Category : PipCorporate

Failure can be good for you. This is not easy to read if a relationship has just ended or your business has just collapsed. And of course, it would be better if these things had not happened. But failure, from time to time, is inevitable and, depending on how we respond to it – it can have an upside. Here’s why.

Our brains have two primary mindsets that underpin our whole lives – one is called the approach mindset and the other the avoidance mindset. The approach mindset is linked to our brain’s reward network – the feel-good “pleasure centre” that switches on when we anticipate good things – success, sugar, sex – that are rewarding to us. This is the go-getting, forward-looking, goal-seeking, reward-relishing circuit of the brain that is closely linked to the brain’s chemical messenger dopamine [1].

The avoidance network, on the other hand is linked to our fear of punishment – of foreseeing risk and bad things happening. It is linked to the fight or flight chemical messenger of the brain, noradrenaline/norepinephrine. To get through life, these two circuits have to be in approximate balance – too much reward seeking and we become blind to risk and can end up crashing spectacularly, as happened in the financial crisis of 2007/8.

Most of the time, for most people, they are in rough balance, which is how the brain likes it, because these two circuits are in competition with each other in the brain – they inhibit each other and in a healthy situation, you get an amiable peace treaty between the two.

But when we fail, the avoidance network gets a boost and the approach network a beating. And when it has the upper hand, the avoidance network not only makes us more anxious and lower in mood, it also makes us more likely to remember past failures and past bad times, and makes it harder for us to anticipate future good times.

But there can be some hidden blessings for you in this state of avoidance and failure which you can harness if you let yourself. Here are some of them:

• Self-awareness is increased when the avoidance network is dominant. Failure can make us reflective and insightful in a way that can really foster future personal growth and also helps us learn from our mistakes.
• Empathy receives a boost with failure – and this can endear you to friends and colleagues. Too much success can make people big-headed and unpopular while failure can help forge bonds with people who could be your allies for future success.
• Creativity can be boosted when our happy headlong success treadmill is switched off. Success narrows attention and so can put creative blinkers on us, while failure broadens attention and can open up possibilities we never thought of.

1. Norbury, A., et al., Dopamine regulates approach-avoidance in human sensation-seeking. International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2015: p. pyv041.

Emotionally resilient people tend to think differently to those who are more vulnerable. In particular, they respond differently to failure.

Imagine that big sale you were on the point of closing falls through at the last minute. How do you feel? – Bad – maybe even terrible. That’s understandable. You put in all of that work and it’s for nothing. Now you are worried about your manager’s response and maybe even about your job.

Feeling bad when you fail is normal and emotionally tough people feel this just as much as emotionally vulnerable people. So what’s the difference? The difference lies in how you understand the causes of failure – and to what you attribute it.

Let’s take two people – Sam and Helen, each of whose deals has fallen at the last hurdle. Both are upset when they hear the news and spend the day brooding on what happened.

Sam thinks “I should never have got into sales – I knew I wasn’t cut out for it – I’m not a good negotiator, I can’t close the deal. I am a failure – I don’t know how I’m going to make a living.”

Helen thinks: “I really messed up there – what an idiot! I nearly had it – it was that last email he sent, if only I had said yes to that last condition – but I thought I had him. And then there were those economic figures in the news that morning – that spooked him, I know.”

A week later, Sam is morose and anxious while Helen is back to her bouncy, optimistic and confident self. Why? Because Sam has a tendency to use an explanatory style that dooms him to feel low and anxious in the face of failure.

While thinking about the failed deal, Sam attributed the cause to himself – he made it personal. Helen, while taking some of the blame, also considered that the morning’s bad economic figures had played a part: an external not a personal factor.

Sam considered that the failed deal was because of something wrong with him, and therefore something that is permanent. For Helen, the cause of her failure was temporary ­–with hindsight she realises that she made a mistake in how she responded to the client’s last email.

Finally, for Sam the failed deal was caused by something pervasive in his life. To Helen, the failure was specific to this situation, and had nothing to say about her in general.

No wonder that a week later, Sam was anxious and low while Helen was bouncy and positive.  Sam had thought himself into a situation where the failure was personal, permanent and pervasive – leaving little hope for his future success. To Helen, the failure was external, temporary and specific – she was ready for the next challenge.

