Two Modest Techniques for a Happier New Year

This basketball may have been doing the two exercises

Whether 2011 was a real winner or a huge bomb, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that most people I know would be happy to have a little more happiness in their lives. This leads me straight to the field of positive psychology, which focuses on helping ordinary people thrive rather than treating illness. It’s a pretty fertile area that spends a lot of time looking at human happiness. I’ve been thinking about two research conclusions that have come out of the field, and some activities I’ve been doing that seem to fit with the findings.

Our Distorted Beliefs
The first is that people are pretty good at figuring out whether they are happy at a given moment. (When someone asks “How’re you doing?” it’s not that hard a question to answer.) On the other hand, the way memory works makes it very difficult to remember what has made us happy in the past or to predict what might make us happy in the future. Plenty of research has shown that people believe that the most intense or dramatic things, such as buying a house, having an illness, or breaking up with a lover, have the biggest impact on their happiness. But in fact these dramatic developments aren’t as important as you might think. One of the leaders in the field, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, elaborated on this in a recent Harvard Business Review interview about the science of happiness:

As it turns out, people are not very good at predicting what will make them happy and how long that happiness will last. They expect positive events to make them much happier than those events actually do, and they expect negative events to make them unhappier than they actually do. In both field and lab studies, we’ve found that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or failing an exam—all have less impact on happiness than people think they will. A recent study showed that very few experiences affect us for more than three months. When good things happen, we celebrate for a while and then sober up. When bad things happen, we weep and whine for a while and then pick ourselves up and get on with it.

Being Good vs. Getting Better — What the Super Bowl Says About Mindsets

All the discussion about Super Bowl this week has me thinking about a key finding in motivational psychology: If you want to succeed at something, you should focus on getting better rather than on being good. It’s a little counterintuitive. Isn’t everyone's ultimate goal to be good? Or even great? That’s certainly what football players hope they’ll be when they step onto the field. But focusing solely on the end result leads people and organizations to perform worse and quit earlier when faced with extremely challenging tasks than those who focus on the process of improving.

Motivational psychology has
a few lessons for this guy

Focusing solely on the end result is evidence of something Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck calls a "fixed mindset." This is the belief that the reason you are going to succeed is because of your innate talents and abilities. (Think, for example, of a football team that believes it will win because it’s bigger, stronger, and better than the opposition.) But when people with a fixed mindset encounter truly major road blocks, or begin to fail, they don’t know what to do. They often give up altogether. After all, if you think you’re not smart enough or strong enough to do something, there’s no point in continuing to try.

Contrast a fixed mindset with people and organizations that have what Dweck calls a "growth mindset." They believe that talents and abilities are malleable and can be improved over time. When doing work, people with a growth mindset focus more on the process of getting better than on the end result. They are likely to look at each challenge as an opportunity to improve. They are likely to look at each failure as something they can learn from for the next time. Another motivational psychologist, Heidi Grant Halvorson, has conducted experiments showing that people can be taught to have a growth mindset. And those who have it are less likely than their fixed mindset brethren to get stymied by tough tasks. They persevere. Over time, they can learn to be gritty and resilient.

How does this relate to football? Good question. Maybe you can guess where I’m going with this.

A Second Guitar Lesson: The Six Month Rule

What happens if there’s not enough time to do this?

This post is about the neuroscience of learning. And I will get to that. But first, a brief interlude about delays, stops, and starts. Jinxed by my last blog entry about learning the guitar, I just went through a month when I really didn’t practice. Three weeks of being super-busy, then Thanksgiving holiday week travel when I couldn’t bring the instrument.

Delays can be fatal when you’re trying to make a change or when—like me—you’re trying to learn a new skill. It’s pretty easy to find examples of projects and change efforts that were delayed in an attempt to kill them off, as far back as ancient Rome and as recently as the Wall Street reforms under Dodd-Frank.

So what does a delay mean for learning a new skill? Maybe something like my slowly developing musical dexterity? Studies in neuroscience, and specifically neuroplasticity, suggest that it all depends on how long you’ve been at it. There’s pretty good evidence that once you’ve been working on a new skill for more than six months, your brain is much more tolerant of delays.

