Dr. Heidi Grant

What Should You Look for In Your Perfect Match?

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Do opposites attract, as Paula Abdul once assured us in a pop song, or do you need to be similar on twenty-nine dimensions of personality – as E-harmony suggests – to find the perfect match? 
Throughout the history of our young science, psychologists have gotten caught up in heated debates over questions like this one.  Is intelligence a product of nature, or nurture?  Is our personality stable, or does it change?  Are our cognitive processes  – like making decisions or forming impressions – rational, or biased?  The answer, of course, always ends up being some version of “It’s both.”
Intelligence is clearly influenced by both the genes our parents bequeath to us, and the environment in which those genes express themselves.  Personality is somewhat stable – most of us can see aspects of who we are now in the children we once were – but people can and do change with experience.  And our decisions can be fairly rational, or remarkably biased, depending in part on how much effort and attention we pay to the problem at hand.
So it shouldn’t surprise you that the answer to the question “Should I choose a partner that is similar to me, or different?” is…  choose someone who is both.  The trick is understanding where similarity matters, and what kinds of differences will benefit you most.
Let’s start with the differences  – and here, it basically boils down to a particular kind of talent sharing.  Research we have conducted with other members of Columbia’s Motivation Science Center, has shown that people tend to see their goals in one of two ways – ways that determine their relative strengths and weaknesses, as well as how they work best. 
If you think about your goals in terms of the potential advancement, accomplishments and rewards they might bring – in terms of what you would gain if you are successful – you have what’s called a promotion focus.  Consequently, your strengths (relative to those who aren’t as strongly promotion-focused) include creativity, openness, and the ability to identify and seize new opportunities.
If, instead, successfully reaching your goals is about staying safe and secure, and ensuring against any losses— you have a prevention focus.  Prevention-focused people want fulfill their responsibilities, make no mistakes, and keep things running smoothly.  Your strengths are careful planning, thoroughness, and solid, realistic reasoning.
           
Promotion-prevention pairings in relationships might, at first glance, seem like a disaster waiting to happen.  He is willing to take a chance on something new, she wants to stick with what has worked before.  He is an optimist, she is a skeptic.  He is spontaneous, she lives by her daily planner.  He speeds, she’s quick to put on the brakes to make sure they are heading in the right direction.  The opportunities for conflict are endless.
But new research that will appear in the journal Social Cognition by MSC Fellow and University of Waterloo psychologist Vanessa Bohns and her colleagues suggests that the best relationships (and by “best,” I mean something like “most adaptive and mutually satisfying”) may in fact be these Odd Couples. 
Bohns and colleagues studied both dating and married couples, and found those with mixed-motivations enjoyed greater relationship satisfaction than all-promotion or all-prevention pairings. They argued that this was because of the clear advantages of being able to “divide and conquer” your various activities. After all, couples usually have goals related to both advancement and security – they need to help each other in order to both reach their dreams and fulfill their responsibilities. So each person can take on the tasks that they are best suited for, knowing that their partner has got the rest covered.  (He can come up with the plan for a great vacation, she can make sure they actually get there with passports and clean underwear.) With mixed-motivation couples, family life has the potential to be more balanced –children know how to be optimistic and realistic – because the partnership contains both the promotion and prevention points of view.  
But there is one very important caveat, and this is where similarity becomes essential.  The couple in question must have shared goals. They need to feel that they are on the same page in terms of what they want in life, and differ only in terms of their preferred ways of getting it.

