Dr. Heidi Grant

You Won’t Stick To Your Diet – Unless You Know These 3 Facts About Willpower

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Most of our New Year’s resolutions have one thing in common: resisting temptation.  Trying to ignore the powerful allure of the forbidden cigarette, doughnut, or latest budget-blowing buying impulse requires willpower.  You might expect very successful people, who presumably have boatloads of willpower, to be particularly good at not giving in.  But if anything, they seem to be even more susceptible to temptation than the rest of us.   Quick – name a famous or powerful person that doesn’t have a well-known weakness for something.   I’ll wait.

Having the willpower to govern a country, yet lacking the willpower to resist cigarettes or french fries may seem like a contradiction, but it actually isn’t, according to research on the nature of self-control.  So if you want this to be the year that you finally stop smoking, slim down, or stick to your budget, it’s a good idea to start by understanding how willpower really works.

Your capacity for self-control is not unlike the muscles in your body.   Like biceps or triceps, willpower can vary in its strength, not only from person to person, but from moment to moment. Just as well-developed biceps sometimes get tired and jelly-like after a strenuous workout, so too does your willpower “muscle.”

Even everyday actions like decision-making or trying to make a good impression can sap this valuable resource, as can coping with the stresses of your career and family.  When you tax it too much at once, or for too long, the well of self-control strength runs dry.   It is in these moments that the doughnut wins.

So the first thing you are going to want to do, if you are serious about resisting temptation, is make peace with the fact that your willpower is limited.  If you’ve spent all your self-control handling stresses at work, you will not have much left at the end of the day for sticking to your resolutions.  Think about when you are most likely to feel drained and vulnerable, and make a plan to keep yourself out of harm’s way.  Be prepared with an alternate activity or a low-calorie snack, whichever applies.

Also, don’t try to pursue two goals at once that each require a lot of self-control if you can help it.  This is really just asking for trouble. For example, studies show that people who try to quit smoking while dieting, in order to avoid the temporary weight gain that often accompanies smoking cessation, are more likely to fail at both enterprises than people who tackle them one at a time.

The good news is, willpower depletion is only temporary.  Give your muscle time to bounce back, and you’ll be back in fighting form and ready to say “no” to any doughnuts that come your way.  When rest is not an option, recent research shows that you can actually speed up your self-control recovery, or give it a boost when reserves are low, simply by thinking about people you know who have lot of self-control.   (Thinking about my impossibly self-possessed mother does wonders for me when I’m about to fall off the no-cheesecake wagon.)

Or, you can try giving yourself a pick-me-up.  I don’t mean a cocktail – I mean something that puts you in a good mood.  (Again, not a cocktail – it may be mood-enhancing, but alcohol is definitely not willpower-enhancing).    Anything that lifts your spirits should also help restore your self-control strength when you’re looking for a quick fix.

The other way in which willpower is like a muscle (and the really great news for those of us trying to lose a few pounds) is that it can be made stronger over time, if you give it regular workouts.  Recent studies show that daily activities such as exercising, keeping track of your finances or what you are eating – or even just remembering to sit up straight every time you think of it – can strengthen your capacity for self-control.  For example, in one study, people who were given free gym memberships and stuck to a daily exercise program for two months not only got physically healthier, but also smoked fewer cigarettes, drank less alcohol, and ate less junk food.  They were better able to control their tempers, and less likely to spend money impulsively.  They didn’t leave their dishes in the sink, didn’t put things off until later, and missed fewer appointments. In fact, every aspect of their lives that required the use of willpower improved dramatically.

So if you want to build more willpower, start by picking an activity (or avoiding one) that fits with your life and your goals – anything that requires you to override an impulse or desire again and again, and add this activity to your daily routine.  It will be hard in the beginning, but it will get easier over time if you hang in there, because your capacity for self-control will grow.

Armed with an understanding of how willpower works, and how you can get your hands on some more of it, there’s no reason why this can’t be the year that you cross those troublesome resolutions off your list for good.

(For more on tips on building willpower and resisting temptation, check out my new book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals)

Five Ways to Increase Your Productivity

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From HRM Today

You just have too much on you plate.  Chances are, your employees do as well.  You suspect that you could all be making better use of your time, completing more projects and achieving more goals.  You want to be more productive, and to help your team be more productive, but you aren’t sure where to start.

You are far from alone in your confusion. Even the most successful, highly accomplished people have difficulty pinpointing why they are so productive.  The intuitive answer – that you are born predisposed to having the intelligence, creativity, and willpower to get the job done – is really just one small piece of the puzzle.  In fact, decades of research on achievement suggests that successful people reach more of their goals not simply because of who they are, but more often because of what they do.   Here are five scientifically-tested strategies that successful people use, proven to help you reach your goals and make the most of your time.

