A Brief History of Feedback

Feedback has always been with us, ever since the first man knelt down at a pool of water to get a drink and saw his face reflected in the water’s surface. Formal up-the-ladder feedback designed to help managers didn’t appear until the middle of the previous century—with the first suggestion box. The feedback that matters to me is a more recent development of the last 30 years. It’s commonly called 360-degree feedback, because it is solicited from everybody at all levels of the organization. Until something better comes along, confidential 360-degree feedback is the best way for successful people to identify what they need to improve in their relationships at work.

Successful people only have two problems dealing with negative feedback. However, they are big problems: (a) they don’t want to hear it from us and (b) we don’t want to give it to them.

It’s not hard to see why people don’t want to hear negative feedback. Successful people are incredibly delusional about their achievements. Over 95 percent of the members in most successful groups believe that they perform in the top half of their group. While this is statistically ridiculous, it is psychologically real. Giving people negative feedback means “proving” they are wrong. Proving to successful people that they are wrong works just about as well as making them change. Not gonna happen.

Feedback generally doesn’t break through to successful people even when we adopt the eminently sane guideline of depersonalizing the feedback. That is, talk about the task, not the person. This is easy in theory. But successful people’s identities are often so closely connected to what they do that it’s naive to assume they will not take it personally when receiving negative feedback about the most important activity in their lives.

Basically, we accept feedback that is consistent with our self-image and reject feedback that is inconsistent.

It’s also easy to see why we don’t want to give feedback. In big organizations, successful people have power over us—over our paycheck, our advancement, our job security. The more successful these people are, the more power they have. Combine that power with the fairly predictable “kill the messenger” response to negative feedback and you can see why emperors will continue to rule without clothes. (Spot quiz: When was the last time your efforts to prove the boss wrong worked as a career-enhancing maneuver?)

I have other issues with traditional face-to-face negative feedback—and almost all of them boil down to the fact that it focuses on the past (a failed past at that), not a positive future. We can’t change the past. We can change the future. Negative feedback exists to prove us wrong (or at least many of us take it that way). Feedback can be employed by others to reinforce our feelings of failure, or at least remind us of them—and our reaction is rarely positive. (Spot quiz: When your spouse or partner reminds you of all your shortcomings, how well do you accept this trip down memory lane?)

More than anything, negative feedback shuts us down. We close ranks, turn into our shell, and shut the world out. Change does not happen in this environment.

But enough about what’s wrong with feedback. I’m not trying to prove that negative feedback creates dysfunction. Feedback is very useful for telling us “where we are.” Without feedback, I couldn’t work with my clients. I wouldn’t know what everyone thinks my client needs to change. Likewise, without feedback, we wouldn’t have results. We couldn’t keep score. We wouldn’t know if we were getting better or worse. Just as salespeople need feedback on what’s selling and leaders need feedback on how they are perceived by their subordinates, we all need feedback to see where we are, where we need to go, and to measure our progress.

We need honest, helpful feedback. It’s just hard to find. But I have a foolproof method for securing it.

…..

Stop Asking for Feedback and Then Expressing Your Opinion

Years ago I was riding an elevator with a famous trial lawyer who was well into his 80s at the time (but still practicing law). The elevator doors opened and a man smoking a cigarette got on. (This was in the early 1980s, before smoking was universally banned.) The lawyer panicked. He was allergic to smoke and he vainly tried to jump off the small cramped elevator so he wouldn’t have to breathe the smoke. Too late. The doors closed.

“Are you okay?” the smoker asked the lawyer.

“Are you okay?” the smoker asked the lawyer.

“You know, you’re not supposed to smoke on elevators,” he told the man. “It’s against the law.”

The man said, “What are you, a lawyer?” He was in no mood to apologize or put out the cigarette. He was clearly prepared to argue with the lawyer, to defend his right to smoke.

“I don’t believe this,” said the lawyer. “You’re acting as if I’m wrong—that you’re the victim because I happen to be in the elevator while you’re breaking the law.”

It was one of those small but outrageous moments that remind you how defensive people can be, whether they are right or wrong—especially if they’re wrong.

I think about that elevator ride every time someone asks me for my advice and then after I give it, they render a less-than-glowing verdict about the quality of my advice. “I can’t believe it,” I say, with the lawyer’s words ringing in my ears. “You asked me for my opinion and now you’re arguing with me.”

It’s no different than our behavior when we argue with someone who’s giving us advice, offering feedback, or otherwise trying to help us. And we do that every time we ask for feedback and unthinkingly respond by expressing our opinion. When we ask a friend, “What do you think I should do in this situation?” we are setting up the expectation that we want an answer—and that we will give the answer full consideration and quite possibly use it. We are not announcing that we’re initiating an argument.

But that’s exactly what we’re doing when we ask for feedback from someone and then immediately express our opinion. This is certainly true when our opinion is negative (“I’m not sure about that. . . .”). Whatever we say, however softly we couch it, our opinion will sound defensive. It will resemble a rationalization, a denial, a negation, or an objection.

Stop doing that. Treat every piece of advice as a gift or a compliment and simply say, “Thank you.” No one expects you to act on every piece of advice. If you learn to listen—and act on the advice that makes sense—the people around you may be thrilled.

Feedback Moments: How to Get Good Feedback on Your Own

I realize few of you have the resources to hire a professional to do the “fieldwork” of getting great feedback.

When I work with executives I spend my first hours on the job conducting a 360-degree feedback review. I don’t want to drape the process in complexity and mystery. It’s really simple. With the client’s help, I identify all the people he or she works with who see his or her interpersonal challenges on a daily basis. These are the raters. I qualify them with my four commitment questions. And I have them fill out a leadership questionnaire. Sometimes the questions are customized to reflect the company’s values and objectives (at GE, for example, there’s a high premium placed on cooperation and sharing information across boundaries whereas at another company the premium value might be customer satisfaction).

The questions are simple. Does the executive in question:

• Clearly communicate a vision.
• Treat people with respect.
• Solicit contrary opinions.
• Encourage other people’s ideas.
• Listen to other people in meetings.

That sort of thing. I ask people to rate their colleague on a numerical scale. From that, a statistical picture emerges, usually revealing one or two problem areas that we need to address. Surveys show that about 50% of corporate America uses something like this in evaluating employee performance and attitudes. If, somehow, this format has eluded you, I’ve included a 72-question leadership survey in an appendix to give you a picture of how professionals in this field operate.

But I’m not asking you to become a “feedback professional” here. I have to do it this way because I’m a newcomer at every company I work in. I don’t have any history with the client. I’ve never worked with him. All I know before I meet the client is what his or her boss has told me about him. So I have no alternative but to canvass the troops.

That said, if you’ve worked in a corporate environment large enough to have three employees in its human resources department, you’ve probably been a participant in something resembling 360-degree feedback.

Even if you haven’t, we’re all familiar with feedback—whether or not we label it as such.

We’ve all endured performance appraisals from our bosses. That’s feedback.

We’ve all gone through salary reviews. That’s the most direct feedback.

If we’re in sales, we’ve all read customer surveys of our performance. That’s feedback.

We’ve sat through quarterly sales meetings as our figures are stacked up against our quotas and projections. That, too, is feedback.

