#228: How to be buoyant
Good morning good people
Yesterday, after months of rain (for which we are grateful) and weeks of wind, summer arrived on the Cape Peninsula. Gaudy neon ribbons of runners and cyclists wove their way around the coastal road. Happy swimmers floated in waters where, for many of winter’s weeks, I was the sole swimmer. On occasion, I was joined by a neighbour or two. The shivered exchange was always the same, ‘quite tropical today’, with the reply ‘toasty’.
I’ve just come back from three days in the Eastern Cape where I was working with clients planning their next 36 months. Our conversations were held at Port Alfred’s Oceana Beach Reserve. It is a remarkable experience to be exploring strategy with a backdrop of strolling giraffes and grazing herds of zebra and wildebeest.
Comic relief punctuated the beauty and seriousness. A Vervet Monkey, more interested in pastries than Michael Porter, crept into the room and gracefully sprung onto the back of a chair. For a moment, a participant was beautifully framed; his face, serious with concentration, standing above him, a furry face filled with opportunism and cheek. Without a doubt, one of my more memorable engagements.
/strategy
If you have people in your business – that’s all of you – do yourself a favour and get acquainted with Connie Hadley. I have previously shared her research on the power of friendship and the effects of loneliness on performance.
Discussing psychological safety in this recent Work Better podcast, she tells us that health insurer Cigna estimates workplace loneliness costs the US economy $400 billion a year.
She notes that our instinctual response to the current environment’s uncertainty is to keep quiet.
This silence has all sorts of negative effects. Mistakes get hidden (remember, many catastrophes result not from one large failure, but from the compounding effect of many small and ignored mistakes eroding fail safes), new ideas are discarded unexpressed and the status quo certainly not challenged (there goes innovation).
Her advice is simple but often not practised effectively.
Step one in creating psychological safety is to issue the invitation. Ask people to express ideas.
Don’t be vague. If you say you have an ‘open door’ policy for ‘any ideas’, it still leaves a lot of risk in the equation. Invitations like that typically fall flat. Be specific. Be clear about what issue you want feedback on and when you’ll be available to listen. Certainty helps people feel safe.
Then, take care to listen (you can learn how to listen better here) and, especially if the news is bad or challenging, be conscious the person has taken a risk to share it. You might not want to hear it, but you’re better off knowing so take care to communicate appreciation.
(Harvard’s Amy Edmondson is the world’s foremost psychological safety thinker. You can read about her work here).
//self
Daniel Pink’s To Sell is Human notes that the most successful salespeople have buoyancy – the ability to stay afloat in the context of “wave after wave of rebuffs, refusals, and repudiations”.
True for salespeople, true for life. Nothing goes all our way all the time. Being buoyant is central to sustained success.
Drawing on Barbara Fredrickson’s work, Pink tells us negative emotions narrow our vision whereas positive emotions open us to possibility, making us more receptive and more inclined to experiment.
Positivity is the bedrock of buoyancy. If you’re relentlessly self-critical, you’re going to struggle with creativity – find three things you’ve done that you are happy about, for each area of improvement you identify.
Pink references work done by Seligman and Schulman showing that salespeople who have optimistic explanatory styles – in other words, see “rejections as temporary rather than permanent, specific rather than universal, and external rather than personal” – were considerably more successful than those who were negative. So much so that those in the optimistic half of the explanatory style sold 37% more than those in the pessimistic half, and those in the top decile outsold the bottom decile by 88%.
To build your optimism muscle, when you experience an undesired outcome ask yourself three questions:
- Is this permanent?
- Is this pervasive?
- Is this personal?
Find a convincing and concrete way to answer ‘no’. Being able to identify the things that are temporary, specific and external strengthens our capacity to persist.
Of course, this does not mean “… banishing the negative. Negativity and negative emotions are crucial for our survival. They prevent unproductive behaviors from cementing into habits. They deliver useful information on our efforts. They alert us to when we’re on the wrong path.”
///soul
Once a year Maria Popova, founder of The Marginalian, shares what she’s learnt from writing her reflections on ‘our search for meaning’ through the ‘lens of wonder’. She’s written eighteen.
I love how she starts this year’s, “Somewhere along the way, you realize that no one will teach you how to live your own life — not your parents or your idols, not the philosophers or the poets, not your liberal arts education or your twelve-step program, not church or therapy or Tolstoy. No matter how valuable any of that guidance, how pertinent any of that wisdom, in the end you discover that you make the path of life only by walking it with your own two feet under the overstory of your own consciousness — that singular miracle never repeated in all the history and future of the universe, never fully articulable to another”.
Her eighteenth lesson is this, “How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. Everything in life is a subset of one or a combinatorial function of all three. Seek people who love and give generously, who have the strength to suffer without causing damage”.
That’s us for this week. Please share this letter with people who will enjoy it, they can subscribe here.
All the best
Karl
PS: You can find my favourite quotations from five years of this letter here.