Level up your mental game and capacity to get things done with this one habit
The Mental Game — Thoughts Have Power
Consider the most productive 10% of project professionals in the world. High performers on projects from across the globe.
Top performers adapt to the constraints of an insurmountable problem and stay cool, calm and collected. As project professionals embrace senior roles, this remarkable ability to let go becomes essential. The energy the project leaders bring may be relaxed and stable. This calm, even-minded energy is contagious and provides a great role model for others to think and behave in the most balanced way possible.
What might top project professionals have in common? Yes, you could argue they have an excellent team around them in whatever projects they serve on. Are they blessed with political acumen 1? Do they ensure they are always seen in the right light 2?
Ignore the external signs of productivity like other’s perceptions. It can be challenging to measure knowledge worker productivity. Instead, focus on one’s genuine contribution to a project — productivity in its most raw form. There may be unsung heroes on projects who don’t stand out as your top-notch productive professionals. Yet they are effective -in raw output and contributions to their community.
What is a common feature amongst these professionals? Mental flexibility-bending with circumstances where necessary. This does not mean they take a passive approach to their projects or their working life. Yet they are smart enough to work within constraints outside their control and do not demand that things be different.
Leading performers on projects do need a unique constellation of experience and training. But what amount of project professional’s success is from their “mental game”? How many minutes in the last fortnight have you reflected on the quality of your thinking?
Many of us are beset by irrational beliefs. Albert Ellis, a leading psychologist, observed that people often think in mindless and self-defeating ways. Ellis coined the term Automatic Negative Thoughts (or ANTs) 3,4. ANTs are habitual thoughts that limit us and shape our career prospects. The problem with ANTs is that these thoughts happen on their own, without any conscious effort. They can be tiring because when ANTs strike, we have to be disciplined to recognise when this ANT has bitten us. Also, after we have a thought, we have to challenge it and replace it with a more constructive view.
Some of us are predisposed towards self-defeat out of habit and conditioning. This conditioning may have been from our family of origin or from our early career experiences. Habits may be formed from these early experiences or have taken root in fertile soil for many reasons. Our brain chemistry and working environment serve as this fertile soil.
While your working environment provides you with great learning experiences, they may not always be psychologically safe. These arduous environments can tax your psyche. Instead of thinking about how we thrive, we instead aim to survive. Your ability to question and test ANTs becomes critical. Yet what “gift” can a toxic work environment or a predisposition towards anxiety or depression provide you? These unfortunate circumstances can act as a catalyst for change. This change? Investing more in the quality of our thinking.
High performers everywhere need an incredible amount of psychological control. Sports psychologists focus on psychological drivers and techniques. Their techniques are based on research and support the world’s greatest athletes. The mental game often trumps the physical game in many sports.
Self-efficacy is a concept from Albert Bandura, a psychologist (who recently passed away at the age of ninety-five). Bandura’s idea of self-efficacy is a way of describing our confidence in achieving challenging outcomes. Both top-level athletes and business professionals need to build their self-efficacy to perform at the highest levels. This can be developed through increasingly challenging and complicated experiences. To help face this challenge. top-level athletes engage in constructive self talk to help them focus on the task at hand. Self-talk is not about forcing yourself to “put on a happy face” 5. Nor is self-talk ignoring the realities of the situation you are in. Instead, self-talk helps you dispute ANTs and replacing them with more constructive ideas 6.
ANTs in the minds of project professionals
On projects, what might be common irrational beliefs in the minds of Project Managers, Business Analysts, User Experience Designers and Change practitioners?
- Everyone must approve of my ideas and contributions to a project.
- I must be confident, adequate and always achieving my deliverables on time and in full.
- My project and organisation should be fair to me, as should my project team.
- My project colleagues and business stakeholders should share my values and beliefs.
- My project’s poor-performing colleagues should be blamed for their poor performance; duplicitous stakeholders should be punished.
- When I perform a task poorly, I an idiot or a failure.
- Life on my project should be comfortable, and I shouldn’t have to suffer or do more than I need to.
- It is easier to avoid problems like project scope changes, slippage, and grappling with complexity. I postpone addressing mistakes and feel that ignoring conflict means it should go away.
- It is awful when my project does not go to plan exactly the way my run sheet or project plan says.