Guitar Lesson: No Such Thing as a One-Way Door

I’m learning to play guitar. Definitely a humbling experience. While I’ve gotten to the point of plucking a few melodies that I actually recognize (who knew Beethoven’s Ode To Joy would be fun played on a cheap folk guitar?), about half the few chords I play sound like dying cats.

As a child, my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to do something musical. So, I chose the trumpet. (I think I saw the instrument on TV somewhere.) I spent about five years going to trumpet lessons and at times pretending to practice so my mother wouldn’t nag me. Despite all my puckering in the mouthpiece, it just never sounded that good.

For many years, I’ve wished I’d learned to play the guitar as a kid instead. But there was an essential trap in my thinking. In my mind, deciding on something besides the guitar all those years ago was like a one-way door. Once I had gone through, I could never go back. The fact that I hadn’t learned guitar back then meant it would never happen. I could even think of all the reasons why: Kids learn to play instruments so much easier than adults, I could never hope to reach a high level of proficiency, I didn’t feel like I had time for lessons and practicing, and on and on from there.

Measurement Has Its Limits: The Cookie-Radish Effect

 No willpower needed

I recently wrote about how measuring your own activity, using something as simple as a stopwatch in the shower, can pay off big time in behavioral change. (It can speed you up on tasks you tend to do slowly.) That said, I’ve recently run into a few people who take that concept much further. They schedule tasks for themselves in 10-minute intervals and constantly check to see whether they’re on time and on task. I’ve even talked to one colleague who suggested I do something similar.

Yikes! I can’t imagine being a slave to the stopwatch in that way. But I want to have a clearer reason why such a thing makes no sense for me. Something more than it just doesn’t feel right. So here it is:

When you force yourself to do something that takes a lot of effort or willpower, what you are actually doing is using the rational part of your brain (the part that handles executive functioning) to take over from the more emotional and instinctive part of your brain (the part that wants to do what feels right). Well, there’s a lot of research that suggests that most people have rational effort/willpower in limited quantities. Use too much of it and you’ll begin to run out.

Measurement Drives Behavior, Even in the Shower

A tool for behavioral change?

Sometimes lasting change comes from very small adjustments… and a little understanding of how our brains are wired.

My natural pace in the morning is slow. I’m one of those people who always seems to take a good long time picking out clothes, showering, getting dressed, etc. And this used to make me late a lot. But in the past year, I’ve turned the situation around. The new element: wearing a waterproof watch with a stopwatch function.

By starting the timer when I step into the shower, I’ve completely changed my dynamic. I haven’t made any conscious effort to speed up (seriously, none), but that’s what has happened anyway. The only effort has been to look at my watch from time to time. That’s where my brain’s wiring takes over. It can’t see a sequence of times, day in and day out, without looking for patterns. I developed a pretty good idea for how long I should take at the various tasks: showering, toweling off, getting dressed, coming down to breakfast, etc. (A five-minute shower is about average, and eight minutes is slow.) Now I can’t help noticing when I take longer than usual; I find myself taking corrective action without much thought. Slow at one step, and suddenly I speed up at my other tasks. Now, when I have everything laid out the night before, the whole sequence of getting out of bed and out the door is less than 25 minutes.

There’s a basic idea that underlies this change: Measurement drives behavior. Just by the act of measuring something and paying attention to the results, people begin to change what they do. This idea is critical in the business and management world. But there’s no reason it can’t work at the level of personal change, too. The hard part is picking the right things to measure and getting the whole process started. That seems to be what’s going on with my morning stopwatch. Looking at a timepiece was not hard to turn into a habit. 

