In The Flow Coaching

Too old, too young, too stressed, not enough time, not enough space, not enough energy, too cold, too hot, too early, too late…we are incredibly resourceful in coming up with reasons why it’s never quite the right time to change the status quo. The fact is, there will always be some condition that is less than ideal.

Watch this Nike ad with Matt Scott, and then let me ask you: “What’s your excuse?”

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Here we stand, on the threshold of a new decade: it’s a fresh start, a new beginning. This is it, your chance to really make a change, once and for all – it’s now or never. Yikes, talk about pressure.

Sure, the beginning of a new year provides fresh inspiration and impetus for your goals. The question is, how do you sustain your motivation and stay on the continuous improvement track when daily life and familiar temptations rear their head (did you really think chocolate or “Lost” reruns were just going to lose their allure?). The “all or nothing” approach – i.e. giving up when you get off track – doesn’t work. Here’s the checklist I return to (over and over) to bolster my resolve and keep moving forward.

1. Figure out your why. That’s what the human brain instinctively responds to. As Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why, points out, however, most people start with the “what.” Whether it’s at the macro level — living a life of purpose – or micro level – losing 10 pounds — sheer willpower only goes so far. Without a driving “why,” motivation falters, inspiration fades and change fails to take hold.

Let’s take a typical New Year’s resolution — losing weight — as an example. At a seminar on change by Martha Beck, the Harvard-trained sociologist and resident life coach at Oprah magazine, there was an older Indian woman in the audience who was very insistent that she wanted to lose weight but simply couldn’t. “Are you sure you really want to lose weight?” asked Martha. “Oh yes,” said the woman, “Since I came to America to live with my daughter and her family, I have gained so much weight and I want to get rid of it.”

Martha called the woman up to the stage to demonstrate an exercise where the body acts like a lie detector. She asked the woman to hold out her arm and say, “I like chocolate.” Her arm stayed firm when Martha pressed down on it. But when she said, “I want to lose weight,” her arm immediately gave way when pressed. “Hmmm,” said Martha, “I don’t think you really want to lose weight.” “But I do,” said the woman, “I want to be able to play with my grandchildren.” Ahhh,” said Martha. “So it’s not that you want to lose weight, you want to be healthy and have energy so you can keep up with your grandchildren. Now that you’ve identified what you really want, see if the weight doesn’t start to come off.” The woman walked back to her seat looking stunned but enlightened: she had replaced her what with a why.

2. Fast-forward past the excuses. Too old, too young, not enough time, not enough space, not enough energy, too early, too late…we’re so resourceful in coming up with excuses. And they’re always valid, of course. Except, as Nike pointed out in a recent ad, there’s someone out there who has a good excuse and they’re doing it anyway. So here’s a thought: You know how you can skip commercials when you TiVo a show? You’ve seen them all before, know exactly where they’re going and the featured program is what you really want to see anyway. Hmmm, kind of like your excuses – why not do the same and fast-forward past them right to the action?

3. Create positive rituals. We are creatures of habit. In fact, research suggests that as little as five percent – five! – of our behaviors are consciously self-directed. That means as much as 95 percent of what we do happens automatically. We use this principle to perpetuate our “bad” habits (having a cigarette when drinking with friends, for example), why not create positive rituals as well?

The key, say Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz in their book, The Power of Full Engagement, is to make the behavior precise and the time specific: meditating for 10 minutes before work, say, reading a novel for 20 minutes at lunchtime, or stretching during The Daily Show.

4. Ask a small question. Once we’ve asked the big question – what is my why? -  it’s time to ask a smaller one. Daniel Pink, who goes beyond carrots and sticks in his latest book, Drive: The  Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, suggests that at the end of each day, you ask yourself: “Was I better today than yesterday?” It’s not about critical judgment or self-flagellation: “Instead, look for small measures of improvement such as how long you practiced your saxophone or whether you held off on checking email until you finished that report.” There are days, says Pink, where his answer is, “No, I wasn’t better than the day before.” But, he says, it’s rare that he’ll answer “no” two days in a row. Asking the small question — and a healthy sense of competition with yourself – is subtly motivating and will help you raise the bar an inch at a time.

