Do You Panic or Thrive?

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On January 29, 1981, Steve Callahan woke abruptly from a dead sleep in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on his little 21-foot self-made sloop. There had been a mighty crash. In the seconds before he could stand into action, the boat was already starting to list and fill with water.

Quickly, within a minute or two he was able to deploy his self-inflating life raft and gather a few items as the boat sank. He leapt to his inflatable to discover a couple small airtight compartments within the sailboat were keeping it afloat for a few moments longer.

He made a small joke to himself about how lucky he was, and calmly used the opportunity to swim inside the sinking boat to retrieve some valuable items – a flotation cushion, a sleeping bag, an emergency kit, food, a spear gun, a solar still, and a few other things.

Over the next 76 days, as he drifted 1800 miles west, and as his body became covered in saltwater sores and sunburns, and as his raft was set upon by sharks, and as his radio failed to signal rescue, and as his body deteriorated, each evening he took time to admire the beauty of the night sky.

According to Laurence Gonzales’ Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, when disaster strikes, the difference between those who succumb to panic and those who don’t is this:

“They immediately begin to recognize, acknowledge, and even accept the reality of their situation… They move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance very rapidly.”

One thing Steve Callahan remembers vividly from the episode is that he was very calm, hyper-aware, and focused throughout the sinking event from first impact to minutes later as he watched his boat slide under the waves. He can recount his every action. He can play the tape in his mind of every nuance of the event.

Al Siebert, in his book The Survivor Personality, continues this thought:

“The best survivors spend almost no time, especially in emergencies, getting upset about what has been lost, or feeling distressed about things going badly….”

When things go badly, those who survive move away from emotion and toward a state of resolve.

*****

From Paralysis to Resolve

Stress is a response to a trigger. That trigger can be a challenge, a circumstance, a rapidly changing environment, or even a negative thought. But the extent to which the trigger induces distress or positive challenge is largely up to us. How we react to these triggers can be the difference between negative stress and positive challenge.

As Shawn Achor, researcher on positive psychology, puts it “stress is the extent to which an individual believes that the effects of stress are either enhancing or debilitating.”

In Kelly McGonigal’s research over an eight-year period, those people who experience high levels of persistent stress had a 43% higher mortality rate. BUT that was only true for those people who also believed that stress has negative health consequences. For those who embrace stress and use it as fuel to convert into positive pressure, stress has little or no negative health consequences.

Pressure can yield excellence. The difference between those who become paralyzed and succumb to stress, and those who interpret obstacles as something to overcome, is Resolve. Resolve is a mindset.

*****

In 1985 Joe Simpson and his climbing partner Simon Yates decide to climb the massive Siula Grande, located in the Peruvian Andes.

They didn’t climb the conventional route, but instead chose to ascend the never-before-attempted West face of the mountain, which is nearly vertical and covered in nothing but “a sheer layer of ice, loose dirt, flat rock, motorcycle grease, melted butter and used cooking oil.” (thank you Ben Thompson)

They triumph in the climb, but on the decent Simpson suffers a broken leg. Yates belays him down the mountain for hours, and then in a rising blizzard mistakenly lowers him over a cliff into a fathomless crevasse. After an hour, Yates cannot hold the rope any longer and believes his partner is irretrievable. It is impossible for Yates to physically pull Simpson back up to safety. In a moment of personal torment, Yates chooses to save his own life, cuts the rope, and allows Simpson to fall to his death.

But Simpson doesn’t die. He awakens to find himself on his back having survived the 50-foot fall with a crushed knee and destroyed leg. He crawls, limps, and drags himself for three days back to camp.

While hanging on the rope for an hour, in the void, as night was turning to dawn, Simpson recounts:

“A pillar of gold light beamed diagonally from a small hole in the roof, spraying bright reflections off the far wall of the crevasse. I was mesmerized by this beam of sunlight burning through the vaulted ceiling from the real world outside… I was going to reach that sunbeam. I knew it then with absolute certainty.”

The opposite response to stress is confusion and panic. M. Ephimia Morphew, a psychologist and founder of the Society for Human Performance in Extreme Environments, spent some time with her colleagues puzzling over why some novice scuba divers drown while still having plenty of oxygen in their tanks.

