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Improving your Habits with Choice Architecture

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Financial Decisions, Health Decisions, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

Choice Architecture Coaching to Improve Habits Picture credit: Ben Deavin

What is choice architecture, and how can we use it to improve our own decisions?

Choice architecture is the art and science of how to present choices to decision makers. The way a choice is presented to us has a much bigger influence on our behavior than we may realize. For example, children eat more fruit when fruit is placed in more prominent positions in a school cafeteria. Or, people are more likely to enroll in retirement savings plans if the employer makes that plan the default option – which is the option that happens when you do nothing. Similarly, people eat less when the default serving size is smaller.

Two recent books shine a light on choice architecture, and on how it affects our decisions:

Eric Johnson’s The Elements of Choice (2021) offers a guide to creating effective choice architectures. The designers of decisions need to consider all the elements involved in presenting a choice: how many options to offer, in which order to present those options, whether to organize them into categories, how much information to provide, whether to make one of them a “default”, etc. We don’t appreciate those factors enough, and we’re often unaware of just how much they influence our choices every day.

With Nudge: The Final Edition (2021, a revised version of their 2008 bestseller), Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein advocate what they call “libertarian paternalism”. This is the idea that it is both possible and desirable (in particular for public institutions, but really for any well-meaning choice architect) to affect people’s behavior for the “better”, while also respecting their freedom of choice. They argue that consumers and citizens should be nudged to help them make the kinds of choices that they would most likely also naturally prefer, if they were making “optimal” (or rational) choices for themselves. What is optimal is not the same for every individual, but I generally define it as the choice that is most aligned with the person’s values.

Both of these books are geared mostly towards “curators” of other people’s choices: for example, the staff of a school cafeteria who gets to decide where to place the fruit, or the employers who present retirement savings plans to their employees. My interest lies more in helping people improve their own choices, but the findings of both books are highly relevant for that. In fact, Eric Johnson concludes his book by advising us to apply the golden rule: “Design for others as you would like them to design for you”. Given that we actually often find it easier to make good decisions for others than for ourselves, I would like to turn this around: “Design for yourself as you would design for others.”

How can you use the tools of choice architecture to improve your own behaviors and habits?

Here are some examples of how you can apply the elements of good choice architecture to your own choices, to help you to improve your habits and change your behaviors in positive ways. It may all sound too simple, and chances are you’ve heard it all before. However, it really does make a difference – in fact, food choices seem to be particularly responsive to choice architecture interventions. Perhaps more generally, choice architecture interventions may be an effective tool for changing habits that are notoriously difficult to change.

1. Defaults:
Set defaults for yourself that reflect your long-term goals. For example: would you like to save more money? If so, enroll in an automatic savings plan, where some amount of your income will automatically be transferred to a savings account. (Increase that default amount beyond your comfort zone if you want to save more aggressively.) Would you like to eat more healthily? Stock your fridge and pantry with healthy options, and move the unhealthy options out of sight and out of easy reach. Do you want to get in the habit of going for a walk first thing in the morning? Get your walking clothes ready the night before, so that dressing in those will be your easiest option in the morning.

2. Primacy effects:
When we’re facing many options, we’re more likely to choose those we see first. How can you make this effect work in your favor? For example: would you like to eat more salads instead of other dishes when you eat at a restaurant? If so, make it a habit to always study the salad section first. You’ll be more likely to find something attractive among the things you read and imagine first.

3. Expecting errors:
Choice architecture has the most impact on vulnerable groups. You may not think of yourself as belonging to a vulnerable group. However, aren’t there times in all our lives when we’re more vulnerable to making bad choices? Maybe early in the morning, or late at night when we feel tired? Maybe after the first or second glass of wine? Be aware of what your weak moments are, and design your choices for those situations with even more care and intention.

If you would like help in applying choice architecture tools to your own live, I’d love to hear from you. I’d be excited to help you design and carry out your own interventions to make your life easier and better.

Contact Ursina Teuscher about choice architecture and coaching

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


Performing under Pressure

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Career Development, Coaching Practice, Neuroscience, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Stress Management
Have you ever choked when you needed to perform under pressure?

