Expert advice will give you a brain freeze

It turns out that getting expert advice literally shuts out brain down, and it can prevent us from making a truly informed decision.  This fact is important to know when you seek expert advice.

1. Don’t rely on a single expert’s advice, get a second or even a third opinion.

2. Do your own research and determine your potential decision options BEFORE you meet with an expert.

I would have loved to not only know of this research but to also really absorb and embrace its truth before some key experiences in my life with “experts” in fields outside of my expertise.  Yes even doctors can fall into this trap of trusting advice from other “experts”, and I can vividly remember several incidences in which my brain shut down/shut off because I was with an “expert”

Expert Advice Shuts Your Brain Down Article

Doctors experience trauma to their hearts and stress to their souls by Edwin Leap, MD

I was talking to some new friends over lunch recently, at the nationally renowned Hominy Cafe, in Charleston, SC. Any place with a Fried Green Tomato BLT, and Shrimp and Grits for breakfast, has my vote!
To the point: my question to these esteemed emergency medicine educators was this: “Do you ever have irrational fears about the people you love, because of what you do?”
The answer was a resounding “absolutely!”
Like me, they worried when ambulances were dispatched while their children were out with friends. They worried when their spouses drove in heavy traffic. The list went on. And I shook my head in agreement.
I had been contemplating this question for quite a long time. What are the consequences of years in the emergency department? Sure, I know: the consequences are anger, bitterness, frustration, distrust, cynicism. Balanced, fortunately, by compassion, perspective, appreciation for life’s gifts, love of common people and the ability to hang out with heavily tattooed bikers, drunks and former felons without feeling the least bit uncomfortable.
But what I mean is this: what emotional, psychiatric consequences are there? What scars do we carry deep inside? I don’t think we acknowledge this; we certainly don’t address it. But the truth is, our specialty takes us into the heart of terror, into the midst of the worst situations humans can experience. All roads, as we know, lead to the emergency room.
The abused child, the raped woman, the burnt workman, the assaulted senior citizen, the addicted teen, the mother dead by suicide. The new diagnosis of cancer the new diagnosis of HIV or Hepatitis. We see the schizophrenic young man who wanders away, we see the demented husband of 50 years who cannot recognize the love of his life.
We tell loved ones that their dearest is dead. We listen as families wail, and collapse onto the ground in the emotional equivalent of a hurricane, suddenly thrust from normalcy and hope to terrible brokenness and stunning loss.
It’s a common fact of the job. We talk about it a little. We teach students and residents how to break bad news. And we tell them the primacy of their own relationships, and explain the perils of using drugs or alcohol to cope. And then we send them off the way we were sent off; like lambs before lions, to face a life of emotional maelstroms.
I wonder, often, how common PTSD is among our population. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is in the news a lot. We associated with terrible trauma, with death and the threat of death, with disaster, with terrorism and combat. We shake our heads in sympathy with the young man or woman, shaken by tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, whether or not they actually pulled triggers or even saw death. Their very proximity to those things is sufficient to win our appropriate concern.
And yet. And yet … Day after day, night after night we go into a workplace where we have no control over who or what comes through the door. And we have no way to predict what we might see. Certainly, we might spend a shift in utter boredom (hey, it could happen!). Or we may see something so horrible that it changes us forever. We may leave having been stained with the blood of a police-officer, coughed on by a patient with tuberculosis, or tearful from giving terrible news to someone we knew.
Furthermore, we go back to the same rooms where we saw death, the same floors that were littered with dressings and body fluids, the same conference rooms where we delivered the terrible news.
And we do it for years. Decade after decade we accumulate stories and experiences which, taken singly, would send the average citizen screaming to their counselor or psychiatrist…and not without reason.
But we? We are rich doctors. We are the educated. We are expected to do it, to show up the next day after the horror of the day before. We are not excused because of the terrible things we endure, but instead wear them as a tragic badge of honor, even as we die a little inside from fear, from worry, from taking all of those things and imagining how they might appear in our own lives, or in the lives of our families. From the fear that we will make a mistake in the midst of chaos, and add to the sum-total of pain in the world.
I don’t know how many of us meet the strict criteria of PTSD. But we experience trauma to to our hearts and stress to our souls. If you have ever wondered about this, on the drive home, or in the hours before work. If you have ever contemplated it in the night between patients, in the fog of exhaustion, or decompressed from it on the beach with your family, then you aren’t alone.
I’m writing to say that your fears, your terrors, are common to all of us who serve our tours in the emergency department. And you are allowed to be shaken by them, to be wounded by them.
I hope you will not let them shape you, or break you. But I fear that much of what we call burnout, much of our “bitterness” or “anger,” or “bad attitudes” are simply our attempt to express acceptable emotions over the hard things we see, do and remember ever after. Because for some reason, we are not supposed to be affected no matter how much misery crashes on our lives like tsunamis.
It’s high time our colleagues, our employers, our friends and educators and even our politicians recognized that money, education and title don’t ease the pain, and the fear, that is inherent in our work.
Perhaps, however, the most important step in healing would be for us all to admit to ourselves that it’s a hard job, and that the consequences to our lives run deeper than circadian problems and contract negotiations.
And that even healers, like us, have wounds too deep to fully understand.

50 No’s & 5 Yes’s: How to Treat Overwhelm?

Overwhelm is a HOT topic.  We all feel overwhelmed at some time in our lives.  Our To-Do lists are stuffed to the gills, and we walk around in a To-Do list haze so overwhelmed that we are so busy listening to the tape playing in our heads of what we need To-Do instead of capturing all the amazing things happening all around us.

Solutions?  Burn the To-Do list?  Maybe.

1. Practice Present Perfect: Our brains are designed to be in the present moment, but our To-Do lists and overwhelm feelings and thoughts are predominantly in the future.  The studies show that by not being focused in the present our brainsare much less efficient so the overwhelm and To-Do lists are actually making us less productive.  How do we practice being more present?  Keep a 3×5 card in your pocket or jot down notes in your smartphone when you are in a moment that you have lost track of time in.  These moments of flow are the present moments that bathe our brain in the chemicals that make us more efficient, more productive, and are the antidote for overwhelm.

2. Purpose:  It is easy to live in the land of overwhelm when we lose site of our purpose.  When was the last time you were truly thrilled? What was your most recent peak experience?  Tapping into these moments will help you focus on doing the things that you were made to do.  The things that you were made to do are those things that thrill you.  Get in touch with your thrilling moments and you will begin to get in touch with your Yes’s.  Now list the 1-5 things that you most love to do at work, at home, etc.  This is your YES list.   These are the To-Do items that you were designed to Do and Be with.

3. Prioritize:  Starting with No’s leads to less overwhelm and more YES.  I recently challenged one of my clients to put together a list of 50 No’s.  50 items that he is going to say no to.  What is on our list of No’s?  Which of these No’s are you going to commit to?  I would love to say No to checking my email on my smartphone when out to dinner…..The NO list is the list that frees us up to say YES.

 

What Are We Running For?

In the movie Chariots of Fire, there are 2 runners. Harold Abrahams who says that he runs to ‘justify [his] whole existence’ where as Eric Liddell says that he runs because when he runs he feels God’s pleasure.

Why do we run?

Are we on the run to justify our existence? Do we run for acceptance? To make more money? For power? For status? Or do we run to feel His pleasure? How might this running transform our lives?

Being Realistic is Over-rated

“Being realistic is the most common path to mediocrity…The moment you decide to be realistic you can pretty much guarantee that is what will happen…”-Will Smith

Is anyone else tired of being realistic?  A saboteur (or gremlin) is a self limiting voice that whispers into our mind.  The saboteur is the voice that “shoulds” on us.  It tells us what we should do not what we can be.

Realistic is the penultimate saboteur.  I can hear the voice: “You will never be able to do that, be realistic.”

Let us today press pause on that voice, and listen to the other voice-the voice that speaks to our heart and soul.  The voice that says, “You can do it!”

Work Life Balance vs. Well Being

This article points out that well being is more important measure than work life balance.  If we have great work life balance but we hate our work and our life, then even though we have work life balance, we are miserable.  We need to look to well being: finding ways to be happy and content in our work and our life.

Why Work-Life Balance Isn’t Balanced

It’s necessary, but not sufficient. Here’s why focusing on wellbeing makes more sense.

by Yamini Tandon

Sheela was doing well in her job. She had an eight-hour workday, great friends, a supportive family, good health, and she was paid well. Everyone around her thought she was happy and lived an ideal life.

Sheela was well-compensated and appeared to have time to balance her career and personal life. But she was struggling.

But Sheela’s life was actually a mess. Her overly aggressive boss thought nothing of shouting at her in front of her colleagues. Though Sheela was a good performer, she was constantly anxious about the next time her supervisor would berate her. Though she was expected to work eight-hour days, her boss would call her at any time of the day or night.

Sheela began to dread hearing her cellphone ring and was so worried all the time that she couldn’t even sleep. She fretted that her colleagues and friends would lose respect for her, and she lost so much confidence that she couldn’t handle even the simplest of social interactions. Sheela began to spend less time with her friends and family, where she would have to put up a brave face, and instead devoted more hours to work, where she could worry freely, obsessing over every detail of her job to the point of compulsiveness.

By most traditional measures of work-life balance, Sheela was doing quite well. She was handsomely compensated for an eight-hour workday, and she appeared to have enough free time to balance her career and personal life. But in reality, Sheela was struggling. What’s more, her frustrations would not be picked up by conventional measures of wellbeing, because those measures don’t take into account the quality of people’s experiences, nor do they incorporate people’s own evaluations of their lives. Instead, those measures rely on factors like income and number of hours worked, under the assumption that these factors determine the quality of people’s lives.

