The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  Lawson, a Methodist minister, had traveled to India to learn the techniques of nonviolent resistance from the disciples of Mahatma Gandhi. When he moved to Nashville, he began to train many of the people who would become leaders in the civil rights movement: Lewis, Nash, and others. Lawson believed strongly in preparation for resistance: “You cannot go on a demonstration with 25 people doing whatever they want to do. They have to have a common discipline; that’s a key word for me. The difficulty with nonviolent people and efforts is that they don’t recognize the necessity of fierce discipline and training.”

  In Nashville, Lawson held workshops to train protesters. “He told the crowd how to behave in the face of a hundred possible emergencies, how to avoid violating the loitering laws, how to move to and from the lunch counters in orderly shifts, how to fill the seats of students who needed to go to the bathroom, even how to dress: stockings and heels for the women, coats and ties for the fellows,” wrote the historian Taylor Branch.

  But Lawson didn’t just offer advice; he insisted that students engage in role-plays. He mocked up a lunch counter, based on the real ones in the downtown stores, and asked students to take their place on the stools. Then, white men—confederates of Lawson—encroached on the students’ space, crowding them. The men shouted racial slurs at the students. They’d lean in, inches from the students’ faces, and insult them. A few of the men flicked cigarette ashes into the students’ hair. They shoved students off the stools, onto the floor, manhandling them and pulling at their clothes.

  The simulated attacks were brutal but essential. Lawson wanted to inoculate the students with the instinct of resistance—the ability to suppress the natural urges to fight back or run away. By the time John Lewis and his peers took their places at the real lunch counters in downtown Nashville, they were ready. Disciplined, polite, unflappable. They were afraid, of course, but they had learned to restrain their fear. As Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”

  2.

  When people recount the proudest moments of their lives, they tend to start with their loved ones. The day I got married. The day my child was born. The day my child graduated from college. These are natural defining moments.

  Then people tend to share proud moments of achievement: barriers overcome, victories won, successes earned. In the past two chapters, we’ve studied ways to create more of these moments: first, by recognizing the accomplishments of others, and second, by multiplying the milestones that we conquer en route to our goals.

  So we take pride in the people we love, and we take pride in our own achievements. But there’s something missing here. Consider how people describe other moments of pride: I stood up for someone. I held firm and took the heat. I made a stand that I believed in. I refused to cave. These sentiments don’t describe “achievements,” at least in the sense of plaques and certificates. Rather, they are describing moments of courage.

  Moments of courage may seem harder to “create” than the others we’ve encountered in this section. After all, we can choose when we recognize someone; we can choose when and how to multiply milestones. But moments that demand courage often arrive unexpectedly. They’re fleeting, and we can be caught off guard. Too often the moment passes and we find ourselves wishing later that we’d spoken up or done something.

  You can’t manufacture “moments of courage.” But in this chapter we’ll see that you can practice courage so that, when the moment demands it, you’ll be ready.

  The military understands this concept well. As the psychologist S. J. Rachman wrote in a report on military training, “What might be called ‘training for courage’ plays an important part in preparing people to undertake dangerous jobs such as fire-fighting or parachuting.”

  Rachman studied soldiers who were responsible for disabling improvised explosive devices (IEDs) during the conflict in Northern Ireland. It’s dangerous work, of course. From 1969 to 1981, more than 31,000 incidents were dealt with, and 17 bomb-disposal operators were killed in action.

  Rachman wrote that the “successful practice of courageous performance” led to a reduction in fear and a bolstering of confidence. Novice bomb-disposal operators were put through a regimen of training that simulated the situations they’d experience in the field. The effect on the operators’ confidence was striking: After completing the simulations, they expressed 80% of the confidence reported by experienced operators. That’s a remarkable level of confidence for people who had not yet deactivated a bomb in the field! (Nor did their confidence seem to reflect naïve optimism: Their estimates of the danger of the work were similar to those of experienced operators.)

  What made the training so effective? “One element of such training, the gradual and graduated practice of the dangerous tasks likely to be encountered, seems to be especially valuable,” Rachman said.

  That element—“gradual and graduated practice”—is also the hallmark of exposure therapy, one of the most effective techniques for reducing phobias (irrational fears). In a study led by Jayson Mystkowski, the researchers applied exposure therapy to people terrified of spiders. At the beginning of the study, the participants were asked to get as close as they could tolerate to a tarantula contained in a terrarium. The average participant stopped 10 feet away.

  Over the course of the experiment, they were asked to practice courage in 14 graduated steps. Each step was first demonstrated by the researcher; then, the participants were asked to repeat the task when they felt ready. Here’s a sampling:

  Step 1: Stand 5 feet from the tarantula inside its terrarium.

  Step 3: Place the palm of your hand against the closed container near the tarantula.

  Step 7: Direct the tarantula’s movement with a small paintbrush 5 times.

  Step 9: Let the tarantula walk over a heavily gloved hand.

  Notice that this is basically a level-up plan, where each step constitutes a concrete and prideworthy moment. (“You won’t believe this, but I TOUCHED A TARANTULA today. Granted, it was with a paintbrush, but still, it counts!”)