We all know what it feels like: you’ve been building your skill – whether it’s in academics, in your career, in sports, in performing arts – but when the big moment arrives, nothing seems to work. You hit the wrong note, drop the ball, get stumped by a simple question. In other words, you choke under the pressure.

Here, I will review a book by Sian Beilock about this topic, along with additional research, and I’ll highlight some findings that can help you perform at your own very best, even under pressure.

A book review and practical applications

Dr. Sian Beilock, an expert on performance and brain science, examines in her book “Choke” why we sometimes blunder and perform at our worst precisely when the stakes are highest. What happens in our brain and body when we experience the dreaded performance anxiety? And what are we doing differently when everything magically clicks into place?

[👆TED Talk by Sian Beilock, author of “Choke: The Secret to Performing Under Pressure.”]

Beilock reveals surprising similarities among the ways students, athletes, performance artists, and business people choke. She examines how attention and working memory guide human performance, how experience and brain development interact to create our abilities, and how stress affects all these factors. The findings she present give us helpful pointers to how we can overcome debilitating performance anxiety, and how to succeed despite the pressure.

What does it mean to “choke” under pressure?
Choking under pressure is poor performance that occurs in response to the perceived stress of a situation. In other words, choking is not simply poor performance. Choking is suboptimal performance. It means that that you perform worse than expected given what you are capable of doing, and worse than you have in the past. It also doesn’t merely reflect a random fluctuation – we all have performance ups and downs. Choking occurs specifically in response to a highly stressful situation.
What are the reasons we choke? Why do we sometimes perform worst in precisely the moment when we care most about a top performance? 
Beilock writes a lot about the effects of an overloaded working memory on performance. While she doesn’t make the following distinction in her book, the findings she presents make more sense to me if we acknowledge that there are two types of performances:
1) There are some skills we have practiced so well that we don’t have a conscious understanding anymore of what we are doing.

The skills of top athletes or musicians are obvious examples here, but we all experience this for skills that require no conscious attention from us, such as running down a flight of stairs. If you suddenly direct explicit attention to exactly what you’re doing with your feet while running, chances are it won’t go so well anymore. This sudden focus on your own movements can happen during a peak performance, and is a well-documented reason for choking. For example, athletes’ tendency to overthink their performance is one big predictor of whether they will choke in important games or matches. In those situations, it helps to add an unrelated thinking task (such as counting backwards) that will distract the performer just enough so that they can’t overthink their performance anymore.

2) On the other hand, there are skills that will always require our full attention, no matter how practiced we are: solving math problems is such an example.

For this type of skill, our performance suffers if we get distracted, because we do need our working memory at its full capacity in order to perform at our best. Worrying about your performance is precisely such a distraction: it takes up precious resources of your usual brain power. When math-anxious people do math, all their worries – about the math, about their performance, about looking stupid – capture a big part of their working-memory, and they are left with less brainpower to focus on the math itself.

When you worry while doing math, something gets sacrificed.
Unfortunately it’s not the worries, but the math.

This is also a well-documented phenomenon. An example of this is the performance hit that is often observed when people are aware of a “stereotype threat”. Namely, bringing up negative stereotypes about how your sex or racial group should perform can be enough to send people into a spiral of self-doubt that uses up valuable brain resources that could otherwise work on the task at hand – resources that are already scarce in high-stakes situations. The mere awareness of these stereotypes can lead to choking under pressure.

So how can you prevent choking, and instead perform at your best when you’re under pressure?

Here are my top five practical tips, based on the science I’ve seen so far (the research findings are taken mostly from Beilock’s book, but see a list of additional references below).

1. Know whether your task requires your full attention or not, and “load” or “unload” your working memory capacity accordingly:

If your task involves fully automated “muscle memory” skills, such as an athletic or musical performance, it may help you if you can distract yourself, in order to avoid focusing your attention on your own movements and getting – perhaps literally – tripped up by your unhelpful focus.

If, on the other hand, your task does require your full attention, such as an academic test, try to “unload” your worries in order to free up working memory. For example, writing about the stressful events in your life on a regular basis can decrease the occurrence of intrusive thoughts and worries. This can bolster your cognitive horsepower. Think of a computer analogy: if a computer is running several programs at once, each one of these programs will run that much slower and be more prone to crash. Getting your worries out on paper eliminates the unnecessary programs from running and helps you focus on the task at hand.

