by Kerr, James
—— Bald. Wrinkle. Grey. Arthritis. Florida. Forgetful.
After completing their sentences, the groups – some of whom had used the age-related flashcards, and others who had not – were then asked to walk along a corridor and sign out. Which is when the real experiment began.
Their progress down the corridor was timed – and something remarkable was discovered. Those in the groups who had been working with the words connoting age – arthritis, Florida, forgetful – walked more slowly.
—— They.
Walked.
More.
Slowly.
The suggestion of age – just the merest idea processed on an unconscious level – led to a reflexive response that had them display the physical behaviour of the elderly.
It’s called the ‘Florida Effect’ and, though the results are still being debated, it indicates that perhaps our sense of free will is neither free nor always wilful, but rather a response to the stimulus around us, to our physical and psychological environment; to the way our world is posited through language.
It is a response to a story.
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In Bruce Chatwin’s book, The Songlines, he explores the Koori (Australian Aboriginal) belief that as young men go walkabout, the words they chant ‘sing their world into existence’. The tribal songs learned on their mother’s laps and the other more sacred songs taught by their fathers in the semi-circles of Corroboree are chanted and hummed as the initiates walk their songlines. With the words they sing come images, new ancient landscapes of their mind’s eye: the dream becoming the reality, the word made world.
Chatwin also reminds us that the Ancient Egyptians believed that the seat of the soul is our tongue. Using it as our rudder, and words as our oar, we steer our way across the waters to our destiny. From ancient theology to contemporary psychology, our words shape our story and this story becomes the framework for our behaviours; and our behaviours determine the way we lead our life and the way we run our organizations.
Richie McCaw tells Greg McGee that he has always kept a notebook. It’s a working document, a library of affirmations, mantras, notes-to-self, reminders, exhortations, expectations, anchors and priming words.
‘Need to be positive and keep belief with the boys with what we’re doing.’
‘Physicality is the key.’
‘Positive mentality in how we’re going to play.’
On game day, the first words in McCaw’s book are always the same – ‘Start Again’ – a reminder that you have to prove yourself again, today. For McCaw, if it’s not written, it’s not real.
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The truth is, we don’t so much tell stories, as stories tell us.
Our narratives frame and structure our lives, becoming the prism through which we perceive and live. Ira Glass, the host of US radio show, This American Life, expresses it perfectly: ‘Great stories happen to those who tell them.’ And vice versa.
This is true for both individuals and organizations.
Dr Pamela Rutledge, Director of the Media Psychology Research Centre says:
—— Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, cognitive maps, mental models, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we explain how things work, how we make decisions, how we justify our decisions, how we persuade others, how we understand our place in the world, create our identities, and define and teach social values.
This has particular relevance to leadership today, argues John Kotter, culture-change guru and former professor at Harvard Business School:
—— We learn best – and change – from hearing stories that strike a chord with us . . . Those in leadership positions who fail to grasp or use the power of stories risk failure for their companies or for themselves.
The language we use embeds itself and becomes action, so it is critical to respect it, shape it and deploy it strategically. The filmmaker Robert Rodriguez once wrote that the first step to becoming a Hollywood director is to get a business card with the word ‘director’ printed under your name. Apple set out to put a ‘dent in the universe’ and it did. Richie McCaw set out to become a Great All Black.
In the lead up to the Rugby World Cup, the All Blacks set themselves an internal challenge: ‘To be the best rugby team there has ever been’.
—— Whāia te iti kahurangi; ki te tuohu koe, me he maunga teitei.
Aim for the highest cloud, so that if you miss it, you will hit a lofty mountain.
It wasn’t about boasting, in fact it was the opposite. It was the team’s equivalent of G. A. B. – the highest cloud, a benchmark, what Jim Collins would call a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
‘It just became a natural part of what we did,’ said Graham Henry, ‘so that everyone’s expectations in that group were the ultimate. And they spoke and walked that way.’
‘Judge yourself against the world’s best,’ Sean Fitzpatrick tells his audience. ‘Without question.’
Embrace Expectations
By embracing a fear of failure, we can lift our performance, using a healthy loss aversion to motivate us. Equally, it pays to hoist our sights if we aspire to be world class: to create for ourselves a narrative of extreme, even unrealistic ambition. It doesn’t even matter if it’s true, or reasonable, or possible; it only matters that we do it. In this way, we set our internal and team benchmarks to the ultimate. Inspiring leaders use bold, even unrealistic goals to lift their game and the power of storytelling to ‘sing their world into existence’. They tell great, vivid, epic stories of what is possible to themselves and their teams – and soon the world repeats the story back to them.
Embrace Expectations
Aim for the highest cloud.
—— Kia whakangawari au i a hau.
Let us prepare ourselves for the fray.
VIII
PREPARATION
—— Ko te piko o te māhuri, te-rā te tupu o te rākau.
The way the sapling is shaped determines how the tree grows.
