Book Review-The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth

Robert Bogue December 28, 2015 No Comments

I view the life I’m living as a journey. (See Changes that Heal for more about viewing life as a journey.) In this journey I believe that I’m trying to learn how to become a better me. That means learning how to love more genuinely and how to accept reality more completely. The Road Less Traveled is like the journal of a man who has already walked this path. He’s someone who has invested his life in showing others how to walk a road that few are willing to walk. This road is a road paved in hardships and learning. It’s lined with trials, failures, and successes. In short, the road is a hard road.

Life is Hard

One of the favorite laments of my adult children is “Being an adult is hard.” It’s said with the awareness that doing the right thing, that growing, that becoming a better person is the right path – but it’s a path that few people travel. When they share this sentiment is when I remember that life is hard – or that is when you live life to its fullest, it’s hard. Hidden somewhere in the message is, the awareness that the growth and the pain are worth it.

Somewhere along the way with our parents picking us up and kissing our skinned knee most of us have developed the impression that all pain is bad. However, pain is an evolutionary signal. It’s a warning but not necessarily that we should stop. Athletes feel pain during the training process as a way of letting them know that they’re tearing down their muscles so that they can be rebuilt stronger.

Pain ultimately means growth and growth is hard. Life can be hard. However, life is hard when it’s a life worth living. It’s hard when you’re not content to allow the world to shape you – without you shaping it back at least a little. Shaping your life requires discipline.

Defining Discipline

In The Fifth Discipline the word discipline refers to what the dictionary calls “a branch of knowledge, typically one studied in higher education.” In the Four Disciplines of Execution the other dictionary definition is used “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior…” However, neither conveys the meaning of self-discipline or how to know when you have it.

Peck suggests that there are four keys to discipline:

Delaying Gratification – Walter Mischel’s famous marshmallow experiment is the classic way to measure the ability to delay gratification. (See Emotional Intelligence for more on this test.) In order for children (or adults) to be able to delay gratification they have to believe the world is safe. (See How Children Succeed for secure detachment.)
Accepting Responsibility – We should accept responsibility for the things that we control – for our behavior. Conversely we shouldn’t accept responsibility for things that are outside of our control. Victims struggle to accept responsibility for their situation. (A good place to start for more on victimhood is Choice Theory.)
Dedication to Truth – Constantly seeking the truth is harder than it seems. There are “boxes” that we end up in (a la Anatomy of Peace) and our persnickety ego that prevents us from seeing clearly. (See Change or Die for more on our ego’s defenses.)
Balancing – Everything in excess or absence is bad for us. In food we become obese or anorexic. In religion we become amoral or a zealot. The final component of discipline is maintaining consideration for multiple conflicting factors and finding a path through them.

Peck’s four part definition of what he means when he says discipline is like the way that How Children Succeed
uses the word grit. It’s also reminiscent of the way that Jim Collins in Good to Great speaks of the Stockdale Paradox – where you’ve got to be persistent with your ideas – and be flexible and adaptable to know when they need to change. Marketing books like Guerrilla Marketing and The New Rules of Marketing and PR speak of commitment and patience for programs. Sticking with something long enough to ensure that it works. Sometimes the waiting for things to get better while you’re continuing to try to push things forward can be excruciatingly painful.

Satisfactory Suffering

Suffering is a part of our human condition. No one has ever been able to completely escape suffering. Even a baby fresh out of the womb is made to suffer so they’ll cry. Suffering is generally considered to be a negative thing. We see suffering and we want to eliminate it. However, it’s suffering that is the fire in which great men (and women) are formed.

Abraham Lincoln’s wife Mary Todd Lincoln is widely regarded as one of the worst first ladies. She was known to be difficult to get along with. Abraham Lincoln suffered numerous failures in his life. He came from humble beginnings and yet with all this suffering he is widely believed to have been America’s best president. Perhaps that is backwards. It’s not in spite of the suffering that he was our best president but because of it.

Find your Courage disagrees with the use of the word suffering here by drawing a distinction between pain which is unavoidable and suffering which is dwelling on that pain. However, suffering is a sustained presence of pain whether or not you choose to dwell on it or not.

How to Be an Adult in Relationships, however, say that suffering is necessary for growth. The Happiness Hypothesis quotes Romans 5:3-4 “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.” and the Dalai Lama “The person who has had more experience of hardships can stand more firmly in the face of problems than the person who has never experienced suffering. From this angle, then, some suffering can be a good lesson for life.”

So we cannot escape suffering. We have only to decide what we’re going to do with our suffering. We have to decide whether we’re going to crumble under its weight or use the suffering to grow. Sometimes knowing how we’re going to deal with our suffering is all about what kind of an animal we want to be.

Skunks, Turtles, and Working through Problems

In my review of Compelled to Control, I mentioned the idea of Skunks and Turtles and the harm that can befall turtles as they struggle to keep it all in – never fully processing their pain. The reality is that our problems rarely (if ever) disappear on their own. Most of the time we need to take some sort of action to take our pains and work through them. We can’t be like the skunk spewing the poison of our problems (suffering) on to others. Nor can we be the turtle pretending that problems don’t exist.

Somehow we’ve got to get past the point of intense and unwavering pain so that we can become a wise owl asking questions of ourselves and finding ways to convert our pain and suffering into something good.

Much of our pain comes from how we relate to the world. Our pain comes because we expect something different from the world than it is able to give to us. We all operate from a set of internal maps that guide us through this world and sometimes those maps are wrong and cause us to bump into the walls of reality.

Mental Cartography

3D Spatial reasoning is one category of intelligence. It refers to someone’s ability to arrange things in three dimensional space. It’s sort of a measure of your ability to make accurate maps in your mind of three dimensional space. It happens to be something that I’m relatively good at. I can put together the pieces of furniture and see if they’ll fit in a room or estimate the distance between two locations in the city with relative accuracy. So in this I’m creating the mental models (See Sources of Power) or schemas (See Efficiency in Learning for more about schemas) to allow me to navigate through the real world.

The problem isn’t that I create these maps. In fact, as Incognito pointed out we all make maps of the world – we don’t “see” the world completely and directly, our brain builds an image – a sometimes faulty image. However, we believe this image to be true. We build mental models for lots of things. It’s our mental models – or our mental maps – that shape our beliefs about the world and how it will react.

A poor mental model is the cause of a great deal of pain. Where our view of the world and the reality of the world are misaligned we’ll not see things and we’ll stub our toe on a chair or a dog. Thus it’s important to have accurate mental maps – but they are always flawed. It takes some conscious effort to continue to revise the mental maps that we have to more accurately reflect reality.

The problem of correcting our mental maps isn’t so much about adding new things to our maps as it is letting go of previously held beliefs. We have to realize that we aren’t the center of the universe or the solar system. We have to recognize that no amount of desiring the world to be flat will make it so. Sometimes we’ve just got to let go.

Letting Go

What parts of your life have you let go of? Most of us have parts of ourselves that we’ve let go of. Sometimes we’ve let go forever and sometimes we’ve just let go of it for a time. It’s been over a year since I’ve piloted an aircraft (flown). It’s been nearly two since I’ve been on a comedy stage. (See I am a Comedian for more about my start with comedy.) Neither of these things are gone for good in my life but for now, they’re not the most important thing. Perhaps you have a hobby (or two) that you’ve stepped away from.

Sometimes when we hear folks talking about letting go they’re talking about loosening our grip on control. Certainly getting more comfortable with the idea that we don’t and can’t control everything is a part of living (See Compelled to Control for more on control.) However, this is more akin to the concept of acceptance – accepting whatever the world has instore for you. (See How to be an Adult in Relationships for more on acceptance.)

However, the letting go that I’m speaking about here is about releasing parts of ourselves – either for a time as above or forever. Releasing things forever can be harder. For instance, Reiss discussed in Who Am I? that some folks value vengeance. Those folks find it hard to let go of the transgressions of others. They harbor anger that festers. Harboring resentment and anger towards another person is often described as taking poison and expecting the other person to die. Releasing the negative feelings that we feel for others is one thing that with work we can let go of.

The most poignant example of letting go that we must all experience as humans is the loss of relationships with others whether through someone moving away or more tragically dying. (See High Orbit – Respecting Grieving for more on loss through death.) Letting go (giving up) is the most painful human experience. In some real sense we’re losing a part of ourselves. We’re letting go of the positive memories of the other person. However, not all letting go is so tragic and overwhelming. There are also habits and passions of ours that we can let go of as well.