2. Practice under the gun:

Of course, practice makes everything easier, but in particular, make your practice situation as similar as possible to the performance situation. For example, if you need to give a presentation, practice it in front of people, or in front of a camera. Different studies, one with golfers and one with with musicians, showed a very similar effect of this kind of practice: those who had practiced while being video-taped performed better in front of an audience than those who had practiced in isolation.

3. Prepare, don’t worry:

Preparing is not the same as worrying! People thinking about an upcoming presentation while lying in a brain scanner got more nervous, the longer they spent anticipating the stressful event. So, prepare well, but don’t keep thinking about the stressful event more than necessary. Once you are well-prepared, it may serve you better to focus your attention on something other than the upcoming performance.

4. Social support – a mixed bag:

Men who were able to spend time with their spouses before having to prepare their speech showed less of a stress response (cortisol increase) in anticipation of a stressful public speaking assessment than those who didn’t spend time with their spouse. However, the same was not the case (in a different study, but with the same stressful public speaking test) with women: women’s cortisol levels went up when their boyfriends were present beforehand. Before generalizing this finding too much, I would like to emphasize that these were different studies and may have included people in different stages of their relationships.

So then, what to conclude from these mixed findings? Of course, you know it: surround yourself with the kinds of people who make you feel calmer, rather than adding more pressure, when you’re stressed out.

5. Focus on values (not goals):

Interventions that asked students to write a paragraph about their values before a task performed better and were less affected by stereotype threats. This may sound like a weird intervention, but it does make sense. Focusing on values may re-affirm your self-worth and integrity, and direct your focus away from your own flaws and onto the bigger picture.

Note that values are not the same as goals: several studies showed that focusing on goals had no effect on performance, for example in soccer players and race car drivers. This is also not too surprising, since goal setting is a motivational technique, rather than one one that optimizes attention, and motivation is already high enough, if not too high, when we choke under pressure.

What next?

Do you need help with your own performance under pressure?

Are you, or is someone you love, struggling with performance anxiety? Would you like to try some of the here discussed or other evidence-based interventions? I would love to help you think about how to apply these and other ideas to your specific situation. Here you can schedule a coaching session or a phone call to discuss options.

Set up an appointment with Ursina Teuscher to discuss Performance Coaching
I look forward to talking to you!

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


References:

J. Aronson et al., “When white men can’t do math: Necessary and sufficient factors in stereotype threat,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 35 (1999), 29–46.
M. H. Ashcraft and E. P. Kirk, “The relationships among working memory, math anxiety, and performance,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130 (2001), 224–37.
S. Beilock. Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To. Atria Books.
S. L. Beilock and T. H. Carr, “On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130 (2001), 701–25.
G. L. Cohen, J. Garcia, N. Apfel, and A. Master, “Reducing the racial achievement gap: A social-psychological intervention,” Science, 313 (2006), 1307–10.
B. Ditzen et al., “Adult attachment and social support interact to reduce psychological but not cortisol responses to stress,” Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 64:5 (2008), 479–86.
A. J. Fiocco, R. Joober, and S. J. Lupien, “Education modulates cortisol reactivity to the Trier Social Stress Test in middle-aged adults,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 32 (2007), 1158–63.
P. Gröpel & C. Mesagno (2019) Choking interventions in sports: A systematic review, International Review of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 12:1, 176-201
C. Kirschbaum et al., “Sex-specific effects of social support on cortisol and subjective responses to acute psychological stress,” Psychosomatic Medicine, 57 (1995), 23–31.
K. Klein and A. Boals, “Expressive writing can increase working memory capacity,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130 (2001), 520–33.
E. H. McKinney and K. J. Davis, “Effects of deliberate practice on crisis decision performance,” Human Factors, 45 (2003), 436–44.
C. M. Steele and J. Aronson, “Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African-Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69 (1995), 797–811.
T. D. Wager et al., “Brain mediators of cardiovascular responses to social threat: Part II: Prefrontal-subcortical pathways and relationship with anxiety,” Neuroimage, 47 (2009), 836–51.
C. Y. Wan and G. F. Huon, “Performance degradation under pressure in music: An examination of attentional processes,” Psychology of Music, 33 (2005), 155–72.


