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How to Tackle Stubborn Goals: Implementation Intentions

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Coaching Practice, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management
What to do with those stubborn to-dos?

Tackling stubborn goals with implementation intentions. Picture credit: Sarah McMillan (https://www.flickr.com/photos/essjay)Do you have items on your to-do list that never get done? Tasks you meant to have crossed off ages ago, but instead they linger and get pushed back forever? Or how about those “little” things you want to do regularly (daily sets of push-ups, perhaps? connecting with friends?), but somehow they keep falling through the cracks?

In general, do you find some of your goals particularly hard to put into practice?

Try “implementation intentions”

A technique that helps is to “script” our intended actions in more specific terms by deciding exactly how, when and where we are going to accomplish each of our tasks. Peter Gollwitzer, a psychologist who has done a lot of research on this, calls those plans implementation intentions. It may be an awkward term, but it stands for a very powerful strategy for self-regulation. The idea is that we should not just form goal intentions (“I intend to achieve X”), but form implementation intentions instead (“I intend to perform specific goal-directed behavior Y when I encounter situation Z”).

Goal intentions

(more general)

“I want to do more push-ups.”

“I want to get in touch with this employer.”

 Implementation Intentions  

If situation, then behavior (more specific)

“If I feel cold while I’m sitting at my desk, and before I put on a sweater, I’ll do a set of push-ups”.

“Tomorrow, right after breakfast and before my second cup of coffee, I will look for possible connections on LinkedIn and will draft a message asking for a brief chat with one of them.”

We can also think of implementation intentions as action triggers. As an example, I could tell myself “whenever I’m home and I feel cold, I’ll do a set of push-ups or jumping squats. Only after that will I put on a sweater or turn up the heater”. In that case, “feeling cold” would serve as an action trigger for a quick workout.

Do implementation intentions really work?

Action triggers like these can be surprisingly effective. For example, experiments with interventions have been successful in improving exercise behavior in firefighters, or in helping people establish a healthier diet. One study looked at older patients who were recovering from hip or knee replacement surgery. Some of them were asked to set action triggers for their recovery exercises—something like, “I’ll do my range-of-motion extensions every morning after I finish my first cup of coffee.” The other group did not receive any coaching on action triggers. The results were dramatic: the patients who used action triggers recovered more than twice as fast, standing up on their own in three and a half weeks, instead of almost eight weeks for the others.

Those are just a few examples, but an analysis of findings from 94 independent tests showed that implementation intentions overall have very positive effects on goal attainment.

They are particularly effective for two types of goals:

  • Goals that are associated with disagreeable tasks, such as phone calls or job applications.
  • Goals that are easily forgotten, such as taking medication.

They are also particularly effective for people for whom realizing plans is especially difficult. For example, people suffering from depression, anxiety or addictions, seem to benefit greatly from this technique.

 A side-note: Because implementation intentions are really just action scripts, I always thought they sounded very much like a simple form of self-hypnosis. It turns out that these two techniques actually work well together: implementation intentions enhance people’s responsiveness to hypnotic instructions.
You’re probably already using lots of implementation intentions.
But if or when not:

For many of your everyday tasks, you may already be using implementation intentions without knowing it. For example, having a regular schedule is already an implementation intention (e.g., “at 8am, I will be at my computer and will start with my most important task.”). You may therefore not need to think about this very often. However, keep it in mind as a helpful technique for tasks that are particularly difficult to get started with, or that you’re likely to forget.

In other words, here’s my suggesting of a meta-version – the mother of many more implementation intentions:

“If I notice one of my to-do’s has been on my list for too long,
I will form an implementation intention.”

Implementation Intentions

by Ursina Teuscher at Teuscher Counseling, LLC


Selected References:
[1] Gollwitzer, P. M., & Brandstätter, V. (1997). Implementation intentions and effective goal pursuit. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73(1), 186–199. http://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.73.1.186
[2] Gollwitzer, P. M., & Sheeran, P. (2006). Implementation intentions and goal achievement: A meta-analysis of effects and processes. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 69–119. San Diego, CA, US: Elsevier Academic Press.
[3] Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. http://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493
Hammer, R. (2010). The Effects of Implementation Intentions on Volunteer Firefighter Exercise Behavior: A Randomized Controlled Study. All Graduate Theses and Dissertations. Retrieved from http://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/753
[4] Schweiger Gallo, I., Pfau, F., & Gollwitzer, P. M. (2012). Furnishing hypnotic instructions with implementation intentions enhances hypnotic responsiveness. Consciousness and Cognition, 21(2), 1023–1030. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2012.03.007
[5] Verplanken, B., & Faes, S. (1999). Good intentions, bad habits, and effects of forming implementation intentions on healthy eating. European Journal of Social Psychology, 29(5-6), 591–604. http://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0992(199908/09)29:5/63.0.CO;2-H
[6] Wang, G., Wang, Y., & Gai, X. (2021). A Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Mental Contrasting With Implementation Intentions on Goal Attainment. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 565202. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.565202


