Behaviour

There shouldn’t be lots of stuff on your mind. Having lots of stuff on your mind is like having someone tug your sleeve every 3 minutes.

The only thing that should be on your mind is the stuff you’re doing right now – the stuff that’s right in front of you. You should be “present”, in the moment, focused on what you’re doing. No sleeves being tugged.

The other stuff on your mind is stealing precious memory (think RAM) and is caused, I am afraid, by operator error. But as we’ve discussed before, the brain, although amazing, is tricky to use and there’s no manual.

The operator error is one of poor housekeeping. The operator has failed to do the hoovering and the tidying up.

The reason stuff is on your mind is because you have not managed it, faced up to it, dealt with it, scheduled it. Whatever you should have done you haven’t done it. The stuff on your mind is feeling neglected and is tugging your sleeve. Every three minutes. And you cannot hit it.

When your mind is like this there is a tendency to do what screams the loudest or is the easiest. That might be the right thing to do next, but probably isn’t.

So you get a double hit – the sleeve tugging makes it impossible to do your best on whatever it is you’re working on and whatever it is you’re working on is probably not the right thing anyway because you only chose it because it was screaming or because it appeared easy. Oh dear.

Our mind should be left alone to focus on the current, present task without any RAM being consumed by the sleeve tuggers.

So, what to do?

Take all of the stuff that’s on your mind and write it down on a piece of paper. For all the small stuff, diary an hour and just do it. Yes, I did just use diary as a verb. For the big stuff, decide if there’s anything you want to and can do about it. If there isn’t, just let it go. Kiss it goodbye, say sorry, accept it as part of the messiness of life – whatever you have to do to let it escape. And don’t chase after it.

If there is something you want to and can do about it, turn the issue into a goal. A SMART goal. Decide if you have the time to make this goal one of your current goals. If not, put it on a list of stuff to come back to later and make sure you do come back later.

If you do wish to adopt it as a current goal, decide on the next thing to do and put that activity in your diary. When the appointed time comes, do the thing, decide what the next thing is and put that in your diary. Repeat to fade.

You will have to do this housekeeping exercise regularly, maybe once a week.

You will be amazed at how this frees up your mind, your RAM. You have made an intelligent decision about what to do and it is in process – the next step is in the diary. There is no more you can do. You are in control. You have self-managed. And you have freed up the greatest thing ever seen in the universe – your mind – to actually focus on the things you have decided merit focus. A great resource used wisely by a skilled operator. It’s not a guarantee of success, but it’s pretty close.

What would you like to stop thinking about today?

I’ve been re-reading Putting Out of Your Mind by Bob Rotella. He’s a sports psychologist for golfers. A head doctor if you will. He recently walked the Open Course with Darren Clarke and is seen as a contributor to Clark’s Open victory.

In this book he suggests that, when lining up a put, we believe with all our being that the put will drop into the hole. We visualise it. We tell ourselves it will happen. We see it so clearly it is as if it has already happened. AND, we don’t care if we miss.

It’s basically about what psychologists call self-efficacy. Very crudely, self-efficacy is our belief about how effective we are at doing something. How skilled we are. How competent.

The key word is belief. Our belief about how effective we are, or could be.

Many studies have shown that it is better to have an inflated belief of your abilities than a deflated one. Yes indeed, confidence, even over-confidence is good, if annoying for those around you.

Self-efficacy is important because it affects almost everything we do. The more self-efficacy we feel about a task or challenge, the harder we work at it. That’s another wee quirk of the human mind. We work harder at the stuff we think we can do.

Critically, I think the better we think we could be in the future, if we apply ourselves, is also a part of self-efficacy. The acceptance that we might be a bit rubbish at the start but having a belief, from self-knowledge, that we could get better in the future – that’s also self-efficacy. The books don’t mention this “self-efficacy orientation”, and I just made it up, but it rings true to me.

Taken to extremes in the other direction, the poorer we think we are at something, the less hard we try, until we give up entirely. Psychologists have a name for this too. It’s called learned helplessness. Isn’t that dreadful – learned helplessness? Ugh.

There are two staircases here.

