Archive for the ‘Psychology’ Category
BOOKS THAT HELP YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR EMOTIONS
Friday, April 15th, 2011I’m a guy who took no English or writing classes in college and only one psychology class and now I’m writing self-help books on emotions (Emotional Equations comes out in January 2012 and PEAK came out in 2007). So, my process of learning about emotions and psychology has been self-taught over the past few years plus I’ve been lucky enough to have a laboratory with a company of more than 3,000 employees and almost 60 different business units. So, I’ve been able to test things in one place and see whether that odd idea is a best or worst practice.
In preparation for writing Emotional Equations, I dove into the deep end of the academic pool reading hundreds of psychological studies and books on everything from anxiety to the difference between happiness and joy to Charles Darwin’s theory on the origin of emotions. Here’s a list of my top twenty book recommendations for anyone who wants to go “swimming” with me (I have put an asterisk * next to my favorite in each category and I haven’t included Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning since it’s not primarily about emotions):
HAPPINESS/CONTENTMENT
- Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life (Dacher Keltner)
- Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth (Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener)
- Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strengths of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity and Thrive (Barbara Fredrickson)
- Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert)
- The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Jonathan Haidt)
- The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want (Sonja Lyubomirsky) *
NEUROSCIENCE/EMOTION THEORY
- Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom (Rick Hanson with Richard Mendius)
- Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Antonio Damasio)
- Emotions and Life: Perspectives from Psychology, Biology, and Evolution (Robert Plutchik)
- The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (Joseph LeDoux) *
- What is Emotion? (Jerome Kagan)
UNCONVENTIONAL BRAIN/EMOTION SCIENCE
- Molecules of Emotion: The Science Behind Mind-Body Medicine (Candace Pert) *
- The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles (Bruce Lipton)
- The Spiritual Anatomy of Emotion: How Feelings Link the Brain, the Body, and the Sixth Sense (Michael Jawer and Marc Micozzi)
- The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits (Gregg Braden)
PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF EMOTION THEORY
- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions (Dan Ariely)
- The Art of Choosing (Sheena Iyengar)
- The Emotional Hostage: Rescuing Your Emotional Life (Leslie Cameron-Bandler and Michael Lebeau)
- The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less (Barry Schwartz)
- The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (David Brooks) *
THE CHIEF EMOTIONS OFFICER
Thursday, April 14th, 2011[Originally posted April 27, 2011 on The Huffington Post]
Executives execute. We don’t execute people as in life and death matters (although, sadly, we do “terminate” people when they’re no longer needed), but we have traditionally thought of business leaders as being emotionless technicians who just keep the trains running on time. But, timely trains didn’t make Southern Pacific or Santa Fe railroads into 21st century mega-corporations. In fact, the train industry missed its chance to expand into automobiles and airplane travel by thinking of their business a little too myopically. Maybe these train executives were a little too focused on the simple execution of being on time.
While execution is still a fundamental skill of the best executives, we no longer are purely executing mechanistic, industrial organizations. In this knowledge era, execution is all about people: how to harness and inspire the potential of those we work with. And, at the heart of people are our emotions, the mysterious internal weather that either propels or penalizes us. After 24 years of being a CEO, I’ve come to realize that the best amongst us are truly Chief Emotions Officers as we are the “emotional thermostats” for our organizations with studies showing that a typical leader has 50-70% influence over the work climate of their team.
There are three great pieces of empirical evidence that amplify this reality about 21st century leadership. First, Daniel Goleman has shown for 15 years now that emotional intelligence (EQ) represents two-thirds of the success of business leaders as compared to only one-third coming from either IQ or the leader’s transferable experience. And, yet, in 2010, less than 10% of the training and development dollars spent by America’s corporations went toward emotional intelligence or literacy training (often called “soft skills”). We know it’s important and, yet, we seem to be reluctant in investing in the skills to help our executives become Chief Emotions Officers.