Interview: How to Beat Job Search Procrastination

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

Interview by Mac Prichard: How to Beat Procrastination in Your Job Search, with Ursina Teuscher

Podcast Interview: How to Beat Procrastination in Your Job SearchMac’s List is a Pacific Northwest job board and “career hub”, driven by the mission to make the hiring process more human. In addition to local job listings, it offers an abundance of educational resources and community-building activities. I’ve been using it for my own education, and have been recommending it as a resource to my clients for years. Its founder Mac Prichard hosts the weekly podcast Find Your Dream Job and has interviewed me on how to beat procrastination in your job search.

Listen to it or find the transcript here:

How to Beat Procrastination in Your Job Search, with Ursina Teuscher

Summary by Mac’s List:

“Do you know it’s time to look for a new job but you keep putting it off? Maybe it seems overwhelming or you don’t know where to begin. The way to beat job search procrastination is to figure out exactly what you’re avoiding. Find Your Dream Job guest Dr. Ursina Teuscher suggests deciding what your next step should be and focusing on one step at a time. Dr. Teuscher also recommends treating a job search like a job. Most of us can do something fairly unpleasant if it’s for work. Finally, create rewards for yourself for completing the tasks you’ve been avoiding.”

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


What Is Procrastination and How Can We Overcome It?

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

What counts as procrastination?

According to Wikipedia, procrastination means to “unnecessarily and voluntarily delay something, despite knowing that there will be negative consequences for doing so.”

What Is Procrastination? Latin origin: “Pro”: Forward/For “Crastinus”: Tomorrow

There are productive ways of delaying tasks, as well as inevitable delays, outside of one’s control. Those don’t typically fall under the term “procrastination”. While not all researchers draw the same lines when defining procrastination, I found Jason Wessel‘s definition and Venn diagram convincing and helpful in distinguishing procrastination from other types of delays. According to that, you are procrastination if you (1) intend to complete the task, (2) delay acting on the intention, (3) have voluntary control to do the task, and (4) an expectation of harm, or things being worse off, if you delay.

What Is Procrastination? Venn Diagram

Can procrastination be a good thing?

“I do my best work under pressure!” – Anonymous Greek Philosopher

What about the claim that procrastination improves performance, because the imminent deadline creates excitement and pressure that allow for peak performance? Do you sometimes feel that you work best under pressure? I certainly hear that from a lot of people. Surprisingly enough though, one study found that chronic procrastinators actually work worse under pressure than non-procrastinators. So the popular notion of “I work best under pressure” may be true for some people, however – tragically enough – it seems to be least true for those people who would most need it to be true. Frequent procrastinators seem on the contrary to be more likely to choke than to thrive under pressure.

But of course there could still be benefits to procrastination. For example, could the enjoyment of carefree times earlier offset the stress and poor performance later on? Unfortunately, that does not usually seem to be the case either. One study found that while procrastinating students did indeed report lower stress and less illness than non-procrastinators early in the semester, they reported not only higher stress and more illness late in the term, but were overall sicker. They also received lower grades on all assignments.

Since we should always be wary about relying on individual studies, I searched for meta-analyses¹ on procrastination. I found a recent one that included at 22 studies conducted between the years 2000 and 2020, and which found a robust relationship² between more procrastination and poorer academic achievement.

Overall, it seems safe to say that procrastination comes along with long-term costs – both to wellbeing and performance – that outweigh the short-term benefits.

How can we overcome procrastination?

While we all struggle with procrastination in one way or another, the struggles come in many shapes and have many different causes. Understanding what leads you to procrastinate on any particular task can be an important first step to help you fix the problem. For example, if distractions are causing you to procrastinate, your best bet is to limit those, whereas if the task itself feels overwhelming, you need to get clarity on the task. This article gives a you a list of frequent procrastination triggers and some suggestions on how you could tackle any one of them. If you find a trigger on that list that seems to ring true, give one of those suggestions a try! Let me know how it worked out for you.

What if nothing on that list resonates and you’re not sure what’s causing you to procrastinate? Here’s a more involved method, but still one you can try by yourself. It’s a three-step intervention designed to help you self-diagnose and treat some of your most persistent procrastination habits. Heads-up: this is not an easy process to go through by yourself, so I would suggest finding a buddy to work with.

