Nine Things Successful People Will Do Differently in 2013

featuring Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D.

february 7, 2013

Sponsored by

2013 Harvard Business School Publishing. Created for Harvard Business Review by BullsEye Resources www.bullseyeresources.com

WEBINARS
february 7, 2013

Nine Things Successful People Will Do Differently in 2013

OVERVIEW
Successful people dont succeed because of who they are; they succeed because of what they do. There are nine cognitive tendencies that distinguish those who make success look easy from the rest of us. Adopting these ways of thinking can not only improve ones own rates of goal achievement but can motivate teams to attain higher levels of performance than ever before. The right mindset is critical; it can significantly boost the odds of success in the face of pitfalls and barriers. In particular, successful people tend to be optimistic, but temper that optimism with realism. They work hard not to be good as compared to others at a static point in time but to get better as compared to themselves in a progressive process over time. They also keep focused on what they will do, and not on what they promise themselves they wont do.

contributors
Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. Author, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently; Associate Director, Motivation Science Center, Columbia University Business School Sarah Green (Moderator) Senior Associate Editor, Harvard Business Review

CONTEXT
Building on Dr. Halvorsons last Harvard Business Review webinar (December 2011), which covered what people can do to reach their goals, this time she focused on mindsets that help people hang in there amid adversity.

Key learnings
Realistic optimism promotes success, whereas unrealistic optimism invites failure. Optimism is widely misunderstood these days. Optimism means believing that good things will happen. It is known to be motivating and associated with higher levels of achievement, mental and physical health, and happiness. But popular culture has so embraced optimism that many people avoid negative thoughts, fearing they will be self-fulfilling prophesies. Proponents of positive thinking imply that somehow the universe itself will bring good fortune to people who stay positive and ignore obstacles. That is unrealistic optimism. It is very different from realistic optimism. Unrealistic optimism Good things will happen to you. It increases when obstacles are ignored. Realistic optimism You will make good things happen. It increases if you consider and find solutions for obstacles.

Unrealistic optimism is dangerous, as obstacles that are ignored cannot be overcome. Expecting success simply to happen promotes procrastination and lowers energy, effort, and planning. Unrealistic optimism hurts performance and invites failure.

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Nine Things Successful People Will Do Differently in 2013

February 7, 2013

It is wrong that thinking about negatives dampens optimism. Realistic optimism increases confidence because it allows obstacles to be analyzed and solutions found. Accordingly, leaders should not shield teams from their concerns, promoting unrealistic optimism. Far more confidence results when leaders are candid about challenges, enabling teams to work on solutions. Optimism grounded in reality and balanced with realism promotes high levels of performance and increases odds of The key to cultivating realistic optimism is mental contrasting. Mental contrasting is a technique that helps one simultaneously hold in mind both positive visions of the desired future and negative realities from the present. It works via simultaneous activation, which involves toggling back and forth mentally between representations of the future and the present. The technique makes the future seem great, although something must be achieved. It makes present obstacles seem surmountable in the gusto to achieve the future. Simultaneous activation incites a strong urge to act, to do something that will bring the future closer to reality. By taking the time to develop a picture of a positive future and what stands in its way, mental contrasting promotes smart commitment. One sees more clearly which goals are worth the commitment of ones limited resources (time, money, energy) and can allocate those resources among initiatives more efficiently. Engaging in mental contrasting helps managers improve at delegation and time management. Mindset is critical to performance: Get Better trumps Be Good. When people are working hard to achieve something, they think about what they are doing in one of two (subconscious) ways: The Be Good mindset: The focus is on proving yourself. Goals are seen as opportunities to demonstrate capability. Bringing projects to completion says something validating about the person. Since the quality of good is typically measured in comparison to others, there is keen focus on outperforming other people, or being better at a given point in time. The Get Better mindset: The focus is not on proving, but on improving; not on validating but on developing; not on being better than others but on doing better than you did in the past. It is progress over time. The Be Good mindset is very motivating, but only when things are going well. When the going gets tough, the person is vulnerable to self-doubt, depression, and withdrawal of effort. Performance suffers. With the Get Better mindset, adversity motivates people to rise to the occasion. They embrace challenges as opportunities to make themselves proud.

Realistic optimism is very, very important for tackling challengesbeing prepared for them, evaluating them critically, and not being too discouraged by them.
Heidi Grant Halvorson

Through simultaneous activation, your brain incorporates action into the representations. People feel the necessity to act, to jump out of their chairs and do something.
Heidi Grant Halvorson

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Nine Things Successful People Will Do Differently in 2013

February 7, 2013

The Get Better mindset is one of the most powerful contributors to success that Dr. Halvorson has identified. In the lab, performance by mindset is measured by telling some subjects that the point of an exercise is to measure their performance against peers and telling others that measuring their improvement is the pointessentially assigning a mindset. In one experiment, the adversity that is introduced is frequent interruptions. In another, subjects are told, falsely, that they scored in just the 29th percentile.
Figure 1 Negative feedback can be motivating or debilitating depending on mindset.

