Achieving Goals Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Decision Coaching – Ursina Teuscher, PhD

Blog Archives

Book Recommendation: The Upside of Irrationality

Dan Ariely (2011). The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic.

Dan Ariely is a great thinker, scientist and story-teller. In this book, he weaves personal anecdotes and research findings together to help us gain insight into our own irrational minds.

Recognizing our own behaviors and thinking patterns is a great stepping stone towards improvement. But rather than assume we could do better and be more rational (which I do believe is important and possible too, at least sometimes…), Dan Ariely suggests we should find ways to make our own irrationalities work in our favor. I find this mindset very useful in practice. In particular, he suggests many methods of how the “right” choice can become the “easy” choice for us. Those are great strategies to set us up for success.

In general,

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Cravings? How To Stay in Charge

The most frequent New Year’s resolution is to lose weight. However, one thing that gets in the way of the best goals and intentions are cravings. Cravings tell us in a very clear voice what we should do, and they have tremendous motivational force. They often seem to trigger a string of actions as if we were on autopilot – we do whatever they tell us, disregarding our own previous plans.

To help with these moments, I’ve created a visual guideline (you can download it in full size as a pdf, if you click on it):

At first my idea was only to create a reminder for myself, but then I realized it might be helpful for others too, so I turned it into a more self-explanatory and shareable design. It is meant as a quick guide to help you reclaim control over your own decisions – in the heat of those craving moments.

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Book Recommendation: Willpower

Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney (2012). Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.

This book is a collaboration of the psychologist and researcher Roy Baumeister with New York Times science writer John Tierney. Together, they created the kind of book I really love. It offers very practical advice, based on a lot of research. It provides very helpful insight into how we can increase our self-control, focus our strength, and better resist temptation. It is easy to read, but not dumbed down, nor diluted with unnecessary stories.

For those who are in money-saving mode after the holidays, you’ll most likely find this one in your local library. Ours (Multnomah County) even has the e-book for mobile devices, so you can borrow it from wherever you are. What I love most about those library e-books is that they return themselves –

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Featured Video: Rob Krar in “Depressions”

Depressions – a few moments from 30 miles in the canyon. from Joel Wolpert on Vimeo.

As one of the world’s top ultrarunners, Rob Krar achieves athletic goals that seem superhuman to most people. One of the highlights of his running career was breaking the record (the fastest known time) for a double crossing of the Grand Canyon — Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim.

In this short film, he shares a very honest and deep insight into his inner struggles. What makes his perspective so powerful is the contrast. The entire film is shot within the Gran Canyon, during one of his trail runs, and there can be no doubt about his enormous will-power and dedication to his athletic performance. But he doesn’t talk about running at all. He tells us about his depression: days and weeks spent in bed,

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Featured Video: Baumeister on Self-Control

Here’s a great talk by Roy Baumeister about all the cool research he and others have done on self-control:

Self-control seems to be one of only two human traits that can predict success through a broad range of situations. The other one is IQ. But the good news about self-control is that we can train it, even as grown-ups, while IQ is much harder to increase. (Only recently have attempts to increase people’s fluid intelligence shown some success, but the effects are small, not very robust, and very hard-earned.)

One of the intriguing findings that Baumeister mentions in his talk: effective self-controllers actually show LESS frequent resistance towards desires, less guilt, and lower life stress. Instead, it looks like they have more proactive coping mechanisms, which set in before the desires even show up. In other words, they have learned to avert crises in advance and therefore have to cope with them less.

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Infographic: Increase Your Productivity Without Burning Out

Here is a two-sided infographic. Together, the two pages give you a visual summary of my workbook: “Increasing Productivity in Healthy and Sustainable Ways”.

The first page provides an overview of important neurological and psychological findings. Based on those, I suggest best practices grouped along five broad principles.

The second page presents a framework for assessing your own work-habits, trouble-shooting your problems, and developing new habits.

Find more information about the workbook here, or on Amazon, where you can look inside, read a sample, and see reviews. You can also order the workbook directly from the publisher on Createspace.

