Because painting was something new to me, I was afraid of making a mistake. This fear was compounded by the fact that the old owners had done a less-than-stellar job of putting up the paint that was there – color was splotched on the baseboards, the cabinets, and the ceiling. And I wanted this new coat to turn out perfectly. So I worried when the tape didn’t stick. I panicked when the walls looked streaky after the first coat. I winced when the old color was still visible after the tape was taken off.

Now? It looks great. Looking back on it, getting started was the most difficult part. The painting part was actually very easy and quite fun. Of course we made some mistakes, but those mistakes were easily fixed.

Lessons Learned:

• To cope with change, compare and contrast the current state versus the end result. When others are having trouble getting on board for change, communicate the big picture and long-term vision. Focusing on the end result—visualizing how much better the new color would look than the current color—helped me get over my apprehension quick!

• Worry during planning. Worry before closing the lid. Do not worry while doing the work. Stressing out about the outcome prevents us (and those around us) from getting into the flow of things. Do your best to foresee difficulties and plan for challenges, execute to completion without hesitation, then double-check for errors and evaluate areas for improvement. Fretting that the walls were going to be streaky prevented me from noticing how relaxing it can be to just…paint.

• Differentiate mistakes versus failure. Especially for those with perfectionistic tendencies, there is a fear of failure that results from thinking mistakes will lead to catastrophies. But failure usually isn’t fatal. Not all mistakes can be foreseen or avoided. Grabbing a mini brush and opening up a can of white paint fixed any error within minutes.

• You don’t know before you know. At one point, you never knew how to do anything, but you learned. Be patient with yourself if you are new at something; coach others through if they are struggling. Before the makeover, painting was not within my skill set. But pushing past the point of incompetence led to knowing how to do one more thing than I did last week.

Making a mistake (or twelve) is better than not doing the job at all. That sounds so obvious, but how often does fear stop us from doing something new? And how often do we worry about small details that we don’t have control over?

This post originally appeared on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership blog.

One problem is that as we get into positions of more responsibility or higher authority, we receive less and less feedback on our performance. We also become more comfortable—after all, we have been successful in the past. Compounding that, power has a strong effect on our behavior—making us more susceptible to being more self-centered, less empathetic, and more likely to not walk the talk.

So what can be done about this? First of all, don’t assume that you know yourself. We humans are dynamic, adapting to new situations, other people, and different environments quickly. Just because you were agreeable and timid twenty years ago, don’t assume that is the way people perceive you today.

Assess and re-assess often:

Ask specific questions

Most people are reluctant to give feedback. It takes tremendous courage, not to mention trust, to go into your boss’s office and provide your negative evaluation after an event. Who does that? But the conversation is easier when you ask for the feedback:

“Can you help me out? I think I am focusing too much on the details of the project and I fear I am neglecting to share the bigger vision with everyone. Have you noticed this—what do you think?… Can you watch for it over the next few weeks? I’ll check back.”

It’s much easier for your team to help you out in this way.

Track it

How easy is it to dismiss feedback that we don’t agree with? Unfortunately, we can do this so automatically that we forget that we received the negative information in the first place! Create a feedback journal and write it all down, immediately—whether you choose accept the feedback or not.  The bonus here is that you can read the positive feedback as a pick-me-up when you are down.

Keep it continuous

Most of us have opportunity to receive feedback annually, but why go that long without information that can help you succeed? Each month, work on a new goal and ask a learning partner for evidence of progress. Each month, ask your coworkers about things you need to do more of and things that you should stop doing. Phrase it like that so the feedback feels more helpful than hurtful.

How do you solicit feedback on your behavior?

This post originally appeared on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership Blog.

At one point during the background preparation for the coaching process, she remarked:

“Here is an example of his poor communication: one Tuesday, he is missing from the office. I go all day wondering where he is, and by the end of the day, when I finally get to my email, I see that he had emailed me last night that he wasn’t going to be in. Why wouldn’t he have just popped in to the office and let me know about this in person?”

At first, I was very confused about the point she was trying to make. At my office, if someone will be out, they send an email; if we don’t realize we’ll be out until the day of, we’ll send a text message. Message is sent, message is received–no big deal. After some discussion, several people in the room, including the executive coach facilitating the session, came to an agreement that email is not communication. That email is a one-way memo that is devoid of tone, posture, and other nonverbals so it cannot be used as a method of communicating with another person.

While everyone in the room seemed content with this, it did nothing to clear my confusion. Are we not living in a world where 70% of workplace communication is electronic, where we can converse in 140 typed characters or less, and our teams are dispersed around the globe? Was this not just a case of poor time management and ineffective information flow?

Then, I realized, the difference is not in which communication style is right or wrong or what is new or old. No one person is at fault here. Communication takes two individuals regardless of the medium or modality that is delivering the message. These communication guidelines can be used with 20-year-olds and 80-year-olds, whether you are speaking face-to-face, talking on the phone, composing an email, texting, or sending an IM:

Personal preferences

Introverts need alone time to process information while extraverts often need to talk through a problem before it begins to make sense. To call an introvert on the phone, spring an unexpected issue, and then expect a response during the same discussion will make it appear that you are unreasonable. Similarly, don’t expect an extravert who is coordinating a team effort to do so without meetings or at least a conference call (or five). Our personal preferences go a long way in determining whether we’d prefer to send/receive a written message versus whether we want to chat about it. Be flexible as often as you can, but do speak up and request communication that fits your needs when it counts.

