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Psychology

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Is Belief Crucial To Success?

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QuestionDo I have to believe in what I am doing in order to be successful at it?

AnswerThe power of belief is the stuff of legend. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy must defeat the Wicked Witch of the West to build enough belief so the magic ruby slippers will send her home. But in real life, belief involves both more and less than Dorothy endured. Depending on what you’re doing, belief may be optional. But even then, belief makes life much easier. And if you’re leading an organization, belief is one of your most powerful tools.

When you believe, it comes out in your body language, tone of voice, and facial expressions. Even great liars can’t fake it for very long; they always give it away somehow. Poker players call this a “tell.” It’s how you know someone’s bluffing. They may shift in their seat, play with their ring, or otherwise reveal a lack of sincerity.

You’ve seen it in personal life. When my significant other invites me to the ballet, I say, “yes” in the interest of domestic harmony. But the insincerity of that “yes” is loud and clear. When we go out to an event we’ll both enjoy, though, we both know it, and it strengthens the relationship.

It’s the same in business. When people don’t believe, their relationships fade a bit. A mid-size company had employees who had only contempt for the CEO and his business practices. Watching them give job interviews was a hoot. Candidates asked, “How do you like it here?” They replied, forced through a fake smile, “It’s a great place to work. I love it so much.” They gave conflicting signals, and the interviewees knew something wasn’t right.

Usually, other people notice the lack of belief but don’t consciously know how to interpret it. They may think you don’t trust them, or you’re distracted, or the deal at hand is a fraud, or that you’re just distant. But however you slice it, they won’t feel a strong connection, because you’ll be holding back.

If success demands good relationships with customers, vendors, and employees, a lack of belief can be a problem.

Belief brings commitment and persistence
Is there anything you love so much you’d do it every day and enjoy it every time? I’ll bet it’s something you believe in. When we believe in a vision, we have the energy to keep pursuing it. We do what it takes to help bring the vision to life.

If your company is treading water, creativity and persistence may be optional, but for growing companies and companies in competitive environments, innovation and problem solving are keys to success. When you believe in a possibility of achieving something, you’ll bring your full creativity to bear and will pursue it relentlessly. When things go wrong, you’ll be out in front with new ideas, schemes to hatch, plans to make, and alternatives to pursue.

A nonprofit’s board met for a day to brainstorm strategy. Their organization wasn’t doing as well as they wanted, and they needed some serious survival plans. People sat around coming up with a vague thought here and there, but the conversation went nowhere. Finally, a member spoke up: “I just don’t believe in the goals we’ve chosen.” After lively discussion, the group chose new goals that everyone believed in. And suddenly, there weren’t enough flip charts to hold all the new ideas.

When you doubt the organization or its goals, it’s an ongoing struggle to stay motivated. You think, “This must get done, even though I don’t believe it’s the right thing to do, or a worthwhile thing to do.” Naturally, you’ll disengage and just go through the motions—what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” Much of your energy goes to fighting the tension between “must do” and “don’t believe” instead of going directly to finish the task.

When you’re completely aligned, you’ll be at your best, body and soul. If it ends up that you don’t reach the goal, it won’t be for lack of trying!

Belief impacts morale—especially for leaders
The biggest issue with belief is morale. Most of us just aren’t very happy when doing something we don’t believe in. We might resign ourselves to it, but futile resignation isn’t exactly a fun place to live day by day. Furthermore, it’s probably not going to bring out your best.

Psychologist Marty Seligman relates in his book Authentic Happiness (Simon & Schuster 2002) that we’re happiest when using our personal strengths to overcome challenges, all while doing something we believe makes a difference. Did you catch that last part? People are happiest in a job they find worthwhile. In fact, people often work harder for fewer rewards for causes linked to deep belief.

If you’re in a leadership position, it isn’t just your morale that will tank; everyone who works for you will feel it, too. A leader whose heart isn’t in it is deadly to a group. Even the group members who want to commit will feel like they’re committing to a phony cause.

People watch leaders to know how to behave. They don’t listen to their leaders; they watch. If you’re listless, if you’re holding back, if you’re putting in 50 percent effort, they’ll know, even if you don’t. Your behavior will signal everyone around you to disengage.

In coaching, this comes up over and over. An executive wonders why their team isn’t performing. I’ll ask, “What would a high-performing team look like?” They’ll tell me, showing all the enthusiasm of a slug on a salt lick. When I point out the discrepancy, we suddenly recognize that the team is performing—exactly to the belief level of the executive. Change the executive and the team changes as well.

After all, if you don’t believe, how will you be able to recruit and lead a team who does?

Sometimes, you don’t need belief to succeed
So sometimes, believing is critical to success. But plenty of jobs don’t depend on forming deep relationships, working with commitment and creativity, or leading people. If you’re in a transaction-oriented environment, belief is probably optional. And let’s face it; front-line retail jobs rarely require belief. Those jobs have massive turnover, and no one expects spiritual engagement from a fast-food checkout person.

But I’ve been talking only about belief, when you also asked about success.

Many people think success means making a lot of money, getting a lot of status, and having a lot of power. It turns out they’re wrong. Studies on success show that above subsistence level, more external “stuff” doesn’t mean more happiness. People who feel unsuccessful keep finding new ways to feel that way on different playing fields. “I don’t have the money for a new TV” becomes “I’m not getting a high-enough return on my investments.”

The people who really feel successful get their success as much from the process as the end results. Yes, they may want money, power, and status. But they get it in ways they enjoy, so they feel successful all along the way. Really thoughtful people use a “balanced scorecard” approach, and consider friendships, community, family, and, yes, doing something they believe in as essential ingredients in a good life.