On the first staircase we take action. We improve. We gain competence and hence confidence and so we take more action and so it goes on. It’s an upwards staircase to the top floor where there is a glass ceiling below an azure blue sky. This is self-efficacy. Psychologists actually say that this is the route to a happy and productive life. They really do. I have the book in front of me (Understand Psychology – Nicky Hayes).

On the second staircase, we seldom take action and when we do take action we are hesitant. Failure or poor results are immediately seen as evidence of our lack of competence. We pull back, do not improve and our competence and hence confidence does not rise. Eventually we stop. Further attempts at action become less and less frequent. We have attained learned helplessness. This is the staircase down into the basement. Where there is no light. We are doomed. Death soon follows.

OK. OK. I’m joking about the death bit.

I had a brush with self-efficacy recently (actually all the time but this is a neat wee example). You may have had a look at my new website for my programme Leading for Growth. I put this website up in about two weeks. It was a lot of work. Most of it outside of my competence. I had so much to learn. I had to do some videoing of me, of all people. Here’s me not yet with the physique of the Tour de France rider and some say a face for radio. Then I had to deal with masses of technology – editing, screen recording…and then the wonder of third party video hosting in the cloud (wot?). It was quite stressful at times and the children were shouted at on more than one occasion (poor self-control). And there were times when I put my foot on the first step of the staircase to the basement…

For example when after two days of video editing I discovered that all my videos were stuttering like Max Headroom (remember him?). But I knew I was going to sink the put. I knew I could do it because, hey, if it can be done by anyone I can do it too. That’s my self-efficacy orientation kicking in. I knew that we as humans have this really funny characteristic where when we do things we seem to get better at them! And in fact, to turn it around, if we don’t do things we CANNOT get better. And the converse of getting better is that in the past we were less good, or rubbish. (I used to have a boss once in my early career who at annual appraisal time would look at my improvement over the year and criticise me for being more rubbish at the start! The only way to avoid this criticism would be to never improve! I guess management just isn’t for some people.)

So where am I now? Well, the video website is up and running and a critical skill set I need for the future has been developed (first steps at least).

What seemed like a huge black hole of zero competence now holds no fear for me. I have improved my self-efficacy massively in an important area and I look forward to my next video/web project not with helplessness but with enthusiasm. I am on the right staircase.

I might be a bit behind the curve here, but I’ve just realised something. When getting stuff done, having the greatest tools and processes is fine but if you don’t use them you might as well not have them. And to use them you need to be in control of your mind. The mental game is paramount.

Achievement, at any level, is about the methodology AND mindset. I guess my realisation is not so much about the importance of mindset but is about the fact that although we understand the importance of  mindset we still do so very little about it.

Education seldom addresses it. Most coaches barely touch on it. Why?

Because it’s hard? Because it’s a bit wooo-wooo?

But it’s half the game, and probably more.

If I was presented with a choice between –

1. Having the best tools and processes in the world but seldom using them because of some mental barrier like procrastination, and

2. Having good enough tools but a mindset that not only didn’t hinder me but helped me…

I’d go for the latter every time.  Who wouldn’t?

There will always be a need for better tools and processes but I think most of that stuff is readily available and of high quality:

• Sales as a process is understood (transactional and consultative)
• Marketing is understood
• Operational excellence is understood
• Strategic planning as a process is understood

It’s all available. You may not have it in your head but you can get the overview for nothing from Google and if you want the complete toolbox someone will sell it to you.

But distinction in performance comes from mastering the mental game.

The sports people have known this for ages.

There’s two levels to this –

First level – throw out the rubbish…

When not fully commanded by you, your mind has a tendency to produce rubbish: procrastination, fear, negative self-talk, biases, prejudices, bad beliefs, tribalism, being a slave to emotions – and that’s just me…

I cannot take each of these apart in a 600 word article. Suffice to say, it’s all rubbish and none of it has a place in anyone’s head.

Second level – putting your mind to good use…

Taking charge – you being aware of everything that your mind injects into your consciousness and you deciding whether or not to keep the thought. If the thought doesn’t serve you, reject it pretty quickly.

• Taking the time to consider what’s possible and seeing all barriers as temporary and surmountable. In other words, thinking BIG. Genuinely believing that the sky is, in fact, the limit.
• Realising you have free will and actually using it.
• Constantly pushing your comfort zone.
• Learning continuously. (Really – if we are not learning what are we doing?)