Puerto Rico Part II: The Engineer Turned Forest Ranger

In my previous post I introduced Frank, who was our guide in the El Yunque rain forest in Puerto Rico. As Lani and I walked along a rain forest path, Frank talked plants and wildlife and then about bits and pieces of his background. Here’s what we learned:

Frank was born in Puerto Rico, but moved to the continent (that’s how many Puerto Ricans refer to the mainland United States) when he was young. You can still hear the remnants of a New York accent in his throaty voice. After high school, he joined the Air Force and was posted with NATO in Europe. He married his high school sweetheart and things went along smoothly. He studied electrical engineering, something that served him well when he left the service. He moved to Puerto Rico where he began working for a large computer manufacturer. He eventually helped the company develop factories that built things like main frame computers – you know, those large, clunky pieces of electronics that existed in the Stone Age, i.e., before advent of the PC. (At one time, tax incentives led a large number of electronics companies to run factories on the island.)

In a matter-of-fact way, Frank told us that his wife died of cancer in the early 1990s. Although he didn’t say the words, I suspect Frank had a nervous breakdown. Frank couldn’t work. He just shut himself off.

“I was depressed, I thought it was all over. I just didn’t want to go on,” Frank explained to us.

Puerto Rico Part I: Rare Finds in a Rain Forest

Lani and I were recently visiting some of her family in Puerto Rico and managed to spend a few days in a mountainous tropical rain forest called El Yunque. (It’s a national forest.) We hiked around verdant landscapes populated with giant ferns, tree frogs, and climbing vines and scrambled our way across mountain streams feeding into waterfalls.

El Yunque is also where we met Frank, shown at right (last name omitted to protect his privacy). A longtime electrical engineer, Frank had a personal crisis that initially dragged him down but ultimately led him to a life as a park ranger, something he’s done now for 15 years. “I work as close to heaven as you can get,” he says.

Frank will be 72 this year, though in person he looks a decade or two younger. (The light breezes of the mountains and Frank’s obvious gusto for his constant level of physical activity probably has something to with it.) He does a whole set of ranger-y tasks: trail maintenance, guiding visitors, search and rescue, etc. He roams around with a wide-brimmed hat, a hand-carved walking stick he made himself, and a necklace with a large ivory-looking tooth on it. A few times a day, he leads short hikes for visitors starting about two thirds of the way up the main mountain. Lani and I were lucky enough to get him all to ourselves on a slow afternoon. We wandered with him under the variegated canopy.

The King’s Speech: Perspective Shifting

People of all sorts have a tendency to take one aspect of themselves and treat it like it’s their whole self. It’s a kind of psychological shorthand. Someone says “I’m an engineer” rather than “I work in engineering,” or “I’m a soldier” rather than “I’m in the military.” But this thinking is a tremendous millstone for people who have to confront serious challenges in their lives. Example numero uno is Bertie (Colin Firth in the recent film The King’s Speech), a.k.a. Albert Frederick Arthur George, the Duke of York, and much later, King George VI.

As portrayed in the movie, Bertie’s label for himself is ineffectual stutterer. He can’t remember a time when he didn’t splutter and stammer in almost any social situation or when he wasn’t utterly terrified of his father and of not living up to his royal responsibilities. He has tried various treatments, all of which failed. And he has become convinced that a stutterer is just what he is and what he always will be.

The perspective shift comes after a trick demonstrated by Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) that allows Bertie to hear a recording of himself reading a passage from Shakespeare with no stuttering at all. That’s when Bertie’s self-label begins to get fuzzy. He can see Bertie the man and the stammering he suffers from as two distinct things.

Reframing, Part III: Practicing the Reframing Process

I've been writing about the process of reframing: redirecting your attention to the motivational and enlivening aspects of what you’re planning on doing, and defining problems you encounter as incidental challenges rather than barriers.

So how do I put this reframing idea to work? I’m going to use the process of writing blog posts to practice it.

I'm reframing my writing process to make it less stressful

Reframing, Part II: Reframing and the Barrier Reflex

I recently wrote about Paul Miller—the self described one-armed dwarf who was one of the most resilient and upbeat people I’ve ever met. Now, a few months after his death, I’ve had a chance to think about some personal change lessons to take from him.

I’m something of a worrier by nature, a glass-half-empty type. When I think about trying something new, my initial reaction is to focus on the barriers that stand in my way. I call this the barrier reflex. The barrier reflex is a knee-jerk, unconscious response that can make it hard to get motivated, hard to get moving, and hard to get out of first gear.