The Key To Choosing The Right Career

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Choosing a career path (or changing one) is, for most of us, a confusing and anxiety-riddled experience. Many will tell you to “follow your passion” or “do what you love,” but as Cal Newport argues in So Good They Can’t Ignore You, this is not very useful advice. When I graduated from college, I liked lots of things. But love? Passion? That would have been seriously overstating it.
We all want to choose a career that will make us happy, but how can we know what that will be? Research suggests that human beings are remarkably bad at predicting how they will feel when doing something in the future. It’s not hard to find someone who started out thinking that they would love their chosen profession, only to wind up hating it. In fairness, how are you supposed to know if you will be happy as an investment banker, or an artist, or a professor, if you haven’t actually done any of these things yet? Who has ever, in the history of mankind, taken a job and had it turn out exactly as they imagined it would?
So if passion and expected happiness can’t be your guides, what can be? Well, you can begin by choosing a career that fits well with your skills and values. Since you actually have some sense of what those are (hopefully), this is a good starting place.
But a bit less obviously — though just as important — you also want to choose an occupation that provides a good motivational fit for you as well.
As I describe in my new book with Columbia Business School’s Tory Higgins, Focus and in our recent HBR article, there are two ways you can be motivated to reach your goals.
Some of us tend to see our goals (at work and in life) as opportunities for advancement, achievement and rewards. We think about what we might gain if we are successful in reaching them. If you are someone who sees your goals this way, you have what’s called a promotion focus.
The rest of us see our goals as being about security — about not losing everything we’ve worked so hard for. When you are prevention-focused, you want to avoid danger, fulfill your responsibilities, and be someone people can count on. You want to keep things running smoothly.
Everyone is motivated by both promotion and prevention, but we also tend to have a dominant motivational focus in particular domains of life, like work, love, and parenting. What’s essential to understand is that promotion and prevention-focused people have — because of their different motivations — distinct strengths and weaknesses. To give you a flavor of what I mean:
Promotion- focused people excel at:
  • Creativity & innovation
  • Seizing opportunities to get ahead
  • Embracing risk
  • Working quickly
  • Generating lots of options and alternatives
  • Abstract thinking
(Unfortunately, they are also more error-prone, overly-optimistic, and more likely to take risks that land them in hot water)
Prevention-focused people excel at:


  • Thoroughness and being detail-oriented

  • Analytical thinking and reasoning

  • Planning

  • Accuracy (working flawlessly)

  • Reliability

  • Anticipating problems
(Unfortunately, they are also wary of change or taking chances, rigid, and work more slowly. Diligence takes time.)
By now you probably have a sense of your own focus in the workplace, but if you don’t, try our free online assessment.
Knowing your dominant focus, you can now evaluate how well-suited you are motivationally to different kinds of careers, or different positions in your organization. More than a decade of research shows that when people experience a fit between their own motivation and the way they work, they are not only more effective, but they also find their work more interesting and engaging, and value it more.
If you are promotion-focused, look for jobs that offer advancement and growth. Consider fast-paced industries where products and services are rapidly changing, and where the ability to identify opportunities will be essential, like the tech sector or social media. To use a sports metaphor, look for a career where you get to play offense — where boldness, speed, and outside-the-box thinking pay off.
If you are prevention-focused, look for jobs that offer you a sense of stability and security. You are good at keeping things running, at handling complexity and always having a Plan B (and C and D) ready at a moment’s notice. Consider careers where your thoroughness and attention to detail are valued — for instance, as a contract lawyer or data guru. You work best when you are playing defense — you can spot a threat a mile away, and protect your company or client from harm.
But what about entrepreneurs? you ask. I’m thinking of starting my own business — which motivational focus is best for that? For any successful venture, the truth is that you need both promotion and prevention. An entrepreneur who is all promotion may get her business going, but she probably won’t keep it going for long, since she’ll be unprepared for the obstacles that will inevitably come her way. And the prevention-focused entrepreneur will get so bogged down worrying about obstacles that his business may never get off the ground at all.
This is one of the reasons that good partnerships can be so invaluable — it often takes a Steve Jobs to see a product’s potential, and a Steve Wozniak to actually build it and make it work. So if you are starting a new venture, make sure that you’ve got a healthy balance of promotion and prevention thinking in the right places.

Finding Your Roadmap to Success: A Virtual Conference

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Picking the right path in life isn’t easy. Young adults have more options than ever before in history, but the paradox is, that all those options can make us feel anxious, uncertain, overwhelmed, and afraid to pick *any* option. The pressure is paralyzing.


