastrophic outcome.”
The O‑ring damage observed after each launch was normal. The culture had simply drifted to a state in which that condition was also considered acceptable. In the NASA example, the existence of the damaged O‑rings after each launch was deemed acceptable. It became an implicit, and accepted, rule that everyone simply tolerated and believed to be quite normal.
But if we step back for a moment and study the situation, as Vaughan did in her analysis, that acceptance of damaged O‑rings seems pretty crazy.
To avoid groupthink, encourage debate and populate your team with different personalities and areas of expertise. And recognize that speed can kill. When we are rushing to deadlines, and racing to complete projects, it’s much easier to overlook mistakes and rationalize errors in an effort to get it done.
As the great John Wooden once said, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”
Check out our new micro-learning series Small Acts of Leadership to begin making cultural shifts one small act at a time. Message me if you’re interested and we’ll send you a preview. Enjoy!
Shawn 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, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
Our poor dog. Penny found a bone out on her morning walk. Perhaps it was in the neighbors yard, perhaps she unearthed it. But now the bone is hers – hers to carry, and own, and jealously protect. There she is. I can see her from the window, walking intently through the backyard with her new bone, looking furtively around. She is clearly stressed about this bone.
She marches into the woods behind our house, buries the bone carefully with earth and leaves, looks around, then digs it up again, and carries it somewhere else. It wasn’t safe there. Surely someone would find it.
She can’t put it down, and I start to think the bone owns her. The bone has finally found a dog and now will not let go of the new owner. Poor Penny is now doomed to carry around her new owner the bone. I think she should chew it, enjoy it, and then leave it for the next dog who comes along. I think she should let go.
We attach ourselves closely to our current efforts. We define ourselves by what we’re working on at the moment, but it’s important to understand you are not your latest project, in the same way you are not the car you drive or the clothes you wear. Hopefully your work will change over time. Hopefully you’ll create a new job. Hopefully, what you are doing at the moment is learning for the next thing you create.
“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”
– Albert Einstein
Our level of curiosity has a strong influence on our ability to learn unrelated things, the kinds of things that appear in our peripheral vision, come out of left field, drop in over the transom. Instead of being distracted and annoyed by surprises and uninvited interruptions, are you open to new and unrelated ideas?
Dr. Matthias Gruber and his colleagues performed an interesting study in which they found that curious people have better memories of extraneous information. In their study, first they showed participants a series of questions, and asked participants how curious they are about the answers (Who was president when Uncle Sam first appeared with a beard? What does the word ‘dinosaur’ mean?).
Then, before the participants were shown the answers to the questions, they were briefly shown a photograph of a face, a fairly nondescript face of someone. Then the participant was told the answer (Dinosaur means ‘terrible lizard’).
The interesting part came next. Those who said they were curious about the answers to the questions were almost twice as likely to accurately remember the faces shown, the extraneous information.
“Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it,”
– Dr. Matthias Gruber
We already know we learn better when we are interested in something. But it turns out that we notice, and remember, unrelated things when we are curious. Stay curious my friends.
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/patrick-hendry-326435-unsplash-e1523196941659.jpg16672500Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2018-04-08 10:21:152023-12-07 10:54:06You Are Not Your Current Project. Move on. Stay Curious.
It’s a straightforward question, “What do you want?”
And depending on the situation, time of day, who we are with, etc. the answer can also be pretty straightforward. “I want to go for a run,” or “I want to talk to my brother,” or “I want you to speak to our boss about our concerns on the project,” or “I want to drink Chardonnay and stare at Netflix for an hour.”
We can understand these wants, but we may not always understand the motivations behind them. According to Marshall Rosenberg, Ph.D., expressing our wants is just a surface expression of a deeper need. And according to Rosenberg, we only have seven foundational needs we are trying to satisfy:
Connection (communication, nurturing, intimacy, be understood)
Play (joy, humor, elation)
Well-being (shelter, food, rest)
Peace (beauty, harmony, inspiration)
Honesty (integrity, presence, authenticity)
Meaning (clarity, contribution, self-expression)
Autonomy (choice, freedom, spontaneity)
When someone says, “I want you to talk to the boss about all the bugs in the software,” they might really be saying “I want support and safety,” or they might be asserting their sense of identity, “I want you to understand I’m in control.” And if your girlfriend says, “I want to go for a walk,” she might be saying “I want to be understood,” or she might be saying “I want to share a sense of meaning and beauty with you.” Or maybe both.