One way past the barrier reflex is through reframing. This is a way of changing the meaning you make of the situation by redirecting where and how you focus your attention.

Reframing, Part I: Eulogy for a "One-Armed Dwarf"

Looking at a situation from a wholly new angle is a powerful technique for change—something psychologists call cognitive reframing. I’ve seen many examples. One that sticks with me came from Paul Miller. In this post, I’ll give one piece of his story, the part that I witnessed. In the next post, I’ll explore some reframing Paul seemed to do so effortlessly that I didn’t really understand it was happening until much later.

Paul Miller

The first time I met Paul was at the dinner table at my cousin’s house in Washington, DC. Paul, who was a little over 4 feet tall, was wearing khakis and a maroon knit shirt with one empty sleeve. He seemed like an inquisitive, upbeat guy who happened to be working crazy hours at the White House while staying in my cousin’s guest room. (Paul’s wife and kids were in Seattle, where had been working as a law professor.) He also fumbled with his food, just a bit. He talked about the foibles of working in the White House office that deals with job vacancies and political appointees—a dicey and complicated business. One day was the day to look for possible Hispanic appointees, another day was African Americans. But he didn’t seem too impressed with himself. Neither his dwarfism nor his missing limb came up at all. (He did talk about the convoluted process he needed to go through to give his daughters, when they came to visit from Seattle, access to the White House playground built for the Obama girls.)

What I didn’t learn until later was that Paul’s arm had been amputated only two weeks before.

Paul was learning to redo everything in his life one-handed without betraying any frustration or changing hi demeanor. He didn’t miss work. He’d been flying home to Seattle every few weeks to get chemotherapy to treat the tumor in his arm. And until the amputation, most colleagues had no idea what was going on.

Alex the Chocolate Alchemist

Alex and an old chocolate roaster

Taza Chocolate is to regular chocolate what a nutty seven-grain bread is to white bread. It has a slightly grainy texture, depth, and a certain hint of fruitiness.

I think of Alex Whitmore, the driving force behind Taza, as a chocolate alchemist. He never set out to be a chocolatemaker, though. Alex got his degree in anthropology in 1999. Rather than work for a dot-com like many classmates, he worked as a yacht captain, sailing Walter Cronkite's 60-foot sailboat up and down the East Coast. Later, he moved to Portland, Oregon, where he waited on tables. That’s where he hit rock bottom – not knowing what to do with himself

I felt like I wasn’t getting anywhere. I was living with college buddies. I was totally depressed. The gray and rain of the winters destroyed me.

Alex became a licensed sky diver, earning money stuffing parachutes into packs. Then it was back to Boston, where he managed a fleet of cars for ZipCar. Then he briefly lived in Chile, where he taught English and rode for a semi-professional bike racing team.

Pretending To Be Adventure Boy: A Trip in a Blizzard (Part II)

Stopping in the ghostly arch

Day two of our trip to the Berkshires began with the blizzard still howling and virtually no visibility. We trudged our way over to the Mass MoCa complex, occasionally stumbling into snow drifts. (Luckily the museum did not close for the day, merely opened late.)

Mass MoCa is housed in a 19th century brick mill complex along a river. It has space for some of the largest museum art installations I’ve ever seen. They’re so big that the museum doesn’t keep most of them permanently. It rotates each art exhibition space around once a year. We first passed through a gallery of some vaguely creepy pieces covered with silk roses in dark wax and preserved peacocks hanging on a dead tree. Then up the stairs to something utterly surprising: a 150-foot-long gallery crossed by dozens of fishing filaments lit to create an arc of light points above a phantom tunnel. Wow. (The piece, Re-projection: Hoosac, by Tobias Putrih, echoes a local train tunnel known for its ghosts.)

Pretending To Be Adventure Boy: A Trip in a Blizzard (Part I)

Getting going to beat the snow

When it comes to braving extreme weather, I start thinking in a voice not so different from my grandmother: “There’s a storm coming? Snow? Wind? A blizzard? Why would you leave the house, Bubelah?”

