The Achievement Habit (18 page)

A good way to become aware of your body’s ability to see and learn is to disrupt the usual use of your senses. A blind walk is an easy exercise that is both enjoyable and informative.

The blind walk can have various forms. The form I use most often is to have two people work as partners. The main rule is that they cannot talk to each other during the exercise. One partner stays “blind”—closing his eyes or using a blindfold—for a period of thirty minutes or more. After that time, the partners switch roles without talking, and the other person stays “blind” for an equal amount of time. Then they both open their eyes and can talk. Because this is a group activity, they also debrief with the entire group.

The idea is that the “sighted” person acts as a guide for the blind person. Usually the sighted person’s job is to facilitate an exploration that will stimulate the blind person’s other senses. This helps the person explore the environment in new ways, using the senses of touch, hearing, taste, and smell. Once in an interesting spot, it is important that the guide gives the blind person a lot of freedom and yet maintains responsibility for his safety, staying aware of his desires and sensibilities. Does he prefer to play it safe and move cautiously, for example, or would he like to run and climb trees while blind?

Most of the time the guide should not lead the blind person by the hand. Most leading can easily be done hands-off, using mainly the sense of sound. It is very easy for the blind person to follow the sound of the leader’s steps, snapping fingers, or tapping on objects.

This exercise promotes sensory awareness and opens up new ways of “seeing” the world. I once spent a weekend with my eyes closed. My guide and I went to restaurants and supermarkets, played catch, rode in cars and in an airplane, and even bicycled. My insights were much deeper and different from those I had gotten from short blind-walk exercises.

The next time you’re feeling stuck, take a blind walk or change your sensory inputs in another way. Chances are, this will help you to achieve what you are after. Even if it doesn’t, you will learn to “see” the world differently by using your body in new ways, and you will have new sensibilities and richer perceptual experiences.

Improvisation, or improv, is an art form originally associated with the theater. In recent years at Stanford it has spread from its home in the drama department into many parts of the university. Improv directly involves the body and enhances spontaneity, observation, communication, and other vital skills. In addition, many of the common improv warm-up exercises are excellent analogues for problem-solving skills, and as such make excellent teaching tools. One of my favorites is called Word-Ball.

Before doing Word-Ball for the first time, it is good to introduce it to a group without its members using words. First, just have them practice tossing an imaginary ball. A group of six to
twelve people form a circle, and one player starts by tossing an imaginary ball to another player. The receiving player catches the imaginary ball and immediately tosses it to another player.

The objective is to have the imaginary ball moving all the time. The learning starts at this point. Some people do not pay attention, so they either never get the ball thrown to them, or they miss it if it is. Other people clown it up. This may be funny, but mainly it just stops the action and slows down the ball. This warm-up is a great analogue to many forms of group activities, such as brainstorming, meetings, and conversations.

Once the group gets the hang of throwing the ball, it is time to introduce a word. Now, in addition to throwing the imaginary ball, the player throws a word out as he throws the ball to another player. The catching player repeats the word she has caught and then immediately, without forethought, throws a different word. The objective of the game is to keep words (and the ball) moving among players as quickly as possible.

Players have to learn to trust in their spontaneity and stay focused on the game, which tests how well they maintain their attention on their intention to catch and throw words. Now, in addition to the pitfalls mentioned for the practice without words, we add the difficulty of people’s inability to be spontaneous in generating a word; many people do not trust their own abilities to respond in real time.

If you stay in your head instead of the game, you will not really be participating in group activities—not just in Word-Ball but also in brainstorming, meetings, and conversations.

There are many variations of Word-Ball. You can have Sound-Ball, where you throw and receive sounds. You can have Theme-Ball, where you throw and receive words related to a certain theme (for example, water). You can have Concept-Ball,
where you throw and receive short concepts related to a certain theme (for example, if the theme is water, someone can say “conservation”). The variations are endless. I find that, in all cases, the best learning comes from using the same basic ground rules: keep the ball moving, stay in the game, be spontaneous (don’t stockpile), and be a team player.

It is also common, once the group gets warmed up and performing well, to introduce a second and even a third ball, so there are multiple ball throwers and catchers at the same time. Although I find it less appealing, it is also possible to use a real softball or other physical object such as a knotted towel instead of the imaginary ball.

The practice of improv has a set of commandments, the two most relevant of which for our purposes are “Yes, and” and “No blocking.” Let’s give them a try!