I would be excited to work with you on this. With the articles I linked here, you can already get a good sense of my coaching approach. I’d first help you figure out what keeps holding you back from doing what you really want to do. Then we’d explore together which simple and practical changes could make your life easier and better. If you’d like my help, you can schedule your first online coaching session or a brief phone call to discuss options.

Set up an appointment with Ursina Teuscher
I look forward to talking to you!

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

Footnotes:

¹ Meta-analyses are studies that analyze the results of a large number of studies. I generally recommend searching for meta-analyses about any topic you really care about. Google Scholar is a neat search tool if you want to find scientific papers, rather than random websites.

² All included studies were correlational, not experimental, which means we can’t truly draw any conclusions about cause vs effect. It is possible, for example, that an unidentified third variable, such as anxiety, or poor self-regulation, might be the cause of both poor performance and procrastination. However, to me, the more intuitive causal direction of procrastination directly causing poor performance does seem quite plausible in this case, for at least two reasons. First, delaying a task, especially a bigger project, can naturally affect the outcomes of the task. Second, at least for chronic procrastinators, we have seen in experiments that more pressure directly causes poorer performance. In any case, most people I talk to do seem to think of procrastination as a problem that causes poor performance and stress for them, so as a coach, it makes sense to me to go with that assumption.

References:

Akpur, U. (2020). The Effect of Procrastination on Academic Achievement: A Meta-Analysis Study. International Journal of Educational Methodology, 6(4), 681–690.
Ferrari, J. R. (2001). Procrastination as self-regulation failure of performance: Effects of cognitive load, self-awareness, and time limits on ‘working best under pressure.’ European Journal of Personality, 15(5), 391–406.
Tice, D. M., & Baumeister, R. F. (1997). Longitudinal Study of Procrastination, Performance, Stress, and Health: The Costs and Benefits of Dawdling. Psychological Science, 8(6), 454–458.
Wessel, J. (2021, July 12-13). Defining Procrastination: A Venn diagram to consider. [Conference presentation]. International Procrastination Research Workshop. Hosted online by Tim Pychyl (Carleton University) and Joel Anderson (Utrecht University).

Picture Credits:

[1] Thomas Couture (1815–1879): Les romains de la décadence, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Modified by UT.
[2] Jason Wessel, reshared with permission from https://www.unpackpsychology.com.au/post/what-is-procrastination. Wessel, J. (2021, July 12-13). Defining Procrastination: A Venn diagram to consider. [Conference presentation]. International Procratination Research Workshop. 


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


Summer Reading List 2020 – Book Recommendations on Leadership and Career Development

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Career Development, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development

Here are a few books about decision making and leadership that I found worth reading and still very relevant, regardless of how things have changed since they were written.

The first two are not only interesting if you’re leading other people, but also if you are running your own business as a solopreneur. Both books talk about value-driven business models, although in very different ways. I found Simon Sinek’s particularly inspiring:

Simon Sinek (2013). Infinite Game. 

Seth Godin (2018). This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See. 

Aaron Dignan (2019). Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?

Brené Brown (2018). Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts. 

My last recommendation is a good basic reference if you’re looking for a job. It offers detailed advice and examples on how to write your resumes and cover letters, and how to tailor them to your desired position. As much as I recommend it though: given how quickly the job market and its challenges are changing, I would recommend any book (regardless of how recently published) only as a starting point, and as one reference. Always do a detailed search online for specific advice about your desired position and industry, and get personal advice from people who are working and hiring in that field – or better yet, at that company. In addition, make sure your resume has a chance to get past automated Applicant Tracking Systems and in front of human eyes at all. (This is not a topic the book talks about, but it is absolutely essential in any resume you submit online).

Patricia K. Criscito (2013). How to Write Better Résumés and Cover Letters.

Book recommendation: resume writing

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


Summer Reading List 2019

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Book Recommendations, Career Development, Financial Decisions, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Risk and Uncertainty

Summer Reading List: Ursina's Book Recommendations on Creative Decision Making and Goal AchievementSomehow it became a summer tradition of this blog: here’s my latest list of book recommendations (you can see the lists from previous years here). As usual, they all have something to do with creative decision making and goal achievement. The first is a novel, the rest is non-fiction:

Wood, Benjamin (2016). The Ecliptic. A Novel. 

