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A Creative Conversation

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I recently met for coffee with my friend and colleague Leo MacLeod, who is a leadership and communication coach. Among the many topics we talked about, one conversational thread led to an unexpected result – a guest blog post by him.

Finding Meaning in Solving Problems

Guest Blog Post by Leo MacLeod

Leo MacLeod, Leadership and Communication Coach

I recently turned sixty-five and, for the first time in a long time, found myself without a plan for my future. I’ve always been a person who has done well with setting goals and following a schedule to accomplish them. But as I looked at retirement, I found myself staring into an abyss of having a lot of time without knowing how to fill it. I lacked purpose.

How do I decide what’s important to me, and how do I take the steps toward a meaningful future? This felt particularly tricky since retirement typically means unwinding. Luckily, I got inspiration from two places: a colleague who specializes in decision-making and a birthday gift.

Ursina Teuscher helps people make better decisions. With a PhD in psychology and a book to her credit, she’s got some pretty cool tools to help people like me narrow down choices. We had coffee, and I shared where I was stuck. In particular, I shared that I struggled with feeling alone, not only as a result of being less active with clients but also because of the cloud of the pandemic, which has everyone hunkered down and more isolated. The loneliness showed up in work and in my personal life.

After getting a good sense of what the problem was, Ursina suggested that thinking more explicitly about my underlying values might be a worthwhile next step. She pointed out that we often skip that step and jump right to finding solutions for our biggest pain points, but it’s worth resisting that urge to act for just a little bit. We often find better solutions if we’re clearer about what we’re looking for. It’s worth not just figuring out the main source of unease (in my case, loneliness) but thinking about what else we might want to optimize in our lives. Taking time to get at the root of why something is important helps us identify larger, more profound needs behind a problem. When we identify those needs that resonate at the deepest level, we see them in a fuller, more comprehensive context. We see all the reasons why they make sense over other decisions we might make. And they fuel our motivation and drive to follow through, especially when the work of reaching our goals becomes hardest.

This got me thinking in a more nuanced way: I’m a social person and get energy from my interactions with people. The times when I feel energized are when I’m collaborating with other people—bouncing ideas off of someone else, building on what someone said, getting excited about creating something larger and more interesting than if I sat alone with my thoughts. For instance, I just finished writing a book about my work as a leadership coach. It required tons of alone time, and I found it draining. By contrast, the last piece of the publishing process involved working with a marketing consultant and book designer. I really enjoyed interacting with them and getting energy from the collaboration. It gave me a boost to do more of the alone work I needed to continue with the project.

What if retirement didn’t look like an abyss with nothing to do and no one to connect with but was filled with projects where I connected with people? That certainly addressed my problem of feeling alone. But were there other reasons why I should fully commit to making collaboration center to my future? Here’s where a birthday gift came in to push the process into a truly meaningful level.

My wife had asked friends and family to write something about what they appreciate about me. It was a truly wonderful way to celebrate my birthday. The messages that really stood out for me were those that said I was remembered for doing something for someone else: I was there for someone in my life at a time when they really needed it. During an illness. A tough transition. A death. When I read those passages where I had made a difference in someone else’s life, I remembered that “making a difference for others” gives me a real sense of purpose. Collaboration is important not just in taking care of my personal needs but in feeding a sense of altruism that speaks to me on a deeper level.

What could this look like, specifically? For my work, it could mean more teaming and collaboration in training, coaching, and content creation. For future books, it could mean cowriting a book. For my love of music, it means writing more songs collaboratively and playing with different musicians to come up with different arrangements.

I spent time imaging what it would feel like to do more collaboration. If I focus on collaboration, others will also feel the similar excitement and energy from working together. They will feel the same of sense of connection and community and creative accomplishment that I will. It will be a shared experience. And maybe even an inspiration for other people to connect. When I look at where I’ve had the most joy in my life, it’s where I created some spark that brought people together to make them feel alive, to challenge each other, to support each other. I will have made a larger contribution than simply taking care of my personal needs. I will help spread a shared community of creativity and cooperation so others feel connected and we can find new ways of helping each other, probably even, in our own way, in our own corners, making the world a better place.

After reflecting on all of this, I ended up with not just one but three values that are embedded inside simply fixing a personal problem:

  • Community. It’s more fun and energizing to work together.
  • Service. I want to help others.
  • Creativity. The best ideas come from many perspectives.

Wow, I started with a problem, but I found much more than a way to solve that. I found a solution that not only would make me happier but would make my work more satisfying, and finally, could help strengthen my community.