If you want the best out of yourself and the people you work with, Get Better is the mindset for you.
Heidi Grant Halvorson

The findings hold implications for leadership. For example, many leaders believe that giving negative feedback is deflating. Research shows that to be true only when the mindset is Be Good. Those with a Get Better mindset are energized by the challenge of improving. Holding up role models as examples cuts both ways as well: Employees with a Be Good mindset tend to feel demoralized upon hearing how great someone else is performing. Those with a Get Better mindset welcome information that can help them improve; they feel inspired by the example. How Leaders Can Promote Get Better Mindsets There are several ways: Framing and feedback. Framing in language that suggests a development opportunity communicates a Get Better mindset. Use words like training, learning, and progress. Let people know that they will face challenges and possibly failures. That removes the anxiety about failing that often causes people to fail.

The number one reason people make mistakes is anxiety. If you take the pressure off, things go more smoothly and you can help people get into a Get Better mindset.
Heidi Grant Halvorson

2013 Harvard Business School Publishing. Created for Harvard Business Review by BullsEye Resources www.bullseyeresources.com

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Nine Things Successful People Will Do Differently in 2013

February 7, 2013

Rewriting goals. The same goal can be expressed with either mindset implicit. Making a subtle shift changes the focus to progress. I want my team to communicate effectively can be tweaked to I want to improve communication on my team. I want to be a great leader becomes I want to learn how to become a great leader. Modeling a Get Better mindset. Managers should recognize that simply drawing comparisons can elevate a particular mindset to dominance. Telling an employee being reviewed, for example, that he is still the worst communicator on the team wont draw out his best performance; that observation has relevance only in a Be Good schema. Telling him how much he has improved over the past year, however, can help performance. A leader who thinks in Be Good terms wont ever shape a team into Get Better thinkers. Focusing on what you will do works better than focusing on what you wont do. To reach a goal requires doing things that move you closer to achieving it and avoiding doing things that move you further away. To stop a bad habit like smoking or losing your temper, people typically tell themselves that they wont do it anymore. Ironically, this often makes the behavior harder to stop, as it requires thinking a lot about refraining. And it requires willpower, a fickle friend. A more successful strategy is telling yourself what you will do instead. If-then plans work well; e.g., If I feel the urge to grab junk food, then Ill have fruit instead. They are great for replacing bad behavior with good and for remembering to take action. The lesson for leaders: improve the performance of maladapted teams by focusing not on where teams are going wrong but on what they should be doing instead; encourage if-then planning, both for actions to take and actions to avoid.

2013 Harvard Business School Publishing. Created for Harvard Business Review by BullsEye Resources www.bullseyeresources.com

www.hbr.org

Nine Things Successful People Will Do Differently in 2013

february 7, 2013

BIOGRAPHIES
Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. Author, Nine Things Successful People Do Differently; Associate Director, Motivation Science Center, Columbia University Business School Sarah Green (Moderator) Senior Associate Editor, Harvard Business Review

Heidi Grant Halvorson is a rising star in the field of motivational science. She is a an expert blogger for Fast Company, WSJ. com, Forbes, The Huffington Post, and Psychology Today, as well as a regular contributor to the BBC World Services Business Daily, the Harvard Business Review, and SmartBriefs SmartBlog on Leadership. Her writing has also been featured on CNN Living and Mamapedia. Heidi is also Associate Director of the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School. In addition to her work as author and co-editor of the highly-regarded academic book The Psychology of Goals (Guilford, 2009), she has authored papers in her fields most prestigious journals. She is also author of the book Succeed: How We Can All Reach Our Goals and the Harvard Business Review eSingle Nine Things Successful People Do Differently. Dr. Grant Halvorson is a member of the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and was recently elected to the highly selective Society for Experimental Social Psychology. She received her PhD in social psychology from Columbia University.

Sarah Green is a senior associate editor at Harvard Business Review and host of the HBR IdeaCast, which has been nominated for two National Magazine Awards. Prior to joining HBR, Sarah spent five years as a baseball writer and worked as a researcher for Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe columnist, Ellen Goodman. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University, where she wrote her honors thesis on Jane Austen.

The information contained in this summary reflects BullsEye Resources, Inc.s subjective condensed summarization of the applicable conference session. There may be material errors, omissions, or inaccuracies in the reporting of the substance of the session. In no way does BullsEye Resources or Harvard Business Review assume any responsibility for any information provided or any decisions made based upon the information provided in this document.

2013 Harvard Business School Publishing. Created for Harvard Business Review by BullsEye Resources www.bullseyeresources.com

www.hbr.org