Is Fear Holding You Back? Try This.

You hate your job, but you are afraid to look for a new one, or (gasp!) change careers altogether.  Or the relationship you are in isn’t making you happy, but you are afraid to leave it.  Or you are single and lonely, but you’re too afraid to get out there and start dating.  Does any of this sound familiar? I’ll bet it does.

Americans have a well-earned reputation for risk-taking, but these days we are something of a timid lot.  Our reluctance to stick our collective neck out has everything to do with the psychology of motivation – specifically, how we think aboutthe goals we pursue. The problem, in a nutshell, is simply this:  when making decisions, many of us have been focused much more on what we have to losethan on what we might gain. 

Whenever you see your goals – whether they are professional or personal - in terms of what you have to lose, you have what’s called a prevention focus.  When you are prevention-focused, you want to stay safe, avoid mistakes, and fulfill your responsibilities.  You want to hang on to what you’ve already got and keep things running smoothly. You aren’t open to taking chances, even when that chance is a chance for happiness.  If fear is holding you back, odds are you’ve been thinking only in terms of prevention.

If, instead, you see your goals in terms of what you might gain, you have what’s called a promotion focus. Promotion focus is about getting ahead, maximizing your potential, and reaping the rewards.  It’s about never missing an opportunity for a win, even when doing so means taking a leap of faith.

In my new book with Tory Higgins, Focus: Use Different Ways of Seeing The World For Success and Influence, we describe two decades of research showing how being promotion or prevention-focused leads to having different strengths and weaknesses.  For instance, having a promotion focus leads to speed, creativity, innovation, and embracing risk, while having a prevention focus leads to accuracy, careful deliberation, thoroughness, and a strong preference for the devil-you-know. 

So how can you learn to embrace risk for the sake of your future happiness, particularly when risk-taking doesn’t come to you naturally?  The answer is surprisingly simple:  when you think about making a change, focus onlyon what you have to gain, and banish all thoughts of what you might lose.

For example, you could take a few moments to list all the ways in which you will benefit by making the change.   Repeat them to yourself when you feel the fear kicking in.  Most importantly, shut out any thoughts about what could go wrong – just refuse to give them your attention.  With practice, this thought-training will become easier, and eventually automatic.  Taking a chance, believe it or not, can become second nature to you, if you think about your goals in the right way.

Are you promotion or prevention focused?  Try my new free online assessment.

The Most Effective Strategies for Success

For years, I've been trying to convince people that success is not about who you are, but about what you do.

Roughly two years ago, I wrote about the "Nine Things Successful People Do Differently," which became HBR's most-read piece of content over that time span. It was a list of strategies, based on decades of scientific research, proven effective for setting and reaching challenging goals. I later expanded that post into a short e-book, explaining how you can make each one a habit. But how would readers know if they were doing enough of each "Thing"? (After all, we're terrible judges of ourselves.) To help answer that question, last spring I created something I called the Nine Things Diagnostics — it's a free, online set of questionnaires designed to measure your own use of each of the nine things in pursuit of your personal and professional goals.

I now have responses from over 30,000 people who've logged on and completed one or more of the Nine Things Diagnostics. The results are fascinating, and a bit surprising even to me. First, each of the Nine Things had a significant impact on success. (That actually didn't surprise me, for obvious reasons.).

But which packed the biggest punch? To find out, I recently took a look at the responses of about 7,000 people who had completed every Nine Things Diagnostic, along with a brief measure of how successful they felt they had been in reaching their own goals in the past.

In order of effect magnitude, the most impactful strategies were:

1. Have Grit — Persistence over the long haul is key
2. Know Exactly How Far You Have Left to Go — Monitor your progress
3. Get Specific — Have a crystal-clear idea of exactly what success will look like
4. Seize the Moment to Act on Your Goals — Know in advance what you will do, and when and where you will do it
5. Focus on What You Will Do, Not What You Won't Do — Instead of focusing on bad habits, it's more effective to replace them with better ones.
6. Build your Willpower Muscle — If you don't have enough willpower, you can get more using it.
7. Focus on Getting Better, Rather than Being Good — Think about your goals as opportunities to improve, rather than to prove yourself
8. Be a Realistic Optimist — Visualize how you will make success happen by overcoming obstacles
9. Don't Tempt Fate — No one has willpower all the time, so don't push your luck

Notice how persistence is at the very top of the list? While we marvel at people who've shown incredible perseverance — Earnest Shackleton, Nelson Mandela, Susan B. Anthony — I wonder how many people have ever thought to blame their own failures on "not hanging in there long enough"? In my experience, very few. Instead, we assume we lack the ability to succeed. We decide that we don't have what it takes — whatever that is — to meet the challenge. And we really couldn't be more wrong. Grit is not an innate gift. Persisting is something we learn to do, when (and if) we realize how well it pays off.