When I was early in my teenage years, I loved television. I turned it on when I came home and turned it off when I went to bed. I’d watch anything. I’d watch reruns of black and white shows that weren’t good when they were produced. I kept up with shows and I invested a lot of time in it. Consciously or unconsciously I’ve moved to a point of view where I rarely watch television.

The children tell me about the latest reality TV show or their favorite fictional drama – but I don’t know anything about it. For the most part I’ve let go of TV in my life. When I watch TV it’s mostly Doctor Who. (and if you’ve seen their production schedule you know that isn’t very frequently.) It’s a part of my life that I left behind and I have no expectation that I’ll ever pick it back up.

I had to let it go out of my life so that I could do other things. One of those is reading books.

Picking Up

If you’re able to let go of something (for a moment or a lifetime) you create space in your life for something else. You create the opportunity to do something different. One of those things for me is my reading and writing. As most people who read my blog know, I read and post a blog post for a book nearly every week. I am frequently asked where I find the time to do this. There are really two answers to this question.

First, my office is at home in a separate building. My commute is 8 seconds. I take the extra hour that most folks spend fighting traffic to and from work and I pour that into my reading and writing. It doesn’t happen every day and sometimes I have my own commute time as I drive to see clients, but it probably frees at least 4 hours a week in my schedule to read. The second answer is that I’m not watching TV – and I’m for the most part not playing computer games – This frees another 5-10 hours a week where I can pour my time into reading and writing.

All total I’ll get an extra 5-15 hours per week where I can read or write. This process for me is a process of improving myself. It’s a process of growing to be a better person today than I was yesterday. It’s a continual refinement of my mental maps and the continual development of skills. Each book puts another set of tools in my toolbox for being in relationships with others.

I am OK – Mostly

Asking for help is both natural and unnatural from an evolutionary point of view. We evolved as social creatures so that we could help one another succeed. However, those same forces would cause others to attack us in our moments of weakness. So we evolved as social creatures who remain guarded even in our social circles. We rarely stop considering how others may react to our vulnerability. As a result we say that we’re OK when we really mean that we’re mostly OK. Revealing our weaknesses hasn’t served us well – so we try to not do it.

However, for those who are interested in growth being vulnerable is a requirement. You can’t grow if you don’t face reality.

One Errors Through Absence the Other through Excess

In the Enneagram model individuals error through either (See Personality Types: Using the Enneagram for Self Discovery for more on the Enneagram) under expressing or over expressing their instincts, feelings, or thinking. (They can also be completely out of touch with any of these three.) In The Road Less Traveled, Peck explains that neurotics assume too much responsibility and those with character disorders accept too little responsibility.

The neurotic uses the word “should” to indicate that they believe they have a greater control of the world than they actually do – and they feel like they’re falling short of the mark. The character disordered individual uses words like “can’t” to indicate that they don’t have the power to change their condition.

In truth we really only have control of our behaviors, we can’t control other people (See Choice Theory) or our current situation. We have to accept that we have control of behaviors – but not control over the behaviors of others. We do have the ability to lift ourselves out of our situation with hard work. However, we can’t change anything that has already happened.

If we’re in debt we can work on paying down and eliminating that debt. We can’t change, however, what got us into debt in the first place whether that debt was caused by an uninsured or underinsured event – or whether the debt was caused by uncontrolled spending.

Nothing Left to Love

Black holes are seen as the monsters of the universe. They are endlessly chewing up stars, planets, and anything else that gets near them. They’re perceived as having an unquenchable thirst for matter – any kind of matter. There are some people who are “black hole” people who seem to devour love – to consume it. They need love so much that they gobble up every bit of love that others offer to them.

These people have love holes so big that it seems like nothing will ever fill it. They are so busy seeking to get love that they’re left without any energy left to give love. This is a tragedy because it means the very thing that they want the most is the very thing they’re not capable of sharing to others in return.

The best way to get love is to give it. Universally if you’re willing to extend yourselves into people to help them and support their growth you’re more likely to get love in return.

Make me Happy

It is one thing to expect that others will love you and quite another to expect that they’ll make you happy. Our feelings, how we feel, are not the responsibility of others. Our feelings are how we choose to react to the world. (See Choice Theory for more on choosing feelings.) Despite the truth that we are responsible for our feelings many people prefer to find someone else who will make them happy.

There’s a certain beauty in this. If someone else is responsible for making you happy then you don’t have to take responsibility for it. When you’re sad you can blame someone else like your spouse. They aren’t making you happy so you can apply pressure to them to do a better job. This is a great deal until you realize that others are quite literally incapable of making you happy and therefore are always doomed to fail. Sure your spouse can cook you a special dinner and draw a warm bath but this doesn’t make you happy. This helps you to feel loved (though it’s not required that you let it in.) The feeling that you’re loved completely allows you to choose to feel happy.

The Balance of Love

There are many definitions of love. The romantic “fallen” in love comes with a belief that you should do anything for the other person. We believe that parents should do anything for their children. However, love is not simply giving the object of your affection everything they want. Love is also desiring their growth as well. Love is wanting for the other person to become what they’re capable of being. Of them becoming more than what they are today.

Sometimes love means judicious withholding so that the other person can grow. (Note that I’m not suggesting the kind of withholding in Intimacy Anorexia which is not focused on the other person’s growth.) Love means caring about the other person enough to let them struggle – when struggling means they’ll grow. Struggle is a natural part of life which can’t be eliminated. For instance, in The Rise of Superman we learned that the struggle phase precedes the flow phase of heightened productivity.

If the center of love is a desire for the other person to be the best person they can be, to enable and facilitate their growth and success, then it makes more sense that there are times, particularly with children, that they shouldn’t get everything they want.

Most parents instinctively know that you can’t give a child everything they want because to do so would create a spoiled brat. At the same time good parents struggle to determine when they should give things to their children to demonstrate that they love them and when to withhold things to demonstrate that they love them – in a way the child won’t immediately understand.

Loved is a Feeling, Love is Not

As mentioned above one can feel loved. That is to accept the loving gestures of another. Love, however, is not a feeling. It’s an active verb. It’s a decision. It’s action. Love is making a decision to create a place of importance in your “quality world” – that is the internal representation of the external world. (See Choice Theory for more on a quality world.)

In Love, Acceptance, and Forgiveness the view that love isn’t a feeling but rather it’s a choice is fully exposed. Here Peck is focused on the action of love. Folks will say that they don’t feel like loving someone else. However, it really means that they don’t feel like giving. They don’t feel like extending themselves further and expending more energy. Realizing love is action you can see that you don’t feel like loving. It’s not that you don’t feel love. You don’t feel like loving others.

Performance-based Love

While love is an act not a feeling, being loved doesn’t require an act or action. However, many people have gotten this mixed up and have taught their children and those around them that in order to be loved they have to perform – to make the person look or feel good. However, this kind of love conveys that the decision to love someone is based solely on what they can do for you.

How can someone feel secure if they’re constantly worried that their performance will cause those whom they are interdependent upon to kick them out and cast them aside? At the heart of performance-based love is this fear, that we won’t be loved. As a result when you teach others a performance based approach to love to condemn them to a life of wondering if they’ll be safe – if they’ll continue to be loved.

Starting the Journey

One of the cautions in The Road Less Traveled is that the harder and longer that you work on spiritual development the lonelier the road becomes. I’d love to change that. I’d love for all of you to join me on The Road Less Travelled.

My Video Studio 2.1

Robert Bogue December 24, 2015 No Comments

It’s only been since June that I wrote about the major upgrades to the studio but there have been a few more enhancements that I’ve done to try to resolve issues I was still having. They really break into two issues. First, Chroma Keying and second, working space.

Chroma Keying

Getting a “clean” Chroma key is really difficult. It’s not that big a deal when you’re just lighting a single subject but as the area you’re trying to key is getting larger and larger it becomes progressively more difficult to get the right results.

There were two specific things I was dealing with. The first was that the green was spilling onto my subject. The reflected light from the backdrop was reflecting onto the person so they’d have a green hue about them. This problem was caused by a variety of factors including the distance between the background and the subject as well as the amount of front lighting that the subject had on them. Second, I was having trouble getting even lighting across the entire width of the scene. The four foot sections of bulbs just wasn’t cutting it.

My first attempted solution involved adding some lights to compensate for shadows on the green screen created by the objects in the scene. So I’d hide small adjustable LED lights behind things like the monitor that was on-scene. I love the Neewer CN-576 lights that I got but I could never quite get the lighting right. I’d take a test shot put it in the editing software and see what I got – and invariably I’d realize that I didn’t like how clean the Chroma key was.