More than the plot, it was the premise and setting that had me hooked from the start: an isolated artists’ colony on a small island – its anonymous residents lingering for years, all expenses paid. Relieved of their own ego and the burdens of everyday life, they should be free to create their next masterpieces. Needless to say, it doesn’t work out quite so smoothly for everyone. You can start reading here.

Two excerpts highlight why this book fits this particular reading list and the topic of my blog. Here’s the voice of the protagonist Elspeth, a Scottish painter: “Any guest who could not wait to talk about the project he was working on was usually a short-termer — that was our evaluation. Anyone who proclaimed his own genius was a fraud, because, as Quickman himself once put it, genius does not have time to stand admiring its reflection; it has too much work to get finished. We never sought out the company of short-termers. We left them to work and find their clarity alone, while we got on with jabbing at our own unwieldy projects. None of us seemed to recognise the fact that our separation from the others was, in fact, a tacit declaration of our own genius — and, thus, it surely followed that we were the biggest frauds of all.”

And the voice of her mentor: “Actually, it reminds me of the work I did when I was drinking — heavily drinking. Your thoughts are leaking out of so many different places you can’t hold them. There’s no control, no discipline. Everything’s just streaming out of you and you can’t stop it. I understand what that feels like, believe me I do. Feels like freedom but all you’re really doing is shutting things out. It leads you nowhere good.”

James Clear (2018). Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones.

Of all the books on habit changes I’ve read so far, this might be the most practical yet. It focuses on small improvements and makes a compelling argument that in the case of habits, thinking small produces the biggest results over time.

Some of the take-home points:

  • Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
  • The most effective way to change your habits is NOT to focus not on specific goals. Focus on your system instead. “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
  • Four rules to build better habits: (1) Make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying. (The opposite rules apply to extinguishing bad habits.) The book goes into many examples and methods on how to apply each of those rules.
  • The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom. As habits become routine, they become less interesting and less satisfying. It is therefore essential that we keep improving our systems. For that we need to remain conscious of our performance with reflection and review.
  • Success, therefore, is not to reach a specific threshold or goal, but to keep improving our systems.(Conveniently enough though, this is also the best strategy to reach any specific goals.)

You can look into the first part of the book here.

Annie Duke (2018): Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.

As a former World Series of Poker champion, Annie Duke shares a convincing perspective of how important it is to cope well with uncertainty, if we want to make better decisions. As opposed to most of us, professional poker players are comfortable with the fact that great decisions don’t always lead to great outcomes and bad decisions don’t always lead to bad outcomes, and they are unafraid to scrutinize and review their own decisions (the processes, not the outcomes!) rigorously, because they know this pays off hugely in the long run.

Annie Duke’s advice is that we need to let go of our need for certainty, and instead make it a practice to accurately assess what we know and what we don’t. One way to committing to this practice is to find a peer group that can help you build a non-confrontational, non-threatening decision review team. If you want to read a sample, here’s a preview.

Vicki Lind, Tifini Roberts, and Leslie Yeargers (2019). Landing a Job Worth Having.

This is a new handbook written by three of my colleagues at Vicki Lind & Associates. It is full of very practical tips and resources, from searching for the right position to negotiating your salary. The authors guide you through all these steps:

  • Assessing what type of job you want
  • Using job boards and social media to find those jobs
  • Building a network of contacts to put you in front of hiring managers
  • Crafting resumes and cover letters to get you interviews
  • Interviewing with confidence and build great references
  • Negotiating a compensation package that matches your worth

Summer Reading List 2019: "Landing A Job Worth Having" by Vicki Lind, Tifini Roberts and Leslie Yeargers

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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Beat Procrastination Habits With A Three-step Intervention

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Coaching Practice, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Resources, tools, Self-Assessments

Do you want to give your productivity a boost? This three-step intervention can help you diagnose and beat some of your most persistent procrastination habits.

Beat Procrastination Habits: Three Step Intervention

Step 1 – Assessment: Diagnose the Problems

Each person is different. What triggers your procrastination?

