Susan Peirce Thompson on Eating to Achieve Top Mental Performance

255 Pages·2015·1.92 MB·English

Table of Contents
3 – Daniel Pink on Motivating Top Performance
12 – Adam Grant on Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
23 – Tom Rath on Best Practices for Eating, Moving, and Sleeping
36 – Greg McKeown on Determining What is Essential and Eliminating Everything Else
49 – Shawn Achor on Staying Positive in a Stressful Workplace
59 – Richard Wiseman on How to Change Your Life in 59 Seconds
68 – Susan Cain: An Introvert’s Guide to Peak Performance
75 – Christine Carter on How to Be Happier at Work
86 – Warren Berger on Asking Smarter Questions
96 – Gretchen Rubin on Changing Your Habits
109 – Michelle Segar on How to Get More Exercise Without Going to the Gym
117 – Laura Vanderkam on What the World’s Most Successful People Do Differently
126 – David Allen on Getting the Right Things Done
136 – David Burkus on How to Elevate Your Creativity
145 – Dorie Clark on How to Network Like a Thought Leader
157 – Marshall Goldsmith on How to Lead Like a CEO
165 – Susan Peirce Thompson on Eating to Achieve Top Mental Performance
176 – Tracy Brower on How to Create Abundance in Your Work and Life
184 – Todd Henry on How to Be Brilliant at a Moment’s Notice
194 – David Rock on How to Listen Like a Leader
201 – Scott Barry Kaufman on What Creative Geniuses Do Differently
210 – Brigid Schulte on Balancing Work, Life and Play
221 – Michelle Gielan on Inspiring Positivity in Others
233 – Peter Bregman on Improving Your Performance in 18 Minutes a Day
244 – Rory Vaden on How to Multiply Your Time
255 – About the Host: Ron Friedman, Ph.D.
THE PEAK WORK PERFORMANCE SUMMIT 2
Daniel Pink
Motivating Top Performance
Daniel H. Pink is the author of five provocative books, including three
long-running New York Times bestsellers: A Whole New Mind, Drive, and To
Sell Is Human. Dan’s books have been translated into thirty-five languages and
have sold more than two million copies worldwide. He lives in Washington,
DC, with his wife and their three children.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Dan Pink, thank you so much for joining us at the Summit. It’s a
real pleasure to have you here.
Dan Pink: It’s great to be here.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: As many of our viewers know, you wrote Drive, which has become
the book on human motivation for a popular audience. In it, you identify three factors that
motivate top performance. What are they?
Dan Pink: At work, the key is to move away from these controlling contingent motivators.
I like to call them “if, then” rewards — as in, “If you do this, then you get that” — because
science shows pretty clearly that they are good for simple and short-term tasks, but not so
good for complex and long-term tasks. For complex and long-term tasks, you absolutely
want to be able to pay people well, but once you do that, you want to offer them autonomy,
mastery, and purpose. Autonomy is a sense of self-direction. Mastery is a chance to make
progress, to get better at something that matters. Purpose is the knowledge of why you are
doing something as well as how to do it.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Let’s talk about ways that people watching this can apply these
principles to the way they work. Let’s focus on autonomy first. At many companies, work-
ers have limited flexibility in how they do their job. That’s especially true early in a career,
when you’re hired in a lower level position. What can you do to maximize your autonomy
when you’re working in a role that doesn’t offer a lot of choice?
Dan Pink: This is from the perspective of the person working?
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Correct.
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Dan Pink: There is some great guidance here from a researcher at Yale School of Manage-
ment named Amy Wrzesniewski, who has written a lot about what she calls “job crafting.”
She has found that high performers — from janitors in hospitals to people at higher levels
of organizations — tend to reconfigure and re-craft their job in a small way that makes it
more fully their own. Her lovely example with a janitor comes from janitors in a hospital
who would talk to patients to check in on how they were doing and find ways to help the
nurses. This shows that what you can take small steps to try to re-craft the job so that it’s
more self-directed and meaningful.
