We all do it. And usually to our own detriment.

There’s not necessarily a pattern: sometimes the task is too hard, sometimes too boring. Sometimes it’s too big or other times it’s too trivial. Whatever the case, there are two real explanations for why we procrastinate.  One is changeable and the other isn’t.

The unchangeable reason: we are wired to be lazy

Human beings have an inbuilt, hard wired tendency to do the easiest thing. This is an evolutionary throwback and one of our most useful survival mechanisms. Our need to survive taught us to preserve energy. After all, you don’t want to be attacked by a saber-toothed tiger (or another human) only to find out that your fuel tank is empty and you are unable to run away or put up a good fight.

For this reason we found ways to save energy physically. For instance, we found an optimal walking speed that allowed us to cover a good distance but which also left us with enough in reserve to run or fight if we needed to. Likewise, we also saved energy mentally by doing the easier thing. We still do this today – given the choice between two things our overwhelming tendency is to do the thing that requires the least energy. This natural tendency is impossible to change, but you can fool it – which is the topic for another post.

The Changeable reason: we get a buzz

The first thing that weed to know here is that patterns of behaviour are reinforced by a chemical called dopamine. Whether it is a physical skill like swinging a golf club or a behaviour like your child tidying up their room, or even a pattern of thinking, the circuits for all of these things are strengthened by this same chemical. Dopamine is also called the reward chemical – it is responsible for the good feeling we get when we get something we like. This is the mechanical reason that positive reinforcement reinforces patterns of behaviour.

But why do we get a reward response when we choose not to do something? Especially when it’s detrimental down the track? Well, every time we decide to do the easier thing, we can internally relax a little. We get that little omens of ‘phew! Now I don’t have to do that hard thing’ and that is what creates the dopamine rush.

So the unfortunate reality is that procrastination re forces procrastination. It gives us a little dopamine reward and therefore reinforces the behaviour for next time.

How do we stop this from happening? Here are two things you can do

1)    Reward the harder thing.

Plan a small reward for doing the harder thing – this might be a quick trip to the coffee shop or reading an article that you’ve saved and haven’t had a chance to get to. It’s important to set up the reward first because the expectation of reward produces dopamine. This way the dopamine is for doing the harder thing rather than the easier thing

2)    Set a short time limit to get the harder thing done.

Take a stopwatch or use the countdown timer on your smartphone and set it for no more than 60mins. Set yourself a target of completing the task (or part of the task if it will take longer that this) and then press the start button. This creates a sense of immediate deadline and produces both adrenalin and dopamine in small amounts. Again the dopamine is for the harder thing rather than the easier thing. It’s important to use a timer rather than just looking at the clock. The clock doesn’t give the same sense of urgency.

There are others things we can do to beat procrastination. Try these simple ones first and then we’ll deal wit some others in a later post.

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.

Why Should People Believe Your Vision?

We’ve talked about making a Vision emotional and memorable. We now move to making it credible. If it’s not credible, then people won’t put in the effort.

This draws a fine line: you want to stretch and inspire people, but you also want them to believe that what you say is possible. People are willing to put in superior effort for something that they really believe in, but once you tip that into the impossible, then all effort evaporates and you end up looking just plain stupid.

If Usain Bolt’s coach says “I think you can run 9.42 seconds for the one hundred metre dash, he trains his butt of, but if the coach says “I think you can run 7.31 seconds, Usain probably starts looking for another coach.

So how do we make sure it’s credible? Well, apart from just making sure that you set something that is within their reach, there are a few other tactics that you can employ.

Here are three.

1) Show Evidence

Why is it possible? People don’t mind being stretched if you can show them the plan. Sony said they wanted to ‘put a radio in your pocket’; Apple’s original plan was to put ‘1000 songs in a matchbox’; JFK said that the American people could “put a man on the moon”. These things sounded incredulous at the time, but people got behind them and made them happen. They believed in them.

And part of the reason they believed was because the leaders had a credible plan. They could see the steps involved and they could make a logical connection. Better yet, where possible, ask your people to come up with their own plan. They might just see the logic and be inspired.

2) Why this time?

Why should people believe that this time is going to be any different? This is a difficult challenge to surmount. Firstly, most employees are conditioned to believe that whatever new vision/mission/strategy you formulate really doesn’t mean anything. Unfortunately, too many managers say things are going to be different – but they rarely are. The big idea gets put in a drawer and everyone goes back to business as usual.