Two people partner, and one leads off with a suggested action. The other then must reply: “Yes, and . . . ,” accepting the original suggestion and building upon it to keep the story going. The first person then makes another suggestion, and they keep building. The net result is forward movement of ideas and a fun feeling of collaboration.

Blocking
is another term used in improv. When you are blocking, you stop the flow of action and creative movement. The partner says no to every suggestion, or gives a reason why it will not be a good idea, or brings up something entirely at odds with the original suggestion. The net result is the generation of a blockage with no way of moving ahead. This is a downer; it generates feelings of opposition rather than collaboration.

The applicability of these rules to all sorts of problem solving and human interaction is obvious. The recognition of the broad utility of improv concepts has taken the art form into many areas beyond its origins in theater and storytelling. It is worthwhile incorporating improv ideas into your professional and personal lives.

You know what streaking is, don’t you? It’s when someone runs naked in public, intending to be noticed. What does that have to do with the topic of this chapter? Well, it has everything to do with it for me. Why else would I have put it in? I use the word
streaking
not in the naked sense but instead as a method of unusual disruption that charges the energy level where a group is working.

In the 1970s I was about thirty minutes into a tedious lecture on mechanical vibrations to a very bored class of seniors. Suddenly the door opened and a naked man entered, ran one lap around the classroom, and left without a word.

The energy level in the room went from -10 to +80. (Don’t ask me what the units on these numbers are, or how I measured them; we’ll just call it the Bernie Scale.) I was amazed that when we all recovered and I resumed the lecture, it seemed like a different class. My speaking became energized, and the students’ attention improved significantly. And even better, that change lasted. Four weeks were left in the term, and they went much better than the first six weeks. The streaker had changed my course for the better.

After this experience I understood the beneficial effects of random interruptions to classes. The more bizarre the event, the better it is. I call them
streaks
in honor of the first time it happened to me with the actual streaker. Most people do not like interruptions to their lectures or workshops. I have learned to welcome and cherish them as random gifts.

If I notice the energy level in a group or class is low, I can declare a break at any time. In fact, it is not uncommon for me to ask a group to stand up and take a stretch or go on a short break. As useful as these activities are, though, they do not hold the same energy charge as when an outside interruption blesses you with a streak.

Unfortunately, streaks are rather rare, unless you are devious and arrange for them yourself. So the best I have been willing to do is use the
concept
of streaking to give myself permission to be honest about what is going on in the room.

I no longer ignore it or try to hide the truth from myself or my classes: if I feel I am being boring, I stop talking. If I feel the
energy level in the room is low, I point it out to the group and do something about it. For me the gift of the streaks has brought a greater willingness to be responsible for the energy and attention level whenever I am with people, regardless of whether it is a class, a meeting, or simply people working together in a group.

Working well in a team requires you to be flexible and tolerant. Changing the physical surroundings and doing group exercises can help the team be more cohesive and effective at problem solving. Even when your group is all about “business,” leaving room for play can only improve the working environment and boost productivity.

CHAPTER 8

Always certain; often wrong.

—Anonymous

Stanford’s d.school has become famous for methodologies centered on using collaborative approaches to inspire human-centered innovations. We always ask: Who are the people we are solving the problem for, and what do they want and need? Human-centered interactions (which mean that people come first) are at the heart of our work because we have found that the achievement of almost any dream relies on our ability to infuse empathy into the project. Usually we think about empathy in terms of getting to know strangers or outside groups so we can understand them better, and thus assist them with some of their needs. We can also turn the idea of empathy inward, using it to better understand ourselves, our friends, our families, and the people we work with.

What you can achieve in life has a lot to do with your self-image. If you see yourself as a risk taker and a doer, you’re more likely to take risks and do! If you see yourself as cautious and scared, it may make the road to achieving your goals a lot more
protracted and difficult. You may not even know for sure how you define yourself, so let’s figure out where your self-image comes from and if it suits where you want to be.

When we are young, we learn from those around us. Naturally, our parents and siblings have a strong influence on who we become as we start to mature. We may be very fortunate and start life in a warm, supporting environment. We may be less fortunate, and start in a harsh threatening environment. Whether we grow up feeling accepted and loved by our family or harshly judged and rejected, it is almost impossible to escape those imprints. We may turn out to be very similar to our family members, or very different; either way, they have influenced us in many subtle ways. They are normally the first people who teach us what and how we are supposed to achieve in life.

