If you feel you’re spinning your wheels and not getting closer to the things you really want, then you need to step back and be clear about the future. When we get real clarity around the outcomes we want, whether that is work or our life outside of work, we make better decisions about the behaviours we choose on a daily basis. In fact, research shows that when we are unclear about our ‘future selves’ we operate with a brain region reserved for thinking about other people instead of ourselves.

A simple research experiment measured people who were disciplined at keeping financial goals (savings targets) with people who were not. The one difference they found was that those who could achieve these long term goals had a clear picture of their ‘future self’. Accordingly when they thought of themselves in the future, they used a brain region corresponding to self-thought.

By contrast, when the researchers looked at those who couldn’t achieve the long term goal, they found the pictured their ‘future self’ with a slightly different brain region – one that is reserved for thinking about other people.

When we are unclear about our future, we don’t even treat our future self as being us. This has incredible impacts on the decisions we make. If it’s not us in the future, we don’t seem to be as accountable for the decisions we make.

People often ask me if we can build up a tolerance to stress. They reason that if we can subject ourselves to high levels of stress as much as possible, then we should be able to perform better under high stress situations because we become immune to it. The answer is no. But here are three things that can at least make it better.

If we are talking about extreme levels of stress – situations that are high intensity, long duration, and uncontrollable – then unfortunately we don’t become immune. In fact the opposite can actually happen and we become hyper-sensitive.

When we are repeatedly subject to a situation or stimulus, we find that generally there are two physiological options: the reaction either becomes desensitized to the stimulus or it becomes habituated.

If you go and live in a warm climate for a number of months, then usually what you find is that you desensitize to the temperature. What felt hot when you arrived three months ago doesn’t actually feel that bad now.

Habituation works the opposite way. If you took a job in a call centre, and every time the phone rang you had to push two buttons to take the call, after a year, we would find that this response hadn’t dulled, but in fact would have become more automatic. You might even find that if you are sitting at home and the phone rings you have this automatic response to to push the two buttons. The reaction has habituated.

In many cases the response to prolonged, high intensity, uncontrollable stress does exactly that – it habituates. The stress response becomes so ingrained and so well trained that it becomes triggered by even the smallest resemblance of a stressful situation. Just like the ringing of the phone puts the ‘push a button’ response into action, the slightest hint of stress can put the stress response into action.

The most famous example of this is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in soldiers who have returned from duty. The unpredictable, high intensity, long duration of stress on the battlefield has so well trained their stress response that it only takes a car backfiring or a bad dream to put that stress reaction into full action.

The equivalent in the workplace is that people under intense stress for a long period of time cannot perform. Like the PTSD soldier, they make mistakes, they become incredibly risk-averse and they resort to ‘survival’ behaviours. We also put thru health at extreme risk if stress related illness, they lose focus and become de-motivated and possibly depressed.

If you are managing your people through a period of uncertainty and high stress (lets face it, who isnt?) Then here are some things to remember:

Controllable stress is not the same as controllable stress

Even though there are things that people have no control over at all, the main thing to realize is that it’s perception of control that really matters. Make sure that people have clear plans for how to succeed in the current environment – plans give us a great sense of control. Also give people autonomy where possible – even autonomy over small things makes a difference.

Social Support is critical

It may sound like whining, but people do need an outlier to talk about hoe frustrated they are and sometimes how hard it is. Create bonds within your team and allow the team to vent every now and then. Follow this up with some action planning to show people that there are things they can be doing to make it better.

Consistency combats insecurity

Try to find things that you can consistently do or focus on. In uncertain times, people look for consistency wherever they can get it. Keep your goals consistent and make some actions and behaviours consistent as well.

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.

More than merely annoying, rude behaviour is a catalyst for aggression and decreased productivity. When an employee is getting on everyone’s nerves, too many managers are too quick to say “oh, that’s just him”…. especially when it’s a star performer.

Addressing behaviour is one of the hardest things that leaders have to do. We don’t like calling out behaviours – generally because it can be pretty subjective and the ‘rules’ are a little ambiguous. But some new research might make you think again about accepting a team member’s rudeness.

Professor Ido Erev, a specialist in behaviour explored the effect of rudeness. Simply, he asked students to turn up to an office to take a test. Outside the door of the office, obscured by a million post it notes, was a small sign that said “test moved to another location”. Most students, unable to locate or read the sign, walked into the office anyway, interrupting a lecturer. The lecturer did one of two things: they either turned on the student saying things like “are you stupid? Can’t you read?” or else they pleasantly told the student of their mistake, and pointed them in the right direction.

Down the hall, in the new location, the students took a problem solving test (this is what they thought the experiment was about). The results were astonishing: the students who were treated rudely scored significantly worse in the test than those who were treated pleasantly.

But here’s another impact. The students also did a classic creativity test – in two minutes, they had to think of as many uses as possible for a brick. Those who were treated rudely concocted far more aggressive uses for the brick than those who weren’t, including smashing windows, using it as a weapon, and weighing down a dead body in a river!!