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


Bias and Noise in Hiring Decisions

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Leadership, Risk and Uncertainty, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
How can companies reduce not only bias, but also noise, in their hiring and other decisions?

The problem of bias in corporate decisions, such as hiring, promotion and salary decisions, is well-known. However, there is another type of error that has not been talked about as much – perhaps because it is harder to see, and harder to fit into a narrative: noise.

What is noise in corporate decisions, and how is it different from bias?

Noise is a random error in our decisions. Research has confirmed that in many tasks, experts’ decisions are highly variable. Professionals often make decisions that deviate significantly from those of their peers, from their own prior decisions, and from rules that they themselves claim to follow. This is the case even when the stakes of those judgments are high, such as when appraising real estate, valuing stocks, or sentencing criminals.

In hiring decisions, noise would be, for example, a variability in who gets hired, based on who is making the decision, what mood they’re in, or what time of the day it is when that decision is made. In other words, influences that shouldn’t play a part do play a part. What differentiates noise from bias is that the error does not always go in the same direction, as is the case with biases.

Bias and Noise in Hiring Decisions

 

The target-analogy in the figure illustrates this difference. The shots on Target A are accurate. There is no bias and very little noise. The shots on Target B are biased, but not very noisy at all. They are systematically off in one direction – down to the right from the bullseye. Target C on the other hand shows noise, but no bias: the imprecisions in relation to the bullseye cancel each other out. Target D has both bias and noise.

 

Daniel Kahneman’s take on noise:

In his latest book “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment“, Daniel Kahneman makes a strong case that we should indeed care about noise, not only about bias. Noise is more difficult to appreciate than bias. However, it is no less real, no less costly, and no less unfair.

How can companies reduce not only bias, but also noise in their decision processes?

Trying to fix a known bias is a bit like curing a known disease. Knowing what the symptoms are, we try to work in the opposite direction. Fighting noise, on the other hand, must be preventative in nature, because we don’t know in what direction we are going to make mistakes. With that analogy, Kahneman recommends “Decision Hygiene”. Just as physical hygiene prevents all kinds of diseases, including ones we don’t fully understand yet, decision hygiene prevents all kinds of errors – noise as well as bias.

A few practical ways to apply decision hygiene, and thereby reduce noise in your hiring and other decisions:
  • Whenever possible, get several independent judgments and calculate their average. Averaging judgments gets rid of noise. (Averaging judgments does not reduce bias. However, it may still be an important step in fighting bias, because it makes any bias more visible. You can see this effect in the target shot illustration above. The bias is much more striking in Target B than Target D. Anyone looking at Target B would advise the shooter to aim “up and left”. For Target D, this conclusion would be much less obvious, even though there is no less bias.)
  • According to Kahneman, rank orders (= comparative judgments) contain less noise than ratings (= absolute judgments). Therefore, make judgments comparative instead of absolute. In other words: create a rank order of your options by comparing them, instead of rating each option separately on a scale.
  • Break problems into subproblems that you evaluate independently. For example, in a hiring decision, create selection criteria that you evaluate separately. Then apply those in the same way to every candidate. (This values clarification exercise may help with creating criteria.) The next point is related to this one:
  • Postpone your intuition. Structure the process to prevent “premature closure” driven by first impressions. In other words, don’t let your gut feelings call ALL the shots by coming to a conclusion too early. This does not mean that you shouldn’t listen to your (or your colleague’s) gut feelings, but give those feelings a place in the process. For example, in a hiring decision, make the “like-ability” of a candidate one of your official criteria. You’ll need to acknowledge that this criterion might be fraught with bias, because we tend to like people who are similar to us. However, when this is made explicit, you can decide consciously how much weight you want to give that criterion. Is it more important than the skills and experience? Does weigh in with it 10% of the total, 20%, or 80%? This kind of transparency and thoughtfulness will again not directly eliminate bias, but will make it more apparent.