Once again, the sports people are showing us the way. Top athletes these days have physios and coaches of course but they also have head doctors as well. Because once the 10,000 hours of training has been done (4 hours a day 5 days a week for a decade) and the body has reached its potential, the mind will make you or break you. The mind will either make you transcendent, or will trip you up on the final lap.

I am not sure why we neglect the mindset issue. Maybe it’s because education is, rightly, at least for a while, tools-based. We need the three R’s. But to keep going solely on the tools-track is robotic. As we mature and the normal stuff becomes routine, we need to look further afield for development. We need to look at our mindset.

We need to think more like top athletes (but without the 10,000 hours of slog).

And this is good because mindset is within our sphere of control. Looking for a new tool…”I need a better spanner”… is pretty close to a workman blaming his tools. It’s an externalisation. This is never good.

But “I’m going to master the inner game of mindset” sounds like something we can actually do. We might not know how but we’ll work it out.

And this is an internalisation which is…

a) better than an externalisation…

and…

b) the first step to self-mastery…

I hate to admit this but a month or so ago I got myself a bit log-jammed. I mean I couldn’t decide what I should be doing in my work. I don’t mean I had a bad afternoon. Or a unfocused day.

This lasted for days. More days than I care to admit to. Quite frightening really.

During which time I messed around. I shuffled some papers. I did all the easy stuff.

I had three big objectives yet I couldn’t knuckle down to any of them. So I did nothing (of importance). I am quite shocked at this because I should, and do, know better. But the logjam happened none the less. Like a football player losing form. I guess it can happen to the best of us.

“Physician, heal thyself” I can hear you all bellow.

Fair comment. So I did. And this is how I did it:

I coached myself. Well I’m supposed to be a coach so I coached myself.

I took myself through a classic coaching process coupled with some extra bits that work and some stuff from goal-setting best practice.

What was important was I gave myself the time to go through the entire process. It was like a system reboot. It wiped clean my confused and addled brain. I was like new.

I’ve put the process into a Word doc for you (click on the image above to get it).

If you’re feeling a bit log-jammed, frustrated and feeling as if you’re not really focusing on the most important stuff, have a look at the document. But you’ll need at least 30 minutes, maybe a bit longer. But it could well be the best thing to do right now.

It really worked for me. The process got me to focus on priority number one (funnily enough, not the one I thought it was), and define and take the first step. And a lot more.

So I’ve now got a major goal achieved and I’m just about to start on the next one. The logs are all flowing down the river again.

Coaching – I love it.

There are a lot of trees sacrificed in the production of books by high profile successful people purporting to tell you how they achieved it all. I find the problem with a lot of this genre is that the authors assume that EVERYTHING they did contributed to their success. So you end up with people saying nonsense like you must eat raw broccoli in the morning or you must speak to at least one customer every single day…

Of course it’s all very specific to the individual and as such of no real coaching value. So I thought I’d have a wee think about the successful people I’ve known and know still.

In my corporate life I had met a lot of people who would consider themselves successful. In the more recent coaching years, I have met a lot more, and from a much more diverse collection of jobs, industries and cultures.

A lot of these people are really successful. By successful I mean that at any given point they know what their “desired future state” looks like and they are making good progress towards it. The future state can, of course, be anything you like. Success has many forms.

I’ve been thinking about what characterises these people. I have constructed a short list of ten. The list is not comprehensive – there are other characteristics not mentioned. And it is not a blueprint – some of the successful people I am thinking of have characteristics opposite to those listed. But most of the success people exhibit most of the characteristics.

Here goes -

1. They are relentlessly positive.

Not head-in-the-sand-positive, but the positive that comes from having a goal, taking action, getting results, moving in the right direction and understanding that there is no failure, only results.

2. They focus on their talents.

They understand that by doing this they stand a much greater chance of making progress. The alternative – ignoring talents and trying to correct weaknesses is a mug’s game. I’m glad Plato did what he did instead of obsessing about his shyness.

3. They work, work, work.

Talents are raw materials. But it is work that turns them into strengths. Without the work we have what is known as “wasted talent”. You often find in sports that the most successful have the most talent AND the highest work ethic. It’s an intoxicating brew.

4. They are inquisitive and love to learn.

To successful people, nothing stands still, including their own world view. They educate themselves constantly. And this also makes them humble because they are constantly reminded of what they don’t know.

