Traction Heroes
Digging in to get results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango
Traction Heroes
Procrastination
What keeps you from doing the things you know you need to do, when you need to do them? The answers go deeper than you think.
Show notes:
- Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman
- Innovation Games by Luke Hohmann
- Nonviolent Communication Marshall Rosenberg
I've discovered through interviewing lots of people on the subject, and by exploring in my own life, that by identifying what I'm avoiding and then by addressing that sooner, it has created this type of virtuous cycle of energy for dealing with things that are even more challenging.
Narrator:You're listening to Traction Heroes. Digging In to Get Results with Harry Max and Jorge Arango.
Jorge:Hey, Harry.
Harry:Hey, Jorge, good to see you again.
Jorge:It's good to see you as well. How have things been?
Harry:Man, things are on fire. So much is happening. Mostly good things. And, then there's everything else in the world, which has got a big giant question mark on it for me. But trying to stay responsibly optimistic.
Jorge:It certainly seems like a time of change. There's a lot of change going on.
Harry:Yeah, it makes it easy to find things to talk about, that's for sure. And the clock rate is incredible. The rate of change, the tempo, is kind of astonishing.
Jorge:The phrase"finding stuff to talk about" makes me think that you've brought a reading.
Harry:Funny, I do. This is something I was listening to. It's a book that I was listening to in audio. And it is really well structured for audio, so definitely will recommend it. And I'm not gonna tell you what it is quite yet, but let me go ahead and read it and we'll see where it goes from there. It starts with a quote. It says,"We cannot change anything unless we accept it." That's Carl Jung. And here's the reading:"It can be alarming to realize just how much of life gets shaped by what we're actively trying to avoid. We talk about not getting around to things as if it were merely a failure of organization or a will. But often the truth is that we invest plenty of energy in making sure that we never get around to them. It's an old story. Some task, or some entire domain of life makes you anxious whenever you think about it, so you just don't go there. You're worried you might have less money in the bank than you've assumed, so you refrain from checking your balances at all, or you're scared that a pain in your abdomen might be a sign of something more serious. So you avoid seeing a doctor. Or you're worried that raising a sensitive subject with your partner could lead to an a blazing row, so you never do. Several times I've caught myself avoiding checking my email for fear of discovering a message from someone. Impatient. I haven't replied to it yet."Rationally speaking, this kind of avoidance makes no sense at all. If you really do have an alarming low bank balance or the pain really is something serious, confronting the situation is the only way you can begin to do something about it. And there's no better strategy than avoiding your inbox to ensure that someone will eventually lose patience with your failure to reply."The more you organize your life around not addressing things that make you anxious, the more likely they are to develop into serious problems. And even if they don't, the longer you fail to confront them, the more unhappy time you spend being scared of what might be lurking in the places you don't want to go. It's ironic that this is known in self-help circles as'remaining in your comfort zone' because there's nothing comfortable about it. In fact, it entails accepting a constant background tug of discomfort, an undertow of worry that can sometimes feel useful or virtuous, though it isn't, as the price you pay to avoid a more acute spike of anxiety."
Jorge:I have to say that we're recording this on April 14th, meaning the day before taxes are due. I suspect that there are a lot of folks around this time of year for whom that might resonate. The word that came to mind in hearing you talk about this is procrastination. What book is this from?
Harry:This is from Oliver Burkeman's most recent work called Meditations for Mortals, and it's really good. And part of what I really liked about it was the structure he used for presenting these ideas was a once a day meditation. So rather than a typical structure, topical structure and an architecture of chapter book, so to speak, it's laid out as one thought for one day. And of course you can consume more than that if you want. But it allows a very different flow of ideas. And this one's really close to my heart for so many different reasons, but I wanted to share it with you and I didn't even think about tax day. That's funny.
Jorge:You said that this somehow resonated with you. Why did you wanna bring this subject to our conversation?
