Kurt Nelson 0:00 Tim, welcome to a special grooving session of behavioral grooves where Tim and I are going to groove on some of the groove questions that we've posted to our Facebook group and the responses that we've gotten from those I love Tim Houlihan 0:19 these episodes, since we get to focus on insights from grooves who are out there, like the behavioral grooves community pages, where grooves get to share their insights about what they're thinking about, and just that is just Kurt Nelson 0:31 very cool. It is. And remember, you too can join our behavioral grooves groove community on Facebook. This is where we pose in respect introspective groove questions. A few times a week, we have some conversations out there on very interesting topics and share a little bit about some of the episodes that we're actually doing on behavioral grooves. But it's a great community. Tim Houlihan 0:54 Yeah, it's a fun group. Look, lots of insights, lots of banter and exchange, and well beyond what you and I bring to the table. Kurt Nelson 1:03 That's so true. That is, that is so so Tim Houlihan 1:06 true. Well, you know, the collective can often be smarter than just one individual, or, in our case, two. So okay, all right, let's first look back at the groove questions that we asked about change, which is scarier. This is the question that we're considering, which is scarier changing too fast or never changing Kurt Nelson 1:25 at all? Oh, that is a good question. I like that one that was fun. Tim Houlihan 1:30 Okay, well, we heard from a couple people. Several people actually responded, Michael and shell and your wife, Erin, jumped right in on it. And both of them thought that the scariest thing was never changing, Kurt Nelson 1:41 right? Which, which I agree with. I still agree with. I didn't just agree then I still agree now that never changing is the scarier of those. But you, Tim Mr. Houlihan, you had a slightly different take, one that focused in on scale. And I thought this was really interesting, so I'm going to quote what you wrote in the groove community here. All right, here it is, okay. Quote. The harder part is generally the fast change, because we anticipate the unknowable. How will I be after the change? The worst experience in our life is not changing. But of course, we are making micro changes pretty regularly and unconsciously. So it sort of depends on scale. So do you want to elaborate on that? Mr. Houlihan, what do you mean by scale? What? Why is it scarier there? Tim Houlihan 2:33 I have to justify or explain. I hate this. Kurt Nelson 2:38 I was, well, it's an important thing. We need to, we need to show how, how we can, you know, bring our thought process to this. Okay, all right, well, so let's Tim Houlihan 2:49 start with, and I wasn't trying to be sarcastic here as really being serious, that we are literally always changing. Biologically. We are aging every day in very, very small amounts. Cognitively, we are encountering, encountering new information every day, and certainly some of that is going to change us. Right? Yes, yes, yes, I would agree. Okay, so that was my first thought that I think the idea of not changing, I so agree with Michael and Aaron, because that would be terrible if we weren't changing. But I don't think we can stop believing that we are not changing, like we are changing. Kurt Nelson 3:27 But you think, but, but there's, there's a part here, right? You're saying that it is, it is almost impossible for us not to change, that, that just by the nature of being human, we are constantly changing, biologically, cognitively, the memories that we have are added to every single moment, and so we are changing. And so the scarier part, at least from our perspective, is this like when change happens really quickly, or largely, is that where Tim Houlihan 3:57 you're going with this, right? So with these micro changes are happening all the time. We get kind of used to them. It's like the Earth isn't standing still. Earth is spinning at like 10,000 miles an hour, hurtling through space. But we don't think about that because it's just the norm. It's the big changes I think that are more challenging and and so I do think that when we think about changing, we tend to want to think that we mostly stay the same. Yet, even though there's lots of great evidence, Dan Gilbert's famous study about can you anticipate the kind of changes that you're going to go through in the next 10 years? Yeah, right, but he did this with 20 somethings. He started with 20 year olds, and then said, what would it be like to be when you're 29 and they could fill in the blanks on big, big issues. They were pretty good about naming. I'm going to graduate from college. Maybe I might have a partner. I could find a job, big, big things. They could nail it. But when they get to the 29 year olds and they ask them, Well, what has changed between 20 and 29 massive list. There are lots and lots of things that we couldn't encounter. And the beauty of this study is that he repeated the same questions to 60 year olds and 69 year olds, Yeah, same where Kurt Nelson 5:10 you