So here’s the good news – thoughts are just thoughts and we can learn to change how we think about failure. If we do that, we will become more emotionally resilient and probably even more successful.

In the last blog we met Joe, a heavy smoker who has just reached the 4^th stage of change in trying to quit (see link here).

Joe has moved through the stages of Precontemplation, Contemplation, Preparation and now he’s at Action. This is the stage at which he has actively quit smoking and plans to stay that way.

But this is also the danger stage.

This is the stage at which Joe will get the most recognition from friends and family for quitting. But he will also have to face a number of pitfalls. For example, he might have quit smoking at home but will he be able to keep that up when out with friends? He might have stopped smoking when he is happy but what about when something goes wrong at work and he needs a stress reliever

This is where understanding yourself, and foreseeing the battles that your future self is likely to face, is important. In good news, there is something to help.

The Volitional Help Sheet is a sheet divided into two. The left column is headed ‘Situations’ and it is filled with a list of times in which you may be tempted to smoke in the form of ‘If I am tempted to smoke …’

For example, one may be ‘If I am tempted to smoke at a bar or pub having a drink’. Another may be, ‘If I am tempted to smoke when I wake up in the morning and face a tough day’.

The column on the right is headed ‘Solutions’ and completes the sentences with a list of alternatives to smoking when facing the situations on the left.

For example, ‘If I am tempted to smoke at a bar or pub having a drink’ may be completed by ‘Then I will recall information people have given me on the benefits of quitting smoking’. ‘If I am tempted to smoke when I wake up in the morning and face a tough day’ may be completed by ‘Then I will make sure I am rewarded if I don’t smoke.’

Research has shown that smokers who are given one of these sheets and are asked to draw lines from the ‘if’ situations to the ‘then’ statements are much more likely to give up than those who aren’t or than those who don’t receive a sheet [1]. What’s more, these types of cheat sheets have also been shown to help people reduce alcohol consumption, increase physical activity and any number of other healthy behaviours that are difficult to implement [2-4].

So if you find yourself sitting on the couch dreaming of a future you why not take a blank page, make a plan and write a help sheet to help you through the tough times. The final stage of the model of change is Maintenance which you reach when you have successfully changed for 6 months or more. Now wouldn’t that be a future you your present self could be proud of?

1. Armitage, C. J. (2008). A volitional help sheet to encourage smoking cessation: a randomized exploratory trial. Health Psychology, 27(5), 557.
2. Kwasnicka, D., Presseau, J., White, M., & Sniehotta, F. F. (2013). Does planning how to cope with anticipated barriers facilitate health-related behaviour change? A systematic review. Health psychology review, 7(2), 129-145.
3. Armitage, C. J., & Arden, M. A. (2010). A volitional help sheet to increase physical activity in people with low socioeconomic status: a randomised exploratory trial. Psychology and Health, 25(10), 1129-1145.
4. Armitage, C. J., & Arden, M. A. (2012). A volitional help sheet to reduce alcohol consumption in the general population: a field experiment. Prevention Science, 13(6), 635-643

“Present you, meet future you: a healthier, wealthier, happier, smarter version of you”.

Sound familiar?

We spend a lot of time thinking about the future and about our future selves. More often than not, we envision our future selves as a better version of our current selves because of some change that we are going to make. Sure, we may be sitting on the couch now but our future self will be out running 5 miles after work. Sure, we may be smoking now but our future self will have given up and saved a pile of money in the process.

Health psychologists have long recognised that there is a gap between our ‘intentions’ and our ‘actions’. While we may ‘intend’ to exercise more, the ‘action’ of actually getting out and exercising regularly is much harder to pull off.

So how do we get from sitting on the couch envisioning our future fit selves to pulling on the running gear?

One way may be to predict, and plan for, our failures in advance.

Psychologists have developed a set of steps that most people go through before making a lasting change. This is called the Transtheoretical Model [1,2].

