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The Problem with Not Having Boundaries

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How well have you been setting boundaries lately? Have you been proactively defining how others should treat you? How about establishing limits for yourself that you commit to respecting? Are you clear on what you’re willing to accept or tolerate—and consistent in enforcing it?

Having boundaries is essential for both your personal and professional wellbeing. Boundaries serve to protect you, enhance your wellbeing, and provide a sense of control over your life.

Unfortunately, it’s not easy—at least not for most of us. Setting and maintaining boundaries can be difficult because it often requires saying no, risking conflict, or disappointing others. This is a problem at work, among managers and workers, in relationships (from parents and children to couples), and in many other settings.

According to a 2022 survey, 58% Americans have trouble saying “no” to others. While this is an issue for both men and women, it was women who reported struggling with it more: 65% of women versus 49% of men admitted to struggling with this. (1) My work with people in different countries leads me to believe that this is a universal struggle.

 

The Problem with Not Having Boundaries

Here’s the problem: Not having or maintaining boundaries can lead to many negative consequences for you. (2) Here are ten problems with not having boundaries:

1. Negative emotions. When you don’t have boundaries, it can cause you anxiety, overwhelm, frustration, resentment, and other forms of emotional distress. It can harm your mental health.

2. Overcommitment and a sense of “time poverty.” Do you often feel that you have too many things to do and not enough time to do them?

3. Overwork or workaholism. Without clear boundaries, you may struggle to say no, take on excessive responsibilities, and feel pressured to always be available.

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4. Exhaustion and burnout. Without boundaries, constant demands and lack of rest can drain your energy. Are you feeling not only fatigued but depleted? Like you have little or nothing left to give?

5. Numbing behaviors. Are you falling into the habit of escaping from your thoughts and feelings by doing other things like binge-watching, doom-scrolling, shopping recklessly, or eating mindlessly?

6. Difficulty making decisions. If you’re so focused on meeting other people’s needs, how can you decide what’s best for you, much less prioritize it?

7. Lower self-esteem. Without boundaries, you may place others’ needs over your own, leading to feelings of being undervalued.

“When we fail to set boundaries and hold people accountable, we feel used and mistreated.”
-Brené Brown, researcher and author

8. Strained or unhealthy relationships. It’s hard to have healthy relationships when your needs or expectations are unclear.

9. Higher potential for people to manipulate or take advantage of you. Without proper boundaries, others may exploit your willingness to accommodate them.

10. Losing yourself of self and your control over your life. When you constantly prioritize others’ expectations over your own needs and desires, you might disappear from the picture or at least fade into the background.

Quality of Life Assessment

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Conclusion

If you struggle with setting and maintaining boundaries, like so many of us do, you might try reframing them: by setting and enforcing boundaries, you create space for what you truly want and need.

Having boundaries frees up your time and energy to live the life you want.

Finally, setting and maintaining boundaries is a continuous process. The issue of boundaries will keep coming up repeatedly in your life and work. Better to face the situation and improve it now.

Handling boundaries well requires ongoing judgment to determine when to stay firm and when to allow flexibility, adjusting as new circumstances arise.

Wishing you well with it. Let me know if I can help.
–Gregg

 

Reflection Questions

  1. Which boundaries have you struggled with?
  2. Why do you think that is?
  3. Is there a pattern involving certain people or situations?
  4. What more will you do to set and maintain healthy boundaries for yourself, starting today?

 

Tools for You

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

Take the Exercise

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Boundaries

  • “Love yourself enough to set boundaries. Your time and energy are precious. You get to choose how you use it. You teach people how to treat you by deciding what you will and won’t accept.” –Anna Taylor, author
  • “Givers need to set limits because takers rarely do.” –Rachel Wolchin, author
  • “Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.” -Josh Billings, American humorist
  • “Setting boundaries is a way of caring for myself. It doesn’t make me mean, selfish, or uncaring (just) because I don’t do things your way.” –Christine Morgan, psychotherapist

 

References

(1) Source: Thriving Center of Psychology October 2022 survey of 1,001 people

(2) As you navigate this process, it’s important to recall that people have diverse needs and will make varying—sometimes vastly different—choices about their boundaries. What works for others may not suit you at all. Therefore, you must set your own boundaries while also supporting others in setting theirs.