Harry:I think there were a whole host of reasons, one of which is I wrote my book on prioritization and I joke around with people that I'm my own best subject, right? I wrote the book I needed to read. And I think we might have talked about the fact I was very interested in a topic of stupidity a number of years ago. And like prioritization, I often thought of myself as my own best subject for that. How do I go about making decisions and actions that blow up in my face? And so I didn't have to look too far to explore the topic. And similarly, this notion of avoidances of things you're avoiding has come up repeatedly over the last n number of years as a way to look at the environment around me and look at my interaction with that environment as where are the signals for what I should be or what I could be drilling into or amplifying or addressing. I've discovered through interviewing lots of people on the subject, and by exploring in my own life, that by identifying what I'm avoiding and then by addressing that sooner, it has created this type of virtuous cycle of energy for dealing with things that are even more challenging. I'm not sure I like it. Because I'm building a muscle, which means I have to lift more weight, right? But I'm noticing that I can lift more weight, and in so doing, I feel stronger and more confident in my ability to move through the world with a greater sense of stability and I'm finding that really helpful right now, given everything that's going on in the world.
Jorge:It's funny that you used the phrase"virtuous cycle" because as you were talking, I was taking notes here, and I have a note that says'vicious cycle.' I'll speak from personal experience, when I've had situations like the ones you've been describing there, where I'm avoiding doing something that I'm going to find uncomfortable, painful, embarrassing, what have you, the avoidance has the effect of postponing whatever negative outcomes might come my way. But the outcomes come anyway. And I feel terrible in the process. Like I am not at my best by avoiding, and the feeling bad about myself feeds the self-image that reinforces that kind of behavior in some ways. And then, that makes me want to avoid taking the next step even more, because I feel like I'm inadequate somehow. So it's, almost like a self-perpetuating, self-amplifying bias that you're creating about your own competency for dealing with painful or difficult situations, which makes things worse.
Harry:Yeah, and increasingly, I'm learning that it's unnecessary. And I don't know that I ever would have gone here naturally, except that I ran into this in the interviews that I was doing for the book that I wrote. But to some extent, this idea started with a friend of mine, Paul Henderson, who used to say,"Bad news doesn't get better over time." And that was a bookend on one side. And then another friend of mine, Brent Johnson used to say that, something his father said is, he goes,"The facts are friendly." He said,"The facts themselves don't actually have a valence." That is, they're not charged. It's our interpretation of those facts that leads us to having some kind of emotional reaction. And so, I've used those two ideas to navigate through the world. And then, over the last few years, having learned that some of the more effective people in the world prioritize what they're avoiding, so that they can make choices about having a tough conversation or filling out a tax form or making a payment or taking their attention and placing it on something that they are expending energy to avoid. That, in itself, releases a lot of good energy, which allows them to focus on other things. So it's less about the avoidance, about the not getting the thing done or about the procrastination, and it's more about releasing the energy that's being bollocked up by that strategy so that you can go do and attend to other things. And I think that's where my interest in this is.
Jorge:And hearing you talk about it, I'm gonna think out loud here, but I'm wondering if there are different kinds of situations in which you would lapse into this kind of avoidance. And one possible way of organizing them, and there might be others, these are just the ones that come to mind, are there are some situations where you are postponing dealing with something because you are going to be letting other people down, and you're concerned with their reaction. Like, if you don't file your taxes in time because you've been putting it off, you're probably not gonna be letting anyone down directly. It might blow up in your face it will likely blow up in your face but it's not like you are postponing a difficult conversation with your spouse. Those feel like two different orders of problems. And I'm bringing this up because I'm trying to think about situations that I've been in, and I've done this for both kinds of situations. And I feel like I've gotten pretty good at swallowing the frogs in both cases. But I'll speak to the letting other people down piece, because that's the one that is most vivid in my mind and in my experience. I've found that whenever I have been in situations where I'm putting off the difficult conversation, because I am worried about letting the other person down or worried about being seen as a"bad person" or what have you, oftentimes, when I finally have the conversation, it's so much easier than I thought it would be. And the other, and it's often been much less of a big deal for the other person than I thought it would be. I've made a mountain out of a molehill, that kind of thing. So it feels like it's been in my mind all along.