The only way to overcome this sort of apathy is to constantly show, through action and communication, that you are serious. Remember, it takes about 1000 repetitions to form a new habit, so changing people’s perceptions is a similar undertaking.

The other challenge to overcome is if a similar vision has been implemented in the past and failed. Why would it be different this time? In this case, showing the evidence (and possibly a sense of urgency) is the means by which you can show people that it truly is different this time.

3) Show them through stories

Whatever your Vision, you will find that you already have people who are displaying the behaviours that will help achieve it. Whether it’s an employee that is showing exceptional customer service commitment, or someone that has challenged the status quo and made the company a better place, these stories do two important things:

Firstly, they show people that it’s possible. People can listen to these and say “hey, they did it, so can I – maybe it’s not that hard.” Secondly, they give concrete parameters about what you expect to see from people in order to achieve the Vision. They positively reinforce the behaviours that you hope for.

There are many reasons why a Vision will fail. But if you do some of these things, you increase your chances of success dramatically. Make your Vision emotional, memorable and credible.

This is the third in the series on creating a Vision that means something.

For Part One “Vision, Emotion and the Five Million Dollar Question“ – click here

For Part Two “Times Table, Humiliation and Two Tips for an Emotional Vision“ – click here

Last week my wife was sick. So it was up to me to look after the kids (lunches, school drop off, pick up, organise activities for the ones not at school etc). But I also had a couple of impending deadlines that I had to meet. I juggled this for four days, and felt pretty proud of myself. However, when my wife finally rose from her sick bed (and I told her how easy her job was – big mistake), she pointed out that I hadn’t done a lot of things she usually does: Namely the washing and grocery shopping.

It wasn’t that I didn’t think these things were important, or that I didn’t really have time – I just didn’t ‘see’ them. With all the other stuff going on, these things didn’t even get my attention, so they didn’t get done.

Our actions are the sum of what we pay attention to.

If we pay attention to the right things, and shut out distractions (the wrong things) we end up choosing the most productive behaviours. If we attend to the wrong things, the opposite happens.

Those domestic chores weren’t front of mind because they weren’t going to affect me that week, and they hadn’t affected me before. I didn’t pay attention to them.

Vision Front of Mind

In many ways, a Vision acts the same way for people. If the Vision is front of mind, we find ways to affect it more often. We look for opportunities to contribute, we find time to do things that actively help us work towards it. If it isn’t front of mind, it ends up like the washing – with no attention and therefore no effort.

In the last post, we discussed how to make a Vision appeal to emotion – thereby making it somewhat memorable. Here are two other tips keep it front of mind:

1)   It needs to be short

If your Vision is more than a couple of sentences, then it is not going to be memorable. There is enough research to suggest that we only remember about 4-7 bits of information (words, numbers etc) at any given point in time. For a Vision – the shorter the better

2)   Hang it on something people already know

In their breakthrough book “Made to Stick” the Heath brothers mention that information is easier to process if it attaches to something we already know.

Their example is in the description of a fruit called the ‘polemo’. The first explanation talks about the rind, the colour, the flesh etc and it gives you a certain interpretation. The second, more effective explanation merely says “a polemo is basically a supersized grapefruit with a very thick and soft rind.” Much easier.

If we can attach the Vision to things that people already know, we capitalise on current interpretations

3)   Make it sound familiar

An extension of #2 above, the more you can make the vision sound like something they already know, the better. Think of current slogans, proverbs and popular culture and then try to design your vision to sound somewhat like those.

This is Part II in our series on creating a Vision that means something. See the related posts below for the others

We want people to remember our vision, right?

Well it pays to understand exactly what we remember and why. Think about these two things that I am sure you have no trouble remembering: 1) the equation 3×3=9, and 2) a time in your life when you were humiliated.

How do we learn?

Whether it is memory or motor skills, learning is the result of something called Long Term Potentiation (LTP). Very simply, as we learn (say, 3×3=9) we build a ‘pattern’ of neural activity, which is essentially an electrical current. Now, at first this electrical current travels slowly – we may need to count 3×3 on our fingers – like the ‘wires’ don’t carry the signal too well. But eventually 3×3=9 becomes automatic and at this point the ‘wires’ seem to become super-conductive and the electrical signal literally races along the neurons. This is learning – or LTP – the neural pattern for a certain memory or behaviour is so well trained that it happens automatically. And it only takes place when the electrical signal is ‘strong’ enough.