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

Unlock the Power of Progress

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You probably have aspirations, and you know that to accomplish them you need to apply yourself and get going on relevant work. But you may also be looking, even if subconsciously, for a Hollywood-style breakthrough. A Eureka moment.

And that’s holding you back.

Researcher and Harvard Business School Professor Teresa Amabile and her colleagues, including researcher Steven Kramer, spent nearly 15 years studying the psychological experiences and performance of people doing complex and creative work in organizations. They looked into workers’ emotions, moods, motivation levels, and perceptions of their work environment. The researchers studied what work they did and what events stood out for them. Their aim was to find what contributed most to the highest levels of creative output. (1)

Enter the “progress principle.”

 

Leveraging the Progress Principle

Question:

What sets your best days—your most productive, engaging, and fun ones—apart from your worst days?

When the researchers compared the best days of the workers with their worst days (specifically, their motivation levels, overall mood, and specific emotions), they found that progress in the work was the most common event triggering the best days. And relatedly, setbacks in the work were the most common event summoning the worst days.

Importantly, even minor progress on things could result in outsized positive effects. They found a clear “inner work life effect” related to progress and small wins.

The researchers could see workers enter a “progress loop,” with consistent progress on meaningful work creating a positive inner work life, which in turn drives performance.

“Of all the things that can boost emotions, motivation, and perceptions during a workday, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work. And the more frequently people experience that sense of progress, the more likely they are to be creatively productive in the long run. Whether they are trying to solve a major scientific mystery or simply produce a high-quality product or service, everyday progress—even a small win—can make all the difference in how they feel and perform.”
-Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins”

 

The Progress Principle in Action

Working on a big, important project with a tight deadline? If you’re in a company, maybe it’s a product launch, marketing campaign, or a system upgrade. In a nonprofit, maybe it’s a fundraising campaign, big event, or recruitment drive. Or in a school district, maybe it’s a curriculum overhaul, technology integration, or implementation of safety protocols. In a government agency, maybe it’s a public health initiative or disaster recovery program. Maybe you’re working on a career change or writing a book.

Tip: Stop stressing over the deadline and focusing only on the final outcome. Instead, break the project into smaller tasks (e.g., researching, outlining, drafting, editing, presenting, improving, releasing, promoting). And when you complete a task, celebrate your progress.

Share updates with your colleagues. Feel the sense of achievement and watch how it motivates you to keep going while also helping you navigate setbacks.

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Implication for Managers: The Power of Progress in Action

How does this work for managers? Amabile and her associates found that facilitating progress, even including small wins, is the best way to motivate people on a daily basis

“The key to motivating performance is supporting progress in meaningful work.”
-Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins”

Unfortunately, the managers they surveyed didn’t view that as high on their list of motivational tools. On the contrary: it was at the bottom of their list.

So, what can you do as a manager to boost motivation and create the conditions for productive, creative output by your team?

First, you can use what the researchers called “catalysts” and “nourishers.”

  • Catalysts are actions you take to support the work of your team. For example: setting clear goals, giving workers autonomy, providing adequate resources and time, helping, fostering the free exchange of ideas, facilitating learning from challenges and successes, and tracking and celebrating progress.
  • Nourishers are acts of support. For example: providing encouragement, emotional comfort, recognition, and respect. Helping people feel a sense of affiliation and belonging.

On the flipside, you can minimize what the researchers called “inhibitors” and “toxins.”

  • Inhibitors can range from not providing support (or enough of it) to your team to actually interfering with their work. As management guru Peter Drucker once wrote, “Most of what we call management consists of making it hard for people to get their work done.”
  • Toxins are things like discouragement, disregard for people’s emotions, and disrespect.

These inhibitors and toxins lead to negative feedback loops—the reverse of the progress loop. They destroy motivation and productivity.

Of course, even good managers can sometimes fall short with their behavior, not least because they’re overwhelmed and under pressure.

 

Managing Setbacks

You’re bound to experience challenges in your work sometimes. As a manager, it’s essential that you manage setbacks in your team proactively.