go, Oh, I'm pretty set in my ways. By the time I am 60 that I I have grown. I'm at the Tim Houlihan 5:18 peak of who I will be. No more big changes for mine? Yeah, yeah, you're not going to find any more big changes in my life, because I'm 60. But the 69 year old said massive changes. Didn't Sure, maybe retire, you know, change jobs, quit jobs, invest in more free time, whatever massive changes in their lives. So this is we just can't easily anticipate it. And so I think the big change problem on a scale, is that it's unknown. It's like, I can't easily anticipate what is going to change. Kurt Nelson 5:50 I think it's really interesting you bring up that change, and the amount of change that we go through that is incremental, but over time, makes a huge difference. It is those small, everyday changes that are happening that compound and that over time, make change us from who we are to who we will be. And it's those things that we don't understand. And I think this is where the question is really interesting. Because, to your point, I don't think we think about change in that way. When we think about change, we think about, oh, I'm going to do a big, drastic, quick change about who I am, maybe not quick, but you're going to continually to grow and to do different things. And if you don't do that, that's very scary. And I think the part that's hard is that we don't notice. We are not aware of all of those changes that are taking place. Yeah. Tim Houlihan 6:49 Okay, so Kurt question back to you is, what about beliefs and values, not just behaviors, but what about sort of things that we might consider more core? Because there I bristle when people say, Oh, I'm exactly the same person as I was. When fill in the blank, I don't know, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, when I first got married, when I was in high school, I'm the same person. That just doesn't it's not tacitly accurate, but, but how do you think about beliefs or values, not just behaviors? Kurt Nelson 7:20 Yeah, I think what you just mentioned is that those are changing as well, and that's harder for us to put our hands around and grasp. Because I think, and again, I'm not going to be able to point necessarily to good research around this, but I believe the research backs us up is that those values that we hold, we would like to say, Oh, they're the same values that I had when I was so I'm 58 the same values I had when I was 48 which are very similar to the values I had when I was 38 which are similar to what I had when I was 28 and I can maybe see that those values have changed over the course of my lifetime. But even the values between 58 and 48 they've changed. It's the environment that we the environment that we live in, is changing. The social contracts that we have are changing the information that we have about who we are about the world in general, about everything has to impact our beliefs. Has to impact our values. And I think that is underrated by most people Tim Houlihan 8:35 agreed. Okay, yeah, Kurt Nelson 8:38 enough on that. Okay, let's move on. Let's move on to another question. How about that? Okay, we go on to because we have, we could go on forever on these questions. And we sometimes, you know, wonderful part of this community is we can. We can build the All right? So here is another question, and this one was actually inspired by a response by one of our grooves, Cindy Baden, who responded to an earlier question about which is riskier, which they thought was riskier, setting goals too high or setting goals too low, where, in her comment on the response that she responded to that question, she referenced the Pygmalion effect of how that was more influential. And for those of you who don't know, the Pygmalion effect is a psychological phenomena where higher expectations from others, not from yourself, but from others, leads to improved performance in individuals. Tim Houlihan 9:31 Can I just say that if you want to get a great movie on psychology, watch my fair lady, which is a movie based on the Pygmalion effect. I did not know that it's absolutely it's a it's an old film, but it's just fantastic. Okay, so where this comes from is that back in the 1960s researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson ran a famous study in elementary classrooms. So they took the T. Teachers basically randomly chose students that were considered intellectual bloomers. Kurt Nelson 10:05 Basically, the researchers said, Hey, teachers, these students randomly selected are intellectual boomers, whether Tim Houlihan 10:13 in fact, they even did IQ tests at the beginning. Basically they just chose randomly who was going to be considered an intellectual bloomer in these elementary classrooms over the course of the year, those kids actually did perform better, the ones who were considered intellectual bloomers, but not because of hidden talent, but because of the expectations the teachers had that they were intellectually blooming. So the beliefs that the that others people have quite literally lifted the aspirations and achievements of the students that were in that