I decided that I needed to be able to see the Chroma key live. I wouldn’t normally do live keying but I needed a way to see things live and make small adjustments. That led me to the BlackMagic ATEM Television Studio Production Switcher. It’s a work of art and it allowed me to literally see the impact of my lighting to the Chroma key I could get. It had the side benefit of having a built in H.264 encoder so now I could quite literally live stream video from my studio. This allowed me to fine-tune the lighting but I still didn’t like the results of the Chroma keying. It could get a solid key but the problem was that it took a fair amount of effort to get things setup and my goal was a studio that I could just get going in and not have to worry about tweaking too much.

I ended up adjusting my preview monitors on the tower to make room for a dedicated preview for the ATEM on the bottom. This meant moving the second preview monitor up above to right about the second camera. It means that the tower looks like a bunch of TVs but at a glance the on-camera talent can see everything that is going on.

As a quick sidebar, the ATEM is a bit picky about the signals it’s getting in. My primary cameras were fine but I sometimes include some cheaper side-cameras for off-angles. Because the ATEM offers six channels (two are SDI only and two are SDI/HDMI and two are HDMI) I wanted to be able to include my off-angle cameras and be able to preview them. That meant finding a scan converter that would create a signal the ATEM liked. I found the Decimator MD-HX Cross Converter which does a wonderful job of cleaning up the signal and as a bonus converts it to SDI.

Back to my problem of having trouble getting even lighting for the Chroma keying. The solution was to custom make some strip lights. I got some white surface-mount LED strips and a power supply and created my own light. The LEDs themselves are sold as SMD 5050s. SMD stands for surface mount device. The 5050 is the size of the LED. A strip is 5 meters long only $10.99 at the time of this writing. I ordered three spools of the LED lights, two dimmers, and two power supplies. I made two lights that were roughly 8 feet long by taking a 1″x4″x10′ board and painting it white then attaching all of the gear to it. The result is one light for the bottom and one for the top that are 8 feet wide. Each have three strips of the lights – one and a half spools. This solved my issue with getting even lighting. The dimmers, it turns out, weren’t even necessary but I’m sure that I’ll find a use for them for lighting effects later.

Working Space

The studio is a 15’x30′ space that has the editing bay at one end. It’s not tiny – but it’s not spacious either. One of the problems that I had was that the front-fill lights (Interfit Photographic Super Cool Lighting Kit) weren’t able to be placed exactly the way I wanted. The two lighting stands that the two lights per side stood on ended up interfering with one another. The result was the lights were difficult to maneuver and difficult to place.

The solution was to have a friend of mine custom-create new lighting stands that are designed to mount multiple lights to and are designed so that the weight is all on one side – eliminating the need for tripod legs and making it easier to place. I really like the results even if I haven’t gotten around to painting them in chrome yet.

Book Review-A Hunger for Healing: The Twelve Steps as a Classic Model for Christian Spiritual Growth

Robert Bogue December 21, 2015 No Comments

A good friend and Christian life coach and I were talking and he mentioned the book A Hunger for Healing was packed with insights and that I should read it. Most of the time when people make a recommendation for a book to read it takes me a while to get to it – this was no exception. I recognize that the research that I’ve done into the roots of Christianity and the intersection of Twelve Step programs is probably more than most folks would be interested in. (See Spiritual Evolution, The Great Evangelical Recession, Churchless, for more on Christianity and it’s evolution.) However, there were some insights in A Hunger for Healing that needed shared – and more importantly it’s the link to a book called The Road Less Traveled that was amazing.

Hurting Church

It’s been said that the church is the only “army” that shoots it’s wounded. There are plenty of places where you can see where the church has done as much harm as it has done good in the world. Recently the pope relaxed the views of the church creating more acceptance of both divorced persons and homosexuals. The church historically had shunned those who were divorced and who were homosexual. While there’s a growing acceptance both groups of people remain treated as if they are damaged goods at some level.

There’s a common fallacy about becoming a Christian that once you accept Jesus Christ your problems stop. All you have to do is accept Christ and the work is over. The truth is that this is when the work really begins. I don’t personally put much stock in spiritual warfare but I know that my problems haven’t stopped.

The truth is that we’re all bruised in different ways. We’re all broken. We all sin. (See Romans 3:23) A friend of mine said that a church is a hospital for the spiritually sick. I believe that wholeheartedly. I believe that we’re all just trying to grow up and be better.

You’re Soaking in It

The more I research cognition and the psychology and neurology of it the more convinced I become that most of what we are is unconscious, not conscious. From the Rider-Elephant-Path model in The Happiness Hypothesis and Switch to the neurology of Incognito to Sources of Power and Recognition Primed Decisions (RPD) there are hints that how we make decisions isn’t either rational or under our control.

Certainly as Kurt Lewin said, “Behavior is a function of person and environment.” We have free will but ultimately our behavior will be determined by both who we are as a person and the environmental factors that are surrounding us. However, there’s more than just the first order problem to look at. The second order problem is that we adapt to social norms. That is if others around us are doing something it’s likely we’ll feel like it is OK. This leads to the broken windows theory of crime covered in The Tipping Point.

I’ve heard criticism of twelve step programs that amounts to “I’m not an addict, so how can it help me?” A good friend of mine pointed me to a story in the Alcoholics Anonymous “big book” to read. I read it and told her that it didn’t make sense. She responded that she asked me to read it precisely because it wouldn’t make sense. She told me that the story resonates with addicts – the story of continuing to do something that you know is harmful is something that they can identify with. For me it didn’t make sense and in this was a very discernable difference between an addict and my situation.

However, despite this, I can say that programs that are based on the twelve step principles can be valuable to non-addicts. The great wisdom that is in the program and more importantly the people applies to every human. Things like “You’re only as sick as your secrets” reminds me to move into my relationships even when I don’t want to.

What I realize as I attend meetings is that I’m “soaking it in.” There are things that I hear that don’t connect for days, weeks, or months. I’m going not because I need a specific insight but rather that I recognize that there is wisdom here.

Controlling

A typical response of an addict – and most of the rest of us – is “white knuckling it.” That is using willpower to overcome the desires of our heart. Whether it’s a drink, or shopping, or sex, the “in control” person prevents those behaviors from leaking out by sheer force of will – that is until they run out of will power. However, sooner or later everyone does run out of willpower. Rather than trying to fix the pains that are bubbling up they try to fight the urges and overcome them. (See Chasing the Scream for more on pains bubbling up.)

Controlling others is the subject of Compelled to Control – one of J. Keith Miller’s other books that I’ve reviewed. At the heart of the matter is our belief that we have to be in control of our lives and that we’re responsible for our well-being.

God in the Center

An odd thing happens when you are in the center of your world. With you in the center you have to solve all of the problems you have. You have to solve the problems that you see. However, it’s the problems that you don’t see that you still have to solve that is more difficult. With you at the center of your world you have to fix your own hurts. You have to recognize that you’re limited and therefore there will be problems that you just can’t solve.

A healthier arrangement is to put God in the center – make him responsible for making all things right. Twelve Step programs are careful to say that anything can be your “higher power.” However, I believe that this is largely because folks have such a distorted view of God that saying God from the outset would probably cause many to run away from the programs.

Whether you believe in an all-knowing and loving God or not – even if you’re an atheist – it’s helpful to realize that you don’t have to be in control of everything. You don’t have to have the solution to every problem. A friend, someone who loves you, or the universe will send you the answers you need.

Self-Care

It may seem odd that when confronted with someone who seems self-indulgent, whose behavior is harming themselves and those around them, one of your responses should be to teach them self-care. Instead of a life draining addiction or struggle they’ll often need to learn that it’s OK to take care of themselves. It’s an odd paradox that you have to be “selfish” to be able to support others but that is a fundamental truth.

You cannot give what you don’t have. If you don’t have peace, you can’t give peace. If you don’t have love, you can’t give love. If you don’t have a respect for yourself, you can’t give this to others. So despite the fact that many people (including addicts) have been told that it’s wrong to be selfish and to take care of yourself, this is precisely what we need to do sometimes.

In fact, as a rule we’re positively lousy at self-care. We’re bad at knowing what will make us happy and just as bad at knowing what will restore us. (See The Happiness Hypothesis, Hardwiring Happiness, and Stumbling on Happiness for more about our ability to find happiness.)

Intimacy

The way that healing comes, the way that we become more whole than we are today is by being intimate with another person. By finding the person who can see us for all that we are and seek to help us become better each day. We heal because others care enough to see our broken spaces and cover them with their love and acceptance. (See How to be an Adult in Relationships for more on acceptance.)

Some are tragically incapable of intimacy and therefore will struggle to heal. (See Intimacy Anorexia for intimacy problems.) It’s through our powerlessness – and the help of others – that we become powerful. Like exercise where we tear down muscles and they come back stronger so we come back stronger when we are able to heal ourselves. So don’t lose. Keep your (A) Hunger for Healing.