As companies these days are more concerned about biases than they used to, they are hopefully also getting more attuned to the general importance of making good decisions, and to the risk of making bad decisions. That effort should naturally lead them to also tackle noise. Thankfully, many of the remedies that improve decisions will reduce both bias and noise.

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

“When something happens, you immediately have a story and an explanation. You have that sense that you learned something and that you won’t make that mistake again.
These conclusions are usually wrong.
What you should learn is that you were surprised again. You should learn that the world is more uncertain than you think.”

Daniel Kahneman

 


Dealing With Regret Part II – Advanced Practice

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Coaching Practice, Resources, tools

"Signs of Regret" - Art installationPicture credit: Ted Eytan

How do we best cope with regret about our past decisions?

In response and as a complement to my last post, I want to offer an “advanced practice” tool to deal with regret.

Regret is a complicated state of mind and often involves a mix of feelings. It’s worth getting clarity about what’s what.

For example, one on my clients gave up an artistic career in favor or a more practical path. The grief she felt about giving up a dream could easily be confused with regret, but it is not the same thing. You can experience negative feelings about the consequences of your choice without regretting the actual choice. Give yourself permission to dislike some of the consequences of your choice, while acknowledging that you chose the best possible path (or what seemed the best possible path at the time you had to make the decision).

Advanced practice: a tool to deal with regrets

Here’s a tool to help with this [download the pdf here]. Whenever you feel any kind of pain with regards to your past decisions, write down how exactly you feel about it. Then, figure out which parts of the negative feelings are true regrets – as opposed to grief, sadness, anger, resentment, etc. Ask yourself: what do I truly wish I had done differently?

Advanced Practice Tool to Deal with Regret.png

Example: Did I act (or fail to act) against my own values when a better path would have been possible? For instance, did I act out of cowardice, laziness, lack of care for others, lack of kindness, or negligent short-sightedness, against my better judgment? (Laziness and cowardice can include the active avoidance of information and of critical thinking – more about this here.)

If any of this applies, think very practically about how you could act more in line with your values next time. In fact, it’s worth thinking about that anyway – even if you feel that you acted to the best of the knowledge and capability you had at that time.

A good format for this are implementation intentions (explained in more detail here):

Example: If/when I find myself on the fence on whether to reach out to someone, I will remember how much I regretted my inaction last time, and I will take the first step. If it feels awkward, I will remind myself that awkwardness is an acceptable worst-case scenario. Losing a friend is not.

“Mathilde had walked in on her once crying in the coed showers,
had recognized her beautiful alto voice, and had walked out
again, choosing to give the gift of privacy over that of comfort.
Only in retrospect was that the worse choice.”

Lauren Groff – Fates and Furies.

Extra credit practice for true regrets:

Ask yourself: is it really too late, or could I still correct my regretted action or non-actions?

Example: Could I still reach out and try to restore that friendship? Could I still apologize, even if I hurt someone decades ago?

“Through this clear window, she could see how good it all had been.
She had no regrets.
[That’s not true, Mathilde; the whisper in the ear.]
Oh. Christ. Yes, there was one. Solitary, gleaming. A regret.
It was that, all her life, she had said no.”

Lauren Groff – Fates and Furies.

You can download a pdf of the advanced practice tool [here]. If you end up using it, I would love to hear from you! Here you can get in touch and schedule a call or leave me a message.

Contact Ursina Teuscher to discuss the "advanced practice tool to cope with regret", or other topics

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


How to Deal with Regret

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Health Decisions, Performance, Academic Achievement, Relationship Decisions, Risk and Uncertainty, Strategic Planning, Business Decisions, Organizational Development
Do you have deep regrets about some of your past decisions?

How to deal with regrets about your past decisionsA solid “No!” to this question should be much more concerning than a “Yes”.  Regrets make us human, as Daniel Pink argues in his new book The Power of Regret. What’s more, regrets can help us become better humans, if we learn something from them along the way.

Drawing from his own research as well as previous studies, Pink claims that people feel regret quite often. He identifies four core categories of regret:

1. Foundation regrets
“If only I’d done the work.”
These are regrets where we opt for short-term gains over long-term payoffs, like not studying hard enough in school or not saving enough money.

2. Boldness regrets
“If only I’d taken that risk.”
These are regrets of inaction, such as not starting a business, not asking someone on a date, or not going on trips. Research suggests that people regret failures to act more often than they regret actions.