Warren Buffett, history’s most successful investor, says he invests because he loves it. Even as a kid, he counted vending machine bottle caps to understand what was selling. His love led to persistence, skill, and finally, billions. He lives a modest lifestyle with his wife in the house they bought forty years ago. His joy comes from living, not having. He could have power, status, and huge skyscrapers bearing his name. But he wouldn’t enjoy that. For him, success is eating at McDonald’s and drinking Cherry Coke—well within the means of us non-billionaires. And, of course, investing, which he’d be doing it even if it didn’t pay.

So can you make money without believing in what you’re doing? Sure. In relationships, creativity, and culture building, belief helps. But either way, only you can answer the real question: Do you need belief to feel successful? And if the answer is “yes,” what are you waiting for?

© Stever Robbins. All rights reserved in all media.

Public Speaking and Performing

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On rock ‘n roll, public speaking, acting, and the nature of story…

Wow, what a pretentious title for this note. I hope it lives up to its promise.

THE SCENE BEGINS IN AN OFF-BROADWAY MUSICAL:

Last weekend, I saw Signs of Life, the Off-Broadway play about life in Terezin, the model concentration camp the Nazis created to show how well the Jews were being treated. My collaborator Joel Derfner composed the show. The acting and singing was excellent. It was very emotional, and left us in a state of profound … profundity. They announced an after-show talk, and my first thought was, “I hope the cast isn’t there.”

My reaction surprised me. I usually love hanging out with creative types, and really love my actor friends. But in this case, despite the actors’ skill, I wanted to preserve the distance. What was up with that?

CUT TO:

I’ve done a lot of public speaking over the years. Whatever “it” is, I have it. Crowds respond to me. Recently, a speaker with a microphone was trying to get the attention of a room. I stood up, looked around, and said “let’s sit down now” in a slightly louder-than-normal voice. Everyone turned around and sat down. At one speech a few years ago, the tapes of my session sold out while the session was still in progress.

Right now, I’m in my first show since forever. I’m an ensemble member with a full five or six speaking lines. Acting someone else’s line and characters is very different from public speaking. We’ll see how it goes.

CUT TO:

My friend Jamie Kent is building a career as a musician. He’s done a lot of theater and is now learning to perform as a musician in venues where some people are attentive fans, while others are drunken revelers. He and I spoke for a while today about the nature of being on stage. He’s found that doing theater is very different from performing music live, and life music seems different from public speaking. He’s still going up the learning curve. I’m watching.

WHAT I’M LEARNING ABOUT STAGE

Acting, public speaking, and performing music are all ways for one person to engage hundreds or thousands of others. There are critical differences that demand different skills in all three. Yet all three depend on the nature of the relationship between performer and audience.

Stage is story.

One-on-one conversation is easy. We adapt to each other and react to each other’s points. It’s conversation. When one person is engaging an audience, I find it helps me be more powerful to think in terms of story. There’s always a story.

Actors. In acting, there’s a story being told. The actors are the medium. They’re an odd medium, since their skill is in knitting their own authentic emotions into building blocks for characters who they aren’t. The audience’s reaction is to the story, not the actors. The story is made more real through the skill of the actors, but the best actors are the ones who create a character so strong you forget the actor. Sean Penn in MILK was this amazing.

The audience is voyeur, watching the story without being part. Though some stories occasionally break the fourth wall and a character talks directly to the audience, the characters don’t expect an answer, and the audience doesn’t expect to give one. Even the breaking of the fourth wall is, itself, part of the story. (If you’ve seen Avenue Q, you’ll recognize the awkwardness of what happens when the fourth wall breaks. We wonder: are we supposed to participate, or continue our part outside the production?)

For the actor, the challenge is to create a character and story without directing it at the audience. The completeness of the character and the power of the direction is the compelling event that makes the audience want to watch. An actor uses their authenticity to create the character, but their job is to create a fiction with that authenticity.

The actors in Signs of Life did such a good job that I didn’t want to meet them in person. The story was too powerful; I didn’t want to meet them not as their characters.

Public speakers. Public speakers tell the story, and their role is narrator. Since they’re outside the story, the audience can interact with the narrator about the story. The audience is in conversation with the speaker about the story.

For the speaker, the challenge is engaging in a conversation with the entire audience as a whole. The speaker must align themselves with the audience and share the audience’s discovery of the material the speaker is providing. Authenticity works well in public speaking, because people can often pick up when someone’s faking or restraining themselves, and people like to have conversations with people who are interesting and real.

My “it” when public speaking is maybe a mild form of autism spectrum disorder that I’ve managed to turn into a huge asset (joking… I think): like many geeks, I can’t maintain a social facade. What you see is what you get. I suffer from involuntary authenticity.

Leaders. Leaders also tell the story as narrator, but there’s an additional level: there’s the story of what it means to be together, sharing that story. When an audience gathers to be led by Lori Leader, Lori tells stories that bring up emotion in the followers. But the more powerful story is the story of why people are listening to Lori in the first place.

Oprah might tell a story about an abused child. She’s narrator, aligned with the audience to discover truths about abuse. The larger story that many of her followers hold, however, is that by allowing Oprah to be their narrator, they will have richer, more fulfilling lives.

For the leader, the challenge is working both of these messages at once. The leader must have a conversation with the audience about the material, just as a public speaker must. The leader also needs to have a separate conversation, about what that conversation means. “Join me to talk about race relations. [I’ll narrate.] Just by being here, you’re showing your commitment to help change the world. [The conversation about the relationship.]”