We’re being told all day long how we’re doing. And the reason we accept this feedback and actually attempt to respond to it (e.g., if we’re down in sales, we’ll try harder to bring the figures up) is that we accept the process: An authority figure “grades” us and we are motivated to do better because of it.

It’s not like that with interpersonal behavior, which is vague, subjective, unquantifiable, and open to wildly variant interpretations. But that doesn’t make it less important. It’s my contention—and it’s the bedrock thesis of this book—that interpersonal behavior is the difference-maker between being great and near-great, between getting the gold and settling for the bronze. (The higher you go, the more your “issues” are behavioral.)

So, how do we get this much-needed feedback if we have neither the skill nor resources nor opportunity to poll our peers on what they really think about us? We know what feedback is. We don’t know how to get it.

Basically, feedback comes to us in three forms: Solicited, unsolicited, and observation. Each of them works well, but not for everyone. Let’s look closely at all three to see which one’s right for you.

Solicited Feedback, or Knowing How to Ask

Solicited feedback is just that. We solicit opinions from people about what we’re doing wrong. Sounds simple, no? I am not always so optimistic.

I’m not saying that you, working on your own, cannot replicate my feedback retrieval methods. It’s quite possible that you could corral a dozen people who know you, qualify them with the four commitment test, and have them fill out a questionnaire about what you could be doing better.

My only concern is that we cannot be sure that you will (a) ask the right people, (b) ask the right questions, (c) interpret the answers properly, or (d) accept them as accurate. This harks back to my big issue with negative feedback: We don’t want to hear it and people don’t want to give it.

In my experience the best solicited feedback is confidential feedback. It’s good because nobody gets embarrassed or defensive. There are no emotional issues, because you do not know who to blame or retaliate against for attacking you. In the best cases, you have no sense of being attacked at all. You’re merely ingesting honest commentary—which you requested!—from blind but well-meaning sources.

The only problem: This is virtually impossible for one person working alone to pull off. To maintain the confidentiality (and avoid the emotionality) you need an unbiased third party to do the polling—someone like me.

Absent that, you have to ask people one-on-one. But that too is fraught with obstacles.

In my experience there are a hundred wrong ways to ask for feedback—and one right way. Most of us know the wrong ways. We ask someone,

• “What do you think of me?”
• “How do you feel about me?”
• “What do you hate about me?
• “What do you like about me?”

These are all variations of the same encounter group question designed to elicit honest feelings between people. Well, we’re not running encounter groups here.

These types of questions are particularly pernicious in power relationships where the boss is asking the bossed, “What do you think of me?” In a power relationship you have all kinds of issues that influence the answer—because the answer has consequences. People will not tell the truth if they think it will come back to haunt them—and in a power relationship subordinates have no guarantee that the unvarnished truth won’t anger the boss, send them back to the end of the line, or worse, get them fired.

When you think about it, these “what do you think of me?” encounter group questions are actually irrelevant. In the workplace you don’t have to like me; we don’t have to be buddies who hang out together after work. All we have to do is work well together. How we really “feel” about each other is practically moot.

Think about your colleagues at work. How many of them are your friends? For how many of them would you be willing to articulate your true feelings? How many of them have you actually thought about in terms of feelings? The answer, I suspect, is not that many. A small minority. And yet you probably work well together with a majority of your colleagues. That disconnect—between the small number of friends and the larger number of colleagues with whom you work well—should convince you once and for all that what people feel or think about you is not the key to getting better.

In soliciting feedback for yourself, the only question that works—the only one!—must be phrased like this: “How can I do better?”

Semantic variations are permitted, such as, “What can I do to be a better partner at home?” or, “What can I do to be a better colleague at work?” or, “What can I do to be a better leader of this group?” It varies with the circumstances. But you get the idea. Pure unadulterated issue-free feedback that makes change possible has to (a) solicit advice rather than criticism, (b) be directed towards the future rather than obsessed with the negative past, and (c) be couched in a way that suggests you will act on it; that in fact you are trying to do better.

Unsolicited Feedback, or the Blindside Event

If we’re lucky, every once in a while something or someone comes along who opens our eyes to our faults—and helps us strip away a delusion or two about ourselves. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, we should consider ourselves lucky and grateful.

Psychologists have all sorts of schemata to explain us to ourselves. One of the more interesting ones is a simple four-pane grid known as the Johari Window (named after two real characters, Joe and Harry). It divides our self-awareness into four parts, based on what is known and unknown about us to other people and what is known and unknown about us to ourselves.

As you can see from the illustration on the following page, the stuff that is known about us to others is public knowledge. What’s known to us and unknown to others is private. What’s unknown to ourselves and others is, well . . . unknowable and, therefore, not relevant.

The post Feedback appeared first on Resnik Consulting.

Self Disputation

Martin E. Seligman. Learned Optimism. Chapter 12: The Optimistic Life. First Vintage Books, 2006. pp. 207-234. Notes and Highlights

The ABCs

KATIE HAS BEEN on a strict diet for two weeks. Tonight after work she goes out for drinks with some friends and eats some of the nachos and chicken wings the others ordered. Immediately afterward she feels she has “ruined” her diet.

She thinks to herself, “Way to go, Katie. You sure blew your diet tonight. I am so unbelievably weak. I can’t even go to a bar with some friends without making a total glutton of myself. They must think I’m such a fool. Well, all my dieting over the last two weeks is blown now, so I might as well really make a pig of myself and eat the cake in the freezer.”

***

When we encounter adversity, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly convert into beliefs. These beliefs may become so habitual we don’t even realize we have them unless we stop and focus on them. And they don’t just sit there idly; they have consequences.

The beliefs are the direct causes of what we feel and what we do next.

The first step is to see the connection between adversity, belief, and consequence.

The first section, “Adversity,” can be almost anything—a leaky faucet, a frown from a friend, a baby that won’t stop crying, a large bill, inattentiveness from your spouse. Be objective about the situation. Record your description of what happened, NOT your evaluation of it. So if you had an argument with your spouse, you might write down that he was unhappy with something you said or did. Record that. But do not record “She was unfair” under “Adversity.” That’s an inference, and you may want to record that in the second section: “Belief.”

Be sure to separate thoughts from feelings. (Feelings will go under “Consequences.”) “I just blew my diet” and “I feel incompetent” are beliefs. Their accuracy can be evaluated. “I feel sad,” however, expresses a feeling. It doesn’t make sense to check the accuracy of “I feel sad”.

“Consequences.” In this section, record your feelings and what you did. Did you feel sad, anxious, joyful, guilty, or whatever? Often you will feel more than one thing. What did you then do? “I had no energy,” “I made a plan to get her to apologize,” “I went back to bed” are all consequent actions.

• Adversity: I decided to join a gym, and when I walked into the place, I saw nothing but firm, toned bodies all around me.
• Belief: What am I doing here? I look like a beached whale compared to these people! I should get out of here while I still have my dignity.
• Consequences: I felt totally self-conscious and ended up leaving after fifteen minutes.

It’s your turn now. Over the next couple of days, record five ABC sequences from your life.