The point is that we rarely ask for what we actually want. We talk around the edges, in cryptic phrases, because we don’t understand what we really want, or we don’t know how to ask for it.
Once we satisfy those eight core needs we feel better, and we feel better in just a few specific ways. We feel one of these emotions:
Affectionate (compassionate, loving, friendly)
Confident (empower, proud, safe)
Grateful (appreciative, thankful)
Inspired (amazed, awed, exhilarated)
Hopeful (encouraged, optimistic)
Peaceful (centered, trusting, calm)
Refreshed (rejuvenated, enlivened)
That’s it. Here’s the exercise: look for those feelings which start to emerge when our central needs are not met. We may start to feel anxious, embarrassed, fatigued, vulnerable, or a whole host of emotions. The trick is to ask “What do you want?” and then work to discover the underlying need behind it.
Even better, when you say to someone “I want ______,” understand you are probably asking for something else. When in doubt start with kindness, it’s the #1 most desired trait, all around the world, for those looking for a long-term partner.
Start building new habits today. Check out our new micro-learning series Small Acts of Leadership on Mindscaling
Shawn 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, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
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Last summer a couple friends and I took our teenage kids and cycled across the United States from Seattle to Portland, Maine, and I can tell you the hardest part wasn’t doing it. The hardest part was getting to the starting line.
The adventure of cycling every day for two months in strange, beautiful places became part of our lifestyle. Doing it became as easy as our everyday lives. The hardest part was convincing ourselves and our kids to do it. Sure, there were some difficult moments on the trip. When we were tired we rested, when we were hungry we ate, and when we were bored we played in the river or went to the movies.
Life is full of unrealized dreams because we don’t know how to get started. Yet it turns out the hill isn’t as steep as it looks, the trail not as long as it looks once we get started. Experienced parkour athletes estimate the height of walls and fences lower than novices. Successful football field goal kickers estimate the upright posts as farther apart than less successful kickers. Golfers who are better at putting often describe the hole as “big as a bucket” or “as big as a basketball hoop.”
It’s not the doing part, it’s the starting that is almost always the hardest. Here are three useful ideas to get started.
Think About What Can Go Right.
What can go wrong is easy. 2:00am awake and wondering if your client will like the project you delivered, what the reviews will be on your most recent presentation, if your kids are exposed to bullying at school, the fact that you haven’t tipped our newspaper delivery guy and probably should, if you am ever going to finish this current book project, and generally if you should be doing something else with my life. That kind of stuff can go on if you let it.
It turns out that luck is a choice, and we can create positive outcomes often by imagining them.
A Little Stress is a Good Thing
I once had an interview with the master entrepreneur and writer Seth Godin. I asked him what does he do when he finds himself in a stressful moment. He said he reminds himself that he is in exactly the right place. What he means, of course, is that when we place ourselves in challenging situations, we have the opportunity to accelerate our learning, become more resilient and gain new skills and insight.
“I think intermittent stressful events are probably what keeps the brain more alert, and you perform better when you are alert.” – Daniela Kaufer, University of California
Find People Who Have Done It
Other people who have been there, done that, are more trust-worthy advisors than your own instincts. But you won’t believe them anyway. In a study entitled, “The Surprising Power of Neighborly Advice,” Dan Gilbert and his colleagues demonstrated repeatedly that the advice of others, who had experienced what the participants were contemplating, was consistently a better predictor of happiness, and positive outcomes. The reason we are likely to reject the advice of others is because we overestimate our uniqueness. We think we are special.