Article: Freedom Through Apps: Targeting and Marketing Your Apps

Robert Bogue December 18, 2015 No Comments

The chink in the armor of most of the developers who are looking to retire rich by creating apps is marketing to users. It may be that you are able to learn how to create some independence. You might even have decided whether the lone wolf or the sexy startup is right for you. You might have even figured out how to iterate App development quickly, but you’re not done when you release your App into the App Store. It takes more than being available in the App Store to be successful, that’s when it’s time to put on your marketing hat—or buy a marketing hat to put on.

Sitting On a Store Shelf

Just because a product is available doesn’t mean that it will automatically sell itself. Just because your application is in the store doesn’t mean that it will sell. In fact, there are thousands of apps that are in the store with nearly zero sales. You don’t want this to be you. If you want to sell your app and retire, it’s going to take getting out there and doing some marketing.

Marketing is not a skill most developers have been taught or even understand. Development is a world of rules and if … then …. The world of marketing isn’t repeatable and just because it worked some way last time doesn’t mean it will behave the same way the next time. However, once your application is launched it’s marketing that will make it appeal to others—and convince them to buy.

The Silence of the Fans (not Lambs) – Quiet PCs

Robert Bogue December 17, 2015 No Comments

In my work with Lynda I got a chance to connect with some really great audio folks who clean, scrub, and ensure the quality of the audio for Lynda.com. If you’ve read my blog for a while you know that I’ve made a lot of investments on my video studio to get premium quality. (See My Video Studio 2.0). You’ve probably also picked up that I’ve got years of running live audio for churches and productions. So I’m really comfortable with audio – however, I was able to hear a few things when with the folks at Lynda that I’ve never heard before.

My Computer Was the Noisiest Thing in the Room

If you’ve ever been in an anechoic chamber you know how disconcerting it is the first time. Your brain doesn’t know what to do with complete quiet. The fact of the matter is that we’re almost always in the presence of some sort of noise. It can be the wind rustling through the leaves or it can be an airplane taking off. Anywhere between the two we’ve still got noise in the background. The ATS Acoustic Panels that I use seriously dampen the noise but at some point the right answer is to not create the sound in the first place.

When I heard the background noise from my recording machine, I decided that I was going to replace it with something quieter. It was well within range for great audio – but I wanted better. However, that meant I’d have to get past a bunch of marketing hype and get to the real answers about how to create a quiet PC.

Go Big and Go Slow

I’m going to skip over the fan construction and which kind of bearings are the right kind and the impact of fan blade shape because if you’re looking for quiet machines these things are just going to be right. I didn’t find fans in my search for silence that didn’t have the basic fan blade shape down and that weren’t using at least acceptable bearings.

However, what I do want to talk about are the physics of cooling. In short for convective cooling – air as a transfer medium for heat – we have only the surface area, the amount of air flow and the temperature differential to talk about as ways to control the cooling process. We can’t control the temperature differential between the CPU and case to the ambient air so we’re down to just air flow and surface area.

So how do you generate a large amount of airflow without a lot of noise? It turns out the answer is: go big and go slow. The amount of air being moved breaks down into the size of the blades and the speed at which the blades are turning. If you use larger fans you can turn the blades more slowly to get the same airflow.

It turns out that the noise of a fan is largely driven by the speed at which the blades are turning. If you turn the blades more slowly, you generate less noise. This means in computer cases you want larger and slower fans rather than smaller and faster ones.

If you’re looking for a case you want to find cases that will support 200mm fans – and fans with a high blade count. However, this works for the case, what about the CPU?

The CPU Generates the Heat

The largest heat source in most computers is the CPU. The heat sinks increases the surface area for cooling and then the fan moves air directly across the heat sink surface to cool it quickly. However, the CPU fan has to dissipate a lot of heat and the fan itself is relatively puny. Most CPU fans are 100mm or less. That means that CPU fan must spin at a really high RPM to force enough air to cool the CPU effectively – and this is where most of the noise comes from.

The single hottest component in the computer is the CPU and because of the physics of cooling it – it becomes the source of the largest amount of noise. However, there are ways to address this.

The first way is to use a very large heat sink and a larger – and slower rotation fan. That’s great but there’s only so much space in the inside of the computer. I’ve literally had to cut the side of a PC case to fit one of the larger air based CPU coolers that I’ve installed. There has to be a better way – and there is but it requires the courage to mix water and computers.

Water and Computers

At first blush water and computers don’t seem to be a good fit. With sensitive electrical components the introduction of water seems to be a bad idea – and it is. However, if we want to take a lesson from our cars, we can learn a very important lesson.

Our petroleum-based cars are quite literally exploding their way down the road. While the mini-explosions that cars run on generate power, they also generate heat. The solution for dissipating this heat is a radiator. It is water running through the engine with the help of a water pump and out to the radiator where the extra heat is dissipated.

It turns out water is a really effective way to transfer heat from one component to another. You can take heat from a CPU and move it out to a radiator in the same way that you can take heat from an engine. This is the core idea of a liquid cooler. The cooler pumps water around a plate that makes physical contact with the top of the CPU and then pumps that into a radiator that is cooled by fans.

This solves the internal space issue by allowing for the surface area of the radiator to be flat – where a heat sink needs to have a shape that supports the flow of heat from the CPU.

If you want to get your computer quiet you find a way to cool your CPU more quietly and by far a liquid based cooler wins in this space.

What Works for Me

Ultimately I decided on a Cooler Master Seidon 240M – this is a sealed, no-maintenance system which features a radiator that’s 120mm x 240mm. That’s a lot of surface area for cooling. It includes two 120mm fans to blow across the unit. It’s super quiet when the CPU isn’t generating a lot of heat. It’s just very quiet when the CPU is cranking out the cycles and the heat.

In order to accommodate the cooler I had to find a case that it would fit well in. That led me to the Cooler Master HAF X case. It has explicit support for the cooler – and two 200mm low noise fans. It’s cool (literally) and it’s quiet. When you add a quiet power supply like the Cooler Master V1200 you end up with a quiet baseline.

You need a motherboard that has temperature based fan controllers – so it turns the fans on high when the temperature climbs but leaves them running slow when there’s no heat. The motherboard that I chose was an Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z. It supported the AMD 9590 processor I decided on – really for cost/performance reasons. The Intel stuff is faster but at a much higher performance premium. The Asus will vary the fan speeds based on temperature and the tooling is really good to set the temperature to fan speed ratios.

The second largest source of noise in a computer can be the video card. Like the processor when it’s cranking out the cycles, it will generate a lot of heat. That’s why I looked for a video card like the EVGA GTX 970 SC which has onboard fan controllers to only spin the fans when necessary.

In the end the new computer is much quieter than the old one. Just a few small tweaks of finding slower faster fans with more blade surface area, fixing the CPU cooling problem, and finding a silent video card made a big difference.

Book Review-Intimacy Anorexia: The Hidden Addiction in Your Marriage

Robert Bogue December 14, 2015 No Comments

It’s been years since I read Intimacy Anorexia. It fell into my standard note taking pattern but I suppressed the process of writing the book review on it because it was too close and too personal. I wasn’t able to be objective about the content because I was too close to it. However, with the passage of time it’s become easier – and possible to share some of the insights that the book contained.

When I read it there were times it was just eerie. I heard my now ex-wife’s voice in some of the quotes in the book. I heard similarities which were difficult to ignore.

Defining Intimacy

I defined Intimacy in my landmark post Trust => Vulnerability => Intimacy as “the kind of connection that two people can have when there are no barriers between them – emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.” That’s a good one sentence description. However, more expansively, intimacy is not needing to defend yourself against the other person because you know they have your best interests at heart.

Intimacy is “in-to-me-see.” That is it’s a window into who the person is. No masks. Nothing preventing a full understanding of the other person. This can be scary if you’re unwilling to look into yourself. If you’re guilty or afraid of what you know to be in there. It’s hard to be intimate with another person if you’re not willing to be intimate with yourself.

Defining Anorexia

Most typically anorexia is used in reference to anorexia nervosa which is an eating disorder where people literally starve themselves. They resist food and gaining weight to a level that they may become skin and bones. Here anorexia is expressed differently. Instead of denying food the intimacy anorexic denies intimacy. To be clear a person with anorexia nervosa does eat. They eat just enough to survive.

Similarly an intimacy anorexic is intimate at times. However, the intimacy comes with guilt and fear. Anorexia isn’t the complete absence of food or intimacy, it is the unhealthy limiting of something.