When my younger son was five years old, a doctor asked him if he preferred to take an antibiotic in the form of pills or an injection. His reply was, “Whichever is cheaper.” Clearly, he already had picked up an attitude toward money from his parents. Now, at age fifty-five, he still has the same attitude toward spending money.

I believe I am very different from my father, and my wife believes she is very different from her mother. Still, the most hurtful thing my wife can say to me is, “You are just like your father”; and I can deliver an equally upsetting blow by telling her she is just like her mother.

In truth, we both carry some of our parents with us, in spite of our desire not to. We deny having the traits that we did not like in our parents, even if it is obvious we do share some of those traits. On the other hand, the things we liked about our
parents we more willingly accept as part of our inheritance, even when there is little evidence that we actually share them.

Examine your family’s viewpoints and how they have affected your adult life.

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What do they think about money?

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What do they think is a suitable life path for you?

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What are their views on authority?

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What are their views on hard work? Grades? Blue-collar versus white-collar work? Getting ahead in life? Work versus play? Hobbies? Taking risks professionally and personally? Personal fulfillment?

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Which of their views do you agree with, and which don’t you? Have you tailored your life in response to their views? Is it helpful to you, harmful, or neutral? Which influences of theirs are better off discarded? Which can you learn from?

On the way to maturity, we go through several stages. The first big break from the nuclear family typically occurs when we enter school and must learn to deal with strangers without the protection of parents or their surrogates. We need to learn to face challenges, competition, frustrations, and the judgment of peers. Schoolmates can be unkind, and we may face physical violence or ridicule.

It is in this environment that we first get to look at ourselves and start to form a self-image that reflects who we are rather than who our parents think we are. If we are lucky, we find a kindred spirit who is usually much like us and becomes our
closest friend. This friend becomes a way to know ourselves better because we are free to share things that we withhold from our parents. With the right friend we are free to explore new aspects of ourselves in a supportive situation as we test and expand the world around us.

In the teenage years this need for intimacy in friendship becomes more diffuse, and more friends enter the circle. This further removes us from our parents, and provides an opportunity for developing and testing our self-image in a new and uncertain environment. It may involve exploration and experimentation into new realms such as sex and drugs. It certainly involves a strong redefinition of self and very strong peer pressure to take on group characteristics. If as adolescents we find a kindred group, our sense of belonging to this world is solidified. If not, it is possible that we might suffer a life of alienation and isolation. Fortunately, most people survive their adolescent traumas, and some are strengthened and made highly self-reliant and resourceful by the experience.

My mother died when I was twelve years old, and my father suffered from a severe manic-depressive disorder. Basically, I was on my own during my teenage years. I held a lot of different after-school and summer jobs, roamed New York City widely, owned cars and motorcycles before I was old enough for a driver’s license, and got into trouble in and out of school. I believe these experiences made me more autonomous and capable than I would have been if I had received the same degree of parental guidance as most of my peers.

In addition to the personal, lifelong sense of loss associated with not having my mother, the downside of being on my own was that I received my guidance from the people on the street.
Not everything they advised was wise or legal. My high school choice was basically made by Charlie, a senior playing football for Stuyvesant High School. I still recall his words of wisdom, “Go to Stuyvesant; you’re not smart enough to get into Bronx Science.”

I allowed guys like Charlie to define the limits of what I could achieve. I could beat myself up for that. I am wiser now, and can look back on my earlier years with empathy for my former self and realize that I had a lot going on in my life emotionally, and that I had not yet figured out who I was or what I wanted.

I prefer not to think of the past with regret. We all have things we’re not particularly proud of, yet we can’t let that fact hover over what we are capable of achieving now. It takes time to gain perspective, particularly during those formative years when we’re testing our self-image against how we see other people. We must be kind to ourselves.

As we leave our teenage years, the next big event in forming self-image occurs when we make a special bond with a love interest. The end result of this pairing is often marriage or some equivalent cohabitation with a partner, and a de facto moving away from the larger group of friends.
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In addition, this is usually a period of personal growth, in which we learn and enhance our marketable skills. We now develop a newer version of our self-image, integrating the influences from our intimate pairing and our skills training into our pictures of ourselves as autonomous adults.

In my case this manifested itself when I got married at the end of my junior year in college. I started to teach as a lecturer after I graduated the following year, and I did graduate work in the afternoons and evenings. Eventually I earned a PhD and obtained an assistant professorship at Stanford University.