Harry:I love that. I love that you're categorizing these, because I think that's really helpful first. Because I think there's a natural tendency to think about things you're avoiding in terms of stuff you have to do that you don't want to do, but placing it into a category of perhaps conversations you don't want to have for fear of letting somebody else down or hurting somebody else's feelings, of course, then allows you to explore the idea that maybe you won't be letting them down or hurting their feelings, but they might hurt yours or they might let you down. And so now you've opened up this thing of, maybe I'm avoiding this thing because I don't want to deal with it. And that's the kind of avoidance in some ways that I was talking about, but I don't think I was clear about these categories and what the implications of these categories are. So back in, I don't know if it was 2014, I went through a workshop program weekend thing, it's called 21st Century Leadership in Tacoma, Washington. It was a thing that Rackspace... I was a VP of Experience Design at a hosting company, and we were working on building a cloud solution at the time. And when we got all done with that, there was this leadership opportunity for me to go do some development work. And one of the things that they taught us there is to ask our ourself the question, what am I pretending not to know? What am I pretending not to know? And that was like this breakthrough question for me, because that was the one where I was able to say, it's categorically different in some ways from things I know, but I don't wanna deal with, because now I'm asking myself the question, is there something that I'm just pretending not to know, that I'm fooling myself in the process. And if I can belly up to the bar and accept the possibility that I'm really fooling myself, which is gonna make it easier for me to fool everybody else, once I'm clear about that this is the thing that I'm pretending not to know, and now I can't avoid that anymore, what are the implications? What does that mean in terms of a difficult conversation I might have to have with somebody else or difficult conversation I'm gonna perhaps have with myself, weirdly as that may sound.
Jorge:When you say, what am I pretending not to know, does that mean, what am I perhaps subconsciously choosing to ignore?
Harry:Yeah, kind of willful ignorance. There's enough information to know that I shouldn't be ignoring it. And that information may be emotional, it may not be in words, but there's enough information there to prompt me to ask myself the question, is there something that I should be thinking about that I'm not thinking about? Is there something that I should be asking myself, questions I should be asking myself? And then like back to that question of a pain in the abdomen, is there something I'm pretending not to know? A pain in the abdomen might be a... it's just a thing. And am I dismissing something that I am then rationalizing away? And there's enough information to add to, prompt you to say,"Hmm, maybe something isn't normal." And what would be the range of normal? And given that range, what's inside that bell shape curve and what's outside that bell shape curve? And if something's outside of that, then"Oh, this is what I was pretending not to know." I was pretending not to know that this person is a pain in my side, right? Or that I have a pain in my side.
Jorge:A quote comes to mind; it's one of my favorite quotes by Richard Feynman. He said,"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." Right? And in this case, the fooling is happening perhaps subconsciously because you're trying to avoid discomfort.
Harry:Do you know Luke Hohmann?
Jorge:No.
Harry:So, Luke is this amazing character in my life. He's written a number of really interesting books. He was the author of a book called Innovation Games, and he's a SAFe Fellow, from SAFe, the SAFe agile world. He's written books on software architecture. A very accomplished guy in the software design development world. And he and I are writing an article together right now on a concept called Collapsing Sliding Windows. And it's the idea that there are these events in the future that are almost certainly going to happen at some point, but it's a little hard to know when they're gonna happen. And moreover, there are situations where those events can happen much faster than you predict. And there are planning strategies you can use for these types of potential events. And one of the ideas here is there's often a predictable last responsible moment. And it's a concept that I really appreciate, because I've gotten more rigorous about asking myself the question, at what point does it become irresponsible of me not to act or not to do something or not to address a question, or so on and so forth. So that's maybe one of the antidotes to this, in my mind, is to continually roll through questions like, what am I pretending not to know? When is the last responsible moment to fill in the blank? And then, with these bookend questions of, bad news doesn't get better over time and the facts are friendly, all of a sudden I've got these pivots that I can use for navigating through the world with a little bit more agency.
Jorge:That seems key. The phrase"the facts are friendly," I believe that it's come up in our conversations before, and that's starting to feel to me like a central tenet somehow, in that it implies suspending judgment. It implies clarity, right? Like, what do you mean by the facts? Are you sure you're clear on the facts? So, that's starting to feel to me like a very important North Star for people who are trying to gain traction. And part of what I'm hearing in this passage that you've read from this book, is that one of the things that might keep you from having the impact you want to have is maybe fear; your own inability to look past the concerns whether real or imagined that might be turning the facts unfriendly somehow.