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

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tDCS: Brain-Zapping for Creativity and Focus

Fun Stuff Brought To Us By Mad Scientists

A recent study found that participants were performing better than usual in a creative task when they received electric stimulation of the brain.
The method is called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and this particular treatment was set up to increase activity in the right hemisphere, while diminishing activity
in a part of the left hemisphere involved with sensory input, memory, and language.

If you’re intrigued – or alarmed – by the idea of sending electric current through your brain, I recommend this Radiolab episode:

It does a great job explaining how tDCS works, including interviews with participants, researchers, and other neuroscientists who might have a more skeptical view of this method.

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

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Book Recommendation: Your Brain at Work

David Rock. (2009). Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long.

This book gives very useful insights into how our brain works, and what we can do to make it work better. So far, it has been one of the most influential books for my own work in helping people be more productive in healthy and sustainable ways.

David Rock does a wonderful job bringing together a vast amount of research on cognitive neuroscience, and in helping us understand why our brains work better in some situations than others. Recognizing the limitations of our brain, he suggests very practical steps we can take to optimize our work days and maximize our brain’s potential.

He presents his advice through a series of anecdotes and stories of the “meet Emily and Paul” type.

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Decision Fatigue: Time for a Break Now?

It turns out that making decisions is tiring and wears us out, more so than other (similarly difficult) mental tasks. At this point, a large body of research shows that whenever we make many choices in a row, the quality of our decisions gets worse over time.

Decisions that are especially taxing are those that involve self-control. For example, when people fended off the temptation to eat M&M’s or freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies, they were then less able to resist other temptations later on.
Nourishment and Recovery
Self-control tasks and decisions also require more glucose in the brain than other mental tasks. Low or hypoglycemic levels of glucose lead to impaired decision making, poor planning, and inflexible thinking. In contrast, simple psychomotor abilities, such as responding quickly to certain cues, seem relatively unaffected by glucose levels.

Rest and Sleep

This pattern is in line with other things we know about impulsive behavior and typical self-control problems.

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Book Recommendation: Smart Choices

John S. Hammond, Ralph L. Keeney, & Howard Raiffa. (1996). Smart Choices: A Practical Guide to Making Better Decisions.

It’s time to recommend another classic. This book is a short and very useful guide, presenting a variety of decision tools. It doesn’t offer too much in the way of psychological explanations of why we need the tools and how they work, but it is a nice little toolkit.

by Ursina Teuscher

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Book Recommendation: Strategic Planning

Erica Olsen. Strategic planning kit for dummies.

If you’re a decision-maker in an organization and you’re serious about strategic planning, I highly recommend this book by Erica Olson as a very thorough but practical reference. It will give you more than you need, but it is very clearly structured so that you easily focus on whatever aspects are relevant to you. It also includes a DVD with worksheets, templates, and videos.

Why does strategic planning matter?

Strategic planning offers a systematic process to figure out where you’re going – as a business or as any kind of organization.

Erica Olsen reports that CEOs of the Inc. 500 spend 50-90 percent of their time on strategy and business development. Why? Probably because they realize how much it pays off. According to her research, the firms with a high commitment to strategic planning had higher sales volumes as well as net incomes than those with lower commitment.

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Book Recommendation: Nudge

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness.

This book offers very well-researched insights into how “choice architecture” can successfully nudge people toward making the best decisions for themselves, such as choosing healthier food, exercising more, saving more money, etc. Nudges consist simply of changing the way choices are presented, without changing or restricting the options or adding any incentives.

The book is especially interesting for people who care about the promotion of human welfare in public policies, but the knowledge can also be help us change our own environment to help us make healthier long-term decisions.

As a very useful practical addition, Dilip Soman, Min Zhao, and Nina Mazar have published a free online-report called “A Practitioner’s Guide to Nudging”

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Book Recommendation: Stumbling on Happiness

Daniel T. Gilbert. Stumbling on Happiness.

This is my pick for the season: an entertaining and well-researched book about our failures to predict what will make us happy or unhappy in the future, and about how these misconceptions affect our decisions.