Beyond work-life balance

When the idea of work-life balance was first introduced, it was a revolutionary concept. In the 18thand 19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution and its resulting shift to manufacturing work made it possible for employers to require workers to labor longer hours than ever before in human history. In some industries, people toiled 14 to 16 hours a day, six to seven days a week.

As researchers began to study the impact that these long hours had on stress levels, health, and family life, the idea of work-life balance gained currency, and many countries began to legislate limits to the workweek. Most developed nations now mandate 40-46 working hours per week, with a minimum of two weeks per year of holiday/vacation.

The concept of work-life balance has been instrumental in influencing these changes and bringing about an improvement in the quality of life that is assumed to accompany shorter working hours. But the concept is useful only up to a point. Globalization has undermined the relevance of reducing worker hours to achieve work-life balance and has revealed limitations; the most significant is that at some point, limiting hours further is just not sustainable.

France has mandated a 35-hour workweek, for example. But what can the country do next? The workweek can’t be reduced indefinitely, as this has implications for a country’s economic viability and competitiveness. In a globalized world, if workers in one country are unwilling to work for economically viable hours, then businesses will migrate to a country where they are willing to do so. In countries such as India and Pakistan, workers are motivated to work 10- to 12-hour workdays — and this is unlikely to change soon due to the large number of workers willing to do so to move up the economic ladder.

Another problem with the concept of work-life balance is that it takes the number of working hours into account but not the quality of the working experience. A person may spend 35 hours a week at work, but if that worker, like Sheela, has an abrasive manager or is in a highly stressful job or one that is not suited to her natural talents, then those manageable work hours are unlikely to enhance her quality of life. Conversely, a person may choose to work long hours because it allows her to progress in her career or to build a social system at work.

Thus, the assumption that reduced hours at work lead to an improvement in personal life is too narrow, and probably faulty. Other factors, such as social support, health, safety, and job fit, contribute greatly to the quality of a person’s life. Since the concept of work-life balance doesn’t take into account these significant factors, it does not provide direction as to how people can actually improve the quality of their lives, except for reducing the hours spent at work. As such, it is not actionable.

The assumption that reduced hours at work lead to an improvement in personal life is too narrow, and probably faulty

How we think about and experience our lives

A more comprehensive concept — one that’s more appropriate for the 21st-century economy — is that of wellbeing, which includes factors that contribute to our experiences and our perception of our lives. Until recently, wellbeing has been seen as an esoteric concept that is difficult to define and quantify. It is most commonly understood as relating to wealth or health, perhaps because of the ease with which these things can be measured.

One reason that wellbeing has been difficult to define is that it means different things to different people depending on what they consider important. To one person, it may mean prosperity or wealth; to another, it may mean values or community involvement or the realization of one’s potential. This is why wellbeing should be measured at the individual level, though it may be aggregated for organizations, communities, and nations. And any measure of wellbeing must be broad enough to incorporate an individual’s own choices and purpose in life while being specific enough to be compared and aggregated to facilitate action that can improve it.

Gallup has developed a wellbeing metric that includes the five key elements of wellbeing: Career, Social, Financial, Physical, and Community. These five distinct factors emerged from research that Gallup conducted across countries, languages, and vastly different life situations. Because these elements of wellbeing are universal, they can be measured and reported on for individuals, organizations, cities, countries, and regions around the world.

Because Gallup’s wellbeing assessment measures these elements individually in addition to yielding an overall score, it is actionable: The assessment gives individuals, organizations, cities, and countries the ability to manage wellbeing by undertaking actions to improve it. If an individual has relatively low Social Wellbeing, for example, she would do well to focus her efforts on improving interpersonal relationships with friends and family.

This can be managed over time. As her Social Wellbeing increases, she may choose to concentrate on Career Wellbeing, for instance, or choose to address both elements by spending time socializing with colleagues and making friends at work. In this way, wellbeing can be measured and managed comprehensively at the individual, as well as government, state, city, or corporate levels, by taking its various components and their interactions into account.

Conventional metrics such as employment status, income, educational level, hours worked, and women’s participation in the workforce are necessary to understand an economy, but they are insufficient when it comes to understanding and evaluating overall life satisfaction. Unless we begin to use a metric of a life well-lived — as measured by one’s own experiences and evaluation — people like Sheela will continue to be under the radar, aware that something is amiss, but without an idea why or what to do about it.

The Five Essential Elements of WellbeingFor more than 50 years, Gallup scientists have been exploring the demands of a life well-lived. More recently, in partnership with leading economists, psychologists, and other acclaimed scientists, Gallup has uncovered the common elements of wellbeing that transcend countries and cultures. This research revealed the universal elements of wellbeing that differentiate a thriving life from one spent suffering. They represent five broad categories that are essential to most people:

  • Career Wellbeing: how you occupy your time — or simply liking what you do every day
  • Social Wellbeing: having strong relationships and love in your life
  • Financial Wellbeing: effectively managing your economic life
  • Physical Wellbeing: having good health and enough energy to get things done on a daily basis
  • Community Wellbeing: the sense of engagement you have with the area where you live

Knowing the Language of Appreciation

I had a fascinating conversation with a USC Business School Professor last week.  He pointed out that only 37% of employees feel appreciated at their job, and the majority don’t trust their leaders.  What would a world look like where employee’s felt truly appreciated?
Are these employees being shown appreciation, but it isn’t landing?  What do you need to hear to feel appreciated?  It is different for different people.  I feel appreciated when I am verbally affirmed, but my bride feels appreciated when I give her my undivided attention.
So maybe these employees are being appreciated, but they are not feeling appreciated??  How could we better learn how to show our appreciation in the “language” that would be heard by our employees, co-workers, spouses, kids?  Curious?  I have some GREAT ideas on how to REALLY show those around you that you appreciate them.  Email me if you are interested!

3 Keys to Great Leadership

by Justin Menkes 

Based on your experience, what traits are needed for a federal leader to be successful?

 There are three attributes that I think best enable a leader to maximize the efforts of the 21st century workforce: realistic optimism, subservience to purpose and finding order in chaos.

What is realistic optimism?

Realistic optimism is especially important for a federal workforce. I think that if you’re going to lead people, you can’t sit there and tell them, “Everything’s going to be fine.”

When you look at poor performing or inept leaders, you find they are often incredibly optimistic. The difference is that they have blind optimism. So, if you say, “We will conquer all. The obstacles and adversities you’re discussing are not important for you to worry about because we’re going to win anyway,” you’ll lose them.

But those with realistic optimism are the ones that say, “These are the challenges that we face and these are some of our proposed solutions. None of us is sure what the final solutions to each problem will look like, but here are our contingency plans for trying to address them. And, I do believe that together, as a group, we’re going to meet our challenges. I have no doubt about it.” That is what it looks like to express realistic optimism.

What about subservience to purpose?

Today, a paycheck is not enough. Workers have to get out of bed every morning believing in what they’re doing. They have to believe that their presence and the activities that they perform on any given day will make positive, meaningful impacts on the world.

Southwest Airlines is a great example. Their people outperform competitors on every metric of productivity that exists. They believe that not only the rich should be able to fly in this country. So they’re going to get those airplanes off the ground on time and as inexpensively as possible, because they believe that that’s an important mission for America. This sense of purpose has lasted since Herb Kelleher founded the airline 35 years ago.

Explain bringing order to chaos.

Finding order in chaos is critical. Leaders cannot throw up their hands and give up. In many ways, today’s workforce has fallen behind in this area. It’s not being trained to find joy in the pressure-filled situations that we face. In the world and the economy today, there is more unfamiliar than familiar. So, you’ve got to get comfortable with it.

The best example of this is A.G. Lafley at Proctor and Gamble. Before he retired, he was in Brazil watching housewives do their laundry in the bayous. When I asked him why, he said that his company had introduced a laundry detergent that should have been hugely popular among this particular Brazilian population. The detergent required no rinse cycle for clothes to be clean, [but] nobody wanted to buy it. Ultimately, what he found out was that the detergent didn’t make suds. As soon as they added suds, the women felt like the product was working. They started using the detergent and the product became a huge hit.

How can current senior federal leaders cultivate these three attributes in their emerging executives?

There are some wonderful things they can do. One of the great teachers of realist optimism is David Novak at Yum Brands. One of the things he’s done is use catch phrases. He found that when people are not taking responsibility or accountability for their actions, being realistic but optimistic is achievable.

He introduced this phrase called ‘victimitis.’ So whenever people would say, “Oh, it’s not my fault,” or attempt to defend their bad actions, all of their colleagues would say, “Victimitis, victimitis!”

Part of what he did was about building a culture and giving people tools they can effectively use — and in some places, playfully use. We need to remind ourselves that our destinies are in some ways beyond our control, but that our day-to-day, work-to-work, minute-to-minute experiences are still very much under our control.

As a leader, if you’re sitting there having to block Internet sites on your employees’ computers, you’ve already lost the battle. You have to have them be interested and motivated to do their work without you looking over their shoulders.