Amabile and her colleagues found that “Small losses or setbacks can have an extremely negative effect on inner work life.” Indeed, negative events can have a more powerful impact than positive events. So, managers are wise to address frictions, hassles, and setbacks directly and quickly—and to view this as an essential part of their job.

“If you want to foster great inner work life, focus first on eliminating the obstacles that cause setbacks. Why? Because one setback has more power to sway inner work life than one progress incident.” -Teresa Amabile, The Progress Principle

In business schools and management books, the focus is on managing people and organizations. Seems like it makes sense, but this research points to an important reframe:

When you focus on managing progress, you’re better able to manage people—and even teams and organizations.
“…the most important implication of the progress principle is this: By supporting people and their daily progress in meaningful work, managers improve not only the inner work lives of their employees but also the organization’s long-term performance, which enhances inner work life even more…. Knowing what serves to catalyze and nourish progress—and what does the opposite—turns out to be the key to effectively managing people and their work.”
-Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins”

Leadership Derailers Assessment

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The Power of Momentum

This research resonates with the concept of momentum in physics, which is “mass in motion” (the product of the mass of something and its velocity). Think of a big 18-wheeler barreling down the highway. Massive momentum.

Some key points about momentum:

Gaining momentum through consistent, purposeful action fuels motivation, while procrastination slows momentum and saps motivation.

Ask yourself this:

What can you do now to build momentum toward something that matters?

If you have goals you want to achieve and a clear vision of a successful future you’re moving toward, are you taking enough action now and every day to create and build momentum toward your desired ends?

 

The Flywheel Effect

Author Jim Collins famously described this as a “flywheel” in his book, Good to Great.

He described a massive metal disk, weighing thousands of pounds, mounted on an axle. Naturally, it takes great effort to get it to move at first. But if you keep pushing consistently, it begins to move, ever so slowly. Then a bit faster. At some point, after disciplined work and sweat equity over time, there’s a breakthrough:

“The momentum of the thing kicks in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn… whoosh!… its own heavy weight working for you. You’re pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort.”

 Eventually, you generate an “almost unstoppable momentum.” The flywheel effect.

“Each turn builds upon previous work as you make a series of good decisions, supremely well executed, that compound one upon another. This is how you build greatness.” -Jim Collins, Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great
Source: Jim Collins, “Good to Great”

Collins notes that the good-to-great transformations in their massive research set didn’t happen in one fell swoop with a single grand program, defining action, or miracle moment. Instead, it took a quiet, deliberate, and cumulative process. Turning the flywheel.

Collins describes it as an organic evolutionary process, a pattern of buildup via an accumulation of consistent steps. The pattern: “disciplined people, disciplined thought, disciplined action.” He cites executives in their own words from the companies they studied:

  • “a series of incremental changes”
  • “an evolution”
  • “very deliberate”
  • “evolutionary… building success upon success”

For this kind of business success, effort and action alone aren’t enough. According to Collins, it also requires “an underlying, compelling logic of momentum.” One might say it’s a powerful combination of a powerful business model with an effective strategy that’s well executed consistently over time. When it works right, he says that doing A almost inevitably leads to B, which inexorably leads to C and then D in a reinforcing loop. Round and round the flywheel.

For it to work, you must discover what your flywheel is in your current context (e.g., market and industry conditions). You don’t have to be a pioneer, first mover, or even unique to make it work. But you do need a clear and deep understanding of your flywheel, along with supreme execution of it over a lengthy period of time.

The flipside of the flywheel effect is what he calls the “doom loop.” It’s when organizations start with one thing, then stop and change course. They lurch back and forth impatiently, perhaps even desperately, seeking the big breakthrough that never comes. It leads only to decline and frustration.

Source: Jim Collins, “Good to Great”

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

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The Power of Compounding

These principles and practices of progress, momentum, and flywheels have echoes in the financial world, with the phenomenon of compounding and compound interest: Savvy savers earn interest both on the money they save and on the interest they earn. Over time, such compounding can lead to spectacular results—huge rewards for wise, patient, and disciplined savers.