Or take "knowing how far you have left to go." Even someone with a healthy amount of grit will probably find his or her motivation flagging if they don't have a clear sense of where they are now and where they want to end up. How much weight would a contestant on The Biggest Loser lose if he only weighed himself at the beginning and the end, instead of once a week? How well would an Olympic-level athlete perform if she only timed her official races, and never her practices? We can see how essential monitoring is for others' performance, and yet somehow miss its importance for our own.

But does that mean that the items further down the list aren't as important? Not quite. For instance, #7, "focusing on getting better, rather than being good," actually predicted using each of the other eight things! People who focused on "being good," on the other hand, were less likely to use the other tactics on the list. In fact, if you do a lot of "be good" thinking, you are less likely to be gritty or have willpower, and you are more likely to tempt fate. You're also, not surprisingly, less likely to reach your goals.

Perhaps the most remarkable finding, however, was the extent to which people weren't using these tactics.

Respondents answered each of the diagnostic questions on 1-5 scale, with 1 being "not at all true of me," 3 being "somewhat true of me," and 5 being "very true of me."

If your average score for a particular tactic falls between Not at all and Somewhat, then you really aren't doing what you need to do to be effective. Here's how the percentages break down:

So about 40 percent of responders aren't being realistically optimistic, or focusing on what they will do, rather than what they won't. And 50 percent of responders aren't being specific, seizing the moment, monitoring progress, having grit, and having willpower. An astonishing 70+ percent of respondents also don't bother avoiding tempting fate. (Apparently, people just love to put themselves in harm's way.)

Here's some good news: an incredible 90 percent of responders report pursuing at least some of their goals with Get Better mindsets. But here's the Bad News: 80 percent of responders are also pursuing goals with Be Good mindsets. So there's still way too much I-have-to-prove-myself thinking going on out there, and it's sabotaging our success.

If you have a few spare minutes, I encourage you to take the Nine Things Diagnostics yourself, assuming you haven't already. It's a quick yet powerful way to target your weaknesses (and learn about your strengths). Remember, improvement is only possible when you know where you're going wrong, and what you can do about it.

How You Can Benefit from All Your Stress

You are stressed – by your deadlines, your responsibilities, your ever–increasing workload, and your life in general.  If you are like me, you even stress about how much stress you’re feeling  - worrying that it is interfering with your performance and possibly taking years off of your life.

This might sound a little crazy, but what if it’s the very fact that we assume stress is bad that’s actually making it so bad for us?  And what if there were another way to think about stress –a way that might actually make it a force for good in our lives? Well there is, according to new research from Yale’s Alia Crum and Peter Salovey, and Shawn Achor author of The Happiness Advantage. 

Let’s take a step back, and begin with a different question: What is stress?

Generally speaking, it’s the experience – or anticipation - of difficulty or adversity. We humans, along with other animals, have an instinctive physical response to stressors. It includes activation of the sympathetic nervous system (“fight or flight”), inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system (“rest and digest”), and the release of adrenaline and cortisol.  But what does all of that do?  In short, it primes the pump – we become more aroused and more focused, more ready to respond physically and mentally to whatever is coming our way. 

Kind of sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it?

But wait, you say, can’t chronic stress make us sick?  Can’t it take a toll on our immune functioning?

Yes…but there is plenty of evidence that stress can also enhance immunity.

Well then, you point out, can’t it leave us feeling depressed and lethargic?

Yes… but studies show that it can also create mental toughness, increase clarity, result in greater appreciation for one’s circumstances, and contribute to a sense of confidence built on a history of overcoming of obstacles (which is the best, most long-lasting kind of confidence you can have).  So stress is bad, and somehow also good.  How can we make sense of the paradoxical nature of stress? 

I’ll bet right now you are saying to yourself, it’s the amount of stress that matters.  Low levels may be good, but high levels are still definitely bad.  (i.e., What doesn’t kill you might make you stronger….but too much stress is probably going kill you.) 

The problem with this theory - which was once the dominant theory among psychologists, too - is that by and large, it doesn’t appear to be true.  The amount of stress you encounter is a surprisingly poor predictor of whether it will leave you worse (or better) off.

As it turns out, your mindset about stress may be the most important predictor of how it affects you.  As Crum, Salovey, and Achor discovered, people have different beliefs about stress.  Some people – arguably most people – believe that stress is a bad thing.  They agreed with statements like  “The effects of stress are negative and should be avoided,” and the researchers called this the stress-is-debilitating mindset. Those who instead agreed that “Experiencing stress facilitates my learning and growth” had what they called a stress-is-enhancing mindset.