The next small step came easily: I emailed Ursina to collaborate on this article!

Left: Ursina Teuscher; right: Leo MacLeod

In a nutshell, here’s the process you too can follow:
  1. What’s a recognizable problem in my life that I want to address? How does it show up as a need? E.g., loneliness, lack of purpose
  2. What do I want more of? E.g., connection with people
  3. What’s a potential solution? E.g., collaboration
  4. What does it specifically look like in my life? E.g., co-coaching, sharing songwriting
  5. How does that solution fulfill other important personal values? E.g., community, service, creativity
  6. What’s an easy small step to get going? E.g., call Ursina

Leo MacLeod is a leadership coach and author of “From the Ground Up! Stories and Lessons from Architects and Engineers Who Learned to be Leaders”. Find out more about him at www.leomacleod.com. 


Summer Reading List 2021: Five Books that Changed my Mind

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Career Development, Coaching Practice, Creative Thinking, Intuition, Leadership, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

This past year gave me a fair amount of time to read and listen to audiobooks. Here are five books I found truly impactful, in that they managed to change some of my fundamental previous assumptions and opinions.

Steven Pinker (2018). Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Steven Pinker presents a passionate and persuasive defense of reason, science and progress. He shows with an abundance of data how a commitment to humanitarian values has kept winning – in the long run – dramatically and consistently over the destruction and chaos that would be the easier and more natural course. It is an uplifting as well as urgent perspective that challenges lazy dogmas from both the left and the right of the political spectrum.

To get a first impression and hear his own voice, here’s Steven Pinker in an interview with Shankar Vedantam on the “Hidden Brain” podcast:

Beyond Doomscrolling

Hans Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund, & Ola Rosling (2018).  Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. 

You may know Hans Rosling from his classic and widely shared 2006 TED talk:

This book offers explanations of why people – including highly educated people – are shockingly and systematically wrong about global trends and facts. Our instincts dramatically distort our perspective: from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them; e.g., poor vs rich etc) to the way we consume media (where fear rules), to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).

The two books above share a similar perspective, but they are different enough (and counterintuitive enough!) that I found it very worthwhile to read both. In fact, I suspect I should read them both again in the near future, lest I forget.

Malcolm Gladwell (2019). Talking to Strangers. 

I’ve often found Malcolm Gladwells’s books worth reading, but hard to summarize. This one is no exception. If I had to summarize my take-home, it would be: “stop assuming”. I might be very wrong about other people, no matter how great I think my intuition is. (This past year I’ve listen to both “Talking to Strangers” and his older “David and Goliath” as audiobooks in short succession, and found them both similarly entertaining, informative, relevant for race politics, and thought-provoking, but only half satisfying.)

Sharna Fabiano (2021). Lead and Follow. 

Much has been written about leadership, but very little about followership in organizations (in fact, my spellchecker doesn’t even recognize “followership” as a word). As an internationally recognized dance artist and teacher, Sharna Fabiano has a deep understanding of the complementary nature of those roles in Argentine tango.

In her words: “To a dancer, improvisation does not mean “winging it” or making it up as you go along. Rather, it implies a highly refined system of communication built through specific methods of training. Improvisation for dancers is a synergy between leading and following actions that is greater than the sum of its parts. We already know a lot about leading at work, but not many of us understand how to follow with intelligence, power, and grace, as dancers do. It’s time we learned.”

Sharna Fabiano presents a coaching model that helps us think about those roles and the skills they require through three phases of increasing sophistication: 1. Connection, 2. Collaboration, and 3. Co-creation. It’s a very practical and well written book. As a reader, you don’t need to know anything about tango to understand the metaphors and their applicability to specific challenges in the workplace.

Steve Dalton (2020). The 2-Hour Job Search. 

What I liked least about this book was its title. I took me a while to figure out what exactly the two hours refer to, and I found the best explanation – and indeed the best book summary – here. The book’s focus is on how to get you interviews as efficiently and quickly as possible, without all the emotional investment that comes with a lot of other career advice. One reason I’ve already recommended it to several clients is that it has very useful templates and easy-to-follow guidelines for requesting and conducting informational interviews.

Steven Dalton’ approach circumvents the online job application process altogether. His approach takes into account the fact that many smaller companies never post their jobs online at all (and did you know that almost 99% of US employers have fewer than 100 employees?*), as well as that the odds for online applications are quite terrible, especially for people without very clearly defined and sought-after skills.

* According to 2016 data from the Census Bureau, firms with fewer than 500 workers accounted for 99.7 percent of businesses, and firms with fewer than 100 workers accounted for 98.2 percent.

