Resolutions

New Year is the time for resolutions: a new year, a new opportunity, a celebration to mark the occasion. But how long do yours last? For most people, a week would be about average!

A resolution is a determination to break a habit. Put into context, what we’re actually doing is pitting one resolution against another, which is why it feels like a struggle. For example, we resolve to not eat any more chocolate, but this is contrary to the established desire to eat chocolate.

Successfully breaking a habit – sticking to the resolution – requires discipline, and discipline is doing what we’d prefer not to do. Just the idea that we have absolute free will to do what we want will usually be enough on its own to defeat the resolution, but when we examine our behaviour more closely it turns out there’s very little free will at all. Most of our thoughts and actions are habitual, conditioned by what we like and don’t like, and these habits are fostered and maintained by emotion. Everything we do is emotional, although this is obvious only at the extremes of the things I really hate doing and the things I love doing: given the choice between washing the dishes and having another cup of coffee, the coffee will generally win.

Training programmes are designed to provide ways of replacing inefficient habits with efficient ones. If you only use two fingers on your keyboard, training in touch-typing will change that and speed up your computing skills. However, training programmes only offer the means, not the discipline, and if you don’t continue to practice touch-typing the old way will quickly reassert itself. This is an emotional decision: I’m comfortable/happier using two fingers, and using all ten is an effort. Paradoxically, if you are able to maintain the discipline you then wonder what the fuss was all about, and touch-typing has by then become the new habit.

Touch-typing is a simple example, and the benefits are quite quickly apparent. Implementing more subtle life skills like resilience requires more discipline, but provided that the programmes really work, the pay-off is correspondingly much greater. Follow-up research on The Challenge of Change training programmes has shown that if participants stick to the practice they become happier and more efficient, and make better leaders as well as team members. Being resilient means being free of stress, but stress is not inflicted on you from the outside, it is a self-inflicted injury incurred by continuing to ruminate about emotional upsets. After a heated argument that you ended up losing, how often afterwards did you go over and over it, imagining that you’re saying all the things you didn’t actually say and winning the argument? Nothing changes, you still lost. You might feel better when the thought of revenge is running, but since nothing’s changed you have to go on and on doing the same thing, like chocolate after chocolate.

What’s required to overcome the habit of ruminating is to wake up out of the nightmare and to put things into their proper perspective. Where New Year resolutions often go wrong is to mistake discipline for denial. The more determined you are to not eat the next chocolate, the more attractive it becomes. Just so with rumination. No matter how much you resolve to not ruminate, repetitive thoughts do keep coming to mind. The key is to neither block them out nor indulge them, but to simply acknowledge them for what they are - just thoughts, that can never satisfy. The final step of letting go of the desire to ruminate can then be taken. Letting go is what discipline is really about, maintaining a detached perspective and seeing things for what they are: a chocolate’s just a chocolate, a thought is just a thought.

Being Well

‘Well-being’ and ‘wellness’ are increasingly popular phrases in the training world, but what do they actually mean? There is ample evidence that practising The Challenge of Change Resilience Training programme leads to greater psychological well-being, but do the benefits extend to better physical health?

The Challenge of Change draws a clear distinction between pressure and stress, and the CoC Resilience programme contradicts the widely held view that some stress is good for you. Pressure is undoubtedly useful and motivating, but all that stress is described as offering is a short, miserable life. The statement is based on The Challenge of Change definition of stress as ruminating about emotional upset, and going over and over all the things in your life that never actually happened is self-evidently a miserable thing to do. Much of the evidence for the effects of rumination came from the research programme that the training is based on, which showed that rumination not only makes you miserable but also prolongs the elevated levels of adrenaline and cortisol that characterise the ‘fight or flight’ response. These are in fact not stress hormones, merely hormones doing exactly what they’re designed to do, but prolonged high levels of adrenaline and cortisol make a huge demand on your cardiovascular system as well as compromising immune function.

In the longer term, then, stress certainly has an impact on health. However, just as some people smoke all their lives and survive to a ripe old age, habitual ruminators might also show the same degree of robustness. The reason is likely to be genes. What we make clear at the start of the resilience programme is that stress does impact on health, but that the role of stress in serious illnesses like cancer and heart disease is far overshadowed by genetics. In my keynote talk at the HRINZ annual conference in Wellington earlier this month, the message about stress offering a short, miserable life was qualified by saying that you may have good genes, in which case you’ll have a long miserable life!