The reason, it turns out, is that in a stressful and unfamiliar environment, people often start to hyperventilate because they feel like they can’t breathe. The instinctive response is to remove any obstruction from their mouth. So in a moment of panic, they rip the regulator off their face and suck in a deep breath of the ocean. It’s similar to why those suffering from extreme hypothermia often take off all their clothes in a snowstorm.

The analogy is extreme, but today’s workplace can be stressful and overwhelming. We can often feel as if we are drowning.

*****

A March 2015 survey of 160,000 employees around the world found that 75% of today’s workers experience “moderate” to “extreme” stress. An April 2014 Monster.com survey of more than 7,000 employees found that 42 percent even left their jobs because the workplace was too stressful.

In that electrifying August, 2015 New York Times article, Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace – which was later rebutted, and is still today deeply argued for it’s validity – Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld write:

“Bo Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

In a typical stress response, heart rates and breathing increase, and blood vessels constrict. But those people who rise to challenges with the belief that stress is a positive opportunity have an opposite physiological response: the blood vessels open and relax as if they were in a state of elation or preparation for physical test.

Or to put it in Kelly McGonigal’s language, to embrace adversity and challenge with a positive mindset is another way of saying that you trust yourself. It’s another gesture of confidence. And that confidence and resolve will make you much more resilient for whatever arises.

Keep your knees bent my friends.

____________________________________________________

Shawn Hunter is Founder and President of Mindscaling, and the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes. It’s about how to lead joyfully in life, and also to lead cultures in your company to drive great results.

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

You may be more afraid of success than failure

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high_dive

Only those who will risk going too far can
possibly find out how far one can go.
– T.S. Eliot

Sometimes, failing is easy. Success is hard. Failing is status quo, back to the norm, maybe even farther back to slackville. Success can bring envy, jealousy, hurt, notoriety, limelight, pressure, confusion. Success takes courage.

Yes, failing can be terrifying when the stakes are high. It’s why I no longer hit those big jumps in the ski park. I crashed hard once, and the ski patroller who picked me out of the snow indentation said to me solemnly, “You know son, these jumps are a young man’s game.” Actually, I just lied. After three years away from it, my son recently coached me to jump again. Feels awesome.

But sometimes the thought of accomplishing your audacious dreams can be just as uncomfortable as dreading failure. It’s the same emotional trigger. This is The Fear of Succeeding, and it can be just as nerve-wracking.

Succeeding creates change. Change, by definition, is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. And succeeding can make you stand-out, make you different than your peers.

Some say you are the average of the five people you hang out with the most. The five people you hang out with the most is your posse, your peeps. And the most uncomfortable idea in the world can be the threat of social and emotional isolation from your tribe. It’s terrifying that actualizing your dreams might alienate those closest to you, simply by stepping outside of the group’s comfort zone.

Fear of social and emotional isolation is the first hurdle to overcome on our way to taking on, and crushing, our own audacious challenges. Start by demonstrating to others they are safe in following their ambitions. Cheer on and support your friends and colleagues when they step out and try something bold. True, they might bomb anyway, but make sure they don’t bomb because you made them feel like they don’t deserve to succeed.

Guilt over asserting yourself in competition is another big one. You know how your game elevates when you play someone better than you? It feels good when someone pulls you up a notch, but the inverse can be uncomfortable. When you are the one elevating the game, when you are the one quickening the pace it can feel like you are dropping your pals, betraying loyalties.

We also sabotage ourselves by fearing that we may discover higher potential. We might feel unworthy or unqualified. The secret here is focus on competence, not confidence. Too often we clench our fists and try to summon confidence on demand. However, it is true, as Amy Cuddy demonstrates, when we make power poses and take an assertive posture it allow a release of dopamine, and a burst of confidence. But true, profound confidence comes from deep competence. Your true potential comes from the tenacity of pursuing excellence.