Tools of the Anorexic

The intimacy anorexic is armed with a set of powerful tools that they use to prevent others (including spouses) from getting close to them. Here are a few:

Busy – When someone is constantly busy with things – committees, work, programs, and tasks there’s no time to get to know who they really are.
Blame – When the other person is blamed they may feel guilt or shame and as a result retreat giving the anorexic more time to avoid intimacy. (See Daring Greatly for more on guilt and shame.)
Withholding Love – Intimacy anorexics often don’t like physical touch. They don’t want to be so close that they might be seen.
Withholding Praise – By withholding praise from someone you’re depriving them of the lifeblood they need to grow and to reach in. The result is that intimacy anorexics can prevent their spouses from reaching in by only sharing negatives or nothing at all.
Withholding Sex – In a married relationship an intimacy anorexic often withholds sex since it’s a necessarily intimate time that’s uncomfortable for the anorexic.
Withholding Spiritually – One of our most sensitive relationships is the relationship we have with our creator. Anorexics withhold this from their spouse because to reveal it makes them and the relationship vulnerable.
Criticism – Humans don’t like constant criticism – particularly when it’s not constructive. An anorexic will use criticism to keep people at bay.
Anger – Some anorexics use their anger to scare off others. If you’re afraid of their anger then you won’t want to be near them.
Silence – The old saying “It takes two to tango” is even more true of conversations. An anorexic will avoid even answering questions that might lead to an intimate exchange. Sometimes it’s known as the glass wall.
Controlling Money – If you can keep control of your spouse by managing or controlling the money then you might be able to keep them away at the threat of losing their money supply.
Required Mindreading – The intimacy anorexic will often require that their spouse read their mind as to what they want. They’ll be chastised when they fail and reprimanded when they ask for what the person wants. In this way they can complain that their spouse never gives them what they want.
Victimhood – The anorexic loves to play the role of the victim. This brings the spouse into the position of trying to come along side and support them. This is a useful distraction for a while as it prevents seeing more of who the person is. (For more on victimhood see Boundaries, Beyond Boundaries, Daring Greatly and Change or Die.)

Causes of Anorexia

While it’s not possible to identify every possible cause for intimacy anorexia, it’s possible to identify a few that can lead to intimacy anorexia issues:

Sexual Trauma – Sex is an intimate act if for no other reason than the brain chemicals it unleashes. Any sort of sexual trauma can be converted into intimacy anorexia.
Opposite Gender Parent Issues – The relationship that you have with your opposite-gender parent establishes a framework for how you’ll relate to your spouse. If your opposite-gender parent relationship wasn’t good or was unstable it can lead to intimacy anorexia.
Sexual Addiction – It seems odd that an intimate moment can lead to intimacy anorexia but it’s precisely because the sexual moment has been made to not be intimate that it’s difficult for other intimate moments to happen.

Fears of the Anorexic

There are common fears that an intimacy anorexic has. Here are some of them:

Lack of Safety – They believe that they have to be safe at all times (perhaps because they weren’t safe as a child) and therefore any lack of safety is a big risk.
Hidden Flaws – They believe that any of their flaws, if discovered, could be the reason why someone else could stop loving them or would be a way to embarrass them.
Loss of Control – Believing that they need to control their lives the anorexic is in fear when they sense any loss of control.
Acknowledging Sexuality – Many anorexics don’t want to acknowledge their own sexuality.

The Intimacy of Sex

Evolution is a powerful force. Natural selection has created numerous systems to ensure reproduction and survival of the species. Not the least of which is the drive for sex and the rewards for sex. We’re chemically driven to desire sex both before the event through the use of pheromones and during/after the event with a chemical reward system. The reward system includes:

Oxytocin – Known as the cuddle hormone. It increases bonding and relaxation
Endorphins – This is the natural high that comes from sex.
Adrenaline (Epinephrine) – This is the source of an energy burst
Dopamine – Engagement and focus are the effects of dopamine. It brings our focus on the here and now.
Serotonin – This is a mood regulation chemical that is at the heart of most anti-depression medicines that calms you down right after climax.

You can imagine with a chemical cocktail like this it’s no wonder that sex is a powerful draw for everyone. However, for the intimacy anorexic who fears being seen by another person the results of the chemical cocktail are frightening. The walls come down for a moment because of the chemical reactions involved. So whether they like it or not sex brings people close together. Perhaps too close for the intimacy anorexic. That’s why withholding sex in a marriage by an intimacy anorexic is so common. The fact that it denies the spouse their only socially acceptable sexual outlet makes it cruel.

Starve the Dog

Earlier I described anorexia as a reduction and not the complete absence of food or intimacy. This is a very confusing point because often anorexics will say that they are intimate or more often they point to the fact that they do have sex with their spouse. They hold up that they can’t be anorexic because they sometimes give into food or intimacy. However, this misses the fundamental point that it isn’t the complete absence but rather an inappropriate ratio or frequency.

Along the same lines of the question “How do you eat an elephant?” which has the predictable answer “one bite at a time” comes the question “How do you starve a dog?” The implication here is not the literal starving of the dog but rather, how do you create a mean and angry dog who will bite at the smallest provocation. The answer is to starve them. However, you have to feed them something or they’ll die and that’s not the point. The point is to create a mean and angry dog so you feed them but always just a little bit too little. You never give them enough to feel satisfied or OK.

The resulting dog will be conditioned into a mean and angry animal. The sad part is that this is the same process through which intimacy anorexics train their spouses. They teach them to be always hungry and just on the edge of exploding. Spouses sometimes choose to get fed other places – leading to inappropriate relationships or they block out that part of themselves. They learn that their need for intimacy is bad and that they should suppress it. They learn to withhold from themselves.

Withholding

At the heart of intimacy anorexia is withholding. The many forms of withholding that intimacy anorexics use to keep others at bay. However, in the end many of the tools of the anorexic are withholding. They are withholding themselves from others. In situations where healthy people would share, they don’t.

Perhaps the most painful lesson that the intimacy anorexic teaches is that withholding is OK. They teach that it’s the right response to withhold yourself instead of share. The sad fact is that the teaching of withholding is caught by those close to the anorexic, particularly children.

Finding Yourself

Whether you find yourself in the story as an anorexic or the spouse of an anorexic – or even if you’re just curious about how intimacy anorexia works, you should pick up the book and read it. You may just find that there’s a bit of Intimacy Anorexia in us all.

Article: Freedom Through Apps: Knowing How to Iterate Apps

Robert Bogue December 11, 2015 No Comments

Becoming rich through the development of applications is a common dream. At the start of this series, I wrote how the road leads through independence. From there, I explained the idea of the lone wolf app developer. The last article was how to get folks together and do a sexy startup. However, this is the structural component of making the dream of retiring rich. It’s time to learn how to create the compelling apps that users will buy.

Perhaps the most successful mobile game of all time is the Angry Birds franchise from Rovio—a Finnish game developer. At first glance, it appears that Rovio has been making great mobile games forever; however, the truth is much different. Angry Birds was their 52^nd game released. Not the first, nor even their fifth…, but rather their 52^nd. Flappy Bird, another popular bird game, found its creator, Nguyễn Hà Đông, re-using a character he had created for a game that was cancelled a year earlier. Not even the titans of the mobile game market earned their chops on their first game. Instead, they had to “kiss a lot of frogs” before they found their prince.

Applications and Apps

It used to be that Electronic Arts built megalithic games with storylines and cinematography and big budgets. Today, PopCap Games (a division of Electronic Arts) builds small games to run on mobile devices. Instead of a game development cycle running years, they run months. Instead of teams of hundreds, they’re teams of dozens.

The market has changed. The market used to be that we had to invest and test to see if it worked at the end. However, today we’re focused on the minimum viable product (MVP). That is what can I get out into the market to test and let users react to it. We need to learn what did—and didn’t work when the users got it. What did they love? What did they hate?

Book Review-The Challenger Sale

Robert Bogue December 7, 2015 No Comments

When I first started my career I loathed sales. I saw a used car salesman trying to take advantage of you so that he could sell one more car and get a commission. I never saw them as folks of high integrity. That was until I went to some of the sales training programs of Bill Caskey. Bill introduced me to the idea of the solution sale. That is he told me that sales should be an advocate for the client trying to make their lives easier. This aligned with my view of the world and while I would never consider myself a professional sales person, I am comfortable in sales situations.

However, my approach to sales always had an edge to it. I can remember how sales folks would bristle when in my technical role I would tell the client that what they wanted couldn’t be done or when I challenged them to think of the problem differently. I can remember one sales person yelling at me because I interrupted his close. I always considered this “edge” something that I needed to work on to be more successful at sales. However, as it turns out, it may be what fuels my success. It turns out there are five different profiles of sellers – and the challenger profile is the most successful one. That’s the story in The Challenger Sale.