Musicians. For musician, the challenge is being both actor and speaker. The songs and what they mean to the audience are what forms the story. People see live music because they want to be in conversation with the musician, yet they want a conversation they know: the music that tells the story the audience wants to experience. Audiences can sometimes even get upset if the musician performs a song differently from how they performed it on their album. The audience wants the story (song) they know, plus the emotional connection they get with a narrator. The musician must create both the narrator relationship and provide the story to engage the audience.

Jamie’s learning curve is likely related to the challenge of the duel relationship of actor and speaker/narrator. His pre-music performing experience was all as actor, and he’s just beginning to wrestle with the need to be with the audience even as he’s acting in the story of the music.

SO WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

My larger story is that sometimes, my insights can help others get clarity on issues in their life. I’m hoping you find something useful, or at least entertaining, in these ideas. Let me know.

I’m just playing with these ideas, as I delve into performing more than I’ve ever done. I’d be curious to know how you think about being on stage. What stories do you tell? How do you relate to your leaders, actors, teachers, and musicians?

P.S. I’m available as a public speaker and performer, by the way… 🙂

Cause and Effect in Current Events

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Don’t be surprised when you get the expected result.

Stupidity is running rampant, world wide. It’s frustrating, because the mistakes aren’t rocket science. They’re really simple stuff. People forget their actions have consequences. Let’s explore some cause/effect you should keep in mind, through the lens of current events. Think how these apply to you, so you aren’t surprised by the utterly predictable.

(This is going to be a provocative article. If it offends you, recommend me to all your friends. The provocation may cause many unsubscribes from my list from people who would rather indulge in knee-jerk responses than think for themselves. Oops!! That sentence just lost a dozen, right there…)

Ignore the competition and you’ll lose. Detroit has been whining about how they couldn’t have forseen the current downturn. In business school in **1989**–twenty years ago–we did cases about how uncompetitive the car companies were, and how they were ignoring foreign competition, etc. Anyone who lived through the gas lines and 50+ mpg Honda Civics of the late 70s and hears Detroit complain that they can’t get 30mpg by 2020 should have nothing but utter contempt for the executives running the Big Three.

If you hit people, they won’t sit there and take it. Hello, Israel and Hamas. Are you listening? Kids beat me up in grammar school. It didn’t make me like them. And if I’d been bigger and stronger, I would have hit back. When Hamas broke a cease-fire and sent rockets into Israel, what did they expect to happen? It isn’t a matter of history, or who deserved what. Just that simple question: what did they expect to happen, other than violent retaliation? (Terrorists knocked down two of our office buildings seven years ago, and we started two wars over it, with a body count that some say is over 100,000 civilians. Clearly, if you swat someone who has more firepower, they just might swat back.)

Debt is bad if not managed wisely. Learn this: if you spend $10 today that you don’t have, how can you expect to have $12 to repay it with interest tomorrow? This only makes sense if you invest the $10 with the expectation of making $12 or more. Thinking of credit cards as free money is dumb. Thinking of a $1 trillion yearly budget deficit being used to fund expenses (e.g. war) rather than investment (e.g. R&D, research, education, infrastructure repair) is dumb.

Deliberate get-rich-quick stupidity will be appropriately rewarded. Banks have a thousand-year history of how to evaluate good credit risks. When they write mortgages to people they would never lend to under prudent guidelines, they shouldn’t be surprised when it all collapses. And by the way, every manager involved should be fired. I’d rather have a high school student running the bank than someone with proven bad experience.

Pay current expenses with current dollars. People get so upset and angry about tax levels. Get over it, people. Borrow-and-spend is _more_ toxic than tax-and-spend; you have to pay back with interest. Unless you are spending on investment that will generate a return, tax-and-spend is a much, much healthier policy. In any event, tax vs. borrow is just a financing detail. The problem is *spend*. (And anyone who still believes either party is more fiscally responsible than the other needs to have their head examined. As far as I can tell, the Repubs are abhorrently irresponsible, while the Dems are despicably irresponsible.)

Don’t borrow if you can’t repay. See the previous paragraph. This applies to credit card holders, home owners, governments, and investment banks. If you borrow $100, you have to pay back $110 next year, or even more in following years. Borrowing gives you the illusion that you have a higher standard of living than you can afford. The world will happily correct that misapprehension.

People do what you pay them for, especially if there are no perceived consequences. I’ll let you find the examples for this one. Just look at politicians, lobbyists, and CEOs of failed banks. (Why, please remind me, are any of those people still there? Aren’t we supposed to fire people who demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt their utter, complete, and total incompetence to run a solvent business?) This applies to politicians, too. If we connected their pay and career paths to desired national outcome measures, you would likely suddenly see a whole different set of conversations in Congress.

Nightmare or Hope? Your decision.

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You have only yourself to blame for the quality of your decisions. Improve it. Start today.

Are you committed to becoming a spot-on decision-maker who can make great decisions that actually guide your world? Because chances are, your personal decision-making process is no guarantee of that.

We’ve just finished two years of hate-filled, vitriolic lies and attacks. Most of us were swayed, one way or another, by the election rhetoric and talking heads. One thing is certain: few of us went to the candidates web sites, read their platforms and policies. Even fewer then consulted a range of economists, industry professionals, and others to figure out whether the policies were realistic, whether we have any data on that kind of policy, or whether they would even lead to the kind of world we want.