 

#1   Get Specific. When setting a goal, try to be as specific as possible.  “Meet with every member of my team once a week” is a better goal than “meet more often with my team,” because it gives you a clear idea of what success looks like.  Knowing exactly what you want to achieve keeps you motivated until you get there.  Also, think about the specific actions that need to be taken to reach your goal.  Just promising you’ll “communicate more” is too vague – be clear and precise.  “At our meeting, I’ll ask about each project they are currently working on” leaves no room for doubt about what you need to do, and whether or not you’ve actually done it.

 

#2 Seize the Moment to Act on Your Goals. Given how busy most of us are, it’s not surprising that we often miss opportunities to act on a goal because we simply fail to notice those opportunities.  Did you really have no time to work on that assignment today?  No chance at any point to return that phone call?  Achieving your goal means grabbing hold of these opportunities before they slip through your fingers.

To seize the moment, decide when and where you will take each action you want to take, in advance.  Again, be as specific as possible (e.g., “When it’s 3pm today, I’ll stop whatever I’m doing and work on that report.”) Studies show that this kind of planning will help your brain to detect and seize the opportunity when it arises, increasing your productivity by roughly 300%.

 

#3  Know Exactly How Far You Have Left To Go. Achieving any goal also requires honest and regular monitoring of your progress – if no one else is looking over your shoulder, then you’ll need to monitor yourself.  If you don’t know how well you are doing, you can’t adjust your behavior or your strategies accordingly.  Check your progress frequently – weekly, or even daily, depending on the goal.

 

#4  Be a Realistic Optimist. Believing in your ability to succeed is enormously helpful for creating and sustaining your motivation.  But whatever you do, don’t underestimate how difficult it will be to reach your goal or complete your project.  Studies show that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you unprepared for the journey ahead, and significantly increases the odds of failure.   Express confidence in your employees, while always being honest with them about the challenges they’ll face.

 

#5  Focus on Getting Better, Rather than Being Good. Believing you have the ability to reach your goals is important, but so is believing you can get the ability.   Many of us believe that our intelligence, our personality, and our physical aptitudes are fixed – that no matter what we do, we won’t improve.  As a result, we focus on goals that are all about proving ourselves, rather than developing and acquiring new skills.

Fortunately, decades of research suggest that the belief in fixed ability is completely wrong – abilities of all kinds are profoundly malleable. Embracing the fact that you can change will allow you to make better choices, and reach your fullest potential.  People whose goals are about getting better, rather than being good, take difficulty in stride, and appreciate the journey as much as the destination.   And telling your employees that you expect them to make a few mistakes as they learn is, ironically, the surest way to elicit their very best performance.

 

Why Some Leaders Don’t Learn From Their Mistakes

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In prepared remarks before the panel investigating the roots of the financial crisis, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan blames the subprime crisis on foreign investors, nonbank lenders, the spread of securitized mortgages and financial firms for failing to manage their risk. The one person he did not blame was himself, or his institution — the Fed.

– Shahien Nasiripour, The Huffington Post, reporting on Greenspan’s testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission on April 7, 2010

Despite the fact that the Federal Reserve, as the nation’s largest bank, did not take any significant action to curb the reckless lending that precipitated the Great Recession, Alan Greenspan seemed to apportion blame everywhere but to himself.  At one point in his testimony, he even appeared to blame the fall of the Berlin Wall.  (His logic:  seeing the truly awful job the Soviets were doing running their economy brought about distrust of “central planning” of any kind.   So evidently, the excesses of Capitalism are Communism’s fault.)

Alan Greenspan was instrumental in determining U.S. financial policy for 19 years, but he doesn’t feel that he was responsible for the failure of the policy he helped create, or that it’s failure was to some extent avoidable.  Is he crazy?  Actually, no.   Did he consciously and willfully mislead the Commission (and the rest of us)?  Very probably not.  Without actually being Alan Greenspan, I can’t say for sure, but the odds are good that he really does believe he’s not to blame.  And as much as we might like to think otherwise, many of us would feel the same way if we were in his shoes.

Psychologists call this the self-serving bias – the tendency to see ourselves as responsible for our successes, but to see other people or the circumstances as responsible for our failures.  We reason this way to protect our self-esteem, and to protect our image in the eyes of others.   We also do it because it really feels right.  Think of an actor on stage – as a member of the audience, you are focused on what he is doing, but if you’re the actor, you see everything but yourself.  You see your fellow actors, the scenery, the audience, but you can’t actually watch you.  Because of what’s called the actor/observer difference, it’s easy for Alan Greenspan to look back over his 19 years at the Fed and see all the factors that played a role in screwing things up, and harder for him to see his own role in it.