Five Profiles

During the recession research from the CEB sought to explain the bright spots in the market where sales folks were still effective at selling in the down economy. (See Switch for more on bright spots.) What they found was that there are five different profiles for sales people and that one of those profiles – the challenger – was likely to outperform the other four profiles. The five profiles are:

The Hard Worker – Always staying late to help a client out the hard worker is convinced that working hard will yield results in the best puritan ethics tradition.
The Challenger – The subject of the book, the challenger isn’t primarily concerned with the feelings of the client. The challenger is most interested in creating value with the client even if that means some discomfort to get there.
The Relationship Builder – The traditional sales person is a relationship builder who is primarily concerned with maintaining the relationship with the customer in the mistaken belief that this will yield more sales. The primary issue of the relationship builder is that they’re unwilling to accept the discomfort necessary to push clients and as a result often have difficulty closing.
The Lone Wolf – Some sales folks don’t fill out their CRM trip reports or even their expense reports. They’re impossible to manage because they’re lone wolves. Sales folks in this profile that survive are more productive than any other kind of sales person (including the Challenger) likely because anyone who wasn’t successful and so blatantly challenged the rules and created problems was fired long ago.
The Reactive Problem Solver – Solving problems is at the core of what good sales people do and this profile is no exception. However, this profile isn’t willing to push the client when necessary. They’re not order takers because they create unique solutions for customers but they’re unlikely to push a customer into being uncomfortable for the sake of solving a problem.

The aim of The Challenger Sale isn’t to convert every sales person into a challenger. Rather the goal is to allow other profiles to leverage the same tools that challengers use naturally. Instead of relying on challengers to forge their own path, the book seeks to pave the road for all sales professionals.

Solutions Selling

In a traditional solution sale you enter a conversation intrigued by the customer and what they need. You encourage them to talk about themselves, their problems, and proverbially what’s “keeping them up at night.” The first problem with this approach is that it takes time – valuable time – for the prospect to explain what their challenges are and for you to test solutions that your organization might be able to create to help them. Today most clients don’t feel like they have time to explain themselves and their problems to you. They’ve become burned out on the number of sales folks coming in who want to know about their problems.

Perhaps more importantly this approach works well if the prospect trusts you but it’s becoming increasingly difficult for sales folks to get prospects to share their pains with you. Sharing your problems is a vulnerable thing and you don’t want to hear the sales person laugh at you for the problems that you have. So sales professionals have to build enough trust to allow the prospect to be real. Often solutions sellers will complain that clients are lying to them. My response is typically – of course they are – why should they tell you the truth?

You have to establish why they want to share their situation with you through trusting that you may be able to help them. They have to trust your integrity but also they have to trust that you have the capability of solving their problems. (See Trust=>Vulnerability=>Intimacy for more on trust and the downstream impacts.)

Because most clients are exhausted with explaining themselves they’re looking to come up with the solutions on their own – but to do that they need to have unique insight into their market or situation. This isn’t an insight that most clients have because they can’t see where they’re standing and where the market is moving.

Clients Want Insight

The State of Indiana went bankrupt. The state was selling bonds for the development of a canal system in the state that would connect Indiana to commerce. The problem is that the state leaders didn’t have the insight to realize the impact of the railroad and how it would rapidly transform transportation. The canal project would bankrupt the state because it didn’t have the insight to see the technological revolution that was coming.

In today’s globally connected, speed of the Internet business world every business faces changes and competitive pressures at a rate that would have been unheard of just a generation (or even a decade) ago. There’s an awareness – and growing anxiety – that whatever works today might be replaced next year. As a result clients are hungry for someone who can climb the tallest tree and look out on the horizon to see and understand what is coming.

Insight with Fries

One of the challenges with sharing insight with clients is that sales people don’t have the perspective to be able to generate the insight in most cases. This is where the tenuous relationship between sales and marketing really gets its test. Sales needs to rely on marketing to create a real insight that can be delivered by sales professionals to customers. Instead of sales pitching the materials from marketing out and creating their own, marketing needs to become the provider of the insight that the sales professionals need.

At some level the challenger sale is an individual skill of reading and adapting to the customer

Six Steps to Presentation Success

One of the challenges to any new methodology is how to do it. If you’re going to storyboard a sales call what should the story beats be? Luckily the challenger sale outlines an approach to presenting your solutions to a customer. The steps are as follows:

The Warmer – The part of the presentation where you build connection and credibility by proactively bringing up problems that customers probably have.
The Reframe – The problem is changed or reframed to reveal a different but important facet or a larger problem that it hides.
Rational Drowning – You overwhelm them with rational data supporting your point of view. You overload their ability to process the data so that they’ll return to their emotions.
Emotional Impact – You connect to their emotions and help them realize that this isn’t a story – it’s THEIR story.
A New Way – You solve the newly reframed and explained problem for them with an approach to the solution that works.
Your Solution – You explain how your solution implements the new way of solving the problem perfectly (or near perfectly.)

If you follow these steps you create the best chance for a sale – but like anything else there are no guarantees.

Free Consulting and Other Cautions

One of the constant challenges with solutions selling – and in my business of being a consultant – is how much free consulting you do and how you get the client to buy from you. It used to be called spilling the candy. In other words, you need to get them used to the fact that you do have insight and you add value and to do that you have to share some with them.

In consulting there are clients that want to ensure that you’re paid for the value that you deliver. There are also clients that will try to get as much for free from you as possible. When someone isn’t yet a client I’ve often solved their problem in an initial sales call and told them that I’m happy to continue to work with them in the future for a fee – if they’re interested. Sometimes they call back and sometimes they don’t.

In a selling situation it’s possible that you can lead the client to thinking about the problem in a better way and that you’ll spend time with them only to have them shop for the cheapest price later. In my experience this rarely happens when you establish credibility and that you’re delivering a unique value to the client. Of course, some of this is believing that you don’t really have competitors. You just have folks in similar spaces. My primary competitor is “No Action”, perhaps you’ve got them in your industry as well.

While there are other ways that The Challenger Sale can fall apart, it’s a good model when you’re willing to help your clients reach the next level.

Article: Freedom Through Apps: Sexy Tech Startup

Robert Bogue December 4, 2015 No Comments

If you are like most developers, you dream of the idea of building the next big app that will cover the cost of your retirement. In the article, Freedom through Apps: The Road through Independence, I cover a few up-front considerations needed to begin the reality of building such an life plan. If you can’t be the lone wolf developer; because it’s too much work, or it’s too risky, or you like people too much and you want a road to financial freedom, how do you get there?

The other vision that people chase is the idea of creating a startup company, getting funding, and making it big. While certainly this has worked for some folks, it’s not the path that most successful folks take. As it turns out the hidden work of building a startup is more than most folks realize.

Fail First, then We’ll Talk

Imagine for a moment that you’re sitting down with an investor who has enough money to invest in your company. Imagine that you’re willing to give up any amount of ownership and you’re ready to deal. However, instead of the investor working on terms and negotiating for a percentage of ownership for an amount of money, you hear “Fail first and then we’ll talk.”

The reality of getting investment dollars is that investors invest in people and not ideas. They invest money where they believe that the person will make it work no matter what the cost. They invest when they believe the investment will pay off and not in a win-the-lottery type of way, but in the kind of way that they expect people will want to buy milk tomorrow. So investors are looking for two key things in a person. First, they want to know that you know what it’s like to fail. They want to know that you’ve learned what you’ve done wrong before so you know not to make the same mistakes.

Book Review-Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change

Robert Bogue November 30, 2015 No Comments

Do you have influence? Most of us want to believe that we wield influence like a machete that can cut a path through the jungle striking a bush or tree in our path and having it instantly fall out of our way but most of us who have tried to wield this weapon have been disappointed. We have left a wake of poorly adopted changes that are unwelcome proof that there’s opportunity for improvement when it comes to leveraging our influence. Influencer seeks to help us to understand how to successfully influence change and what we might have done wrong in our failed attempts to influence others to change.

Six Sources of Influence

Key to Influencer is the idea that there are six powerful sources of influence that most of us don’t use in the right proportions or at the right time. As we’ve influenced other’s we’ve leaned heavily on one or two of the six sources and it’s because we’re not leveraging them all together that we’re not as effective as we can be. The six sources of influence are:

	Motivation	Ability
Personal	Personal Motivation	Personal Ability
Social	Social Motivation	Social Ability
Structural	Structural Motivation	Structural Ability

As you can see they break down into two dimensions. The first dimension around motivation and ability and the second dimension about the scale – whether personal, social, or structural.