Finally, there is the pressure to constantly match or exceed one’s own previous best performance. There is a 10k road race I do every year. And every year I try to post a personal best. Usually I don’t beat my previous performance, but I try to. It’s getting tougher every year to beat myself, but I still believe it’s possible. Last year I posted a personal best I posted over 9 years ago. It’s hard, but it can be done. But here’s the funny thing. I exceeded what I thought was my own capacity by approaching the problem differently. I used to train in volume, now I train in quality.

The same is true in many aspects of life. Pursue quality, not quantity. Because we can explore new outputs only by changing the inputs.

When in doubt, get pronoid. Pronoia is the opposite of paranoia. Pronoia is the belief that the world, and everyone around you is conspiring for your success.

Good Things Happen When You Live Your Values

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livevaluesOn Monday, August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina made it’s third and most devastating landfall with sustained winds of over 125mph. Inside the headquarters of Hancock Bank in Gulfport, Mississippi, Katrina’s 30 foot storm surge had driven 4 feet of water throughout the ground floor and destroyed the elevator system.

A tornado had ripped out 1300 windows on the face of the building and blown glass, furniture and debris throughout the interior. The bank had a 1-inch steel roof that had been peeled off by the gale winds, exposing the interior of the 17-story building to the storm and deluge. And in the basement, the central data center was being flooded and blasted with falling sheet rock as the interior walls crumbled and fell.

In the shelter of a nearby building COO John Hairston managed to call Security IT Manager Jeff Andrews sitting in Chicago. With the winds howling outside, John yelled into his cell phone,

“Jeff, the building’s a total loss. You’ve got 4 days. Bring up the systems, get it current. I may not be able to talk to you again for a while…If we cannot get the systems up, we don’t have a company.”

The following morning, the bank executives huddled over the hood of a car in the parking lot. It was Tuesday, August 30. Payday. Most of their customers would be getting paid today, many by direct deposit. They needed those funds desperately for basic food, shelter and clothing. Credit cards would be useless. The region was devastated, the infrastructure flattened. With sporadic electricity available, cash would be critical to sustaining people’s lives.

Serving customers from Texas to Florida, Hancock Bank was one of the primary banking providers in the region. But without power at their banks or ATM facilities there was no way their customers could get access to funds to buy basic needs. Fifty of their regional bank branches were offline, with no power or access to customer account information.

Those executives in the parking lot of Hancock Bank then did something remarkable. Reminded of the original charter of the bank to serve communities first, profits second, they asked their branch managers to open no matter what. Without power or lights, and some without doors or windows, that afternoon 10 locations opened for business. Several of those locations served customers from card tables in front of the shattered bank. Within three days, 30 locations opened for business, and invited people in.

In exchange for an IOU on a post-it note, with only a name and an address if they had no identification, each makeshift bank provided $200 cash to anyone who asked for it. That’s right. In the critical week following Katrina, without requiring either proof of identification or verification of account information, Hancock Bank pulled cash from destroyed ATM machines, dried it out, and put $42 million into the local economy.

According to bank CEO George Schloegel, Less than $200,000 was not returned. And in the five months following the disaster, 13,000 new accounts were opened, and bank deposits grew by $1.5 billion. Yes, billion. Hancock Bank had definitively become the people’s bank of the community.

That’s the power of knowing the right thing to do, and actually doing it. That’s what happens when you cross the bridge between the knowing-doing gap.

How the Happiest People Think and Act

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The happiest parts of vacations are planning them. The most joyous time is before we even pack our bags. And only those who were able to really, truly check out and relax reported a performance and happiness boost after returning to work.

We aren’t very good at remembering how we felt in the past. We consistently remember the highlights, when in fact the majority of the actual time spent was more mundane. We have the experiencing self in real time who has opinions and emotions, and we have a remembering self who recollects events and provides us with advice about the quality of that experience and how to make future choices.

Researchers have consistently demonstrated that we are poor predictors of what will make us happy in the future. The world is full of miserable lottery winners. We still think that, if only we have the house, the car, the spouse, the job, the vacation, we will be so happy. And yet consistently many of these dreams fail to deliver joy upon arrival, or at least to deliver sustainable joy. One reason is our projection bias – we think the way we feel now is the way we will feel in the future. After a big dinner we think we won’t enjoy breakfast because we’re full. Which explains why we buy impulsively at the grocery store when we are hungry, and the most sensible shopping is done after a meal.

Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues conducted a study in which the researchers asked participants to categorize their days into fifteen-minute increments and value them in real time on the basis of how they felt at those moments. They found that we really only spend less than 30% of our day engaged in activities we characterize as either enjoyable or meaningful. And our most enjoyable or meaningful moments are almost always in the company of others and in pursuit of a purpose greater than ourselves. These are times at lunches, or dinner parties, or playing with friends and loved ones. In the study, the activity of volunteering or working with loved ones in the service of others was evaluated as peak happiness events.

Harvard has completed a study observing the lives of 268 men from 1938 until now. From war to marriage to career triumphs, personal tragedies, parenting, habits and daily behaviors, the Grant Foundation has followed these men as they live (and sometimes die) for the last 80 years. In the book Triumphs of Experience, George Valient breaks down what they have learned are characteristics of a long, healthy and joyful life.

It doesn’t have anything to do with religion, political or sexual orientation. A happy childhood is helpful, but not necessary, for a thriving adult life. The habits you establish before 50 become predictive of mental and physical stability decades later. Learning and change is a lifelong pursuit, and not restricted to childhood and adolescence. And the inevitability of a mid-life crisis is a myth popularized in the 70s.

But according to the study, the two strongest behavioral contributors of a joyful and successful life are the ability to create quality relationships with those around us, and establishing “mature defenses.” According to George Valliant “altruism (doing as one would be done by), anticipation (keeping future pain in awareness), humor (managing not to take oneself too seriously), sublimation (finding gratifying alternatives), and suppression (keeping a stiff upper lip) are the very stuff of which positive mental health is made.”

Go forth in 2015 with happiness, success and joy.

When to Let Others Fail on Their Own

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Favorites from my 365 Project.

It was getting out of hand. It was time for an intervention. Only a year earlier we had a 30 minute “screen time” media option in our house for our three kids. After homework, after chores, after mealtime together, and after checking in and sharing with us their daily activities, they could zone out on NetFlix, Instagram, TV, or whatever they wanted for 30 minutes. In fact, this turned out to be a rather enjoyable time for us as well. While kids blanked out on devices we could chat in the kitchen cleaning up after dinner.

A year later it had devolved into our kids leaping into one, then two-hour headphone-wearing journeys silently watching Parks and Rec, or lost in Taylor Swift albums, or bingeing on FIFA Soccer on XBox. All drifting quietly alone in corners of the house.

I’m all for music and movies, and sometimes throw dance parties with the kids in the living room, or have sessions of watching Forrest Gump, laughing together. But this had gotten out of hand. The rules had lost meaningful consequences, and often we were too exhausted to martial our efforts to stop it. It was time to break the habit.

It hasn’t been consistently effective, but instead of insisting, demanding or confiscating their devices, we have had some progress when we initiate playing with our kids like building a ski jump or playing soccer in the back yard, or assigning small jobs like setting the table or preparing parts of dinner, or simply explaining that staring at a screen near bedtime makes it hard to go to sleep. And when all else fails I quietly go into the basement and unplug the wifi router.

So how do we instill better decision-making in our kids? There are a few clues in recent studies from Brigham Young University in which researchers followed 325 families over a period of four years, examining the behavior of the families with kids between the ages of 11 and 14. After examining parenting styles, family attitudes and subsequent goals attained by the kids, the researchers concluded that three key ingredients consistently created higher levels of persistence, confidence, and higher performance in school as well:

  • a supportive and loving environment
  • a high degree of autonomy in decision-making
  • a high degree of accountability for outcomes

In other words, ensure that there is high trust and unconditional love and support. Then let them make their own choices in recognition of shared understanding of consequences. Believe me, this certainly doesn’t always work. In our experience, a 14-year old does not always make thoughtful and conscientous decisions when granted autonomy. That’s the understatement of the week, but it is the eventual goal because in a few short years he will be making many of these decisions without us around.

I had an interview recently with the CEO of a 6 billion dollar company and he told me that sometimes he knows a project or initiative of a junior team will fail. He has the experience and the insight to recognize that it’s likely to bomb. But he lets it unfold anyway. He believes that as long as it’s not a mission-critical failure, it’s more important to let people go through that learning experience themselves. They need to have the experience of understanding first-hand that a particular process or initiative won’t work.