Secondly, Dr Matthew Lieberman at UCLA has proven that labeling our emotions reduces the intensity of these emotions in such a way that it maximizes our cognitive abilities just at the time when we most need to use the prefrontal cortex of our brain for better reasoning and judgment. By being emotionally literate about what we’re experiencing, executives can sidestep the 10-15 point drop in IQ that often occurs for those who are barraged by having to make decisions during times of emotional distress. So, maybe being a CEO is less about being able to predict the times of trains and more about being an internal weather forecaster.
Finally, Harvard’s Nicholas Christakis, as well as a few other academics, has shown that our emotions are contagious. When we have the flu, our colleagues feel comforted that we stay at home in order not to spread the misery. Yet, when so many of us have caught the “fear” at work – especially in economically turbulent times – there’s no sane corporate voice warning us of the risks of how our emotions can spread and threaten the well-being of those in our organizational petri dish. The ultimate inoculation for fear is a great corporate culture and companies with great cultures have healthy psycho-hygiene. In other words, their leaders are emotionally attuned to what’s going on around them and they cleanse the company through transparent communication or other tactical means to help employees feel recognized and engaged.
Any executive worth their weight understands the principle of accrued interest. If you have a loan and don’t pay the interest currently, it accrues and can compound and over period of time. The cost of the interest can become staggering. This is an apt metaphor for organizational emotions that are not properly addressed in the workplace. Most companies – led by CEO’s who aren’t nearly literate about their own emotions – are actively disengaged in addressing the individual and collective emotions that are invisible predators of passion and engagement. From my own experience, I have learned the hard way. When I most have bottled up my emotions for extended periods of time, they have leaked out in other subversive ways that didn’t serve my purposes as CEO. And, yet, when I was most vulnerable and authentic in my emotional communication with fellow co-workers, ironically, I was told by these colleagues that I was more admired and they felt most comfortable to be all they could be at work.
THE MOST NEGLECTED FACT IN BUSINESS
Monday, March 28th, 2011[Originally posted March 28, 2011 on The Huffington Post]
Henry Ford complained, “Why is it when I need a pair of hands, I have to get the whole man as well?” Sorry, Henry, that’s how it works. My father, when he was in the midst of strenuous management-labor negotiations would say to me as a kid, “I love business, but the people side of business can be really frustrating.” As much as I love my dad, I see the fallacy in his thinking now that I’m no longer a young whipper-snapper. There is no people “side” of business. The most neglected fact in business is that we’re all human and virtually everything we do in the context of business can be distilled down to the emotions and whims of people, just like you and me.
Douglas McGregor, who wrote “The Human Side of Enterprise” fifty year ago, suggested, “Behind every managerial decision or action are assumptions about human nature and human behavior.” McGregor was the management guru who popularized Theory Y management, or the idea that people long for a workplace that allows them to actualize their greatest potential. Humans are trustworthy, motivated, and collaborative. Unfortunately, most of us come from the Frederick Taylor scientific management school of thinking. Taylor famously suggested 100 years ago that, “In the past, man has been first; in the future, the system must be first. The first object of any good system must be that of developing first class men.” I’m sure Henry Ford was a big Frederick Taylor fan. Theory X management is based upon the premise that men, by nature, are moldable and need to be trained because, left to their own devices, men are lazy losers. Have you ever worked at a company that had this kind of underlying assumptions about its people? What was the effect on the work climate over time?
The intersection of psychology and business is typically seen as being as congested, stressful, and emotionally barren as a peak commute traffic day on the LA freeways. But, thankfully, we live in an era in which neuroscientists are teaching us about the malleability of our brain and the emotionally contagious nature of our workplaces. We are not robots and, yet, when we’re treated as such, we can lose our passion for our work and our compassion for our fellow employees and customers. Yet, companies that create a healthy “psycho-hygiene” are able to tap into the full potential of their people. These companies evaluate their leaders not purely on financial results but on scales for both results and relationships, they create cultures of recognition knowing that positivity has a ripple effect just like negativity does, and they create a sense of purpose and meaning that helps employees feel that they’re motivated by an internal calling or inspiration as opposed to being a trained seal who only performs when financial incentives or awards are offered.