Let’s face it… The world is changing and the traditional roadmap for success just isn’t working anymore. So, what does it actually take for us to be happy and successful?

Join us for the WTF Should I Do w/ My Life?! Virtual Conference April 22 – 27, 2013!

Happiness and success is just the tip of the iceberg in this free virtual-conference. More than 30 of the world’s leading thinkers including, Tal Ben-Shahar, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Chip Conley and Tony Schwartz, (and of course, me) answer real-world, no-BS, street-smart questions to give you grounded, specific, actionable solutions so that we can rock *all* the important areas of our life.

You’ll be left with the confidence, the courage, clarity, and tools, to make your ideal life a reality.

What you need to know
Dates: April 22 – 27, 2013 (schedule forthcoming)
Price: FREE
I hope you will join us so you can finally answer the question – WTF Should I Do w/ My Life?!



Is Fear Holding You Back? Try This.

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You hate your job, but you are afraid to look for a new one, or (gasp!) change careers altogether.  Or the relationship you are in isn’t making you happy, but you are afraid to leave it.  Or you are single and lonely, but you’re too afraid to get out there and start dating.  Does any of this sound familiar? I’ll bet it does.

Americans have a well-earned reputation for risk-taking, but these days we are something of a timid lot.  Our reluctance to stick our collective neck out has everything to do with the psychology of motivation – specifically, how we think aboutthe goals we pursue. The problem, in a nutshell, is simply this:  when making decisions, many of us have been focused much more on what we have to losethan on what we might gain. 

Whenever you see your goals – whether they are professional or personal – in terms of what you have to lose, you have what’s called a prevention focus.  When you are prevention-focused, you want to stay safe, avoid mistakes, and fulfill your responsibilities.  You want to hang on to what you’ve already got and keep things running smoothly. You aren’t open to taking chances, even when that chance is a chance for happiness.  If fear is holding you back, odds are you’ve been thinking only in terms of prevention.

If, instead, you see your goals in terms of what you might gain, you have what’s called a promotion focus. Promotion focus is about getting ahead, maximizing your potential, and reaping the rewards.  It’s about never missing an opportunity for a win, even when doing so means taking a leap of faith.

In my new book with Tory Higgins, Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing The World For Success and Influence, we describe two decades of research showing how being promotion or prevention-focused leads to having different strengths and weaknesses.  For instance, having a promotion focus leads to speed, creativity, innovation, and embracing risk, while having a prevention focus leads to accuracy, careful deliberation, thoroughness, and a strong preference for the devil-you-know. 

So how can you learn to embrace risk for the sake of your future happiness, particularly when risk-taking doesn’t come to you naturally?  The answer is surprisingly simple:  when you think about making a change, focus onlyon what you have to gain, and banish all thoughts of what you might lose.

For example, you could take a few moments to list all the ways in which you will benefit by making the change.   Repeat them to yourself when you feel the fear kicking in.  Most importantly, shut out any thoughts about what could go wrong – just refuse to give them your attention.  With practice, this thought-training will become easier, and eventually automatic.  Taking a chance, believe it or not, can become second nature to you, if you think about your goals in the right way.


Are you promotion or prevention focused?  Try my new free online assessment.

