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

The Work of Confidence

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People are rewarded in public for what they practice for years in private.
– Tony Robbins

In an interview, Jake Gyllenhall once described his acting preparation as accessing a parallel world through grinding determination and hard work. For example, to prepare for the movie Southpaw, he spent five months at boxing clubs, talking to boxers, watching boxing matches, training with boxers. Not so he could understand them, but so he could become them.

He described these parallel lives as simply different rivers of energy, and that if we give enough time and enough focus and enough belief in those worlds, we can slowly abandon our usual lives, and adopt an entirely new consciousness. In his words we can access “an entirely different molecular structure”. But it takes work and determination to leave the comfort of our habits.

Not all of us are willing to abandon our comfortable habits and pick up activities so far removed from our understanding. But remarkable things can happen when we try. And who knows about accessing parallel rivers of consciousness. But I do know this: Nothing builds confidence quite as quickly and powerfully as building competence. Competence begets confidence.

As the legend goes, in 1937, on stage at the Cutting Room in NYC, the drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at Charlie Parker’s feet. The gesture was clear. It means “You don’t have what it takes. Get out of here.” Humiliated, Parker worked even harder at the instrument and famously secluded himself that summer at a resort in the Ozark Mountains to work on his playing. He emerged from that self-imposed seclusion to introduce an entirely new and rarified version of jazz known as be-bop.

The interesting thing about the story is that it wasn’t Charlie Parker’s first impulse. A couple years earlier the same incident had happened to him on stage at the Cutting Room. He was asked to leave the stage because he didn’t have the chops. When it happened the first time Parker felt not only humiliated, but also incompetent. He threw his horn in a closet and refused to play for a month.

When it happened the second time, he rose to the challenge. Known in jazz circles as “going to the woodshed” or “woodshedding,” the term means secluding oneself to develop virtuosity through practice and hard work. It’s the path to innovation, and it’s the path to confidence.

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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

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

Believe in Your Goals, but Earn Your Gifts

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You’ve probably heard of the Pygmalion effect. It’s when people start to escalate their performance because of the expectations others have of them. It’s named after the Greek myth of Pygmalion who fell in love with an ivory sculpture he created. He loved his sculpture so much that he wished her alive as his wife, and so it happened.

That, of course, is a myth. But the phenomenon of willing high performance in others is real. In classic experiments over forty years ago, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson demonstrated that teachers in classrooms can elevate the performance of their students simply by believing that the kids are destined to be high performers. In the study, researchers gave fake IQ tests to elementary students, and then lied to the teachers that 20% of their students were identified as “intellectual bloomers”.

It worked. The teachers began to hold a false belief that specific students in their classroom were intellectually gifted, and destined for high performance. As a result, the teachers started to create a more nurturing environment to help those “intellectual bloomers” excel. The lie created a false belief that 20% of their students had elevated IQs and were poised for intellectual greatness.

The teachers believed in the potential of their students and intentionally created circumstances to enhance their success.

The teachers did this by deliberately “creating a warm and friendly environment for students, providing students with opportunities to practice their skills, and providing students with performance-based feedback.”

More recent studies find the same is true when it comes to building high-performance cultures in the workplace. When leaders hold high expectations of those around them, they tend to offer more learning opportunities, provide more consistent feedback, and hold people to a high level of accountability.

There’s one critical factor in all of this high-expectations business: Never tell them they are great. Don’t tell the kids they are brilliant, and don’t tell your colleagues they are inherently gifted and destined to thrive.

When we tell someone they are brilliant, gifted, and remarkable, we create an illusion that they have some inherent, hard-wired advantage over others. So they start to self-evaluate and compare themselves to others and try to identify their edge. That comparison and self-scrutiny can be crippling.

The world is littered with stories of those who choke in the face of high expectations. Remember Michelle Kwan, the American skating prodigy? Having won four world titles heading into the 2002 Winter Olympics, critics universally picked Kwan to wear the gold medal before the competition even began. Any threat would certainly only come from rival talents Irina Slutskaya and Kwan’s own teammate Sasha Cohen.

But they all skated tight, self-consciously. They skated as if they were obligated to win. Instead it was no-name Sarah Hughes, who barreled on to the ice and delivered a vibrant, unrestrained, and confident four minutes of joyous choreography to the deafening roar of approval in the stadium. Sarah never believed that she deserved to win, or was expected to win – only that with pluck, dedication and work, a win was an achievable goal. Her coach, Robin Wagner said in the weeks leading up to the Olympics, “Our feeling is, you go for the gold,” Wagner said. “It’s a feasible expectation.”