Psychologist Tony Greenwald’s 1980 American Psychologist article on this topic cited some very amusing examples of the self-serving bias, taken from a San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle article on the explanations drivers gave to their insurers after an accident.  You’ll notice that some of these people went to remarkable lengths to deflect blame:

As I approached the intersection, a sign suddenly appeared in a place where a stop sign had never been before.  I was unable to stop in time to avoid an accident.

The telephone pole was approaching.  I was attempting to swerve out of its way when it struck my front end.

A pedestrian hit me and went under my car.

My car was legally parked as it backed into the other vehicle.

Studies show that in fact, nearly us fall victim to this kind of bias (though we tend to think that only other people do – yet another example of the bias at work.)

The upside of all this self-protection is that we don’t feel so bad when things go wrong, and can stay optimistic about our future chances for success.  The downside, particularly for the leaders on whose judgment we must rely, is that we don’t learn anything from our mistakes if we don’t recognize that we made them in the first place.  How can you do a better job next time if you won’t even admit you did a bad job this time?

From a motivational perspective, the best way to handle a failure is to look honestly at how your own actions contributed to the outcome, emphasizing what you can change so that your performance improves from now on.  And even though, in his mid-80s, Alan Greenspan is unlikely to serve a second round as Fed Chairman, he would probably like to get an accurate handle on what went wrong – something he will never do unless he admits that he was actually driving.

How Long Will This Take? 3 Steps to Being a Better Judge of Time

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From my Fast Company blog:

Every Saturday morning, while my husband JD is eating his cereal and attempting to fully awaken, I ambush him with the list of household chores and errands I’ve been making all week (and saving for when he’ll be home to help me.)  Every single time, an argument ensues.  At its core is JD’s unshakeable belief that any task, no matter how complex or difficult, can be completed in about 15 minutes.  “Let’s go out and have some fun, “ he’ll say, “and we’ll tackle that stuff when we get back this afternoon.”  “But there won’t be enough time!” I reply, with mounting frustration.  “It will be fine,” he says.  More often than not, he is wrong.

As much as I enjoy giving him a hard time about his total inability to judge how long something will take, the truth is that most people aren’t much better at it.  In fact, human beings are generally pretty lousy when it comes to estimating the time they will need to complete a task.  Psychologists refer to this as the planning fallacy, and it’s an all too common problem – one with the very real potential to screw up our plans and keep us from reaching our goals.

Studies show that the planning fallacy can be attributed to several different biases we have when estimating how long it will take to do just about anything.  First, we routinely fail to consider our own past experiences while planning.   When my husband tells me it will take him 15 minutes to vacuum the carpets, he is ignoring the fact that it took him an hour to do it last time.   And as any professor can tell you, most college seniors, after four straight years of paper-writing, still can’t seem to figure out how long it will take them to write a 10-page paper.  We just don’t take our past into account the way we should when thinking about our future.

Second, we ignore the very real possibility that things won’t go as planned – our future plans tend to be “best-case scenarios.” So running to the store for a new vacuum cleaner might take 15 minutes – if there is no traffic, if they carry the model we’re looking for, if we find it right away, and if there aren’t long lines at the register.

Lastly, we don’t think about all the steps or subcomponents that make up the task, and consider how long each part of the task will take.   When you think about painting a room, you may picture yourself using a roller to quickly slap the paint on the walls, and think that it won’t take much time at all – neglecting to consider how you’ll first have to move or cover the furniture, tape all the fixtures and window frames, do all the edging by hand, and so on.

So while we all tend to be prone to the planning fallacy to some extent, some of us fall into its trap more often than others. People in positions of power, for example, are particularly vulnerable, because feeling powerful tends to focus us on getting what we want, ignoring the potential obstacles that stand in our way.  A recent set of studies by Mario Weick and Ana Guinote shows that such a narrow focus does indeed turn powerful people into very poor planners.

In one study, half of the student participants were made to feel powerful (by being told that their opinion would influence the course requirements established for future students).  Next, all students were asked to estimate how long it would take to finish an upcoming major assignment.   Everyone was overly-optimistic, but the powerful ones were significantly more so.  Powerful students estimated that they would finish their assignments 2.5 days before they actually did, while the control group was on average only 1.5 days late.    So feeling powerful makes you think you’ll take a whole day less to complete the assignment than you would have guessed had you been feeling a little more ordinary.

A second study induced feelings of power by having some of the participants recall a time in their past when they felt very powerful, and this produced a similar result.  Powerful participants estimated that it would take them only 4 minutes to complete a proofreading task that actually took 9 minutes, compared to the control group’s estimate of 6.5 minutes.

In a third study, participants who were made to feel powerful thought it would take them less time to write an essay, get ready for an evening out, shop at the supermarket, and prepare a 3 course meal, than the control group.   Importantly, these effects completely disappeared when powerful participants were explicitly told to recall how much time these activities had taken them in the past, and use that information to make their estimates.  So when powerful people are forced to focus on all the relevant information, their planning is far more accurate.