So next time you hear complaints about rude or unfair behaviour amongst your team, think twice about looking the other way. You just never know how big the impact is to those around you. You might even find yourself on the wrong end of a brick.

Should You Control Your Emotions Or Not?

How do you keep a lid on your emotions?  You actually shouldn’t.  Now, I am not saying that you should go ballistic at every chance you get.  That wouldn’t be helpful at all.  Last time I yelled at just about anyone I cared about things went badly.  But suppressing emotions is probably the worst thing that you can do if you want to maintain healthy relationships and perform at your best in the office.

Hard Work

Eveyone will agree that when we try to keep our emotions deep inside and don’t let people see them, it takes a lot of mental effort. Sometimes an extreme amount.  And that mental effort could be used elsewhere like controlling our behaviour, cognitive performance like problem solving and decision making, and also remembering things – holding things in short term memory.  You see all of these things (including suppressing emotions) takes place in the same area of the brain and if you are burning fuel doing one thing, then chances are you won’t have any fuel left to do some of the others.

We also know that the stress on people around us is dramatic.  There is evidence to suggest that people who have to watch someone suppressing their emotions show elevated levels of stress hormones and stress reactions.

So what can you do?

What can you do without getting into serious trouble?  If bottling them up doesn’t work and expressing them relentlessly doesn’t work either, what then?

Well it seems that one of the best ways to deal with negative emotions (or even extreme positive emotion that might be clouding your ability to perform) is to name it.  This method is called labeling and it seems to switch on our brain’s handbrake – the part that stops circuits from repeating themselves.  If you can say what the emotion is – succinctly – then it seems the emotion starts to suppress itself.  A recent study also found the same result when people wrote about their emotions and anxiety before having to perform.  Those emotions were lessened.

Don’t go too far….

The only caveat that seems to be in place is that you have to make sure that you do this succinctly.  Wallow too much in your own negative feelings and you are bound to make them worse.  And anyway, no one wants to listen to you whine…..not even yourself.

How the things we say belie our efforts

I am doing some research for a new book on creating the environment for people to thrive. Along the way, we have been looking at the reasons that people succeed on an individual level and the overwhelming amount of research (as I am sure most of you will know) points to self-regulation as the common denominator.

Self-regulation: the key to success?

What is self-regulation? I’m glad you asked (well, I asked), because the definitions are pretty vague and general. But we can safely say that, broadly, self-regulation involves being able to regulate your behaviours – to stop doing the things you shouldn’t do and also have the discipline to do the things that are best for you, even if it involves some short term discomfort.

And central to this argument is that we choose our own behaviours, because if we aren’t responsible and accountable for them, then we have no chance of self-regulating. The research in particular by Martin Seligman, which is dated but still incredibly relevant, and the famous ‘marshmallow experiments’ by Mischel** shows this in an entertaining and enlightening way.

**(If you haven’t seen the ‘marshmallow experiments’ they gave children the choice of taking one marshmallow, in front of them, right now, or wait and get more marshmallows. Those who waited (self-regulated) tested higher in almost every measurement of success in their early adult life).

What does this have to do with language?

What we say can sabotage our ability to succeed

Think about the language that many people use. It actually runs counter to these foundations of success. You hear people use the following phrases mainly when they are feeling out of control. Here are just a few that come to mind:

“If only I had/did/could…..”
This is really saying “I’d like to be able to do this, but because something isn’t in place for me, it ain’t gonna happen. So I might as well just wait until this thing falls into place because then I will be able to perform/succeed.”

A mentor of mine once told me that losers say “if only this happened…I would perform” winners say “only if I do this….will I perform.”

“He makes me angry”
When people say this, they are telling themselves that they are not in control of their emotions. Think about it….he MAKES me angry. Did he really make you angry? Of course not. He did x, and you got angry. Big difference. This is disturbing because I hear myself say it to my children sometimes.

“You make me so angry sometimes!” I should say, “When you push your brother down the stairs, I get angry.” Poor example but you get the picture.

“I have to go to work/the gym/my mother-in-law’s”
You don’t have to do anything. I used to say this to athletes all the time. “you don’t have to turn up to training; you don’t have to run this drill……..but if you don’t you have to live with the consequences.”

If we indeed choose all of our behaviours, then you choose to do all of these things. “I am going to……” or “I choose to……” would be a better option.

“I can’t do it”
This gives you no choice. If you can’t do it, you can’t do it. No point in trying anymore. The correct answer would sound like “I don’t know how to do it yet” or even “I don’t know how to do it”. Even this hints at the fact that you have options – you can learn.

Are these just excuses?
The funny thing is that all of these phrases excuse us from doing our best, in any zones of performance. The reason we say them is because it makes us feel better about not doing the thing we know we should be doing. It gives us a reason not to do it.

We all have the ability to self-regulate and therefore the ability to perform at our best in any situation. Maybe it just starts with the things that we say.