The motivational categories are relatively straight forward in that they’re seeking to provide the energy for the system – the drive to change things. The other side, categorized as ability, is really about preventing barriers and providing resources. It’s about how you change the dynamics of the situation so that they’re easier. If motivation is the gas pedal in the car, ability is releasing the emergency brake.

The Reality of Change

As I mentioned in The Heart of Change and Leading Change, even those like John Kotter struggle to make organizational change work consistently. The failure rate on organizational change projects is appalling. There are so many forces inside the organization designed to resist change it’s very difficult to get change accomplished. (See The Fifth Discipline and Thinking in Systems for more about the factors in an organization that resist change.) So while there’s a culture that is talking about how the world is changing faster now than it ever has – we’re just as resistant – if not more resistant to change than we’ve ever been. There are so many change initiatives and programs that it’s hard to pick the ones to look at much less decide which approach is right for your organization.

The result is that we’ve got a reality where we need to have adaptability and to be able to change our organizations but it’s more likely that we’ll try and fail. We’ll further entrench the cynicism that has already taken hold of most of the members of the organizations that we work for.

Fuzzy Objectives

Perhaps the most powerful speech ever given in the history of mankind was when John F. Kennedy laid out the plans to safely transport a man to the moon and back as a part of a special message to congress on May 25, 1961. Specifically he said “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” His goal was quite specific in the objective and in the timeframe. It was a crystalizing vision that was specific and engaged the emotions of a nation which believed they were losing the space race to the Russians. However, most of the objectives that we see inside of an organization aren’t so clear.

Improving morale is certainly a worthwhile endeavor but without any sort of metric or clear timeline it’s still fuzzy. What’s more it’s not clear to most folks how to actually change that. While we may not personally know how to build a rocket we know that there are people who do who were tasked with getting us to the moon and back. However, most people don’t know how to improve morale or who we would go get to do that work.

There are lots of ways to improve morale. The Romans pacified the masses by bread and circuses. You can improve moral by having a Christmas party or a summer picnic. However, these are short term solutions to the challenge of improving morale. When we’re looking for morale improvement are we looking for a lasting change in the perception – or are we simply looking to change the number to hit our latest set of management objectives?

By clearly articulating our goals we can set on a course to achieve them. If the goals can’t be clearly articulated then there is little hope of reaching them.

Measuring Change

As Edward Deming noted, “You get what you measure.” This is both a good thing and a bad thing. On the good side if you measure the right things for change you can accomplish the change. On the bad side if you measure the wrong thing, you’ll get that too. The beauty of measurement is that by planning measurements you’ll develop a better understanding of the objective that you want to accomplish and in that you’ll automatically tighten the objective itself.

One of my “Nine Keys to SharePoint Success” is planning measurement. That is you have to plan how you’re going to measure change to be successful. Often people and organizations don’t put enough effort into designing the metrics. We look for simple process measures which indicates we’ve completed the process or we look for the results that we’re hoping for, but rarely do we look for creative metrics that are somewhere between the behaviors we’re asking for and the results we’re hoping for. They are a blend of both leading and lagging indicators.

Leading vs. Lagging indicators

Anyone who has ever tried to lose or manage their weight knows that the ultimate end judge of success is the scale. There’s no other measure that stands up to the number on the scale. However, there’s nothing you can do – directly – to change the number on the scale. From a systems point of view (See Thinking in Systems) our weight is largely a matter of the additional stores that we’ve put on by way of fat. In order to influence the amount of fat that we have stored in our bodies we have to burn more energy than we take in. We can control how much energy we expend by exercising or making small changes such as walking up the stairs. We can change the amount and type of food we take in to control the number of calories that we’re getting. There are other factors like our metabolic rate that influences our total calorie burn but really by managing the number of calories we take in and the number we put out through various forms of movement we control our weight.

So the leading indicators for success in managing our weight may be the number of calories that we’re taking in – as most weight management programs focus on. In fact most of those programs are focused on making the problem simpler so we can actually achieve our goal of taking in less calories. Tools like Fitbit and other fitness bands track our relative activity level. Together these metrics help us to predict what will happen on the scale.

There are many things that you can measure like the number of pushups that you do or the amount of fat that you take in. These may help you assess what will happen on the scale, but they’re not the best predictors. These leading metrics can impact the end result – the lagging indicator – we’re looking for but only when all other variables are the same. If we pick these metrics we’ll likely be disappointed as our leading metrics don’t lead to the results we’re looking for. A good leading indicator reasonably predicts the outcome of the lagging indicator (result) that we’re looking for.

As it turns out figuring out what the right metric for an initiative is – well, it’s difficult.

Right Metrics

Metrics are necessarily a simplification of success. They measure just a part of the equation. The end result doesn’t measure sustainability. Returning to Kennedy’s call to go to the moon, we know from the book Lost Knowledge that we’ve forgotten how we got there. If the objective was to get to the moon we’ve accomplished the goal but more often the goals are layered and we really wanted to build the capacity to get to the moon. A one-time program is a good start but sustainability tends to be much more important in business.

Norton and Kaplan created the concept of a balanced scorecard in 2005. The idea is that you wouldn’t look at a single indicator to determine the health of a system. Instead you would look at a set of metrics that together gave you a picture of how the organization or initiative was working. Instead of deciding whether to look at the lagging indicators for which there was little direct control or leading indicators that might impact the real goal but aren’t necessarily directly correlated, you could look at both. In fact, they encouraged a look at a small set of metrics that together created a sketch of how things were operating.

Knowing that you don’t have to get everything into a single metric makes it easier to pick metrics – but it doesn’t instruct you as to how to pick metrics. Here are a few of my tips:

The overall goal – If it’s getting to the moon it’s binary and insufficient but it’s the first starting place for the metrics. In cases where you’re looking for a particular sales goal, the goal can be much more useful.

The prerequisites – In our moon example we needed to have a rocket design that had sufficient thrust to escape the gravity of the Earth. The rocket capacity might be one of the metrics that you would track.
Leading Behaviors – Behaviors which you believe are tied to the goal are good metrics. The key here is ensuring that the leading behavior really does drive the result.

Storm the Castle

One of the characteristics of an influencer is their ability to over-determine their success. (This goes by other names in other contexts.) The heart of this idea is that influencers don’t leave important variables to chance. If there’s a question about whether there’s enough internal marketing for an idea, they’ll lobby for additional messaging. If they’re concerned about the outcome of an important decision they’ll plot out a plan for all the possible outcomes so they’re ready to respond when they’re informed of the results of the decision.

If they’re looking for a connection to a person or organization, they’ll look for multiple connections from different angles to ensure that their linchpin connection doesn’t fail. Influencers know that failure isn’t an option – it’s a certainty. It’s just a matter of time and preparation. The more preparation you put in the longer it will be until the failure – and quite often the lower the impact will be.

Influencers aren’t afraid to overdo it when the component is essential to their objective.

Something Wicked This Way Comes

How do you get normal people to behave as monsters? It turns out that it isn’t hard. It seems like we’ve all got monsters inside of us who aren’t limited by our rational thinking. Consider the research by Stanley Milgram which discovered that 65 percent of research subjects were willing to administer seemingly lethal shocks to another person when they couldn’t see the other person. More troubling is that when he introduced an accomplice who was willing to do seemingly lethal shocks to an unknown and unseen accomplice, the percentage of people who would administer seemingly lethal electrical shocks stood at 90%. So in answering the question of how folks could be complicit in the extermination and genocide of Jews during World War II we found the monster – and we are he. Also, when an accomplice refused to issue the shocks only 10% of the research subjects would administer the shocks.

Humans have a fundamental attribution error which leads us to believe our poor choices are based on circumstances and others poor choices are based on their character (See Crucial Conversations, The Advantage, Switch, and Beyond Boundaries for more.) We explain away our weaknesses and vilify others. What Milgram’s research shows is that we are the villain – at least 90% of us are. The way that we can truly influence the world we live in is the way that Milgram accomplished it – by demonstrating to someone that they have a choice. That they can say no. The more that we can make the normal behavior the one that we want the easier it will get.

Social Norms

It turns out that we’re not so driven by our rational minds as we would like to believe. In fact we’re not as driven by our emotional considerations as we would like to believe. The rider (reason) and the elephant (emotion) are often blindly walking down the path of the social norm. (See Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis for more on the model of the Rider, Elephant, and Path and how it works.) In Thinking, Fast and Slow we learned that our unconscious processing (System 1) often makes judgements that it passes along to our conscious processing (System 2) that our conscious mind doesn’t question. So even when we are able to think about something we may not be able to question the social norms in which we live. (See also Incognito which talks about the unconscious being aware before our consciousness is.)