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Video: A Dialogue About Procrastination

A conversation about procrastination with Joseph Rhinewine, PhD, from Portland Mindfulness Therapy:

by Ursina Teuscher

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Coaching Online or in Person — Does the Setting Matter?

What the research says about online coaching:

At this point, there is quite a bit of research on this question, for example showing that coaching over the phone or through online channels can be very effective, that adequate rapport can be established between a counselor and client, and that some clients prefer the reduced stigma and easier access offered by online mental health services.

For more in depth discussion, this handbook addresses many practical aspects of online counseling, such as technological, ethical, legal and multicultural issues, treatment strategies, and testing and assessment:

Kraus, R., Stricker, G., & Speyer, C. (Eds.). (2010). Online counseling: A handbook for mental health professionals. Academic Press.

My own experience with online coaching:

While I do enjoy in-person meetings with clients,

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Featured Video: Inbox Zero

Merlin Mann is advocating a lean process to deal with our flood of emails and become more productive: http://inboxzero.com/video.

The talk itself is 1/2 hour (~2:30-32:30), the rest is intro and Q&A.

The basic idea is to keep your Inbox empty and not spend time re-reading and re-considering emails without responding.

What I like about it is that you can apply the Inbox Zero principle to other tasks: get each new task out of your mind immediately by either getting it done right away, scheduling it, or deciding not to do it. In other words, get a system that helps you NOT think about any other tasks than the one you’re working on right now. This will reduce decision fatigue and help you focus.

“That Zero? It’s not how many messages are in your inbox – it’s how much of your own brain is in that inbox.”

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Book Recommendation: “Decisive” by Chip and Dan Heath (2013)

Chip and Dan Heath (2013). Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. New York: Crown Business.

I was impressed with this new book by the Heath brothers, a very helpful guide to decision making. It does not offer any formal tools to evaluate options, but a process with powerful ideas that are easy to apply to any personal or business decision.

They call their approach the WRAP process, an acronym standing for (1) Widen your options, (2) Reality test your assumptions, (3) Attain some distance, and (4) Prepare to be wrong.

Here’s a sample of some ideas that I’m finding very effective with clients as well as for my own decisions:

For widening your options,

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Book Recommendation: Two Very Different Books about Happiness

Gretchen Rubin. The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun.

Russ Harris (Author), Steven Hayes (Foreword). The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living.

On first sight, the two books appear to be on two opposite sides of the happiness controversy – should we pursue it or not? Should we strive to be happy, or is happiness only achievable as an indirect (and not guaranteed) consequence, or side-effect, of focusing on other worthwhile pursuits?
After reading both books, I find their opinions smart and differentiated enough to agree with both. Whether the authors would agree with each other, I don’t know…

Gretchen Rubin’s book is a delightfully honest,

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Procrastination and Self-Compassion

It’s not surprising that procrastination can lead to considerable stress, exacerbated by feelings of guilt and failure. A recent study found that procrastinators were indeed less self-compassionate than others, and that those who showed least self-compassion experienced the most stress as a result of procrastination.
The author, Dr. Fuschia Sirois, suggests that this lack of self-compassion might not just be a consequence of procrastinating, but that it might set the stage for procrastination to become more chronic in nature. Namely, the self-blame could lead people to over-identify with procrastinating and to ruminate about the unattained goal, rather than to focus on a new goal.

Or, in other words, being more self-compassionate after we fail may help us get over it more quickly, move on, get a fresh start and get new things done.

Happy New Day!

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Seth Godin: Do You Ship?

Seth Godin makes the case that having great ideas is not difficult. “Shipping” them – actually getting them done and out – is the hard part, and the important part.

Shipping is not just hard because it takes a lot of work, but also because it’s scary. It’s our shipped stuff that will be judged, and – as opposed to our brilliant ideas – the finished product will never be perfect.

I can relate to that very well, because almost everything that I ever accomplished in my life required me to get out of my comfort zone – not only the big projects, but even the daily little shippings, like sending emails, or posting stuff to this very blog.

So how can we do it?

Commit to delivering on time.

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