Discipline. It’s a trait that might make us more successful at anything we do. Whether you are aprofessional athlete needing to put 100% into every training session, or a working mum needing to keep your cool with your kids (and husband) after a taxing day at work, or a staff member who has to get a monthly report in on time, discipline will undoubtedly help you in everything you do.

In fact, there are some famous experiments by Walter Mischel called the ‘Marshmallow Experiments’ that highlight the necessity of this trait. Simply, the research involved children sitting in a room with a marshmallows in front of them. The researcher told them that he had to leave for a while and that they could have one marshmallow only, but if they waited for him to return before eating any marshmallows, then they could have two. The particular results of the experiment weren’t terribly astonishing – some children were able to hold out, while others weren’t (there’s a good article in the New Yorker).

But the surprising results came years later when the subjects were followed up during their schooling. The data showed, without a doubt, that those who were able to hold out for the second marshmallow were the exact same people who showed the greatest academic success. This discipline wasn’t just useful for resisting lollies – it was useful for academic performance as well.

This has been shown time and time again, most notably by Malcolm Gladwell in his best selling book, Outliers.

So, are we born with discipline and self-control or can it be trained? Let’s look at one of the most brutal forms of discipline to find out.

Meditation is hard. It involves shutting out all distractions and thinking about nothing. In some ways, thinking about nothing seems easy, but paradoxically, keeping our neurons and cells completely at rest requires a tremendous amount of energy. Doing and thinking nothing is one of the hardest things to do. It’s easier to day dream (in terms of energy expenditure) than it is to do nothing.

But we know that we can train meditation ability. The ability to hold our full attention on being completely still mentally and physically. Even small amounts of practice greatly increase people’s ability to pay attention and physically increase the size of the brain region devoted to controlling emotions and attention. So it’s possible.

But beyond meditation, what are the things that help build self-control and discipline?

Well, like it or not you do this every day – or you don’t. Every day, most likely hourly, we train ourselves for either self-control or to give in to our whims. Here are some examples:

• You procrastinate instead of doing something productive
• You commit to something like getting up to go to the gym, or to hand in a project by a certain date and then you skip it
• You only do 90% of something that you could complete right now
• You use the last 15 minutes of your day to do mundane things to kill the time rather than start a really important piece of work

When you do each of these things, you condition yourself to do the easier thing. It becomes self-reinforcing because the immediate good feeling you get (staying in bed, letting yourself ‘off the hook’, doing easy things) produces a dopamine response (signaling reward), which reinforces the behaviour.

So, can we train discipline? Absolutely. We do it every day even when we don’t realize it. The more often we practice the better we get – don’t wait only for the big moments to practice self-control, do it every hour of every day.

Of all the things that helps us perform at our peak, the most effective is still getting a good night’s sleep. When we sleep, we re-charge the brain and body, consolidate learning and neutralise stress chemicals. You need 7-8 hours sleep a night to be most effective.

Although some people think that they can get by on less sleep than this, the research suggests that if we get only 5 hours sleep, 3-4 nights in a row, it has the equivalent effect of staying up for 24 hours straight. This sort of sleep deprivation has a terrible effect on our cognitive ability, our physical endurance and our immune system. It is actually comparable to being legally drunk!

Here are some tips for getting a good night’s sleep:

• Have a pre-bed routine – try to do the same things in the 30-40mins prior to going to bed
• Go to sleep at roughly the same time every night – this helps establish a pattern
• Get up at the same time every morning – this is even more important than going to sleep at the same time
• Try warm milk or chamomile tea to help you relax prior to bed
• Write out tomorrow’s important to-do’s – this will help to free your mind

There isn’t a magic bullet for performance, but a good night’s sleep is pretty close

I was talking with a client the other day. For the last few weeks we’d been discussing the (under) performance of one of his team and what it would take to get her back on track. The client had tried a number of strategies and was frustrated. This meeting started really well when he told me that the team member had completely turned things around. The obvious question was ‘what did you do?’

“I yelled at her.”

Now, if you’re like me and your life revolves around managing people and trying to get the best out of them, then you probably just got that sinking feeling in your stomach – the same way I did when my client said this directly to my face. But after some deliberation, I couldn’t help but wonder:

Have we gone too far in trying to nurture our staff? Do we mother them too much and wrap them up in bubble wrap because we’re so keen to engage them and so worried about losing them?

I know that many people say the same thing about the way we raise our kids these days, so you can’t help but wonder – are they right?

Now, I’m not necessarily condoning this, or yelling, but I’m just asking the question, so let’s look for the positives in getting angry at our staff. And I can think of only one – but it’s a big one.

Evolution has primed us to form our greatest memories with negative emotions and fearful situations.

Our limbic system (the ‘emotional’ system) is very densely linked to the hippocampus, which is responsible for coding long-term memories. Now, this logically means that any high emotional state would have a direct impact on memories, but because the emotional system has a stronger reaction to negative emotions than positive ones, it is the negative emotion that creates the most vivid memories. This is quite possibly the explanation as to why we can all remember where we were and what we were doing – vividly – when something catastrophic happens – the Twin Towers or JFK’s assassination for example.

So, maybe, just maybe, when we stay calm, and gently coach people – and, dare I say it, coddle them when we are trying to correct their behaviour – maybe we are doing them an injustice because the memory won’t be as profound about the mistake they’ve made.

Once again, I’m not condoning the behaviour. I’m just trying to think about it objectively. I know this will probably polarize some people, but maybe it’ll also stir up some thought.