Expectations within your relationship

Expectations can be set implicitly or explicitly. If you fail to set expectations verbally, you will set expectations with your actions. If you generally respond to email within five minutes, people will expect that you will always respond quickly and become concerned if you don’t. If you regularly take a day or so to respond to your email, you are effectively training those you communicate with to contact you using other means if something is urgent. If you want to receive certain messages through email and others during team meetings, then let others know.

Norms within your work team

How does work get done in your team or in your company? If you are a bunch of individual contributors, asynchronous communication can be infinitely more productive than constant interruptions. If you are working on a deadline that requires intense concentration (say, programming, writing, or data analysis), it’s much easier to turn off Outlook notifications and put up an away message than it is to tune out the overly chatty cubemate. But if you rely on others to get work done–and conversely, others rely on you then you may have to be available and visible.

Communication skills

For decades, training professionals have built up a vast amount of literature on active listening skills, persuasion, and assertive language; how to stand and how to project your voice, and all that. Well, now we need the same for our online world. The words we use in written communication have nuances akin to nonverbal signals during face-to-face conversation. To write a clear and concise email that minimizes confusion, describes intent, and requests action is a skill. To read an email without overanalyzing the emotion or motive behind it is a skill.

Empathy

Regardless of preferences, expectations, norms, and skills, if you only think of yourself and your needs your communication efforts will fail. Communication takes two–their preferences, their interpretation of expectations, their generational norms, the norms at their previous company or work team, and their communication skills (or lack thereof) have as much of an impact on the message that is conveyed and how it is received.

Do your personal preferences determine how you communicate? Do the generational stereotypes fit you? Leave stories of your communication mishaps in the comments!

This post originally appeared on the Intuit Quickbase Team Leadership Blog.

Chris and Dan sent me a copy of the book and offered to do an exclusive Q+A for this site. I would like to pay it forward and give my copy away now that I’ve read it. Here is the Q+A: I asked the questions, they provided the answers, and all the links in this article were added by me simply for convenience to the readers.

What inspired you to write The Invisible Gorilla? How long did it take and what was your writing process like?

We first started discussing ideas the book when we received the Ig Nobel Prize for our “gorillas in our midst” experiment in 2004 — the award recognizes research that “first makes you laugh and then makes you think.”  That’s when we began to realize that the “gorilla effect” was having a bigger impact on people than we had expected.  Our original experiment was intended as a study of selective attention and perception, but we think the gorilla video we created caught on largely because it forced people to confront their own flawed intuitions about how the mind works.  Unlike earlier demonstrations of selective attention, it was hard for people to rationalize why they missed something so glaringly obvious. And, when you miss something like a chest-thumping gorilla, it forces you to see that your intuitions about what captures attention and how much we notice in the world are fundamentally wrong.  As we thought more about the illusory belief that distinctive things automatically capture attention, we soon realized that many of the assumptions we make about the workings of our minds are wrong, and that those mistaken assumptions can affect all of us every day.

We began planning the book shortly after the award ceremony in late 2004, and gradually developed a book proposal over the next few years.

We sold the book in May of 2008 and finished the first draft of it in June 2009.  We spent the next several months revising before it was released in May 2010. So, the thought process, planning, and research for the book took quite a while, but the writing took us about a year.

During that time, we exchanged drafts of chapters and sections, editing and commenting on each other’s work, until we eventually reached consensus on everything. (Though we each have some words and phrases we might still change if it were up to us as individuals …)

The central theme of the book seems to be, Our attention is limited and our assumptions are flawed. What do you hope readers get out of this insight?

That’s just one of many themes in the book.  We would say that the central theme is that we hold mistaken ideas or intuitions about how the mind works and that those assumptions affect almost all aspects of our daily lives.  These intuitions reflect what we call everyday illusions.  Our goal is not to convince people that they are stupid or misguided.  Rather, we try to explain why we hold such flawed intuitions and what we can do about them.  By becoming aware of the many mistaken assumptions we all make about our minds, we can make better decisions at home and at work, and lead happier, safer, and more informed lives

You devote chapters to six everyday illusions of attention, memory, confidence, knowledge, causality, and potential. Why these six? Are there other cognitive distortions than these six worth noting?

We chose those six illusions because they seemed to fit together well. They relate to each other; for example, the illusion of confidence operates strongly when we think about the accuracy of our own memories (we think they are more accurate than they are) and when we think about whether people who claim confidence in their memories are reporting accurately about what happened (they aren’t as accurate as we assume they are). Our knowledge is often the most illusory when it concerns our understanding of the causes of things. And so on.