Almost every job has that; it’s actually kind of a fascinating notion. We tend to think that
there are these job descriptions and people only swim within the lanes of that job descrip-
tion; but if you actually look at what happens in organizations, people are crafting and
re-crafting what they’re doing. If you go in as a young employee and say, “I need to do what
I’m supposed to do, but part of my job is to re-craft what I do and how I do it in a way that’s
meaningful to me,” you can get a lot of satisfaction from that.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Going beyond the job description that’s been handed to you and
looking for proactive ways in which you can shape your role.
Dan Pink: Yes, and it doesn’t have to be big things. People have a lot more latitude than
they think. The secret of job crafting, according to Wrzesniewski, is not saying, “Oh, even
though I’m an account executive, I’m going to start writing lines of code for the software
that we’re selling.” But it could be saying, “Even though I am an account executive, I might
go talk to the coders and go out to lunch with them because that will give me a better
understanding of the product that I’m marketing.” No one is telling you to do that. That’s
not in your job description, but it’s meaningful. You self-direct and it makes you a better
performer.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Now, what if your barrier to autonomy isn’t your role in the compa-
ny? What if it’s the personality of the person to whom you report? Do you have any tips for
increasing your autonomy when you work for a micromanager?
Dan Pink: That’s a very real challenge for a lot of people. There are a couple of things that
you can do.
Number one is, if you want the autonomy and feel like you need permission from that per-
son, ask for it; but ask for it only in terms of that person’s interests. Don’t say, “I really need
to feel more autonomous.” That’s not going to work with a lot of those people. Instead say,
“Hey boss, I have this great idea for how you can achieve more and accomplish your objec-
tives,” and it just so happens that the pathway there is greater autonomy.
The other thing is to just do things. In most cases, job crafting is done without any for-
mal permission. People just start doing it. There’s nothing to be said; you just start doing
something that is meaningful to you. If you’re doing something that is meaningful to you,
enhances your performance, and helps out the organization — but your boss tells you to
stop, then you might be working in the wrong place. That can be a signal that it’s time to go
somewhere else.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Let’s turn to mastery. One of the tips that you offer in your book for
enhancing your level of competence is to periodically close the door and conduct a perfor-
mance review on yourself. Do you conduct performance reviews on yourself and, if so, are
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there some questions that you include that might be helpful for people watching this?
Dan Pink: That’s a great question. I do a modified version that I stole from Peter Druck-
er. I don’t do it monthly, though I probably should. I do it at around a six-month juncture,
but not religiously at six months. It could be at some sort of meaningful break instead. For
instance, I did one when the summer came to an end and there was a kind of turning of the
page because my kids went back to school - one of them went back to college.
I write out just a few paragraphs saying how I want things to go for the next, say, four
months and some pitfalls that I need to think about. It’s a mix between Peter Drucker’s
advice and what is often called a pre-mortem, as opposed to a post-mortem. Then I file it
away in Dropbox and go back to look at it however many months later to see if my expecta-
tions were right and what the pitfalls were and whether or not I avoided them.
If I were more diligent, I would probably do it monthly, but that process works reasonably
well for me. The questions that I ask myself at the beginning are, “What do I want to ac-
complish?” and, “What do I want to learn?” Those are the two most important things. The
other important one is, “What are the pitfalls?” If you start out at the outside of a time peri-
od and address those three questions, put it aside and come back and revisit that after one
month, two months, three months, whatever, you’ll learn something.
It’s weird. I’m not sure I can draw any kind of great conclusions on that from my own ex-
perience. Sometimes I’m totally wrong about the pitfalls, sometimes I’m totally right and
still don’t avoid them. I’ve also found that my expectations often tend to be too extreme:
I think, “It’s going to go really well…” and it ends up being okay; it’s just all right. It’s an
interesting exercise in that.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: I have a friend who is an executive coach and recommends that her
clients do something similar. The only difference is, rather than filing it away in Dropbox,
she has them staple it to the front of their notebook so that they are forced to look at it ev-
ery time they open their to-do list.
Dan Pink: That’s interesting.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Let’s turn to purpose, the third factor you’ve identified. Purpose,
of course, is the experience of feeling like you are contributing to something bigger than
yourself. What are some concrete things that I can do right now to achieve a sense of pur-
pose in my work?
Dan Pink: In the time since I’ve written the book, I actually have a slightly different ver-
sion of purpose and a way to describe it. I was slightly off in the book. I missed an import-
ant component.
