Dr. Heidi Grant

How to Stop Love From Making You Act Like A Fool

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Falling in love makes otherwise smart and self-respecting people feel, and act, ridiculous.  This is a fact.  Whether it’s finding pathetic excuses to call again when he doesn’t call back right away, or scheming to run into her outside her office “by accident,” I don’t know anyone hasn’t, at least once, gone a bit bonkers for new love.

It’s not as if you don’t at least suspect, when it’s happening, that you’re being an idiot.  But that doesn’t help you, because you tackle your idiocy from the wrong end – you try, by sheer force of will, to purge yourself of your idiotic impulses.  This never, ever works.  Which is why, despite swearing to yourself and your friends that you are going to play it cool this time, you’ll still end up sneaking off to the bathroom to check your messages again, for the twentieth time that day.  You need a better approach.

The fact of the matter is, you can’t make yourself stop wanting to do dumb things when you have fallen hard for someone, any more than you can make yourself stop wanting cheesecake, or a cigarette, or a martini, or anything else that tempts you.   Take a moment to let that sink in, because it’s really important.  I’ll wait.

Now, the good news is that you can stop actually doing the things that make you look and feel like an idiot, despite the fact that you really want to do them, if you use the right strategy.  You can stop the compulsive voicemail and email-checking, the constant texting, and the Facebook stalking.  You can stop yourself from Googling his name (again).  You can shut out all those premature thoughts of what your wedding will be like, and what you’ll name your children.  And when you’re wondering on your second date if she has fallen in love with you yet, you can stop yourself from actually asking her.
The solution begins with embracing the idea that dating is like dieting.  Nobody loses weight by deciding that they just won’t want calorie-rich food anymore.  You can’t talk yourself out of wanting french fries. And if you’re counting on the sheer force will to see you through when you feel tempted, you’re going to end up eating a lot of french fries. 

The next step is to do some if-then planning.  Over a hundred scientific studies – on everything from diet and exercise to curbing spending and quitting smoking – have shown that deciding in advance how you will handle your impulses (e.g., “If I am hungry and want a snack, then I will choose a healthy option like fruit or veggies,” “If I want to smoke, then I’ll step outside and take a deep breath,”) will double or triple your chances for success.

The key to a successful plan involves deciding what you will do instead.  So when you are taken by the desire to try to track him down on Facebook or Foursquare, or to leave the “not sure if you got my last message” message on her answering machine, what more productive, non-creepy behavior will you replace it with?  My mother once giving me some excellent advice about a boyfriend I was obsessing over.  “If you feel like calling him,” she said, “then call me.”  You don’t have to call your mother when love messes with your head, but having some sort of plan in place is essential.
If-then plans are simple, easy to create, and extraordinarily effective when it comes to resisting temptation, edible or otherwise.  Just taking a moment to decide, in advance, how you will handle your less attractive impulses could mean the difference between finding Mr. Right, and seriously freaking him out.

How “Positive” Thinking and Vision Boards Set You Up To Fail

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I wish I could make the universe deliver wonderful things to my doorstep just by imagining them.  I can’t – and neither can you, no matter what anyone tells you.   There is not a single piece of hard evidence that “visualizing success,” and doing nothing else, will do a damn thing for you. 
In fact, there is plenty of evidence that it will leave you even worse off than when you started.  Scientifically-speaking, focusing all of your thoughts on an ideal future reliably leads to lower achievement.  In other words, you are less likely to achieve your goals when all you do is imagine that you already have achieved them. 

“Negative” thinking, on the other hand, has gotten a bad rap.  This is mostly because the people who advocate “positive” thinking lump all the “negative” thoughts together in one big unpleasant pile, not realizing that some kinds of negative thoughts are actually necessary and motivating.  There is a big difference between “I am a loser and can’t do this” (a bad, self-defeating negative thought), and “This won’t be easy, and I’m going to have to work hard” (a very good negative thought that actually predicts greater success).