Pretty much all of us relied mainly on charisma (or lack thereof) and ideology (or lack thereof) and knee-jerk logic to make our decision. And yes, this means you, my above-average-intelligence friends! Intelligent people seem to believe that they understand things better, even though when it comes to politics, there’s no reason to believe that. Smarts are no defense against relying on shallow, biased media reports and cherry-picked statistics.

The challenge: improve your decision making!

Here’s my challenge to you: actually learn from this experience.

Whether you’re feeling fear, anger, hope, or happiness today, grab a piece of paper. Write down all your fears. ALL of them. If you are convinced our President-elect is a terrorist whose greatest desire is to bring down America, write that down. If you’re convinced he’ll raised your taxes, write that down. If you’re convinced that taxes a worse financing decision than debt when you’re running a deficit, write that down, too.

If you believe that America will become a hotbed of corrupt moral practices, write that down.

Now write down your hopes. If you believe we will magically become debt-free in an economic prosperity paradise brought on by a single change in President, write that down. If you believe that America will become a multicultural paradise of acceptance and love, put it on paper.

For both your fears and your hopes, jot down the basis (or lack thereof) you have for those beliefs. You are the ONLY ONE who will see this, so be honest. Expect to have fairly little evidence for any of this.

You know now what you’re projecting on this candidate, good or bad. You could be wrong about a lot of what you’ve written. In fact, you probably are. And you’ve done this with every election you’ve ever voted in.

Now is the time to learn, instead.

Arrange to re-evaluate your decision-making in 2012

Head over to TimeCave.com, and schedule an e-mail to yourself to be delivered in July, 2012. Type in everything you’ve written. Also paste in the following debrief form. Then in 2012, you may be able to make an even higher-quality decision than you did this year.

DEBRIEF OF MY 2008 DECISION
1. Where was I right in my ability to project the candidate’s results?
2. Where I was right, how much of that was due to the candidate’s efforts, and how much of that was external factors that the candidate couldn’t control?
3. Where was I wrong?
4. How much of *that* was under the candidate’s control?
5. Where did I get my information about the candidate?
6. Am I using the same or different sources this time?
7. Do I know how high-quality the sources are? Why do I believe they are high (or low) quality?

When you receive the email in 2012, spend some time thinking through the questions. You may discover that your fears were misplaced. The world didn’t come to an end. You may discover that your hope was a bit overblown. The world didn’t become paradise.

Either way, you’ll discover that you can find ways to improve your decision-making in 2012. That’s a good thing. You will begin to be more nuanced and more thoughtful in your vote, which is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make.

And why not start now? Campaign 2012 starts in about three weeks…

The key to ethical, sane behavior: the *little* voice.

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Your little voice may have all the answers you need.

Have you ever wondered how certain corrupt businesspeople can keep spouting great, moral words while doing the exact opposite in their behavior? You wonder how they can wax eloquent about the need to give customers high-quality products while they happily substitute inferior quality raw materials to save costs. You wonder: are they insane? Probably not. Yes, they hear voices in their head. But we all do that. The problem is that they’re listening to the wrong ones.

In a New York Times article today, John Tierney discusses the science behind hypocrisy and how we fool ourselves. It seems when we distract our conscious mind, we listen mainly to our “gut” (or our “heart,” depending on how poetic an image you prefer), and we know when we’re doing The Wrong Thing. When our conscious minds are free, however, we use them—to self-justify. When we engage in hypocritical or anti-social behavior, our conscious mind goes to work creating justifications so we believe we’re doing the right thing, even when we aren’t.

In the past several years, I’ve become more aware of my own “heart voice.” When I have a troubling decision to make, or strong ambivalence about a situation, I sit quietly. Actually, my brain is usually shrieking gibberish about how unfair I’m being treated, or about how I don’t deserve what’s happening, or about how I’m an utter and complete failure at life because I missed “9 Down” in today’s New York Times crossword puzzle. So here’s this Shrieking Monster in my head, and I let it rant while putting attention on the middle of my chest. Then when the Shrieking Monster stops to take a breath, I quickly ask, “What should I do in this situation?”

Then I sit. After a few minutes, beneath the Monster comes a little, quiet voice. It’s barely even in words. And it has an answer.

The moment the answer comes, I know it’s the right one for me. It’s almost always the moral thing, the ethical thing, the loving thing, the passionate thing. In some weird way, it’s the answer I already knew was right, but just wouldn’t admit to myself. It took a chat with the Little Voice to bring it to the place where it could be heard over the Shrieking Monster voice.

The Shrieking Monster is the one that usually pushes me to do stupid things. It goads me to yell at people when I’m frustrated, to get petulant and childish when I could be forging alliances, and to beat myself up when I don’t do well, even if I did my best. The Little Voice, though, is my own internal Dear Abby: its advice is excellent, even if its hairstyle could stand some updating.

If you’ve never tried this, give it a shot. Ponder a decision that’s giving you angst. Maybe it’s an ethical quandry, or an issue with a co-worker, or that persistent fantasy about wrapping your boss in duct tape upside down, hanging from the ceiling. Choose something really, really important, like: is it fair that I always have to spend the 3 minutes to type up action items after a meeting?

Sit quietly with the situation. Your Shrieking Monster will helpfully point out how unfair it is that you have to type those action items, how your fingers ache, how it’s probably carpel tunnel syndrome and you’ll be crippled for life, and how you really deserve to be the boss and are just not deeply appreciated. Then sit quietly and listen to the Little Voice behind the shrieking monster. It just might have some good advice.

