Top Executive Coaching with Tony Mayo

I am offering a series of drop-in, no-set-fee executive coaching workshops on Tuesday evenings in McLean, Virginia.

Click here for details and R.S.V.P.

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Compiling research from psychologists and economists (including colleague Richard Thaler), Professor Hsee provides tips on how to make the people around you—employees, significant others, friends, relatives—happy.

1. Separate gains.
   Combine losses.
2. Announce good news early.
   Announce bad news late.
3. Unpredictable gains are better than stable gains.
   Stable losses are better than unpredictable losses.
4. Choice is bad for good options,
   good for bad options.
5. Wanted is better than needed.
   Memorable is better than usable.

Details in The University of Chicago Magazine.

– Prof. Christopher K. Hsee
Chicago Booth

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Just Ask Leadership: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions

Excerpted, by Art Kleiner in Strategy+Business, from chapter 2

Here’s how the process works. The day before meeting, your coworker brings you a list of five or six key objectives, detailing her progress on each. During the review on the following day, you simply assess the data and discuss how performance compares with objectives. Depending on the employee, this can be a short thirty-minute process, or take as long as two hours. [If you do this weekly or every day, as you might on a tight deadline or vital project, the meeting might last ten minutes. --Tony]

When an employee comes into your office, she should always bring a pen and paper and be required to take detailed minutes of the meeting. Once the meeting is over, the employee should make a photocopy of the minutes for your file. [This is a bit dated! Have the employee email a summary. For high value employees, use a Read the rest of this entry »

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When people undertake to control their minds while they are burdened by mental loads–such as distracters, stress, or time pressure–the result [will] often be the opposite of what they intend. …

Individuals following instructions to try to make themselves happy become sad, whereas those trying to make themselves sad actually experience buoyed mood.

…

When people in these studies are encouraged to express their deepest thoughts and feelings in writing, they experience subsequent improvements in psychological and physical health. (See also Resistance is Futile on this blog.) Expressing oneself in this way involves relinquishing the pursuit of mental control, and so eliminates a key requirement for the production of ironic effects. After all, as suggested in other studies conducted in my lab with Julie Lane and Laura Smart, the motive to keep one’s thoughts and personal characteristics secret is strongly linked with mental control. Disclosing these things to others, or even in writing to oneself, is the first step toward abandoning what may be an overweening and futile quest to control one’s own thoughts and emotions.

When we relax the desire for the control of our minds, the seeds of our undoing may remain uncultivated, perhaps then to dry up and blow away.

The Seed of Our Undoing by Daniel M. Wegner
From Psychological Science Agenda
January/February, 1999, 10-11.

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Novelist Amy Bloom surveys the literature on happiness for the New York Times and distills these five essentials. I have recently rediscovered the importance of number 2.

The Fundamentally Sound, Sure-Fire
Top Five Components of
Happiness:

1. Be in possession of the basics — food, shelter, good health, safety.
2. Get enough sleep.
3. Have relationships that matter to you.
4. Take compassionate care of others and of yourself.
5. Have work or an interest that engages you.

I don’t see how even the most high-minded, cynical or curmudgeonly person could argue with that.

–Amy Bloom
The Rap on Happiness
NYTimes.com

See also, Have Some Happy, on this blog.

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This transcript of a conversation between theologians and est founder Werner Erhard may be incomprehensible to anyone not trained in ontological coaching. For those of us who are, Werner provides a thrilling demonstration of how to apply coaching distinctions. In this excerpt, Werner articulates one of the fundamental insights executive coaches bring to bear on their clients’ issues.

I’m not making an issue of the words you use. I’m making the system from which the words are derived the problem. Given the system, I can’t answer the question. You see, it’s not simply the words you’re using that are the problem.

What I want to convey to you is this: In the assumptions from which you are asking the question, you allow for no truthful answer to the question. The words you use reflect your assumptions accurately, and given your assumptions, there’s no solution to the problem. One cannot solve the problem in the system you are using. In fact, that system is the problem.

Now, I’m going to answer your question, because, you know, I came here and agreed to do that, but I want to tell you the truth before I answer the question. So I’m telling you that my answer will make no sense if you listen to the answer in that system from which you asked the question.

–Werner Erhard
in The Network Review
September 1983

See also, Never say, “It’s Just Semantics” on this blog.

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How you put your goals into language has a huge impact on their likelihood of success. Above all, be sure your goals are describing specific, measurable results (SMRs).

1. Remove all reference to time and change.
   1. Pretend you are at the completion date, the SMR is achieved, and describe how it is. This is different from, and much more effective than standing in “today” and saying how it will (might) be?
   2. Write every SMR in the present tense, as of the completion date. Instead of “I will weigh 160 pounds on August 12.” write “I weigh 160 pounds.”
   3. Remove any reference to change or comparisons. That means no “more,” no “increase,” no “lose.”
2. State everything positively
   Remove all “not,” “end,” and “stop.”
   Write “I have been breathing only clean air for two weeks.” instead of “Stopped smoking two weeks ago.”
3. For SMRs that are continuing activities or states, for example, “exercise for 30 minutes twice per week,” be specific about the performance period.
   State exactly which weeks the activities will occur: 2 out of the last 3? All of the last 12? All are equally valid, you decide and specify a measure that describes a victory for you.
4. Banish all thoughts of how-to.
   1. For now, consider only what you want. There’s time to work on the methods later.
   2. Check to see if your SMR is actually a how-to for the SMR you really want.
      One client had an SMR of “Eat vegetarian and visit the gym twice per week.” She changed it to “Going all day with energy and eagerness, caffeine-free.” Diet and exercise weren’t her goals, just how-tos. She got the result through a visit to her doctor and a specific treatment.

See also Managing Yourself with Specific Measurable Results, on this blog.

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