Posted at 01:56 PM in Books, Professional growth | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
My interests toward most sports are close to zero. But I find sports performance psychology fascinating. I am always curious how top performers/experts in various competitive fields were trained and why they could perform as good as they do under tremendous pressure. I have followed James E. Loehr’s work for some time. I like his ideas. His ideas confirmed my basic belief that most of the important skills in life are not inherited. They can be learned and improved upon if we can find a way to sustain our motivation and if we understand the mechanism of good practice.
I believe Loehr’s research and practice have profound implications in how we should view and take advantage of stress. Be able to thrive on stress will make it possible for us to live a happy, balanced, productive, and fulfilled life.
Here is Loehr ‘s big idea. Stress exposure is not the problem. Without stress exposure, there is no growth. What do you think happens to a broken arm protected in the cast? Completely free from stress for a few weeks, when the cast is removed, do you expect the arm to be stronger or weaker? Stress is a problem only when the volume of recovery doesn’t match the volume of stress. With excessive stress and insufficient recovery, our adaptation threshold is exceeded and our system, physically, mentally, and emotionally, simply can’t respond appropriately, and serious harm could be done. On the other hand, with too much recovery and not enough stress exposure, we gradually lose the capacity to handle stress and our adaptation threshold is lowered. The balanced life is an oscillation between stress and recovery and the stress level has to be high enough to maintain our capacity and progressively higher to ensure growth.
One of Loehr’s most important discoveries is Trained Recovery. In Loehr’s early sports research, he wanted to find out what made some tennis players top performers and some just good ones. For tennis players with the same level of technical skills, he didn’t observe any measurable differences when they are playing the points. What he did catch were the between-point differences. In the 25 seconds allowed between points, the time necessary for the players to move to the appropriate position on the court, top players have a much disciplined sequence of thoughts and actions. Their movements, gestures, and rituals in between-point help them recover from the stress of the previous point and help them maintain their ideal performance state in the most effective way. In other words, after you get your techniques well trained, what can make you or break you, to a large extent, depends on how well you use your down time to recover.
For most of us, the good news is our recovery time is usually longer than 25 seconds. So how can we enjoy the trained recovery in our own lives? Our challenge is to find high quality recovery time and good recovery strategies to match the stress level in our life. To start with, we need to allow ourselves to have high quality breaks and down time. It’s easier said than done. I remember when I was doing computer programming, I could sit in front of the computer for 5 to 6 hours straight till my eyeballs can’t move and my brain felt like mashed potato. I usually started to make stupid mistakes after two hours. I knew that when I started to curse the computer and I knew I needed a break. But I simply didn’t want to get up and walk around. Discipline and will power alone doesn’t ensure that I work most productively even if I know how. The only way to get there is through forming healthy habits and establishing carefully crated rituals. For example, I could use a kitchen timer to remind me when I need to get up and take a break, or I can write a program to force the computer to save my work and reboot every so often till I get used to taking breaks. Using down time well is even more important and difficult. It requires us to be fully present in the moment. How many of us feel that we can’t turn off our brains at the end of the work day? I sure can’t from time to time. It takes planning and discipline, ahead of the time. When we feel exhausted after a full day’s work, especially if we didn’t take high quality breaks through the day, we have little mental/emotional energy left to decide how best to spend our non work time. Habits and rituals are probably more reliable in this case as well. I remember a decompress ritual shared by a friend. When he gets home after work, he would ask his kids to shake off his stress. His kids literally jump up to him and shake his whole body for two minutes. That became a ritual and bonding experience between him and his kids.
Loehr argued that stress response is emotional response. To be able to use our recovery time well, we need to take control of our emotions. Stress control is ultimately emotional control. There are two parts in emotional control. The ability to summon positive emotions at a moment’s notice, regardless of the circumstance; and the ability to handle negative emotions so that they don’t intrude into the trained recovery time, especially under great pressure and after making a mistake. In other words, emotional control is the ability to summon appropriate emotions for the given context and delay experiencing the inappropriate emotions when necessary.