If it seems reasonable, give it a shot. You might find yourself acting more ethically, more morally, more professionally, and more happily. In other words, you just may find your little voice is the key to acting as—not just aspiring to be—your Very Best Self.

Find the article on hypocrisy at http://r.steverrobbins.com/hypocrisyarticle.

Groupthink, brainwashing, and politics: eek!

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You have everything to gain by thinking outside your own box!

Click here to hear this article as a podcast.

Maybe you’ve been successfully brainwashed and just don’t know it. How would you? Pretend you were kidnapped by the People’s Liberation Front of Jordania, which originally attracted you by serving your favorite brand of spaghetti sauce every night of the week (yum!). They successfully brainwashed you, and now you would go on raids with them, eat with them (spaghetti!!), live with them, and genuinely believe in their cause. If someone said to you, “The PLFJ has brainwashed you,” you wouldn’t believe them. You’d go back to contentedly slurping spaghetti.

Schools brainwash us

This is more than an academic question, though it arises in academia as well. People attend schools where they learn certain ways of thinking and are taught that some thinking is preferable to others, or even that some thinking is “right” and some is “wrong.” For example, they teach that the Earth revolves around the sun, and not vice-versa. For centuries, people believed the opposite, and could even be put to death for suggesting the Earth orbited the Sun. So which is the brainwashed? Both have their belief systems, both indoctrinate new people into those beliefs, both have evidence that suffices for them, and both would view the others as living in a fantasy world.

In Business School, students are taught to do cost/benefit analyses, and many of them reframe their entire world in terms of costs and benefits. Great for balancing their checkbook, maybe not so much for making their Sweetie feel loved. “If I spend five minutes cuddling and my time is worth $45/hour…”

In contrast, philosophy majors are taught there are many ways to approach a problem, and may have a very different way of thinking about life (“Amour! Eros! Love! Let’s cuddle!”), and be lousy at balancing their checkbook.

Who’s “right?” Both are. And both have habitual ways of thinking that were taught by a school. How are the schools not brainwashing institutions?

Politics brainwashes us!

Scott McLellan, Pres. Bush’s former Press Secretary, just published a book that reveals how he now believes he had been manipulated and misled for years by Bush. It wasn’t until he left the administration, however, that he had enough perspective to question what he had been told and been living for several years.

We’re all brainwashed, all the time.

If you think about it, you’re probably the member of an exclusive club, all the way down to having your own language. Maybe you’re part of the business club, and you talk about “profits” and “margins” and “business models.” Or you’re a Swing dancer and you talk about doing a “Texas Tommy” (isn’t that illegal in 39 other states?). Or you’re a graphic designer and you know what “Pantone” means.

Now think about your organization. You probably have your own shared beliefs. Those beliefs are a form of brainwashing, and you don’t question them. Everyone takes them for granted, and those who don’t are marginalized or ignored. But the world changes! Yesterday’s “common sense” is today’s backward thinking. “Cars will never take off; they require pavement, and who’ll pay to pave a downtown when so few cars exist to use the roads?”

Sometimes, the world doesn’t even change, the conventional wisdom is just wrong. “The world will only ever need four computers.” “Customers will never buy water in bottles when they can get it free from the tap.”
“I’m really happy to listen to you talk about your ex-boyfriends, dear.”

Find freedom beyond your assumptions

In organizations, getting through your brainwashing is the key to innovation, creativity, and “thinking outside the box.” Indeed, it’s your shared assumptions that are the box!

The key to getting past your brainwashing is to seek out evidence that you might be brainwashed. Write down some of the reasons you know your business is successful:

  • People love our customer service.
  • We are the low-cost provider.
  • We hire the best and the brightest.

Now write down some of the reasons you know your competitors are doomed to fail:

  • They just don’t “get it.”
  • Our customers would never like their product.
  • We’ve locked up the biggest, most important customer.

Take the reasons you just wrote down, muster your courage, and spend some time exploring each one. If your belief is false, how would you find out? What data would you seek? What trends would you be following?

You don’t just have to re-examine your work assumptions. You can also list things you “know” about your family life. Stuff like, “my teenagers won’t listen to me” or “watching TV together is the highest form of quality family time.”

Start seeking some data. Start following some trends. Try a few alternatives. Find out where you’re following the herd, and where you’re really in touch with reality. You’ll learn how much of your life is groupthink, rather than YOUthink. You’ll find yourself thinking outside the box. Although it could scare people around you, it might open your eyes to a whole new world of opportunity. There are advantages to being the sighted man in the land of the blind, and not just because it makes it easier to button your shirt…

Happy or Successful? Which will you pursue?

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Click here to listen to this as a podcast.

Click here to download the Happy versus Successful graphic

On a recent birthday I was looking back at the strategies that my friends from high school and college and I employed to get where we are today. We assumed that success would bring happiness, and as far I can tell, we were wrong. It turns out that the two are separate, even though marketers would have us believe otherwise.The slogan for Cadillac is “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit.” Of course what your mind fills in is Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. As if a $50,000.00 car will actually make you happier. And maybe it will. But keep in mind, if your life fundamentally sucks, it’s gonna keep on sucking the moment you step out of the car and onto the concrete. So, if the two are different—if happiness and success are not the same—what’s the best life strategy?

We are certainly taught to believe that being successful will make us happy. Society tells us, our parents tell us, our teachers tell us, students in high school as young as 12 and 13 are already being lectured about college. I take it to an extreme. I have a 5-year-old nephew, I am thinking about his college, I am thinking about his high school. It’s ridiculous; I am missing his entire childhood because I am so busy thinking about making him successful in the assumption that thus will he be happy.