5. Measure and track. News flash: memory and conjecture are not an objective way to determine whether you’re sticking to the plan or making progress. Instead, come up with concrete, quantitative ways to measure your goals — e.g. how often you went to the gym, how many Spanish verbs you learned to conjugate, the number of sales calls you made – and keep track on a piece of paper or Excel spreadsheet. (Check out http://www.joesgoals.com for a simple online habits tracking system.)

Or you can use the technique that Jerry Seinfeld used to discipline himself to write jokes everyday. Get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page, and a red magic marker. For every day that you finish your goal task, put a big red X over that day. “After a few days,” says Seinfeld, “you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

If you can embrace the idea that change is a daily, iterative process — with reviewing and tweaking to be expected — you’ll find that, even if you’re taking two steps forward and one step back, you’re moving faster and forward.

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Here in the US, as we celebrate the holiday season, there’s been a lot of thanks and appreciation in the air. But going beyond the seasonal tradition, developing the habit of gratitude has become a common buzzword in mainstream media, touted as the key to less stress, better health and more happiness.

Considering there are hundreds, if not thousands, of books written on the topic (based on a quick Amazon search), however, it seems we  need a little instruction on how to be grateful on a regular basis. In the developed world at least, where most of us can take our fundamental needs for granted, too often, it seems, we reserve gratitude for that colossal gift or happy event: something exceptional and out of the ordinary.

But I hear you, devil’s advocate: Even if we have enough to eat and a place to sleep, modern life is stressful! How could we possibly feel grateful when we are feeling upset or thwarted and things aren’t going our way? If we show gratitude for the small and paltry, then that might be all we end up with. Plus, being appreciative puts us in a position of indebtedness and weakness.

Au contraire, mon frere. The power of gratitude lies in its ability to transform your state of mind. It’s virtually impossible to feel grateful and depressed at the same time, or grateful and entitled, or grateful and unhappy. Moreover, expressing gratitude puts you into a place of readiness to receive even more, not less. After all, why would the powers that be shower you with your heart’s desire when you don’t even appreciate what you already have? (And if you’re still not convinced, take a look at the people who wallow in entitlement and eternal dissatisfaction – do they seem happy to you?)

So if your gratitude muscle needs a little exercise, here are some suggestions on how to pump it up:

1. Go on a rampage of appreciation. That’s what Abraham-Hicks calls it in their book, Ask And It Is Given. Hone your powers of observation, notice what you typically take for granted and actively identify things in your immediate environment that are pleasing to you – the way your favorite cashmere sweater feels on your skin or the cool breeze coming in the window. Then, extend the rampage to things not directly related to your welfare: the playful way that father is interacting with his daughter at the grocery store, for example, or the smooth ride of the newly paved highway.

2. Deliberately direct your focus. Mundane stuff, isn’t it. But once you become oriented toward looking for things to appreciate you’ll find that your day is filled with such things and you will start to feel a quiet buzz of contentment. (Plus, it’s easier to feel grateful for little things that are not chronically associated with negative emotion or resistance.) And whatever you’re not grateful for? You don’t have to change your feeling about it, just don’t focus on it. Like you would with a wandering dog on a leash, practice pulling your focus back, again and again, to what’s pleasing and feels good.

3. Use a cheat sheet. For sure, it’s difficult to feel grateful in those moments when you are feeling thwarted or out of sorts and distinctly unappreciative of your current situation. So you need a back-up plan: keep a gratitude journal or a pre-written script which you can refer to and rely on to conjure up feelings of appreciation. The longer you can focus on it, the quicker you can regain a positive grounding.

4. Get regular. Five to 15 minutes is the recommended daily allowance of focused gratitude. But I also grab a quick fix when I’m in transit, walking to the elevator or down the street. Like a curious beagle, I sniff out things to appreciate — the confident swagger of a five-year-old, the smile of a courteous policeman, or a storekeeper clearing the sidewalk of litter — and give myself a gratuitous burst of energy.

5. Be grateful in advance. Is there something you’d like to have (more of) in your life? Instead of fretting or wondering when or if it’s coming, assume it’s on its way and start feeling grateful before it even arrives.

I’ll leave you with these words from an unknown author:

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

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In my  recent teleseminar, Motivation: How To Get It, Stoke It and Keep It Strong, with ace tennis coach Ed Tseng, we discussed the ephemeral nature of motivation.