Ursina reading an entirely different book from the ones on her Summer Reading List

What have you all read or listened to recently? As always, please let me know your favorites! Contrary to what this post might suggest, I also enjoy fiction, escapism, and otherwise simply pleasurable entertainment. Would love to hear your recommendations!

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Should You Become an Intrapreneur?

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Career Development, Creative Thinking, Leadership, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

Could you make your job better by becoming an intrapreneur? Intrapreneurship means to think and work like entrepreneur, even though you are still a part of a large organization.

For example, you might have an idea of how to improve a product, and suggest those changes to your boss. Or, you might look for ways to make a specific service more profitable for your company. Maybe you discover a new opportunity to market a product or a service. You might find ways to communicate better within your team, and with that, speed up the workflow. Or you might go the extra mile to increase customer satisfaction. In other words: whatever your role within the organization, you actively drive innovation and keep looking for opportunities to improve your company.

Good employers realize how valuable intrapreneurs are to their organization, and a lot of research is being done in the attempt to understand how different leadership styles and company cultures can encourage intrapreneurship among employees.
Improving your Job Satisfaction by becoming an Intrapreneur
Now, we all know that not every employer encourages innovation. Maybe the company you work for does not foster intrapreneurs at all. Nonetheless, the good news is that being an intrapreneur also benefits you, as an employee. Namely, it seems to start a positive cycle of growth for yourself that gives you more personal resources, which in turn gets you more engaged and even more motivated to make a difference at your workplace.

So how can you do it?

Five tips on how you can become an intrapreneur and thereby increase your work satisfaction:
  1. Think like a boss or owner. Which improvements would add to the value of the organization as a whole, rather than just make your own life better?
  2. Find ways to make improvements yourself. Even if you think big, it’s often best to start with small changes that you can take on yourself. Eventually, when you need help from others to accomplish bigger things, they can see that you’ve already put in your work, and they’ll trust you to match their effort with yours.
  3. Find allies. Search through the organization for people who are passionate about accomplishing something and team up with them. Look for ways to make their job easier and better.
  4. Take risks. Don’t be afraid to experiment, and recognize that it is often necessary to explore many different paths in order to produce innovative breakthroughs. Some of those paths will fail, but recognize this as part of the process.
  5. Stop making excuses. Your boss might not support of all your new ideas, or you might be limited in your efforts by your workload or your environment. Nonetheless, within your realistic limits, keep searching actively for opportunities to make a difference wherever you can.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

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Self-Assessment: How Awe-Struck are You?

Posted on by by Posted in Creative Thinking, Self-Assessments

In a earlier post, I wrote about how feelings of awe can affect our decision making. Here you can take a quick self-assessment as to how often you experience awe in your own life.

Note that this self-assessment is not a scientifically normed scale. The items are loosely based on Michelle Shiota and her colleagues’ scales of dispositional positive emotions, where awe is one out of seven positive emotions (the other six being joy, pride, contentment, compassion, amusement, and love). So far, not much research has been done on whether experiencing awe is a stable trait within a person’s personality structure. But regardless of whether some people are more naturally prone to it than others, the feeling of awe is an experience that we can seek out, if we choose to look for it.

Would you like to experience more awe in your life? If so, try to surround yourself more with natural beauty and seek experiences that expand your horizon. Or as one group of researchers put it: look for things that have “perceptual vastness”, to the extent that they might dramatically expand your usual frame of reference. In experiments, the feeling of awe has often been induced with images or videos of stunning landscapes, night skies, or the real experience of nature, such as standing under towering trees. The Greater Good Science Center (SGCC) at UC Berkeley suggests this video as a practice. There are also certain types of music that have been used successfully to induce awe, such as the song Hoppípolla by Sigur Rós.

If you take another look at the self-assessment scale above: on which of the items could you get a higher score with the easiest changes in your daily habits or leisure activities?

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

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Inspired: How Awe Affects Our Decisions

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Feelings of awe and wonder make us feel smaller, but richer in time. This affects our decisions in several interesting ways.

Awe is a powerful emotion that we feel when we encounter something so strikingly vast (grand, beautiful, or powerful) that it overwhelms our mental capacity. Some researchers describe such vastness as “provoking a need to update one’s mental schemas”, while the rest of us might more succinctly call it mind-blowing. These feelings can be induced experimentally, for example by having research participants stand in a grove of towering trees or looking at stunning images of the sky, space or landscapes.

It turns out feelings of awe have interesting effects on decision making.