5. They think big.

They understand that most barriers are in the head. They ask themselves “and how could we do ten times more.” They don’t let a lack of something get in the way. They simply add it’s acquisition to their To Do List.

6. They are highly productive.

They understand what needs to be done and what’s just fluff. They spend a lot of time on the important stuff, in blocks of time, and they deal effectively with the rest. They have LARGE wastepaper bins that are well used.

7. They have lots of time off.

They know when the next holiday is. They often work in quite intense blocks of up to ten weeks (weekends off of course) and then have a holiday to refresh. Work hard, play hard – repeat to fade.

8. If they are men and married with children, their wives tend to look after the children rather than work.

I was surprised by this but there it is.

9. They help others to grow.

They delegate thoughtfully. They coach others. They see life as a win-win, not a zero-sum game.

10. They are happy.

They usually have a twinkle in their eye and a laugh is never far away.

All of these characteristics, and particularly the last one, are all predicated on the people being successful by THEIR definition, not someone else’s. There lies madness.

We all make decisions all the time. And we are very rational. Are we not? We make rational decisions. This is called utility maximisation by economists. Economics is not called the dismal science for nothing you know.

This is how we make decisions: we look at all our options and we decide the relative likelihood of each actually occurring. Then we look at the value each option gives to us. We then synthesise this information and we make our choice. This is rational decision making.

However, what I have described is how a computer algorithm might make a decision. But we are not so clever. Or should I say not so rational.

We especially do not make decisions like a computer when there is a gain or a loss involved.

Two economists, Kahneman and Tversky won the Nobel Prize in 2002 for their work on what they called Prospect Theory, which describes decisions between alternatives where there is a risk involved.

Their studies showed that people are much more sensitive to a loss than to a gain. This is true to such an extent that people are willing to take on board serious risk to avoid a loss. For example, people sell shares when the stock market goes down, and they continue to pour money into something that they have put money into previously when they really should just walk away.

It was Warren Buffet who said that “losses gain twice the emotional response of gains.”

People are risk-averse (i.e. they play it safe) in relation to gains, but are also loss-averse (and will gamble to avoid losses).

Makes no sense at all.

Here’s an experiment – people were asked to imagine they were scientists and they were working on an outbreak of a nasty disease which was expected to kill 600 people. Two different programmes to fight the disease have been proposed. The first group of people were asked to decide between these two programmes –

A: 200 people will be saved.

B: there is a one third probability that 600 will be saved, and a two-thirds probability that no people will be saved.

In this case, 72% of the group favoured programme A.

A second group of people were asked to decide between these two programmes –

C: 400 people will die.

D: there is a one third probability that nobody will die, and a two thirds probability that 600 people will die.

Now you will see that A is the same as C and B is the same as D. It’s just that the first choice (A or B) is framed as a choice between gains and the second choice (C or D) is framed as a choice between losses.

In the second case, 78% of people preferred programme D. Their preference has been reversed by changing the frame from gain to loss, although the options are essentially identical. Hmmm…

So, why care about this?

Well, marketers have us sussed and they use this to their advantage.

Would you rather get a 10% discount or avoid a 10% surcharge? It’s the latter, because loss-avoidance trumps a gain. Hence the often used phrase “sign-up by the 17^th or you will lose…”, or “offer ends Sunday…”

Prospect theory explains both why we act when we shouldn’t (usually to avoid loss, i.e. in selling shares when the market goes down) and why we don’t act when we should. In fact, the more choices people have the more likely they are to do nothing. And the more good or attractive options there are, the worse the paralysis. And the longer the decision is deferred, the less likely it is that a decision will ever be made.

For example – one study asked people to complete a questionnaire for a decent reward: some were told the deadline was 5 days, others 21 days and a third group had no deadline. Results: 66% returned within the 5 day deadline, 40% in the 21 day deadline and 25% where there was no time limit. And it wasn’t because they forgot.

So if you find yourself with decision paralysis, consider this –

• Not to decide is itself a decision. Procrastination must be killed!
• Think of opportunity cost, i.e. doing nothing may be more costly than doing something sub-optimal.
• Play devil’s advocate – challenge assumptions and consider the issue from scratch, not where you are today because what’s already invested is a sunk cost. You cannot get it back no matter how much more love and money you throw at it.

