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How to Monitor Goal Progress

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management

Best Ways to Monitor Goal ProgressIf you want to achieve goals, one of the most effective things you can do is to measure and track your progress.

There are many ways to monitor goal progress, and it turns out they are all helpful. However, some techniques are more effective than others, as was shown by a large meta-analysis, which included findings of 138 experiments. Three things in particular will make it more likely that you achieve your goals:

1. Measure frequently. The more often you monitor your progress, the greater your chance of success.

2. Share your information. You don’t have to make your information public; even reporting it in private to one other person helps. If you’re really not into sharing though, don’t despair – you’re in good company. This last point is still for you and becomes all the more important:

3. Record your information physically, such as in a written diary or spreadsheet. As an example, here’s a spreadsheet template for tracking your caloric deficit or surplus over time, and here are some insights from a guy who lost weight with a spreadsheet. Or, one of my clients was able to overcome her writing paralysis when she started to simply log how many words she wrote every day. For her, it was particularly helpful to have a spreadsheet (shown below) with some conditional formatting, where the cells changed font or background color when she reached certain thresholds – in her case: two hours of (focused) writing time, or 1200 words written per day. That gave her logging the character of a game and made the process more rewarding.

How to monitor goal progress - example of a writer's word count spreadsheet

All that said, does it even matter whether we are successful in the pursuit of our goals? Will it make us happy? That was the topic of another meta-analysis, which included 85 studies. They found, perhaps not so surprisingly, that successful goal pursuit was linked to greater well-being. However, what’s interesting is that this relationship was stronger when success was defined as progress towards the goal, rather than as reaching a goal. Does that mean that the path is indeed the goal, as wise people have suggested before? No. The goal is still the goal, but moving towards it seems to be more tightly related to our well-being than reaching it.

Would you like to get help with your own goals? Schedule your first online coaching session or a brief phone call to discuss options.

Set up an appointment with Ursina Teuscher

I’ll be excited to talk to you!

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


References:
Klug, H. J. P., & Maier, G. W. (2015). Linking Goal Progress and Subjective Well-Being: A Meta-analysis. Journal of Happiness Studies, 16(1), 37–65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-013-9493-0
Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., … Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198–229. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000025


Event Series: Procrastination and ADHD Follow-Through

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, ADHD, Career Development, Coaching Practice, Neuroscience, Performance, Academic Achievement, Procrastination, Productivity, Time Management, Resources, tools

Free webinar series with Vicki Lind (MS) and Ursina Teuscher (PhD) on Procrastination and ADHD.

Banner for Webinar Series on Procrastination and ADHD with Vicki Lind and Ursina Teuscher

Do you procrastinate? Do you have ADHD? Stalled on a project? 

Start 2023 with a clear plan and support by joining my colleague Vicki Lind and me in a webinar series and support hub. Do you struggle with procrastination or ADHD, or know someone who does? Learn more about procrastination and how to beat it, and get the support you need to follow through on your plans.

Vicki and I will teach three free interactive webinars together in January. Each week has a different focus:

Tue Jan 10, 9-10am PST: Support from Your Heart & Head
Tue Jan 17, 9-10am PST: Support from Others: Co-working, Bookending & Rewards
Tue Jan 24, 9-10am PST: Support from Your Tools: Your Calendar, Lists & Rewards

Following this series, Vicki will offer a February Support Hub, beginning on Jan 31st, Tuesday at 9 am. If you attend two webinars (in the past or now), you are invited to join Vicki and four other members in regular co-working sessions and ongoing encouragement as you carry out each clear, concrete task.

In our first webinar on January 10th, you will:

  • Identify the thoughts that get you off track and learn how to replace them
  • Understand some things about the brain, and what they mean for best practices
  • Get support for one or two essential action items that fit you
Are you ready to spend an hour with us to move ahead?

​Reserve your spot: vicki@aportlandcareer.com or 503-575-8217 or sign up with the form above

Vicki Lind, MS, Speaker at the Webinar on Procrastination and ADHD Ursina Teuscher, PhD, Speaker at the Webinar on Procrastination and ADHD

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


When should you quit your job?

Posted on by by Posted in Book Recommendations, Career Development, Risk and Uncertainty
Fortune Cookies: A new job is in your future

What can poker teach you about when to quit your job?