I also find that in career coaching new MBAs, they have an almost religious belief that they can plan out a 20-year career path. They say things like, “I will make my money and then I will be happy. Then I will do the things that are meaningful.” Then, then, then. As if, among other things, you can even control whether “then” ever arrives.

So strategy number 1 is: pursue success and hope for happiness. The other strategy is to pursue happiness and meaning and find a way to make a living doing it. This is the strategy where happiness leads to success. Which one is better? Let’s see…

If you go for success and you become successful and you find a way to be happy doing it, yeah, you’re happy and successful. If you go for happiness and find a way to make money doing it, yeah, you’re happy and successful. So, in the case where you can achieve both, it doesn’t really matter which strategy you choose, you end up happy and successful.

But the point we rarely consider is what happens if everything doesn’t work out. If you define your life as pursuing success but you don’t actually find a way to be happy while doing it, or you get to that point where you have the money and now you don’t even know what makes you happy because you have spent the whole time pursuing success instead of happiness, well, great. You’re successful, but you’re not happy. You walk into an empty house surrounded by beautiful gorgeous things. You have a lot of friends and they like you. Why? Because you have a lot of nice things that they want to borrow. You buy a cat, the cat puts with you because you leave its automated feeding bowl in place while you go work at office. It actually hates you because you’re never around. You are too busy working, but at least it will pretend to purr every now and then.

On the other hand, if you go for happiness and aren’t successful, at least you will be happy and you will have a life full of meaning. They found one of the big things that helps people be happy, for example, it is having family and friends and community. So, if you are happy, but don’t quite make it to successful, you may wander into your one-bedroom tiny apartment and be surrounded by friends and family and people who love you and a cat that purrs because it recognizes you—it knows who you are and it appreciates the fact that you feed it. You may not have the money, but you will be happy.

So, in the case where the future works exactly the way we want it to, it doesn’t matter whether you pursue success and then find happiness or whether you pursue happiness and then find success. But in the case where you can’t guarantee the final outcome, it makes so much more sense to pursue happiness and hopefully you can find a way to be successful doing it.

I have spent my life up until very recently doing the opposite. I have spent my life pursuing success under the assumption that it would make me happy and it is not clear that it’s been worth it. Missing a weekend with friends so that I can work hard and earn enough money that I can take time off and … spend a weekend with friends. Hello? This doesn’t exactly make a whole lot of sense.

What I would like to invite you to do today is to examine your own life and your own motivations—How do you work? Are you pursuing success assuming that someday will bring happiness? Are you pursuing happiness looking for way to be successful while doing it? Are you getting both? And I would invite you to play around a little bit. Try doing something from the other camp and find out if that works for you.

If you’re a Type-A Personality Workaholic, skip a day of work, call in sick and do something that makes you happy, that’s meaningful, and that could be a taste of the life you could be living right now, maybe in exchange for money but maybe not. Because when you pursue happiness, you never know what kind of opportunities arise.

I am now one year into a three-year experiment of living my life to the extent that I can get my Type-A Personality to do so. I pursue the things that make me happy and have meaning. The bizarre part is my life is less predictable than ever before. The things I am getting involved with weren’t even on the radar screen a year-and-a-half ago, however, some of them are grander and more exciting than anything I could possibly have planned. Make a choice. Pursue success and find happiness or pursue happiness and find success. Either way you have a shot at both, but in one case you guarantee you will be happy.

Is Counting the Root of all Evil?

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The love of money isn’t the root of all evil; arithmetic is the root of all evil. More specifically, counting.

Don’t get me wrong; counting was a wonderful invention. It has its uses. We can keep track of kids: “Are all 5 kids here? Let’s see, 1… 2… 3… 4… where’s Billy?” We can keep track of time. “He’s working overtime in the salt mines, honey. Instead of 12 hours, he’s working 14 hours today. He’ll be home at … 9, 10. Yes, 10 p.m.” And we can keep track of money: “He gets paid $1.49/hour working overtime, so our bank balance will be $11.37 … $12.37 … $13.37 … $13.86 after Billy gives us his share.” In fact, they remind us over and over in MBA school that “What gets measured, gets managed.”

So where’s the problem? This is evil? This gave us the industrial-friggin’-revolution. This sounds great!!

We measure the wrong stuff

Well, the problem starts when we choose what to measure. We often measure what doesn’t lead to our goal, and expect the measuring to magically create the managing.

Want profit? Let’s count expenses. Tell all managers to submit weekly reports of their team’s expenses. Let’s call it a TPS Report, and count how many TPS reports people send, to make sure they’re doing their job (which has silently morphed from “running a profitable business” to “submitting TPS reports”). Well, whoopie. We’ve added a whole layer of useless counting, and then another layer to count who is and isn’t counting. Since we don’t actually know what to do with the silly TPS report, we slide further from profitability. We’re counting the wrong thing.

Or how about sick days? There’s a hoot. “You only get six sick days.” Nice. Like that’s controllable. If you’re sick for seven days, come on in and give it to everyone else in your department, so everyone has to take six days off. You can measure sick days, but the measure is useless.

Seemingly meaningful measurements … aren’t

Then we make up measurements that mean nothing and try to manage those. “Let’s rank our employees. Then we can fire the bottom 10%.” Sounds easy; isn’t easy. (Sadly, however, it is a much-publicized Jack Welch policy.) How much time will managers spend on this ranking exercise? Do they apply consistent standards that are directly related to the company’s goals? Do we fire the 10% of managers whose ranking skill is in the bottom 10%? Who decides that?