College and university professors are not usually trained how to teach; they’re trained to be researchers and to mimic what their teachers have done. It can take many years before they find their own voice as teachers. To some extent they never shake the influence of their professors entirely, just as one is never entirely free of parental (or parental surrogates’) influences.

I had just led a full-day workshop in Taiwan titled “Creative Teaching,” and a young assistant professor was driving me back to my hotel. In the privacy of the car he told me, “That was very interesting. I never thought that I could modify how I teach. I did not realize I could consider redesigning the structure of my job and actually approach the issue of how to teach as a problem-solving activity.” He was visibly shaken: he had seen a yellow-eyed cat. He now understood that teaching needs to be approached from an individual perspective that is broader than simply covering specific material; teachers need to be clear what their intention is for each class session, and develop a style suited to who they are.

Unfortunately, many people are in the same trap—and not only in academia. We are influenced by our teachers and parents to the extent that we spend our lives trying, as best we can, to mimic them, and all too often we end up being second-rate replicas.

One of the social functions of families and the other communities to which we belong is to constrain our behavior. Normally these social constraints serve a valid societal function. Yet they can also have a big downside unless we are willing to confront and—if appropriate—discard them in a productive manner. If we realize we have a unique persona and a history different from that of our teachers and parents, we can end up
being creators of a new synthesis that honors our influences yet is also a true expression of our very being. It is important that we look at our life and work not only from the point of view of its content but also from the question of what our actual intentions are.

Create a list of all the things you intend to accomplish with your work. You can get there by asking yourself a series of questions:

What is my intention?

Is it simply to get through the day?

Is it to get a specific task done?

Is it to have a good time?

Is it to bolster my ego?

Is it to delight?

Is it to inspire?

Is it to motivate?

Is it to escape?

Then, once it is clear what your basic intentions are, the next issue is how to accomplish them. Before you get to that, it is important to be sure your intentions are real and not simply a series of clichés that you have been programmed to recite or have created to appease your self-image. Once you have your basic intentions clear, you can view the method of implementing them as a creative problem-solving activity that will get you unshackled from past practices and mimicked constraints.

If we are with someone we admire, we often start to take on some of her traits. In this way we learn how to act from our parents, romantic partners, friends, teachers, and colleagues. Generally this happens subconsciously. Interestingly, it is also possible to learn from them how
not
to be; this generally requires
some conscious effort. For example, if I grow up in a house where my parents are continually fighting or mad at each other, I can note that it is something I do not want to replicate in my own family. However, unless I specifically guard against it, my parents’ behavior will likely surface in me when the going gets tough with my spouse.

In our minds we all have pictures of what and who we are; these are collectively known as our self-image. Our interpretations of our self-image—that of our bodies, emotions, actions, and thoughts—ultimately define for us who we are. We may have an accurate self-image, or it may be way off the mark.

List five short (one- or two-word) descriptors of the type of person you think you are. Ask five friends or family members to each also list five things that describe who they think you are. Then compare their twenty-five items with your five items. The amount of agreement and disagreement can give you valuable insights regarding the accuracy of your self-image.

Whether or not we have an accurate self-image, it can strongly color who we are, what we do, and how we respond to the world around us. Others can use it to manipulate us, and we can use it to manipulate others. It can be largely positive or largely negative, though for most people it is both.

Often our self-image constrains what we will and will not do, or at least colors our feelings about what we have and have not done. In an ideal world, self-image would form the basis for much of what we did and didn’t do; in the real world, things are
a bit more complicated. Using rationalization, people can justify any action or inaction in an attempt to bring it into accord with their self-image.

Most of us do not have a completely realistic self-image. Harvard business psychologist Chris Argyris concluded, after forty years of studying people, that they “consistently act inconsistently, unaware of the contradiction . . . between the way they think they are acting and the way they really act.”
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Causing our behavior to fall in line with our self-image requires telling ourselves the truth, not lying to ourselves or rationalizing our behavior. Our self-image evolves and changes as we go through life. We may have certain inborn tendencies that get reinforced by our environment, while entirely new aspects come as the result of our experiences as we accumulate successes and failures. Thus one of the ways we can change our behavior is to proactively change our self-image while at the same time bringing our behavior in line with our self-image. In fully integrated people, behavior changes self-image and self-image changes behavior throughout their lives.