condition and the other kids they just fared normally. Basically, yeah, which is, Kurt Nelson 10:55 it's amazing, when you think about that, the expectations of others actually made those kids so at the end of the year, when they actually did the IQ tests, compared to the IQ test at the beginning of the year, those students had increased more so than the control group, which is fascinating, right? Tim Houlihan 11:17 Expectations matter so so much. I mean, we've talked about the expectation effect in studies done about milkshakes, huge thing. And my first manager in after I graduated from college, she said, if you think you're going to succeed, or if you think you're going to fail, you're probably right. Kurt Nelson 11:37 Yeah, isn't that always like Henry Ford or something, they supposedly said that. I don't know somebody like who actually said that first was there. So anyway, getting back to the question. So, so the question that Cindy inspired with her Pygmalion Effect response was this, and we wrote this, who influences your aspirations most you, or the people around you. And we got some really good conversations around this, some really good insights. So we Tim Houlihan 12:06 did one of those responses was from Anita Bernardo, and she said, I think this is so beautiful. I do have internal goals, but I listen to others that see me bigger than I see myself. It expands what I think is possible. There are so many stories of people who do things they don't they didn't consider possible because of feedback from a trusted person, parent, teacher, mentor, etc. I just think that's a beautiful Kurt Nelson 12:34 reflection. It is, and I found it to be such a great response, which goes again to highlight this fact that the people that you surround yourself with are super important, and that you need to surround yourself with positive people who believe in you and can see in the potential that you have. I mean, what do you think about that? I think Tim Houlihan 12:57 I think we're done. I think that I need to find a more positive group of people to hang around. Kurt Nelson 13:03 Are you saying that I have a negative influence on you? Man, I thought I was not every day. That's true. That is true. No, no, Tim Houlihan 13:14 there's, there's great research on this right to show that who, who you hang around with influences you deeply. And of course, we've got more recent research that that indicates not just behaviors, but it also gets into your values. We've had guests on recently that are doing research on your values and and what you believe in is actually influenced by the people around it around Yeah, so it matters. Kurt Nelson 13:38 And so one of the key things here is to think about who it is that is that you hang out with. And again, as much as I hate the name of this book, what you know the five people that you surround yourself with or that that meme, but there's truth in it, and that is really important. And I think there is a real choice that we have to make, which isn't always easy, because sometimes we just need to remove or lessen the negative people in our life. Sometimes you can't remove them, their family, various different things, but you don't always have to respond to them. You don't always have to do things with them, particularly if you know they're bringing you down, when in fact, you should be surrounding yourself with people who are going to, you know, create a Pygmalion effect for you, because they go You are awesome. You have an amazing ability to do things and maybe even believe in you more than you believe in yourself, and just that fact of believing in you can help you achieve those things that you didn't even think possible. Yeah. So, Tim Houlihan 14:50 speaking as somebody who has lived in three major cities in the last three years and the moving around a lot of. I've lived in five homes in the last three years. Finding like a place to fit in is is difficult, but I also see that you get to choose, like just follow your bliss. If you, if you love to read books, go to a library and hang out. You will find other people who are doing the same thing. If you, if you love sports, go to sports bars, go to go to sporting events, hang out with people who also love the same team, like you'll find somebody who has all you have to do is just pay, in large part, pay attention to what it is that you love, and make time for that, and go out and be social. You can create the networks that will provide you with the positive feedback that you need. That's my Kurt Nelson 15:43 and and as some of our guests in the past have talked about, you know, go out and talk to those strangers because it though it may feel very awkward and hard and difficult to begin with, you will have a much better response from that. And to your point, you may find those people who you jive with, who you groove with, who bring out the best in you. And I want to just say this, the Pygmalion effect is really interesting because it was done on students, and they did it on elementary kids, and then I think they replicated it in other situations and different things, but it is