When you have recorded your five ABC episodes, read them over carefully. Look for the link between your belief and the consequences. What you will see is that pessimistic explanations set off passivity and dejection, whereas optimistic explanations energize.

The next step follows immediately: If you change the habitual beliefs that follow adversity for you, your reaction to adversity will change in lockstep.

Disputation and Distraction

THERE ARE TWO general ways for you to deal with your pessimistic beliefs once you are aware of them. The first is simply to distract yourself when they occur—try to think of something else. The second is to dispute them. Disputing is more effective in the long run, because successfully disputed beliefs are less likely to recur when the same situation presents itself again.

Distraction

I WANT YOU now NOT to think about a piece of apple pie with vanilla ice cream. The pie is heated, and the ice cream forms a delightful contrast in taste and temperature. You probably find that you have almost no capacity to refrain from thinking about the pie. But you do have the capacity to redeploy your attention.

Think about the pie again. Got it. Mouth-watering? Now stand up and slam the palm of your hand against the wall and shout, “STOP!” The image of the pie disappeared, didn’t it?

Some people ring a loud bell, others carry a three-by-five card with the word STOP in enormous red letters. Many people find it works well to wear a rubber band around their wrists and snap it hard to stop their ruminating.

If you combine one of these physical techniques with a technique called attention shifting, you will get longer-lasting results. To keep your thoughts from returning to a negative belief after interruption, now direct your attention elsewhere. Try this: Pick up a small object and study it intently for a few seconds.

Finally, you can undercut ruminations by taking advantage of their very nature. Their nature is to circle around in your mind, so that you will not forget them. When adversity strikes, schedule some time—later—for thinking things over … say, this evening at six P.M. Now, when something disturbing happens and you find the thoughts hard to stop, you can say to yourself, “Stop. I’ll think this over later, at … [such and such a time].”

Also, write the troublesome thoughts down the moment they occur. The combination of jotting them down—which acts to ventilate them and dispose of them—and setting a later time to think about them works well; it takes advantage of the reason ruminations exist—to remind you of themselves. If you write them down and set a time to think about them, they no longer have any purpose, and purposelessness lessens their strength.

Disputation

More lasting remedy is to dispute them: Give them an argument. Go on the attack. By effectively disputing the beliefs that follow adversity, you can change your customary reaction from dejection and giving up to activity and good cheer.

• Belief: What awful grades, Judy.
• Consequences: I felt totally dejected and useless.
• Disputation: I’m blowing things out of proportion. Those aren’t awful grades. I may not have done the best in the class, but I didn’t do the worst in the class either. I checked. The fact that I am forty doesn’t make me any less intelligent than anyone else in the class. I have a lot of other things going on in my life that take time away from my studies. I have a full-time job. I have a family. I think that, given my situation, I did a good job on my exams. Now that I have taken this set of exams, I know how much work I need to put into my studies in the future in order to do even better.
• Outcome: I felt much better about myself and my exams. I’m still concerned that my age may be a disadvantage, but I will cross that bridge if and when I come to it.

Distancing

IT IS ESSENTIAL to realize your beliefs are just that—beliefs. They may or may not be facts. If a jealous rival shrieked at you in a rage, “You are a terrible mother. You are selfish, inconsiderate, and stupid,” how would you react? You probably wouldn’t take the accusations much into account.

We can more or less easily distance ourselves from the unfounded accusations of others. But we are much worse at distancing ourselves from the accusations that we launch—daily—at ourselves. After all, if we think them about ourselves, they must be true.

Wrong!

They are merely bad habits of thought produced by unpleasant experiences in the past—by childhood conflicts, by strict parents, by an overly critical Little League coach, by a big sister’s jealousy. But because they seem to issue from ourselves, we treat them as gospel.

They are merely beliefs, however. Checking out the accuracy of our reflexive beliefs is what disputation is all about.

Learning to Argue with Yourself

You already have a lifetime of experience in disputation. You use this skill whenever you argue with other people.

There are four important ways to make your disputations convincing.

• Evidence?

• Alternatives?

• Implications?

• Usefulness?

Evidence

THE MOST CONVINCING way of disputing a negative belief is to show that it is factually incorrect. You adopt the role of a detective and ask, “What is the evidence for this belief?”

Judy did this. She believed that her “awful” grades were the “worst in the class.” She checked the evidence. The person sitting next to her had much lower grades.

It is important to see the difference between this approach and the so-called “power of positive thinking.” Positive thinking often involves trying to believe upbeat statements such as “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better” in the absence of evidence, or even in the face of contrary evidence. Learned optimism, in contrast, is about accuracy.

It is how you cope with negative statements that has an effect. Usually, the negative beliefs that follow adversity are inaccurate. Most people catastrophize: From all the potential causes, they select the one with the direst implications. One of your most effective techniques in disputation will be to search for evidence pointing to the distortions in your catastrophic explanations. Most of the time, you will have reality on your side.

Alternatives

ALMOST NOTHING that happens to you has just one cause; you did poorly on a test, all of the following might have contributed: how hard the test was, how much you studied, how smart you are, how fair the professor is, how the other students did, how tired you were.

Here again, disputation usually has reality on its side. There are multiple causes, so why latch onto the most insidious one?

To dispute your own beliefs, scan for all possible contributing causes. Focus on the changeable (not enough time spent studying), the specific (this particular exam was uncharacteristically hard) and the nonpersonal (the professor graded unfairly) causes. You may have to push hard at generating alternative beliefs, latching onto possibilities you are not fully convinced are true.

Implications

BUT THE WAY things go in this world, the facts won’t always be on your side. The negative belief you hold about yourself may be correct. In this situation, the technique to use is decatastrophizing.

Even if my belief is correct, you say to yourself, what are its implications? Judy was older than the rest of the students. But what does that imply? It doesn’t mean that Judy is any less intelligent than they are, and it doesn’t mean that nobody would want to hire her.

How likely, you should ask yourself, are those awful implications? How likely is it that three Bs mean no one will ever hire Judy? Once you ask if the implications are really that awful, repeat the search for evidence. Judy remembered that almost everyone who got a master’s degree from her program got a decent job.

Usefulness

SOMETIMES the consequences of holding a belief matter more than the truth of the belief. Is the belief destructive? Katie’s belief in her gluttony, even if true, is destructive. It is a recipe for letting go of her diet completely.

Some people get very upset when the world shows itself not to be fair. We can sympathize with that sentiment, but the belief that the world should be fair may cause more grief than it’s worth. A technician doing bomb demolition might find himself thinking, “This could go off, and I might be killed”—with the result that his hands start to shake. In this case I would recommend distraction over disputation. Whenever you simply have to perform now, you will find distraction the tool of choice. Use the distraction techniques. (Stop! Assign a later worry time. Make a written note of the thought.)

Another tactic is to detail all the ways you can change the situation in the future. Even if the belief is true now, is the situation changeable? How can you go about changing it?

Your Disputation Record

Now I want you to practice the ABCDE model.