TRAIN TO WIN
Practise under pressure
Shepherd St, Bowral, New South Wales, Australia, 1915
A different sport; another lesson.
A small boy is playing cricket alone in a backyard. The sound of ball on bat echoes over the neighbourhood, rebounding over ordinary weatherboard bungalows in an ordinary Australian town.
The bat is a cricket stump. The ball is a golf ball.
The boy throws the ball against a curved, corrugated wall. Each time he throws, it flies off at a different, random angle.
Sometimes he cuts. Sometimes he blocks. Sometimes he drives.
Every time, though, he hits the ball.
Every time.
The boy does this every morning, every afternoon, every day and every year for a decade. In his first game for the local school, aged twelve, he scores 115 not out. In the return match his captain retires him on 72. For the third match the opposing captain refuses to field a team if he is selected.
A few years later, during his first season of club cricket, the boy scores 995 runs in just nine innings. In 1927 he plays his first first-class match.
The next year he plays for his country. Twenty years later he retires, with an average Test score of 99.94 – dismissed one run short of an extraordinary career average of 100.
The boy’s name was Donald Bradman, the finest sportsman of any generation.
Bradman learned his trade on the backstreets of Bowral by bouncing a golf ball off a corrugated wall and hitting it back with a cricket stump.
He made practice his test.
˜
‘Practise with intensity to develop the mindset to win,’ the All Blacks say. It’s a methodology called ‘Train to Win’ and Graham Henry describes it as one of the key strategic pillars that propelled his team to World Cup victory.
‘We talked about leadership and expectation, a learning environment and those sorts of things; we were handling pressure . . . and that involved a lo
t of pretty simple brain biology and how the brain works under stress and how you handle that stress.’
‘The training, decision-making wise, should be harder than the game,’ says Wayne Smith. ‘So you try an overlying principle of throwing problems at them – unexpected events – forcing them to solve the problems.’
Like Bradman’s corrugated wall.
Patrick McKendry in the New Zealand Herald described the final full training session before an All Blacks match:
—— Training on Thursday is all about intensity. The players don’t stop for mistakes as they once did. They reason, quite rightly, that opposition teams don’t stop for All Blacks’ errors – they try to take advantage of them – so they should train that way.
‘We wanted to replicate playing conditions,’ says Smith. ‘I used to constantly try and put [scrum-half] Jimmy Cowen under pressure by telling him they were going to score against him at training . . . to replicate what it was going to be like on the field.’
He explains: ‘By throwing all sorts of problem-solving situations at them and randomizing situations, we found we were getting better long-term learning. If you are not over-extending yourself you’re not going to get much learning . . . there’s no point in ducking the challenges.’
Intensity of preparation – ‘training to win’ – conditions the brain and body to perform under pressure. It lets peak performance become automatic. It develops the mindset to win.
˜
Arnold Schwarzenegger calls it ‘reps’. ‘There are no shortcuts,’ he says in in Total Recall, his autobiography. ‘It took hundreds and even thousands of repetitions for me to learn to hit a great three-quarter back pose, dance the tango in True Lies, paint a beautiful birthday card, and say “I’ll be back” just the right way . . . No matter what you do in life, it’s either reps or mileage.’
And the best kind of practice involves intensity – getting out of your comfort zone, extending yourself. In a phrase heard around the All Blacks’ camp, ‘If you’re not growing anywhere, you’re not going anywhere.’
˜
‘The fight is won or lost,’ says Muhammad Ali, ‘far away from witnesses – behind the lines, in the gym, and out there on the road, well before I dance under the lights.’
In business, training is often seen as a soft option and is limited to the occasional away-day. However, effective training is intense, regular and repetitious. For world-class results, it should be central to the culture.
When coaching the Japan speed skating team in the 1990s, Dr Izumi Tabata observed that short, intense training sessions were as effective as longer, more languid sessions in building both anaerobic capacity and VO2 max, key indicators of fitness. A test group performing short intense bursts of activity increased their anaerobic capacity by 28 per cent and VO2 max by 15 per cent, compared to a second group training more traditionally, who only improved their VO2 max by 10 per cent, with no gain in anaerobic capacity.
Meanwhile, the Department of Surgery at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a teaching hospital in New York City, have developed what they call the ‘Top Gun Laparoscopic Skills Shoot-Out’, an intensity-based interactive ‘video game’ for surgeons-in-training. Laparoscopic surgeons who spent three hours a week training on the video game made one third fewer errors and performed 25 per cent faster than those who didn’t.
Training with intensity accelerates personal growth.
˜
Intensity training isn’t new, of course – military organizations have enjoyed its benefits for millennia; from Spartan regimes in Ancient times to today’s dreaded Fartlek Hill, the training course for the US Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia.