When genetic effects are partialled out it is probably true that resilience contributes to a longer life, but we need to keep the issue about stress and health in perspective. That means practising resilience not to live longer, but to live better. Quality of life isn’t something you look forward to perhaps having at some future time if you survive; quality of life is now. Hence the real emphasis in The Challenge of Change: that the imagined past and future are just dreams, second-hand lives. Real life is lived now. When people behave absolutely appropriately in emergencies, they’re described as having presence of mind. This means literally that they were in the present, and they will often say afterwards that at the time they felt no fear at all – their minds became quite clear and still, in the midst of chaotic and often life-threatening events.

Real resilience is being able to maintain that clarity of mind in all circumstances. To do so, the first essential step is to wake up out of the dream of the past or future, to keep your attention under control, to maintain a detached perspective, and to let go of the ‘what-ifs’ and ‘if-onlys’ that characterise stress. You’re then free to access the past and the future intentionally, drawing on your experience to act appropriately and without the confusion and entanglements of rumination.

Happiness

In the most recent World Values Survey, which ranks the countries of the world on happiness, Denmark tops the list. Perhaps not altogether surprising – a small but prosperous country with generous state benefits – and it is joined in the top dozen by Sweden, Ireland, Netherlands and Canada. So far, the results suggest that wealth and relative peace might account for the ranking, but also in the top five is Colombia, and the wealthiest nation, the USA, comes in only 16th.

In fact, surveys like this provide no clear explanation for relative happiness: New Zealand is 15th, ahead of Australia, yet Kiwis are crossing the Tasman in droves. Part of the problem is the breadth and generality of the survey, and it might be more useful to focus specifically on whether people are happy at work. The Danes actually have a word for happiness at work – arbejdsglaede – so they would probably top the list again. The British are thought by many to be among the most dissatisfied at work, but that view may simply reflect the same cultural stereotype that has spawned innumerable jokes about whingeing Poms (‘you know when a plane’s arrived from England, the whining continues after the engines are turned off’). Stereotypes are just that, and seldom add any real understanding to the debate.

So what does ensure that people are happy at work? The question is a really important one. Alex Edmans, Professor of Finance at Wharton Business School points out that the 100 ‘best companies to work for’ (rated by Fortune magazine) in the States earned more than double the annual return for investors than companies in the overall market. In other words, happy people work better. What makes people happy to work for one company but not another has little to do with the actual physical environment – there are few dark, satanic mills anymore. The difference lies in the attitudes and behaviour of management. Edmans describes traditional management theory as treating workers “like any other input – get as much out of them as possible and pay them as little as you can get away with.”. Most managers would argue that they don’t, but between management and workers there is a credibility gap that belies managers’ protestations.

Of course, there are many managers whose people love working for them, but whether you have a manager from heaven or a manager from hell seems arbitrary. The reason goes back to traditional management theory, which informs much of what passes for management training: learning about procedures that trained monkeys can perform. Despite the job being primarily about working with the company’s greatest asset – the people who work there - management training seldom sets out to produce the business equivalent of counsellors. Indeed, in many companies I’ve worked for, the very behaviours that guarantee a miserable workforce are endorsed through promoting managers who act that way.

Unfortunately, the advice offered to ensure a happy workforce often amounts to little more than a superficial shifting of chairs around the deck. What’s needed is a clear understanding of the real duty of care managers have towards their people. Probably everyone would agree that you should never place them under stress, but because of the almost universal confusion over the difference between pressure and stress, managers are often unwittingly doing just that. The psychologists responsible for cultivating the ignorant belief that a bit of stress is good for you have a lot to answer for. Pressure is good, but only when it is understood as a value-free demand for performance. Stress, properly defined, is ruminating about emotional upset, and it is incontrovertibly bad, not just for productivity but also for health and well-being. There is a simple way to manage better and ensure happiness: don’t give your team anything to ruminate about.

Coping with Recession

Interviewed on the NZI Business morning TV programme on Monday, I was asked for my views about how business people can cope with the downturn in the New Zealand economy.  Putting recessions into context, the economy is by nature cyclic: after periods of growth, there is a necessary correction.  Knowing this in theory doesn’t lessen the impact of suddenly having fewer orders, having to make people redundant, perhaps even having to wind up the business, and what makes the current global change especially demanding is that it is happening very rapidly indeed.  In the space of a week during a recent visit to the UK, we saw several thousand jobs go in the construction industry alone. 