  The long series of steps culminated with Step 14: allowing the tarantula to walk on the participant’s uncovered hand. Take a guess: How long do you think it took these arachnophobes to reach Step 14? That is, to reach the point where they would voluntarily allow a big hairy tarantula to take a leisurely stroll across their palm? Weeks? Months?

  Try two hours. That was the average time to complete Step 14, and astonishingly, all the participants succeeded. These were people who couldn’t get within 10 feet of the terrarium a short while earlier! Even more impressive, six months later, they could still touch the spider.

  “Before treatment, some of these participants wouldn’t walk on grass for fear of spiders or would stay out of their home or dorm room for days if they thought a spider was present,” said lead author Katherina Hauner.

  We often replicate “exposure therapy” in our own lives. Think of a parent trying to coax a nervous child to relax around a friendly dog. Look at what that beagle is doing, he’s so silly . . . Do you want to see him chew his toy? . . . He’s sitting down now—do you want to pat his furry back? . . . He loves treats—do you want to give him one? And soon your child has a new best friend.

  Managing fear—the goal of exposure therapy—is a critical part of courage. The civil rights demonstrator and the bomb-disposal operator must be able to control their fears to be successful. But courage isn’t just suppressed fear. It’s also the knowledge of how to act in the moment.

  Recall that James Lawson had given students direction on “how to avoid violating the loitering laws, how to move to and from the lunch counters in orderly shifts, how to fill the seats of students who needed to go to the bathroom,” and so on. His workshops weren’t just about toughening up emotionally. They were about mental rehearsals. Participants had to anticipate how they would react to certain situations. In a sense, they were preloading a response so that, in the moment, they could act quickly wit
hout deliberation.

  The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer has studied the way this preloading affects our behavior. His research shows that when people make advance mental commitments—if X happens, then I will do Y—they are substantially more likely to act in support of their goals than people who lack those mental plans. Someone who has committed to drink less alcohol, for instance, might resolve, “Whenever a waiter asks if I want a second drink, I’ll ask for sparkling water.” And that person is far more likely to turn down the drink than someone else who shares the same goal but has no preloaded plan.

  Gollwitzer calls these plans “implementation intentions,” and often the trigger for the plan is as simple as a time and place: When I leave work today, I’m going to drive straight to the gym. The success rate is striking. Setting implementation intentions more than doubled the number of students who turned in a certain assignment on time; doubled the number of women who performed breast self-exams in a certain month; and cut by half the recovery time required by patients who had received hip or knee replacement (among many other examples). There is power in preloading a response.

  This preloading is what’s often missing in organizational situations that require courage. A colleague or client belittles someone, or makes an off-color remark, or suggests something unethical, and we’re so taken aback that we do nothing. Ten minutes later, we curse ourselves for not acting. We missed our chance.

  These missed opportunities made Mary Gentile reconsider the way we teach ethics in schools. Gentile, a a professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, realized that ethics education was dominated by the question, “What is the right thing to do?” But people often know what the right thing to do is. The hard part is acting on that judgment.

  “We can all generate a list of what makes this hard to do,” Gentile said. “We feel alone; we wonder if we’re being naïve; we wonder if we’re misinformed (or we want to believe that perhaps we are); we wonder if our boss will be receptive; we anticipate that we will encounter ‘push back’ if we raise the issue and we don’t know what we’ll say when that happens; we worry about being ostracized or worse if we appear not to be a ‘team player.’ ”

  She became convinced that ethics education should focus not on WHAT is the right thing to do? but rather on HOW can I get the right thing done? She created a curriculum called Giving Voice to Values, which has been used in more than 1,000 schools and organizations.

  The heart of her strategy is practice. You identify situations where an ethical issue might arise. You anticipate the rationalizations you’ll hear for the behavior. Then you literally script out your possible response or action. And finally you practice that response with peers.

  Leaders who want to instill an ethical business culture—and not just mouth the words of a toothless “statement of values”—will take inspiration from Gentile and make practice a priority. Because the situations that lead to unethical behavior are predictable: A relentless pressure for results, coupled with avert-the-eyes management, will lead to cut corners or outright fraud (think banking scandals). Blurry lines of accountability, plus get-things-done urgency, will lead to accidents (think cataclysmic oil spills). A leader’s bias or bigotry or sexism, taking root in a permissive environment, will inevitably lead to abuse.

  These are not anomalies. They are probabilities. They can be foreseen and fought.

  “Just as an athlete practices his or her moves to commit them to muscle memory, the point here is to make voicing our values the default position,” said Gentile.

  3.

  At the seminary at Yeshiva University, students role-played difficult situations with actors, modeling the crises they might face as a rabbi dealing with congregants. As reported by Paul Vitello in the New York Times, the situations they rehearsed are complex and emotional: Talking with a suicidal teenager. Comforting an elderly woman frustrated with the indignities and invisibility of old age. Counseling a victim of childhood sexual abuse. Telling a man his wife had died of an aneurysm while visiting the synagogue.