In sum, we’re finally starting to realize that organizations are purely the sum total of the relationships that make up that organization. The companies we admire are like the people we admire: resilient, authentic, personable, collaborative, ambitious, and humble. Daniel Goleman has proven that two-thirds of the success in business is based upon our Emotional Intelligence as opposed to our IQ or our level of experience. As we look for the next crop of future CEO’s, maybe it’s time for America’s corporations to start interviewing grads from the Psychology masters’ programs rather than the MBA programs.
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
2011: THE YEAR OF CURIOSITY
[Originally posted December 20, 2010 on The Huffington Post]
‘Tis the time of the year to reflect and project. I’m going to take my cue from the most famous management theorist of all time, Peter Drucker, who lived to the ripe old age of 95. This leadership guru incorporated two practices into his professional and personal life that I’ve decided to adopt in the new year.
First off, Drucker made it a practice of spending two weeks every year reviewing his work, a habit he picked up from his Editor-in-Chief when he was working for a newspaper in Europe. He would set aside this time to “review my work during the preceding year, beginning with the things I did well but could or should have done better, down to the things I did poorly and the things I should have done but did not do.” Simple idea, yet few of us practice this kind of self-reflection. I’m off to the beach for the next few days and, while I won’t spend two weeks on this, I will spend a few days doing an inventory of what I learned this year and how I can apply it in 2011.
Peter Drucker’s other practice – to adopt a new subject, completely unrelated to his work life, to study and master over the course of three years is an unadulterated form of curiosity. When I spent some time with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of the landmark book Flow, this summer, he told me that the most important trait for 21st Century innovation isn’t creativity, but instead it’s curiosity. Curiosity – that blessed alchemy of wonder and awe – is a quality that we all had as a child and yet, with time, most of us found ourselves on a narrower and narrower path.
For more than 60 years, Peter Drucker studied one subject at a time from Japanese art to Civil War history with the intent of mastering the subject. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it helped Mr. Drucker keep a facile mind and a youthful spirit into his mid-90’s. So, starting in 2011, I am going to take one subject per year and devour it – both mentally and experientially. This first year I’m going to tackle the sublime and geological magic of natural hot springs. Why and how were these created? Why do some smell so different than others? What are the health benefits or risks associated with using them? And, what’s the history of public bathing? And, as I will do in the future with subjects like Renaissance art or hang gliding, I plan to explore these subjects by literally diving in. So, in 2011, I will visit a different natural hot spring every month of the year. Iceland and Japan, here I come!!
Some of you may think this is silly. How can this be related to business leadership? One of the most sage pieces of advice I ever heard went something like this: “Great managers have great answers. Great leaders have great questions.” At the heart of great leadership is a curious mind, heart, and spirit. Today, business serendipity and profound innovation will come from seeing the metaphors and natural laws in one part of life and applying them elsewhere with a vision that less curious minds would never have imagined. See you in the springs.
Living Downwind from the Flower Shop
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010[Originally posted August 24, 2010 on the Huffington Post]
One of the great mysteries in life is why some of us prefer to be swamp-dwellers. Not literally. I’m not dissing those living in the low country of the Gulf States or, frankly, anyone stuck in less than pristine living conditions. No, what I’m talking about is why some of us choose to be prisoners of our own minds. My grandmother used to tell me, “Some days, you need an escort to take you through that dangerous neighborhood that is your mind.”
Ask a thoughtful swamp-dweller why they perennially veer toward the negative and they may tell you that low expectations translate into less disappointment in their lives. In fact, philosopher William James once wrote that self-esteem could be distilled down to an equation: success in life divided by expectations. Recent studies have shown that Asian-American students coming from families with high academic expectations of them tend to have lower self-esteem even when they score very well on their exams, so maybe there’s some truth to this. But, low expectations can also translate into less success when one’s spirit and motivation is poisoned by a lack of hope, meaning, or possibility in one’s life.