In their studies, Crum and colleagues began by identifying stress mindsets among a group of nearly 400 employees of an international financial institution.  They found that those employees who had stress-is-enhancing mindsets (compared to stress-is-debilitating) reported having better health, greater life satisfaction, and superior work performance.

That’s already rather amazing, but here’s the best part – your mindset can also change!  If you have been living with a stress-is-debilitating mindset (like most of us), you don’t have to be stuck with it.   A subset of the 400 employees in the aforementioned study were shown a series of 3-minute videos over the course of the following week, illustrating either the enhancing or debilitating effects of stress on health, performance, and personal growth. Those in the stress-is-enhancing group (i.e., the lucky ones) reported significant increases in both wellbeing and work performance.

Yet another study showed that stress-is-enhancing believers were more likely to use productive strategies, like seeking out feedback on a stress-inducing task.  They were also more likely to show “optimal” levels of cortisol activity. (It turns out that both too much and too little cortisol release in response to a stressor can have negative physiological consequences.  But with the stress-is-enhancing mindset, cortisol release is – like Baby Bear’s porridge -  just right.)

Taken together, all this research paints a very clear picture: stress is killing you because you believe that it is.  Of course, that doesn’t mean you aren’t juggling too many projects at once – each of us has limited time and energy, and people can and do get overworked.

But if you can come to see the difficulties and challenges you face as opportunities to learn and grow, rather than as your “daily grind,” then you really can be happier, healthier, and more effective.   Maybe you don’t need less stress – you just need to think about your stress a little differently.

This post appeared originally on HBR.org

Don't forget to check out the FOCUS pre-order giveaway and free online assessment!

Read an excerpt from FOCUS (available April 18th)

Most people in every workplace, classroom, or community on the planet belong to one of two camps. In Camp #1, there’s Jon - the kind of person that some people might call “difficult,” though probably he (and we) would prefer the term “skeptic.”  It is a challenge to get to the end of a sentence in Jon’s presence without having him interrupt you to tell you how the beginning of it was all wrong.  He is immaculate in his appearance, chooses his words with precision, and never procrastinates.  He is, by nature, a pessimist (the defensive kind that we describe later) – try to tell him things are going to work out just fine and watch as he gets visibly uncomfortable with your reckless and naïve attitude. 

At this point, Jon is probably starting to sound pretty annoying to work with, and there is no denying that he can be on occasion.  But once you have gotten to know him, it’s easy to see why he works the way he does – he is determinednot to make mistakes.  In fact, just the idea of making a mistake upsets him.  (Did we mention that much of the time he is at least a little anxious?  He is.)  As a result, his work is usually flawless.

In Campt # 2, there’s Jon’s colleague Ray – the Anti-Jon.  We’re not sure that Ray has ever actually worried about anything.  He is just as smart, and just as motivated, but he goes about his work (and his life) with a relentless optimism that is impossible not to envy.  He doesn’t sweat the small stuff – he’s all about the Next Big Idea.  But sometimes, that sweat-free existence leads to trouble.  He has been forced to label most of his possessions “If Found, Call Ray 555-8797” because he is always forgetting where he left them.

Ray’s work is creative and innovative – he’s not afraid to go down untraveled paths and take intellectual risks, even though some of them end up being time-wasting dead ends.   But appearance-wise….well, Jon once remarked during a meeting that Ray’s shirt was so wrinkled it looked like he had been keeping it in his pants pocket all morning.  Maintenance is not Ray’s thing.

On the surface, Jon and Ray are two talented, hard-working individuals who have the same goal:  to do their jobs exceptionally well.  When you want to influence someone else - whether you are a psychologist, manager, marketer, teacher, or parent - you usually start by trying to figure out what that person wants, and then use that knowledge to understand and predict their behavior.  But if Jon and Ray want the same thing, then why is everythingabout the way they pursue it so different?

Two Kinds of Good (and Bad):  Promotion and Prevention

People like Ray, as the old song goes, “accentuate the positive.”  They see their goals as opportunities for gain or advancement.  In other words, they are focused on all the great things that will happen for them when they succeed – the benefits and rewards.  They “play to win.” When people pursue this kind of “good,” we call it having a promotion focus. Studies from our lab (and many other labs now) show that promotion-focused people respond best to optimism and praise, are more likely to take chances and seize opportunities, and excel at creativity and innovation.  Unfortunately, all that chance-taking and positive-thinking makes them more prone to error, less likely to completely think things through, and usually unprepared with a Plan B in case things fail. For a promotion-focused person, what’s really “bad” is a non-gain:  a chance not taken, a reward unearned, a failure to advance.  They would rather say Yes! and have it blow up in their faces than feel like they let Opportunity’s knock go unanswered.