3. Moral regrets
“If only I’d done the right thing.”
These often seem to hurt the most and last the longest. They involve taking what our conscience says is a wrong path, such as lying, stealing, betraying or hurting someone. I found it actually quite heartwarming to read some of the examples Pink provided, such as lasting feelings of deep shame about not standing up for a bullied classmate in school. Surely, the fact that moral regrets are the most painful regrets says something nice about the human species.

4. Connection regrets.
“If only I’d reached out.”
These regrets stem from missed or broken relationships, such as when friends lose touch with each other over the years, or families remain estranged over a falling out that happened a long time ago.

How can we make the best use of our feelings of regret?

Pink fights the common idea that it would be a good thing to have no regrets. He argues that regret fulfills an important function in motivating us to do better. He points to three benefits of regret:

  • Regret can improve future decisions. Studies have shown that when people think about what they regretted not doing in the past, they made better decisions later on.
  • Regret can boost performance. Researchers have found that even thinking about other people’s regrets led to improved test scores.
  • Regret can deepen meaning. Examining regrets can help us clarify our life’s purpose and steer toward meaning.
On the other hand – there’s a dark side to regrets

All that said, I also often see that regrets – or rather the fear of regrets – can be paralyzing. My clients often tell me the one thing that makes their decision the most difficult is the fear they might regret their choice later. This fear is often influenced by past regrets that are still painful. So what should you do if the fear of future regrets is paralyzing your current decisions?

While I agree that past regrets can be very powerful in informing our future decisions, I do want to point out that they are not always rational. We often judge our past decisions with hindsight bias. Once we know the consequences of our actions or inactions (after they happen) it’s easy to see how we should have acted differently. In the moment we had to decide, chances are we simply didn’t know all that.

How can we avoid the kind of regret that’s based on hindsight bias?
  • A “therapy” for regret is to remind yourself of what you knew at the time you made the decision. If you considered the possible consequences at the time you made the choice, and linked reasonable probabilities to them, that’s all that can be expected of anyone. In the case of extremely unlikely events, even that may be too much to expect. (If you didn’t take these things into account when you could have, that’s another matter. Then the regret you feel might be a good opportunity to start learning and practicing a more rational approach to your decisions.)
  • Even better than therapy is inoculation. You can “inoculate” yourself against future regret before you make a decision by (a) preparing yourself to live with the worst-case scenario and also (b) preparing to remind yourself of what little was known at the time you made the decision.

Fear of regret can cause decision avoidance or paralysis. These can come at a high cost in the long run. In fact, there’s a sad irony to that, given that people tend to regret inaction more often than action.

Inoculation against regret can therefore play a very important role in helping you be courageous enough to actively and rationally decide in the first place, rather than avoiding the decision and letting fate (who’s not always on our side) take over.

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


A Creative Conversation

Posted on by by Posted in Creative Thinking

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. 


Heuristics and Biases in Early Responses to Pandemic Uncertainties

Posted on by by Posted in Health Decisions, Leadership, Risk and Uncertainty

Decisions under uncertainties are driven to a large extent by heuristics and biases. How can policymakers take advantage of this knowledge in order to communicate more effectively?

I’m happy to share the publication of a new commentary article by Raffaella Misuraca’s team that addressed this question in depth. It’s been a pleasure to be included in this collaboration:

Heuristics and biases in early responses to pandemic uncertainties

Can We Do Better Next Time? Italians’ Response to the COVID-19 Emergency through a Heuristics and Biases Lens
by Raffaella Misuraca *, Ursina Teuscher, Costanza Scaffidi Abbate, Francesco Ceresia, Michele Roccella, Lucia Parisi, Luigi Vetri, and Silvana Miceli
* Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

ABSTRACT:
During the outbreak of COVID-19 in Italy, people often failed to adopt behaviors that could have stopped, or at least slowed down, the spread of the disease. We offer cognitive explanations for these decisions, based on some of the most common heuristics and biases that are known to influence human judgment and decision-making, especially under conditions of high uncertainty. Our analysis concludes with recommendations: policymakers can and should take advantage of this established science, in order to communicate more effectively and increase the likelihood that people choose responsible actions in a public health crisis. View Full-Text

Keywords: heuristics; biases; COVID-19; decision-making
Behavioral Sciences. 2022, 12(2), 39; https://doi.org/10.3390/bs12020039
View Full-Text Download PDF


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. 


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