I was talking a few weeks ago about the power of routines. I’ve had some good feedback. So I’m going a bit deeper this week.

I’m talking about taking something you don’t particularly like doing and doing it the same way, every day (or so), until it becomes a routine. This works because routines become automatic. “I’ve always done it this way”. Not so good if we’re talking 3 hours of TV every night. A bit better if we’re talking 20 minutes hard exercise before 730am.

It starts with willpower. The sheer will to begin to do something. Willpower is a great force but there are two things you need to be aware of. Firstly, willpower is in short supply. Don’t confuse its immediate power with consistency. Willpower is soon depleted. It is difficult to use willpower in the long term to achieve anything.  Secondly, using willpower, or indeed any power, is draining. There’s less left in the tank.

This is where routines come in. Leverage willpower by establishing routines. Like my morning routine I was talking about last time. A little power goes a long way because it kicks off a routine. The willpower required is tiny – it is the willpower required to get up as soon as the Blackberry alarm first snooze is over. That’s the will power. Not much. And the leverage is the routine – the main benefit of which is that I exercise and actually eat some breakfast.

This is the efficient and effective use of will power.

The 800-pound gorilla in the room is our old friend: fear. Fear – the enemy of will. Fear needs to be managed. Something Rory McIlroy clearly managed to do yesterday when he won the US Open golf by a mile. A significant improvement on his efforts a few weeks earlier in Atlanta when the gorilla ate him alive on the last day.

There’s no time here for a treatise on fear but try this – when you feel fear, recognise it, accept it for what it is (some ancient obsolete brain function designed to protect you from something that wanted to eat you over by the swamp), wonder about the poor caveman or woman that needed that protection, and then do what it is you want to do anyway, after checking for sabre-toothed tigers.

So can you really use will power, routine and fear management to do anything you want? Well I think you can. And that’s 90% of the battle, for me. I don’t accept I cannot do something. Sometimes I have been shown to be wrong but that’s not the point. It’s the attitude that matters. Going back to golf, the sports psychologists say you should look at every putt with an overwhelming certainty that it will sink AND to not mind if you miss. This seems internally inconsistent but it is actually management of the fear of failure by understanding that failure is not personal, merely a result you didn’t want.

So how do we put all this together –

1. Design the routine first. Maybe a morning routine. A high-payoff activity you hate doing, e.g. making 20 phone calls a day; speaking to a group. Whatever it is. Routine-ise it. What are you going to do? Where are you going to do it? When are you going to do it – time and frequency?

2. Then apply willpower. Use sparingly, as a catalyst, to begin the routine. Let’s say you want to do your routine every working day. It will take about three weeks for your routine to become so engrained that you won’t need to use any willpower at all after that. You have a new habit. We’re 80% robot. We can use this to our advantage by setting up routines.

3. From the start, manage any fear you have. Recognise it, accept it, but remain unchanged by it.

Worth a try? What’s the worst that can happen? Good luck.

I’ve been playing around with a morning routine, or ritual, for a few weeks now.

Why?

Well, I know of some people who swear by their morning routine. So I thought I’d give it a go. Plus, I know from observing myself that when I’ve had some form of routine in the morning that kick-starts me and focuses me it can help to avoid the admittedly infrequent occasions when I don’t really get started and I end up having one of those unproductive, frustrating days that drive me nuts.

So, a wee while ago I put together my first proper morning routine. It looks like this –

1. Get Up – good start.

Set the alarm and allow myself one press of the “snooze” button. When it goes off a second time I get up. That’s 18 minutes snoozing.

2. Drink – loads.

Descend stairs and drink a large glass of water while the kettle boils. Make coffee.

3. Exercise – so early!

Do 30 minutes of stretching and weights whilst listening to Mahler in my 37^th attempt to get into classical music.

4. Plan The Day – it’s not the plan that matters, it’s the planning (General MacArthur).

Most of what I need to do is already in the diary: client facing time; high-payoff activities. But I just make sure I am absolutely clear what else I must do before the working day is over.

5. Eat – full English!

You must be joking. I’m talking protein shake. I love eating but this is not part of the love. It is a system reboot. Just do it.

6. Get presentable – you may get run over.

Shower/dress etc.