D is for disputation; E is for energization. During the next five adverse events you face, listen closely for your beliefs, observe the consequences, and dispute your beliefs vigorously. Then observe the energization that occurs as you succeed in dealing with the negative beliefs,

Example below:

• Adversity: I borrowed a pair of really expensive earrings from my friend, and I lost one of them while I was out dancing.
• Belief: I am so irresponsible. They were Kay’s favorite earrings, and of course I go and lose one. She is going to be so absolutely furious at me. Not that she doesn’t have every reason. If I were her, I’d hate me too. I just can’t believe how much of a klutz I am. I wouldn’t be surprised if she told me she didn’t want to have anything to do with me anymore.
• Consequences: I felt totally sick. I was ashamed and embarrassed, and I didn’t want to call and tell her what happened. Basically, I just sat around feeling stupid for a while, trying to muster up the guts to call her.
• Disputation: Well, it is really unfortunate that I lost the earring. They were Kay’s favorites [evidence] and she probably will be very disappointed [implication]. However, she will realize it was an accident [alternative], and I seriously doubt she will hate me because of this [implication]. I don’t think it’s accurate to label myself as totally irresponsible just because I lost an earring [implication].
• Energization: I still felt bad about losing her earring, but I didn’t feel nearly as ashamed, and I wasn’t worried that she would end the friendship over it. I was able to relax and call her to explain.

The Externalization of Voices

IN ORDER to practice disputation, you don’t have to wait for adversity to strike. You can have a friend provide the negative beliefs for you out loud, and then you dispute his accusations, also out loud. Your friend’s job is to criticize you. Choose your friend carefully.

Help your friend choose the right kinds of criticisms by going over your ABC record with him, pointing out the negative beliefs that afflict you repeatedly. With these understandings reached, you’ll find that you don’t, in fact, take the criticisms personally when your friend makes them. Your job is to dispute the criticisms out loud, with all the armaments you have. Marshal all the contrary evidence you can find, spell out all the alternative explanations, decatastrophize by arguing that the implications are not nearly as dire as your friend charges. If you believe the accusation is true now, detail all the things you can do to change the situation. Your friend can interrupt to dispute your disputing.

The post Self Disputation appeared first on Resnik Consulting.

Excerpt From Sally Helgesen, How Women Rise, Random House Business pp. 225-26

While you’re reexamining these attitudes, you might also want to jettison your critique of how “political” your colleagues and bosses are, often and especially including the men. Yes, your peer clapped wildly when the boss introduced a new initiative in the quality meeting, even though he had been trashing the same idea the previous week. But instead of deciding the guy’s a hypocrite who’s playing the typical hierarchical game, why not consider that he’s just a working stiff with a family to support who’s doing what he believes he must to stay employed? It’s not surprising that this includes flattering a boss who has repeatedly made it clear he’s a sucker for even the most flagrant brownnosing.

Judging others often finds expression in phrases such as, “You’d think someone who has reached his level would be more thoughtful.” Or “You wouldn’t expect a managing partner to act like such a jerk.”

The question you might want to ask yourself if you hear these words fall from your lips is simply why? What exactly in the history of the world, or the history of organizations, supports the idea that powerful leaders are always good-hearted and enlightened persons who routinely treat others with respect and make great decisions?

Yes, outstanding leaders have an outsize impact, and we are fortunate when we work with such people. But they are rare. So it doesn’t make much sense to expect that, just because someone reaches a high position, he or she would (fill in the blank).

The problem with judgment is that it gets in your way, sucks up your time, and makes positive change more difficult. It also demonstrates ill will to your fellows, which inevitably comes through, even when you think you’re cleverly disguising your assessment.

Judgment of self or of others won’t improve the quality of your life. It certainly won’t make you happier. But it will keep you stuck when you’re trying to shift behaviors so you can become that most wondrous of creatures, your best self.

The post Judging Others appeared first on Resnik Consulting.

THE FATHER is looking down into the crib at his sleeping newborn daughter, just home from the hospital. …

The baby opens her eyes and stares straight up.

The father calls her name, expecting that she will turn her head and look at him. Her eyes don’t move.

He picks up a furry little toy attached to the rail of the bassinet and shakes it, ringing the bell it contains. The baby’s eyes don’t move.

His heart has begun to beat rapidly. He finds his wife in their bedroom and tells her what just happened. “She doesn’t seem to respond to noise at all,” he says. “It’s as if she can’t hear.”

“I’m sure she’s all right,” the wife says. Together they go into the nursery.

She calls the baby’s name, jingles the bell, claps her hands. Then she picks up the baby, who immediately perks up, wiggling and cooing.

“My God,” the father says. “She’s deaf.”

“No she’s not,” the mother says. “I mean, it’s too soon to say a thing like that. Look, she’s brand-new. Her eyes don’t even focus yet.”

“But there wasn’t the slightest movement, even when you clapped as hard as you could.” The mother takes a book from the shelf. “Let’s read what’s in the baby book,” she says. She looks up “hearing” and reads out loud: “ ‘Don’t be alarmed if your newborn fails to startle at loud noises or fails to orient toward sound. The startle reflex and attention to sound often take some time to develop. Your pediatrician can test your child’s hearing neurologically.’

 “There,” the mother says. “Doesn’t that make you feel better?”

“Not much,” the father says. “It doesn’t even mention the other possibility, that the baby is deaf. And all I know is that my baby doesn’t hear a thing. I’ve got the worst feeling about this. Maybe it’s because my grandfather was deaf. If that beautiful baby is deaf and it’s my fault, I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” says the wife. “You’re going off the deep end. We’ll call the pediatrician first thing Monday. In the meantime, cheer up.”

The father takes the baby but gives her back to his wife as soon as he can. All weekend he finds himself unable to open his briefcase and prepare for next week’s work. He follows his wife around the house, ruminating about the baby’s hearing and about the way deafness would ruin her life. He imagines only the worst: no hearing, no development of language, his beautiful child cut off from the social world, locked in soundless isolation. By Sunday night he has sunk into despair.

The mother leaves a message with the pediatrician’s answering service asking for an early appointment Monday. She spends the weekend doing her exercises, reading, and trying to calm her husband.

The pediatrician’s tests are reassuring, but the father’s spirits remain low. Not until a week later, when the baby shows her first startle, to the backfire of a passing truck, does he begin to recover and enjoy his new daughter again.

THIS FATHER and mother have two different ways of looking at the world. Whenever something bad happens to him—a tax audit, a marital squabble, even a frown from his employer—he imagines the worst: bankruptcy and jail, divorce, dismissal. He is prone to depression; he has long bouts of listlessness; his health suffers. She, on the other hand, sees bad events in their least threatening light. To her, they are temporary and surmountable, challenges to be overcome. After a reversal, she comes back quickly, soon regaining her energy. Her health is excellent.

The optimists and the pessimists. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.

These two habits of thinking about causes have consequences. Literally hundreds of studies show that pessimists give up more easily and get depressed more often. These experiments also show that optimists do much better in school and college, at work and on the playing field. They regularly exceed the predictions of aptitude tests. When optimists run for office, they are more apt to be elected than pessimists are. Their health is unusually good. They age well, much freer than most of us from the usual physical ills of middle age. Evidence suggests they may even live longer.

In tests of hundreds of thousands of people, a surprisingly large number will be found to be deep-dyed pessimists, and another large portion will have serious, debilitating tendencies toward pessimism. I have learned that it is not always easy to know if you are a pessimist, and that far more people than realize it are living in this shadow. Tests reveal traces of pessimism in the speech of people who would never think of themselves as pessimists; they also show that these traces are sensed by others, who react negatively to the speakers.