“We don’t believe other people’s experiences can tell us all that much about our own. I think this is an illusion of uniqueness.” – Dan Gilbert, Harvard University
The research suggests we should get over ourselves, give trust and listen thoughtfully to those who have gone before us.
Shawn 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, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
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“In a nutshell, advice is overrated. I can tell you something, and it’s got a limited chance of making its way into your brain’s hippocampus, the region that encodes memory. If I can ask you a question and you generate the answer yourself, the odds increase substantially.” – Michael Bungay Stanier
Recently, I had a habit I was trying to get rid of. Sometimes I was in a bad mood in the morning. It’s a drag. It affects everyone in the house and sets me up for a distracted, frustrated day.
One morning, my wife’s alarm went off at 6:15am, which is fine since it’s not my alarm. It’s her alarm. I don’t use alarms. Don’t be impressed, I just don’t need one. If I want to wake up, at maybe 6:30am, I just tell myself to and I will open my eyes at 6:29am. It’s not a superpower, it’s just a thing I have. I can’t remember the last time I set an alarm.
So when my wife’s alarm goes off at 6:15am, it can’t be for me because, like I said, I don’t set alarms. Then she says, “We should help get Annie ready for the bus.” But I don’t hear we. In my mind I hear, “You have to get up and get Annie ready for the bus.”
So I get annoyed and say, “What would you like me to do?” Which instantly I know is a stupid thing to say becomes it comes from a place of resentment. To which she says, “I don’t want you to do anything. I want you to do whatever you want to do.” She’s smart that way. She doesn’t get baited easily.
Now my day is now only 60 seconds old and already I’m annoyed. I close my eyes and ask myself a new question, what is the most useful thing I could do right now? Then I answer myself, the most useful thing I could do right now is gently wake up Annie, make the coffee, and prepare her breakfast. So that’s what I do.
And suddenly I’m not frustrated, resentful and annoyed, because all of my actions have a different intention. My motivation is to be helpful, not to satisfy what I imagine to be someone else’s expectations. If the goal is to be helpful there’s nothing to be resentful about. By recognizing what triggers my bad mood, and then choosing a different response to that trigger, I changed my outlook and changed my day.
Take a tip from a master of understanding habits, Charles Duhigg. In order to change a habit, we first have to:
Understand the trigger. According to Duhigg there are only 5 types of habit triggers: location, time, emotion, people, and the preceding action. The goal is to be as specific as possible in identifying the trigger. For example, “I get annoyed (emotion) when my boss Sally (person) reviews my project report each week (time).”
Next identify the usual response. So if your usual response is to make a smart-ass comment to Sally and then fall into a funk for the next hour and complain to your colleagues, you should clearly outline and understand, with as much detail as you can imagine, what your habitual response is. Envision what you usually do each week when the trigger occurs.
Finally, define a new behavior. Envision reacting to that trigger in a new way. Again, be specific and imagine something that takes very little time, only a minute or less. Imagine your very first response being different. For example when responding to Sally, you might say “How would you approach this problem?” And then really listen to the answer. Don’t wait for your turn to talk. Listen to what Sally has to say. If you think her suggestion isn’t constructive, instead of reacting, keep your remarks to yourself, then let it go.
Remember you can’t change someone else, that’s up to them, but you can have a new response and develop a new habit whenever you’re around them.
When we change our questions, we change the way we see the world. We change the results. See Question Thinking with Marilee Adams. Message me and I’ll send access to preview the course. It’s awesome.
Shawn 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, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
Most of us move through the day without recognizing the alternatives we have and actively deciding among them. As a result, we give up the feeling of control and mastery to mindfully create options and then select among them. – Ellen Langer, Ph.D.
I keep thinking lately that these are the good ol’ days. Right now. What if we could bottle up these moments and not just gaze longingly at them as memories, but instead live the best version of ourselves every day?
Many of us can pick a point in the past and remember a strong, confident version of ourselves. Think back twenty years. Here are some cues. Twenty years ago Alanis Morissette won the American Music Awards, Princess Diana had just died in August in a car crash, the Dow Jones index closed at just over 7000, Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear off, scientists cloned a sheep named Dolly, and the movie Titanic became the biggest box office release of all time. What were you doing then that made you feel stronger, sharper, and more alive? Did you go to the gym more? Travel more? Got a positive image in your mind of yourself back then?
