Great Expectations

One of the most enduring concepts in the field of individual differences is optimism, usually described by invoking what is conventionally thought to be its opposite: optimism-pessimism. That turns out to be oversimplified: rather than being at opposite ends of a single dimension, the statistics suggest that while they are related, they represent discrete dimensions.

Optimism is often thought of as hope: the hope that things will be better in the future. In the nature of things, that’s likely for only part of the time: things also get worse! The difficulty with ‘better’ and ‘worse’ is that they have an emotional connotation; an alternative is to think about it as the inevitability of change. Better or worse actually means better or worse for ‘me’. Here’s an example: you’d very much like to see one particular candidate appointed to the management role in your team, but one of your colleagues would rather it was a different candidate. The role will be filled; if it is with your candidate you’ll be elated and your colleague disappointed, and the reverse if their candidate wins the day. Elation and disappointment are a consequence of fulfilled or disappointed hope, which in the former case can lead to triumphant crowing and in the latter case to opposition and negativity. Both will undermine the cohesion of the team.

One of the reasons for adopting a pessimistic view is that you protect yourself against the disappointment of things not working out as planned – ‘I knew it wouldn’t work’ seems preferable to ‘I wish it had worked’, and it gives the perverse impression that failure is a kind of success. On the other hand, adopting an unfailingly optimistic view of life isn’t necessarily the preferred alternative! Expecting that everything will always work out fine is unrealistic, and in teams it will often generate friction between gloomy pessimists and unrealistic optimists.

So what’s a realistic expectation? The heart of the problem is thinking in twos, assuming that there are only the two options of optimism or pessimism to choose between. Instead, try adding a third point, not just some compromise midway between but an entirely different view. In the Challenge of Change Resilience Training that third point would be exemplified by taking a detached perspective, illustrated in the programme by being ‘in the loft’ in the diagram we use to illustrate the house of the mind. From there you’re able to keep the issues in perspective, but what exactly is that perspective?

One way we could describe it is indifference. A common reaction to the word ‘detachment’ is that it means being cold or uncaring, which it isn’t, but if that’s the response detachment evokes you’ll probably find the word ‘indifferent’ even more challenging! It is always helpful to consider what the word means: just as with detachment, indifference isn’t not caring, it just means you don’t see a difference between the ‘successes’ and ‘failures’. As we saw with the example of preferring different candidates for a job, success and failure are in the eye of the beholder; the reality is that someone gets appointed who some will like but others won’t. The positive and negative perceptions of things are simply values we attribute to them, they’re not inherent in the things themselves.

Without wanting to be too philosophical about it, consider the Zen Buddhist story of the monk accused of fathering the child of a local girl. Her parents insist that he adopt the child and look after it, which he does. Some years later the girl admits that someone else was the father and the parents return to the monk and ask him to give the child back, which he does. At each twist and turn in the story the monk’s only response is, ‘is that so’? Indifference doesn’t mean being disengaged – the monk willingly looked after the child. It does mean not becoming a victim of circumstance by attributing values to things that have none.

The F-words

Most people have heard the phrase ‘fight-or-flight’, which describes a response to perceived threat: faced with an aggressive competitor for food or mates, animals have the choice either to respond in kind (fight) or to run (flight).  The choice is simple, but it will be influenced by a variety of factors.  If the animal is protecting eggs or young from a predator, for example, it might be more likely to fight than to flee; confronted with an overwhelming threat like a wildfire, animals will always choose flight.  The emotional components of fight or flight might be different – aggression or fear – but the physiological response involves the same cascade of hormones.  The most prominent of these is adrenaline, which facilitates action by increasing heart-rate and blood pressure.  There is always adrenaline in your system, but the inner part of the adrenal gland is specialised to secrete large amounts of it very rapidly in response to demand.  

The physiological process of fight-or-flight is the same in all animals, including humans, and the intensity of the demand determines the amount of adrenaline produced.  To use a human example, if you’re quietly reading a book and someone calls your name, you look around to see who it is.  This orienting response involves an increase in adrenaline, but the physiological effect is almost imperceptible.  If the person who calls your name is someone you’re madly in love with you’d probably be aware of the change, and if instead of your name being called you heard a sudden loud bang, you’d soon notice your pounding heart!

These varying responses are ranged along a continuum, but mild or extreme, the effect is an increase in adrenaline to facilitate whatever action might be required.  Simultaneously, there is an increase in another adrenal hormone called cortisol, which aids fight-or-flight by controlling the inflammation that would occur if we were injured in an emergency.  It also facilitates the release of stored sugar, to provide the extra energy we need, and it conserves energy by temporarily suspending the production of certain white blood cells. 

If you then realised that the loud bang you heard was just the ladder you left outside toppling over in the wind, your heart rate returns to normal quite quickly – your body is governed by the homeostatic principle, and returns to a resting state as soon as possible.  This will minimise the strain caused by prolonged elevations in heart rate and blood pressure; what happens biochemically is that the excess adrenaline is rapidly metabolised because it is no longer needed.  The same occurs for the excess cortisol, so that white blood cell counts can return to normal and restore effective immune functioning. 

Intermittent increases in arousal followed by recovery are a natural response to changing demands in our everyday life, but they have been confused with stress by calling them ‘acute stress’.  They are simply changes in pressure.  On the other hand, if the demand was continuous – chronic stress – the strain on your body would eventually lead to exhaustion and deteriorating health.  Continuous external demand is very rare: in our everyday lives, after a period of demand there is always an opportunity for recovery.  However, while external pressure comes and goes, what might become chronic is internal pressure: continuing to ruminate about emotional upsets.  If you close your eyes and think about an upsetting incident your blood pressure and heart-rate rise, yet all you’re fighting or fleeing from is a thought in your head.  Rumination transforms fluctuating pressure into stress, and the misery of churning over emotional upsets significantly impacts your health and well-being.  Rumination is what stress really is, and you have a choice whether or not to ruminate: one of the most important consequences of defining stress in this way is that it liberates you from becoming a mere victim of circumstance.