expanded beyond just the classroom, right? This happens in work, as you talked about, you know, your boss and the boss's expectation of you, it happens with our friends and family. What do it was those people think of us, and so make sure you're in situations where you can capitalize on Tim Houlihan 16:34 that. Yeah, if I, if I could, I just want to call attention to we talked about expectations in a way that just reminds me of our conversation about Aaliyah, crumbs, fantastic research and and that was the Mind Mind Over milkshakes episode, yeah, which just explains that really, really well. Kurt Nelson 16:56 Okay, okay, that's all right. So let's explore one more question and the responses that we got from only one more. Well, okay, maybe I don't know. All right, we'll play by ear, but here we go. Okay, there was a whole week, maybe even more, if I actually went and looked at it, where we were asking questions based on a bit of research that I was doing on Kurt Lewin, the famous psychologist from the 30s, 40s and 50s, who went to my or is taught at my alma mater, University of Iowa, for a few years, at least, Tim Houlihan 17:27 he's like your spirit animal, basically, isn't he? Oh my gosh, Kurt Nelson 17:32 a brilliant man B had so many insights and it just into human nature that have kind of didn't necessarily take off when he brought them up, but then, like, have been reborn. Have got, like, it's like, Oh, wow. This really fits back into what Lewin was saying back in the 40s, back in the 50s. And he, he, tragically, he died very young. I think he died at my age, which was 58 I'm not sure, but somewhere he died relatively young. And it would have been just amazing if he could have lived longer, just to see where that research would have gone, because I think he was just at the cusp of really getting into deep into some of these other areas anyway, and our love fest with Lewin, we could go on and, well, he had a good name too. Oh yeah, Kurt with the K, right way to spell it. There you go. So in I was doing some research on him, because I think it's, you know, I'd like to, at some point, do a deep dive into Lewin that we would actually do a couple episodes on. Hopefully that'll happen. But he I came across this work that I hadn't found with him before, which was about levels of aspiration. And levels of aspiration, was some work that he did with Tamara Dembo in the 1930s where they studied how people set goals. So again, this is right up our alley. Tim, absolutely. This is what we talk about all the time, and work and various different things in our consulting world. And I didn't even know that Lewin had been doing this work, and he they did experiments on people's levels of aspiration, in which they found that we tend to recalibrate our goals, either after a success or failure. Kind of recalibrate based upon, oh, I set this goal, I achieved this goal. So great. Next time I can actually recalibrate a little bit higher. Or I set this goal, I didn't achieve it, therefore I need to recalibrate a little bit lower. So hit your target, and you often aim higher, the next time miss it, and you might set the lower bar for Tim Houlihan 19:38 that. That is very cool. So here's the thing. What Lewin and Dembo found is that too many easy goals can make us complacent and not drive us to reach our potential, while too many ambitious goals can just wear us down and contribute to learned helplessness. There is, there absolutely is a Goldilocks zone on this thing. Yeah. Kurt Nelson 19:59 Well. Which is also what Locke and Latham found, right? So again, the famous gold guys that we've we've talked with Gary Latham a couple different times on the show, and they emphasize the importance of goals being specific and challenging, but also realistic, realistic enough to keep people engaged. So again, if it's too high, we tune out too low, they become bored and ignored. So all of this is leading up to the question that we asked here, right? So the question that we asked in in the groove community was this, do you set your goals based on your past performance or your future dreams again, thinking about this that are, am I? Am I looking at how I how I did? Am I recalibrating my using this level of aspiration, or am I just saying, No, I'm shooting for those stars, and I'm going to aim for the stars, right? Well, our Tim Houlihan 20:51 on our Facebook page, since this is about grooving on the Facebook page, our good buddy, Paul Hebert, had a really good response, and that he took this in a slightly different direction, he said. And I'm going to, I'm going to read his quote here. The map is not the terrain. The map is not the terrain. That these things are different, and we shouldn't conflate them. When we asked to, when we asked him to elaborate, because we went back and said, What's the deal? Kurt Nelson 21:16 What do you mean? The map isn't the terrain. What the hell you talking about that, buddy? Tim Houlihan 21:19 He said, My point was more about separating the idea of achieving a specific goal from not achieving the ultimate goal. And I think sometimes we conflate this idea