That’s it. Fifty to sixty minutes all in.

It covers the bases –

• Physical – exercise is great and eating is good.
• Mental – planning the day is good for the psyche.
• Emotional – the major emotional component is also the exercise. I cannot tell you how relieved I am after doing thirty reps of the trunk twist while lying on my back with my knees in the air, clutching a 6kg medicine ball between the aforementioned knees. I have dropped the ball once. That will not happen again. Plus, with the exercise I’m wired on endorphins (and Guatemalan coffee).

Keeping to the routine was a bit hard for the first two weeks. As always, I overdid it and tried to stick to it for 7 days/week. Now it’s 5 days/week – the working days. I do get up earlier so that I can have it done by 8/830-ish. Now it’s been about three weeks and it is still a wee bit hard but getting easier.

I am aware that it takes about twenty to thirty days to establish a habit but once you have the habit things get easier. You make your habits and then your habits make you. (Many people claim to have coined this phrase but the first guy was my main man Aristotle).

So, has this been worthwhile?

A resounding “yes!” to that:

I think the key is the exercise. It stretches my muscles and kick-starts my system. And equally importantly, exercise also touches me emotionally – it just lifts me. It makes me happy. Endorphins. So the exercise is a big, big plus.

Eating is also good. I have never, ever felt hungry in the morning so the great temptation is to skip breakfast. But when I actually eat breakfast (especially a protein shake) it’s like a massive switch inside me has been slammed into the ON position.

And finally, despite invariably having my day filled with high-payoff activities, it is good just to spend ten minutes really, really defining what tasks I must do today and I will not stop until they are done. Never start the day until you have finished the day on paper (as Jim Rohn said. Aristotle would have liked Jim).

I still resist the discipline of the morning ritual but I am beginning to love it and it has huge benefits.

I guess I’m about twenty days in now. It takes thirty days to make a habit. So if I persevere for another ten days or so my morning routine will become a habit that I will have made and then I can allow the habit to make me…

I’m so rubbish at golf. Came 94^th out of 96 last Saturday. Aarrgghh! (I take some solace from the fact that there were twelve bad boys and girls who failed to return their scorecard, presumably because if it isn’t recorded it never happened, right?)

I am not scared of failure. I have got used to it. As the American golfer Tom Watson famously said – “if you want to double your rate of success, double your rate of failure.” I must be getting pretty close to a major breakthrough as I have upped my failure rate significantly.

So, how do you double your rate of failure?

Well, there are two forms of failure –

Failure through action…

And…

Failure through inaction.

Hmmm.

Let’s take the first one first:

Failure through Action

This is absolutely forgivable. We do stuff. We review what happens. We make changes because we didn’t quite get what we wanted. Simple. What happens if someone – you’re boss, loving spouse, yourself – gives you a kick up the backside because you didn’t get the exact results you forecast? Well you could be forgiven for avoiding getting things wrong again by swerving all challenging stuff as it comes to you. This is bad.

Or you could just jab a pointy stick in your tormentor’s eye and say “there is no failure, just results I didn’t want, you numbskull.”

The more stuff you do the more you find out what works and what doesn’t. And provided the mistakes are stopped early, the learning can be extracted from them at low cost. This works in marketing. It works in most fields. Fail quickly and cheaply and you quickly build a huge reserve of knowledge on what does work. There is no success without failure. But you still need to manage risk of course. No failure should be bigger than it has to be. We should not be fearful of failure, we should be fearful of the absence of failure because that’s symptomatic of inaction which takes me nicely to …

Failure through Inaction.

This is insidious as it is often invisible. Fear of failure tends to be more focused on action: doing things and failing, rather than inaction…not doing things and failing.

Now clearly if you are observably not doing something you should be doing you will get pulled up for it. And rightly so. Where failure through inaction is at its most dangerous is when the inaction is about failure to behave in a certain way. I’m using “behave” in its neutral form – how we conduct ourselves. Nothing to do with “bad” or “good” behaviour.

I’m talking about staying inside your comfort zones: that mental straight jacket that we all have. And not taking managed risks. Not having the difficult conversations. Not reflecting and making changes. Becoming stuck in our ways. Keeping the song inside us.