Benjamin Franklin noted this centuries ago:

“Money makes money. And the money that money makes, makes money.”

The phenomenon is so powerful that it’s been called “the eighth wonder of the world,” a quotation often attributed to Albert Einstein.

“Enjoy the magic of compounding returns. Even modest investments made in one’s early 20s are likely to grow to staggering amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.” -John C. Bogle, investor and philanthropist
Source: Wikipedia

 

Conclusion

There are many benefits that come from using the progress principle and its related practices. The advantages include greater motivation, effectiveness, satisfaction, resilience, and confidence. And big results.

It’s also an antidote to the common traps of overthinking, worrying, and rumination—as well as indecision and inertia.

Unlocking the power of progress and small wins can lead to big changes. Why not get started with it, today?

Wishing you well with it.
-Gregg

 

Reflection & Action Questions

  1. Are you leveraging the progress principle in your life and work?
  2. Are you managing your setbacks proactively?
  3. Have you discovered the flywheel that will generate powerful momentum for you?
  4. What more will you do on these fronts, starting today?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles & Resources

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Progress and Small Wins

  • “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” -Robert J. Collier, publisher
  • “You have to put in many, many, many tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile.” -Brian Tracy, author and speaker
  • “Tiny victories are like gems scattered on your journey, notice them.” -Emma Xu
  • “The great victory, which appears so simple today, was the result of a series of small victories that went unnoticed.” -Paulo Coelho, Brazilian novelist
  • “’the progress principle’: Pleasure comes more from making progress toward goals than from achieving them.” -Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis
  • “Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach.” -Charles Duhigg, author
  • “Track your small wins to motivate big accomplishments.” -Teresa Amabile, researcher
  • “The most effective form of motivation is progress. When we get a signal that we are moving forward, we become more motivated to continue down that path. In this way, habit tracking can have an addictive effect on motivation. Each small win feeds your desire.” -James Clear, author

(1) Their research methodology included end-of-day email surveys sent to 26 project teams from seven companies, comprising 12,000 diary entries from 238 people. (Source: Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer, “The Power of Small Wins,” Harvard Business Review, May 2011.) The idea behind the progress principle and small wins has resonance with other ideas and frameworks, including agile software development (which often includes breaking product development work into small increments, including sprints and rapid iterations) and innovation approaches like lean startup methodology, including its focus on “minimum viable products.” Entrepreneur and author Peter Sims advocates making “little bets.”

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, and TEDx speaker on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Crafting Your Life & Work online course or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

How to Be More Decisive in Your Life and Leadership

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“Should I stay or should I go?”
-the Clash

We make many decisions every day. Many are trivial, but some are consequential and taxing. Which career to pursue (or transition into). When to make a big move. Who to live with, work with, or hire. Whether to start a new venture.

To live and lead well, we must get good at making decisions.

On the leadership front, do we want leaders who wallow and waffle? Or leaders who move forward despite uncertainty; home in quickly on the key issues; actively gather input before deciding; involve others in decisions; invoke their experience, judgment, wisdom, and gut instinct; and remain calm under pressure?

There’s a lot at work with making good decisions. The neurological mechanics of decision-making are breathtaking. When we make decisions, we’re using the brain’s prefrontal cortex for what’s called “executive function.” We’re drawing upon an array of cognitive processes, including: attentional control; cognitive inhibition; working memory; cognitive flexibility; reasoning; problem-solving; differentiation between conflicting thoughts; value determinations (good, bad, better, best, worse, worst); prediction of outcomes; and more.

No wonder so many people sometimes struggle with indecisiveness—wavering between different courses of action and having trouble deciding and moving on—and its related problem of “analysis paralysis.”

Truth be told, getting good at decision-making isn’t easy. This isn’t a new challenge. Even Aristotle mused about the absurdity of the idea that “a man, being just as hungry as thirsty, and placed in between food and drink, must necessarily remain where he is and starve to death.” Indecisiveness indeed.

The challenge can be even more complex with making decisions in organizations. As expected, there’s much room for improvement here as well. According to a McKinsey Global Survey, only 20 percent of respondents say their organizations excel at decision making. What’s more, a majority report that much of the time they devote to decision making is used ineffectively.

