In The Flow Coaching

“Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed.”

– Arthur Schopenhauer

Here, in New York, where there’s a bravado culture — especially among lawyers and investment bankers — of who can survive on the least sleep, I’ve always felt a bit wimpy because I’ve always made sleep a priority and have even been known to take naps mid-afternoon. (Apparently some Tokyo-ites feel the same way.)

But now with a rash of articles about the dangers of sleep deprivation, I feel smugly vindicated.

The National Sleep Foundation recommends eight hours of sleep and if you’re getting less than that on a regular basis it will affect your:

1) physical health (digestive disorders, high blood pressure, weakened immune systems, weight gain)

2) mental functioning (ability to concentrate, multitask, pay attention, retain information, problem-solve, react quickly, and make good judgments) and, ultimately,

3) quality of life (you’re cranky, irritable, hyper-sensitive)

From a work standpoint, sleep deprivation threatens our ability to focus, the key element necessary to get into the flow. As  Ariana Huffington notes in her sleep challenge, “Work decisions, relationship challenges, any life situation that requires you to know your own mind — they all require the judgment, problem-solving and creativity that only a rested brain is capable of and are all handled best when you bring to them the creativity and judgment that are enhanced by sleep.”

If you constantly push yourself to get by on less you will never know what that peak performance — or flow state — feels like.

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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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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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Suppressing emotions, rather than expressing them, has generally been the modus operandi for the US Army.

The New York Times reports that, working with Dr. Martin Seligman, one of the fathers of positive psychology, the Army is now requiring 1.1 million of its soldiers to take intensive training in emotional resiliency. The new program is modeled on techniques that have been tested mainly in middle schools where studies have shown that the techniques can reduce mental distress in some children and teenagers.

Some doubt whether mental toughness can be taught in the classroom but how can role-playing and learning different ways of examining thought patterns in a safe, controlled environment not be helpful?  This is the kind of example that inspires hope that training makes a difference:

One, a veteran of several deployments to Iraq, said he was out at dinner the night before when a customer at a nearby table said he and his friends were being obnoxious.

“At one time maybe I would have thrown the guy out the window and gone for the jugular,” the sergeant said. But guided by the new techniques, he fought the temptation and decided to buy the man a beer instead. “The guy came over and apologized,” he said.

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Doesn’t it seem as if the more the pace of modern life increases, the more we scramble to keep things under control?

In the movie Click, Adam Sandler’s character was given a universal remote control that allowed him to pause, rewind and fast-forward to manipulate the events of his life. But although we may indulge in similar wishful thinking, do we really want to be totally in charge of everything – the weather, the traffic, what our colleagues, friends and family wear, say and do? I mean, aren’t we already kind of busy as it is?!

What We Really Want

Instead of being in control in actuality, I think what we really want is simply the sense of exercising control. This is one reason why being in the “flow” — that exhilarating state of being totally immersed in an activity — is so satisfying: in the flow, we experience a heightened sense of personal control.

Take rock climbers, for example. Rather than fret about the very real physical threats over which they have no control — a sudden storm, avalanche or drop in temperature – they focus on what they can control: their discipline, preparation and skill, and finding the next hand hold. Although the final outcome will always be uncertain and out of their actual control, they derive satisfaction from knowing they are equipped to handle whatever comes up and thus influence the outcome.

The One Thing You Can Always Control

The modern workplace, with its constant stream of distractions, changing strategies and unpredictable demands, can create a sense of powerlessness that is frustrating and de-motivating. Amid all the external variables, however, there is one thing over which you, and only you, have absolute and total control: where you focus your attention.

So when your boss comes in with yet another urgent priority, the client calls for the twentieth time with a question about the agreement, or your colleague needs help putting out a fire that you warned him about, you can sit there seething and sighing in annoyance at the injustice of it all – or you can take control and decide where to put your focus. (Hint: taking a deep breath is a good start.)

Setting an intention (“I am going to stay calm”) and asking questions are a powerful way to do this – “What’s the first thing I need to do?” or “How can I make a game out of this?” or “Will this bother me in ten months?”

Simply by learning how to reframe even the most chaotic situation, you’ll find that feeling “in control” is reliant less on things going just as you planned, and more on your ability to determine where you focus your attention.

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