Take Joe, a heavy smoker for the last 10 years. Joe doesn’t have any intention of quitting smoking. He is in what is called the ‘Precontemplation’ Stage. But, if Joe was to quit, the steps he would go through over the next few years may look something like this:

• Precontemplation: Joe knows he’s a smoker, he knows smoking is bad for him but he has no intention whatsoever of stopping.
• Contemplation: Joe used to be an avid five-a-side footballer. He tried to play football in the garden with his son last week and got a huge shock when he couldn’t run a few metres without wheezing and coughing. His doctor told him that if he stops smoking now he can still regain his fitness. He has a hazy plan to stop but not any time soon.
• Preparation: Joe’s cough is getting worse, his wife told him she is sick of the smell and his son has started to cry whenever he smokes because he knows it’s bad for his dad. Joe makes a commitment to stop within the next month. He Googles smoking cessation courses and nicotine replacement therapies as a first step.
• Action: Joe has stocked up on nicotine patches and has joined a supportive smoking cessation group. He had his last cigarette on Sunday night and feels optimistic.

This is the danger zone.

This is the stage of change at which Joe is most likely to change forever and also most likely to fail. Why? Because stopping smoking hasn’t yet become a habit.

Joe finds it relatively easy not to smoke when he is at home on a Sunday night with his family but what about when he is in the pub with friends? Or during a stressful day at work? There are a lot of pitfalls in this stage that Joe has to overcome. Thankfully, research has shown one way to help and we discuss this in our next blog.

1. Prochaska, J. and DiClemente, C. (1983) Stages and processes of self-change in smoking: toward an integrative model of change. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology , 5, 390–395.
2. Prochaska, J.O., DiClemente, C.C., & Norcross, J.C. (1992). In search of how people change: Applications to the addictive behaviors. American Psychologist, 47, 1102-1114. PMID: 1329589.

A new project, a long report, a goal for the future: these are all daunting prospects at the start. How on earth do you sit down to start that 10,000 word report? Or where do you begin in your end-of-year goal to change a long-standing management practice?  The key is breaking it down into manageable chunks.

We all like to be rewarded for our efforts. In fact being rewarded for effort is the basis of all learning, from being potty trained as a child to getting a promotion in work. As children when we learn a new skill or complete a chore we are usually rewarded for it. Unfortunately in adulthood the frequency of these rewards is reduced meaning we have to motivate ourselves to complete long or arduous tasks for a future, sometimes unforeseeable, reward. This is why we need to break down tasks into smaller parts.

Take out a sheet of paper and write your big goal at the top. Then write down the steps you need to achieve that goal. Try to keep the steps small enough that they don’t seem daunting when you look at them individually. For example, the first step in changing a long-standing management practice may be ‘Read current protocol’; the second step may be ‘Arrange meeting with HR to discuss strengths and limitations of current protocol’ and so on.  Now comes the fun part. Write down what rewards you will give yourself for completing each of these tasks but make the types of rewards different. For example, you might have rewards in the categories of social (engaging with friends or colleagues), consumption (a sweet treat or a hot drink), activity (a walk, an exercise class, listening to a podcast) and any others that you think of. Write down what reward you will give yourself for each task that you complete. Here’s a tip though: the key is to mix up the categories of rewards so you are aiming for a different one each time. A recent study found that people were more motivated to work on a project when they knew they would receive different types of rewards for every task they completed [1].

We’re simple beings at the end of the day. That 10,000 word report as a fully-fledged adult isn’t really much more difficult than being potty trained was for your younger self. Break big tasks down into management chunks and reward yourself for each part. Soon you’ll find yourself with a completed project saying ‘well that wasn’t so hard now, was it?’

1. Wiltermuth, S.S. and F. Gino, “I’ll have one of each”: How separating rewards into (meaningless) categories increases motivation. Journal of personality and social psychology, 2013. 104(1): p. 1-13.

Have you ever looked back through rose-tinted glasses? What about blue-tinted specs? Ok so it may not be a common phrase but it should be. In this blog we explain why.

We all view the world through a lens that colours what we see and how we interpret it. This lens is formed by our personalities, past experiences and our mood. We wrote before about confirmation bias (link to blog here) which is the tendency to pay attention to information that confirms our viewpoint and ignore information that disconfirms it. Another bias that we fall foul of is paying attention to information that fits our current mood. This is called an attentional bias.