You can think of one type of purpose as Purpose with a capital “P.” That is exactly what
you said, Ron — doing something in service of something larger than yourself: feeding the
hungry, solving the climate crisis, whatever.
I also think there is another kind of purpose out there that you can think of as purpose with
a small “p,” which is just making a contribution, doing something that others care about,
and asking, “If I didn’t come into work today, would things be worse?”
People want to know at an existential level if anybody would notice and if something
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would not get done as a consequence of their working or not working. Those are two as-
pects of purpose, capital “P” and small “p,” and to me they drill down to slightly different
questions. Capital “P” purpose is, “Am I making a difference?” Small “p” purpose is, “Am I
making a contribution? Am I doing something that contributes to someone else or helping
my teammate get something done?”
One of the things that I find useful to do, maybe twice a week, is turn a “how” conversa-
tion into a “why” conversation. I like small, lightweight interventions and I try to do this
myself. You can take it from the individual approach or you can take it from the leadership
approach, from the angle of the individual contributor or from the boss. Let’s say you are a
boss and do this twice a week. Bosses always tell you how to do stuff: here’s how you make
a sales call, here’s how you do a presentation, etc. That is helpful for bosses in getting bet-
ter work out of their people. But just twice a week, turn those conversations into a “why”
conversation instead.
As a writer, I find this very useful. Instead of saying, “Okay, how can I finish this article;
how can I write this essay?” It is important to ask myself why I am doing this. Why am I
even writing this in the first place? Asking why can often give you a North Star, and — at
the risk of being overly and poorly poetic — that North Star can light your way.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: You literally will stop in the middle and ask yourself…
Dan Pink: Not always; but sometimes, especially when I’m stymied. Say I’m writing an
op-ed and wondering how I should start. If I’m stymied, I say, “Okay, wait, cut, fade out —
why am I doing this? Why am I doing this in the first place? What am I trying to contribute
here? What am I trying to do here?” That can help me to reboot and re-center, and give me
a bigger picture.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Very interesting. In To Sell is Human — your follow up to Drive —
you examine the research on persuasion and make a critical point that, to be effective in
just about any role, it helps to be persuasive. What are some things that we can do in order
to make ourselves more persuasive at work?
Dan Pink: You had it exactly right. If you look at what people do on the job, they are spend-
ing an enormous amount of time persuading, influencing, convincing, cajoling, and doing
all those things that “smell” like sales. I don’t think there is a single bullet in how to do this
effectively, but I do think it is important to understand how the landscape has changed. In
any kind of persuasive effort — whether you are selling a labeler, a car, consulting services,
or even an idea — you have to recognize that the seller and the buyer have generally the
same access to information. That’s a big change.
In the old days, the seller always had more information than the buyer. This asymmetric
information relationship is the reason for the idiom “buyer beware.” That asymmetry has
sort of balanced out now. Not everywhere, not entirely, but the gap has closed incredibly.
Sellers are on notice that the way to be an effective seller of anything in a world of informa-
tion parity is to concentrate on understanding the other side’s point of view: What is the
other side thinking, what is the other side’s perspective, what’s the other side’s interest?
That’s, hard for us sometimes, but it’s a powerful skill.
The other thing that I would recommend is looking for ways to respond to the changed
condition. Everybody has access to information, but a genuine expert can curate that
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information and make sense of it more readily. You can separate out the signal from the
noise in that information.
Another big aspect, especially in sales, is problem solving. Problem solving as a skill is less
important. A lot of us don’t realize that, if our customer or prospect can precisely identi-
fy their problem, they can find a solution without us. They don’t need us, unless they are
wrong about their problem or they don’t even know what their problem is. Throughout
white-collar work, including in selling and persuasion, the premium has shifted from the
skill of problem solving to the skill of problem finding. Can you see problems before any-
one else?
Those are some general tips on how to approach persuasion. Approach it with a sense of
humility because you have information parity, and try to understand the other’s point of
view and go beyond the merely transactional things from accessing information to curat-
ing it and from solving existing problems to surfacing hidden problems.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: You mentioned seeing things from the perspective of the customer
or the person with whom we are interacting…
Dan Pink: The other person’s, yes.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Right. And there’s an interesting barrier that you discuss in the
book that comes about as our status at work rises. As we become more powerful, we have a
harder time empathizing with others. Why does that happen?