  That last scenario was presented to the 24-year-old student Benjamin Houben. Here’s how Vitello describes the scene: “To prepare for the scene, [Houben] paused outside the room, trying to conjure the feeling of death. He entered the classroom, wearing a look of grief that he hoped would telegraph what he was about to say. But the actor was not about to make the job easier. He waited to be told, then he went to pieces with ‘great skill,’ said Mr. Houben, whose face seemed to sag just retelling the scene. . . . The lessons he learned from the simulation, he said, were these: People may not believe you when you tell them. It may take a long time for them to absorb the shock. And after that, it only gets worse.”

  Originally in the role-playing exercises there were no actors—the students role-played with each other. But there was a problem. “It wasn’t real enough,” said Rabbi Menachem Penner, the dean of the seminary. “It was instructional but not experiential. It was the difference between reading something in a book and living through it. The actors created the level of tension that really made it valuable.”

  A crucial feature of practicing courage, then, is making sure the practice requires courage! In the Nashville rehearsals, James Lawson’s confederates cursed at the student protesters. Mocked them. Shoved them. And Rabbi Penner’s seminary students must confront congregants who scream and cry and break down. In the back of their minds, the students know it’s not “real,” but the moment feels real.

  The students gain confidence from rehearsing such fraught and delicate conversations. “We’ve found that when students practice, even for one session, it makes them so much calmer and more prepared when they have to do it in real life,” said Rabbi Penner. It takes courage to offer counsel in such traumatic situations, and that courage is strengthened with practice.

  In most organizations, employees won’t be called on to deal with situations this grave, but at some point everyone will face an anxiety-making conversation. How do you stand up to a dictatorial boss? How do you say “no” to an important customer? How do you fire an employee who might lash out? How do you lay off a loyal employee whose role is no longer needed? Every industry has its own unique set of emotional encounters: An airline desk agent who must help an irate passenger who’s missed his connecting flight by 90 seconds. A teacher who must tell a student’s parents that their child is behaving badly. A financial advisor who must inform an elderly widow she’s lost a fifth of her nest egg because of a stock market correction.

  Practice quiets the anxiety that can cloud our mind in a tough moment. When we lack practice, our good intentions often falter. As an example, take the antidrug program D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education), launched in 1983, which invites police officers into schools to inform students about the harms of drugs and to encourage a drug-free lifestyle. It’s an admirable and well-intentioned intervention, and it’s popular. It’s the most widely used drug prevention program in the United States. But the evidence from several studies is clear: It doesn’t work. One meta-analysis found that teens enrolled in D.A.R.E. were just as likely to use drugs as those who weren’t.

  Why doesn’t D.A.R.E. work? Clues about the program’s flaws can be found in the work of Pim Cuijpers, who studied what made antidrug programs successful. Cuijpers’s research had led to a simple conclusion: Programs that reduce drug use employ interactive methods, while ineffective programs don’t.

  In other words, to resist drugs, students need the opportunity to practice courage. The hard part isn’t knowing what the right thing to do is. The hard part is doing it. There will come a time at a party when a 16-year-old is offered alcohol or marijuana. If they haven’t rehearsed what they’ll do or say in that moment, they are likely to feel their resolve crumble.

  What teens may not realize is that if they resist drugs or alcohol, they will make it easier for others to resist, too. An act of courage can bolster the resolve of others. One executive gave us an example of how he acts on this insig
ht in his business. “When we have meetings, I typically have a ‘plant’ in the audience and give them a tough question to ask,” he said. “It’s always a question we know people are asking and talking about but afraid to actually bring to leadership. I do this to ‘pop the cork’ and show that it’s safe.” He’s right to be concerned about people staying silent: One study found that 85% of workers felt “unable to raise an issue or concern to their bosses even though they felt the issue was important.”

  His solution—the confederate with the tough question—is well supported by evidence. There’s a classic study, conducted by Charlan Nemeth and Cynthia Chiles, demonstrating that one act of courage supports another. Let’s say you are a participant in the study. You are matched with three other people, and a researcher shows your group a series of 20 slides. After each one is presented, the researcher pauses to ask each of you what color the slide is. It’s an easy task: All the slides are blue, and all four of you say “blue” all 20 times you’re asked.

  Then, that group breaks up and you are put into a new group of four. Same task. This time, though, the first slide is red. Oddly, all three of your group-mates call it “orange.” What will you call it? It certainly looks red, but could you be wrong? This happens 19 more times—your group-mates always call the slides “orange” and, each time, everyone looks at you to hear your answer.

  If you think you would stay strong in this situation, you might be right, but you’d be in the minority. Most people in the study caved. On average, they called 14 of the 20 red slides “orange,” conforming to the majority’s incorrect view. (The three people in the group who claimed all the red slides were “orange” were, as you might have guessed, confederates of the researchers.)

  Another set of participants were ushered through the sequence above but with one crucial difference: This time, the researchers also added a confederate to the first group (the one viewing blue slides). He was instructed to call all the blue sides “green.” Let’s call him the Brave but Wrong Guy. The other three (normal) participants were probably puzzled by his seeming color-blindness, but they easily stuck to their guns, calling all the blue slides “blue.”