It turned out to be Hughes’ one, and only, big time win. Only a year later Hughes retired from skating on her own terms, satisfied and elated with her short career.

Believe in your goals, earn your gifts.

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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

Do You Know When to Disobey?

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What if your boss asks you to do something you think is wrong? What if there are practices your company engages in that are just ridiculous, or redundant? Or worse, what if there is an institutionalized process in your company that you think is flat-out unethical?

Maybe you work in a look-the-other-way culture, or a get-it-done-at-all-costs culture. What do you do?

According to a survey of 1600 managers in the UK, unethical behavior at work is common and widespread. In the survey, these managers reported the top ten questionable behaviors include:

  1. Taking shortcuts / accepting or encouraging shoddy work: 72%
  2. Lying to hide mistakes: 72%
  3. Badmouthing colleagues: 68%
  4. Blaming colleagues (when you don’t get your work done): 67%
  5. Slacking off when no one is watching: 64%
  6. Lying to hide colleagues’ mistakes: 63%
  7. Taking credit for colleagues’ work: 57%
  8. Calling in sick (when you’re not): 56%
  9. Lying about skills and experience: 54%
  10. Stealing low value items from the company: 52%

So, what do you do when your boss asks, or simply suggests, you do something inappropriate? Here’s is what people at some of the highest performing companies do: they disobey – intelligently, politely, and firmly.

Intelligent disobedience is a term that originated in the dog training world, and has migrated over to business culture. In Ira Chaloff’s new book Intelligent Disobedience, he describes what can go horribly wrong when people blindly follow orders, and inversely, how high-performing organizations create cultures in which individuals think for themselves.

Training guide dogs can take up to three years, and the really hard stuff comes at about 18 months when trainers introduce concept of intelligent disobedience. To teach a guide dog to cross the street safely with a handler is pretty straightforward.

First you teach the dog to stop at the down curb, which indicates to the handler that you are at the edge of the street. Then you teach the dog to respond to a “forward” command to lead the handler to the other side of the street. No problem.

But training guide dogs to “intelligently disobey” is tricky work. What if you want to teach the dog to willfully contradict the command, and not lead when a car is approaching? Trainers will ride in an approaching vehicle and use nerf bats or squirt guns to gently correct them. It takes time and patience, but eventually guide dogs learn to assess the situation, and decide for themselves if the path is clear and safe to cross the street.

Many guide dogs start the training process, and most don’t make it through to final graduation. One of the biggest reasons guide dogs washout during the training process is they follow every single command without question.

The opposite of courage is not cowardice, it is conformity. Even a dead fish can go with the flow.
– Jim Hightower

In business settings, it can be tough to contradict your boss. Often, managers reflexively don’t like dissent. They may view it as insubordination. As Chaloff points out in his book, “…if obeying is likely to produce more harm than good, disobeying is the right move, at least until we have further clarified the situation and the order.”

Kirk O. Hansen, professor of social ethics at Santa Clara University suggests starting with a non-confrontational approach that might point out the questionable ethics of the order, such as “Do we have a policy on that?” or “Under what circumstances would we normally destroy documents?”

According to Chaloff, if ultimately you can’t stop your boss from his intentions and actions, at least you can choose not to participate yourself. Chaloff suggests you don’t step off that curb with him into oncoming danger, accept any short-term consequences, and focus on long-term integrity and character.

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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

Destroy One Fear, Change Your Life

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What’s one of your biggest fears? Spiders maybe? Public speaking? Annual performance reviews?

Let’s say it’s snakes. Many people are terrified of snakes. Picture one now in your mind. Now imagine that you are being asked to stand near the snake. Now you are being asked to touch it, or even hold it.

Albert Bandura is 90 years old now and widely considered one of the greatest living psychologists, and among the greatest ever alongside BF Skinner, Freud and Paiget. Dr. Bandura still practices in his office at Stanford today.

Over forty years ago he started experimenting with helping people overcome their phobias, and he started working with people who are afraid of snakes. These are people who had such profound paralyzing fear of snakes that they were terrified of even walking in a park or a garden lest they might come across one. Their phobia of snakes had truly become a limiting factor in their quality of life.

