The Genius Habit by Laura Garnett

Author:Laura Garnett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2018-02-16T16:00:00+00:00

Negative Thoughts Sabotage Your Ability to Perform

The logic of the achievement junkie is a vicious cycle: if you’re only getting your enjoyment from achieving a goal, you have to achieve that goal in order to be happy. In this scenario, you’re actually creating a threatening environment for yourself: every time you miss a deadline or don’t achieve the goal, you beat yourself up and consider yourself a failure. According to Ashley Merryman and Po Bronson, authors of Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, the stress that comes with a threatening environment can negatively affect your performance. Their book features a study in which researchers presented students at Princeton University with a list of GRE questions. For half the students, the questions were presented in a threatening context—they were a test of the students’ ability, a judgment on whether they truly belonged at Princeton. The other students received the same questions, but in a challenging context, where they were encouraged to try their best and didn’t have a judgment attached to their outcome. Their version of the test was titled “Intellectual Challenge Questionnaire,” and the questions were construed as brainteasers. In the threat context, the Princeton undergrads got 72 percent of the questions correct. In the challenge context, an equally talented group got 90 percent correct.25 The takeaway here is that in a challenge state, you’re not exerting energy worrying about the outcome, so you can focus on doing your best. Based on this knowledge, creating a threat situation by being focused on the achievement greatly impacts your ability to perform.

Think about how often we create threat situations for ourselves at work: we worry we will be fired for missing a sales target; we think that our performance on a presentation dictates our value; we assume that our colleagues’ success makes us look like failures in comparison. We unconsciously think that if we create worry or fear, we are being more careful and calculated, but the truth is exactly the opposite—you are actually sabotaging your ability to perform at your best. Reframing work by creating a challenge versus a threat environment will actually help you achieve more. And doing so can be as simple as giving yourself the mental space to shift your perspective.

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