What makes people particularly distressed is having so little control over what is happening, and in the absence of control over things in the world, people shift to attempting to control them in their minds.  This leads to an endless cycle of ruminating about ‘what-ifs’ and ‘if-onlys’, which is precisely the definition of stress that forms the basis for the Challenge of Change resilience training programme.  As we’ve shown with our programme, ruminating about emotional upset has no effect at all on the world – if worry worked, the economy would be thriving again!  Unfortunately, it does have a catastrophic effect on individuals, making them and those around them miserable and possibly shortening their lives.

What’s to be done?  There are of course steps that can be taken to protect businesses, but in the process the misery inevitably gets spread around: ruminating about where the next job is coming from is no less distressing than seeing your business collapse.  We tell people attending the Challenge of Change two things: that no training programme is a road to Damascus, but also that with practice, habitual ways of thinking can be changed.

Putting this into context, at one end of the stress continuum is post-traumatic stress: pressure that is so emotionally demanding that it overrides resilience and leads to a diagnosable disorder requiring treatment.  At the other end is day-to-day stress, the sorts of things we have deal with constantly in our daily lives.  Post-traumatic stress requires the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, dealing effectively with day-to-day stress is the preventative fence at the top.

The place to start is building or strengthening the fence, and that’s what the Challenge of Change programme is designed to do by providing the adaptive coping skills of being awake and controlling attention, becoming detached and letting go.  However, if the emotion becomes too overwhelming, the final step is to seek professional help.  That too requires letting go: there are things we can’t control, and there should be no stigma attached to getting professional counselling to help put things back in perspective.

Flexible Working, Inflexible Attitudes

A page in the Business section of recent edition of the Press made interesting reading.  The lead article was a report on the implications of the new Flexible Work Arrangements Act, which will allow those employees who care for others the legal right to flexible working arrangements.  The business community – or part of it at any rate – is predictably upset by the new Act, arguing that it will make unacceptable demands on small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).  The feedback to Claire Massey of the NZCentre for SME Research is that these employers resent being dictated to, and that their view is ‘Come on, give us a break, we have more common sense than that’ – in other words, you don’t need to legislate, we look after our staff already.

It is true that new legislation can add burdensome layers of compliance regulation and paperwork, but the idea that employers are already looking after their staff is not.  In my experience, like almost anything else there is a bell-curve, with a few employers who really do look after staff, the majority in the middle doing only an average job, and a few down the other end who only care about the bottom line.  The paradox is that looking after your staff is what working smarter means – those companies at the best-practice end of the continuum generally achieve far more with the same number of staff, because those staff are happy and therefore work well.  They also stay.  Companies at the opposite end of the continuum tend to have high turnover, which is a very real issue in an economic environment of extremely low unemployment.

The heart of the problem is a misguided ‘nose-to-the-grindstone’ attitude.  Here’s what it looks like: in one company I worked with, staff would leave their jackets on the backs of their chairs when they took breaks, just in case someone thought they were actually taking a break.  In other words, unless bums are on seats, work isn’t getting done.  This fallacy was disproved a long, long time ago, when production line staff were allowed to work next to each other.  Management’s response: ‘they’ll just chatter, and do less work!’  The truth?  Of course they chatted, were therefore happier, and were in fact far more productive.  Managers will often protest that their people are perfectly happy, ‘just ask them!’.   I have, in the absence of the manager, and the response is very different.  Come on, give them a break, they have more common sense than to admit it, but how long do they stay?  Managers who don’t actually care about the welfare of their staff – and that includes all of those doing just an average job – already have retention problems that will only get worse.

Paradoxically, on the same page ofThe Press was a report of an interview with BNZ chief executive Phil O’Rielly. We can confidently assume that this is someone with the experience and common sense to be able to offer sound advice.  One of his key tips: ‘Attracting and retaining quality staff is fundamental to your core business.  Are you offering positive, secure and flexible working environments that will do this?’.  Here are my suggestions: instead of acting like Luddites, broadcast to your staff the fact that you’re embracing flexible working, then collaborate with them to create a company ethos based on mutual trust instead of ‘us and them’.  New Zealand is a tiny player in the global game; all the more need to start really working smarter.  And try to create a company climate based on people being happy to work there.  Not difficult, really, just start with the simple principle of not giving your staff anything to ruminate about negatively and destructively after you’ve left the room.  Think it doesn’t happen in your business?  Think again; statistically it is highly likely.