Happiness is Friends & Just Enough Money by Jennifer Robison

The search to define happiness has consumed a lot of human energy. Until recently, we’ve had little to show for it — some songs, a few poems, and a Charles Schulz cartoon about happiness being a warm puppy — but nothing of much practical use.
The best life evaluations come from people who went to college, got married, and have good jobs.
To get practical results, you need scientists. Fortunately, two of the best are now on the case: Angus Deaton, Ph.D., a renowned economist, and Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D., a Nobel prize-winning psychologist, both from Princeton University. Dispensing with romantic imagery, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Kahneman looked for happiness in numbers. More specifically, they analyzed responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index (GHWBI), a daily survey that asks roughly 1,000 U.S. residents a battery of questions about their wellbeing.
After analyzing more than 450,000 GHWBI responses from 2008 and 2009, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Kahneman found that happiness is actually the result of the fulfillment of two abstract psychological states — emotional wellbeing and life evaluation. The finding is important because it offered the researchers a new and more useful way of looking at happiness.
“What did we get from these data? Everything,” says Dr. Deaton. “The GHWBI asks clear questions about life evaluation as well as emotional wellbeing. These data are just terrific in permitting research that was not really possible before.”
Evaluation and emotion
The difference between life evaluation and emotional wellbeing is vital, though the two are related. “Nobody claims that the two dimensions are independent,” says Dr. Kahneman. “They’re clearly distinct dimensions that are correlated. But they have somewhat different determinants. What improves people’s emotional wellbeing is different from what it takes to make them say that they’re satisfied with their life.”
In other words, life evaluation and emotional wellbeing refer to different feelings. Life evaluation requires a long view of a person’s overall life. Though life evaluation is colored by the day’s emotions, Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Deaton’s GHWBI research shows that people evaluate their lives based on a retrospective of their achievements. If they’ve accomplished the goals they’ve set, are financially secure, and are emotionally fulfilled, they’re more likely to have a high evaluation of their life.
And research shows that the more conventional the goals, the better the life evaluation. Dr. Kahneman notes that the best life evaluations come from people who went to college, got married, and have good jobs; other studies show that people who wanted to be performing artists when they were 18 but didn’t end up to be were generally very dissatisfied with their lives at age 45. “Having goals that you can meet is essential to life satisfaction,” says Dr. Kahneman. “Setting goals that you’re not going to meet sets you up for failure.”
Emotional wellbeing reflects a much shorter view and refers to the emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience. If the day’s experience is negative, emotional wellbeing will take a hit. That said, people with good emotional wellbeing seem to get it through social contact.
“Emotional happiness is primarily social,” says Dr. Kahneman. “The very best thing that can happen to people is to spend time with other people they like. That is when they are happiest, and so, without question, this is a major story. We find loneliness is a terrible thing. So is extreme poverty. But loneliness, regardless of how rich you are, is a very bad thing.”
But the research also indicates that you won’t become happy merely by socializing with your best friends and achieving your goals. You also need $75,000.
The magic number: $75,000
Of all the important and interesting findings Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Deaton’s research has uncovered, the most reported finding is that people with an annual household income of $75,000 are about as happy as anyone gets. More specifically, those with annual household incomes below $75,000 give lower responses to both life evaluation and emotional wellbeing questions. But people with an annual household income of more than $75,000 don’t have commensurately higher levels of emotional wellbeing, even though their life evaluation rating continues to increase.
This finding holds true even where living isn’t cheap. “When we mention $75,000, the question I always get is, ‘What about New York City?'” says Dr. Kahneman. True, $75,000 won’t go very far in big cities like New York, London, or Singapore, and it makes sense that a high cost of living will make even large sums feel puny. “Our finding indicates that $75,000 is the limit even in large expensive cities,” says Dr. Kahneman. “So, though there may be places in which happiness levels off at a lower income, $75,000 is the sufficiency point in the most expensive places.”
Dr. Deaton and Dr. Kahneman are not certain why, but the data are clear: Even in high-cost cities, incomes over $75,000 don’t correlate to greater happiness. They think this is because even in expensive places, $75,000 is enough to live on while allowing for emotionally rich — and enriching — social experiences. Some places such as New York may be expensive precisely because they are such great places to live, says Dr. Deaton, because their terrific amenities may offset the higher cost of living there.

“No matter where you live, your emotional wellbeing is as good as it’s going to get at $75,000,” says Dr. Deaton, “and money’s not going to make it any better beyond that point. It’s like you hit some sort of ceiling, and you can’t get emotional wellbeing much higher just by having more money.”
Your emotional life depends primarily on your relationships with people.
Emotional wellbeing may not improve with additional money, Dr. Deaton and Dr. Kahneman think, because of several factors. One is that humans adapt quickly to the things money can buy. A mansion is a thrill the first month you live in it, but it’s just a house the second.
Moreover, other research suggests that wealthy people don’t take as much pleasure in actual pleasure as do poor people. In one test, social researchers primed some test subjects to feel rich and found that the “wealthy” subjects didn’t enjoy luxury chocolate as much as the control group, the “non-wealthy,” did.
And Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Deaton believe that when it comes to the very wealthy with high life satisfaction, their evaluations may be influenced more by keeping score than by purchasing power. If life evaluation is based on reviewing how much progress people have made in their lives, money may become a marker of success.
“Not having enough money to live a decent life really gets in the way of doing the ordinary things that make people happy,” says Dr. Deaton. “What might create your emotional wellbeing is spending time with your friends, and if your income is below $75,000, you may not have the money to do it. But for life evaluation, money represents a sense of achievement. And that just keeps on going up when you have more money.”
Stressing the subject
So people who have achieved their goals, who spend a lot of time with friends, and who make a lot of money have the most life satisfaction, while those who earn at least $75,000 a year have the greatest emotional wellbeing. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t stressed. The GHWBI data show that college graduates report more stress than people without college degrees, and Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Deaton say that stress levels are generally higher in wealthy countries.
The GHWBI data also showed that most Americans are happy and satisfied with their lives — 85% reported a lot of happiness, enjoyment, and smiling; 24% reported sadness or worry; and 39% reported stress. Comparing the U.S. life evaluation scores with data available from about 150 other countries through the Gallup World Poll, the U.S. ranks fairly high. The only nations with higher scores are the Scandinavian countries, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and New Zealand.
However, while Americans come in near the top for life evaluation and do well on wellbeing, they’re also among the most stressed. U.S. stress levels are the fifth highest when compared to data from other countries in the Gallup World Poll.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 2010 poverty level for a family of four was a long way from $75,000 at $22,314 — and 15.3% of Americans earned that much or less. “It is worse to be alone, it is worse to be divorced, it is worse to be unemployed, and it is worse to be sick if you’re poor, and you get less benefit from the things that create emotional wellbeing,” says Dr. Kahneman. “There are huge emotional costs to poverty.”
And poor people are hardly carefree — in fact, the researchers found that the poor report more stress than the economically comfortable. They also don’t gain the benefit of stress alleviation on weekends, as do their better-off counterparts. And Dr. Deaton notes that there’s a big difference between the stress associated with success and the stress caused by constant deprivation.
But the data show that money doesn’t alleviate stress in the same way it alleviates unhappiness. In fact, money may go hand in hand with stress among high-earning people. “I think stress sometimes goes with success,” says Dr. Deaton. “America is a very rich, busy, striving country, and that may be associated with stress. But we sort of like it.”
With a little help from your friends
Dr. Kahneman says some studies show that while warm puppies really can improve emotional wellbeing, your emotional life depends primarily on your relationships with people. “I’d feel embarrassed to give that as advice — ‘improve your relationships.’ But obviously if people are going to get happier, it’s going to come to that,” he says.
There is one thing, however, left to mention in this discussion of happiness — individual temperament. Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Deaton’s research, and that of others, clearly indicates that some people are just born happier, or “sunnier,” as Dr. Deaton calls them. Their emotional wellbeing will always be higher than everyone else’s.
That’s not to suggest that those who aren’t “sunny” are doomed to lives of misery. Even the most pessimistic, grumpy-by-nature people can find solace in Dr. Deaton’s statement: “It may be that we’re not designed for happiness.” And what is it we were designed for? “To avoid getting eaten by predators,” says Dr. Deaton. “If nothing eats you today, you ought to be happy. At least it’s a start.”

6 Suggestions Guaranteed to Improve Performance in Almost Any Workplace

He took the words right out of my mouth! I was recently brainstorming with a business executive, and this list sounds VERY similar to the one we came up with! GREAT stuff.

Six suggestions guaranteed to improve performance in almost any workplace.

By Lawrence M. Miller
Jan. 3, 2012

Here are some suggestions guaranteed to improve performance in almost any workplace.

First, let’s agree to encourage others. I know it is a simple and obvious thing. But, we all thrive on encouragement. Let us agree to see the potential, not simply the current reality, in each of our team members.

There is something I like to call “creative dissatisfaction,” which is the gap between who we are and who we know we could become … and, there is always a gap, no matter how great we may be. Rather than pointing out what I am not (and there is lots you could point to!), how about pointing to what or who I could become? It’s a small difference that makes a huge difference. When I have a vision of who I could become, I develop a drive, that creative dissatisfaction, to achieve, to close that gap.

Second, strive to become a scientist in the coming year. It may sound strange, but how we make judgments is often colored by learned biases. Continuous improvement is the result of the continuous design of experiments, watching the data, understanding cause and effect and the humility to say, “Oh, well, that one didn’t work. Let’s try something else.” The great managers, like the great scientists, respect the data and have the courage to experiment and to learn from what the data are telling them.

Third, demonstrate through your deeds the value of the world’s greatest experts who are on-the-spot. The traditional culture of our organizations has taught us that “moving up” is valued; those who have been promoted up in the organization must be worth more. We naturally value them. But who actually serves customers? Who does the real work that adds value to customers and who become genuinely expert in the process of serving customers? It is most often not those who are “up” but those who have their hands on the real work. The gemba walk is a philosophy, not merely something you do with your feet and the philosophy is to learn from and value those who are on-the-spot.

Fourth, commit to your team. A very few significant successes are attributable to individuals alone. Individual successes are more likely to be achievements in the arts or sciences, rather than in business. Most success in business is the result of teamwork. You are a member of a team. Jim Collins, in his book “Good to Great,” defined what he called the Level 5 Leader who managed to sustain great companies over time. These leaders were not ego-driven charismatic stars, rather they were focused on building great teams. “Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make head-lines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy – these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar,” Collins wrote.

So make this the year when you focus less on yourself and more on your team. Give them credit, demand that they work together as a team, and insist that they do what you expect from everyone else: know and serve their customers; know and improve their own processes; and strive to win against their own team’s scorecard.