A pessimistic attitude may seem so deeply rooted as to be permanent. I have found, however, that pessimism is escapable. Pessimists can in fact learn to be optimists, and not through mindless devices like whistling a happy tune or mouthing platitudes (“Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”), but by learning a new set of cognitive skills. Far from being the creations of boosters or of the popular media, these skills were discovered in the laboratories and clinics of leading psychologists and psychiatrists and then rigorously validated.

The Unclaimed Territory

AT THE CORE of the phenomenon of pessimism is another phenomenon—that of helplessness. Helplessness is the state of affairs in which nothing you choose to do affects what happens to you. For example, if I promise you one thousand dollars to turn to this page, you will probably choose to do so, and you will succeed. If, however, I promise you one thousand dollars to contract the pupil of your eye, using only willpower, you may choose to do it, but that won’t matter. You are helpless to contract your pupil. Page turning is under your voluntary control; the muscles that change your pupillary size are not.

Life begins in utter helplessness. The newborn infant cannot help himself, for he is almost entirely a creature of reflex. When he cries, his mother comes, although this does not mean that he controls his mother’s coming. His crying is a mere reflex reaction to pain and discomfort. He has no choice about whether he cries. Only one set of muscles in the newborn seems to be under even the barest voluntary control: the set involved in sucking. The last years of a normal life are sometimes ones of sinking back into helplessness. We may lose the ability to walk. Sadly, we may lose the mastery over our bowels and bladder that we won in our second year of life. We may lose our ability to find the word we want. Then we may lose speech itself, and even the ability to direct our thoughts.

The long period between infancy and our last years is a process of emerging from helplessness and gaining personal control. Personal control means the ability to change things by one’s voluntary actions; it is the opposite of helplessness. In the first three or four months of an infant’s life some rudimentary arm and leg motions come under voluntary control. The flailing of his arms refines into reaching. Then, to his parents’ dismay, crying becomes voluntary: The infant can now bawl whenever he wants his mother. He badly overuses this new power, until it stops working. The first year ends with two miracles of voluntary control: the first steps and the first words. If all goes well, if the growing child’s mental and physical needs are at least minimally met, the years that follow are ones of diminishing helplessness and of growing personal control.

Many things in life are beyond our control—our eye color, our race, the drought in the Midwest. But there is a vast, unclaimed territory of actions over which we can take control—or cede control to others or to fate. These actions involve the way we lead our lives, how we deal with other people, how we earn our living—all the aspects of existence in which we normally have some degree of choice.

The way we think about this realm of life can actually diminish or enlarge the control we have over it. Our thoughts are not merely reactions to events; they change what ensues. For example, if we think we are helpless to make a difference in what our children become, we will be paralyzed when dealing with this facet of our lives. The very thought “Nothing I do matters” prevents us from acting. And so we cede control to our children’s peers and teachers, and to circumstance. When we overestimate our helplessness, other forces will take control and shape our children’s future.

If we habitually believe, as does the pessimist, that misfortune is our fault, is enduring, and will undermine everything we do, more of it will befall us than if we believe otherwise. Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.

A poignant example is the case of a young woman I knew, a student at a university where I once taught. For three years her advisor, a professor of English literature, had been extremely helpful, almost affectionate. His backing, along with her high grades, had won her a scholarship to study at Oxford for her junior year. When she returned from England, her main interest had shifted from Dickens, her advisor’s specialty, to earlier British novelists, particularly Jane Austen, the specialty of one of his colleagues. Her advisor tried to persuade her to do her senior paper on Dickens, but seemed to accept without resentment her decision to work on Austen and agreed to continue as her co-advisor.

Three days before her oral examination, the original advisor sent a note to the examining committee accusing the young woman of plagiarism in her senior thesis. Her crime, he said, was failing to give credit to two scholarly sources for her statements about Jane Austen’s adolescence, in effect taking credit for those perceptions herself. Plagiarism is the gravest of academic sins, and the young woman’s whole future—her fellowship to graduate school, even graduation itself—was threatened.

When she looked at the passages the professor said she had failed to credit, she found that both had come from the same source—the professor himself. She had gotten them during a casual conversation with him, in which he had spoken of the perceptions as just his own thoughts on the matter; he had never mentioned the published sources from which he had obtained them. The young woman had been sandbagged by a mentor jealous of losing her.

Many people would have reacted with fury at the professor. Not Elizabeth. Her habit of pessimistic thinking took over. To the committee, she was certain, she would appear guilty. And, she told herself, there was no way she could prove otherwise. It would be her word against his, and he was a professor. Instead of defending herself, she collapsed inwardly, looking at every aspect of the situation in the worst possible light. It was all her own fault, she told herself. It really didn’t matter that the professor had gotten the ideas from someone else. The main thing was that she had “stolen” the ideas, since she had failed to credit the professor. She had cheated, she believed; she was a cheat, and she probably always had been.

It may seem incredible that she could blame herself when she was so obviously innocent. But careful research shows that people with pessimistic habits of thinking can transform mere setbacks into disasters. Elizabeth dredged up memories that seemed to her to confirm her extreme verdict: the time in seventh grade when she had copied test answers from another girl’s paper. And now this act of “cheating” in the writing of her thesis. She stood silent at her hearing before the examining committee and was denied her degree.

This story does not have a happy ending. With the washout of her plans, her life was ruined. For the past ten years she has worked as a salesgirl. She has few aspirations. She no longer writes, or even reads literature. She is still paying for what she considered her crime.

There was no crime, only a common human frailty: a pessimistic habit of thinking. If she had said to herself, “I was robbed. The jealous bastard set me up,” she would have risen to her own defense and told her story. The professor’s dismissal from an earlier teaching job for doing the same thing might have emerged. She would have graduated with high honors—if only she had had different habits of thinking about the bad events in her life.

Habits of thinking need not last forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.

Instead of a person’s environment, individual expectation, preference, choice, decision, control, and helplessness, more important factors are considered in thinking.

This fundamental change in the field of psychology is intimately related to a fundamental change in our own psychology. For the first time in history—because of technology and mass production and distribution, and for other reasons—large numbers of people are able to have a significant measure of choice and therefore of personal control over their lives. Not the least of these choices concerns our own habits of thinking. By and large, people have welcomed that control. We belong to a society that grants to its individual members powers they have never had before, a society that takes individuals’ pleasures and pains very seriously, that exalts the self and deems personal fulfillment a legitimate goal, an almost sacred right.

The post Two Ways of Looking at Life appeared first on Resnik Consulting.

Marshall Goldsmith; Mark Reiter. Triggers: Creating Behavior That Lasts–Becoming the Person You Want to Be, The Crown Publishing Group, Crown Business 2015. pp. 111-120.

We initiated a study, with the steady stream of participants in my leadership seminars, in which people answered six active questions every day for ten working days. I “reverse-engineered” the questions based on my experience and the literature on the factors that make employees feel engaged. Here are the six Engaging Questions I settled on—and why.