This is the second, social, and third, structural, portions of the motivation framework. It’s the social aspects that drive social norms and the structural components that drive the social norms – much like how calculus is able to tell you the slope of a line at a given point, structural influence drives social influence.

Personal Motivation

We’ve all been through some sort of a motivational event. Perhaps it’s not an event where at the end it seems like everyone would sign up for a six month mission to the Congo but there are definitely times when we feel like we’re sold on an idea. If you’ve ever been to a time share event you’ve experienced the psychological warfare that is designed to get you to buy into a time share – and it’s effective. However, personal motivation created in those ways don’t last. It doesn’t take long for us to realize that it’s an illusion.

To create personal motivation there are four tactics that you can use:

Allow for Choice – You can’t expect to motivate people to an activity if they don’t have a choice. If they can’t say no then they won’t say yes. (See Choice Theory for more)
Create Direct Experiences – Make it real for them by engaging them in what they’re going to be doing. The more real you can make it – and the more the person can feel it the more they’re likely to want it.
Tell Meaningful Stories – Sometimes you can’t involve people in the solution directly, sometimes the only answer is to give them a vicarious experience through an emotionally engaging story.
Make it a Game – A lot has been made of gamification these days but it’s more than badges and achievements. Making something a game is creating the balance between ability and challenge that is essential for flow. (See Flow, Finding Flow, and The Rise of Superman)

The reason we need to create personal motivation lies in the marshmallow experiments of Walter Mischel. Children who were able to delay gratification were much more likely to succeed in life. (See How Children Succeed, Introducing Psychology of Success, and The Information Diet for Walter Mischel’s famous test.) As Steven Wright says “Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.” By teaching the skills necessary to delay gratification we’re able to improve the possibility that we’re going to accomplish our goals – both personally and organizationally.

In truth most of the challenges that we have with folks when it comes to motivating them isn’t the fact that they have some moral or character defect. Instead the issue is simply moral slumber. That is that they don’t realize the problems that their behavior is causing. It’s not that they are callus and don’t care for others. It’s that in the moment, in what they’re doing, they aren’t realizing their impact on others.

Personal Ability

If I were to tell you that right this very second there’s an asteroid barreling down on the Earth and it’s quite likely to end all life on the planet I won’t motivate you. I’ll create deep emotions of dread and anxiety perhaps but I won’t motivate action. The reason for this is simple. You can’t do anything about an asteroid barreling down on the planet. It’s unlikely you know anyone who could do anything about this. You would be motivated to change the outcome but intensely frustrated that you have no power to change it.

When we work on personal motivation and we create a burning desire in someone to make a difference but make no effort to create a belief in the person that they are up to the task of achieving the goal that the motivation is aimed at, we create frustration. So the other side of the coin from motivation is creating ability – or at least the perception of ability.

Often times the object of the motivation can feel overwhelming. How can you solve starvation in Africa is an immense goal. You can’t possibly solve that by yourself. However, what you may be able to do is save one child, one family, or one village from starvation. By narrowing the focus of the motivation into something achievable we create the perception of personal ability.

There are, however, other ways of creating the belief of personal ability necessary to drive someone forward. It can be a framework “proven” to be successful on the kinds of problems that you’re interested in. It might be training on new skills that you can use to get closer to or work on the chosen motivation. It could be – as it often is for me – reading a book and trying to understand the insights that it offers so I can unwrap one more layer of the mysteries about why organizations rarely change.

For me, increasing personal ability is at the heart of lifelong learning as well as flow. (See The Rise of Superman, Flow, and Finding Flow for more on flow). Improving personal ability is about a willingness –if not a hunger – for learning and the application of continual challenges to continue to drive improvement – often through flow.

Social Motivation

Perhaps one of the most telling examples of how people motivate others is the work of Everett Rogers as described in his book Diffusion of Innovations. Rogers explains how innovations – particularly farming innovations – disperse through the community. He identified five factors that lead to adoption but also how the cosmopolitan tendencies in people made them more motivated to adopt a change – and in turn how this would help to motivate the peer groups which they operated in.

While Brene Brown may caution against shaming (See Daring Greatly), social shaming is a powerful force and it can be a powerful force for good. Consider what happens when you report to a household their energy consumption – almost nothing – as compared with what happens when you show a household how inefficient their consumption of energy is when compared to their neighbors. The resulting social shaming causes even the most hedonistic and unconcerned home owner to start to consider their energy usage.

Social Ability

Have you ever wondered how Weight Watchers works? I don’t mean how the point systems works. I mean how the program works. How is it that you can get together a set of folks who all struggle with their weight and the end result is that they – for the most part – lose weight? The answer lies in the social connectivity that is built. Weight Watchers groups are designed to support and reinforce the successes that people are having and to support those that are struggling. It seems like a simple thing but it works.

Similarly how did two drunks create Alcoholics Anonymous, a twelve-step movement, and a path for “sanity” in the lives of otherwise broken people? The aspects of acceptance and support help motivate alcoholics to not drink. (See How to Be an Adult in Relationships for more about acceptance.)

This is at the heart of social ability – leveraging the support and acceptance of others to motivate us to do better.

Structural Motivation

Any organization is perfectly designed to get the results you’re getting. If you want to change the results you’re getting – change the organization. In systems thinking (see Thinking in Systems) our goal is to find the best leverage point on the system to effect change. This is quite often to change the equation. When you change the reward systems you change how everything works making it easier to create the social and personal motivators that you need. All too often folks reach for these big levers and hope that the downstream influences will just line up correctly. Politicians set policy and law and hope that they’ll get the results they want. However, often what they’re looking for doesn’t happen.

As was discussed in Dialogue Mapping and The Heretic’s Guide to Best Practices, there are some systems so complex that they become wicked problems where you can’t predict the outcome when you change the system. Instead, you have to accept that what you’re doing may have different – and sometimes opposite consequences. Drive describes how sometimes providing extrinsic motivations sometimes destroys or reverses intrinsic motivations. So on the one hand, the big lever in the system is changing the game so that there’s a new set of motivations. On the other hand, using the lever may not have the reaction that you’re looking for. The Law of Unintended Consequences (discussed in my review of Diffusion of Innovations) guarantees that there will be some unintended consequences of every change you make – those intended consequences may be a big deal – or they may be trivial. Consider for a moment the experiment to tame the Red Fox which has resulted in the Russian Domesticated Red Fox – and that while selecting only for one attribute – inherent tameness – they happened to bread in other changes such as spotted fur. The fur differences aren’t a problem – but they are an unintended consequence of breading for tameness.

With this in mind structural motivation are the carrots and sticks that we can use to try to control the situation. While these are necessary, they’re the last thing to choose – not the first.

Structural Ability

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” – Winston Churchill

If you were trying to predict which researchers would work with one another, what do you think the largest factor would be? Would it be that they have the same or similar disciplines? Would you think that it would be how far apart you place their desks that would matter most? Perhaps not and perhaps it’s not the strongest factor in your situation but sheer proximity has a profound effect on collaboration. Churchill was right when he said that we shape our buildings then they shape us. Great buildings change the nature of how we interact together.

Structural ability is about creating the right circumstances so that the desired outcomes are easy. For instance, if you’re working on your weight it’s about hiding the candy and sugar and setting healthy fruits and vegetables out on the counter – or better yet by keeping food out of sight all together so it’s not something you think about. In the case of a building if you want serendipitous interaction then creating large open foyers can be helpful as can a subsidized cafeteria so that employees want to stay together and sit at big round tables to talk to one another.

Demand talked about hassle maps and particularly how some rather small and insignificant hassles have a big impact on outcomes. Structural ability is removing those hassles, small barriers, and insignificant hurdles so that the right answer is the easiest answer.

Discussing the undiscussable

Influencing others is difficult. Being a good influencer is being someone who wants to grow other people. The best way to create real growth in people is through creating groups of safety where the undiscussable can be discussed – where there are opportunities to examine old patterns of thought and old ways of acting can be done. We won’t look deeply into ourselves unless we feel safe. We don’t discuss undiscussable topics unless we know that there will be no repercussions.

Whether you’re talking about the sex trade in Thailand or the destructive impact that your secret behaviors have on the community, being an influencer means in part making the impossible to discuss only difficult to discuss – and then discussing it. Being an influencer isn’t for the faint of heart, for those unwilling to slay the sacred cows (You can learn more about sacred cows and being defensive in general in my post Defensive Routines), but influencers are powerful. Read Influencer to learn how.

Public Speaking