Dr. Heidi Grant

Be An Optimist Without Ending Up A Fool

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There are quite a number of motivational speakers and self-improvement books out there with a surprisingly simple message: believe that success will come easily to you, and it will. There is one small problem in this argument, however, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to stop anyone from making it: it is utterly false.

In fact, not only is visualizing “effortless success” unhelpful, it is disastrous. This is good advice to give only if you are trying to sabotage the recipient. It is a recipe for failure. And no, I’m not overstating it.

But how can this be? Isn’t optimism a good thing? Yes it is. Optimism and the confidence it creates are essential for creating and sustaining the motivation you need to reach your goals. Albert Bandura, one of the founding fathers of scientific psychology, discovered decades ago that perhaps the best predictor of an individual’s success is whether or not they believe they will succeed. Thousands and thousands of experiments later, he has yet to be proven wrong.

But there is an important caveat: to be successful, you need to understand the very vital difference between believing you will succeed, and believing you will succeed easily. Put another way, it’s the difference between being a realistic optimist, and an unrealistic optimist.

Realistic optimists (the kind Bandura was talking about) believe they will succeed, but also believe they have to make success happen – through things like effort, careful planning, persistence, and choosing the right strategies. They recognize the need for giving serious thought to how they will deal with obstacles. This preparation only increases their confidence in their own ability to get things done.

Unrealistic optimists, on the other hand, believe that success will happen to them – that the universe will reward them for all their positive thinking, or that somehow they will be transformed overnight into the kind of person for whom obstacles cease to exist. (Forgetting that even Superman had Kryptonite. And a secret identity that took a lot of trouble to maintain. And also relationship issues.)

One of the clearest illustrations of the dangers of unrealistic optimism comes from a study of weight loss. Psychologist Gabriele Oettingen asked a group of obese women who had enrolled in a weight-loss program how likely they felt they were to reach their goals. She found that those women who were confident that they would succeed lost 26 pounds more than self-doubters, as expected.

But Oettingen also asked the women to tell her what they imagined their road to success would be like – if they thought they would have a hard time resisting temptation, or if they’d have no problem turning down free doughnuts in the conference room and a second trip to the all-you-can-eat buffet. The results were astounding: women who believed they would succeed easily lost 24 pounds less than those who thought their weight-loss journey would be no walk in the park.

(She has found the same pattern of results in studies of students looking for high-paying jobs after college, singles looking to find lasting love, and seniors recovering from hip replacement surgery. Realistic optimists send out more job applications, find the courage to approach potential romantic partners, and work harder on their rehabilitation exercises – in each case, leading to much higher success rates.)

Believing that the road to success will be rocky leads to greater success, because it forces you to take action. People who are confident that they will succeed, and equally confident that success won’t come easily, put in more effort, plan how to deal with problems before they arise, and persist longer in the face of difficulty.

Unrealistic optimists are only too happy to tell you that you are “being negative” when you dare to express concerns, harbor reservations, or dwell too long on obstacles that stand in the way of your goal. In truth, this kind of thinking is a necessary step in any successful endeavor, and it is not at all antithetical to confident optimism. Focusing only on what we want, to the exclusion of everything else, is just the kind of naïve and reckless thinking that has landed industry leaders (and at times entire industries) in hot water.

Cultivate your realistic optimism by combining a positive attitude with an honest assessment of the challenges that await you. Don’t visualize success – visualize the steps you will take in order to make success happen.

G. Oettingen (2000). Expectancy effects on behavior depend on self-regulatory thought. Social Cognition, 18, 101-129.

The Difference Between Good and Bad Advice

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Most advice is terrible.  Whether you get it from a best-selling author, your boss, or your neighbor, nine times out of ten it’s about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.   And yet most advice – at least the kind you take seriously – comes from people who are in their own way very accomplished.  So it presents something of a paradox – successful people who can’t seem to effectively articulate how they became so successful.

It doesn’t stop them from trying.  And you can’t blame them, because each of us feels like we understand the causes of our own past successes and failures.  We tell stories to ourselves, about ourselves, that seem to make sense.  Why not tell the story to others so that they, too, can benefit from it?

Well, for starters, many of the stories we tell about ourselves are wrong.  Decades of research paint a pretty poor picture of human beings’ ability to accurately identify the causes of our own behavior, and the reasons why we succeed or fail.  Very successful people may do the right things, but they aren’t necessarily any better at figuring out what exactly they did right.   

For the record, before I started studying motivation and achievement for a living, my intuitions were no better than anyone else’s.  I thought I got A’s in school and was a disaster in every sport because I was born that way.   Years later I learned that no one is born that way.  It forced me to rethink the story I had been telling myself all my life.