Your current mood is a powerful force that drives your attention towards things that match it. If you feel sad your attention is more likely to be drawn to sad things. This has been shown in many controlled research studies in which people are made to feel either happy or sad and then tested for their memory or attention towards happy or sad things. For example, one set of researchers asked happy or sad participants to do a computer task in which they counted balls moving around a screen. Unbeknownst to participants at the start of the study, halfway through the task the researchers turned one ball into either a happy or a sad face. When asked afterwards if they had noticed this the people who had felt sad while doing the task were only likely to notice the face if it was sad, they didn’t even notice that a face had appeared if it was a happy face [1]. This was a laboratory task but think about what this means in a real-life context. If you are feeling blue you may be less likely to notice a happy scene occurring right in front of you and may be more likely to focus on something sad that matches your own mood. This type of bias even affects our memories. Another group of researchers found that when people look at a list of words when they’re feeling down they will be more likely to remember words that have negative connotations than positive [2]. This type of bias can lead to a negative cycle in which the worse you feel, the more your attention is drawn towards things that will make you feel sad and the more sad this will make you feel. This type of attentional bias is particularly problematic in disorders such as depression [3].

So how do we swap the blue specs for rose ones? It’s not always easy and depends on circumstance but positive mood can drive our attention towards positive things. Kick start the process by doing something nice for yourself, for someone else or by consciously drawing your attention towards something positive. A boost in mood will help you to focus on other things that are rewarding helping you to keep giving yourself little positive boosts that will help you to step out of the negative cycle and take off those blue-tinted specs [4].

1. Becker, M.W. and M. Leinenger, Attentional selection is biased toward mood-congruent stimuli. Emotion, 2011. 11(5): p. 1248.
2. Koster, E.H., et al., Mood-congruent attention and memory bias in dysphoria: exploring the coherence among information-processing biases. Behaviour research and therapy, 2010. 48(3): p. 219-225.
3. Gotlib, I. H., Krasnoperova, E., Yue, D. N., & Joormann, J. (2004). Attentional biases for negative interpersonal stimuli in clinical depression. Journal of abnormal psychology, 113(1), 127.
4. Tamir, M. and M.D. Robinson, The happy spotlight: Positive mood and selective attention to rewarding information. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2007. 33(8): p. 1124-1136.

When we think of the word ‘stress’ often the first thing that pops into our mind is work. No matter what your job is you are likely, at some point, to find it stressful. We’re often told that stress is bad for our health and sure, that’s true, but as we’ve written about many times the key to stress is taking control of it rather than letting it take control of you.

The keyword here is ‘control’. When we feel that what happens to us is out of our control we are much more likely to feel depressed, stressed and even to suffer from more physical health problems such as heart problems and auto-immune disorders [1,2]. When we feel in control, however, even if faced with a difficult situation, we are much better able to cope and to face the challenge head-on.

A recent study on stress in the workplace has thrown this into stark relief. Researchers at the Indiana University Bloomington analysed data from over 2000 individuals aged 60 and over measured over 7 years. They found that working too hard was associated with an increased risk of death over the 7 years. But, there was an important caveat. People in high-demand jobs – in other words jobs that were stressful and time-pressured – who had a low level of control over when and how they did the jobs were more likely to die. However, people in high-demand jobs who had a high level of control were much less likely to die. It wasn’t the work itself which predicted ill health but how much control people had over it [3].

This is where managers can take note. People who had high job control weren’t just the bosses. They were people who felt that they had control over the speed and time at which they did work, the order in which they completed tasks and the number of decisions they could make about their own work. These are relatively small levels of control which, it appears, can make a big difference. If an employee has a high demand job with low control over how they do it it can be very difficult to feel a sense of satisfaction about the work completed because it is likely to feel far removed from them and out of their hands. If, on the other hand, an employee has a demanding job that they can take control over, it is easier to feel part of the end product and pride in what has been achieved.

While giving employees full control over projects is not always possible there are small changes that can give a sense of control such as letting people choose what order they do tasks in or, to a certain extent, when they do them. Increasing control can reduce stress and, ultimately, improve employees’ health. So, the next time you feel yourself micromanaging a project take a step back, delegate and let someone else take a little bit of control back into their life.