So, should Lani and I drive across the state to the Berkshires on a day when there was a big ol’ blizzard warning? At least two different times—night before and morning of—we nearly said no. But it was 9 a.m. and the snow was just falling lightly. The main event wasn’t due until midday. We decided to act like hardy New Englanders (even though we’re really wimpy New Englanders) and get on the road. The grandmother part of me insisted that we pack plenty of food and add a snow shovel to our luggage, just in case.

The result: We zipped out of Boston and outran the storm for a good part of the day.

"Just Show Up": The Uncle Paul Principle

Paul's focus shifted from the law to music composition

My Uncle Paul has a music studio set up in his house. The room is populated with drums – djembes, congas, snares, bass drums, and high hats. It’s also full of recording equipment he uses to compose his own music, meticulously assembled from samples and remixed with a computer and soundboard. Right now he has multiple albums – based on world beat, jazz, latin fusion, and whatever else suits his fancy – for sale through iTunes and other online services. What fascinates me is not where he is now but how he got there. Once he was a lawyer in Pittsburgh who dabbled in music; now he’s a musician who dabbles in law. That transition took more than 30 years. But it started with something pretty simple – just showing up.

Resolutions To Change: Small Movement vs. Willpower

The Wall Street Journal regularly does stories about New Year’s resolutions, including this one. (Here’s the same reporter at it a year ago.) My problem is that these stories make it seem like the New Year is the one time to change. Not true, of course. But Sue Shellenbarger does put her finger one key fallacy—thinking that force of will is what will make change stick:

Most people get stuck thinking willpower is the answer. In a survey of 1,134 adults released last month by the American Psychological Association, willpower was the top reason people cited for failing to make positive changes.

But in fact, the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that helps you impose your will, especially when choosing among multiple options, can easily get tired out. Relying on continuous brute psychological force doesn’t make a good foundation for change.

Ira Glass — On Being Wrong

The fear of being wrong leads people to resist change. Then again, the state of actually being wrong is a big reason why people (and organizations) change. I’m fascinated by people who are willing to talk about their own wrongness and how they got past it.

Through an interview on Slate.com, you can see that the career of NPR’s Ira Glass was initially a tale of his dogged persistence in the face of his own incompetence. Glass used an extreme version of the Uncle Paul Principle ("Just Show Up"); he spent a decade showing up in radioland despite a total lack of outside encouragement. He burrowed his way step-by-step into skills needed for audio storytelling.

Everybody has a drama, a struggle that they went through, and for me it was turning myself from somebody who wasn't any good at this thing into somebody who's really, really good at it. I was a great intuitive story editor from the start, but writing, interviewing, performing on the radio—I was just terrible at all of that. All through my 20s, my parents were like, "Why are you doing this?" I wasn't making any money, and I was so bad at it. I was 19 when I started at NPR and I was 27 or 28 before I could competently put together a story that I had written. All that time, I just stubbornly pushed toward this thing because I thought it would work out in some form. I was right about that, but I was wrong about pretty much everything along the way.

Personal Change: The Role Dark Chocolate

I’m a dark chocolate guy. I like its depth, its round feel in the mouth. The sweet and slightly bitter combined. I didn’t set out to write a blog about shifts in perspective; I set out to write about chocolate. Over the past decade, there’s been an explosion of high-end artisanal chocolate-makers: people who are meticulous about getting involved in every piece of the chocolate production process – starting with close contacts with cocoa growers to machinery that lets you make chocolate in small, minutely adjusted batches. (They remind me of craft-brewed beer, only earlier in the cycle.)

My brainstorm was to explore the personalities in the world of artisanal chocolate through a sort of travel narrative. So, I talked to a lot of people and tried a lot of chocolate. What I found in almost every case was that the people who came to the world of artisanal chocolate started out doing something completely different. They were yacht captains, musicians, golf course managers, and engineers. Something just happened to each one of them on the way to wherever they were going that shifted their perspective. In future posts, I’ll tell some stories about individuals behind companies such as Taza Chocolate, Black Mountain Chocolate, and Bittersweet Café.