1. Did I do my best to set clear goals today?

Employees who have clear goals report greater engagement than employees who don’t. No surprise. If you don’t have clear goals and ask yourself, “Am I fully engaged?” the obvious follow-up is “Engaged to do what?” This is true within big organizations as well as for individuals. No clear goals, no engagement. After the 2008 financial crisis I worked with executives at a bank that had gone through three “revolving door” CEOs in three years. The organization was directionless, and it showed in the disintegrating engagement scores of the senior management. The lowest scores were attached to the question “Do I have clear goals?” Tweaking the question into active form made an immediate difference. Executives demoralized by their leaders’ fecklessness became dramatically more engaged after they started setting their own direction for the day instead of futilely waiting to receive it from someone else.

2. Did I do my best to make progress toward my goals today?

Teresa Amabile, in her scrupulous research and in The Progress Principle, has shown that employees who have a sense of “making progress” are more engaged than those who don’t. We don’t just need specific targets; we need to see ourselves nearing, not receding from, the target. Anything less is frustrating and dispiriting. Imagine how you’d feel if you chose a goal and instead of getting better at it, you got worse. How engaged would you be? Progress makes any of our accomplishments more meaningful.

3. Did I do my best to find meaning today?

At this late date, I don’t think we have to strenuously argue that finding meaning and purpose improves our lives. I defer here to Viktor Frankl’s 1946 classic, Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl, an Auschwitz survivor, describes how the struggle to find meaning—the struggle, not the result—can protect us in even the most unimaginable environments. It’s up to us, not an outside agency like our company, to provide meaning. This question challenges us to be creative in finding meaning in whatever we are doing.

4. Did I do my best to be happy today?

People still debate if happiness is a factor in employee engagement. I think that because happiness goes hand in hand with meaning, you need both. When employees report that they are happy but their work is not meaningful, they feel empty—as if they’re squandering their lives by merely amusing themselves. On the other hand, when employees regard their work as meaningful but are not happy, they feel like martyrs (and have little desire to stay in such an environment). As Daniel Gilbert shows in Stumbling on Happiness, we are lousy at predicting what will make us happy. We think our source of happiness is “out there” (in our job, in more money, in a better environment) but we usually find it “in here”—when we quit waiting for someone or something else to bring us joy and take responsibility for locating it ourselves. We find happiness where we are.

5. Did I do my best to build positive relationships today?

The Gallup company asked employees, “Do you have a best friend at work?” and found the answers directly related to engagement. By flipping the question from passive to active, we’re reminded to continue growing our positive relationships, even create new ones, instead of judging our existing relationships. One of the best ways to “have a best friend” is to “be a best friend.”

6. Did I do my best to be fully engaged today?

This gets to the head-spinning core of the Engaging Questions: To increase our level of engagement, we must ask ourselves if we’re doing our best to be engaged. A runner is more likely to run faster in a race by running faster when she trains—and timing herself. Likewise, an employee will be more engaged at work if she consciously tries to be more engaged—and rigorously measures her effort. It’s a self-fulfilling dynamic: the act of measuring our engagement elevates our commitment to being engaged—and reminds us that we’re personally responsible for our own engagement.

Given people’s demonstrable reluctance to change at all, this study shows that active self-questioning can trigger a new way of interacting with our world. Active questions reveal where we are trying and where we are giving up. In doing so, they sharpen our sense of what we can actually change. We gain a sense of control and responsibility instead of victimhood.

Testing on Myself

Adding the words “did I do my best” added the element of trying into the equation. It injected personal ownership and responsibility into my question-and-answer process.

I chose to grade myself on a 1-to-10 scale, with 10 being the best score. If I scored low on trying to be happy, I had only myself to blame. We may not hit our goals every time, but there’s no excuse for not trying. Anyone can try.

Since then I’ve gone through many permutations of my Daily Questions. The list isn’t working if it isn’t changing along the way—if I’m not getting better on some issues and adding new ones to tackle. Here’s my current list of twenty-two “Did I do my best?” questions that I review every day:

There’s no correct number of questions. The number is a personal choice, a function of how many issues you want to work on. My list is twenty-two questions deep because I need a lot of help (obviously) but also because I’ve been doing this a long time.

The point is, your Daily Questions should reflect your objectives. They’re not meant to be shared in public (unless you’re writing a book on the subject), meaning they’re not designed to be judged. You’re not constructing your list to impress anyone. It’s your list, your life. I score my “Did I do my best” questions on a simple 1 to 10 scale. You can use whatever works for you. Your only considerations should be:

• Are these items important in my life?
• Will success on these items help me become the person that I want to be?

The post The Engaging Questions appeared first on Resnik Consulting.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness. Rider, 2002, pp. 162-163.

Although, as we have seen, people generally long to leave their places of work and get home, ready to put their hard-earned free time to good use, all too often they have no idea what to do there. Ironically, jobs are actually easier to enjoy than free time, because like flow activities they have built-in goals, feedback, rules, and challenges, all of which encourage one to become involved in one’s work, to concentrate and lose oneself in it. Free time, on the other hand, is unstructured, and requires much greater effort to be shaped into something that can be enjoyed. Hobbies that demand skill, habits that set goals and limits, personal interests, and especially inner discipline help to make leisure what it is supposed to be—a chance for re-creation. But on the whole people miss the opportunity to enjoy leisure even more thoroughly than they do with working time. Over sixty years ago, the great American sociologist Robert Park already noted: “It is in the improvident use of our leisure, I suspect, that the greatest wastes of American life occur.”

The tremendous leisure industry that has arisen in the last few generations has been designed to help fill free time with enjoyable experiences. Nevertheless, instead of using our physical and mental resources to experience flow, most of us spend many hours each week watching celebrated athletes playing in enormous stadiums. Instead of making music, we listen to platinum records cut by millionaire musicians. Instead of making art, we go to admire paintings that brought in the highest bids at the latest auction. We do not run risks acting on our beliefs, but occupy hours each day watching actors who pretend to have adventures, engaged in mock-meaningful action.

This vicarious participation is able to mask, at least temporarily, the underlying emptiness of wasted time. But it is a very pale substitute for attention invested in real challenges. The flow experience that results from the use of skills leads to growth; passive entertainment leads nowhere. Collectively we are wasting each year the equivalent of millions of years of human consciousness. The energy that could be used to focus on complex goals, to provide for enjoyable growth, is squandered on patterns of stimulation that only mimic reality. Mass leisure, mass culture, and even high culture when only attended to passively and for extrinsic reasons—such as the wish to flaunt one’s status—are parasites of the mind. They absorb psychic energy without providing substantive strength in return. They leave us more exhausted, more disheartened than we were before.

Unless a person takes charge of them, both work and free time are likely to be disappointing. Most jobs and many leisure activities—especially those involving the passive consumption of mass media—are not designed to make us happy and strong. Their purpose is to make money for someone else. If we allow them to, they can suck out the marrow of our lives, leaving only feeble husks. But like everything else, work and leisure can be appropriated for our needs. People who learn to enjoy their work, who do not waste their free time, end up feeling that their lives as a whole have become much more worthwhile. “The future,” wrote C. K. Brightbill, “will belong not only to the educated man, but to the man who is educated to use his leisure wisely.”

