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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


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


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


Performing under Pressure

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

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

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

A book review and practical applications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Practice under the gun:

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

3. Prepare, don’t worry:

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

4. Social support – a mixed bag:

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

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

5. Focus on values (not goals):

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

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

What next?

Do you need help with your own performance under pressure?

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

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

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


References:

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


Interview: How to Beat Job Search Procrastination

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

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

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

Listen to it or find the transcript here:

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

Summary by Mac’s List:

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

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


What Is Procrastination and How Can We Overcome It?

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

What counts as procrastination?

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

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

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

What Is Procrastination? Venn Diagram

Can procrastination be a good thing?

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

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

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

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

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

How can we overcome procrastination?

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

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

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

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

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

Footnotes:

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

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

References:

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

Picture Credits:

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


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

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

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

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

Simon Sinek (2013). Infinite Game. 

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

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

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

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

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

Book recommendation: resume writing

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


How Does Career Decision Coaching Work?

Posted on by by Posted in Achieving Goals, Career Development, Coaching Practice, Self-Assessments

If you’re considering getting help for a career decision, you may wonder what exactly it would look like to work with a career counselor or coach. Here’s a description of the coaching process and tools I often use when I work with clients on a career decision.

Career Decision Coaching:

1. Defining the Problem

The first step for me is to make sure I understand exactly what your needs are, and what you’re hoping to achieve by working with me. For example, you may look for a change in your career, and for help figuring out which direction to take. If you’re hoping to get clarity in a career decision, we’re on a good track and I’ll be confident that my process can help you.

(If you’re looking for something else, I might be able to refer you to one of my colleagues. For example, if you need help searching for specific jobs, tailoring your resume, or improving your interviewing skills, I’m happy to connect you with someone else on our team).

2. Clarifying Criteria

If you want to take your career in a new direction, we usually start with an in-depth clarification of your personal criteria. Career CounselingWhat matters most to you for your next career move? Partly, this will be an open conversation. Sometimes I use image cards to draw out more information about your core values and issues that matter to you personally. Letting you pick images and talk about them can illuminate your values in a way that words alone may not. Then, we may dig into different aspects with several standardized assessments. For example:

  • An assessment of your skills, including those with growth vs. burn-out potential, with the Motivated Skills Card Sort Matrix
  • An assessment of your career-relevant values with the Knowdell Career Values Card Sort task
  • A personality assessment, based on the five factor model of personality with 30 subscales (IPIP-NEO 300: International Personality Item Pool Representation of the NEO Personality Inventory – Revised: NEO PI-R)

How does career decision coaching work?

3. Exploring Options and Strategies

Each of these steps and assessments usually takes at least one session to complete. At the end of each session though, we will always think about possible homework for you, if you’re up for that, so that you can drive the process forward as much as possible in between sessions, if and as much as you choose to. For example:

  • After the Skills Assessment we may think of new search terms you could use when looking for careers. We’ll discuss search strategies for you, such using O*NET or LinkedIn as sources for information (each very limited in their own way, but valuable and complementary).
  • The results of the Skills Assessment can be a terrific starting point to re-think your work history and accomplishments. You can do exercises at home that will help you later craft your resume and talk naturally about your skills and strengths in an interview. You’ll find ways to highlight the skills you most enjoy using and would like to grow more in your future.
  • The Career Values Assessment, as well as the Personality Assessment, can give us new ideas about employers and work environments that would be a good fit for you. You might want to set up informational interviews between sessions, so that you can come back in with new information and new ideas. For most people (not just introverts!) asking someone for an informational interview is not easy. I can help you think about how to reach out and what questions to ask, based on where you’re at in your decision process.

How does career decision coaching work?

4. Deciding on Your Best Strategies and Planning Next Steps

Once we have the results of all the assessments, we will look through all that information and distill your very personal set of your most important criteria. We will use this set of criteria to guide your search for options and information, and to evaluate specific career paths. Visual tools, such as decision tables and trees, can help us determine which strategies are your winners. We can even evaluate your options with weights and numerical ratings, if the decision is still difficult at that point. Or, I can help you think about particularly uncertain options with risk analysis tools, such as scenario trees. Oftentimes however, these formal tools are not even necessary in the end. You’ll probably have gained enough clarity about what direction you want to take, and about your best strategies to pursue that direction.

Once you have decided on a strategy (or on several you want to keep pursuing), I can help you plan your next steps. At that point you’re probably well on your way. Our coaching process could end there, or you might like to get some continued help and guidance from me, as you take next steps and work towards your next goals. Either way, the clarity you’ll have gained from this process, and the knowledge that you’re making the best possible decision, will help you fully commit and take action.

I hope this description gives you a better idea how career decision coaching could work for you! If you’re interested in coaching, here’s more information about the typical setting and fees to work with me. If you want to talk to me on the phone or are ready to come in for a first session, you can schedule a chat or meeting here.

Set up an appointment with Ursina Teuscher

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


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