Dan Pink: What the research shows is that — exactly as you said — as we feel more pow-
erful, our ability to take other people’s perspective degrades. There’s actually some logic to
that. If I’m in charge, I can’t spend all of my time wondering, “What does Ron think about
this? What does Susie think about this? What does Freda think about this? What does José
think about this?” I’m never going to get anything done. You have to adopt that action ori-
entation that limits your ability to spend time considering people’s perspective.
Power can lead people to become too heavily anchored in their own vantage point. They
say, “Hey, if you were as powerful as me, you would be the one in power. So I don’t care
what you think.” That holds back an enormous amount of leaders because they have little
coercive power. Without a cult of personality or incredibly ginormous thermonuclear car-
rots and sticks, you don’t have a lot of power to coerce. You need the power of empathy, to
ask, “Can I see your perspective, understand your point of view and find common ground?”
There’s this peculiar inverse relationship between feelings of power and perspective tak-
ing, and it’s where a lot of bosses go awry.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: What do we do to remain empathetic even as we rise up the ladder
at work?
Dan Pink: Part of it is being conscious of this phenomena. A lot of this stuff happens below
our conscious awareness. We’re not saying, “I’m so powerful, I’m not going to take your
perspective.” It’s just the way it plays out. If you’re conscious of these phenomena, that’s
one step.
The other thing that you can do, and it would be best to do this before an encounter, is dial
down your feelings of power just a little bit. This doesn’t mean you give back your salary or
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resign your job or anything like that, but you say, “You know, I want Ron to do something.
Ron’s a smart guy, and what’s in it for him to do it this way? If I sense that he is resisting,
why is he resisting? Maybe there’s a barrier I can kick out of the way.”
That lowering of your feelings of power at that moment can actually make you a more
effective leader. It’s a little counterintuitive for people because, when we face resistance,
we always want to dial our feelings of power up — to force or coerce people a little bit more.
There is an interesting set of data showing that notching it back the other way might be
more effective.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: That’s a very interesting suggestion and I imagine it would be kind
of hard for any of the managers watching this. As you pointed out, the impulse is to try and
assert your position of leadership...
Dan Pink: Just to be clear, that’s often a good idea, but not always. I want to suggest think-
ing about power as a dial and recognize that dial goes up and it goes down. Adjusting your
feelings of power — not your titular power, your feelings of power — can work in both
directions and be enormously effective.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Very interesting. One group whose performance depends on being
persuasive is salespeople, who also have to stomach a lot of rejection. One way the best
salespeople overcome that rejection is by interpreting their failures in a way that benefits
their future performance. How do successful sellers explain their setbacks and what can we
all learn from their approach?
Dan Pink: This is the work of Martin Seligman at the University of Pennsylvania. Years
ago, Martin did a well-known study about life insurance salespeople and found that the
single biggest predictor of their success was what he called their “explanatory style.” They
had a way of explaining failure that wasn’t delusional, wasn’t making it someone else’s
fault, but actually focused on what Seligman calls the three P’s: personal, pervasive, and
permanent.
Rejection is so toxic to us — we hate it so much — that a lot of us will go out of our way to
avoid being in a position to even risk it. It feels terrible, and there’s probably some good
evolutionary explanation for that. If you were constantly being rejected, your chances of
survival were probably not great. If rejection felt bad, you would do anything you could to
avoid that feeling. Seligman says that we tend to turn rejection into a catastrophe; we say,
“It’s all my fault, it always happens, and it’s going to ruin everything.”
Seligman’s advice is to re-explain it to yourself, challenging your assumptions and say,
like you would for a friend, “Okay, it wasn’t really all your fault or they were just not ready
to buy. Is it really pervasive? No, it’s not pervasive, Ron, because you closed the deal last
week. Is it going to ruin everything? Come on, there are very few things that ruin every-
thing.” Recasting your explanatory style along the lines that Seligman is talking about can
be really effective.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: Another thing that persuasive salespeople do well is providing
clarity. You provide an example in your book of two irrational questions that we can all ask
when we’re trying to motivate others. What are those questions?