Procrastination is at its worst when we’re not aware of it. The first step in this intervention is therefore to increase your awareness of what’s tripping you up. You’ll want to get as much insight into yourself as possible, recognizing any problematic habits, or any patterns in your thoughts and behaviors that are getting in your way.

With that goal, keep a productivity journal to collect some data about yourself. You can download a template here and print it out.

Beat Procrastination Habits - Step 1: Assessment with Productivity Journal

Here is how it works: the night before your workday, write a to-do list and a schedule for the following day. Make sure to schedule realistically, including breaks and transition times.
Next to the planned schedule, have an empty column. As your workday unfolds, write into the empty column what you actually did.

– Warning: this may be painful! –

Throughout that day, take notes of what happened when you did or didn’t stay on track. Were there outside interruptions or emergencies? If not, what caused any deviations from your plans? Were you aware, at any moment, that you were procrastinating? What were your thoughts and feelings in that moment?

Keep this log for at least several days (more is better, but they don’t need to be consecutive days), then start analyzing patterns. Are there things that repeatedly throw you off?

This previous post lists some of the most frequent procrastination triggers I’ve observed in my own practice.

Step 2 – Treatment: Change One Thing

After analyzing your logs and seeking patterns, choose one issue to fix: what is the one thing you could do differently that has a potential of making things better? Choose the lowest hanging fruit first. Try an intervention, targeted at one trigger at a time. See it as an experiment you do with yourself. Whatever you try, do it for at least one week, or better yet, three weeks. Keep journaling throughout this time.

If you like the change you see, stick to it for another two weeks, even if it’s hard, because it takes a while for habits to form. By that time you will likely find it easier and will be able to keep the new habit, if it is making a positive difference in your life. If you find it hard to make the change, keep the mindset of a scientist: how could you make it work?

Step 3 – Repeat: Experiment, Tweak and Practice

Remember that this is an experimental approach. Whatever you try, see it as an experiment that may succeed or fail. Either way, you learned something important that will help you fine-tune your work habits.
After going through Step 1 (Assessment) and Step 2 (Treatment), you will likely observe some changes. If you don’t like them, or if you feel that there could be even more improvement, repeat both steps. If your assessment in Step 1 gave you a lot to work with, you may only need to repeat Step 2 by trying a new intervention, or by tweaking what you tried before, to make it work even better.

Also, remember that it takes a lot of time, grit and practice to become an expert, and to truly master a difficult skill. Managing our time (and yourself!) well is an inherently difficult skill to master, so be patient with yourself and don’t give up if things don’t improve right away. Take on your next obstacle and try the next intervention.

It is also a good idea to do the entire intervention with other people, such as with a friend, in a group, or with a coach. Not only does this give you accountability, which sometimes makes all the difference, but it also adds more creative thinking power to the process. When other people are helping you think about your problems, it will be easier to diagnose your triggers and design new solutions that may work for you.

If you would like my help with any of this, schedule your first coaching session or a brief phone call to discuss options.

Set up an appointment with Ursina Teuscher

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), Portland OR


Common procrastination triggers and fixes

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Self-Assessments

What are some of the most common procrastination triggers? Finding out why you procrastinate will help you tackle each of your problems one by one.

Common Procrastination Triggers and How to Beat Them

There are many reasons we procrastinate, and it is important to first figure out what’s tripping you up, before trying to fix it. The problems I’ve encountered most frequently in my coaching experience (and in myself!) are:

Procrastination Trigger #1: Fear
This could be fear of the task itself, or it could be fear of the consequences of doing the task. For example, you might feel anxious about making a phone call simply because you don’t like talking on the phone, or you might be anxious because the phone call could result in failure or disappointment.
You might feel nervous about a presentation because you’re not used to speaking in front of an audience, or you might be afraid that your audience will be critical. You might want to apply for a job, but worry about not getting it –– or about getting it but then hating it or not being good at it. All those fears can hold you back from getting started. The good news is that even just recognizing the fear as such often takes the edge off. Also good to remember: it’s ok to be afraid –– it doesn’t mean we can’t act. Sometimes, reframing fear or nervousness as “excitement” can help us channel our energy into the task. Other than that, different tricks help for different people: some do best if they tackle the scariest thing first thing in the morning, maybe even before breakfast. (Mark Twain may have been of those people – or not.) Others prefer to divide and conquer, starting with the easiest part. If your perfectionism is paralyzing you, first set yourself the goal of writing “just a draft” of an email, for example, instead of the scary email itself.