The ability to summon positive emotions at will takes practice, lots of practices, daily and consistent effort. The foundation for this skill is self-awareness. We need to be aware what we are thinking and what we are doing when we are in a positive emotional state. With practice, the images of what we did and the thoughts we had when we experienced positive emotions can become the triggers for accessing future positive emotions on demand. The basic techniques for practicing are visualization and controlling our thoughts and attitude.
Personally, I found that the strategy for dealing with emotional discomfort is the same as that for physical discomfort. It is called Detachment. You become an observer of what you are going through, you make a mental note here and there for you to review later, and you just watch without interference. You treat your negative emotions as messengers who tell you some of the true needs you should fulfill in the most constructive way, as soon as you get a chance. Then you let them go. You don’t allow the negative emotions to control your thoughts and actions. I first learned this when I had to deal with the pain of child birth. I used pain mediation when my first child Chloe was born. She came out drowsy and can’t suck on her own for a couple of days. Scary experience. So I refused to use pain medication when my second child came along. Looking back at Chloe’s birth, when I felt the pain was intolerable, what got me was not the physical pain itself. It was the fear of the unknown. I didn’t know how much worse it would get and how long it would last now that I already can’t breathe freely. The second time around, I turned my fear into my curiosity. I was curious how bad it can get. I watched the pain comes and goes, wave after wave, and imagined myself riding on the ocean waves in a small canoe. Without fear and anxiety, I truly enjoyed the ride. Pain was just another physical sensation, though not the most pleasant one. By itself, it was not unbearable. Later I learned to use the same strategy to handle emotional and mental stress and found it quite effective. When I feel overwhelmed, for whatever reasons, I try to pause and say “It’s interesting. I am curious how bad it can get”. That always gives me a little distance and perspective to regain my sanity.
Many of us have excessive emotional/mental stress and insufficient physical stress. It’s easier to control the stress and recovery level in physical training. Since the responses for physical stress and emotional stress share the same biochemistry and neurochemistry, we will be able to respond to emotional/mental stress better if we have a good physical foundation for recovery. One interesting point in Loehr’s books is his first priority in physical training. Core muscles. The strengthened core muscles could help us with our posture and help us breathe better in cardiovascular training. The goal is to do 200 curl-ups in sets of 25 every day. I started a few days ago and I am still sore.
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Posted at 08:32 AM in Books, Professional growth | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath is one of those rare books that I bribed my kids to go to bed earlier and get up later as soon as I started reading. It was such a pleasure to go through and it had such a huge impact on my thinking. I will remember some of the examples and case studies for many years to come. Hopefully I will pause and catch myself more often before I commit another one of the communication sins mentioned in the book.
Here are a few things that hinder the effective communications that I could personally relate to.
· The curse of knowledge. After we have learned something, we don’t remember what it’s like not to know something or be able to do something. For example, when my older daughter was two, we tried to teach her how to count. She knew how to recite numbers. However, she had a hard time to match numbers with objects. One object she would count as one, two as two, then three, four, five, etc she would also count as two. I was at my wit’s end. I simply didn’t understand why she can’t get it and I didn’t know how I can make her get it. Knowing and not knowing seem to be two discrete states that can’t be connected easily. After you know something, a one way switch is flipped and you are not accessible to the state of not knowing anymore. This is one of the most important points we should be aware of when we communicate. With the curse of knowledge, often we are also tempted to share all we know and in a single setting, we are tempted to share the tips and conclusions which emerge from months of hard work, without providing the necessary context, without much supporting evidence or examples, and nobody will be able to figure out how what we said is relevant. Once in a while we might state what we know so accurate, to the point of useless to others.