The Most Effective Strategies for Success

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For years, I’ve been trying to convince people that success is not about who you are, but about what you do.
Roughly two years ago, I wrote about the “Nine Things Successful People Do Differently,” which became HBR’s most-read piece of content over that time span. It was a list of strategies, based on decades of scientific research, proven effective for setting and reaching challenging goals. I later expanded that post into a short e-book, explaining how you can make each one a habit. But how would readers know if they were doing enough of each “Thing”? (After all, we’re terrible judges of ourselves.) To help answer that question, last spring I created something I called the Nine Things Diagnostics — it’s a free, online set of questionnaires designed to measure your own use of each of the nine things in pursuit of your personal and professional goals.
I now have responses from over 30,000 people who’ve logged on and completed one or more of the Nine Things Diagnostics. The results are fascinating, and a bit surprising even to me. First, each of the Nine Things had a significant impact on success. (That actually didn’t surprise me, for obvious reasons.).
But which packed the biggest punch? To find out, I recently took a look at the responses of about 7,000 people who had completed every Nine Things Diagnostic, along with a brief measure of how successful they felt they had been in reaching their own goals in the past.
In order of effect magnitude, the most impactful strategies were:
  1. Have Grit — Persistence over the long haul is key
  2. Know Exactly How Far You Have Left to Go — Monitor your progress
  3. Get Specific — Have a crystal-clear idea of exactly what success will look like
  4. Seize the Moment to Act on Your Goals — Know in advance what you will do, and when and where you will do it
  5. Focus on What You Will Do, Not What You Won’t Do — Instead of focusing on bad habits, it’s more effective to replace them with better ones.
  6. Build your Willpower Muscle — If you don’t have enough willpower, you can get more using it.
  7. Focus on Getting Better, Rather than Being Good — Think about your goals as opportunities to improve, rather than to prove yourself
  8. Be a Realistic Optimist — Visualize how you will make success happen by overcoming obstacles
  9. Don’t Tempt Fate — No one has willpower all the time, so don’t push your luck
Notice how persistence is at the very top of the list? While we marvel at people who’ve shown incredible perseverance — Earnest Shackleton, Nelson Mandela, Susan B. Anthony — I wonder how many people have ever thought to blame their own failures on “not hanging in there long enough”? In my experience, very few. Instead, we assume we lack the ability to succeed. We decide that we don’t have what it takes — whatever that is — to meet the challenge. And we really couldn’t be more wrong. Grit is not an innate gift. Persisting is something we learn to do, when (and if) we realize how well it pays off.
Or take “knowing how far you have left to go.” Even someone with a healthy amount of grit will probably find his or her motivation flagging if they don’t have a clear sense of where they are now and where they want to end up. How much weight would a contestant on The Biggest Loser lose if he only weighed himself at the beginning and the end, instead of once a week? How well would an Olympic-level athlete perform if she only timed her official races, and never her practices? We can see how essential monitoring is for others’ performance, and yet somehow miss its importance for our own.
But does that mean that the items further down the list aren’t as important? Not quite. For instance, #7, “focusing on getting better, rather than being good,” actually predicted using each of the other eight things! People who focused on “being good,” on the other hand, were less likely to use the other tactics on the list. In fact, if you do a lot of “be good” thinking, you are less likely to be gritty or have willpower, and you are more likely to tempt fate. You’re also, not surprisingly, less likely to reach your goals.
Perhaps the most remarkable finding, however, was the extent to which people weren’t using these tactics.
Respondents answered each of the diagnostic questions on 1-5 scale, with 1 being “not at all true of me,” 3 being “somewhat true of me,” and 5 being “very true of me.”
If your average score for a particular tactic falls between Not at all and Somewhat, then you really aren’t doing what you need to do to be effective. Here’s how the percentages break down:
most-popular-success-strat (1).jpg
So about 40 percent of responders aren’t being realistically optimistic, or focusing on what they will do, rather than what they won’t. And 50 percent of responders aren’t being specific, seizing the moment, monitoring progress, having grit, and having willpower. An astonishing 70+ percent of respondents also don’t bother avoiding tempting fate. (Apparently, people just love to put themselves in harm’s way.)
be-good-get-better (1).jpgHere’s some good news: an incredible 90 percent of responders report pursuing at least some of their goals with Get Better mindsets. But here’s the Bad News: 80 percent of responders are also pursuing goals with Be Good mindsets. So there’s still way too much I-have-to-prove-myself thinking going on out there, and it’s sabotaging our success.
If you have a few spare minutes, I encourage you to take the Nine Things Diagnostics yourself, assuming you haven’t already. It’s a quick yet powerful way to target your weaknesses (and learn about your strengths). Remember, improvement is only possible when you know where you’re going wrong, and what you can do about it.