There are two ways that this electrical signal becomes ‘strong’ enough.

Firstly, the signal itself may not be that strong, but if it happens over and over again, the cumulative effect can be strong enough. Take the case of 3×3=9. Why do you remember it? Because you have heard it so many times. While the signal isn’t that strong, the cumulative strength of hearing it over and over again is.

The other way is if the signal is so great that LTP happens immediately. For a signal to be this strong, it needs to be tied to an emotional signal. While 3×3=9 is not emotional, that humiliating event definitely was. So, although that event hasn’t happened over and over again (I hope), you still remember it vividly.

The Vision that you want people to remember needs to have the same components: it needs to be repeated often and it needs to be emotional, which is what I’m dealing with in this post.

How do we make a Vision appeal to emotion? Here are two tips:

1)     Create an Imbalance

Most theories of motivation and behaviour propose that all behaviour and learning is the result of an imbalance between what we currently have and what we would ideally like to have. For the majority of workers, there is no imbalance – they are quite happy going about their work everyday.

To create an imbalance, we need to contrast what their position is currently, versus what it could be in the future. Painting a picture, and a contrast, between the current state and the potential future state is a surefire way to create an emotional response.

We all like to hold onto our positive self-perceptions and when we see a better alternative to what we have now, we are pulled in that direction.

One caveat – the future state has to reflect something that your staff actually wants.

2)     Use common language

Consider these two differing statements that I heard recently at a management retreat:

a) “We set high business outcomes for our clients and we deliver on those expectations in a timely and complete manner”

Does that inspire you? Probably not. Now consider this alternative:

b) “We do what we say we’re going to do”

The second option actually makes you feel something and one of the reasons is that it uses common language. Or more accurately because it doesn’t use business-speak.

The problem with humans is that we have competing parts of our brains for emotions and logic. If you’ve ever had an emotional argument and left thinking: “I had so many great retorts, but I couldn’t think of them!” then you know this is true.  In fact, it is impossible for us to switch on our Limbic System (emotions) at the same time as our Pre-Frontal Cortex (analysis and logic).

Business-speak forces us to analyse. It makes us turn on the analytical part of our brain and this switches off the emotional part. A Vision with too much analytical language literally forces people to switch off emotionally.

To create a Vision that means something, you have to go out on a limb. That is why it is so hard. Go out on a limb to create something that means something emotionally to your people, set a path for something better, and go out on a limb and sound like a normal person instead of a manager.

The biggest negative impact on performance is an attitude of pessimism. And not many things make a bigger impact on our attitude than the language that we use. When we treat adversity as PERMANENT (“this always happens to me”), PERVASIVE (“this is going to ruin my whole day”) and PERSONAL (“this happened because I’m no good”), then we set ourselves up for pessimism and poor performance. When we use language that is Temporary, Specific and External, we start to make a difference.

This is based on the groundbreaking work of Martin Seligman who continues to get amazing outcomes using his methods.

Let’s break this down for a second and look at the alternatives:

PERMANENT vs TEMPORARY

“This always happens to me.” This essentially says that there is no use in trying to change it because it will always happen.

“This doesn’t usually happen. I wonder if there’s a way I can change it next time.” This actually puts some optimism in the conversation and forces us to look for ways to change the future outcome.

PERVASIVE vs SPECIFIC

“This is going to ruin my whole day” This puts you in a terrible mood and often makes associations based on flawed logic. Just because you got a bad phonecall in the morning, doesn’t mean that the whole day is going to be ruined.

“Oh, well, this will create some other opportunities” This language puts us on the lookout for a positive event and stops us using the negative perception as an anchor for future events

PERSONAL vs EXTERNAL:

“This happened because I’m no good” This deals, like the other language, in absolutes. If you are no good, then what’s the point in trying? This will keep happening regardless of what you do, so you don’t bother doing anything different.

“I wasn’t able to do that because I didn’t have the skills for that situation”. Now, this is something changeable. If you don’t have the skills then you can acquire them. It can be different in the future.