David McClelland, a Harvard psychology professor and author of Human Motivation, says there are three fundamental drivers that motivate all humans: 1) achievement (the desire to compete against increasingly challenging goals); 2) affiliation (the desire to be liked/loved); and 3) power, both personalized (the desire for influence and respect for yourself) and socialized (the desire to empower others; to offer them influence and respect)

In his soon-to-be-released book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, career analyst Dan Pink posits that motivation in the 21st century is a different animal. That when it comes to problem-solving, non-linear work we are inspired by intrinsic — not extrinsic — motivators, namely autonomy, mastery and purpose. Here, in his presentation at the TED conference, he makes his case:

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As the offspring of a Swedish-German father and Korean mother, I’ve always been interested in the idea of “hybrid vigor,” something farmers have long experimented with in plants and animals.

In “Is It Better To Be Mixed Race?” Aarathi Prasad, a geneticist and mother of a mixed race child, sets out to challenge the ideas of racial purity and examines provocative claims that there are, in fact, biological advantages to being mixed race.

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Back in the mid-90s,I had just returned to New York after graduating from business school in France. I was feeling a little ungrounded career-wise – I had an MBA but no real interest in typical MBA professions like investment banking or consulting – and so, in the meantime, was temping at a mindless 9 to 5 job.

Being a night owl, I realized, I still had a good six hours after work before bedtime and the idea of taking martial arts popped into my head (like most of my life-changing decisions do). Flipping through the Yellow Pages, I found a taekwon-do school a few blocks from my apartment and signed up for the one-month trial.

Within the first few days, I was hooked, going to class four or five times a week. And for the next seven years that I pursued my first-degree black belt, martial arts training was my anchor — through a myriad of jobs, roommates and relationships — a profound source of lessons and references that I could translate into work, music and every aspect of life.

1. Break down the impossible into the possible. When I first started training, I saw the students with advanced belts leaping high up in the air and throwing  flamboyant kicks, and I couldn’t imagine ever being able to do them myself. Luckily, as white belts, we began with a basic turning kick, which was vaguely doable and, from there, almost without realizing, I made incremental progress until it was me who was one of the advanced belts breaking boards with a flamboyant kick.

This has been an invaluable reference that I’ve applied to everything I do. Feeling that awful “how am I ever going to do this?” pit in my stomach when faced with a daunting challenge – whether it’s distilling reams of information into a client presentation, learning the thousands of notes in a Rachmaninoff concerto or memorizing the names of all the muscles and bones for a fitness certification exam – I remind myself that I’ve done the “impossible” before and I can do it again.

2. Feel the emotion without reacting emotionally. It’s so easy when you’re contact sparring to get angry and take it personally when your opponent lands a painful punch to the stomach or kick to the head. But when anger – or other strong emotion — clouds your thinking, performance suffers (it may also have something to do with the kick to the head). So, I learned to quickly process (not suppress) my emotions, and not let them (necessarily) dictate my actions or demeanor. (P.S. This is a handy skill to have at the office.)

3. If your first attempt isn’t successful, try it again (or something else). I think this may have been said more eloquently by someone else, but in truth, I often fell prey to the illusion that if something didn’t work the first time, perhaps it wasn’t meant to be.

In class, we would learn different kick combinations to counter or initiate an attack. Practicing with a partner, they seemed so simple and effective. And yet, I was frustrated when the combinations didn’t work in actual sparring. What was wrong with me?! In fact, it wasn’t about finding a foolproof strategy or formula that would work right off the bat regardless of circumstances: it was about tweaking the formula or trying different strategies until one worked. (Hmmm, can you think of other situations where this might apply?)

4. No-one is good at everything. Surrounded by talented students — some who competed internationally, had black belts in multiple martial arts or had been training since they were two years old – they all melded, in my mind, into one incredibly fast, strong, flexible super-human composite. Intimidating and discouraging, to say the least, and not even accurate. As it turned out, everyone had their strengths and weaknesses, and it was a better use of time to maximize what strengths I had than to psyche myself out exaggerating those of others. (Corollary: Stop playing the comparison game.)

5. Energy starts in the mind. As passionate as I was about training, I didn’t always feel like going to class after work. Some nights I would drag myself sluggishly across the mat, shoulders slumped, focused on how I could sneak out early. But then one of the master teachers would appear in front of me with a kicking pad, and I would be miraculously flooded with renewed vigor.