In fact, study after study shows that people who think not only about their dreams, but about the obstacles that lie in the way of realizing their dreams  – who visualize the steps they will take to make success happen, rather than just the success itself – vastly outperform those who sit back and wait for the universe to reward them for all their positive thinking.   Whether it’s starting a relationship with your secret crush, landing a job, recovering from major surgery, or losing weight, research shows that if you don’t keep it real you’re going to be really screwed.

A new set of studies by NYU psychologists Heather Barry Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen offers insight into why this kind of thinking isn’t just useless, but actually sets you up for failure.  These researchers found that people who imagined an uncertain and challenging future reported feeling significantly more energized, and accomplished much more, than those who idealized their future.  The purely “positive” thinkers’ lower energy levels even showed up in objective, physiological measurements.  (Ironically, these studies showed that the more important it was to the participant that the dream come true, the more idealizing sapped their motivation!)

Kappes and Oettingen argue that when we focus solely on imagining the future of our dreams, our minds enjoy and indulge in those images as if they are real.  They might be reachable, realistic dreams or impossible, unrealistic ones, but none of that matters because we don’t bother to think about the odds of getting there or the hurdles that will have to be overcome.  We’re too busy enjoying the fantasy.

Admittedly, there are some people that might experience a benefit from visualizing a positive future or a vision board.   People who are depressed, or have very low self-confidence, are more likely to think about obstacles, and only obstacles. They may need to be reminded that a positive future is possible, and a vision board when used hand-in-hand with some realistic thinking and planning, can be an effective tool.

Believe me when I tell you that I truly wish the Law of Attraction would work.  I also happen to wish that Hogwarts was a real place, and that Antonio Banderas was my next-door neighbor.  But wishing will not make it so, and that’s exactly my point.

How Much Feedback Is Too Much? Finding The Sweet Spot.

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Everyone needs feedback.   It’s hard to get motivated to reach a goal or complete a project, and impossible to stay motivated in the face of difficulty, when you aren’t sure if you are on the right track.  None of us are truly comfortable flying blind.   For any leader or manager, giving frequent, carefully-crafted feedback is one of their most important (and most challenging) responsibilities (as I’ve written about here.)

Feedback should be frequent – but how frequent?  Much has been written about the futility of the traditional annual review, and how it offers far too little too late in terms of useful information.   So we can probably all agree that feedback needs to be given more than once a year…. but once a month?  A week?  A day?  Every hour on the hour, like a traffic update?

Since feedback is a good thing, you might think that you really can’t have too much of it.  But according to new research, if you thought that, you’d be wrong. 

Receiving feedback, it turns out, comes at some significant cost.  Processing what you are being told (whether it’s positive or negative) and responding to it appropriately (or even inappropriately) creates cognitive and emotional demands that can interfere with learning and performance.

In fact, if you plotted the relationship between feedback frequency and performance out on a graph, it would look like an inverted U.  In other words, as feedback frequency increases, performance improves…until it starts taking a nosedive.  Past a certain point, receiving and responding to too much feedback becomes a liability because it takes your attention away from the work you need to do.

For example, in a study conducted by University of Michigan researcher Chak Fu Lam and his colleagues, participants engaged in a 70-minute long defense simulation exercise.  They were given feedback either 2, 4, 7, or 14 times.  Lam found that overall performance increased with increases in feedback frequency until it peaked at 7 instances (i.e., every 10 minutes), but it went significantly down when feedback was given 14 times (i.e., every 5 minutes). 

Interestingly, the effects of receiving too much feedback were most pronounced during the early learning phase, when participants were trying to get the hang of the task.  So having to turn your attention away from what you are doing in order to process feedback is most disruptive when you working on something new and unfamiliar.