Harry:Yeah, and I think this idea of the facts are friendly takes the teeth out of the narrative, whatever you're telling yourself is true, and it forces you to set these things back into a more neutral context, which I think gives you more choice in terms of how to react because no longer are you stuck in the frame of the narrative fallacy, right? Which is the story that you're telling yourself is going to frame a set of reasonable and unreasonable actions or responses on a reasonable and unreasonable timeline. And if you can take the facts out of the story and just look at the facts on their own, it makes it possible to tell alternative stories, which potentially lead to alternative strategies and actions. And it's not always easy to do this on your own. Sometimes this is a buddy sport, or having a sensible person to talk to who you trust their judgment and their discernment, their ways of thinking about things, makes it possible to reimagine or reinterpret what's actually happening to consider perhaps a different emotional response to it. As you think about, if you back up from this and you look at Marshall Rosenberg's work, which I suspect you're familiar with this, the Nonviolent Communication NVC work, right? Where at the highest possible level, there's this structure of there's observation, the next level down is interpretation, the next level down is feeling, and the next level down is need. So it's a way of looking at what's happening. So. If you were to do something, there's a set of observable facts about it, there's an interpretation that I'm meaning-making what you're doing, right? And then, I'm having an emotional reaction to that; that's my feeling. And then, I have some kind of unmet need, which then translates into some kind of action on my part. And the idea that I was drawing this back to is, if you can separate what you're actually observing from how you're interpreting it from how you're feeling about it, you're starting to peel apart the facts from the story, and that gives you potentially more choice in terms of how you're gonna respond or react to what's happening. So, if you were to yell at me right now, I, could say,"Oh, Jorge yelled at me." Or I could say,"Jorge raised his voice to an unusual amplitude." The second one would be the fact, and the first one would be more of an interpretation, because yelling is my way of understanding how a particular volume is. And then I might interpret that as he's angry with me. I might feel scared and then my unmet need might be to apologize for something that I either did or didn't do. But if I can go back and say,"Gosh, Jorge, just the amplitude of his voice went up," and then I can look at the possible interpretations. One possible interpretation is you're angry. Another possible interpretation is something hap... you may have spilled your very hot coffee over there and I can't see it, but it's got you excited about 210 degree liquid dripping on your lap right now. And so, your voice went up. And that's gonna lead to a very different emotional reaction on my part. And so, peeling these things apart start to become really valuable when it comes to looking at what's going on in the world around us, considering the possibility that the facts that we're seeing are not necessarily tightly coupled or bolted to what we think they mean and the story that we're telling about them. And if we can tease those apart a little bit, we end up in a stronger position to consider alternative narratives and consider how we might move through the space to make better choices that are more in line with our values and the goals that we have and our needs.
Jorge:That sounds like a really good way to encapsulate the idea. And just to try to wrap it up in a kind of concrete way, part of what I'm hearing there is that that level of self-awareness is easier done when you can interact with someone else and have them help you gain some perspective. And I will just put this out there, I haven't done this myself for this particular use case, but I suspect that this is a good use for AI chatbots
Harry:Oh, how cool is that?
Jorge:And I'm saying that because on the one hand you can write these ideas down and get some feedback, even though you're not dealing with a sentient being, but just the mere fact of putting the words out might make you more aware of what is going on. There's this... people talk about rubber ducking, this technique of talking to the rubber duck and just talking to the duck makes you realize what is going on. Like I said, I haven't done this for this particular use case, but I have had similar interactions with AI chatbots where I know that I am not talking with an entity that is going to be passing judgment on me, and the responses, you can take them at face value, but I often find that it helps me see things from a slightly less emotionally charged perspective just because of the fact that I know that I'm talking with... our friend Jesse James Garrett talks about the big ball of numbers, right? Like, I'm essentially talking with a big ball of numbers. And just the fact that I can put it into words and getting some reaction in words maybe could be a way to get a little bit of perspective.
Harry:I really like that idea a lot and I'm gonna have to play with that a little bit. Yeah. Boy, that's clever. Thank you for that suggestion. That's really cool. I never would've thought of that.
Jorge:Alright, if the opportunity comes up, which I hope it doesn't'cause I wanna be on top of things and I wanna be very responsive and not get caught up in these mental games, but if it does, I'm gonna try it. Alright, Harry, as always a treat talking with you.
Harry:Thank you so much, Jorge. I really like these conversations.
Narrator:Thank you for listening to Traction Heroes with Harry Max and Jorge Arango. Check out the show notes at tractionheroes.com and if you enjoyed the show, please leave us a rating in Apple's podcasts app. Thanks.