Ranking is hard. Really hard. In fact, in 1963, psychologist George Miller’s famous paper “The Magic Number 7 +/- 2” presented results showing people can make ranking distinctions between 5 to 9 items, and then we pretty much lose track. If you think you can accurately rank a 250-person department, you’re deluded and thus in the bottom 10%; it’s time to pack your bags.

Even if you can rank, can you use the rankings for action? We want to punt the bottom 10% of the company. We can’t really compare an accountant against a design engineer, so our fresh new Harriford MBA, Darren, suggests we eliminate 10% of each department. That will add up to 10% of the company.

But what if our 30 design engineers rock, while our 30 accountants all suck eggs? As a company, we want to fire six accountants (10% of 60 employees) and no design engineers. But firing 10% of each department means we leave three mediocre accountants standing, and three rockin’ design engineers out of work. That’s clearly wrong. But we get one benefit: we know Darren didn’t understand the logic of firing, so we know he’s in the bottom 10% and should be fired. Success! We have at least one confirmed cost savings from this exercise.

Measurement turns us evil

I know you’re asking: what in heaven’s name does this have to do with spirituality, morality, and/or the rest of our lives? (If you weren’t asking that, don’t worry, just go with the flow.)

Here’s where the evil comes in. We only measure so we can make decisions about those measurements and change our behavior. But we do this by judging the measurements as “good” or “bad.” When we’re measuring a “bad” trend, we panic. We’re afraid. We’re angry. We get frustrated, anxious, mean, jealous, violent, and nasty.

How do people act when they feel anxious, mean, jealous, violent, and nasty? Fortunately, we live in a Highly Evolved Society, so we meditate for five minutes, do some yoga, and we’re fine. NOT! Most people want to get rid of the bad feelings. Some fudge the numbers and play financial games. Think Enron. Some people hit something. Some people treat everyone around like crap. And some people blame.

Yes, they blame. They blame colleagues. “Sales are down! Sally distracted me so I lost the big prospect.” They blame loved ones. “I went over my sick day quota since I had to take Billy to treatment for his Black Lung disease.” They blame the government.”If it weren’t for the (Republicans/Democrats), (the economy/the occupation/global warming/life/love/happiness) would be better.” And they blame themselves. “I’m just a failure.”

All because they counted, then got emotionally wedded to the counting.

What counts and what doesn’t?

I’ve been talking so far about business, only not really. We count the wrong things in business, we count the wrong things in life. We go to pieces when our business counts go off-track, we go to pieces when our real-life counts go off-track. And remember, real life counts more. Where do you get caught in the counting?

Some of us count who’s done more housework, us or our spouse. Some of us count the dollars in our savings account. Some of us count what someone does to prove they love us. Some of us count how pious our neighbors are. It all turns into judgment, and from there, into emotion. When the counting is going the way we want, we think life is good. When the counting goes the other way, we get upset.

The upset is extra, though! It’s our reaction to the counting. The counting doesn’t cause the problem; it’s our stories about the counting that cause the problem.

Let’s fix this. Let counting be counting. Let emotion be emotion. All this score-keeping, counting, and measuring is made up. It’s all fantasy. It’s a convenient tool for making decisions. But it’s not real. And it’s certainly not worth turning yourself into an ogre, feeling horrible, and abusing yourself and your loved ones.

What if you count and discover your bank account isn’t high enough to send your kids to college? Don’t get upset. Use it as information and change your savings plan. But don’t beat yourself up. You can’t do anything for your kids that way, except set a bad example. Use the information to stay centered and work with the people you love to fix the situation.

What if you count and discover your spouse overcharged on the credit card? You can fly into a rage, or you can sit down with your spouse, love each other tremendously, and decide from that place how you’ll deal with the situation. I used the “fly-into-a-rage” method several times. It didn’t pay the bill, nor did it make me an attractive snuggle partner, even to our stuffed animals. The counting-as-information plus love-then-problem-solving works way better.

What if you count pounds, and discover you have more than you want? You can get depressed and eat a chocolate cake to help yourself feel better (Stever’s diet advice: learn to distinguish “sugar rush” from “feel better”). Or realize the number’s just information you can use to change your diet. If you’re going to diet, doing it from a place of fun makes it … well … more fun. And if you’re not going to diet, then at least enjoy the chocolate cake. But don’t let counting trick you into not-dieting, and also not enjoying the cake. That’s plain foolishness!

And what if you count and discover you’re not as rich as Darren, despite your superior skills? Or you’re not as rich as the goal you set at age 23? You can call yourself a failure and jump out of a plane without a parachute. That’s one solution. But maybe you can notice that a number is just a number, while you’re an entire human being who has much more to offer than a number.

Counting is optional. If you stop counting and look around, you just might find you’re warm, dry, full, and reading the web. And that’s not such a bad place to be. So count only when it’s useful, don’t take it too seriously, and feel good either way. Move your attention from counting to living. Put your attention on the things that make you feel happy, joyous, and grateful. If you must count, count those, and every day, count a little higher. It’s your life, and only you can make your counting count.

Overcoming your own change resistance

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Some change resistance is good. How about yours?