In the context of business, we’re all aware that some corporate cultures create a momentum of victory while others create a constant feeling of failure. Given that my company often takes over the management of hotels that are in a downward spiral, I know the signs of a troubled culture: passive aggressive communication, lots of finger pointing, and universally low expectations. Yet, there are many companies that have risen from their swamp whether it’s Continental Airlines with a newcomer CEO Gordon Bethune in the 90′s or Apple with returning CEO Steve Jobs at around that same time. In both cases, these execs first had to help all in the organization believe in themselves again and identify a few initial victories that they could point to in order to start building that momentum of victory.
My son has just been released from prison after a Federal Judge found that his constitutional rights had been violated (due to mistaken jury instructions). While he was initially ecstatic about being out after being wrongly accused for four and a half years, he started to gravitate back to familiar territory: Will the County District Attorney choose to appeal the Judge’s ruling? Of course, this has enormous implications for his life, but it’s also something he has little influence over and, for the time being, there’s so much life to catch up on and to celebrate that obsessing on the D.A.’s actions can become a no-win game. One of the responsibilities of friends and family is to escort each other through the dark alleys of our minds when there are sunny, open spaces just around the corner.
I’ve been fortunate enough to spend the past few days in Montana with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (and his wife Isabella), the author of Flow and many other books on how to live an optimal life. One of the basic premises of Flow is that life is at its best when we’re expertly navigating between challenge and skill. Think of a graph with two axes: with challenge on the vertical axis and skill on the horizontal axis. Flow occurs as we move diagonally away from the intersection of these two axes toward the upper right hand corner. But, most of us spend our lives toggling between boredom (low challenge, high skill) and anxiety (high challenge, low skill) living a life that feels too full of inertia or exertion.
Mihaly says someone in Flow
…concentrates their attention on a limited stimulus field, forgets personal problems, loses their sense of time and of themselves, feels competent and in control, and has a sense of harmony with their surroundings…they cease to worry about whether the activity will be productive or whether it will be rewarded…they have entered a state of flow.
This is true of individuals inside and outside of work as well as companies that pursue an organizational predilection toward Flow.
Manifesting a good life by just thinking positive thoughts is not enough. There’s no doubt that healthy psycho-hygiene creates a greater likelihood of living a life in flow with the world. But, I prefer to think of this as more like planting yourself “downwind from the flower shop.” Your willingness to build your skills and to accept challenges — emotionally, professionally, intellectually, athletically, spiritually — is your means of placing your destiny at a fortuitous intersection where good things come wafting your way. To understand how to find that flow in your life, read Mihaly’s book of the same name or Finding Flow or Good Business (to understand the context for work) or The Evolving Self (how Flow can make a difference to society).
Happy Birthday, Abe!
Tuesday, April 1st, 2008I’m not one to hang out at séances, but I do need to remind the world that today, April Fool’s Day, Dr. Abraham Maslow would have been 100 years old. Not many people can attest to having an IQ of nearly 200 (those who do attest to this should save the info for their Mensa meetings), serving as the President of the American Psychological Association, and creating a self-affirming philosophy of life that the US Army translated into an effective advertising campaign (“be all you can be”). Abe reminded us of the power of pyramids and the purity of potential.
When in doubt, create a gratitude list, right?! If Abe had never joined us on this earth, we might never have:
- understood that more can be learned from the “best practices” of human beings than the “worst practices” (his psychologist brethren tended to focus on the latter)
- fully appreciated that self-actualization is a state in which we ironically transcend ourselves and connect with the oneness of something bigger than us
- realized that “being out of our minds” can actually be a good thing from a psychological perspective
- understood how important it was to find the intangible, “deep satisfiers” in life as opposed to the tangible base needs (think MasterCard’s Priceless commercial)
- been able to re-interpret “being-ness” for the “busy-ness” world as I’ve tried to do in my book PEAK.