Quitting is Easy. Living with Quitting is Hard

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Your son doesn’t like 7th grade band? Let him quit. French IV is too hard? Drop the class. Training for that marathon is too hard? Just quit. Feeling frustrated or detached from your work. Quit. It’s easy. Tired of not making progress on your writing project? Drop it, lose it, let it go. Yah! That felt good.

Go to Google and start typing “top reason to…” The #1 result is “…quit my job.” Don’t misunderstand. There are plenty of valid reasons to quit your job including toxic cultures, lack of professional growth, and more.

But remember when you quit something you have to live with quitting, so you should have a pretty good reason. Because while quitting might feel thrilling and easy, it’s hard to go back. Not impossible, mind you, but pretty hard. I once heard a story about a rich guy who kept giving so much money to his alma mater they named the football stadium after him. Why did he keep giving so much money? Because when he was a junior at the University he quit the football team because practice was too hard. He has regretted it for over thirty years.

It’s also important to distinguish the difference between quitting and taking a break. Since 2000 I have started a marathon training plan almost every year. I’ve only made it to the starting line twice over the past 14 years but I always start the training plan. Last year my wife and I got up to 18 miles and stopped. With the kids’ schedules it was too time-consuming. But if I bail out midway because of injury, travel or time constraints, I don’t think I’ve quit the sport. I just had to adjust to changing circumstances.

Or to take a work example, some of the happiest and most successful people I know have a portfolio life in which they change careers and take sabbaticals in the middle of their careers. It’s not impossible, it just takes thoughtful planning.

There are legitimate reasons to quit something, but commitment to hard work is not one of them. Legitimate reasons to quit include:

  • It’s making you sick: Stress-inducing work, school or sporting environments are intolerable. You can try to turn it around and be the change you wish to see in the world, but if the toxicity is overwhelming, I think it’s OK to quit. Because you bring that stress home, and infect your family and friends. Your health, and the health of the people you love, is more important than your job.
  • It’s a professional dead-end: Unfortunately it’s becoming increasingly common to pigeon-hole workers into particular jobs, roles and responsibilities. It seems gone are the days to working your way up through the mailroom and getting job experience throughout the organization – the kind of professional experience that leads to personal and professional growth. Companies with the highest retention, highest levels of innovation are when people get to work in varieties of positions in the company. Or as they say on the soccer field, when you play different positions, you “see all sides of the ball.”
  • It’s devoid of challenge: The saddest expression I heard recently was describing people who “quit and stay.” Meaning of course, they have emotionally and psychically checked out, yet remain in their job, punching a clock, either for the money or the simple inability to conceive of doing anything else.

But don’t quit because “it’s too hard.” That place where you feel challenged – that spot right on the edge of your capabilities where you have to step up your game – is the place where you are at your most creative and productive. When you feel right on the edge of what you are capable of, that’s where you’ll learn the most.

    ____________________________________________________

Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building powerful human and digital learning experiences 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.

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.

Your Expertise Might Be An Illusion

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Here’s an old brain trick: Look below. Which line is longer? You know this trick. They are the same, right?

MullerLyon1

 

But I changed the trick. Here are the same lines as above but I took the fins off. Look again.

MullerLyon2

 

Yes. You see they are different now. Ten percent different.

MullerLyon3

Maybe you weren’t fooled because you anticipated a trick. But your brain still recognized that old familiar illusion. It’s called the Müller-Lyer illusion. Even when you know it’s a brain trick – a visual illusion – it’s still hard to see it differently. In your mind you know they are the same length because you have learned that the lines are the same, despite what you see.

But visual illusions are different than cognitive illusions. We can mentally adjust to what we think we see, but it’s much harder to adjust or change what we think we know. Cognitive illusions can be more persistent and harder to dispel than visual illusions.