Procrastination Trigger #2: Uncertainty or confusion about the task
From what I’ve seen, this is not only one of the most common, but perhaps the most under-appreciated procrastination trigger: not having a clear plan of what you need to do next. This uncertainty can lead to a vague feeling of being overwhelmed or anxious, even if there is nothing unpleasant about any of the actual tasks or consequences. What’s worse, we are often not aware that the cause of our reluctance is simply that we haven’t figured out the details of what’s ahead yet. Once you notice the problem, start writing a more specific list of what needs to be done. Schedule “figuring out what needs to be done next” as if it were the actual task – because it is.

Procrastination Trigger #3: Lack of purpose or direction
This problem is more fundamental: you may have doubts about whether you’re on the right track at all, or whether your work will lead to success. Maybe the project you’re working on has stopped making sense to you, or your work lacks purpose, or you don’t see where your career is headed. My advice in that case: reconnect with your values – figure out what truly matters to you in the long term. What are the things that will still matter to you in 30 years? What could make your life as meaningful and “good” (whatever that is for you) as possible? Are you on the best possible track to fulfill your most important values? If not, explore alternatives. Or, why are you doing what you’re doing? Maybe your work, as much as it sucks, is still your best option and you have good reasons to keep doing it. If so, you ARE on the right track. Own it. Even so, explore any options and actions you could take that would add meaning and purpose to your work (here’s a book for that).

Procrastination Trigger #4: Lack of urgency or accountability
Too much freedom with a task can be a big problem, in particular if there’s a lack of accountability, or if the deadlines are too far away. Some things that can help in that case: set earlier deadlines for partial achievements and make those deadlines real by scheduling a rewarding activity at the end of each. If you have a supervisor, talk to them about about your goals and promise results at different stages of a project. Otherwise you can announce your commitments to friends or colleagues, or find a partner to work with, a coach, or an “accountability buddy” who’ll check in with you on a regular basis.

Procrastination Trigger #5: Distractions or interruptions
Outside interruptions such as phone calls or people stepping into your office can be legitimate reasons for not sticking to your plans – they may or may not be avoidable, depending on your work. If you can, shield yourself during your most productive work hours by disconnecting and closing doors. If the interruptions are necessary, recognize that, schedule accordingly and adjust your expectations. Distractions can also come from within though. Being distracted by our own thoughts is a frequent reason to lose focus, whether we’re simply daydreaming, or planning dinner, or adding items to a mental shopping list. If your distracting thoughts are practical and useful (planning, thinking about things you need to do later), write them down to get them out of your head. Otherwise, recognize that staying focused requires practice. Stretch your ability to focus by redirecting your attention back to the task, in the moment that you become aware you’re distracted (as opposed to giving into the distraction and switching tasks).

Procrastination Trigger #6: Competing tasks and activities
Sometimes you’ll find yourself immersed in tasks other than the one you were planning to do – for example because the previous tasks take longer than anticipated, or because you’re held up by unexpected problems. For example, you may find that you write emails during the time you wanted to do something else. If you work from home, you may suddenly find yourself doing chores or running errands, rather than doing the work you intended. And then there’s all the fun stuff: pleasurable or entertaining activities, such as snacking or watching movies. Schedule specific times of the day to do those fun things in your breaks. If necessary, set an alarm clock to remind you when to stop your break. Games, TV series, social media or other kinds of on-screen activities can have addictive qualities and can take up tremendous amounts of time. People are often reluctant to admit even to themselves just how much time they spend with these activities. Start logging those hours, if you’re brave enough to face the truth.

So, the next time you find yourself procrastinating: try to figure out the true and specific reason you’re procrastinating right then. Do you find the reason in any of those triggers I described, or is it something else entirely? Once you’ve figured out what’s tripping you up, you can create a precise intervention to target your problem.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), Portland OR

A shorter version of this post (by Ursina Teuscher, edited by Vicki Lind and Leslie Yeargers) was published 01/26/19 on aPortlandCareer.com


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