- It is impossible for me to be happy when my project is not going well.
- If there is a chance something wrong might happen on my project, I have to dwell on it.
- There is the perfect solution to all problems on my project, and I cannot rest until I find it.
Psychiatrist Aaron Beck introduced the concept of logical thinking errors or faulty thinking. Here are some examples applied to a project professional and operational leader context:
Black-and-white thinking: A tendency to see only the good or bad while ignoring any grey area between the two. For example, a minor error in a business functional specification that you are drafting as a Business Analyst. A Business Analyst with black-and-white thinking may see this minor error as a catastrophe. This small error is blown out of proportion. Even though it doesn’t have significant consequences for the specification document.
Over generalising: A tendency to draw negative conclusions based on limited evidence. A Test Manager may have had a disastrous experience in presenting on one occasion. Since then, she believes that she will always mess up her presentation, despite limited evidence to the contrary.
Personalising: We feel responsible for things that are not our fault or assume others curt tone or abrupt manner are targeted at us. A Project Manager might take a blunt stakeholder’s tone personally. Yet, we may not know that that stakeholder is currently facing significant personal issues in their home life. They may struggle to keep themselves together at work and can’t dig deep enough to engage their usual diplomacy.
Filtering: it is easy to focus on the negative in anything.
Jumping to negative conclusions: We might draw negative conclusions despite limited evidence to support this. Sometimes when we feel stressed out on projects, we have limited internal resources to test our assumptions about emerging problems. We may jump to negative conclusions. Instead, had we assessed a given situation, we may have acted differently. For instance, you find out an intranet platform is no longer being supported. So much of your work sits on this intranet, and you are already stretched trying to deliver critical outcomes. There’s no time to identify a new intranet platform and migrate your work. Had you reached out to a subject matter expert, they may have provided sage advice. Instead, we hit the panic button and feel overwhelmed by the enormity of what we need to do.
Mind-reading: this is where we may jump to a conclusion based on our inner confidence in what other people might be thinking. Sometimes we are right, but sometimes we are not.
Blaming: this one is the opposite of acceptance. For example, a long-standing project professional has been made redundant from an organisation after twenty years of loyal service. This professional blames the company for being cold-blooded and self-serving. A period of grieving involving some anger and sadness is quite normal. Yet as long as this professional continues to blame and criticise their old organisation, it is difficult for them to move on and explore even better opportunities in the project world.
Labelling: this is where you may be inclined to label yourself or others with an unkind and definitive label. For example, a Business Analyst may be working on a requirements document. When discovering a minor error, they think of themselves as a loser or a failure.
Catastrophising: Some people habitually focus on negative possibilities. For example being sacked from a job, ostracism, or contracting an illness preventing them from working. Sometimes these things can and do happen. Yet, some of us may focus on these possibilities. By narrowing our focus on worst cases, we lose our ability to engage with the world around us. Perhaps we are waiting for a contract extension, and the decision is made slowly. We catastrophise several scenarios during this waiting period and worry about something that doesn’t actually come to pass. Our contract extension comes through, but we have wasted valuable energy.
Comparison: There is a beautiful saying-comparison is the thief of joy. There is always someone in the project world doing better than you. Someone was recently promoted to Change Director. Another — with who you shared early career experience — has become a successful Program Manager. Yet another project professional has recently landed a fantastic project opportunity that you could only dream of. Someone else has a better day rate than you. Yet another colleague enjoys a permanent job opportunity with incredible security and benefits. These people who may seem better off than you haven’t done anything wrong….yet do any comparisons leach the joy out of your circumstances?
Discipline, intention and time are useful ingredients for adapting a new habit like evaluating our thinking. Yet this discipline can help us maintain stability and poise no matter what life on projects throws at us. This discipline is in our capacity to watch our own thoughts and identify patterns contributing to upsetting emotions. Suppose we can identify these automatic negative thoughts or ANTs. In that case, we stand a better chance of disputing these faulty thoughts and replacing these with more balanced alternatives. With balance, thoughts become better moods, clearer thinking and better responses (rather than reactions) to circumstances. This applies to our life on projects and in our personal life.