– You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em –
– Know when to walk away and know when to run –
Kenny Rogers “The Gambler”.

Here’s a surprising fact about professional poker players: they quit – or fold – much more often than amateurs. Amateur poker players play over 50% of the hands they’re dealt, while great players play only between 15% and 25%.

Our natural intuitions about when to quit are flawed

According to Annie Duke, former poker champion and best-selling author of Thinking in Bets, these numbers illustrate just how poor people’s natural intuitions are about when to quit.

In her latest book, she argues that our poor quitting skills extend to all kinds of life and career choices, not just to poker. We tend to stick to our given path, even when that path is no longer promising. There are powerful forces at work that undermine good quitting behavior, and Annie Duke is not alone in arguing this. In fact, decision science has established a whole slew of cognitive biases that work in favor of “sticking it out”, rather than quitting, even when quitting would be more rational. These biases have been widely documented, and you can find them under terms such as the “sunk cost fallacy“, “loss aversion“, “escalating commitment“, the “endowment effect“, and “status quo bias“. (Granted, many of these concepts overlap.) 

However, knowing when to quit is essential for success. Just like bad poker players, we keep losing out if we don’t develop better skills at knowing when to quit. 

How can we find the right moment to quit?

Think forward, not back

Think about your future, not your past. This seems obvious, but is much harder than it sounds. If we were perfectly rational and omniscient, we would quit when the expected value—what we’re expecting to get out of the path we’re on—is no longer worthwhile, compared to other possible paths.

In reality, we do let the past creep into our decisions. We care about our life’s narrative. We want our past investments to pay off, even it means sacrificing more while staying on our course.

A trick that can help with this is to imagine a world without the status quo. For example: if you’re offered new position, ask yourself: if I wasn’t already at my current position, which one would I pick? Would I pick my current position or the new alternative? In my conversations with coaching clients, I’ve been surprised how often this question leads to a very clear answer of “I’d definitely take the new one”.

Don’t make decisions in the heat of the moment

When we’re right in the middle of a situation, we often make bad decisions, because our emotions have overwhelmed us. Instead:

Get clarity on your “values” – then figure out how to best meet them

In poker, you would define the expected “value” of your options simply in monetary terms: the amount you might win or lose. In a career, it’s not that simple. What are your criteria – your values – when it comes to you career? What do you want, and what do you NOT want from your work? Define your criteria, and then start to figure out how to best meet them. Look around to see if you could fulfill them better elsewhere. But also, figure out if you might be able to fulfill them better at your current organization, if you made some changes.

Keep exploring, even when things are good

Annie Duke suggests we take a lesson from the ants: even when most of them are on on their way to a big pile of food, a few of them are always wandering off somewhere, seemingly lost and at random. They’re exploring, always. They never know when their main source of food dries up.

Do the same with your resources: spend at least a little bit of your time on exploration. Create and maintain professional connections with people outside your organization. Take the recruiter calls, just in case.

Get a “quitting coach”

It is hard to see ourselves clearly. Annie Duke suggests we all find someone we can talk to regularly, who helps us see when we’re stuck on the wrong path. Your quitting coach could be a friend, a mentor, a coworker, a sibling, or a parent. The best quitting coach is a person who cares for your long-term well-being, and is willing to tell you the truth of what they see, even if it is uncomfortable. I would add to this that it should be someone who understands and accepts your values.

Don’t quit blindly

As enlightening as the poker analogy can be, it has its limits when compared to career choices. One big difference: when you fold in a poker game, you simply wait for the next round. The odds of your next hand are always the same unknown. In other words, you always get the same clean new start, to which you can compare the odds of your current hand. (By the way, if I ever play poker, I’ll find a way to sneak in this Odds Calculator.)

Your future odds on the job market are much less straightforward. But on the upside, you don’t need to fold first, before getting dealt your next hand. If at all possible, look for another job before quitting, and make sure to get as much information about it as possible. Again, get clarity on your values. Then, figure out which of your next options will fulfill them best.

by Ursina Teuscher (PhD), at Teuscher Decision Coaching, Portland OR
Photo credit: www.flazingo.com


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
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