· “Bury the lead”. A concept borrowed from journalism. Inverted pyramid structure of ideas/information is how good journalists use to write their pieces. You read the first sentence/paragraph and you know most of the story. That first sentence/paragraph is called the Lead. This is something I saw myself doing over and over. I got lost in the abundance of information and tried to organize that information in a logical fashion. In other words, I worry more about presentation and less about the core message, the most critically important element that I really wanted to convey. There are two other manifestations of “burying the lead”. One is “starting with something interesting but irrelevant in hopes of entertaining the audience.” The remedy is to “work to make the core message itself more interesting.” Another one is “tempted to tell you everything, with perfect accuracy, right up front, when they should be giving you just enough info to be useful, then a little more, then a little more.”
· Decision paralysis. This one is on the receiving end. Research shows, when people are uncertain about something, when they are presented with many options, even if they are all attractive, they will delay their actions or decisions, or even take the route that is not very attractive. So if you want your audience to act on your message, you need to reduce the amount of information in your idea.
The main point of the book is that you can study success and get better yourself. Here is the best part. Successes share some common traits and you can identify them and create a template or checklist. One interesting study quoted in the book is about systematic creativity. According to the study, surprisingly, people who were given the creative template for ads produced ads that were judged more creative compared to people who were given other types of creative training, such as free association. The authors said it better. “If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.” The book lay out the requirements and common traits shared by useful and lasting ideas, the sticky ideas as the authors call them. It also shows you what the core message is like, how you can find the core message, and communicate it effectively.
In their framework, there are two stages in making the ideas sticky. First, the Answer stage, you use your expertise to find the most critically important idea and make it compact. Then, Telling Other stage. You need to construct your idea in the way that makes your audience pay attention, understand and remember, agree and believe, care, and be able to act on. The checklist for making your ideas sticky is: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotion, and stories. Every one of these elements is rich and powerful and is usually under applied.
Take simplicity for example. Be simple does not mean to dumb down or just sound bites. Be simple means you only keep the most critically important element. Not only you strip away anything that is not essential, but also you leave out some important but not the most critically important elements. Be simple also means that the expression of the idea is so compact, so concise, so clear that it is memorable and its meaning is not open to interpretation.
The book is very thought-provoking. Many points and observations struck me and made me pause and reflect. Here are a few of them.
· Presentation. “The goal is not to summarize; it’s to make you care about knowing something, and then tell you what you want to know.” When we give a talk, we are often so passionate about our subject. We assume you feel the same way about the topic. See, we know so much. We just want to give you all the facts and conclusions. We assume you will pay attention. You have to. Our talk is not mandatory. You come to our talk by your own free choice. It’s a waste of your time not to pay attention, don’t you think? We put in little thoughts on how to get your attention and how to hold your attention. However, “To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from “what information do I need to convey?” to “what questions do I want my audience to ask?””
· Using numbers and statistics. Without using numbers and statistics, and equations by the same token, our ideas seem to be wishy-washy, hand-waving. But numbers alone don’t convey much. Most people don’t have an intuitive feel about the magnitude and relevancy of pure numbers. Numbers and statistics are useful only if you can use them to illustrate relationships in the right context.
· Concreteness. The authors observed the difference between novice and expert. “If concreteness is so powerful, why do we slip so easily into abstraction? The reason is simple: because the difference between an expert and a novice is the ability to think abstractly”. “Novices perceive concrete details as concrete details. Experts perceive concrete details as symbols of patterns and insights that they have learned through years of experience. And, because they are capable of seeing a higher level of insight, they naturally want to talk on a higher level.”
· Availability bias. People believe something is more likely to happen or to be true when it’s easier to remember.
· Motivation. We tend to think that we are motivated by higher and nobler desires and other people are motivated by more materialistic and base desires.
Overall, this is a book worth digesting. The language is fluid. The layout and the fonts are very pleasing to the eyes in the hardcover edition. The book is well researched and full of intriguing examples. I think it’s a must-read for people who want their ideas to have impact. There is an Easy Reference Guide at the end of the book. It is a very useful refresher after you read the book. The Notes section is worth reading as well. There are a lot of fascinating studies and papers plus insightful comments. The index is well prepared. I could flip the page in the index section and linger on one or two entries and see what they remind me of.
Posted at 02:13 PM in Books, Communication | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)