The post THE WASTE OF FREE TIME appeared first on Resnik Consulting.

How do you start taking responsibility for assuring your work gets noticed? How do you draw attention to what you contribute without feeling like a self-centered jerk? You might start by articulating a vision of where you would like your job to take you so you can give people a context for what you want in your future. Then prepare yourself to take advantage of any opportunities to share what you see.

This is an approach advocated by Dong Lao, who in addition to being a world-class banker, works with the women in his organization to identify how to secure the resources they need to get ahead. During a recent conference at an off-site in Switzerland, a participant asked him during the large plenary session what one thing he thought you could do to better position themselves for leadership in the organization.

He responded with a story about finding himself in the elevator at the bank’s London headquarters a few months before. A young male analyst who had recently joined the organization was standing next to him when a high-profile senior official stepped inside.

“The official had no idea who the analyst was since people at headquarters don’t connect much across levels. But as the elevator started to move, the executive asked the young man what he did at the bank.

When the spiel was finished, the analyst stopped speaking and handed his card to the official, who then held the elevator door open as he got off. “I’m going to pass this along to the head of our subcontinent investment team,” he said. “If you don’t hear from him, let his office know I personally told you to call.”

“Why am I telling you this story?” Lao asked his audience. “Because I believe many of you can learn from it. Having a clear, concise statement ready to deliver at any moment—one that says what you do now but emphasizes what you want to do in the future and why you’re qualified to do it—gives you a huge advantage in terms of visibility and positioning. It sets you apart from the pack and enables you to make the case for yourself at the highest level when the chance presents itself. In my experience, great careers are often built on chance encounters. So it always pays to be prepared.”

Lao noted three advantages to having an elevator speech memorized and ready to go. “First, it shows you’re ambitious, and that your ambition is focused on something specific that you’re working to achieve. Second, it gives you an opportunity to talk about your skills or background in a way that aligns with what could be useful to the organization, not just now but in the years ahead. You’re not blowing hot air, you’re telling a story about why you have what it takes to move up and, by implication, how the organization can benefit from that. Third, it gives you a chance to show that you’re thoughtful, reflective, and concise—the last being important to executives who are always pressed for time and in the habit of asking people to bottom-line it.”

What was particularly impressive, said Lao, was how the young man stopped speaking once he had said his piece. “He didn’t ramble on or try to fill the time. He came to a full stop and handed over his card. Mission accomplished.”

Lao suggested each participant at the conference work on developing an elevator speech, a clear and concise summary of what they do, what they want to do in the future, and why they believe they are the right person to do it. He said, “The most important things are that it’s real, a true statement of what you could see yourself doing in the future and have a desire to do. And that it’s as brief as you can possibly make it. No background, no extra details, no explanations, justifications, ifs, or hedges. You want to keep it as short and clear and strong as you can.”

Lao also advised not worrying that what you have to say might change over time. “If that happens, you’ll develop a new elevator speech. The goal is to be prepared to stake a claim for yourself and your future so that when the chance to connect with a senior leader falls in your lap, you can seize it. You want to get noticed and create opportunities for yourself. If they change over time, that’s all to the good.”

Source: Sally Helgesen / Marshall Goldsmith, How Women Rise, Random House Business Books, 2019 (pp. 82-84) 

The post The Elevator Pitch appeared first on Resnik Consulting.

Excerpts from: Sally Helgesen, How Women Rise, Random House Business Books, 2019 (pp. 86-92)

Trying to master every detail of your job in order to become an expert is a great strategy for keeping the job you have. But if your goal is to move to a higher level, your expertise is probably not going to get you there.

It may be because, like many women, you’ve assumed expertise is the surest route to success. And so you put enormous effort into learning every aspect of your job and assuring your work is letter-perfect.

Meanwhile, your male colleagues are taking a different route, trying to do the job well enough while focusing their time on building the relationships and visibility that will get them to the next level.

That’s because the top jobs always require managing and leading people who have expertise, not providing expertise yourself.

Your commitment to expertise may have helped you survive and may have gotten you where you are today. But as you move higher, it may start to get in your way.

Feeling fulfilled at work requires two things: mastery and recognition.

Mastery is the expertise part, the sheer enjoyment you feel when you do something you value really well.

The second requirement for workplace fulfillment is being recognized for what you do.

You need someone else to recognize you. It’s not surprising, then, that women tend to overvalue expertise, since women often have a tougher time being recognized for their achievements.

Women are often under-recognized because they’re uncomfortable claiming their achievements. If talking yourself up or drawing attention to what you’ve accomplished makes you feel like a self-important jerk, you probably prefer to keep your head down and hope that others notice what you’re contributing. But women are also at times under-recognized because the people around them undervalue their contributions.

When you’re routinely under-recognized, expertise can become a defense, your way of asserting your value regardless of what others perceive or think.

But it’s insufficient if you want to move ahead.

Ashley

When asked what was most responsible for her meteoric rise, “It was learning to let go of being an expert.”

While expertise is expected in almost any job, it doesn’t do much to help you get ahead.

When I joined the company, there were very few women, and I worried about being up to the job.

I felt I had to watch my step and earn my way, so I focused on learning every detail, becoming expert in every task, proving my value, and avoiding criticism. Which is fine, but it’s a poor way to position yourself for something bigger.”

1. Learning every detail to perfection uses up a lot of bandwidth, leaving you little time to develop the relationships you need to move ahead.
2. Your efforts to do everything perfectly usually have the effect of demonstrating that you’re perfect for the job you already have.
3. The expertise you develop may make you indispensable to your boss, who will quite logically want to keep you where you are.

She’d been with the company six years when her boss mentioned that her name had surfaced for a job.

“He told me that he, my boss, couldn’t afford to lose me,” Ashley says.

I saw nothing wrong with it. I actually felt flattered that he needed me so much. It was the validation I’d been looking for since joining the company”.

After watching two less qualified colleagues get juicy promotions, Ashley realized her “mastery mind-set” approach to her current role was virtually designed to keep her stuck.

“Of course you need to deliver on your work, but you’ve got to think bigger than that. It’s rare to get promoted because you’ve done your job flawlessly. You’re most likely to get promoted because people know you and trust that you could be contributing at a higher level. And because you demonstrate you’re ready for a challenge.”

It required her to think deep and hard about her strengths. This changed her picture of what she had to contribute. She says, “I’d always taken for granted that being diligent and super-conscientious was what made me successful in the jobs I’d held. But looking beneath the surface, I saw that my skill at managing relationships was actually my biggest asset. That’s what really qualified me for the next job. More important, it helped me see that I was ready.”

The post Habits That Keep Women from Reaching Their Goals 2. appeared first on Resnik Consulting.

Excerpts from: Sally Helgesen, How Women Rise, Random House Business Books, 2019 (pp. 63-75)

Several years ago, the author spent days interviewing senior female partners in accounting, law, consulting, and investment firms. She was interested in learning what they believed had been most responsible for their success.

When asked about the greatest strength of the younger women in their firms, the female partners almost unanimously cited their ability to deliver high-quality work. “The women here go the extra mile when you give them assignments,” said one partner. Another said, “They are extremely conscientious, crossing every t and dotting every i. They take deadlines seriously. They show up. They are meticulous. You can count on them to get the job done.”