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Q: I am change-resistant. I know it, but it doesn’t help. Once I’ve decided to change something, I enjoy the challenge. But I often resist with “it won’t work because…” How do I know when I am simply resisting change or have a valid concern? You can always point out what can go wrong, and the change resistant-person (e.g. me) truly believes he or she is correct in their objection. – Suzanne

A: You’re in good company, Suzanne! Things change fast these days, yet success is built on resisting change. Yes, you heard right; results come from stability, dependability, focus, and persistence. In other words, the *change-resistance* that keeps us on-track day in and day out. Trust me, Fortune 500 companies rarely get there by embracing change. They innovate once (or get lucky), grow, then do everything they can to keep anyone from creating change that might topple them. Just watch ExxonMobile embracing change around global warming…

Change is hard, physically hard. Our brains grow neural pathways when we learn. Change means creating new paths, PLUS actively resisting our past learning. It’s way easier to invent reasons not to change, so we often do.

You know you’re knee-jerk resisting when you start with objections. Your points may be valid. Maybe. But starting with “No” shows resistance. If the objections come rapid-fire, that’s an even stronger signal. On your third “yes, but…” you’re driving from habit. Realize it. Pat yourself on the back for realizing it. Then stop.

(Try a rubber band around one wrist. When you hear yourself say “yes, but…” snap the rubber band lightly to remind yourself to shift gears.)

Next, just listen. Inside, think, “yes, AND…” Outside, say “Tell me more.” Listen, nod Yes, smile, and take notes. Agree to nothing. Just listen. Inside, object to your heart’s content; go wild. Outside, nod, smile, and write. Then say, “I’d like some time to think about this. Thank you.”

You listened, now think. Write down your objections. On paper, you’ll often find them less daunting than you thought. Once you’re done kvetching, list the possible benefits of the change.

Now, stretch your imagination; write down three or four possible futures that could come from the change. Explore positives and negatives about each one. For example, “If we move, we’ll have more Chinese restaurants that deliver. That means more romantic evenings at home. But then, we’ll bloat from the MSG, so we’ll need to buy a treadmill…” Be humorous. You’re not trying to predict the future; you’re just shaking up your thinking.

After this brainstorming, decide if you agree with the change. If not, you’ve thought enough to build a careful argument. Rather than a seeming nay-sayer, you’ll be a thoughtful contributor to the discussion. If you decide you like the change, psyche yourself up for the challenge and give it a go, full steam ahead!

Change-resistance is fine, if your reasons are good. By letting your knee-jerk response signal Time To Think, you can choose when to keep the status quo and when to act. Either way, you won’t respond willy-nilly; you’ll make a good decision from careful deliberation.

Producing powerful business results with NLP

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Using NLP at an organizational level

NLP business applications often suck. Well, maybe they’re not that bad, but all you hear about is rapport skills, predicate matching, and sometimes meta-programs. At best, they’re applied to getting people to play nice together, helping customers who call for help feel better, and convincing people to feel good buying stuff they don’t really need or want. NLP is a universal tool that can be used much more widely. It’s a tool for understanding, and a tool for making changes. Using an NLP mindset can lead to powerful business results, just as it leads to powerful personal results.

NLP Thinking Helps Fix Business Problems

NLP provides Practitioners techniques like Change History and Anchoring. As your skill increases, you start thinking in processes. You ask, “How does this person get their current results?” You elicit strategies and states, identify triggers, and choose interventions that change a person’s process.

Process thinking is like gold in business; few people do it well. Applying NLP thinking to business helps find the root cause of business problems. While a person is conveniently self-contained, a business is made of many people, so you’ll be doing your strategy elicitation by working with people and the relationships between them.

Imagine Miss Anne’s Department Store is losing business. Elicit MADS’s strategy for making money by asking, “What’s MADS’s strategy for getting a customer to buy?” Then trace the process step-by-step to find out where it fails. Your strategy elicitation will lead you through the entire organization:

First, MADS must get customers. This leads you to marketing. You ask customers how they heard of MADS. Everyone says, “on MADS’s 5 p.m. radio ad,” even though MADS advertises in 5 different places.

Next, customers visit the store, try on clothes, and buy or don’t buy. You notice people who try on the clothes return most of what they try on when they return from the fluorescent-lit dressing room.

Then, customers approach the cash register to pay. They walk up to an empty register, look around in puzzlement, and hunt through 3 departments to find the on-duty cashier. After a 10-minute wait, they reach the register.

Finally, customers pay. You notice that several want to pay by credit card, and are dismayed by MADS “cash-only” policy. Without sufficient cash, some customers return clothes to the racks.

We’ve just seen the business-equivalent of a strategy. Just as NLP strategies lead you to the intervention (“you’re yelling at yourself? Let’s turn the volume down!”), business strategies also suggest their own interventions. In this case, help the marketing department do a better job of attracting customers, replace the dressing room light bulbs with full-spectrum lighting, make sure cash registers are fully staffed, and accept credit cards.

NLP Helps Understand the Link Between Individuals and the Business

Once you’ve found the critical organizational process moments at the business level, you can search for the people at the heart of organizational issues. When people make decisions that set policy, those decisions get magnified into organizational behavior. For example, I worked with a COO candidate who made decisions too slowly for his CEO’s comfort. He liked making fully-informed decisions. Really fully-informed. Jam-packed-fully-informed. He could spend months gathering and analyzing data. Thus, the organization itself would slow until he made up his mind.

This executive’s personal decision-making strategy determined the entire organization’s speed! At this point, we could shift to “typical” NLP with the individual. Here, NLP came into play unpacking and revising his decision-making process. His decisions sped up, his organization’s decisions sped up, and he was eventually promoted to COO.

You’ll find this is not uncommon. Individual NLP skills can, indeed, help people in an organization get better at what they do. But when you combine individual NLP skills with NLP process thinking at an organizational level, you can find the organizational leverage points where a single change in the business or in a person can create lasting, significant business value.