Fifth, practice Four-to-One. In the mid 1970s I worked with Fran Tarkenton and Aubrey Daniels at Behavioral Systems Inc. We took the research of Dr. Ogden Lindsley, who studied the effects of positive reinforcement versus negative comments by teachers in the classroom. He found that the ideal ratio that maximized learning was 3.57 positive to 1 negative. We rounded it off and called it Four-to-One. We encouraged plant supervisors to record their positive and negative comments to employees, and too often it was one to four, in other words four times the number of negative comments than positive.

This year, try to achieve the four-to-one ratio of positive to negative interactions with your employees. This focus on positive behavior and achievements will increase positive behavior and achievements. Almost 40 years later that is now being practiced at Toyota and other great companies. It works!

Sixth, find the noble in your work. We all live our lives in the moment, struggling to do what is urgent, but always longing to find the important, that which is noble and worthy in our work. The most primary source of motivation is the search for meaning, the desire to accomplish something worthy. I believe it is important to meditate on what we do and why it is important.

The best public-speaking advice I ever heard was to be certain, before you stand in front of an audience, that you have something genuinely important to say, something important for that audience. If you don’t believe you have something important to say, there is no way you can fool the audience into believing it is important.

Management and leadership are the same. Have something important to say. Meditate on how you and your company are making this world just a little bit better each year. And, then say it to your employees. Make life in your organization important and worthy.

I am sure you can think of other commitments you can make going into the new year. It is a good time to reflect on how we can each improve, both personally and professionally. It would be a good idea to ask your entire management team to reflect on their own behavior and how they could each improve, how they could each contribute to the collective performance of the group.

And, oh … I will complete that book I have been working on for the past five years!!!


Thanksgiving & Gratitude

Over and Over again the research is CRYSTAL CLEAR.  Gratitude works.  Those who take a moment every day to list what they are grateful for lead better lives.  So this Thanksgiving, try a serving of gratitude!

New York Times Online
Findings: A Serving of Gratitude May Save the Day

The most psychologically correct holiday of the year is upon us.

Thanksgiving may be the holiday from hell for nutritionists, and it produces plenty of war stories for psychiatrists dealing with drunken family meltdowns. But it has recently become the favorite feast of psychologists studying the consequences of giving thanks. Cultivating an “attitude of gratitude” has been linked to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others, including romantic partners. A new study shows that feeling grateful makes people less likely to turn aggressive when provoked, which helps explain why so many brothers-in-law survive Thanksgiving without serious injury.
But what if you’re not the grateful sort? I sought guidance from the psychologists who have made gratitude a hot research topic. Here’s their advice for getting into the holiday spirit – or at least getting through dinner Thursday:
Start with “gratitude lite.”That’s the term used by Robert A. Emmons, of the University of California, Davis, for the technique used in his pioneering experiments he conducted along with Michael E. McCullough of the University of Miami. They instructed people to keep a journal listing five things for which they felt grateful, like a friend’s generosity, something they’d learned, a sunset they’d enjoyed.
The gratitude journal was brief – just one sentence for each of the five things – and done only once a week, but after two months there were significant effects. Compared with a control group, the people keeping the gratitude journal were more optimistic and felt happier. They reported fewer physical problems and spent more time working out.

Further benefits were observed in a study of polio survivors and other people with neuromuscular problems. The ones who kept a gratitude journal reported feeling happier and more optimistic than those in a control group, and these reports were corroborated by observations from their spouses. These grateful people also fell asleep more quickly at night, slept longer and woke up feeling more refreshed.
“If you want to sleep more soundly, count blessings, not sheep,” Dr. Emmons advises in “Thanks!” his book on gratitude research.

Don’t confuse gratitude with indebtedness. Sure, you may feel obliged to return a favor, but that’s not gratitude, at least not the way psychologists define it. Indebtedness is more of a negative feeling and doesn’t yield the same benefits as gratitude, which inclines you to be nice to anyone, not just a benefactor.

In an experiment at Northeastern University, Monica Bartlett and David DeSteno sabotaged each participant’s computer and arranged for another student to fix it. Afterward, the students who had been helped were likelier to volunteer to help someone else – a complete stranger – with an unrelated task. Gratitude promoted good karma. And if it works with strangers ….

Try it on your family. No matter how dysfunctional your family, gratitude can still work, says Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside.

“Do one small and unobtrusive thoughtful or generous thing for each member of your family on Thanksgiving,” she advises. “Say thank you for every thoughtful or kind gesture. Express your admiration for someone’s skills or talents – wielding that kitchen knife so masterfully, for example. And truly listen, even when your grandfather is boring you again with the same World War II story.”

Don’t counterattack.If you’re bracing for insults on Thursday, consider a recent experiment at the University of Kentucky. After turning in a piece of writing, some students received praise for it while others got a scathing evaluation: “This is one of the worst essays I’ve ever read!” Then each student played a computer game against the person who’d done the evaluation. The winner of the game could administer a blast of white noise to the loser. Not surprisingly, the insulted essayists retaliated against their critics by subjecting them to especially loud blasts – much louder than the noise administered by the students who’d gotten positive evaluations.  But there was an exception to this trend among a subgroup of the students: the ones who had been instructed to write essays about things for which they were grateful. After that exercise in counting their blessings, they weren’t bothered by the nasty criticism – or at least they didn’t feel compelled to amp up the noise against their critics.

“Gratitude is more than just feeling good,” says Nathan DeWall, who led the study at Kentucky. “It helps people become less aggressive by enhancing their empathy. “It’s an equal-opportunity emotion. Anyone can experience it and benefit from it, even the most crotchety uncle at the Thanksgiving dinner table.”

Share the feeling. Why does gratitude do so much good? “More than other emotion, gratitude is the emotion of friendship,” Dr. McCullough says. “It is part of a psychological system that causes people to raise their estimates of how much value they hold in the eyes of another person. Gratitude is what happens when someone does something that causes you to realize that you matter more to that person than you thought you did.”

Try a gratitude visit. This exercise, recommended by Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, begins with writing a 300-word letter to someone who changed your life for the better. Be specific about what the person did and how it affected you. Deliver it in person, preferably without telling the person in advance what the visit is about. When you get there, read the whole thing slowly to your benefactor. “You will be happier and less depressed one month from now,” Dr. Seligman guarantees in his book “Flourish.”

Contemplate a higher power.Religious individuals don’t necessarily act with more gratitude in a specific situation, but thinking about religion can cause people to feel and act more gratefully, as demonstrated in experiments by Jo-Ann Tsang and colleagues at Baylor University. Other research shows that praying can increase gratitude.

Go for deep gratitude. Once you’ve learned to count your blessings, Dr. Emmons says, you can think bigger.

“As a culture, we have lost a deep sense of gratefulness about the freedoms we enjoy, a lack of gratitude toward those who lost their lives in the fight for freedom, a lack of gratitude for all the material advantages we have,” he says. “The focus of Thanksgiving should be a reflection of how our lives have been made so much more comfortable by the sacrifices of those who have come before us.”
And if that seems too daunting, you can least tell yourself -Hey, it could always be worse. When your relatives force you to look at photos on their phones, be thankful they no longer have access to a slide projector. When your aunt expounds on politics, rejoice inwardly that she does not hold elected office. Instead of focusing on the dry, tasteless turkey on your plate, be grateful the six-hour roasting process killed any toxic bacteria.

Is that too much of a stretch? When all else fails, remember the Monty Python mantra of the Black Plague victim: “I’m not dead.” It’s all a matter of perspective.

Top Athletes and Singers have Coaches Should you? by Atul Gawande

Wouldn’t it be great if your physician was willing to have a mentor now and then to sharpen his skills?  I recently mentioned this idea to some physician friends of mine, and they immediately said, “Very few doctors will every go for that idea.”

I was really saddened by their comments, but I am not going to give up on this powerful idea.

Let me know your thoughts after you read this ground breaking article about mentors/coaches for physicians.

Annals Of Medicine

Personal Best

Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you?

by October 3, 2011

 

 

No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That

No matter how well trained people are, few can sustain their best performance on their own. That’s where coaching comes in.

 

 

<:ARTICLE>

I’ve been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I’d like to think it’s a good thing—I’ve arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I’ve just stopped getting better.

During the first two or three years in practice, your skills seem to improve almost daily. It’s not about hand-eye coördination—you have that down halfway through your residency. As one of my professors once explained, doing surgery is no more physically difficult than writing in cursive. Surgical mastery is about familiarity and judgment. You learn the problems that can occur during a particular procedure or with a particular condition, and you learn how to either prevent or respond to those problems.

Say you’ve got a patient who needs surgery for appendicitis. These days, surgeons will typically do a laparoscopic appendectomy. You slide a small camera—a laparoscope—into the abdomen through a quarter-inch incision near the belly button, insert a long grasper through an incision beneath the waistline, and push a device for stapling and cutting through an incision in the left lower abdomen. Use the grasper to pick up the finger-size appendix, fire the stapler across its base and across the vessels feeding it, drop the severed organ into a plastic bag, and pull it out. Close up, and you’re done. That’s how you like it to go, anyway. But often it doesn’t.

Even before you start, you need to make some judgments. Unusual anatomy, severe obesity, or internal scars from previous abdominal surgery could make it difficult to get the camera in safely; you don’t want to poke it into a loop of intestine. You have to decide which camera-insertion method to use—there’s a range of options—or whether to abandon the high-tech approach and do the operation the traditional way, with a wide-open incision that lets you see everything directly. If you do get your camera and instruments inside, you may have trouble grasping the appendix. Infection turns it into a fat, bloody, inflamed worm that sticks to everything around it—bowel, blood vessels, an ovary, the pelvic sidewall—and to free it you have to choose from a variety of tools and techniques. You can use a long cotton-tipped instrument to try to push the surrounding attachments away. You can use electrocautery, a hook, a pair of scissors, a sharp-tip dissector, a blunt-tip dissector, a right-angle dissector, or a suction device. You can adjust the operating table so that the patient’s head is down and his feet are up, allowing gravity to pull the viscera in the right direction. Or you can just grab whatever part of the appendix is visible and pull really hard.