Instead of reminiscing about our past selves, what if we picked up those positive habits and behaved that way today? Ellen Langer performed exactly this experiment on a group of older men in 1981. She, and her colleagues, selected a group of men in their 70s and 80s and took them to a place in New Hampshire which was renovated to look and feel exactly like 1959, twenty-two years earlier. They scattered books and magazines from 1959 around the house. They removed all of the mirrors, and decorated the house to look and feel exactly as if it was 1959, complete with vinyl records, a phonograph, and a black and white television.
To add to the sense of realism, she played “live” radio broadcasts of news reports, of baseball games, and a “live” reporting of Royal Orbit winning the Preakness horse race. The participants were instructed not to reminisce about the past, but to interact and speak to each other, as best they could, as if it really was 1959. They were asked to discuss the plane crash that “just recently” killed Buddy Holly, the importance of Hawaii becoming the 50th state in the union, and the Mercury 7 astronauts. As the week went on, the participants got deeper and deeper into living, and becoming, their past selves.
Before the experiment participants were given a battery of physical and cognitive tests to evaluate them on a variety of variables such as physical flexibility and strength, eyesight, posture, memory, attitude, and outlook.
The results were astonishing. Every single participant showed physical and mental improvement. Their posture got better, their eyesight improved. Their sense of smell, taste and hearing improved. They laughed more. Even their shoulders became more broad as they stood straighter, and their fingers got longer and less arthritic. Ellen Langer was so surprised by her findings that she underreported the results, thinking people wouldn’t believe her. At the time she didn’t report the spontaneous touch football game that happened on the last day on the front lawn. Some of the participants entered the experiment using canes.
Ellen Langer came to believe that we can transform ourselves through our mindset, our environment, and the intentional actions which reinforce our outlook on life. She has conducted similar studies over the past thirty years to demonstrate the power of our minds, and how we conduct ourselves, to show that our attitudes and behavior have significant impacts on our lives, and in turn, the lives of those around us.
In another study she asked nursing home residents to choose plants, assume responsibility for them, and decide how and when to water and care for each plant. She told a separate group of residents that she was placing plants around the facility and not to worry about them. The attendants would care for them. Eighteen months later, the people who intentionally and purposefully assumed responsibility for the plants were not only happier and more healthy, they were alive. More than twice the number of people in the other group had died during that period of time.
Langer believes the key to these personal successes in her studies is intentional mindfulness, which she defines as “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things.” In her explanation it does not necessarily require deep meditation (although that can help), it simply means being present and open to noticing new things.
Changing contexts and expectations can change results. An eye chart, for example, practically shouts out your limitations. You know that as the lines of letters get smaller and smaller, you won’t be able to read them, so you give up earlier. Langer did an experiment in which she simply turned the chart upside down and asked people to read from the bottom up. She revealed that by simply changing the experience and expectation, people can read smaller letters, and their eyesight is better, than they expected.
“Once you’ve seen there is another perspective, you can never not see that there’s another point of view.” – Ellen Langer, Ph.D.
You know there’s another way to see and experience the world. You’ve done it before. Try searching your past. Recollect, and envision deeply, a moment when you were at your best. As Tim Sanders likes to say, “What were you doing back in the day, that you’re not doing today?”
To learn the art of improv, and how to stay calm in chaos, see The Art of Leadership Presence with Karen Hough.Message me and I’ll send access to preview the course. It’s awesome.
Shawn 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, (Routledge) just released. You can grab a copy now. Have a meeting coming up? Let’s talk.
https://shawnhunter.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/annie-spratt-46095-540x360.jpg360540Shawn Hunterhttp://shawnhunter.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/logo.pngShawn Hunter2017-10-17 13:12:462018-04-02 10:12:32What were you doing back in the day?
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of 
Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of