When I decided to get into the advice-giving business and write my book Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals, I thought a lot about what makes advice useful. Recently, I was struck once again by the clear difference between useful and useless advice while reading Guy Kawasaki’s excellent new book Enchantment.    It reminded me that good advice has two distinct qualities.  And since it would be pretty obnoxious of me to use my own book as an illustration of great advice-giving (though it is tempting), I’m going to use Kawassaki’s instead.

Enchantment is a handbook for total transformation.  It’s a step-by-step guide to becoming the kind of person who enchants, which in turn allows you to create the kind of business that enchants, too.    One of the things I love about this book is that Kawasaki isn’t afraid to set himself an incredibly ambitious goal –  he’s not content to show you how to be more effective or make more money.  He’s going to show you how to be extraordinary.   In terms of gutsiness, this is like teaching an art class at your local community college, and promising students that they won’t just learn to paint a cow that looks like a cow – they’ll learn to paint cows like Picasso.  (I’m not sure if Picasso ever painted cows, but you get my point.)

The thing is, Guy Kawasaki pulls it off.   He has written a book that gives useful advice on achieving a particularly big, hairy, and audacious goal: becoming the kind of person who changes the “heart, mind, and actions” of others.  And he succeeds because his advice embodies these two principles:
Good advice is true.  

This sounds obvious, and yet, a staggering amount of the advice you’ll read on how to do just about anything is simply not true.  There is, for instance, absolutely zero evidence that if you imagine yourself getting everything you want effortlessly, it will somehow magically happen – and plenty of evidence that this kind of thinking actually undermines your success.  This is good advice to give only if you are trying to sabotage the recipient.

Kawasaki’s advice is true because he is wise enough to not simply rely on his own experiences, despite having more than enough of those to draw on to fill many books.  He casts a much wider net and incorporates the experiences of countless other individuals and businesses, along with relevant scientific research, into his analysis of enchantment and its root causes.   By taking a more objective view, Enchantment becomes not just a story of why Guy Kawasaki is successful, but of how each of us can be as well.
Good advice is concrete – it has steps.

This is the principle that advice-givers nearly always violate.  “Be Positive!”  they tell you.  Gee, thanks.  “Take Action!”  Oh, I need to take action?  Silly me, I had no idea. 

We all know we need to do these things to be successful – the problem is that we don’t know how to do them.  We need steps.  We need specificity.  We need someone to tell us where to start.  Advice that tells you what to do without bothering to tell you how to do it is utterly pointless.

Which brings me to the second thing I love about Enchantment:  It takes a concept as elusive and difficult-to-define as “enchantment,” defines it, and then tells you exactly what you need to do to get your hands on it.  

It doesn’t just say “Be Likeable,” it actually spells out how to become more likeable in terms of concrete behaviors – what to do more of (e.g., find commonalities), what to do less of (e.g., using 25-cent words when a 10-cent word will do), and what to do only under the right circumstances (e.g. swear).  Kawasaki’s advice is just as specific when it comes to cultivating authenticity, overcoming resistance, and making enchantment last. 
So, what’s the lesson here?  The lesson is simply this:  be careful giving advice that’s based solely on your personal experience, and always be very specific about exactly what needs to be done differently – the specific behaviors the person should or shouldn’t engage in.     Bad advice can leave the recipient frustrated, confused, or headed down the wrong path.  When they just can’t seem to “Be Positive” and “Take Action,” they might feel that the fault lies with them. 

If you are an advice-giver  (and that category includes managers, parents, friends, and teachers), you have a responsibility to do right by those who come to you for help.  Keep these two principles in mind and you can make the most of the wisdom you have to offer.

The Belief That’s Sabotaging Your Career

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We are all impressed by demonstrations of ability.  Pro athletes, computer whizzes, math geniuses, bold entrepreneurs, accomplished musicians, gifted writers… these people are widely-held in admiration, because we appreciate their extraordinary aptitudes.  And we envy them a little, too.  You’d be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t wish that they were a little smarter, a little more creative, a bit better at communicating, or perhaps more socially skilled.

So you would think being told that, due to practice and learning, you have gotten smarter (or more creative, eloquent, or charming) would be welcome news.  Don’t we all want to improve?  And aren’t we all happy when we do?  Yes…. and no.

For many of us, improvement – while objectively a good thing – is also, often unconsciously, anxiety-provoking. 

That’s because we believe it shouldn’t be possible.  