Once you have the little organ in view, you may find that appendicitis was the wrong diagnosis. It might be a tumor of the appendix, Crohn’s disease, or an ovarian condition that happened to have inflamed the nearby appendix. Then you’d have to decide whether you need additional equipment or personnel—maybe it’s time to enlist another surgeon.

Over time, you learn how to head off problems, and, when you can’t, you arrive at solutions with less fumbling and more assurance. After eight years, I’ve performed more than two thousand operations. Three-quarters have involved my specialty, endocrine surgery—surgery for endocrine organs such as the thyroid, the parathyroid, and the adrenal glands. The rest have involved everything from simple biopsies to colon cancer. For my specialized cases, I’ve come to know most of the serious difficulties that could arise, and have worked out solutions. For the others, I’ve gained confidence in my ability to handle a wide range of situations, and to improvise when necessary.

As I went along, I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages. My rates of complications moved steadily lower and lower. And then, a couple of years ago, they didn’t. It started to seem that the only direction things could go from here was the wrong one.

Maybe this is what happens when you turn forty-five. Surgery is, at least, a relatively late-peaking career. It’s not like mathematics or baseball or pop music, where your best work is often behind you by the time you’re thirty. Jobs that involve the complexities of people or nature seem to take the longest to master: the average age at which S. & P. 500 chief executive officers are hired is fifty-two, and the age of maximum productivity for geologists, one study estimated, is around fifty-four. Surgeons apparently fall somewhere between the extremes, requiring both physical stamina and the judgment that comes with experience. Apparently, I’d arrived at that middle point.

It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d hit a plateau. I grew up in Ohio, and when I was in high school I hoped to become a serious tennis player. But I peaked at seventeen. That was the year that Danny Trevas and I climbed to the top tier for doubles in the Ohio Valley. I qualified to play singles in a couple of national tournaments, only to be smothered in the first round both times. The kids at that level were playing a different game than I was. At Stanford, where I went to college, the tennis team ranked No. 1 in the nation, and I had no chance of being picked. That meant spending the past twenty-five years trying to slow the steady decline of my game.

I still love getting out on the court on a warm summer day, swinging a racquet strung to fifty-six pounds of tension at a two-ounce felt-covered sphere, and trying for those increasingly elusive moments when my racquet feels like an extension of my arm, and my legs are putting me exactly where the ball is going to be. But I came to accept that I’d never be remotely as good as I was when I was seventeen. In the hope of not losing my game altogether, I play when I can. I often bring my racquet on trips, for instance, and look for time to squeeze in a match.

One July day a couple of years ago, when I was at a medical meeting in Nantucket, I had an afternoon free and went looking for someone to hit with. I found a local tennis club and asked if there was anyone who wanted to play. There wasn’t. I saw that there was a ball machine, and I asked the club pro if I could use it to practice ground strokes. He told me that it was for members only. But I could pay for a lesson and hit with him.

He was in his early twenties, a recent graduate who’d played on his college team. We hit back and forth for a while. He went easy on me at first, and then started running me around. I served a few points, and the tennis coach in him came out. You know, he said, you could get more power from your serve.

I was dubious. My serve had always been the best part of my game. But I listened. He had me pay attention to my feet as I served, and I gradually recognized that my legs weren’t really underneath me when I swung my racquet up into the air. My right leg dragged a few inches behind my body, reducing my power. With a few minutes of tinkering, he’d added at least ten miles an hour to my serve. I was serving harder than I ever had in my life.

Not long afterward, I watched Rafael Nadal play a tournament match on the Tennis Channel. The camera flashed to his coach, and the obvious struck me as interesting: even Rafael Nadal has a coach. Nearly every élite tennis player in the world does. Professional athletes use coaches to make sure they are as good as they can be.

But doctors don’t. I’d paid to have a kid just out of college look at my serve. So why did I find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into my operating room and coach me on my surgical technique?

What we think of as coaching was, sports historians say, a distinctly American development. During the nineteenth century, Britain had the more avid sporting culture; its leisure classes went in for games like cricket, golf, and soccer. But the aristocratic origins produced an ethos of amateurism: you didn’t want to seem to be trying too hard. For the Brits, coaching, even practicing, was, well, unsporting. In America, a more competitive and entrepreneurial spirit took hold. In 1875, Harvard and Yale played one of the nation’s first American-rules football games. Yale soon employed a head coach for the team, the legendary Walter Camp. He established position coaches for individual player development, maintained detailed performance records for each player, and pre-planned every game. Harvard preferred the British approach to sports. In those first three decades, it beat Yale only four times.

The concept of a coach is slippery. Coaches are not teachers, but they teach. They’re not your boss—in professional tennis, golf, and skating, the athlete hires and fires the coach—but they can be bossy. They don’t even have to be good at the sport. The famous Olympic gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi couldn’t do a split if his life depended on it. Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention. Consider Maxwell Perkins, the great Scribner’s editor, who found, nurtured, and published such writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. “Perkins has the intangible faculty of giving you confidence in yourself and the book you are writing,” one of his writers said in a New Yorker Profile from 1944. “He never tells you what to do,” another writer said. “Instead, he suggests to you, in an extraordinarily inarticulate fashion, what you want to do yourself.”

The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction. You graduate. You’re done. You can go the rest of the way yourself. This is how élite musicians are taught. Barbara Lourie Sand’s book “Teaching Genius” describes the methods of the legendary Juilliard violin instructor Dorothy DeLay. DeLay was a Perkins-like figure who trained an amazing roster of late-twentieth-century virtuosos, including Itzhak Perlman, Nigel Kennedy, Midori, and Sarah Chang. They came to the Juilliard School at a young age—usually after they’d demonstrated talent but reached the limits of what local teachers could offer. They studied with DeLay for a number of years, and then they graduated, launched like ships leaving drydock. She saw her role as preparing them to make their way without her.

Itzhak Perlman, for instance, arrived at Juilliard, in 1959, at the age of thirteen, and studied there for eight years, working with both DeLay and Ivan Galamian, another revered instructor. Among the key things he learned were discipline, a broad repertoire, and the exigencies of technique. “All DeLay’s students, big or little, have to do their scales, their arpeggios, their études, their Bach, their concertos, and so on,” Sand writes. “By the time they reach their teens, they are expected to be practicing a minimum of five hours a day.” DeLay also taught them to try new and difficult things, to perform without fear. She expanded their sense of possibility. Perlman, disabled by polio, couldn’t play the violin standing, and DeLay was one of the few who were convinced that he could have a concert career. DeLay was, her biographer observed, “basically in the business of teaching her pupils how to think, and to trust their ability to do so effectively.” Musical expertise meant not needing to be coached.

Doctors understand expertise in the same way. Knowledge of disease and the science of treatment are always evolving. We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind. So the training inculcates an ethic of perfectionism. Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.

Coaching in pro sports proceeds from a starkly different premise: it considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection. It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own. One of these views, it seemed to me, had to be wrong. So I called Itzhak Perlman to find out what he thought.

I asked him why concert violinists didn’t have coaches, the way top athletes did. He said that he didn’t know, but that it had always seemed a mistake to him. He had enjoyed the services of a coach all along.

He had a coach? “I was very, very lucky,” Perlman said. His wife, Toby, whom he’d known at Juilliard, was a concert-level violinist, and he’d relied on her for the past forty years. “The great challenge in performing is listening to yourself,” he said. “Your physicality, the sensation that you have as you play the violin, interferes with your accuracy of listening.” What violinists perceive is often quite different from what audiences perceive.

“My wife always says that I don’t really know how I play,” he told me. “She is an extra ear.” She’d tell him if a passage was too fast or too tight or too mechanical—if there was something that needed fixing. Sometimes she has had to puzzle out what might be wrong, asking another expert to describe what she heard as he played.

Her ear provided external judgment. “She is very tough, and that’s what I like about it,” Perlman says. He doesn’t always trust his response when he listens to recordings of his performances. He might think something sounds awful, and then realize he was mistaken: “There is a variation in the ability to listen, as well, I’ve found.” He didn’t know if other instrumentalists relied on coaching, but he suspected that many find help like he did. Vocalists, he pointed out, employ voice coaches throughout their careers.

The professional singers I spoke to describe their coaches in nearly identical terms. “We refer to them as our ‘outside ears,’ ” the great soprano Renée Fleming told me. “The voice is so mysterious and fragile. It’s mostly involuntary muscles that fuel the instrument. What we hear as we are singing is not what the audience hears.” When she’s preparing for a concert, she practices with her vocal coach for ninety minutes or so several times a week. “Our voices are very limited in the amount of time we can use them,” she explains. After they’ve put in the hours to attain professional status, she said, singers have about twenty or thirty years to achieve something near their best, and then to sustain that level. For Fleming, “outside ears” have been invaluable at every point.

So outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes. What about regular professionals, who just want to do what they do as well as they can? I talked to Jim Knight about this. He is the director of the Kansas Coaching Project, at the University of Kansas. He teaches coaching—for schoolteachers. For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers. Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores. People like Jim Knight think we should push coaching.

California researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools, and noticed something interesting. Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time. Even when a practice session with demonstrations and personal feedback was added, fewer than twenty per cent made the change. But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent. A spate of small randomized trials confirmed the effect. Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

Knight experienced it himself. Two decades ago, he was trying to teach writing to students at a community college in Toronto, and floundering. He studied techniques for teaching students how to write coherent sentences and organize their paragraphs. But he didn’t get anywhere until a colleague came into the classroom and coached him through the changes he was trying to make. He won an award for innovation in teaching, and eventually wrote a Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Kansas on measures to improve pedagogy. Then he got funding to train coaches for every school in Topeka, and he has been expanding his program ever since. Coaching programs have now spread to hundreds of school districts across the country.