He would bring the patient into his office and tell them that there is a snake in the next room, behind that door, and that they are going to go in there and touch it. You can imagine the reaction. Most patients told Dr. Bandura what he could do with that idea! There was no way on earth they were going in there. Ever.

Our daughter holding a tarantula.

Our daughter holding a tarantula.

First Dr. Bandura would have the patient stand behind a one-way mirror facing the adjacent room and have the patient look at the snake being held by a veterinarian. The patients would often panic in belief that the snake was going to suddenly attack and strangle the veterinarian. But instead the snake was held comfortably and lazily by the handler.

Next Dr. Bandura would ask the patient to put on thick leather gloves and even a protective mask, if they wish, and stand in the same room as the snake. And finally, Bandura and his patient would gradually approach the handler and the snake. Over time using this slow approach he called “guided mastery”, his patients developed the ability to touch the snake with a gloved hand, and ultimately even hold the snake in their own hands.

And just like that, their phobia would be gone. Dr. Bandora checked in with his patients in the days and weeks after they left his offices, and universally he discovered that their phobias stayed gone. In one interview with a patient long after her session with the snake, she recounted having a dream in which a friendly boa constrictor helped her wash the dishes. Another patient was able to wear a necklace for the first time in her life. And another patient dramatically increased their real estate sales because they were no longer afraid to show rural properties.

The post-snake-touching interviews with his former patients also revealed something more profound. Many of his former patients reported that once they had been cured of a once-debilitating phobia, they started trying out other new activities. Some started doing public speaking, or taking more audacious risks in their professional work. One patient started horseback riding. In general his patients reported feeling more free, more uninhibited by fear.

Bandura’s conclusion from his research was that by destroying one fear in their life, people had begun to develop the mindset that they could change other paralyzing aspects of their lives as well.

If you can destroy one of your fears, it could affect your entire life.

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Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of thought-leaders and authors. He is also the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes.

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

Why Energy is More Important Than Skills and Results

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helpinganother

I had an interview recently with Victor Cho. Victor is currently the CEO of Evite, the digital invitation service. You may have used them to organize a dinner event, or your kid’s birthday party. Evite currently has about 70 employees, which as he describes, is big enough to offer a full spectrum of organizational challenges, yet small enough to remain nimble in this volatile technology market.

In our conversation, Victor pointed out that competitive advantage comes down to the quality of the people. Talent is everything. When it comes to hiring, and placing the right people in the right roles at Evite, Victor thinks in three dimensions.

Skills and Capabilities
First, do they have the skills and capabilities to do the job, and are they willing to constantly learn and gain new capabilities. As he described, it’s certainly important that people arrive with great skills for whatever role they are applying for, but more importantly he looks for a constant willingness to learn, grow and develop new capabilities along the way. This is the growth mindset every top contributor needs.

Points on the Board
The second criteria Victor considers is how much contribution are they making to organizational goals? It’s something Victor refers to as “points on the board.” That is, how many hard, measurable contributions are people making toward the company’s vision. He’s patient with this criteria. It can take time and inertia to put points on the board.

Energy Accretion
The final criteria Victor looks for is something he calls “energy accretion.” Accretion is a fancy word simply meaning “to build gradually” or “to grow.” His expression means how much do people in the organization contribute to, and accelerate, the positive energy of those around them. If “points on the board” is the science, then “energy accretion” is the art.

Victor defines “energy accretion” as one’s ability to build a positive sense of curiosity, enthusiasm, and can-do attitude on the team. Victor views this subjective, and hard-to-quantify trait as the most important characteristic.

Victor has the least patience with those who disrupt the chemistry in the organization. The other two factors about skills and contribution, he is more forgiving and patient. Here’s why: Skills can be learned and developed, and points on the board can be coached, and often outside factors can get in the way of contributing hard results.

Bad chemistry and negative mojo can quickly spoil the energy of an entire team. In Victor’s opinion, this is where many leaders can often get sidetracked. In his experience, leaders and managers often hold measurable contributions in highest esteem.

This is an easy trap to fall into. After all, if we want results, who cares how it gets done, right? This is a mistake. When we start to reward results by any means, at any cost, we celebrate lone heroes, and place individuals above the team. Because in the long run, it’s teamwork and collaboration that will create breakthrough results, not lone wolves.

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Shawn Hunter is President and Founder of Mindscaling, a company building beautiful elearning courses based on the work of thought-leaders and authors. He is also the author of Out•Think: How Innovative Leaders Drive Exceptional Outcomes.

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