Years ago, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman was invited to give a lecture at a financial management firm that specialized in managing portfolios of very wealthy clients. Before his presentation, he was given a spreadsheet which reflected the previous eight year investment performance of the top twenty-five financial advisors at the firm. Each year’s annual performance was the basis of each advisor’s bonus. The better the return, the higher the yearly bonus. Using the data, Kahneman could easily compute the correlation coefficients between the advisor rankings in each pair of years. So he could compare year 1 with year 2, then year 1 with year 3, year 1 with year 4, and so on for each advisor at the firm.

Kahneman anticipated that he would find only small differences in persistence of trading skill over the years between the top twenty-five advisors. But what he found instead exceeded even his own expectations. The average of all correlations comparing all advisors’ performance over an eight year period was .01, or effectively zero. In other words, the firm believed it was providing bonuses based on trading skill, but in fact the data showed nonexistent, or negligible, difference in skill between the top twenty-five advisors. The firm was clearly rewarding luck, not skill.

Armed with this bomb, Kahneman gave his presentation to the executive team and the response was yawns around the room. It was as if he had reported some obscure statistic which was irrelevant to their work. Kahneman thought the financial executives would be shocked and astonished to discover there was virtually zero statistical difference in their skill as traders, and furthermore their own reward system was based on a fallacy!

The reaction of the executives was instead blasé. The audience clearly believed the results that Kahneman presented – how could they dispute facts? But their reaction was as if the information was peripheral or entirely unrelated to their work. They reacted as if it was meaningless and extraneous information.

The reason is the illusion of expertise, or what Kahneman calls the Illusion of Validity. When we, as highly trained experts and professionals in our field, are presented with information that is contrary to our deeply ingrained experience or way of doing things, we ignore or invalidate the information. We dismiss the finding as extraneous and unconnected. And these persistent beliefs are further reinforced by the professional cultures we work in.

The point here is that high levels of confidence, when highly subjective and only reinforced by homogenous cultures, can be unreliable sources of accuracy. When weighing a decision, get not only second and third opinions, but get them from different perspectives and areas of expertise. Or as Daniel Gilbert advises in his book Stumbling on Happiness, get the advice from people who have actually experienced what you are contemplating.

Nourish Your Pack First

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The Iditarod dog sled race in Anchorage

Rona Cant, of Oxford England, should change her name to Rona Can.

After being an English housewife and raising two children, she decided life was missing something. She wasn’t the type to host afternoon tea, so she started a business in fabrics and upholstery. That wasn’t quite satisfying enough, so she decided she needed another degree and enrolled at a University. Something was still not quite right. She felt a bit unfulfilled, so she started taking sailing lessons.

Finally realizing she was confusing busyness with fulfillment, she signed on to a yacht crew to race around the world. But before she could feel competent to race, she completed the arduous Yachtmaster ocean certificate to ensure her capability and contribution on the boat. And just for good measure she also completed a diesel engine mastery course just in case the ship’s engines needed repair while far from harbor.

Then she participated in another around the world yacht race. Then a third race around Great Britain and Ireland. And this time winning. Now you are introduced to the kind of flinty, tenacious, can-do person that Rona is.

So it won’t surprise you to learn that after winning the sailing race around Great Britain and Ireland, she signed on to be part of a three-person expedition to drive dogsleds through the remote wilderness and mountains of Norway 500km to the very tip of the Norwegian landmass where it touches the arctic ocean. To a remote outpost of snow and ice on the edge of the world called Nordkapp. It wasn’t even a trail. In fact the goal was to create the trail – pioneer it – so that it could be done again.

In our interview last week, Rona described to me something I found fascinating about dogsledding in the northern wilderness. Each evening they would camp near a frozen lake or river. While Cathy erected the tents and Rona built a fire and untethered the 28 sled dogs and inspected them for cuts and injuries, their guide Per Thore would take an immense auger and drill a hole through a meter of ice. Then Rona would hike to the well he had created on the lake, post-holing her way through the waist-deep snow to ladle 40 litres of water into a plastic container and haul it to the campsite.

This required several trips to deliver all of the water to where Per Thore was busy sawing chunks of frozen reindeer meat to mix with dry food and water, and then set over a campfire to make a stew for the dogs. The dogs required over 60 kilos of food per day.