Looking inside ourselves and taking the right actions may well make us and they are very unlikely to break us. It really is an asymmetric bet – the upside is bigger than the downside. If you place a small number of bets where the upside is bigger than the downside you make a bob or two. If you place hundreds of these bets, you get rich…

Of course there are risks but when you are considering doing something a wee bit “out there” ask yourself – what’s the worst that can happen? Could I get back to the pre-action reality or am I irredeemably lost at sea? How can I de-risk this?

And here’s a great question – “What’s the risk in doing nothing?” People often think doing nothing has no risk. This is seldom true.

So here’s my challenge to you for this stupidly short week. It’s in two parts –

1. Stop doing something that you thought would give you a benefit but simply isn’t. I’m talking about ACTIONS that may be difficult to stop but are FAILING and therefore should be stopped).

2. Start doing something that may take you forward. Trial it and see what happens. I’m talking about ACTIONS that may seem difficult but might help you SUCCEED. Manage the risks. Do it for a short while and review. Then make changes if necessary, and keep going.

There is no failure. It’s just feedback. And we need feedback don’t we?

It’s a wonder we ever get anything right.

Cognitive bias is a fancy-pants name for all the “distortions in the human mind that are hard to avoid and lead to perceptions and judgements that deviate from the reality…” – Rudiger and Pohl in “Cognitive Illusions”. I haven’t read it.

And all this happens involuntarily and without our knowledge.

Jeeze.  That explains a few things…

Hindsight Bias…the inclination to see past events as predictable.

Yup – got that one.

Fundamental Attribution Error…basically – “he did bad stuff because he’s bad”, not because he was in a bad situation (and maybe had been for a very long time).

I’m OK on this one I think.

Rationalisation…constructing a logical justification for an emotional decision.

Used to do this. Not anymore. I now know I am much, much more emotional than I ever thought. Just kept a lid on it.

Bandwagon Effect…the tendency to do or believe something because others do.

Ha! Don’t have any of this…or do I? Hmmm. The casual observer may disagree.

Confirmation Bias…a classic. Searching for evidence to back up your case, rather than gathering all the evidence and taking a balanced view.

Got this one licked usually, unless I’m clearly right in which case I’m not biased am I?

Status-Quo Bias…the preference towards alternatives that maintain the current situation.

AV anyone? I’ll be voting yes. Anarchy in the UK!

Illusion of control…the tendency for human beings to believe they can control outcomes when they cannot.

Messed up big on this one once when v young. Cost my employer a bob or too. Still, we all learned from it!

Recallability Trap…giving great weight to recent events over past events.

The M1 is shut just now because there was a fire in a scrap yard near to the carriageway. I heard some politician calling for specific new legislation to stop scrap yards going on fire. I laughed out loud while chopping a shallot. Almost cut my bloody hand off. The boys said “what is it Daddy?” I couldn’t begin to explain.

Sunk Cost Bias…another classic. To make decisions in a way that justifies past decisions, even if they are no longer relevant.

I know someone who will not throw stuff out because at that point it becomes “a waste”. No, if you don’t use it and it’s lying around, it’s already a waste. I’m not telling you who this person is. I don’t think she reads my blog. Why would she?

Loss Aversion…tendency to strongly prefer avoiding losses to making gains.

Here’s a question for you. You buy a share in company A for £10 and one in company B for £10. Two weeks later the A share is at £5 and the B share is at £15. What do you do? –

a) sell both

b) keep both

c) sell A and keep B

d) keep A and sell B

Answer at the bottom.

Anchoring…when making a decision, the mind gives too much weight to the first information received.

Yes….I never liked him from the moment I met him. Oops.

Survivorship Bias….failure to include “deaths” in your research, e.g. when doing market research failing to include in the sample those who no longer buy, or got close but swerved at the last minute.

Goodness me we are frail beings are we not? All these biases to overcome. The brain really is amazing, but, as I’ve said before, it’s not user-friendly and has no manual. Still, forewarned is forearmed, as they say.

ANSWER

c) sell A and keep B.

Cut your losses and ride your winners. Most people would keep A and wait for it to “come good”. They would also sell B to realise a small gain. The likelihood is that A will continue to decline and B will continue to rise, so selling A to prevent further losses and holding B to realise greater gains is the correct answer, usually. But loss aversion prevents us from doing the right thing.