Dozens of studies by Carol Dweck and her colleagues have shown that roughly half of us subscribe to the belief that our abilities are fixed.  These so-called entity theorists expect their performance to be relatively stable – in other words, you have just so much intelligence (or creativity, or charm), and there isn’t anything you can do about it.  Incremental theorists, on the other hand, believe that ability is malleable – that it can and does change with effort and experience.

 So what happens when an entity theorist who thinks his intelligence is fixed finds out that he has, in fact, gotten smarter?  A recent set of studies by Jason Plaks and Kristin Stecher provides the answer:  It freaks him out.

In their studies, college students were given difficult reasoning problems, and after the first round, everyone received feedback that they had performed at the 61st percentile.  Next, all of the students were given a lesson on how to approach solving the problems, including tips and strategies.  After a second round of problems, some students were told that their performance had not changed, while others were told that it had improved to the 91st percentile.  

Not surprisingly, everyone who improved was happy to have done so – but entity theorists, believing that they really shouldn’t have improved,  also reported significant increases in anxiety.  The more anxiety they felt, the worse they performed on a third set of problems that followed. 
In fact, entity theorists who were told that they didn’t improve did better on the third set then those who were told that they did!

So when we don’t expect to improve, does this mean we actually prefer not  to improve?  I wouldn’t go that far.  Everyone welcomes improvement, but only for entity theorists does that improvement come with anxiety.   That anxiety, in turn, undermines future performance – eroding our confidence that improvement was ever actually real.

Looking back, these studies have given me some insight into some episodes in my own life.  For instance, take my experience with billiards.  I freely admit that I am a terrible pool player.  I played a few times in college and it was a sorry sight.  I wrote the game off quickly, believing that I just didn’t have the hand-eye coordination to ever be any good at it. (I should mention that I had a long track record of lacking hand-eye coordination.  When my brother tried to teach me to catch a ball in our backyard when I was 10, I caught it with my face and broke my nose. )

Years ago I dated an avid pool player, who convinced me one night at our neighborhood bar to give the game another chance.  Before beginning, he gave me a brief lesson – how to hold the cue, how to line up a shot, etc.  We played, and something totally unexpected happened – I played well.  In fact, I came awfully close to beating him.  And I remember feeling both elated that I had improved, and completely freaked out.  Did I really improve?  How was that possible?  I’m not good at this sort of thing.  Maybe it was a fluke. 

A few days later we played again, and I approached the table with a nervousness I hadn’t felt before, even when I thought I’d play terribly.  What would happen?  I had no idea.  And that nervousness wreaked havoc on my ability to play – I couldn’t sink a ball to save my life.  I knew it was a fluke, I thought.   I’m definitely not good at this sort of thing.

Granted, we’re talking about playing pool here, and I realize that it’s not a skill that usually has life-altering consequences.  But what if it was?  What if instead of writing off my pool-playing ability, I had written off my ability to do math, learn to use complex computer programs, write well, be creative, embrace risk, give compelling presentations, or become more socially skilled?  What if I believed that I couldn’t improve when it came to something that really mattered?

The bottom line is, no matter what kind of learning opportunities you are given, you probably aren’t going to see lasting improvement if deep down, you don’t believe improvement is possible.  Believing that your ability is fixed is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and the self-doubt it creates will sabotage you in the end. 

To be successful and truly make the most of your potential, it’s critical to examine your beliefs, and when necessary, challenge them.   Change really is always possible, and the science here is crystal-clear – there is no ability that can’t be developed with experience.   The next time you find yourself thinking, “But I’m just not good at this,” remember:  You’re just not good at it yet.
J. Plaks & K. Stecher (2007) Unexpected improvement, decline, and stasis: A prediction confidence perspective on achievement success and failure.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 93, 667-684.

What it Means to Be Happy Changes As Employees Age

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I am nearly 40 years old.  I spent last Saturday night at home, in a t-shirt and pajama pants, rereading a favorite novel and listening to the sounds of my husband and children playing video games in the next room.   It was wonderful.

If you could have talked to my 20 year old self, and described this evening that awaited her 20 years into her future, she would be have been utterly devastated to learn that her life turned out to be so…. boring.  That a Saturday night spent reading a book  – not even a new book – would qualify as great time.  “What the hell happens to me?” she would wonder.

The answer, of course, is that she grows up.  Along the way, what it means to be “happy” slowly evolves into something completely different from her youthful idea of happiness.  And she is not alone.

In a recent set of studies, psychologists Cassie Mogliner, Sepandar Kamvar, and Jennifer Aaker looked at how people’s experience of happiness changes with age.  They examined twelve million personal blogs, to see what kinds of emotions the bloggers mentioned when they talked about feeling “happy.”