The metaphor that I imagine when I think of Abe and self-actualization is the idea of a runner. Self-actualization isn’t easy. It’s not something that just miraculously appears and gives you a magic carpet ride. It is the difference between wearing a pair of ill-fitting running shoes that diminishes your ability to run as fast and as far as possible versus wearing just the right shoes. Self-actualization does mean you sweat and labor, but you do it in a manner that taps into your endorphins rather than sapping your energy. Living your calling produces a high that allows you to have a high threshold for pain as well as a high capacity for love. Happy Birthday, Dear Dr. Maslow, and thank you for introducing the world to the powerful idea of human potential.
Wants vs Needs
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007One of my favorite pastimes is traveling. While this isn’t unusual for most Americans, I have to say that one of the primary reasons I enjoy traveling is because it means uninterrupted reading time on cramped planes. And, what a stroke of luck it is when your destination and your reading material crescendo into a “Eureka” moment.
I’m writing this particular musing as I travel on a cramped plane to London after a week in Prague and Budapest having devoured Gregg Easterbrook’s The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse . Easterbrook successfully dissects an issue that I address in my upcoming book, “Peak”: the fact that the Western world is increasingly more prosperous, yet shows no more happiness associated with this affluence (in concert with Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness and Darrin McMahon’s Happiness: A History , I’ve had a curious appetite for understanding the ephemeral pursuit that our founding fathers articulated in the Declaration of Independence). The punchline from each of these books seems to suggest an old Henny Youngman joke: “What good is happiness? It can’t buy money.”
I’d love to join Gregg Easterbrook at a spirited dinner table with a good Hungarian bottle of wine because his thoughtful arguments (80% of which I agree with) are perfectly suited to a verbal jousting match. But, what I found most interesting was his dozen page recital of how the study of psychology, which had its origins in the Enlightenment period of world history, moved from a desire to elevate the mind to the Freudian/Behaviorist perspective of the last century that psychology’s purpose was to understand malady (as opposed to sanity, or for that matter, happiness). Imagine if business leaders focused on “worst practices” as opposed to “best practices” in trying to understand how to improve their operating performance. A “Freudian financier” could tell you all the ways he could lose money, but wouldn’t have a clue how to make a buck.
This part of the book also outlines how the positive psychology community (a movement that sprouted out of Abraham Maslow’s humanist psychology writings) is proving that happiness has an awful lot to do with distinguishing between one’s wants and one’s needs. He writes, “The blurring of needs and wants is important here because needs can be satisfied. A person needs food, clothing, shelter, medical care, education, and transportation; once attained, these needs are fulfilled. Wants, by contrast, can never be satisfied. The more you want, the more likely you are to feel disgruntled; the more you acquire, the more likely you are to feel controlled by your own possessions.”
This quandary of affluence is at the root of why modern man can become more prosperous, yet still be “wanting.” It seems that wants are truly personal and individualistic, while needs are more universal to man. Paris Hilton or Dick Cheney’s “hierarchy of wants” might be quite different from my own, but our “hierarchy of needs” (credit Dr. Maslow) might be uniformly common. Easterbrook quotes George Will who has written that today’s need “is defined, in contemporary America, as a 48-hour-old want.” The result is a “blurring of needs and wants,” which leads to a “tyranny of the unnecessary.” My biz school classmate and the co-author of our first books together, Seth Godin , should also be added to that dinner table conversation with Gregg Easterbrook as he and I once started an engaged email conversation about wants versus needs that still needs to be finished (while we’re at it, please make it a table of four as let’s add George Will to the dinner party, too).