And then Rona would return to the hole in the ice to retrieve 10 litres of water for the humans. You see, only after the dogs were fed, and cared for, would the humans take their first sip of water. When you hear her tell the story the reason is obvious. Without the dogs in the wilderness you die. Without the dogs you are going nowhere. They are the engine that makes the expedition possible, and without their health and well-being, and rest and focus, all is lost.

The same is true on teams. The people on our teams, in our organizations, are the reason our companies exist at all. And when the boss spends all of his time working, refining and forwarding their own agenda – their own mission and aspiration for promotion, or money, or recognition – it’s the beginning of the end. Things start to break down. Not just the processes and integrity and quality of what your company delivers, but the very people within the organization begin to suffer emotionally and even physiologically.

Remember, nourish the people first. The expedition will go great places.

Money can buy happiness… If you give it away

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Imagine that every morning someone gives you an envelope with either $5 or $20. You never know which. And each day you are asked to either spend it on a treat for yourself, or spend it on a gift for someone else. Then that same person calls you at 5pm to ask how your day went. How do you feel?

Turns out that the answer to the question, “Can money buy you happiness?” is Yes. The kicker is that the greatest happiness comes from spending it on someone else. And as it turns out, how you spend the money is much more important than how much money it is.

Michael Norton and his colleagues Elizabeth Dunn and Lara Aknin researched whether money can really buy happiness. The hypothesis was that after basic needs of shelter, food, education, and living standards are met, extra income has little impact on personal happiness, except when we spend it on acts of generosity.

The reason for the study was based on the paradox that although people spend so much of their time and effort trying to make more and more money, having all that money does not seem to make them as happy. Could it be that they were not spending money the right way? The idea was if people were encouraged to spend money differently, perhaps we might be able to generate a greater sense of joy within ourselves and others.

An interesting part of the study revealed that this goes directly against our own instincts. When asked, 65% of those surveyed stated that spending money on themselves would make them the happiest. Additionally, over 85% believed that receiving $20 to spend would have a greater happiness advantage than $5. Wrong again. Turns out that the amount we spend on others doesn’t make than much of happiness difference. The important part is the act of generosity, not the amount we spend.

The same is true at our work. Lending resources across divisions and product lines increases collaboration, unity and sense of shared purpose. Generosity of time, energy, and commitment builds our own sense of belonging and joy. Remember, generosity only makes you richer.

Have a goal? You can double your odds of success.

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Make_a_PromiseA colleague called me yesterday and said, “I want to talk about commitment.” We had just finished brainstorming an idea over a few days and we both agreed we had something good, quite good, excellent actually. She wanted to have that conversation about accountability, about follow through. Which got me thinking about how to improve the odds of completing anything we set our minds to.

A group of researchers in California did an interesting study in which they randomly assigned people to five different groups. All five groups had to think about and prioritize goals they wanted to accomplish over the next four weeks.

  • All Groups had to think about their goals
  • Group 2 through 5 had to write them down
  • Group 3 had to also write specific action items
  • Group 4 had to also share those action items with someone
  • Group 5 had to also share those action items and progress regularly

Group 1 had a 43% completion rate on the goals they thought about, which is a little better than the 29% who actually complete marathon training schedules and show up at the starting line. But those in Group 5 who had to not only write down their goals, but be specific, and share their progress regularly had a 76% completion rate.

It’s why every support group imaginable exists – from cooking classes to exercise bootcamps to beekeeping clubs. When we build a cohort of supportive peers and hold ourselves accountable to them on a regular basis, success happens.

One of the most simple and effective accountability tools I know goes like:

  1. Write down up to 20 things you want to improve on. It can be anything from making people laugh to doing more pushups to making dinner for your kids. Anything.
  2. Next turn those goals into simple yes/no questions such as, Did you make someone smile today? You can also frame the questions to require a number answer, such as “How many miles did you run today?” No questions requiring elaborate answers. Keep it simple.
  3. Now give those questions to someone who will call you up every day, or twice a week and ask you your own questions.

When you know you have to testify to someone you care about on the goals that you want to accomplish, you will show up, you will do the work, make the difference, and answer that call every day prepared to give answers you believe in.

Specificity + Accountability + Consistency = Results.