Dan Pink: This is interesting work from Mike Pantalon at Yale University. It’s a technique
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called motivational interviewing. It’s been around for a while and is often used in thera-
peutic settings. The idea is that, if somebody is resistant to doing something, you ask him
or her two questions.
First, on a scale of one to ten — one meaning not at all likely, ten meaning ready to do it
right now — how likely are you to do your homework, clean your room, or look for a job -
anything? Since these people are generally resistant to what they are doing, the answer is
often very low; for example a three.
That might aggravate us as parents, bosses, or counselors; but instead of being aggravated
by that low number, you ask the follow-up question: “Okay, Ron, you are a three…” — sorry
to keep using you as the example for all these bad behavior — but, “Okay, Ron, you are a
three, why didn’t you pick a lower number?”
That’s the key. The reason that is effective is because, at that point, that person has to see
why he or she is not a two. If we’re talking about looking for a job, they might say, “Well, I
probably should look for a job because I am thirty-five years old and I don’t want my wife
to carry all the burden of my family and I do have some skills.” What happens then — and
this is the key point — is people begin articulating their own reasons for doing something.
When people have their own reasons for doing something, they believe those reasons more
deeply and adhere to the behavior more strongly. That’s the power of that kind of one-two
punch of peculiar questions.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: That’s interesting. What do you do if the person says to you, “You
know what, Dan? On that ten-point scale, I am a one.”
Dan Pink: Okay, great. This is actually a really interesting question. You say, “What could
we do to make it a two?” In those kinds of cases, there’s usually some kind of barrier there.
Continuing with the job example, it could be, “You know what? I don’t have any suits.” Or,
“I have no idea how to write a resume.” Then you can respond by saying, “Okay great, we
will help you write a resume and that could get you to a two.” Usually you get twos and
threes. When you get a one, it usually means that there is a barrier that is preventing them
from making any motion at all.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: I want to close with a broad question. You’ve spent the last decade
thinking carefully about the psychology of work. Based on everything you’ve seen and
read, how do you think work is going to change in the years to come, and what can we do to
prepare ourselves for the workplace of the future?
Dan Pink: That’s a really good question. Another good question. You know, it’s weird —
there’s no single answer to that question. It’s going in two very different directions.
Certain kinds of work are moving toward being much more humanistic, much more about
having autonomy, much more about being — as Studs Terkel once famously said — a
source of daily meaning along with daily bread. There’s a much greater sense of purpose
there, and many jobs are moving in that direction.
At the same time, other jobs are not. There are jobs where people feel that they are under-
paid, they are not treated well, they are often monitored and there are a lot of things going
on that are dehumanizing.
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We’re seeing, throughout the workplace, a kind of wide split, not only in wages and sal-
aries and what people are earning, but simply in terms of how they are treated and how
much we — as bosses, as customers, and others — respect their work. We need to get both
of those groups going in the same direction. There are some good examples of that — Amy
Wrzesniewski’s, which we talked about before, and job crafting, which is very important for
lower skilled and lower wage employees.
I’m a little concerned about the degree of monitoring that’s going on in the workplace
where companies are measuring keystrokes in the name of efficiency. That can end up
being counterproductive because it’s dehumanizing. There’s this hospitality/restaurant
view of work where you have people who are in front of the house and people who are at
the back of the house. The people who are in front of the house get better pay, more free-
dom, and more money while the people at the back of the house are hidden. There are a lot
of folks in this economy right now who occupy the back of the house and we’re not treating
them well enough in terms of recognition, in terms of the money, or in terms of challenge.
If we make an effort to take those folks and steer them in the direction that work is going
for people like you or me, then we have a more humane and productive workforce.
Ron Friedman, Ph.D.: If someone watching this is thinking about leaving their job and
looking for a new position, are there some things that you recommend they look for?
Dan Pink: In terms of the components of the job or the quality of the job? I would talk to
past and present employees and ask what it’s like to work there. Think about your values.
Do you value autonomy? If you do, ask about that. What kind of autonomy are you talking
about? Are you talking about being able to come and go to the office as you want, or are you
more interested in being able to pick your assignments? Or both?
Do your due diligence, get on the phone, get on email, find people who work there now,
find people who used to work there, and try to get the ground truth of what it’s really like to
work there.
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