Maybe there’s a time, every now and then, when being angry is the most useful tool we can use.

What do you think?

There are many different philosophies around working at your peak. One of these involves focusing on your strengths. But what would happen if you got a promotion and all of a sudden those weaknesses became a whole lot more important? Well, you’d just work on them when the time came, right? Not so fast.

Focussing on your strengths is a great idea, but the other side to this strategy is using compensation or avoidance strategies to combat your weaknesses. That is, being able to avoid situations that show your weaknesses or using compensating by using alternate skills.

Why avoidance strategies don’t work

The inherent problem in this strategy is that you will never get better at the things you can’t do, and the reality is that, at some stage you’ll be faced with the need to use these weak skills.

Behaviour research and learning shows us that if we don’t use a certain neural circuit – a certain skill for instance – that skill doesn’t just lie dormant, to be activated if and when we need it, it actually disappears.

Use it or lose it

In his landmark book on plasticity, The Brain that Changes Itself, Norman Doidge reflects on one of the early, definitive experiments that showed what takes place when we don’t use a certain skill.

In this particular experiment, subjects were blindfolded and the researchers observed what happened to the ‘visual’ part of the brain by an increase in the use of ‘touch’ instead of vision. Over a period of days, the part of the brain devoted to processing visual information started to become activated by ‘touching’ things. The skill that we weren’t using ‘disappeared’ – the area of the brain devoted to this decreased – while the skill that we were using repetitively  – touch – started to take over this area so that more of the brain could be used for processing this information.

So what this tells us is that when we don’t use certain skills or behaviours, not only do get de-activated, they actually get taken over by something we are doing more and more of. If you only focus on your strengths, those strengths will take up more neurons, while the brain region devoted to the weak skill, if never used, might disappear altogether. If you need to activate this, it might not just be difficult, it might be impossible.

So, while focusing on your strengths is a pretty good idea, we also need to focus on doing the things that we aren’t so good at. As we build these circuits we become better and more efficient, and we stop our current habits and strengths from becoming the only ‘tools’ we can use.

The simple rule is that when you practice, you actually get better. But when it comes to multitasking (or technically, task-switching) we find the exception to the rule.

The accepted wisdom is that as we have become accustomed to the information age and the influx, overload and immediacy of this information, we have developed skills to cope effectively. We are becoming better at managing a number of separate tasks all at once, with more efficiency, controlling our attention between multiple activities.

This is wrong.

New research shows that people who are heavy multitaskers don’t actually get bet at multitasking, but they do get better at something – getting distracted. Heavy multitaskers are prone to getting more distracted by irrelevant information than those who don’t multitask as much.

While it seems that we’re practicing multitasking, what we’re really practicing is getting distracted. This is more evidence that we need to focus on completing one thing at any given point in time.

Here are some tips for maintaining focus:

• Be clear about the most important thing you need to do at any point in time
• Turn off your email alerts on your computer AND your phone. For those brave enough, divert your telephone if you need intense focus
• Don’t be afraid to close the door to your office for an hour or two when you really need to knuckle down
• If you work in a cubicle or open plan office, have a signal for when you’re working flat out – put your headphones in or something similar (even if you’re not playing music)
• Talk to your team about this so everyone’s on the same page

Multitasking has been proven time and again to impair productivity, increase error rate and increase time on the primary task. But still we do it and, worse, we might even expect it of our staff.

Another argument against multitasking come from neuroplasticity. It seems that we only really embed behavioural change when we focus on an activity with full attention. When we just ‘go through the motions’ and get distracted, the behavioural re-wiring is only temporary.

Stop multitasking, start focusing.

“Your job as a manager is to make yourself redundant.”

It’s an old line that has helped inspire many leaders to manage their teams in such a way that they, as a leader, are not really needed anymore. The team can run itself and the leader can happily go on holidays without a care that the team will be in great shape when they return.

However, I recently spoke with a manager who does not believe in empowering his staff at all. And I was quite surprised to find out that he had come back from a holiday and found that the team had functioned terrifically.  That’s when I learned of the shortcut he had taken.

There are two ways to make sure that your team can run by itself. You can help them achieve Autonomy or you can force them to be Automatic. There is an enormous difference.

The Automatic team is so well drilled that they don’t put a foot wrong. They are like a well-oiled machine and will do the same thing over and over again without so much as a mistake. These teams can work well without a leader – all they need is for someone to wind them up and go. But what is the expense?

The Automatic team is great for tasks that require auto-pilots. However, if they have to solve an out-of-the-ordinary problem or give a client special attention, or if something out of left field goes wrong, they are toast. These teams don’t really have the ability to do anything outside of the norm. They wince at the need for abstract thinking and cannot make decisions by themselves. In short, they have been so well drilled that they become fearful of doing something different. ‘Correct’ is so well defined that they are paralysed at the thought of doing something ‘incorrect’.

On the other hand the Autonomous team will thrive in this kind of environment. They are empowered to make decisions that will greatly benefit the team and have no hesitation in problem solving and choosing the correct path, even when thrown a curve-ball. Even if they are in an auto-pilot task, they will look for ways to improve and try new approaches to get things done.

Autonomy and Automatic are mutually exclusive. If you have shown your team that there is only one right way, then you miss out on the potential benefits that your team members can bring. However, there are probably also times to be Automatic – especially when under enormous pressure or following a strict protocol. Be sure to understand which one your team will benefit from the most and then strive to make it happen.