When asked what the younger women in their firms were worst at, the responses were also consistent. “Hands down, they are worst at bringing attention and visibility to their successes.”

“They often work harder than their male peers but then go out of their way to avoid taking credit for what they’ve done, especially with senior leaders.” “A lot of our women seem uncomfortable using the ‘I’ word, so they always try to spread the credit around. This might make them good people but it doesn’t help their careers.”

The reluctance to claim achievements is common among women in every sector and at every level.

When the question “How many of you are good at drawing attention to what you achieve?” is asked, usually, only scattered hands go up. Sometimes, not a single woman describes herself this way.

When asked to reflect on why, two responses surface nearly every time: “If I have to act like that obnoxious blowhard down the hall to get noticed around here, I’d prefer to be ignored. I have no desire to behave like that jerk.”

And: “I believe great work speaks for itself. If I do an outstanding job, people should notice.”

A woman will pick out the most shameless self-promoter in the organization and decide that, if she tries to draw attention to what she’s doing, she will be acting like him. (It’s usually a him.) Since the thought of emulating this insufferable colleague’s behavior repels her, she prefers to keep her head down instead of looking for ways to get recognized for her contributions.

There are two problems with this approach. First, citing the jerk down the hall as an example of everything you are not and don’t wish to become indicates an either/or way of thinking. Either you exemplify the worst aspects of a given behavior, or you behave in an entirely opposite manner. Either/or thinking sees no possibility of a middle ground, no graceful way, for example, to bring attention to the quality of your work without becoming obnoxious and self-serving, and so justifies your refusal to do so.

Second, contrasting your refusal to claim credit for your own good work with an extreme opposite example can inspire you to feel morally superior to anyone who is comfortable doing so.

This is unhelpful, because it gives you an excuse for buying into what is ultimately a rationale for staying in your comfort zone. Instead of asking yourself why you have trouble bringing attention to your successes and then figuring out an appropriate way to do so, you congratulate yourself for being a wonderful human being who doesn’t need to toot her own horn. And then you try to take solace in that when you’re passed over for the next promotion. People generally tailor their behavior to meet the expectations of their “referent group.”

Basically it means that people act the way the group they identify with expects them to act. If you feel uncomfortable drawing attention to your achievements, it’s often because your referent group—other women, a former boss, a repressive culture, your family of origin—expects you to be modest and self-effacing.

As a result, you tend to view behaviors that don’t meet these expectations as disruptive. And you avoid them even in professional situations where they are expected. But think about it. If women in the seventies, eighties, and nineties had been universally concerned with meeting the expectations of their referent group, there would be about zero women in management ranks today.

While there’s nothing to gain from being obnoxious, shrinking into yourself in an effort to please isn’t going to benefit you—or other women.

As you move to a higher level, any discomfort you feel claiming recognition will begin to incur higher costs. That’s because when you represent your organization diverting credit not only diminishes your own achievements, it undercuts the visibility of the people you work with: colleagues, employees, partners, senior leaders.

Organizations often fail to address women’s reluctance to effectively market themselves because they assume a male leadership template.

Although many of the women were confident of their ability to deliver outstanding results, they struggled with getting recognized for their work.

The art of self-promotion

If you struggle to claim credit for your achievements, it may cost you throughout your career. But the costs will be highest when you’re trying to move to the next level or seeking a new job.

Speaking up about what you contribute and detailing why you’re qualified does not make you self-centered or self-serving. It sends a signal that you’re ready to rise.

Search firms confirm that women applying for jobs are often less assertive than men when it comes to declaring their qualifications.

“We find women are often tentative when describing their skills and experience. It’s not uncommon to come across comments in application letters such as, ‘I’ve never held a position like this before so I’m not sure if my qualifications are an exact match.’”

“A guy might say, ‘I have exactly the skills you are looking for and can easily meet these requirements because I’m excellent at X, Y, and Z.’ Maybe X, Y, and Z have nothing to do with the job, but his confidence somehow manages to convince you. Whereas women are more likely to express doubt. All too often, this results in the job going to the less qualified man. Since he so firmly believes he can do the job, the employer is willing to give him a chance.

Effectively marketing yourself, far from being shameful, is an important part of every job—and key to helping you reach the next level of success.

If you don’t find a way to speak about the value of what you’re doing, you send a message that you don’t put much value on it.

If you’re considering how you might promote yourself, it helps to bear in mind that you are your primary product. As you talk about what you have achieved, you are always selling you—not just the details but the overall package. Every successful salesperson knows this. People buy because they like and trust you. And because they believe what you offer may have value for them. Why do they believe this? Because you so obviously do!

Mesmerizing belief is the secret of every great salesperson. To sell yourself effectively, therefore, believing in what you have to offer is essential.

The post Habits That Keep Women from Reaching Their Goals appeared first on Resnik Consulting.

I’ve had wonderful parents. They supported me all along, especially when I was a child. They never thought or mentioned that anything could be unreachable for me.

Probably this is the reason that I don’t feel any limitations. I rarely doubt, if I’m able to achieve anything I’d love to.

As I have healthy self-compassion, I could never properly understand teachings about ‘Learn to love yourself unconditionally’.

Then, I got a lesson from a client. A client asked for my support, as she was so much overwhelmed with work that the stress blocked her from starting the work.

After the initial questions, it turned out that she had deep self-compassion issues. Based on her description, her boss seemed to be a bully, but – according to her, he was a very good person. After all, he evaluated her well, and nobody can be perfect. It’s only she, who was a horrible person, as she could not handle everything that she believed she needed to.
I asked her if she could accept that she was still a wonderful human being, even if she could not complete the work at hand on time.
This was the moment when I saw I lost her.
At the end of the session, she thanked me and told me she was very grateful. Then, I never heard from her again.

When I re-evaluated this conversation later, I realized that – from my safe space – I entered her house by kicking the door in. She was not yet prepared to see herself as a wonderful being. She gave me a lesson on what it means to be suffering from lack of self-compassion.

😣 Our negative drivers (saboteurs), like stress, anger, regret, fear, guilt, anxiety, shame, obligation, can surely push us into action and we can achieve success through that.
🛑 The accompanying result of these successes are frustration, burnout, depression, heart-failure and other stress related sicknesses.

✨ Our supportive mind offers a very different approach.
It reassures you that, even though you made a mistake, you are still a wonderful person.
✨ It tells you that everything, even your mistakes, can be turned into gifts and opportunities by the way you react to them.
✨ It tells you that you can launch into action through compassion, curiosity, creativity, the joy of self-expression and a desire to contribute.
✅ The result will be accomplishment, satisfaction and joy.

👀 Unfortunately, it is not always a simple decision which road you chose. Your childhood impressions determine your choices and might put your saboteurs in the driving seat.

👉 The first step on the way out is awareness.
👉 Then, a strong will to put your supportive mind in control.
👉 When you are determined to change your life, coaching can offer you invaluable support on your way.

#selfcompassion#selfconfidence#loveyourself#unconditionallove#coaching#success#change#grateful#hedikovacsresnik#resnikconsulting#integrity#values

The post How Much Do You Love Yourself? appeared first on Resnik Consulting.