Others, like Jon, tend to see their goals as opportunities to meet their responsibilities and to stay safe. They consider what might go badly if they don’t work hard enough to achieve.  They don’t play to win – they play to not lose. They want, more than anything else, to feel secure.  When people pursue this kind of “good,” they have what we call a prevention focus. In our studies, we find the prevention-focused to be more driven by criticism and the looming possibility of failure (if, for example, they don’t work hard enough) than by applause and a sunny outlook. Prevention-focused people are often more conservative and don’t take chances, but their work is also more thorough, accurate, and carefully-planned.   Of course, too much caution and hypervigilance for error pretty much kills off any potential for growth, creativity, and innovation.  But for the prevention-focused, the ultimate “bad” is a loss you failed to stop:  a mistake made, a punishment received, a danger you failed to avoid.  They would much prefer to say No! to an opportunity, rather than end up in hot water.  Whoever first said “the devil you know is better than the one you don’t” would have earned Jon’s enthusiastic approval.            

Researchers (ourselves included) have been hard at work for twenty years, exploring the causes and consequences of promotion and prevention focus in every aspect of our lives.   We know that while everyone is concerned with both promotion and prevention, most people have a dominant motivational focus – the one they use to approach most of life’s challenges and demands.  It’s also true that focus can be situation-specific:  some people are promotion-focused at work, but more focused on prevention when it comes to their kids.  Everyoneis promotion-focused when they line up for a lottery ticket, and prevention-focused when they line up for a flu shot.

 Hundreds of studies later after that initial insight, it’s become clear that the kind of “good” you are pursuing affects everything about you – what you pay attention to, what you value, the strategies you choose to use (and which ones actually work for you), and how you feel when you succeed or fail.  It affects your strengths and your weaknesses, both personally and professionally.  It affects how you manage your employees and how you parent your children (and why your spouse’s decisions and preferences can seem so odd). Without exaggeration, your focus affects just about everything.

In Part 1 of FOCUS, we’ll explain the nature of the promotion and prevention focuses  and how they work, and you will come to understand yourself and the people around you in a whole new way.  Some things will make sense that never did before.   You’ll finally see why it’s so hard to be good with both the big ideas andwith the details.  Why the “spontaneous” one in any couple usually isn’t the one who balances the checkbook.  Why you either underestimate how long everything will take, or you overestimate how difficult it will be – and why someone different from you can seem so strange.  You’ll understand the choices you’ve made, the experiences you are drawn to, and why you tend to prefer one brand of product to another.  And you’ll be able to use that knowledge to enhance your well-being and be more effective in your life.

Increase Your Influence

It will be especially valuable for you to understand promotion and prevention if you are in the business of influencing others - if a big part of what you do every day involves informing, persuading, and motivating. (Note that this definition of “influence” applies to teachers, coaches, and parents as much as it does to marketers, managers, and advocates.  Come to think of it, most of us – in one way or another – are engaged in the ‘business’ of influence.  Unless you live alone on a desert island, in which case you can try using this book to break open your coconuts.)

Products, activities, and ideas can appeal to either promotion or prevention motivation, depending on the kind of “good” or “bad” they focus on. Some are obvious: seat belts, home security systems, and mammograms are essentially about avoiding loss (prevention focus), while vacation homes, lottery tickets, and facelifts are about potential gains (promotion focus). Other products can satisfy either promotion or prevention motivation, depending on how you talk about them. When toothpaste is about a “whiter smile” and “fresh breath,” it’s a promotion-focused product. But when it’s about “avoiding cavities and gingivitis,” it’s all about prevention.  As the studies we share with you in Part 2 of FOCUS will show, you can learn to speak the motivational language of the person you are trying to influence.

A Practical Guide

This book is a practical guide to understanding and working with your promotion or prevention focus. Use this knowledge in your own life, and you’ll be more effective in reaching your goals.   Use it as a tool to influence others, and it’s as if you can create trust, value, and better performance out of thin air.  It’s like magic.  Only it’s real.

Want to know if you are promotion or prevention-focused?  Take our free online assessment.

How Are YOU Motivated? A New Free Online Diagnostic

Are you more promotion-focused or prevention-focused overall?  How about at work - what's your dominant focus there?  And are you good at reaching your promotion and prevention goals?

Find out using my new (free) online assessment, located at www.YourFocusDiagnostic.com.  It's quick and easy, and will set you on the right path to knowing how you tick, and what you can do to become even more effective in reaching your personal and professional goals.