They found that younger bloggers described experiences of happiness as being times when they felt excited, ecstatic, or elated.  (20-year old Heidi, and your younger employees, would completely agree.  Happiness for the young is all about anticipating the joys of new accomplishments –  finding love, getting ahead at work, and buying your first home). 

Older bloggers were more inclined to describe happy experiences as moments of feeling peaceful, relaxed, calm, or relieved.  As we grow older, we find that happiness becomes more and more about fulfilling your responsibilities well and hanging on to what you’ve already got – working things out with your spouse, staying healthy, and being able to make your mortgage payments.

The researchers argue that this change from seeking excitement to seeking peacefulness has to do with being becoming increasingly focused on the present, as opposed to the future.  Because younger people feel they have their whole lives ahead of them, they seek novelty and feel capable of anything.  When time feels more limited, we focus instead on seeking contentment in our current circumstances.

Another way to think of this change is as a gradual shifting from the promotion mindset (i.e., seeing your goals in terms of what you can gain) to the prevention mindset (i.e., seeing your goals in terms of avoiding loss.)  In previous posts, and in my new book Succeed, I’ve described how these two ways of looking at your goals create different motivations, and lead to very different strengths and weaknesses (e.g., creativity, innovation, speed, and embracing risk vs. thoroughness, accuracy, persistence, and careful planning).

If you want to understand how to best motivate your employees, both young and old, it’s essential to keep these differences in mind.  Younger people are more promotion-minded, and are drawn to opportunity (though their eagerness can sometimes to lead recklessness). They are more likely to value the possibility for growth, advancement, and creative expression at least as much as their monetary compensation. 

More prevention-minded older employees, on the other hand, are looking for a safe bet.  They’re highly motivated to perform well, avoid mistakes, and will work hard to protect what they’ve earned.  Expect them to think more about their job security, and to care more about having the tools in place to enable them to do the work right.

Why Letting Yourself Make Mistakes Means Making Fewer of Them

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Think back to the last time your boss assigned you a new project or task at work, or the last time you tried to tackle something really difficult in your personal life. How did it feel? I’m guessing scary, right?

While some people seem eager to tackle new challenges, many of us are really just trying to survive without committing any major screw-ups. Taking on something totally new and unfamiliar is understandably frightening, since the odds of making a mistake are good when you are inexperienced. Small wonder that we greet new challenges with so little enthusiasm.

How can we learn to see things differently? How can we shift our thinking, and approach new responsibilities and challenges with more confidence and energy?

The answer is simple, though perhaps a little surprising: Give yourself permission to screw up. Start any new project by saying, “I’m not going to be good at this right away, I’m going to make mistakes, and that’s okay.”

So now you’re probably thinking, “If I take your advice and actually let myself screw up, there will be consequences. I’m going to pay for it.” Fair enough. But you really needn’t worry about that, because studies show that when people are allowed to make mistakes, they are significantly less likely to actually make them! Let me explain.

We approach most of what we do with one of two types of goals: what I call “be-good” goals, where the focus is on proving that you have a lot of ability and already know what you’re doing, and “get-better” goals, where the focus is on developing your ability and learning a new skill. It’s the difference between wanting to show that you are smart vs. wanting to get smarter.

The problem with “be-good” goals is that they tend to backfire when things get hard. We quickly start to doubt our ability (“Oh no, maybe I’m not good at this!”), and this creates a lot of anxiety. Ironically, worrying about your ability makes you much more likely to ultimately fail. Countless studies have shown that nothing interferes with your performance quite like anxiety does; it is the goal-killer.

“Get-better” goals, on the other hand, are practically bullet-proof. When we think about what we are doing in terms of learning and improving, accepting that we may make some mistakes along the way, we stay motivated despite the setbacks that might occur.

Just to give you an example, in one study I conducted a few years ago with my graduate student, Laura Gelety, we found that people who were trying to be good (i.e., those who were trying to show how smart they were) performed very poorly on a test of problem-solving when we made the test more difficult (either by interrupting them frequently while they were working, or by throwing in a few additional unsolvable problems).

The amazing thing was, the people who were trying to get better (i.e., those who saw the test as an opportunity to learn a new problem-solving skill) were completely unaffected by any of our dirty tricks. No matter how hard we made it for them, students focused on getting better stayed motivated and did well.

Too often, when the boss gives us an assignment, we expect to be able to do the work flawlessly, no matter how challenging it might be. The focus is all about being good, and the prospect becomes terrifying. Even when we are assigning ourselves a new task, we take the same approach, expecting way too much too soon.

