In The Flow Coaching

Equinox Gym has 18 locations in New York City, and I have an all-access pass, which means I can go to any of them. This offers fantastic variety for mixing up my workouts but also means that planning my workouts each week can become a logistical nightmare.

In addition to choosing between my eight or nine regular classes, I have to factor in whether one of my favorite instructors is teaching, travel time to the gym, proximity to a business meeting and whether there are two classes I can take back-to-back — the permutations are mind-boggling. On days that my brain is overloaded, I have been known to waffle over the possibilities until I have no choice but to scramble to the last available class of the day!

This is a pretty typical example, I think, of how our options in the information age have multiplied exponentially. More choice means more decisions: Who and when to marry, when or if to have children, whether to take the overseas job promotion, rent or buy, Mac or PC, sparkling or tap – the sheer volume of decisions we face can be overwhelming, to the point that we can’t decide at all.

Have you heard of the famous jam study? In The Art of Choosing, Columbia University professor Sheena Iyengar tells about the experiment she and her research assistants carried out at a local San Francisco supermarket. Posing as reps for Wilkin & Sons, they set up a table where they presented various jams for sampling. Periodically during the day, they switched between offering 24 flavors and six flavors; everyone who stopped by the table was given a $1 coupon.

Now, this wouldn’t be the ‘famous jam study’ if the results had turned out as expected. And in fact, more of the people who had seen the small assortment — 30% — decided to buy jam. Only 3% of those who saw the larger assortment did. Interesting: even with something as basic as jam, people are more likely to buy when there are fewer choices.

Of course, not making a choice is also a decision. But decision by default rarely produces meaningful satisfaction. So, gym quandaries aside, here’s my cheat sheet for making decisions more quickly and confidently:

Determine what’s important to YOU. Too often, we try to make a decision without first getting clear on what we actually want. You may know very little about camera technology and still find yourself standing in front of the store display comparing megapixels, optical zoom, vibration reduction and countless other features that you didn’t even know existed. That’s backwards. First, determine what criteria are important to you (not the manufacturer, not the salesperson), and stop evaluating the ones that aren’t.

Decide and commit fully. Olympic fencer Jason Rogers says: “Indecision weakens your skills. Better to do the wrong thing with 100 percent of your effort than the right thing with 50 percent.” How often do you play it safe rather than going all out? Strong conviction in your decision can very well compensate for any flaws in your reasoning. While a habit of tentative execution — though it may not get you poked in the eye with a saber — will steadily gnaw away at your confidence. As Byron Katie says: “When we try to be safe, we live our lives being very, very careful; and we wind up having no lives.”

Factor in human nature. The collapse of the financial markets in recent years demonstrated, on a large scale, the human propensity to take greater risk to avoid loss than to achieve gain. Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale University, was curious to see if she could trace the roots of our irrational economic behavior and created an experiment in which she taught monkeys to use money and engage in marketplace trading. Turns out, monkeys also demonstrate loss aversion, just like humans. It’s in our genes!

Elsewhere, humans are consistently inaccurate in their assessment of perceived vs. actual risk. As security technologist Bruce Schneier asserts: “People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks. They worry more about earthquakes than they do about slipping on the bathroom floor, even though the latter kills far more people than the former. Similarly, terrorism causes far more anxiety than common street crime, even though the latter claims many more lives.

The take-home message: Knowing how our evolutionary tendencies can trip us up, we can compensate and consciously make smarter, more rewarding choices.

Make decisions from where you want to be. Consider this: Your best thinking got you where you are now. So if you want to improve an area of your life, you need to make different decisions. To start thinking like the person you want to be, adopt a role model (or two) — someone whose achievements or behavior you admire. When you’re feeling stymied, ask yourself: “What would [my role model] do?”

Make decisions quickly. Face it, you will never have complete information before making a decision. Three things that can make it easier to take the plunge: First, it’s easier to change the direction of a boat that’s already moving – the sooner you take action, the sooner you can course-correct. Second, though no-one enjoys making mistakes, that is where the most valuable learning is. The sooner you screw up, the sooner you know what doesn’t work.

Third, in his TED talk on what really makes us happy, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains how, thanks to our “psychological immune system,” we overestimate the effect that events – positive or negative — will have on us. It stands to reason, the consequences of our decisions won’t affect us as long or as much as we think.

The bottom line? Successful people make more decisions.

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I love lists. And the book, 8 Ways To Great: Peak Performance on the Job and In Your Life, by Dr. Doug Hirschhorn, is my favorite kind of list: what successful people do to stand out from the crowd.

Dr. Doug, as he is known among the Wall Street elite, offers no earth-shaking surprises in his eight core peak performance principles. But that’s not the point. Because, for the most part, we know what to do to achieve excellence, just like we know what to do to lose weight. What we need is a shift in perspective that will galvanize us into action.

From abstract to concrete. What a relief to find that, unlike plenty of other self-help books, this one is free of glib platitudes. Dr. Doug makes every point with precision and backs it up with specific examples and illustrations so you understand exactly what he means.

Principle #1, for example, is “Find your why.” Now that could be kind of daunting if you’re thinking you have to come up with some grandiose mission statement for your life. But with examples like: “I’m a marketing executive because I get a kick out of figuring out how to influence people to buy,” you get it: it’s about articulating what’s meaningful to you in a down-to-earth kind of way.