There are two more F-words: flail and freeze.  When people are caught up in life-threatening emergencies they might be so overcome by fear that they either go into a flailing, blind panic or are completely stopped in their tracks and don’t act at all.  Other animals will sometimes freeze as part of fight-or-flight: if they remain perfectly still a predator is less likely to see them, and this is an adaptive response when fighting or fleeing might not work.  Human freezing or panicking are a consequence of being overwhelmed by emotion, and are not adaptive, but what has happened is that the element of choice has been compromised: people who respond in this way have been pushed beyond the threshold of rational decision-making that we described in an earlier blog (Blog 41, ‘Carried Over The Threshold’).   

Extreme situations don’t normally last all that long, but if the intense rumination about them continues there is a real risk of the response becoming firmly established.  This is what post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is about.  The term PTSD is over-used – the proportion of people who can reliably be diagnosed as having the disorder is actually very small, even after exposure to major traumas.  However, that shouldn’t detract from the real suffering experienced by people who genuinely have it: symptoms include disturbed sleep, emotional lability, and recurring flash-backs to the event which provoke all of the emotions over again.  The root cause is rumination, but choice has been compromised and the emotional triggering of the symptoms has become crystallised. 

Genuine PTSD is thankfully rare, and it is addressed by intensive, one-on-one counselling.  By contrast, the Challenge of Change Resilience training programme is designed to address what we call everyday stress, and is delivered in group training sessions.  What’s required to be free of everyday stress is to take all four steps in the training programme, culminating in letting go, and you can’t let go until you’ve woken up, regained control of your attention and taken a detached perspective.  What you let go of is the paralysing emotion that compromises action. Even if all you’re ruminating about is the negative comment from your boss about the last piece of work you did, it isn’t easy to do, but we know from our follow-up research that habitually ruminating about everyday issues like this can be completely changed with diligent practice.

Enough is Enough

One of the scales on the Challenge of Change questionnaire is titled Perfect Control.  The higher your score the stronger your perfectionist and controlling tendencies are, and on the course we emphasise that low scores are the goal. We are not saying the work is never perfect – books have to balance and you can’t have a spelling mistake on a billboard – but that’s not the sort of work that trips up people high in perfect control.  More typically, these are the people you see going over and over (and over!) plans, graphs, emails, etc., double-checking and checking again that it’s “right”. They’re also likely to be the people staying late, putting on the finishing touches and making the presentation just perfect – they find it almost impossible to say “enough now”, and the cost is when they find themselves spending too much time and effort on one task when their attention needs to be given to another.

What drives perfectionists is the anxiety about not delivering perfection.  People high on this scale like to be in control of what is happening and to have things done their way, and when this isn’t happening they start to feel frustrated and stressed (not surprisingly, there is a relationship between perfect control and rumination). They also get anxious when they have to delegate or let go of work, fretting that others won’t do it well enough. They may try to temper this with giving precise instructions about how it is to be done and putting in place frequent feedback check-ins, but they tend to think people get away with a standard of work that is too low.

The real problem is perfect controllers fail to see where the most value is added, and ignore the 80/20 rule, proposed originally by the economist Vilfredo Pareto.  The rule shows that 80% of task outcomes are derived from 20% of the effort devoted them, and it takes the form of a steep initial gain which levels off at the point where more effort no longer yields significant gains.  Your best work is likely to come toward the beginning and middle of the project.  Fluffing around at the end adds no significant value, and you run the risk of getting yourself agitated and frustrating others if you’re constantly double checking their work, changing words in the report because you have a different way of expressing the same thing, and re-doing the PowerPoint.

Different tasks require different levels of perfection, and the problem for people high on this scale is that they can’t differentiate between them. If you apply the same standards to everything you do, you won’t possibly be able to manage it and will feel disheartened and stressed.  You may find yourself complaining that the expectations are unrealistic, but I often wonder whose expectations these people are referring to?  Here are some steps you can take if you’re a perfect controller:

1.      Stop being so hard on yourself. If you aren’t getting negative feedback and no one is asking you to do it again, your work is good enough, even if you feel you could have done better.

2.      Begin by asking yourself what work needs most of your attention.  Where can you add value that others can’t.  What is your unique value?  Focus your attention there.  Ask: while I am attending to this, what isn’t getting my attention?

3.      Remember that 80% of the value you add will be in the first 20% of the work.  Are you spending 80% of your effort finishing off the last pieces?

4.      Ask to be shown examples of what the end effort looks like.  Listen to the critical voice in your head insisting you could do better.  Maybe you could, and maybe you should, but would anyone care, notice? Would people actually pay for that difference? Ask what feedback was received last time and maybe choose just one aspect where you could improve it.

5.      Try letting go of some of the smaller stuff and asking others to do it.  Watch your tendency to want to control how they do it.  Instead say something like “if you need any ideas, feel free to ask me.” You will want to know that progress is being made, so schedule a set time rather than repeatedly dropping by the desk to check up! If you feel brave enough, ask the person to suggest how often they would like to schedule check-ins.  Find a half way point if you have to.  Watch yourself wanting more information – change the route you go to get your coffee if you can’t help looking over their shoulder each time you pass their desk.

6.      When you let go of something, busy yourself with something else that equally requires your attention.  There is lots which could benefit from your magic and abilities but not all need it.