of a small failure is really a failure in the bigger picture. Think of it like this. And I'm again quoting Paul here. He says, Think of it like this. It's the difference between saying or thinking a failure today means I cannot achieve my goal. Versus my failure today taught me something about how I can achieve my ultimate goal. They aren't necessarily linked. Yeah, I think that that that was a really great way of thinking about it, to separate long term goals, North Stars, really big picture things, because this is really important for us to have, super important for us to have. But it's also good to have objectives that are short term and highly achievable. Getting back to the Latham and Locke work, Kurt Nelson 22:11 right? And I think there's an interesting piece here. I think what you know Paul was bringing in is almost, it's this mindset. It is, it is. How am I viewing these setbacks? So if I don't achieve a goal, am I catastrophizing this? Am I saying, Oh, crap, I'm not good enough, and therefore I can't achieve the end? Or do I have a growth mindset where I'm going, oh, what can I take from this failure and now apply it in the next and I think it's a it's a little bit different than what the question we asked, but I think it was a really interesting take on this, because this idea of how we approach failure or success on those goals, again, to the levels of aspiration, all right, That impacts how we set our next goals, but also depending upon the mindset that we have, is the mindset that we have, one of growth that I can learn from that failure. Therefore, I'm not going to necessarily decrease my goal as much, because now I have additional information, I might be actually able to even increase that goal, which the research, at least from what they did didn't align with that. But again, this is where modern kind of insights and the ancient world of ancient I call it from the 1930s Tim Houlihan 23:31 right? It's a little drama Kurt Nelson 23:32 Psych. It is. It's ancient demand. It's almost 100 years old, if you think about it. So that insight from there, mirrored with today, could really bring some cool insights that we just haven't been able to look at yet. Tim Houlihan 23:49 I was so glad that you brought this up, especially Lewin and demos work, because I wasn't familiar with it. And all the all the research that I've done on goal setting, I'd never seen it. And in the mid 2010s George Lowenstein from Carnegie Mellon and I started running studies on salespeople during the goal setting experience. In other words, we interrupt the interrupted them in the process of setting a goal, and we asked them a few questions to get their their feedback on what they thought, but then we tracked what what they thought about their goal and how confident they were in their goal setting compared to how well they did and and the important thing is that over time, some of these people went through this goal setting process more than once, so they did it once, and then six months later, maybe they come back to it again, and they went through it again, and we found exactly what Lewin and Dembo found, that people who shot too high tended to recalibrate and discover, well, wait a minute, maybe I'm not thinking about this the right way. And people that shot too low were giving up, giving away opportunity. They recalibrated in a very positive way. They felt like they actually saw more. And another interesting thing about this is that. Again, both men and women had too much, you know, confidence and under confidence, women tended to be more likely to shoot low on the first time through, even though, when we looked at their performance, performance was same as men like, yeah, so, but they were just less confident the first time. Women were also quicker to make that correction in subsequent rounds. When they came back to it, they were like, Okay, I learned from this. Boom, I'm going to make I'm going to make a better choice the next time around. And I think so it's kind of cool to see it happening in 2015 just as Lewin and Dembo saw it in the 1930s Kurt Nelson 25:38 which, again, it goes to the genius of Lewin, which we need to go on. But I find that work really fascinating, and I think there's some really cool stuff. And would love to be able to work with some other organizations and maybe kind of bring this up to more. But before we go past this question, Tim, I wanted to bring back as you responded to this one as well, and with what I thought was a really cool insight. And you said this, and I'm going to quote you again, here we go. If incremental goals or objectives are more successful and more readily achieved, I'd start with past performance and gently lean into dreams. However, for aspirational, quote, unquote, Mount Everest sorts of long term North Star goals, I'd rely less on past performance and lean more into dreams you want to care to expand on that because a beautifully said Unknown Speaker 26:36 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Kurt Nelson 26:39 No, it's not this, this idea of incremental goals versus those mount, Everest, really, as