Flipping your perspective. I read fast and I know I’ve hit gold when I hear the figurative screeching of tires in my head. With Principle #2: Get to know yourself, Dr. Doug reassures us that we don’t have to change who we are. We just have to develop greater self-awareness of our strengths and weaknesses. Then he throws in a subtle twist: get a grip on how your strengths can be potential weaknesses, and vice versa – the ability to remain calm, for example, becomes a liability when we don’t communicate the urgency of a situation.

This to me is the mark of a “self-help” book that is truly helpful. It presents what you may already know with a fresh, often subtle spin. And this time, you really “get” it.

For example: winning is not everything, I know that. As a performance coach myself, I’ve always advised my clients to “love the process” (Principle #3). And yet, in reading this book, I realized that I hadn’t fully understood the profound truth in committing to “measure success in terms of how well you performed, not only the outcome.” The greatest traders and athletes would rather play their best and lose rather than make stupid mistakes and win. Any attachment to the outcome will, paradoxically, keep us from achieving Principle #5: “Be all that you can be.”

Dr. Doug writes with such credibility and authority – earned from working with thousands of trading professionals at financial institutions and hedge funds around the world – it melts any resistance to accepting the truth of what he says. Oh, so I can stop waiting for the perfect moment before making a decision? (Yes, Principle #7: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable.).

Keeping it real. Still, all of this advice-giving would be kind of dry if Dr. Doug didn’t weave in plenty of colorful anecdotes and stories to drive home his point. There’s the one about the multi-millionaire client who could afford to lose $150,000 in a trade but couldn’t bear the idea of throwing $600 in the East River if he didn’t follow his game plan – and so, stayed accountable (Principle #8). Or the client who called in a panic because he was literally losing millions in one of the crashes of 2009. Without coddling – “If you want a hug, call your mother” – Dr. Doug sent him back to the trenches to look for the opportunity emerging among the chaos (and the client thanked him later).

Anyone looking to step up their game needs to read this book. Take notes, do the exercises and keep it handy so you can refer back to it regularly. Do that, and you can’t help but become great.

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When Shannon Bahrke won bronze in women’s moguls at the 2010 Winter Olympics, in her excitement she “hugged first-place winner Hannah Kearney so tightly that she almost knocked her U.S. teammate over.” Next to them on the podium, however, Canadian skier Jennifer Heil looked crestfallen after taking silver.

From our vantage point as a spectator, it might be hard to imagine feeling disappointed at “only” winning a silver medal. On the other hand, we can kind of understand how, after years of training and sacrifice, being so close to the gold — and falling seconds short — could feel like failure.

That crucial difference in perspective is why “on average, bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists,” says Victoria Medvec, a psychologist and professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Illinois. Research shows a disconnect between performance and satisfaction, she says. “Those who perform objectively better can actually feel worse than those who they outperformed.”

Of course, there are high-performers in all arenas – business, medicine, performing arts – who are never quite satisfied with their impressive achievements. They zone in on the flaws, lament their missteps and don’t really seem to savor and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Makes you wonder, what’s the point of achievement again?

The secret to happy goal attainment comes down to focus. Here are five ways Happy High-Achievers – let’s call them HaHAs – play hard and stay content:

1. HaHAs keep their balance. Come on, there’s no glory in pushing to the edge, sacrificing proper nutrition, sufficient sleep and movie night, if it means you’re going to collapse, be out of commission and have disgruntled friends and family. HaHAs keep an ongoing cost-benefit analysis and remember their core values (that trophy isn’t going to come visit you in the hospital!) to make sure they don’t sacrifice what’s really important.

2. HaHAs enjoy the process. Yep, that ol’ chestnut. But isn’t most of the time we spend in pursuing a goal considered “process?” To focus on the fleeting moments on the podium (the stage, the finish line) and expect them to feel like sufficient reward for your hard work is a recipe for dissatisfaction. For HaHAs, the purpose of a goal is for what they’ll learn and the joy in striving for it – actually achieving the goal is just icing on the cake.

3. HaHAs pursue excellence, not perfection. Can we just agree already that perfection does not exist? And if it does, it’s subjective and a constantly moving target? HaHAs know this and refuse to hold themselves up to some impossible standard. They don’t compare themselves relentlessly to others or pay attention to the inner critic. Instead, they prefer to focus on the more satisfying challenge of simply doing better than they did the day before.

4. HaHAs focus on what they can control. And they spend minimal time focusing on what they can’t. When results fall short, HaHAs don’t blame the weather, their neighbor’s barking dog or the dry-cleaners. They don’t constantly look in the rear-view mirror and beat themselves up for a result that is past and done. Whatever happens, HaHAs forgive (themselves and others), show gratitude and find a way to reframe the situation so they can feel good and move forward.

5. HaHAs are doin’ it for themselves. That’s because working toward a goal solely to satisfy someone else’s expectations – whether your parents, fans or society – is destined to create a feeling of gnawing emptiness and “is this all there is?” Conversely, no matter how “unimpressive” or inadvisable a choice of action might seem to an outsider (“What do you mean you don’t want the promotion?!”), HaHAs have figured out which accomplishments give them the greatest satisfaction in practice – not just theory – and they stay true to themselves.

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This MSNBC video goes behind the scenes of Navy Seals training, the stage for extreme fitness.

Only 20 – 25% make it through the training and it’s not always the biggest and baddest: What psychologists studying the results have found is that more than physical fitness, mental toughness and “mission focus” are the number one indicators of success.

How important is mental toughness in the business world?

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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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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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