Clearly, we have work to do.

Quality of Life Assessment

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The Problem with Indecisiveness

“Indecision may or may not be my problem.”
-Jimmy Buffett

Indecisiveness has many drawbacks—and sometimes costly and painful consequences. For example, indecisiveness can:

  • make an already difficult situation worse
  • create delays that have spillover effects, impeding important progress
  • cause frustration
  • reduce productivity, effectiveness, and credibility
  • inhibit innovation
  • bring about stress
  • lead to team and organizational stagnation, breakdowns, and failures
  • prevent us from realizing new opportunities
“Indecision is the greatest thief of opportunity.”
-Jim Rohn

When making decisions, we can experience “choice anxiety”: feeling distressed because we can’t seem to determine what’s right, with the fear of making the wrong decision shutting us down.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz talks about the “paradox of choice” and claims that the freedom to choose, while sounding nice, is actually one of the main roots of unhappiness today, in part because we live in such abundance. Choice overload leads to anxiety. We fear making the wrong choice or fear missing out on the “right” choice.

Schwartz cites an intriguing “jam study” in which a store gave one set of shoppers a range of six jams to consider, and another set of shoppers a range of 24 jams. In the end, shoppers were ten times more likely to purchase jam from a range of six jams than from the much larger set. 10x.

Choice overload can easily lead to not making a choice. We simply walk away. (See my article, “Choice Overload and Career Transitions.”)

Another big problem is second guessing—when we keep revisiting previous decisions and agonizing over whether we should change them. An unproductive and frustrating doom loop.

 

Causes of Indecisiveness

There are many causes of indecisiveness. Here are eleven of the leading causes:

  1. personality (e.g., our levels of neuroticism and anxiety)
  2. fear of making the wrong choice: we’d rather not decide than risk making the wrong decision, due to loss aversion
  3. fears of failure or of rejection or loss of social status
  4. lack of confidence
  5. excessive risk aversion
  6. lack of clarity about what we want or where we’re going
  7. conflicts between our own preferences and the expectations of others
  8. decision fatigue (a state of mental overload and depletion from making many decisions)
  9. family or cultural conditioning (such as excessive punishment for making mistakes)
  10. lack of accountability for indecisiveness
  11. a history of perfectionism

 

Personal Values Exercise

Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.

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How to Be More Decisive

Thankfully, there are many things we can do to become more decisive. Note that decisiveness doesn’t mean making hasty, impulsive, or rash decisions. It means making decisions quickly, firmly, and effectively. Here are 22 tips and techniques for developing our decisiveness:

  1. recognize that decisiveness isn’t a set trait, and that decision-making is a skill that can be practiced and developed
  2. acknowledge that indecisiveness is a form of self-sabotage, only making things harder for ourselves and others
  3. become clearer about what we want—including clarity about our personal purpose, core values, and vision of the good life
  4. build our confidence (the good kind, which is earned through hard work and disciplined attention to growth and development), since this is a key factor in decisiveness
  5. develop systems to make as many decisions as possible habitual, routine, or automatic—such as having a regular reading or workout routine at a certain time on certain days (this helps us avoid decision fatigue and frees up cognitive resources for other decisions)
  6. increase our self-awareness so we know under what conditions we work and decide best (and worst)
  7. recall that most decisions involve uncertainty, which tends to come with anxiety, and learn to expect and account for that
  8. develop mechanisms for coping with anxiety and stress, since these contribute to indecisiveness
  9. recognize the difference between fear and actual danger, noting that our fears are often exaggerated versus the actual dangers we face
  10. recognize that being decisive isn’t about always being right (instead, it’s about being able to make clear decisions—even tough ones—quickly, firmly, and confidently despite uncertainty)
  11. distinguish between irreversible and reversible decisions (Jeff Bezos wrote about this in his 2015 letter to shareholders with the distinction between one-way doors, where there’s no going back, and two-way doors in which you can simply “reopen the door and go back through.” He lamented that too many big companies use one-size-fits-all decision making, treating all decisions like one-way doors and in the process slowing everything down.)
  12. get curious and investigate why we avoid making decisions
  13. build our decisiveness and decision-making courage by working to make decisions more quickly and more boldly—and then take stock of how things turn out
  14. start small and make less consequential decisions more quickly at first, building from there to bigger decisions
  15. divide bigger decisions into smaller ones (or a series of steps) that are less intimidating and more manageable
  16. summon more urgency into our lives, since time is precious and wasted time is a common regret
  17. set deadlines for making decisions
  18. “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” as the expression goes. Look for the point where we have enough information to make a reasonable decision instead of waiting until we have nearly all possible information, variables, and scenarios accounted for. Focus on pursuing learning and growth instead of perfection when making decisions.
  19. recognize that we can’t control our future and that we can’t make perfect decisions
  20. use the “only option test”: imagine that only one of the two options were possible and then see how it feels; then imagine that the other option was the only possible one and see how it feels; then consider whether we have two good options, and it doesn’t really matter so much which one is chosen*
  21. focus only on the most important things and don’t get caught up in the rest, thereby reducing the total number of decisions to make
  22. pray on or sleep on important decisions, summoning deeper wisdom and grace
“If you were omniscient and had a time machine, you would know everything you need to know about the [the results of your decision], but the problem is that we don’t have either of those things, so we don’t have perfect information when we’re making a decision.”
-Annie Duke