1. Lachman, M.E., S.D. Neupert, and S. Agrigoroaei, The relevance of control beliefs for health and aging. Handbook of the psychology of aging, 2010: p. 175-190.
2. Zilioli, S., L. Imami, and R.B. Slatcher, Socioeconomic status, perceived control, diurnal cortisol, and physical symptoms: A moderated mediation model. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2017. 75: p. 36-43.
3. Gonzalez‐Mulé, E. and B. Cockburn, Worked to Death: The Relationships of Job Demands and Job Control with Mortality. Personnel Psychology, 2016. 00: p. 1-40.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise, think about and respond to emotions in both yourself and in other people [1]. If, for example, your friend is feeling sad and refuses a social invitation an emotionally intelligent person will recognise their sadness and correctly reason that this is why their friend does not want to socialise. Someone who is less emotionally intelligent may instead feel angry at their friend for refusing the invitation and then find themselves taking their own anger out on someone else. They are not able to reason rationally about their friend’s emotion – sadness – or to recognise their own emotion – anger – and how it is going to affect their behaviour.

Emotions play a large part in the decisions we make in life which can be a good or a bad thing. If you have a bad morning and decide to send a rude email to your work colleague this would be a decision poorly ruled by emotion. On the other hand, if you are offered a new job and you feel sad about leaving your current job you would want to consider why you are feeling sad and whether it is, in fact, a relevant factor in your decision.

Emotional intelligence plays a big role in decision making abilities. One group of researchers tested this by measuring emotional intelligence in a group of volunteers [2]. They then made half of the volunteers anxious (by asking them to give a presentation) before they completed an unrelated gambling task in which they could choose a high-risk option for a high reward or a safe option for a low reward. Those who were low in emotional intelligence and who were made anxious were much more likely to go for the safe option than those who were high in emotional intelligence. This is because they were unable to attribute their anxious feeling to the presentation they had just given and instead attributed it to the task at hand meaning they went for the safe option. However, when the researchers told the volunteers that they may be feeling anxious because of the presentations they were no more or less likely to choose the safe option than other participants.

Of course, the safe option may sometimes be the best one but at other times we have to take risks to reap the rewards. The importance of this study is not that it made people more or less risky but that it shows how an unrelated emotional experience can affect the decisions we make if we are not aware of how they are affecting us.

1. Salovey, P. & Mayer, J.D. (1990). Emotional intelligence. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality, 9(3), 185-211.

2. Yip, J. A., & Côté, S. (2012). The Emotionally Intelligent Decision Maker Emotion-Understanding Ability Reduces the Effect of Incidental Anxiety on Risk Taking. Psychological Science, 24(1), 48-55.

Biofeedback does exactly what it says on the tin. It gives feedback on the biological or physical signals of our bodies. Our bodies give off signals all of the time, some of which we can see and some of which we can’t. When stressed, for example, your heart beats faster, your mouth becomes dry and your palms become sweaty. These are the signals that you can see or feel. There are also other bodily signals that occur when we are tense or stressed that are hidden: your blood pressure rises, your body releases chemicals such as cortisol and adrenaline and the electrical conductivity of your skin increases. This latter signal is also known as skin conductance or electrodermal activity (EDA). This is the signal that the Pip measures because it is sensitive to even minute changes in stress or tension.

The main function of biofeedback is not the measuring element but the feedback element. Biofeedback essentially opens a window into the hidden signals of your body that allow you to recognise when you are stressed or tense and when you are relaxed. Although most of us would notice if our hearts were pounding wildly and our palms were sweating profusely before a meeting we may be less likely to pay attention to stress when it is hidden, when we are sitting on a bus fretting over work and forgetting to breathe, for example. In these situations it can not only be difficult to recognise stress but to know how to relax. Biofeedback tools let you test out different ways of relaxing and get immediate feedback on whether they really do calm both your body and your mind. This knowledge is a powerful tool to have at your disposal when stress levels start to creep up too high.

As the saying goes, knowledge is power. The advantage of tools such as the Pip is that the more knowledge they give you on your body and the more you practice using them, the better you are likely to become at self-soothing and calming yourself. At the start, apps such as Clarity provide guided audio that leads you through relaxation techniques. As you get more proficient at using the Pip you will find out which technique suits you best, or develop your own personal techniques. This means that you can transfer your skills to the other unguided apps and, ultimately, to real world situations. We all get stressed and, as we’ve shown before, not all stress is bad (link to blog here). The challenge is knowing when and how to let stress work to your advantage and when and how to relax again, take a break and recharge the batteries for the next challenge ahead.