There are, of course, many other sorts of distortions, some of which we deliberately chose not to discuss (because they have been covered extensively by others).  The six illusions we chose also contain other, related illusions within them. For example, the illusion of cause encompasses both our difficulties in figuring out what causes what, and our tendency to assume that a single event (like the invasion of Iraq) must have had a single cause (e.g., the search for weapons of mass destruction), when in reality most events have multiple causes.

What advice do you have for people who want to know whether they should go with their gut or whether they should take a more logical approach to decision-making?

Our advice would be that you should trust your gut whenever a decision can’t benefit from additional analysis.  No amount of cogitation or deliberation will improve your opinion on which ice cream you like best or which potential date you find the most attractive.  In fact, careful analysis might actually lead to worse decisions when the basis for the decision is just an emotional response or aesthetic preference.  Our larger goal, though, is to identify cases in which our assumptions about our own minds might lead us to trust our gut when we shouldn’t. These are the illusions we write about.

In the book you are somewhat critical of other business books, especially Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. What are your thoughts on that?

It is unfortunately true that many business books come to erroneous, or at best unsupported conclusions because of the illusion of cause.

You simply cannot infer a valid general lesson from a single positive anecdote or collection of such anecdotes (e.g., companies that practiced some particular marketing strategy or management technique and were successful). You need a lot more evidence and analysis, as we explain in our book. We pick on Malcolm Gladwell mostly because he has published several high-profile books in this vein. We have written a more extensive essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “The Trouble with Intuition” that gives our views on the dangers of relying too heavily on intuitions, something that people seem to have taken away from books like Blink (even when those books themselves are more nuanced). In a nutshell, we argue that the un-nuanced advice of “trust your gut” can be extremely dangerous when those gut instincts concern things like whether we are paying attention to as much as we think, whether our memories are complete and correct, whether we understand the causes of trends, developments, and events, and the like. Moreover, we think that some popular examples of the value of intuition turn out to be mere anecdotes that don’t withstand scrutiny.

This book has a very unique voice because it is based on your own research. What recommendations do you have for other academics or graduate students who want to write a mainstream book about their scientific research?

The biggest challenge in writing a science book for a general audience is recognizing what people find most compelling.  A book that talks down to readers or that tries to persuade with statistics won’t reach the widest audience, or have the maximum impact. We hope that our own book might serve as an example to aspiring writers of how social science research can be communicated accurately and also engagingly to the public.  We would even suggest that by understanding the many ways that people see, remember, and think about their world, authors can capitalize on everyday illusions to make their messages more compelling. We try to use anecdotes and stories to convey our message while backing the conclusions we draw with the experiments that underlie them.  Too many scientists try to use the experiments themselves to convey their message, but as we argue in the book, statistics are inherently less compelling than stories. We also think that it should be the job of academics and intellectuals to communicate their ideas and findings to the public, rather than outsourcing that job to journalists. As good as they can be at their craft, journalists rarely have the training or experience to fully appreciate how research is done and what it can mean. Researchers themselves might even enjoy learning a few new tricks of communication—writing The Invisible Gorilla was definitely an enjoyable learning experience for us!

Related Links:

http://theinvisiblegorilla.com
http://youarenotsosmart.com
VIDEO: TEDxUIUC – Daniel Simons – Counter-Intuition
The Invisible Gorilla: Are You Paying Attention to the Wrong Stuff? – Huffington Post

Please leave a comment that somehow pertains to this topic below if you would like the book. I will pick the winner on or before July 20th.

Why are some leaders able to inspire us to act when others can’t? Why are some organizations are able to inspire us to buy while others can’t? Simon Sinek gives an 18-minute TED Talk about how this works.

If you don’t watch the video, here’s a quick recap:

Those of us who know the “Why?” behind what we do are the ones who are able to inspire. Most of us know what we do and some of us even know how we do it, but the powerful thing is to know why. This works because the why tells us about a purpose, a cause, or a belief. That why informs us of the core reason for existence, which in turn drives behavior and action. Our emotional response to the why is what inspires trust and loyalty. So you could say that inspiration has a strong emotional component behind it.

So if that is inspiration, how do you get there?

Everyone’s path will be different, but there are three pieces that are crucial to inspiration:

Energy

You must first be able to inspire yourself before you can inspire others. If you often feel down, unmotivated, disengaged, you have to engage yourself first.

Empathy

The Golden Rule is bad advice. You shouldn’t treat people how you would want to be treated; you should treat people how they want to be treated. Likewise, what inspires you may not inspire others. Appeal to others’ intrinsic motivations and values in order to inspire.

Communication

Thinking and feeling the right things won’t get you far if you cannot communicate all of that in a way that is understood. The vision that you set forth needs to be understandable, precise, powerful, and engaging.

In an HBR blog post, John Baldoni writes that an inspirational leader has a strong leadership presence, which, he tells us, is made up of knowledge, authority, humility, and hope. I don’t think you have to be anyone special or have anything special in order to inspire. I believe we all have an ability to inspire. We just each do it in our own unique way.

Have you experienced inspirational leadership?

This post originally appeared on the Intuit QuickBase Team Leadership Blog.