How strange, nothing else had changed; I hadn’t eaten a Power Bar or gulped down a Red Bull. By virtue of the master’s attention, I simply felt inspired to try harder, to show respect by doing my best. That instant energy surge was vivid proof that it’s the mind that tells the body what to do, not the other way round.

6. Persistence pays off in more ways than one. Okay, it’s one thing to know this intellectually; it’s another to experience the confidence-building effects. The black belt test takes about an hour and consists of calisthenics, forms, sparring and breaking a block of five boards with a back kick. No matter how well you perform on the other parts of the test, if you don’t break the boards, you don’t get your black belt. This was the one part of the test I wasn’t able to practice and, as I faced the boardholders bracing for my kick, I was overcome by doubt.

I didn’t break the boards the first time. Nor the second time, the requisite three months later. I don’t think I have ever felt so discouraged and inadequate. But I was determined not to walk away, like some of the other students who never came back after their first failure. It took me five separate tries and hours of practice over the course of a year to finally break the boards, but the intense feeling of relief, sense of accomplishment and confidence in my ability to persist was priceless.

7. Commitment trumps ability. My frustration from not being able to break the boards was exacerbated when I saw students who were less fit or not as strong as me, kick right through with apparent ease. (And I’m guessing the muscular football player who also took several tries to break the boards felt the same.) The difference was they believed they could do it and they didn’t hold back. As the instructors used to say: “Kick like you mean it.”

I have yet to use any kicks or punches in actual combat. But the mental muscles I developed – confidence, resilience, ability to adapt, self-control — those, I have occasion to use every day.

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As the last of the baby-boomers approaches the half-century mark, science is picking up speed in its efforts to slow down aging. A recent article in the BBC News highlighted the incredible technology advances that will improve our quality of life as 100-year life spans become increasingly common.

Researchers are coming up with innovative solutions that will increase the durability of hip and knee transplants – so that they last the 100 million steps that a 50-year-old can be expected to take by their 100th birthday, for example, instead of the current 20 years — and improve the viability of transplanted tissues and eventually organs.

So I find it somewhat ironic that at the same time we’re extending our longevity, our general performance is slipping. At least that’s what Australian anthropologist Peter McAllister says in an interview with The Independent regarding the premise of his new book, “Manthropology:” when it comes to speed and strength, the ability of modern man pales in comparison to our ancestors in ancient cultures.

That’s right: apparently, not only would I have gotten thumped in an arm-wrestling match with a Neanderthal woman, former bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger would have as well.

In one example of his extensive research, McAllister analyzed a set of footprints — preserved in a fossilized claypan lake bed from 20,000 years ago, of six Australian aboriginals chasing prey – and concluded that they had reached speeds of 37 kph running on a soft, muddy lake edge. In comparison, Usain Bolt, a.k.a. “The Fastest Man On Earth,” reached a top speed of 42 kph when he ran the 100 meter dash in 9.69 seconds at last year’s Beijing Olympics.

“With modern training, spiked shoes and rubberized tracks,” says McAllister, “aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph.”

With all our technological advances in equipment, training and nutrition — how could this be!? McAllister blames it on the increasing inactivity of our lifestyle since the industrial revolution.

“The human body is very plastic and it responds to stress. We have lost 40 percent of the shafts of our long bones because we have much less of a muscular load placed upon them these days.

“We are simply not exposed to the same loads or challenges that people were in the ancient past and even in the recent past so our bodies haven’t developed. Even the level of training that we do, our elite athletes, doesn’t come close to replicating that.”

This only confirms what I’ve always suspected: that sitting hunched over in front of a computer for hours a day eating jelly beans is detrimental to our growth as a species. Looks like we’re going to need an extra fifty years of active living just to bring our performance up to par with our ancestors.

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With all the books and magazines urging you to “follow your bliss,” it’s tempting to believe life would be a piece of cake — if only you had your “dream” job.

Mornings, you’d wake up bursting with energy, raring to go. Your work would be endlessly fascinating, your interactions with colleagues and clients energizing and, of course, you’d find yourself continuously and effortless in flow.