Unfortunately, there can be no hard-and-fast rule about how often you should give your team feedback.  The ideal amount will vary according to the nature of the work they do  – the duration of projects, complexity, how motivated they are, etc.  But here are some strategies to keep in mind when you are trying to find the sweet spot:

1.    When your employee is taking on a new project in an area in which they lack experience, be careful not to overwhelm them with frequent feedback.  They will need their energy and effort to be focused where it belongs.    Instead, make it clear that you will gladly provide feedback and guidance when they ask for it.

2.     Keep feedback straightforward and to-the-point, to minimize the amount of time employees will spend wondering what you meant.  Whenever possible, be specific about what they did right or wrong, and make concrete suggestions about exactly what they need to do differently. 

3.     When in doubt, ask your team directly if they would like more, or less, feedback.  People generally have a good sense of whether it’s a help or a distraction.

Are The Best Innovators Those Who Have Power, or Those Who Want It?

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Where should you look to find the most creative, flexible, forward-thinking people in your organization – at the top, or in the rank-and-file?  For years, the answer provided by research seemed a straightforward one:  powerful people are more creative.  But thanks to a recent set of studies, it’s clear that the story is a bit more complicated than that.

Being in a position of power certainly changes you – not necessarily in an evil way, but there is a definite shift in how you perceive the world around you when you’re the one in the driver’s seat.  You think in a more abstract, big-picture way.  You become more optimistic, more comfortable with risk, and more open to new possibilities.  (A series of studies by Cameron Anderson and Adam Galinsky showed that when people felt powerful, they preferred riskier business plans with bigger potential rewards to more conservative plans, divulged more information and were more trusting during negotiations, chose to “hit” more often during a game of black-jack, and were more even likely to engage in unprotected sex during a one-night stand.)

The relatively powerless, on the other hand, are more concerned with safety and security.  They’ve got their guards up, and have to stay focused on not making mistakes or displeasing the higher-ups.  Their thinking is more concrete, more conventional, and more risk-averse – not at all conducive to great innovation.

When you are in power, you can be more innovative because you feel more comfortable and secure, and less sensitive to or constrained by what other people think of you.  Unless, of course, you don’t feel secure – because your position of power is not guaranteed.  Then, according to new studies from researchers at the University of Amsterdam, the tables turn.

When the powerful can become the powerless, and vice versa, psychologists call it an “unstable power hierarchy.”  If you are operating in that kind of environment and staying in power is your primary focus, then feelings of power can actually make you more conservative. 

Basically, when you don’t want to lose the power you’ve worked so hard to attain,  you avoid risks and your creativity is diminished.  But unstable power hierarchies are terrific for unleashing the potential of the rank-and-file, because the very real prospect of becoming powerful has the same mind-expanding effects on our thinking that being powerful has in a stable environment.

So if you are at the top of your game and your position is essentially irrevocable or at least particularly secure (think Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, or a second-term U.S. President), you mind is likely teaming with bold and possibly brilliant new ideas.  But where gains and losses of power are not only possible but likely, ordinary Joes and Janes may be your organization’s most creative innovators.  

How to Become A Great Finisher

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The road to hell may or may not be paved with good intentions, but the road to failure surely is.   Take a good look at the people you work with, and you’ll find lots of Good Starters – individuals who want to succeed, and have promising ideas for how to make that happen.  They begin each new pursuit with enthusiasm, or at the very least, a commitment to getting the job done.

And then something happens.  Somewhere along the way, they lose steam.  They get bogged down with other projects.  They start procrastinating and miss deadlines.  Their projects take forever to finish, if they get finished at all.

Does all this sound familiar?  Maybe a little too familiar?  If you are guilty of being a Good Starter, but a lousy finisher – at work or in your personal life – you have a very common problem.  After all, David Allen’s Getting Things Done wouldn’t be a huge bestseller if people could easily figure out how to get things done on their own.

More than anything else, becoming a Great Finisher is about staying motivated from a project’s beginning to its end.   Recent research has uncovered the reason why that can be so difficult, and a simple and effective strategy you can use to keep motivation high.