How You Can Benefit from All Your Stress

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You are stressed – by your deadlines, your responsibilities, your ever–increasing workload, and your life in general.  If you are like me, you even stress about how much stress you’re feeling  – worrying that it is interfering with your performance and possibly taking years off of your life.
This might sound a little crazy, but what if it’s the very fact that we assume stress is bad that’s actually making it so bad for us?  And what if there were another way to think about stress –a way that might actually make it a force for good in our lives? Well there is, according to new research from Yale’s Alia Crum and Peter Salovey, and Shawn Achor author of The Happiness Advantage. 
Let’s take a step back, and begin with a different question: What is stress?
Generally speaking, it’s the experience – or anticipation – of difficulty or adversity. We humans, along with other animals, have an instinctive physical response to stressors. It includes activation of the sympathetic nervous system (“fight or flight”), inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system (“rest and digest”), and the release of adrenaline and cortisol.  But what does all of that do?  In short, it primes the pump – we become more aroused and more focused, more ready to respond physically and mentally to whatever is coming our way. 
Kind of sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?
But wait, you say, can’t chronic stress make us sick?  Can’t it take a toll on our immune functioning?
Yes…but there is plenty of evidence that stress can also enhance immunity.
Well then, you point out, can’t it leave us feeling depressed and lethargic?
Yes… but studies show that it can also create mental toughness, increase clarity, result in greater appreciation for one’s circumstances, and contribute to a sense of confidence built on a history of overcoming of obstacles (which is the best, most long-lasting kind of confidence you can have).  So stress is bad, and somehow also good.  How can we make sense of the paradoxical nature of stress? 
I’ll bet right now you are saying to yourself, it’s the amount of stress that matters.  Low levels may be good, but high levels are still definitely bad.  (i.e., What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger….but too much stress is probably going kill you.) 
The problem with this theory – which was once the dominant theory among psychologists, too – is that by and large, it doesn’t appear to be true.  The amount of stress you encounter is a surprisingly poor predictor of whether it will leave you worse (or better) off.
As it turns out, your mindset about stress may be the most important predictor of how it affects you.  As Crum, Salovey, and Achor discovered, people have different beliefs about stress.  Some people – arguably most people – believe that stress is a bad thing.  They agreed with statements like  “The effects of stress are negative and should be avoided,” and the researchers called this the stress-is-debilitating mindset. Those who instead agreed that “Experiencing stress facilitates my learning and growth” had what they called a stress-is-enhancing mindset.
In their studies, Crum and colleagues began by identifying stress mindsets among a group of nearly 400 employees of an international financial institution.  They found that those employees who had stress-is-enhancing mindsets (compared to stress-is-debilitating) reported having better health, greater life satisfaction, and superior work performance.
That’s already rather amazing, but here’s the best part – your mindset can also change!  If you have been living with a stress-is-debilitating mindset (like most of us), you don’t have to be stuck with it.   A subset of the 400 employees in the aforementioned study were shown a series of 3-minute videos over the course of the following week, illustrating either the enhancing or debilitating effects of stress on health, performance, and personal growth. Those in the stress-is-enhancing group (i.e., the lucky ones) reported significant increases in both wellbeing and work performance.
Yet another study showed that stress-is-enhancing believers were more likely to use productive strategies, like seeking out feedback on a stress-inducing task.  They were also more likely to show “optimal” levels of cortisol activity. (It turns out that both too much and too little cortisol release in response to a stressor can have negative physiological consequences.  But with the stress-is-enhancing mindset, cortisol release is – like Baby Bear’s porridge –  just right.)
Taken together, all this research paints a very clear picture: stress is killing you because you believe that it is.  Of course, that doesn’t mean you aren’t juggling too many projects at once – each of us has limited time and energy, and people can and do get overworked.
But if you can come to see the difficulties and challenges you face as opportunities to learn and grow, rather than as your “daily grind,” then you really can be happier, healthier, and more effective.   Maybe you don’t need less stress – you just need to think about your stress a little differently.
This post appeared originally on HBR.org

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