The truth is, no type of work inherently induces passion — and its natural companion, flow — or boredom. There are surgeons who are bored with their operating duties and machine operators who are enthralled with theirs.

As Alina Tugend points out in the New York Times, “If Not Passion for the Job, at Least Warm Feelings,” perhaps it is more important to be able to find flow — and a measure of passion — in whatever work you happen to be doing. Something that is wholly possible if you can achieve two of the major factors needed to feel good about a job according to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the principal arbiter on flow; 1) a sense of personal control over a situation or activity and 2) a balance between one’s ability and potential so the endeavor is neither too easy nor too hard.

Ultimately, suggests Peter Warr, an emeritus professor at the Institute of Work Psychology at the University of Sheffield in England, “it would be better to think less in terms of passion, and the inflated sense of drama that can go with that, and more in terms of job satisfaction or finding meaning in your work.”

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When I heard that Michael Jackson had died, my reflex reaction was: “It’s just as well, he wasn’t happy.” I have no way of knowing that, of course (he never confided in me at the Oscars) but the parade of lawsuits, media drama and plastic surgery didn’t seem to me like the hallmark of a contented life.

What’s more, continuing my presumptuous speculation about Michael’s emotional state, I’d bet that he was happiest when he could lose himself in the simple joy of dancing.

Which brings me to the point of this seemingly gratuitous celebrity reference: It’s the ability to achieve the state of total absorption in the moment, or “flow” – not wealth, talent or millions of admirers – that is one of the keys to happiness.

We all experience flow from time to time. The question is: how do you get into flow on a regular basis, even during the more mundane aspects of life? In his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identifies one of the key factors of flow as a balance between level of ability and challenge. If a task is too easy, it’s difficult to get engaged; if it’s too hard, you’re likely to be discouraged and give up. You need to be like Goldilocks and find just the right level of challenge.

Let’s try a food analogy. Life is like a stress sandwich, says Charles Raison, MD: “The bottom and top piece of bread are “bad stress.” The bottom piece of bread is the bad stress that comes from living too dull and routine a life (yes, being bored is itself a powerful stressor). The top piece of bread we might call “being overwhelmed”-this is the stress that comes from feeling like life is asking more from us than our emotions can handle.”

The trick is to achieve positive stress – the “meat” in between – by calibrating each situation for optimal challenge. Here’s what I mean:

1. Seek out novelty. Bored with the same old, same old? Before you quit your job, divorce your spouse or move to a different country, introduce change on a smaller scale. Discover a new author, teach yourself to draw cartoons (there’s a kit at Barnes & Noble) or try a different recipe. Don’t underestimate the power of spending even 20 minutes a day in an activity you enjoy simply for its own sake to reinvigorate the rest of your routine.

2. Take risks. In writing his latest book Absinthe and Flamethrowers: Projects and Ruminations on the Art of Living Dangerously, William Gurstelle noted (and studies show) that people who take just a few more risks than average, tend to be more satisfied with their lives and more fulfilled. You don’t, however, have to risk your life driving 120 mph on the Autobahn or eating the world’s hottest pepper, as Gurstelle suggests. It’s enough to stay within spitting distance of your comfort zone: present a provocative viewpoint in a meeting, brave the extra attention of wearing a colorful outfit, or move to the front row of the kickboxing class.

3. One bite at a time. Overwhelm happens when we’re focused more on the sheer volume or difficulty of what’s before us, rather than deciding the next action. You don’t try and fit a whole Subway Footlong sandwich in your mouth, do you? (Another sandwich analogy!) You size it up and decide where to take that first bite. Same approach works with even the most daunting project. Figure out the smallest action you can comfortably take, and focus on that. Repeat as needed.

4. Know your skill level. Matt Koppenheffer, columnist at The Motley Fool, notes how matching challenge and ability can help you enjoy the process of investing: You need to “have a sense of your skill level as an investor and match that to the companies you try to tackle. For example, a beginning investor is likely to get overwhelmed trying to nail down all the intricacies of Goldman Sachs and its black-box operating model. Trying to analyze a more straightforward company like Coca-Cola may be more likely to induce flow for that investor.” The same concept applies whether you’re learning a language, having a dinner party or starting a business.

If you can use creativity and resourcefulness to continuously tweak the degree of challenge, either up or down, your life will become more interesting, manageable and, dare I say, happier.

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