There have been encouraging early results, but the data haven’t yet been analyzed on a large scale. One thing that seems clear, though, is that not all coaches are effective. I asked Knight to show me what makes for good coaching.

We met early one May morning at Leslie H. Walton Middle School, in Albemarle County, Virginia. In 2009, the Albemarle County public schools created an instructional-coaching program, based in part on Knight’s methods. It recruited twenty-four teacher coaches for the twenty-seven schools in the semi-rural district. (Charlottesville is the county seat, but it runs a separate school district.) Many teacher-coaching programs concentrate on newer teachers, and this one is no exception. All teachers in their first two years are required to accept a coach, but the program also offers coaching to any teacher who wants it.

Not everyone has. Researchers from the University of Virginia found that many teachers see no need for coaching. Others hate the idea of being observed in the classroom, or fear that using a coach makes them look incompetent, or are convinced, despite assurances, that the coaches are reporting their evaluations to the principal. And some are skeptical that the school’s particular coaches would be of any use.

To find its coaches, the program took applications from any teachers in the system who were willing to cross over to the back of the classroom for a couple of years and teach colleagues instead of students. They were selected for their skills with people, and they studied the methods developed by Knight and others. But they did not necessarily have any special expertise in a content area, like math or science. The coaches assigned to Walton Middle School were John Hobson, a bushy-bearded high-school history teacher who was just thirty-three years old when he started but had been a successful baseball and tennis coach, and Diane Harding, a teacher who had two decades of experience but had spent the previous seven years out of the classroom, serving as a technology specialist.

Nonetheless, many veteran teachers—including some of the best—signed up to let the outsiders in. Jennie Critzer, an eighth-grade math teacher, was one of those teachers, and we descended on her first-period algebra class as a small troupe—Jim Knight, me, and both coaches. (The school seemed eager to have me see what both do.)

After the students found their seats—some had to search a little, because Critzer had scrambled the assigned seating, as she often does, to “keep things fresh”—she got to work. She had been a math teacher at Walton Middle School for ten years. She taught three ninety-minute classes a day with anywhere from twenty to thirty students. And she had every class structured down to the minute.

Today, she said, they would be learning how to simplify radicals. She had already put a “Do Now” problem on the whiteboard: “Simplify √36 and √32.” She gave the kids three minutes to get as far as they could, and walked the rows of desks with a white egg timer in her hand as the students went at it. With her blond pigtails, purple striped sack dress, flip-flops, and painted toenails, each a different color, she looked like a graduate student headed to a beach party. But she carried herself with an air of easy command. The timer sounded.

For thirty seconds, she had the students compare their results with those of the partner next to them. Then she called on a student at random for the first problem, the simplified form of √36. “Six,” the girl said.

“Stand up if you got six,” Critzer said. Everyone stood up.

She turned to the harder problem of simplifying √32. No one got the answer, 4 √2. It was a middle-level algebra class; the kids didn’t have a lot of confidence when it came to math. Yet her job was to hold their attention and get them to grasp and apply three highly abstract concepts—the concepts of radicals, of perfect squares, and of factoring. In the course of one class, she did just that.

She set a clear goal, announcing that by the end of class the students would know how to write numbers like √32 in a simplified form without using a decimal or a fraction. Then she broke the task into steps. She had the students punch √32 into their calculators and see what number they got (5.66). She had them try explaining to their partner how whole numbers differed from decimals. (“Thirty seconds, everyone.”) She had them write down other numbers whose square root was a whole number. She made them visualize, verbalize, and write the idea. Soon, they’d figured out how to find the factors of the number under the radical sign, and then how to move factors from under the radical sign to outside the radical sign.

Toward the end, she had her students try simplifying √20. They had one minute. One of the boys who’d looked alternately baffled and distracted for the first half of class hunched over his notebook scratching out an answer with his pencil. “This is so easy now,” he announced.

I told the coaches that I didn’t see how Critzer could have done better. They said that every teacher has something to work on. It could involve student behavior, or class preparation, or time management, or any number of other things. The coaches let the teachers choose the direction for coaching. They usually know better than anyone what their difficulties are.

Critzer’s concern for the last quarter of the school year was whether her students were effectively engaged and learning the material they needed for the state tests. So that’s what her coaches focussed on. Knight teaches coaches to observe a few specifics: whether the teacher has an effective plan for instruction; how many students are engaged in the material; whether they interact respectfully; whether they engage in high-level conversations; whether they understand how they are progressing, or failing to progress.

Novice teachers often struggle with the basic behavioral issues. Hobson told me of one such teacher, whose students included a hugely disruptive boy. Hobson took her to observe the boy in another teacher’s classroom, where he behaved like a prince. Only then did the teacher see that her style was the problem. She let students speak—and shout, and interrupt—without raising their hands, and go to the bathroom without asking. Then she got angry when things got out of control.

Jennie Critzer had no trouble maintaining classroom discipline, and she skillfully used a variety of what teachers call “learning structures”—lecturing, problem-solving, coöperative learning, discussion. But the coaches weren’t convinced that she was getting the best results. Of twenty kids, they noticed, at least four seemed at sea.

Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components. In sports, coaches focus on mechanics, conditioning, and strategy, and have ways to break each of those down, in turn. The U.C.L.A. basketball coach John Wooden, at the first squad meeting each season, even had his players practice putting their socks on. He demonstrated just how to do it: he carefully rolled each sock over his toes, up his foot, around the heel, and pulled it up snug, then went back to his toes and smoothed out the material along the sock’s length, making sure there were no wrinkles or creases. He had two purposes in doing this. First, wrinkles cause blisters. Blisters cost games. Second, he wanted his players to learn how crucial seemingly trivial details could be. “Details create success” was the creed of a coach who won ten N.C.A.A. men’s basketball championships.

At Walton Middle School, Hobson and Harding thought that Critzer should pay close attention to the details of how she used coöperative learning. When she paired the kids off, they observed, most struggled with having a “math conversation.” The worst pairs had a girl with a boy. One boy-girl pair had been unable to talk at all.

Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires. You have to work at what you’re not good at. In theory, people can do this themselves. But most people do not know where to start or how to proceed. Expertise, as the formula goes, requires going from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence to conscious competence and finally to unconscious competence. The coach provides the outside eyes and ears, and makes you aware of where you’re falling short. This is tricky. Human beings resist exposure and critique; our brains are well defended. So coaches use a variety of approaches—showing what other, respected colleagues do, for instance, or reviewing videos of the subject’s performance. The most common, however, is just conversation.

At lunchtime, Critzer and her coaches sat down at a table in the empty school library. Hobson took the lead. “What worked?” he asked.

Critzer said she had been trying to increase the time that students spend on independent practice during classes, and she thought she was doing a good job. She was also trying to “break the plane” more—get out from in front of the whiteboard and walk among the students—and that was working nicely. But she knew the next question, and posed it herself: “So what didn’t go well?” She noticed one girl who “clearly wasn’t getting it.” But at the time she hadn’t been sure what to do.

“How could you help her?” Hobson asked.

She thought for a moment. “I would need to break the concept down for her more,” she said. “I’ll bring her in during the fifth block.”

“What else did you notice?”

“My second class has thirty kids but was more forthcoming. It was actually easier to teach than the first class. This group is less verbal.” Her answer gave the coaches the opening they wanted. They mentioned the trouble students had with their math conversations, and the girl-boy pair who didn’t talk at all. “How could you help them be more verbal?”

Critzer was stumped. Everyone was. The table fell silent. Then Harding had an idea. “How about putting key math words on the board for them to use—like ‘factoring,’ ‘perfect square,’ ‘radical’?” she said. “They could even record the math words they used in their discussion.” Critzer liked the suggestion. It was something to try.

For half an hour, they worked through the fine points of the observation and formulated plans for what she could practice next. Critzer sat at a short end of the table chatting, the coaches at the long end beside her, Harding leaning toward her on an elbow, Hobson fingering his beard. They looked like three colleagues on a lunch break—which, Knight later explained, was part of what made the two coaches effective.

He had seen enough coaching to break even their performance down into its components. Good coaches, he said, speak with credibility, make a personal connection, and focus little on themselves. Hobson and Harding “listened more than they talked,” Knight said. “They were one hundred per cent present in the conversation.” They also parcelled out their observations carefully. “It’s not a normal way of communicating—watching what your words are doing,” he said. They had discomfiting information to convey, and they did it directly but respectfully.

I asked Critzer if she liked the coaching. “I do,” she said. “It works with my personality. I’m very self-critical. So I grabbed a coach from the beginning.” She had been concerned for a while about how to do a better job engaging her kids. “So many things have to come together. I’d exhausted everything I knew to improve.”

She told me that she had begun to burn out. “I felt really isolated, too,” she said. Coaching had changed that. “My stress level is a lot less now.” That might have been the best news for the students. They kept a great teacher, and saw her get better. “The coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is,” she said.

I decided to try a coach. I called Robert Osteen, a retired general surgeon, whom I trained under during my residency, to see if he might consider the idea. He’s one of the surgeons I most hoped to emulate in my career. His operations were swift without seeming hurried and elegant without seeming showy. He was calm. I never once saw him lose his temper. He had a plan for every circumstance. He had impeccable judgment. And his patients had unusually few complications.

He specialized in surgery for tumors of the pancreas, liver, stomach, esophagus, colon, breast, and other organs. One test of a cancer surgeon is knowing when surgery is pointless and when to forge ahead. Osteen never hemmed or hawed, or pushed too far. “Can’t be done,” he’d say upon getting a patient’s abdomen open and discovering a tumor to be more invasive than expected. And, without a pause for lament, he’d begin closing up again.