In their studies, University of Chicago psychologists Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach examined how people pursuing goals were affected by focusing on either how far they had already come (to-date thinking) or what was left to be accomplished (to-go thinking).  People routinely use both kinds of thinking to motivated themselves.   A marathon runner may choose to think about the miles already traveled or the ones that lie ahead.  A dieter who wants to lose 30 pounds may try to fight temptation by reminding themselves of the 20 pounds already lost, or the 10 left to go.

Intuitively, both approaches have their appeal.  But too much to-date thinking, focusing on what you’ve accomplished so far, will actually undermine your motivation to finish rather than sustain it. 
Koo and Fishbach’s studies consistently show that when we are pursuing a goal and consider how far we’ve already come, we feel a premature sense of accomplishment and begin to slack off.  For instance, in one study, college students studying for an exam in an important course were significantly more motivated to study after being told that they had 52% of the material left to cover, compared to being told that they had already completed 48%. 

When we focus on progress made, we’re also more likely to try to achieve a sense of “balance” by making progress on other important goals.   This is classic Good Starter behavior – lots of pots on the stove, but nothing is ever ready to eat.

If, instead, we focus on how far we have left to go (to-go thinking), motivation is not only sustained, it’s heightened.   Fundamentally, this has to do with the way our brains are wired.  We are tuned in (below our awareness) to the presence of a discrepancy between where we are now and where we want to be.   When your brain detects a discrepancy, it reacts by throwing resources at it:  attention, effort, deeper processing of information, and willpower.

In fact, it’s the discrepancy that signals that an action is needed – to–date thinking masks that signal.   You might feel good about the ground you’ve covered, but you probably won’t cover much more.
Great Finishers force themselves to stay focused on the goal, and never congratulate themselves on a job half-done.   Great managers create Great Finishers by reminding their employees to keep their eyes on the prize, and are careful to avoid giving effusive praise or rewards for hitting milestones “along the way.”  Encouragement is important, but to keep your team motivated, save the accolades for a job well – and completely – done.

This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review (HBR.org) 

Quick Decisions Create Regret, Even When They’re Good Decisions

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Why do we sometimes regret the choices we make?  The obvious answer is that we sometimes make bad choices, with unforeseen (though not necessarily unforeseeable) negative consequences.  But that’s not the only time we experience the pain of regret.   In fact, we routinely regret perfectly good choices – not because of the outcome, but because of our experience of choosing.

In his excellent book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that the quick decision – the “snap” judgment – is much maligned.  He cites many studies showing that human beings are remarkably good at “thin-slicing” – making a speedy assessment of situations and acting on conclusions based on very little information.  Haste doesn’t always make waste, and Gladwell’s got plenty of scientific evidence to prove it. 

But even if speedy decisions aren’t necessarily bad ones, they still have a significant downside – they feel wrong. The popularity of Blink notwithstanding, people seem to implicitly believe that a quick choice is always a bad choice.  In fact, new research reveals that when people feel they were rushed while deciding, or that they rushed themselves, they regret the decisions they make even when they turn out well.

Two other interesting insights emerged from these studies that are worth noting.  When we make a choice from among many options, we naturally feel more rushed because there is so much more information to consider.  For example, in one study, people who chose a DVD from a set of 30 felt significantly more rushed – and regretted their choice twice as much – as those who chose from a set of 5, even when they could take as much time as they needed.

The second, related insight is that regret comes from feeling rushed, not from being rushed.  In other words, it’s not how much time you take to make your decision – it’s whether or not you felt you took enough time.

In the end, if you don’t give yourself the time you feel you need to make a judgment or choice, you will undermine your satisfaction and your subsequent experience.  You will regret you decision, even when it is completely unwarranted. 

So when someone tries to pressure you into deciding right now – whether it’s a colleague, a friend, or the guy waiting to take your drink order – get used to saying, “I’m going to need a little more time.”  You won’t regret it.