Socratic questioning
Some automatic negative thoughts are easy to challenge. We can observe potential irrationality and look for a more balanced perspective. Some thoughts are indeed resistant to change. Socratic questioning can help with this. Socrates was an ancient Greek — and incredibly innovative — philosopher. Socrates used provocative questions to challenge underlying assumptions in his audience. Socratic questions act as a sequence of curiosity to help change minds. This inquiry seeks to understand the other person’s point of view and asks for evidence from them about it 7. The “five whys” technique or root cause analysis is a form of Socratic questioning. This technique may sound familiar to project professionals with an analytical bent!
The Socratic questioning technique was developed by psychologists Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck 8. Socratic questioning helps people overcome automatic negative thoughts (ANTs). This technique is part of a broader treatment called Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT). CBT is a leading treatment for a range of psychological disorders like depression, anxiety, self-esteem issues, anger, perfectionism and low motivation. Yet we can borrow from the CBT playbook even if we are flourishing.
Project life throws us many curveballs; each serves as an opportunity! For at least one opportunity in the next week, think about your reactions to little project surprises. Applying Socratic questioning to faulty thoughts is straightforward.
Think of an example — such as a new problem or disappointment on your project. Did your thoughts about this lead to frustration or a low mood?
Let’s divide the problem into three aspects. What are:
- The facts in the matter?
- People’s opinions
- Your feelings about this situation?
Psychologists listen for fact, opinion and self-report in their client’s account of a recent problem. Breaking out this account into three neat aspects helps us apply Socratic questioning:
- What evidence supports other’s opinions and my feelings about the problem?
- What evidence contradicts other’s opinions and my feelings about the situation?
- What thinking errors may I be making right now?
- How else could I look at this situation, and what advice would I give to a friend in this situation?
- Have you had enough sleep, and are you exercising and eating well? These fundamental pillars of well-being sustain a sense of balanced thinking- am I in a state of balance right now?
What of the top 10% of project professionals? Is mental flexibility common amongst this productive cohort? Discipline in challenging unhelpful thoughts is a sustainable advantage. This discipline yields a valuable return on effort: an even emotional keel.
Do our top performers channel their “inner ancient Greek philosopher” and put themselves back into a better state of mind? A better state of mind is balanced despite the storm of things outside their control. Balance gives us space to “think about thinking”. Not all problems can be solved. Our top performers maintain a balanced perspective. When a positive action can’t be taken, their adaptability goes inwards. They adapt themselves to the circumstance. With a good sense of humour, they may see the “gift” from adversity.
By examining our thinking quality, we have a greater capacity to look at rational yet lateral and creative ways to take positive action on problems. This applies to all problems we encounter — not only those surfacing on projects.
Your higher quality thinking may open adaptive ways to deal with increasingly complex project problems. You may find ways to “learn to let go”. This balanced mindset can open your career to more significant opportunities. Isn’t it time you also give yourself this perspective?
My book — The Change Manager’s Companion — is available now. You can also check out my online course on Change Management.
References
1. Machiavellianism Scale. https://www.machiavellianismscale.com/. Accessed August 21, 2021.
2. What Is Self-Monitoring? https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-self-monitoring-5179838. Accessed August 21, 2021.
3. 5 Worksheets for Challenging Negative Automatic Thoughts (+PDF). https://positivepsychology.com/challenging-automatic-thoughts-positive-thoughts-worksheets/. Accessed August 21, 2021.
4. Cognitive Distortions: Unhelpful Thinking Habits — Psychology Tools. https://www.psychologytools.com/articles/unhelpful-thinking-styles-cognitive-distortions-in-cbt/. Accessed August 21, 2021.
5. What is toxic positivity? — University of Wollongong — UOW. https://www.uow.edu.au/the-stand/2021/what-is-toxic-positivity-.php.
6. Hannan T. What Olympic athletes can teach us about regulating our emotions and staying dedicated. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/what-olympic-athletes-can-teach-us-about-regulating-our-emotions-and-staying-dedicated-165170?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest from The Conversation for August 2 2021–2019219840&utm_content=Latest from The Conversation fo. Published 2021. Accessed August 20, 2021.
7. Sutton J. Socratic Questioning in Psychology: Examples and Techniques. Positive Psychology.com. https://positivepsychology.com/socratic-questioning/. Published 2020. Accessed November 29, 2020.
8. Edelman S. Change Your Thinking [Third Edition]. 3rd edition. ABC Books; 2013.