Alina Tugend, in her excellent new book “Better by Mistake,” illustrates through fascinating examples how the expectation of perfection — in business, in the practice of medicine, even in aviation — has been a direct contributor to catastrophic failures. Expecting perfection in your own life, she explains, is a recipe for self-sabotage.

The irony, you see, is that all this pressure to be good results in many more mistakes, and far inferior performance, than would a focus on getting better. Mistakes, as Tugend points out, should be thought of as something to manage and learn from, rather than something to eliminate (because the latter is more or less impossible). “We should strive to do our best,” she writes, “but if the prize is ever elusive perfection, then the fear of failure will too often overshadow the willingness to experiment, take risks, and challenge ourselves.”

How can you reframe your goals in terms of getting better? Here are the three steps:

  1. Start by embracing the fact that when something is difficult and unfamiliar, you will need some time to really get a handle on it. You may make some mistakes, and that’s OK.
  2. Remember to ask for help when you run into trouble. Needing help doesn’t mean you aren’t capable — in fact, only the very foolish believe they can do everything on their own.
  3. Try not to compare yourself to other people — instead, compare your performance today to your performance yesterday. Focusing on getting better means always thinking in terms of progress, not perfection.

Getting Your Risk-Averse Boss to Take a Chance On Your Ideas

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This is a guest post I wrote for the excellent thoughtLEADERS Blog: 
A good friend of mine, “Tom,” recently brought a product to his boss’s attention that would allow his company to take its social media efforts to a whole new level, and might significantly improve their image.  It would be an industry first, and not entirely without risk, but with huge potential payoff.
After hearing his pitch, his boss asked, “Are any of our competitors using this?”

“No,” Tom replied, feeling that this was a strong selling point – a competitive edge.

“Well,” his boss responded,  “then I don’t think we want to stick our necks out and be the first, do we?”

Huh?

Tom was disappointed, but not at all surprised.  For every manager out there trying to encourage innovation, there seem to be ten standing squarely in the way of it.  I spend a lot of time talking to people about motivation and growth, and everywhere I go, I hear complaints like:

I just can’t get my boss to take the risk.
There’s a huge opportunity here, and we’re missing it.
We just follow trends, we don’t ever create them.
It’s incredibly frustrating to know you have a real winner of an idea on your hands, something that could really shake things up, and not be able to get it past your Nervous Nelly of a boss.  Not that the cautious, conservative approach doesn’t have its place – but ultimately an organization cannot grow without embracing some risk.

(The recent recession has only made matters worse.  People don’t want to rock the boat at a time when jobs are hard to find.  Unfortunately, they forget that without organizational innovation and growth, no job is safe for long.) 

The problem, in a nutshell, is this:  when they make decisions, many managers focus much more on what they have to lose than what they might gain. 

When we see our goals in terms of what we have to lose, we have what psychologists call a prevention focus.  Prevention focus is about security, avoiding mistakes, fulfilling responsibilities, and doing you feel you ought to do.  It’s about trying to hang on to what you’ve got, and it isn’t at all conducive to taking chances.

On the other hand, when we see our goals in terms of what we could gain, we have what’s called a promotion focus. Promotion focus is about achievement and accomplishment, maximizing your potential, and doing what you’d ideally like to do.  It’s about never missing an opportunity if you can help it.

In my book Succeed, I describe research showing that while promotion and prevention-focused people can be equally successful, they work very differently to reach their goals.  They use different strategies, have different strengths, and are prone to different kinds of mistakes.  One group is motivated by applause, the other by criticism and self-sacrifice.  One group readily embraces creativity and risk, while the other prefers careful deliberation and the status quo. 

So, how can you get your overly cautious boss to go out on a limb and embrace a great, albeit risky, idea?  The key is to stop fighting his or her prevention-focused mindset, and work with it instead. 
In the end, it’s all about language.  You may be thinking of your great idea as an opportunity for gain, but you can always reframe it as an opportunity for avoiding loss.  To persuade a prevention-minded person, you want to emphasize how a course of action can keep your company safe and secure – how it will help you to avoid making a terrible mistake. 

For instance, you may be thinking of a new social media venture as a chance to get in front of the pack, but your boss might be more persuaded if you phrased it as a way to not fall behind.  (“Everyone is moving in this direction.  It’s inevitable.  We could lose market share if aren’t prepared for the future.”)

In general, it’s important to frame your pitch in a way that is persuasive to the kind of person you’re talking to.  Figure out if the decision-maker is promotion or prevention minded, and pitch accordingly.  Remember that even the most timid, prevention-minded person will gladly take a risk, once you help him understand why it would be a greater risk not to.