Year after year, the senior residents chose him for their annual teaching award. He was an unusual teacher. He never quite told you what to do. As an intern, I did my first splenectomy with him. He did not draw the skin incision to be made with the sterile marking pen the way the other professors did. He just stood there, waiting. Finally, I took the pen, put the felt tip on the skin somewhere, and looked up at him to see if I could make out a glimmer of approval or disapproval. He gave me nothing. I drew a line down the patient’s middle, from just below the sternum to just above the navel.

“Is that really where you want it?” he said. Osteen’s voice was a low, car-engine growl, tinged with the accent of his boyhood in Savannah, Georgia, and it took me a couple of years to realize that it was not his voice that scared me but his questions. He was invariably trying to get residents to think—to think like surgeons—and his questions exposed how much we had to learn.

“Yes,” I answered. We proceeded with the operation. Ten minutes into the case, it became obvious that I’d made the incision too small to expose the spleen. “I should have taken the incision down below the navel, huh?” He grunted in the affirmative, and we stopped to extend the incision.

I reached Osteen at his summer home, on Buzzards Bay. He was enjoying retirement. He spent time with his grandchildren and travelled, and, having been an avid sailor all his life, he had just finished writing a book on nineteenth-century naval mapmaking. He didn’t miss operating, but one day a week he held a teaching conference for residents and medical students. When I explained the experiment I wanted to try, he was game.

He came to my operating room one morning and stood silently observing from a step stool set back a few feet from the table. He scribbled in a notepad and changed position once in a while, looking over the anesthesia drape or watching from behind me. I was initially self-conscious about being observed by my former teacher. But I was doing an operation—a thyroidectomy for a patient with a cancerous nodule—that I had done around a thousand times, more times than I’ve been to the movies. I was quickly absorbed in the flow of it—the symphony of coördinated movement between me and my surgical assistant, a senior resident, across the table from me, and the surgical technician to my side.

The case went beautifully. The cancer had not spread beyond the thyroid, and, in eighty-six minutes, we removed the fleshy, butterfly-shaped organ, carefully detaching it from the trachea and from the nerves to the vocal cords. Osteen had rarely done this operation when he was practicing, and I wondered whether he would find anything useful to tell me.

We sat in the surgeons’ lounge afterward. He saw only small things, he said, but, if I were trying to keep a problem from happening even once in my next hundred operations, it’s the small things I had to worry about. He noticed that I’d positioned and draped the patient perfectly for me, standing on his left side, but not for anyone else. The draping hemmed in the surgical assistant across the table on the patient’s right side, restricting his left arm, and hampering his ability to pull the wound upward. At one point in the operation, we found ourselves struggling to see up high enough in the neck on that side. The draping also pushed the medical student off to the surgical assistant’s right, where he couldn’t help at all. I should have made more room to the left, which would have allowed the student to hold the retractor and freed the surgical assistant’s left hand.

Osteen also asked me to pay more attention to my elbows. At various points during the operation, he observed, my right elbow rose to the level of my shoulder, on occasion higher. “You cannot achieve precision with your elbow in the air,” he said. A surgeon’s elbows should be loose and down by his sides. “When you are tempted to raise your elbow, that means you need to either move your feet”—because you’re standing in the wrong position—“or choose a different instrument.”

He had a whole list of observations like this. His notepad was dense with small print. I operate with magnifying loupes and wasn’t aware how much this restricted my peripheral vision. I never noticed, for example, that at one point the patient had blood-pressure problems, which the anesthesiologist was monitoring. Nor did I realize that, for about half an hour, the operating light drifted out of the wound; I was operating with light from reflected surfaces. Osteen pointed out that the instruments I’d chosen for holding the incision open had got tangled up, wasting time.

That one twenty-minute discussion gave me more to consider and work on than I’d had in the past five years. It had been strange and more than a little awkward having to explain to the surgical team why Osteen was spending the morning with us. “He’s here to coach me,” I’d said. Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice. Like most work, medical practice is largely unseen by anyone who might raise one’s sights. I’d had no outside ears and eyes.

Osteen has continued to coach me in the months since that experiment. I take his observations, work on them for a few weeks, and then get together with him again. The mechanics of the interaction are still evolving. Surgical performance begins well before the operating room, with the choice made in the clinic of whether to operate in the first place. Osteen and I have spent time examining the way I plan before surgery. I’ve also begun taking time to do something I’d rarely done before—watch other colleagues operate in order to gather ideas about what I could do.

A former colleague at my hospital, the cancer surgeon Caprice Greenberg, has become a pioneer in using video in the operating room. She had the idea that routine, high-quality video recordings of operations could enable us to figure out why some patients fare better than others. If we learned what techniques made the difference, we could even try to coach for them. The work is still in its early stages. So far, a handful of surgeons have had their operations taped, and begun reviewing them with a colleague.

I was one of the surgeons who got to try it. It was like going over a game tape. One rainy afternoon, I brought my laptop to Osteen’s kitchen, and we watched a recording of another thyroidectomy I’d performed. Three video pictures of the operation streamed on the screen—one from a camera in the operating light, one from a wide-angle room camera, and one with the feed from the anesthesia monitor. A boom microphone picked up the sound.

Osteen liked how I’d changed the patient’s positioning and draping. “See? Right there!” He pointed at the screen. “The assistant is able to help you now.” At one point, the light drifted out of the wound and we watched to see how long it took me to realize I’d lost direct illumination: four minutes, instead of half an hour.

“Good,” he said. “You’re paying more attention.”

He had new pointers for me. He wanted me to let the residents struggle thirty seconds more when I asked them to help with a task. I tended to give them precise instructions as soon as progress slowed. “No, use the DeBakey forceps,” I’d say, or “Move the retractor first.” Osteen’s advice: “Get them to think.” It’s the only way people learn.

And together we identified a critical step in a thyroidectomy to work on: finding and preserving the parathyroid glands—four fatty glands the size of a yellow split pea that sit on the surface of the thyroid gland and are crucial for regulating a person’s calcium levels. The rate at which my patients suffered permanent injury to those little organs had been hovering at two per cent. He wanted me to try lowering the risk further by finding the glands earlier in the operation.

Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down. It’s too soon to know for sure whether that’s not random, but it seems real. I know that I’m learning again. I can’t say that every surgeon needs a coach to do his or her best work, but I’ve discovered that I do.

Coaching has become a fad in recent years. There are leadership coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, and college-application coaches. Search the Internet, and you’ll find that there’s even Twitter coaching. (“Would you like to learn how to get new customers/clients, make valuable business contacts, and increase your revenue using Twitter? Then this Twitter coaching package is perfect for you”—at about eight hundred dollars for a few hour-long Skype sessions and some e-mail consultation.) Self-improvement has always found a ready market, and most of what’s on offer is simply one-on-one instruction to get amateurs through the essentials. It’s teaching with a trendier name. Coaching aimed at improving the performance of people who are already professionals is less usual. It’s also riskier: bad coaching can make people worse.

The world-famous high jumper Dick Fosbury, for instance, developed his revolutionary technique—known as the Fosbury Flop—in defiance of his coaches. They wanted him to stick to the time-honored straddle method of going over the high bar leg first, face down. He instinctively wanted to go over head first, back down. It was only by perfecting his odd technique on his own that Fosbury won the gold medal at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, setting a new record on worldwide television, and reinventing high-jumping overnight.

Renée Fleming told me that when her original voice coach died, ten years ago, she was nervous about replacing her. She wanted outside ears, but they couldn’t be just anybody’s. “At my stage, when you’re at my level, you don’t really want to go to a new person who might mess things up,” she said. “Somebody might say, ‘You know, you’ve been singing that way for a long time, but why don’t you try this?’ If you lose your path, sometimes you can’t find your way back, and then you lose your confidence onstage and it really is just downhill.”

The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate. Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for doing extraordinary things: operating inside people’s bodies, teaching eighth graders algebraic concepts that Euclid would have struggled with, building a highway through a mountain, constructing a wireless computer network across a state, running a factory, reducing a city’s crime rate. In the absence of guidance, how many people can do such complex tasks at the level we require? With a diploma, a few will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could. We treat guidance for professionals as a luxury—you can guess what gets cut first when school-district budgets are slashed. But coaching may prove essential to the success of modern society.

There was a moment in sports when employing a coach was unimaginable—and then came a time when not doing so was unimaginable. We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion. Local health systems may need to go the way of the Albemarle school district. We could create coaching programs not only for surgeons but for other doctors, too—internists aiming to sharpen their diagnostic skills, cardiologists aiming to improve their heart-attack outcomes, and all of us who have to figure out ways to use our resources more efficiently. In the past year, I’ve thought nothing of asking my hospital to spend some hundred thousand dollars to upgrade the surgical equipment I use, in the vague hope of giving me finer precision and reducing complications. Avoiding just one major complication saves, on average, fourteen thousand dollars in medical costs—not to mention harm to a human being. So it seems worth it. But the three or four hours I’ve spent with Osteen each month have almost certainly added more to my capabilities than any of this.

Talk about medical progress, and people think about technology. We await every new cancer drug as if it will be our salvation. We dream of personalized genomics, vaccines against heart disease, and the unfathomed efficiencies from information technology. I would never deny the potential value of such breakthroughs. My teen-age son was spared high-risk aortic surgery a couple of years ago by a brief stent procedure that didn’t exist when he was born. But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology. This is true of all professions. What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology. We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.

A determined effort to introduce coaching could change this. Making sure that the benefits exceed the cost will take work, to be sure. So will finding coaches—though, with the growing pool of retirees, we may already have a ready reserve of accumulated experience and know-how. The greatest difficulty, though, may simply be a profession’s willingness to accept the idea. The prospect of coaching forces awkward questions about how we regard failure. I thought about this after another case of mine that Bob Osteen came to observe. It didn’t go so well.