In the eighteenth century Alexander Vasilyevich Suvorov espoused ‘constant, progressive and repetitive training under conditions gradually approaching those of genuine combat’. Central to his training programme was an exercise called ‘skvoznaia ataka’ (‘attack through’). A thousand men would charge from one side, a thousand from the other, at pace and with meaning. Men and horses were injured, some would even die, as the practice was repeated and repeated.
Better to lose a few men in training, Suvorov believed, than lose a battle.
His methods worked. He was never defeated.
In the early 1970s, the US Air Force set up Exercise Red Flag. Analysts had discovered that after ten successful combat missions the survival rate of pilots improved significantly. The intensity of live combat, it seems, is invaluable training for, well, live combat. Red Flag, based at Nellis Airforce base, Nevada, simulates large-scale, realistic air combat situations. Former Red Arrows pilot Justin Hughes says, ‘You’re trying to exercise decision-making in high stressed environments. It’s role play for real. You’d probably do a week of days – and a week of nights – the bad guys don’t sleep at night . . . Because we train so hard and so well at it, we tend to be better than everybody else.’
It’s not the physical but the psychological aspect that the All Blacks have pioneered – the use of randomness, unpredictability and constant questioning, combined with pace and physicality, in order to stress the brain and test decision-making capacity.
‘It’s all about performing under pressure on the paddock,’ says Gilbert Enoka. And to perform under pressure when it matters, you need to train that way.
That way, when we do it for real, it’s automatic. We don’t think, we just do.
We have clarity. Accuracy. Intensity.
Train to win.
˜
In early 2010, Gilbert Enoka called in the services of Gazing Performance System’s Ceri Evans and Renzie Hanham, two men with both a theoretical and a practical understanding of how the brain performs under pressure.
Evans, a karate black belt and former Rhodes Scholar who won fifty-six caps for the New Zealand football team, is a forensic psychiatrist who developed the methodology that Gazing now uses to help organizations lift performance. Hanham has represented his country in karate and coached organizations, as well as sports teams to Olympic level. Gazing works internationally with companies including Xerox, Avis and UPS in handling pressure, improving performance and delivering results.
Evans and Hanham, alongside Henry, Enoka, Smith and Hansen, trainer Nick Gill and the players’ Leadership Group, formed the ‘Mental Analysis and Development Group’ early in 2010 to confront the issue of pressure – what it is, what it does and what they can do about it. They called it MAD for short.
‘Just having a knowledge of how the brain reacts to stress was a pretty important first step,’ says Henry. ‘What the players do, why they felt the way they felt.’
Though unwilling to reveal the specifics of the work Evans and Hanham did with the All Blacks – ‘some of it is clinical’ – Bede Brosnahan of Gazing was happy to discuss how some of the tools, techniques and methodologies they use with elite teams can apply to the world of business.
‘The work we do is all about the control of attention,’ says Brosnahan. In pressure situations, he says, it is very easy for our consciousness to ‘divert from a resourceful state to an unresourceful one’, from a position of mental calm, clarity and inner strength into what he calls ‘Defensive Thinking’.
We’ve all felt it – the sensation as our shutters come down, our horizons narrow and we find ourselves in an ever-tightening corridor from which we feel there is no escape. In this state we’re thinking about survival, says Brosnahan. ‘A negative content loop’ forms and our perceptions create feelings of being overwhelmed, tightening and tension. This in turn leads to unhelpful behaviours – overt aggression, shutting down and panic. We let the situation get to us. We make poor decisions. And we choke.
In Gazing parlance, we are H.O.T.
° Heated
° Overwhelmed
° Tense
They call this ‘Red Head’.
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The opposite they call ‘Blue Head.’
This is the ability to maintain clarity, situational awareness, accurate
analysis and good decision-making under pressure. It’s a resourceful state in which we are able to trust ourselves to deliver, to be flexible, adaptable and on top of our game. We can see the big picture as well as the important details and our attention is where it should be. To have a Blue Head means to remain on task, rather than diverted, and Gazing’s parlance allows us to ACT:
A. Alternatives:
to look at our options, adapt, adjust and overcome
C. Consequences:
to understand the risk/reward ratio of each alternative and to make an accurate assessment of what is needed
T. Task Behaviours:
To stay on task and execute the tactics and strategy
Performance under pressure is knowing how to ACT. In Brosnahan’s words, ‘allowing yourself to win by following the process rather than being caught up in outcomes’.
‘The skill to handle pressure was critical,’ says Henry. ‘Pressure is a privilege,’ says Gilbert Enoka – it means you’re playing to the highest level. ‘If an organization is really going to be world-class,’ Brosnahan elaborates, ‘that’s going to mean an awful lot of pressure – pressure is a good thing.’
The thing is, he continues, most organizations don’t focus on a programme of training for mental toughness. They ‘tend to go for the one-off hits, which is unrealistic’: a training session, an away day, an inspirational speech, but nothing continuous and progressive. Few focus on long-term development, on a programme of improvement.