When you’re making a plan and estimating how long it will take, be sure to stop and 1) consider how long it has taken you in the past,

2) identify the ways in which things might not go as planned, and

3) spell out all the steps you will need to take to get it done.

This is particularly important when you are in a position of power, so make sure that there are safeguards or reminders in place to help you to consider all the information you should.  Otherwise, you may fall victim to the everything-takes-15-minutes kind of optimism that can lead to disaster.

Longer May Not Be Better, But It Feels that Way

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Thinking about trying to shake things up at work?  Brimming with new ideas and strategies?  Hoping to get your organization to try a new way of doing things, or maybe just get your family to alter their holiday traditions a bit?   Good for you.  But if you are going to be an advocate for change, it might help you to start by understanding what you are up against, psychologically speaking.

It’s not just that people fear change, though they undoubtedly do.  It’s also that they genuinely believe (often on an unconscious level) that when you’ve been doing something a particular way for some time, it must be a good way to do things.  And the longer you’ve been doing it that way, the better it is.

So change isn’t simply about embracing something unknown – it’s about giving up something old (and therefore good) for something new (and therefore not good).

Recent research shows that people have a very reliable and tangible preference for things that have been around longer. In one study, students preferred the course requirement described as the status quo over a new version (regardless of whether the new version meant more or less coursework), and liked it even more when it had been around for 100 years rather than only 10 years.   In another, people who were told that acupuncture had been in existence for 2000 years expressed more favorable attitudes toward it than those who were told it existed for 250 years.

The bottom line is, unconsciously we all believe that longevity = goodness.  There are, admittedly, plenty of instances where this is perfectly rational.  When a particular product or way of doing things has stood the test of time, it is probably a superior to alternatives in at least some respects.

The problem is that longevity and tradition aren’t always accurate predictors of goodness – inertia, habit, marketing prowess, market monopoly, and fear of change can all be the real reasons why we haven’t tried something new.  Also, there are areas of life that really should be unaffected by this sort of bias – in domains like art or cuisine, how long something has been around should have little to do with how aesthetically pleasing or delicious you find it.

And yet, it does.   In one study, people who saw a painting described as having been painted in 1905 found it far more pleasing to look at than people who saw the same painting described as created in 2005.  In another, they admired the appearance of a tree described as being 4500 years old more than did those who thought the same tree just 500 years old.

In my favorite example, study participants were given a piece of European chocolate.  It was described to them as having first been sold in its region either 73 years ago or 3 years ago.  Guess which group rated the chocolate as better-tasting.

It’s not impossible to overcome an unconscious bias, but if you want to succeed you need to start be realizing that it’s there.  Change and innovation requires that we not only convince others that new can be good, but that we address their (often unconscious) assumption that what’s been around longer looks, works, and tastes better.

Too Much Miscommunication At Work? A Simple Fix

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From my Fast Company Blog:

“I’m sure he understood what I meant.”

“I’m sure it was obvious.”

“It goes without saying…”

The most common source of miscommunication in any workplace is a very simple one:  people routinely fail to realize how little they are actually communicating.  In other words, we think we’ve said a lot more than we actually have.

Psychologists call this the signal amplification bias (because we can’t resist slapping esoteric names on things – calling it the “I’m Sure It Was Obvious” Effect would be much more to the point.)

Studies show that the vast majority of us tend to believe that our behavior is much more expressive than it actually is, and this occurs across a wide variety of situations.

For instance, we often think people know when we’re lying – that our discomfort with deception is obvious – when they rarely have any idea.  We also assume that others understand our goals and what we’re trying to accomplish, when in fact they don’t have the first clue.  Most of what we say and do every day is open to multiple interpretations, and when other people try to figure out what we really mean, they are apt to guess wrong.

We are particularly likely to be “sure it was obvious” with people we know well or who we’ve worked with for a long time – we assume our thoughts and behaviors are transparent, when they are far from it.  So, ironically, the risk of miscommunication is greater with a close colleague than a brand-new coworker.

When we assume that other people know what we’re thinking, and what we are expecting of them, we do them a real disservice.    Assuming that we’ve been clear about what we wanted, we blame them when things don’t go as planned.

The next time you catch yourself thinking “I didn’t expressly say that to Bob, but it should be obvious…” STOP.  Nothing is ever obvious unless you made it obvious by spelling it out.

Remove the phrase “It goes without saying” from your mental lexicon, because it is total rubbish.  If something is important, then it goes WITH saying.  Make a point of saying exactly what you mean, and asking for exactly what you want, and you will be pleasantly surprised by often you get it.