One other key point, which Easterbrook makes, that resonated with me and the Relationship Truths pyramid I’ve outlined in my book “Peak” is the idea that happiness comes from transcending the base of the pyramid. The idea that we aspire to something greater and more full of meaning is a basic precept of both individuals as well as employees in the workplace. He writes, “A transition from material want to meaning want is in progress on an historically unprecedented scale involving hundreds of millions of people and may eventually be recognized as a principal cultural development of our age.” He continues, “Ultimately, the reason that possessions and their attendant stress are so alluring is that acquiring possessions is a simpler challenge than acquiring a fulfilling philosophy of life. Western society has concentrated intently on producing a vast output of material goods in part because this was an empirical, tangible goal – we knew we could do it. Now we face a task about which we are less confident, the search for meaning.”
Viktor Frankl’s stunning account of his time in a concentration camp Man’s Search For Meaning is worth reading if you want to explore an argument for the importance of meaning in one’s life that is both intellectually-rigorous while emotionally-wrenching. From the perspective of the workplace, I think that companies as diverse as Southwest Airlines, Harley-Davidson, Whole Foods Market, Medtronic, and Joie de Vivre Hospitality have proven that elevating employees’ perspective on their work from a job to a career to a calling has proven to result in peak performance. Unfortunately, most company leaders (and even HR departments) have a tin ear for meaning. And, our capitalistic society (whether we’re the producer or consumer) tends to get a little too enamored with elements that are lower on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs pyramid.
Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn once wrote about the U.S. and Europe by saying these places “were full of choice, unfortunately most of the choices are mundane.” Having just spent a week in two former Soviet block countries – the Czech Republic and Hungary – I was struck with the dramatic difference in spirit and perspective (dare I say happiness) that existed between two of the star cities in the democratizing Central Europe: Prague and Budapest. In Prague, we found a positive enterprising philosophy in the people we met that matched the pristine and unique architecture. As one Czech said to us, “The past is behind us and the future is bright.” In contrast, many of Budapest’s buildings, while historically majestic, were falling down and so seemed to be the spirit of the people. After having chosen the wrong side in the first two World Wars and having been occupied by the Nazis and then the Soviets, most Hungarians seemed to have lost their meaning or hope in life.
Even the historical sightseeing tributes (or, more accurately, the accounting of the assaults) that both cities have created suggest a difference in perspective. Prague has a Museum of Communism that is ironically upstairs from a McDonald’s and next door to a casino and shopping mall. This Museum is quaint, almost a little haphazard, and has a bit of a sense of humor (where else would you find a mock Soviet poster with a collection of smiling but stern mid-20th century women under the heading “Like their sisters in the West, they would’ve burnt their bras, if there were any in the shops”) in the telling of the tale of how the Czech Republic suffered under the yoke of communism. Budapest’s House of Terror is quite a different place albeit with the same intent in its storytelling. Ironically, while Budapest is clearly behind Prague in its modernization and prosperity, a small fortune and quite a bit of ingenuity have gone into telling the story of how the Hungarian people have persevered while being occupied for nearly a half-century by hostile powers. Unlike the Czechs who seemed to have moved on from their tragic past, the Hungarian’s impressive House of Terror museum suggested that tyranny wasn’t a distant memory and was still deeply-rooted into the population’s psyche.
Of course, some of the collective psychology of these two places has to do with their respective economies (the Czech Republic is on fire while Hungary is waded in debt…similarly, Prague has proven to be a more captivating tourist destination than Budapest). One could make the argument that it’s a strong argument for a free market economy as the Czechs have embraced capitalism more than the Hungarians. But, there seem to be other factors at work here also – some of them potentially very historical in nature while others purely a function of the needs and wants of the people.
One particular conversation with a Hungarian summed it up for me. He said, “We see our fellow Soviet block folks like the Czechs and Croatians evolve into happier and prosperous people. It seems like they are getting everything they want, but we here in Hungary are barely able to get what we need.” The moral of the story: focus on your needs first and foremost and only then will you have the luxury of striving for those elusive wants. (Just as an aside: my partner Donald and I actually preferred Budapest for its impressive bathing culture and monumental architecture as we found Prague tilting too much toward tourist trinkets.)