For one, feelings of awe can lead to more ethical decisions, more generosity, as well as more compassion. For instance, research participants who experienced awe were more willing to volunteer their time to help others.

Another effect is that people who experienced awe preferred investing money into experiences rather than into material products. As I discussed in an earlier post, this is a decision pattern that can lead to more satisfaction and well-being.

How Awe Affects Our Decisions

Why does awe have these effects on our decisions?

One reason is probably that awe expands our sense of time. Research participants who experienced awe, felt they had more time available and were less impatient. This kind of expanded time perception certainly influences decisions. For example, not having enough time is an often-cited reason for not engaging in leisure activities, and so a sense of abundant time could well help people choose experiences over material goods. Time perception also affects moral choices: people act more helpfully towards others if they have extra time on their hands, rather than feeling rushed.

Another explanation is that feelings of awe lead to feelings of a “small self”. For example, taking in the vastness of a natural landscape can make us feel small and insignificant, which could explain why people feel less of a sense of entitlement after experiencing feelings of awe. Being reminded of our own smallness may help us take ourselves and our concerns a bit less seriously and focus on others instead.

How Awe Affects Our Decisions

Warning: Side-Effects

The experience of awe has one more effect that we should be aware of: it increases our supernatural beliefs. The reason for this might be that awe lowers our sense of control over the world, and when feelings of personal control are low, people turn to supernatural explanations, as a means of lowering the uncertainty and restoring a sense of control. Feelings of awe do indeed lower people’s tolerance for uncertainty, and people who have a low tolerance of uncertainty are more prone to magical thinking and superstitious behavior.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Selected References:
Case, T. I., Fitness, J., Cairns, D. R., & Stevenson, R. J. (2004). Coping With Uncertainty: Superstitious Strategies and Secondary Control1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 34(4), 848–871.
Darley, J. M., & Batson, C. D. (1973). “From Jerusalem to Jericho”: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27(1), 100–108.
Kay, A. C., Gaucher, D., McGregor, I., & Nash, K. (2010). Religious Belief as Compensatory Control. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 14(1), 37–48.
Keinan G. (1994). Effects of stress and tolerance of ambiguity on magical thinking. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 48–55.
Keinan G. (2002). The effects of stress and desire for control on superstitious behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28, 102–108.
Piff, P. K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., Stancato, D. M., & Keltner, D. (2015). Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 108(6), 883–899.
Rudd, M., Vohs, K. D., & Aaker, J. (2012). Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1130–1136.
Shiota, M., Keltner, D., & Mossman, A. (2007). The nature of awe. Cognition and Emotion, 21(5).
Valdesolo, P., & Graham, J. (2013). Awe, Uncertainty, and Agency Detection. Psychological Science, 956797613501884.
Van Boven, L., & Gilovich, T. (2003). To Do or to Have? That Is the Question. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(6), 1193–1202.

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Are You Scared of Your Next Decision?

Posted on by by Posted in Creative Thinking, Risk and Uncertainty, Stress Management

Scared of Your Next Decision?

Edvard Munch (1893): The Scream. Oil, tempera & pastel on cardboard. [Image rights in the public domain.]

Tonight will be a scary night for the bravest of us, with countless children roaming the streets, high on sugar, threatening to knock on our very doors.

However, even today, our most crippling fears probably come from within. Are you scared of your next decision? Afraid of making the wrong choice? Funnily enough, while dogs and – some say – children can smell our fear; on our own we’re not always very good at recognizing when and why we’re scared.

Here’s how you can recognize whether your decision scares you:

  • You avoid making the decision altogether, for example by procrastinating or by shifting the responsibility to others.
  • You get overly emotional about your decision. Maybe you get angry or burst into tears when others are bringing up uncomfortable truths about your situation? Such emotional outbursts are effective ways of shutting down a conversation, and they can be warning signs that your fears are holding you back from thinking and acting in the best way.
  • You keep investing into previous mistakes. This is also known as “escalating commitment”. When coping with poor outcomes of our previous choices, it is tempting to dig in our heels and devote even more resources to our current path, in the hope of somehow making it work. But sometimes, making the best decision for the future requires that we admit having made a mistake in the past. This is not easy: even admitting mistakes just to ourselves takes a lot of courage, but it can open the door to a new and better direction.

If any of these points ring true, take it as a warning sign that you might need more courage to approach your decision.