what we call them in, you know, behavior shift and the work that we do with that, the Keystone goals of your life, right? Those big, hairy, audacious, behad goals that you know is, you know, out there, yeah, those are different. They're different types of goals. So Tim Houlihan 27:01 yeah, I think I'll let Fischbach would even say that they we can call them goals, but they're really they are so materially different that we need to treat them differently. And that's kind of where I'm coming from. Is that the North Star, the Keystone goal, that this monstrous be hag that's out there. Lean more into your dreams, like go for Dream big, you know, go for the long term. Think as big and broad and have the greatest impact on your life and others as you possibly can on those however, in the short term, if you're if you're measuring steps to climb Mount Everest, figure out what the next step is that you can achieve. So lean more into your past performance and gently lean into your dream, just for inspiration, so that you can keep achieving in order to give you fuel, because that is high octane stuff, that achievement is absolutely high octane stuff. So you've got to have enough wins in order to keep getting to the next step. But those are, yeah, and that all in nature. Kurt Nelson 28:06 And I think you you nailed a really key piece on this, which is also All right, if I'm climbing Mount Everest, if I have that big Keystone goal, I need to break that down. I need to break it down into milestones like, all right, am I going? We're at base camp one. Now I need to get to base camp two, then I'm base camp three. And those are milestones I hit that. But even in between milestones, you have those stepping stones. You have to do the work in order to get there, right? So those are the ones where you go, okay, I can get this far today in this manner based upon how I've done in the past two, three days, and I need to recalibrate that if I've done better than I did before or I did worse. And so that's where it really is important to make sure that you're taking into account the difference of how I performed in the past. Tim Houlihan 29:06 So absolutely it well, well. Said, I don't have anything else to add to that. Kurt, Kurt Nelson 29:12 all right, So that about wraps it up, except we will. We'll go into, we'll dig into one, one last question that we asked, this was a poll. Actually, it wasn't a question, and it relates to the question that we ask every, almost every time that we have a speed round, we ask people if they are coffee or tea. People right now, now, we asked the poll and we had coffee, tea, other both and then and and other and other, yeah, so the coffee or tea or both or other, right? And we got some interesting responses, Tim Houlihan 29:56 and the story and the survey says, Hmm. Hmm, we could just add a special effect, just to have trumpets there, by the way, or Kurt Nelson 30:06 trumpet what you don't like, there you go. That's my drum roll. Tim Houlihan 30:13 It turns out, with this audience, 40% of the people prefer coffee. 25% prefer T, 10% both, only 10% for both. And then there's this mysterious other. What is other? If it's not t both or like, Kurt Nelson 30:32 it's Adam Hanson. Adam Hanson, who we we've had on the show, and we know friend of ours. He wrote Dr Pepper zero in as another. And I'm, like, voted for that, yeah? So I think that's two people, right? So there you go. So I was interested that you didn't write in Coke Zero because that's your Tim Houlihan 30:56 go to. That is, that is, but it's not like for caffeine purposes. It's just because I like sweet and I like no calories. That Kurt Nelson 31:03 sweet no calories. Wouldn't that be great if all food was, well, no, you need some calories, don't you? But yeah, it needs some calories, but not all. I really want ice cream to be a healthy food. If I had, if I had my dithers of like anything to like a magic wand, it would be like ice cream is a healthy food, and the more I eat, the healthier I'll be. Tim Houlihan 31:30 Just, I'm just contemplating, like, what that would look like or taste Kurt Nelson 31:34 like, but it would taste the same. It just is good for Tim Houlihan 31:38 you as good all right, okay. Is Is that enough? Can we wrap I Kurt Nelson 31:43 think that that wraps up this special episode. And again, if you found this interesting at all, please, please, if you haven't already joined our Facebook group, please join it. It is the behavioral grooves groove community. You can just if you're out on Facebook, you can search groups, and it should pop up. We have almost 200 people in it now. We're, you know, just keep, keep it growing. Share it with your friends if you like it. And again, you'll get questions like these. You'll get the responses like we had a few times every week. And we would love to see you out there, to quote Tim Houlihan 32:19 our famous producer, Caroline Schaefer, see you out there, baby. Kurt Nelson 32:28 All right. With that, we hope that these groove questions have inspired you to go out this week and find your groove. You you. Transcribed by https://otter.ai