The patient was a woman with a large tumor in the adrenal gland atop her right kidney, and I had decided to remove it using a laparoscope. Some surgeons might have questioned this decision. When adrenal tumors get to be a certain size, they can’t be removed laparoscopically—you have to do a traditional, open operation and get your hands inside. I persisted, though, and soon had cause for regret. Working my way around this tumor with a ten-millimetre camera on the end of a foot-and-a-half-long wand was like trying to find my way around a mountain with a penlight. I continued with my folly too long, and caused bleeding in a blind spot. The team had to give her a blood transfusion while I opened her belly wide and did the traditional operation.

Osteen watched, silent and blank-faced the entire time, taking notes. My cheeks burned; I was mortified. I wished I’d never asked him along. I tried to be rational about the situation—the patient did fine. But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I’d let him see that I may not be who I want to be.

This is why it will never be easy to submit to coaching, especially for those who are well along in their career. I’m ostensibly an expert. I’d finished long ago with the days of being tested and observed. I am supposed to be past needing such things. Why should I expose myself to scrutiny and fault-finding?

I have spoken to other surgeons about the idea. “Oh, I can think of a few people who could use some coaching” has been a common reaction. Not many say, “Man, could I use a coach!” Once, I wouldn’t have, either.

Osteen and I sat together after the operation and broke the case down, weighing the decisions I’d made at various points. He focussed on what I thought went well and what I thought didn’t. He wasn’t sure what I ought to have done differently, he said. But he asked me to think harder about the anatomy of the attachments holding the tumor in.

“You seemed to have trouble keeping the tissue on tension,” he said. He was right. You can’t free a tumor unless you can lift and hold taut the tissue planes you need to dissect through. Early on, when it had become apparent that I couldn’t see the planes clearly, I could have switched to the open procedure before my poking around caused bleeding. Thinking back, however, I also realized that there was another maneuver I could have tried that might have let me hold the key attachments on tension, and maybe even freed the tumor.

“Most surgery is done in your head,” Osteen likes to say. Your performance is not determined by where you stand or where your elbow goes. It’s determined by where you decide to stand, where you decide to put your elbow. I knew that he could drive me to make smarter decisions, but that afternoon I recognized the price: exposure.

For society, too, there are uncomfortable difficulties: we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely, and yet hold in confidence what they see. Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance. Yet the allegiance of coaches is to the people they work with; their success depends on it. And the existence of a coach requires an acknowledgment that even expert practitioners have significant room for improvement. Are we ready to confront this fact when we’re in their care?

“Who’s that?” a patient asked me as she awaited anesthesia and noticed Osteen standing off to the side of the operating room, notebook in hand.

I was flummoxed for a moment. He wasn’t a student or a visiting professor. Calling him “an observer” didn’t sound quite right, either.

“He’s a colleague,” I said. “I asked him along to observe and see if he saw things I could improve.”

The patient gave me a look that was somewhere between puzzlement and alarm.

“He’s like a coach,” I finally said.

She did not seem reassured. ♦

The Age of Overwhelm?

I have recently had some interesting conversations with 20 somethings who are STRESSED!  Stressed about relationships, about school, about work, about life.  They feel overwhelmed and anxious.

I have recently had some interesting conversations with 30 somethings who are STRESSED!  kids running around zapping their intimacy, chaos creating lack of connection, overworked, overwhelmed.

I have recently had some interesting conversations with 40 somethings who are STRESSED! Ok. You get the idea.

Stress is everpresent.  We hear that our 20’s are supposed to be carefree time to enjoy life.  We hear that our 30’s are time to settle down and make a family….etc.  But we let our 20’s pass by with busyness, stress, overwhelm, and our 30’s pass by with a marriage that dissolves from lack of intimacy, lack of connection…

What are we to do?

20’s: Develop the skills to recognize and manage stress

30’s: Create healthy patterns in our marriages–daily time outs with our spouse to check in and really connect/communicate, find scheduled times for intimacy, date each other, recognize the importance of Mom and Dad’s relationship coming ahead of the kids.

 

What Is Coaching? Values & Saboteurs

At the top of my website there is a link to a page that explains what coaching is all about, but words can’t do coaching justice.  I have found a great video to explain in a mystical, right brain kind of way what coaching is like.  So humor me….any thoughts??

 


2 Common themes explored in coaching are: values and saboteurs.

This video starts with a great example of saboteur(s).  It is that little voice or voices that whisper bitter sweet nothings into our hearts: “you are not enough.” “you are a failure.” etc.  Recognizing these saboteurs exist is the beginning to reaching the abundant life.

This video goes on to focus on finding your game aka what are your unique values aka what is your song to the world.

 

What Are Our BEST Moments?

The high energy cases.  The patients that take up all the time, effort, AND ENERGY always seem to be the ones that create the most discussion and stress among us (doctors, nurses, etc.).  We always raise such a fuss and express so much frustration, anxiety, and stress when the ‘difficult’ patient arrives.  You know the ones: too much alcohol, too much craziness, too much neediness…  When these ‘difficult’ patients are not around everything moves smoothly.  We are in autopilot.  Isn’t ironic that the ‘difficult’ patients and situations at work turn up the energy?  From mundane to stresssss!  But these are the patients and situations that generate all our energy, all of our discussions.  When our loved ones ask about work, we share with them about the high energy moments.  These ‘difficult’ patients and moments are often the only thing(s) we remember about the day.

Contrary to what we usually believe–the passive, relaxing times are the best moments of our lives.  What if our best moments are occurring right before our eyes when our bodies and minds are stretched to the limits in our efforts to deal with these ‘difficult’ patients, people, and situations (This is what Professor Csikszentmihalyi points out in his landmark book: Flow).  What if the ‘difficult’ is really the technicolor of our lives?  If you are like me, I am thinking that these difficult times are the worst times, filled with negative energy, negative feelings, etc.  BUT I am working to change my perspective on this.  As I become more aware of these ‘difficult’ moments, I am able to embrace them, explore them, feel them…because in the end, they may actually be the best or at least the most memorable moments of our lives so let’s look at them for just that…technicolor, heart racing, fully alive, high energy moments…

Present Perfect, Living in the Now Here

One of the fundamental principles of coaching is the practice of what I call: Present Perfect.  The art of being in the now here (Brennan Manning is known for saying that you are either Now Here or Nowhere).  This practice is known by other names such as process or mindfulness.

The lack of mindfulness or living in the now creates a frantic pace to our lives that is fraught with stress, limiting our experiences, and not embracing life to the fullest.  When we are fully present aka present perfect, we are able to fully experience life.

So how do we live in the now? Here are a few ways:

  • Record Your Moments: Record some random moments for a week.
    • Set your alarm on your smart phone or your watch or whenever your phone rings in the next week STOP what you are doing
    • Carry a 3×5 card with you and write down what you are doing at the moment when your alarm goes off.  Ask yourself what are you doing in this moment? What do you notice? What are you feeling? What are you thinking?
    • This is a great way to start to exercise your living in the moment muscles…
  • Freeze Frame: This week when you are with your loved ones stop and ponder:
    • Are you fully present?
    • What are you feeling, hearing, tasting, seeing, doing….
  • Body Check: Stop for a moment and check in with your body…
    • Let go of your current struggles/to do list/etc.
    • Notice your breathing
    • Notice places in your body that are tense and relax them
    • Take note of what happens when you do these things…what is possible from this place that wasn’t before?

So how do YOU live life in the now? Any ideas? Please share your ways/tricks to stay in the present, now here of your life.

I have a guy that could use some coaching…

I am in the process of building my coaching practice.  I LOVE coaching, but the marketing piece….not so much.  When I ask around & share the incredible testimonials from those who I have coached, most people think or say, “I don’t need coaching…but I might know a guy who could use some coaching…”

I clearly will never be a ‘marketeer’ but coaching is not what someone else could ‘use’ or ‘need’.  Coaching is the unique opportunity to learn how to flourish, to learn how to live a life of fulfillment.  If we were to score on a 1 to 10 scale each segment of our lives (our marriage, relationships, work, play, parenting, etc.), what numbers would we see?  Are we living life to the fullest? Coaching is a gift.  It is the place to discover what a 10 looks, sounds, tastes, and feels like!  Can you imagine that?

Coaching has transformed my life and the lives of my clients.  It is an opportunity to learn & develop the know how to live your most fulfilling life, to live in the present (the land of the now here rather than the land of nowhere), to discover the power of choice, to laugh & live more…Now who doesn’t want some of that?!

Carton Calculus

The Genius in All of Us by Shenk points out that it is not about an IQ number. One example is seen by a group of uneducated factory workers who had developed the capacity to perform highly complex mathmatics so they wouldn’t have to bend over so much at work. When a complicated order for many different kinds of milk cartons was given to them, they would quickly figure out a way to package the order in a simple and elegant way to limit their physical labor. When the highly educated, high IQ boses tried to make the same calculations, they failed miserably. Pointing out that it is not about IQ, we all have the capacity to make complex calculations when motivated in the right ways.

Nerve Lesson #12: Open Up To Fear Unconditionally

Nerve by Taylor Clark is a great read. It is an entertaining and insightful look into fear. He shares some key methods to deal with fear, anxiety, and stress. I didn’t say overcome fear because our fears are here to stay (for the most part). The hero’s of the world acknowledge the fear and move forward with it.

Lesson #12: Open up to fear unconditionally.
“There’s nothing wrong with feeling anxious, ever, over anything at all. Fear and anxiety are part of who we are. Once we drop the pointless, wrongheaded routine about needing to get rid of them, we can carry fear and anxiety around with us through life like friendly companions. Instead of battling fear, we just let it happen, and when the fight against it dissolves, so does the torment. We slowly learn to live in harmony with fear, anxiety, and stress, expecting them to show up and welcoming them when they do.”