How to become a braver decision maker

The simplest way to get more courage is to take responsibility for your decision process, even if the outcomes are not all in your control. Follow a decision process that is in line with your values. Without being able to predict the future, we will never have a guarantee that good decisions will lead to good consequences, but there is plenty of evidence showing that a good decision process is indeed more likely to result in better outcomes. Since you will make many decisions over your lifetime, you can therefore be assured that if you follow a good decision process throughout your life, your decision outcomes will be better overall.

Four steps to tackle your decisions fearlessly:

1) Commit to a value-driven rational decision process. This does not guarantee good outcomes, but it does make them more likely.

2) Ask yourself: Which of my values matter for this decision? In other words, what are my personal criteria as to whether the outcome will be “good” or “bad”?

3) Think: What can I do that best fulfills all those values? (Think beyond your initial ideas. If necessary, use tools/visuals/charts etc to evaluate your options – I’m not getting started on all this here, but you know who to ask if you want to know more about creative thinking and evaluating options.)

4) Act. Knowing that you’ve made the best decision you possibly could have with your current knowledge – a decision that is based on your values, rather than on fear – will empower you to act with confidence.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Selected References:
Anderson, B., Hahn, D., & Teuscher, U. (2013). Heart and Mind: Mastering the Art of Decision Making. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
Aschenbrenner, K. M., Jaus, D., & Villani, C. (1980). Hierarchical goal structuring and pupils’ job choices: testing a decision aid in the field. Acta Psychologica, 45, 35–49.
Bruine de Bruin, W., Parker, A. M., & Fischhoff, B. (2007). Individual differences in adult decision-making competence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(5), 938–956.
Dean, J. W., & Sharfman, M. P. (1996). Does Decision Process Matter? A Study of Strategic Decision-Making Effectiveness. The Academy of Management Journal, 39(2), 368–396.
Herek, G. M., Janis, I. L., & Huth, P. (1989). Quality of U.S. Decision Making during the Cuban Missile Crisis: Major Errors in Welch’s Reassessment. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 33(3), 446–459.
Keeney, R. L. (1996). Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decision Making. Harvard University Press.

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Summer Reading List 2016

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Creative Thinking, Leadership, Risk and Uncertainty

Some book recommendations on decision making, innovation and productivity:

Kayt Sukel (2016) The Art of Risk: The New Science of Courage, Caution, and Chance
A very readable overview of current research on the neuroscience of risk, illustrated with personal stories and some inspiring interviews with risk takers and scientists.

Charles Duhigg (2016). Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business.
Important insights into how organizations can foster better productivity and innovation. For my taste, the book relied very heavily on anecdotes though, to the extent that I found it difficult to identify key takeaways.

Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner (2015). Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.
A convincing case that – while even experts usually make poor predictions about the future – forecasting is a skill that can be improved. Good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers either. However, it does involve gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course.

Drew Boyd & Jacob Goldenberg (2013). Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results.
This book does a great job demystifying the creative process. It shows how innovation can come from a structured process, using a set of templates that channel creative thinking. The techniques are derived from research that discovered a surprising set of common patterns shared by inventive solutions.

Those are some of the books I’ve read recently and found worthwhile. Which other ones would you recommend I add to my own summer reading list?

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Why is it such hard work to find your own niche?

Posted on by by Posted in Creative Thinking, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development

Because until you fill it, it’s just a gap.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR

Find your own niche

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Featured Video: Raise Your Children As Entrepreneurs

Posted on by by Posted in Career Development, Creative Thinking, Financial Decisions, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

Entrepreneurial skills are not a part of traditional education, even though they are important if we want to empower more people to make an independent living in a world where not everyone can find a good job.

In this TED talk, Cameron Herald argues that we should encourage and foster those skills in children. He makes a case that entrepreneurial traits occur quite naturally in children and can be encouraged and reinforced in playful ways. He gives many practical suggestions how parents can help their children develop those skills. For example, rather than giving children allowances and thereby getting them used to expecting a regular paycheck, children could be paid for specific projects.

Many important traits could be developed in that way, including such big ones as creativity, social skills, a proactive attitude towards working, and an understanding of what it means to create value for others.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR


Do Reading and Writing Make you More Creative?

Posted on by by Posted in Creative Thinking, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

A study by Amber Y. Wang gives us reason to think so: students who spent more time reading and writing performed better on creativity tests.

The study only investigated the correlations however, so it can’t tell us what’s cause and what’s effect. Reading and writing might indeed lead to more creativity, but it’s also possible that creative people naturally feel more drawn to reading and writing, or that other factors influence all of it together: reading, writing and creativity.

What we can say in any case is that both reading and writing are related to creativity.

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling, LLC


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