The key isn’t just decisiveness. What we really want is skills in making good decisions. It’s about both decision-making quality and decisiveness. Surely it’s easier to be more decisive when we know we have a good decision-making process. So what does that look like?

 

How to Get Better at Making Decisions

A good decision flows from a good process for deciding. Here are several ways we can get better at making decisions:

  • look into whether there’s more information readily available that would be important for making a good decision—or not—and gauge whether we have enough of the right kind of information to decide
  • get input on decisions from trusted friends and colleagues
  • evaluate the likely impact of a decision before making it
  • invoke our intuitive sense (gut instincts) as well as our reason and logic when making important decisions
  • distance ourselves from the situation (e.g., project forward decades into the future and think about which choice will serve us the best over time)
  • view the issue from a different perspective (e.g., ask ourselves what we’d advise our best friend to do in the situation at hand)
  • look for innovation solutions such as creative combinations or trials* (example: when I was in graduate school, I did two different summer internships to get a feel for both opportunities—and learned that neither was a good fit for me)
  • get feedback and coaching or mentoring on decision-making

Take the Traps Test

We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.

Take the Test

 

Final Thoughts

One of the keys to decision-making and decisiveness is learning to trust ourselves more. Without self-trust, all of this can fall apart quickly. We don’t need to be perfect. We just need to apply ourselves consistently at getting better.

Once we make a decision, it’s important not to dwell and not to agonize. We must let go of the myth of the one perfect decision and focus more on making the best of the decisions we’ve made. Focus more on developing and using a good decision-making process instead of on whether any decision is “right” or “wrong,” and then trust in that process to serve us well over time.

Refuse to live in a state of regret: take full responsibility for our choices and move on. Make changes when needed. Give ourselves credit for doing our best.

Finally, consider this: If we can get good at making decisions and being decisive, it will help us with everything we do. There’s incredible leverage that comes from improving this. Wishing you well with it.

-Gregg

 

Reflection Questions

  1. To what extent is indecisiveness causing you problems (and in which areas)?
  2. What can you do to improve your decision-making process?
  3. What will you do, starting today, to become better at making good decisions with urgency and resolve—at becoming more decisive?

 

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

 

Resources on Decision-Making

 

Postscript: Quotations on Decisiveness and Decision-Making

  • “Indecisiveness is the number one reason for failure. Lack of ability to make a decision in a timely manner causes most people to fail with their projects and plans. Identify this challenge and decide to no longer let it be a setback from your success.” -Farshad Asl
  • “Be decisive. A wrong decision is generally less disastrous than indecision.” -Bernhard Langer
  • “In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.” -Theodore Roosevelt
  • “Ambivalence is like carbon monoxide—undetectable yet deadly.” -Cherie Carter-Scott
  • “A person’s greatest limitations are not genetic, but imposed by self-doubt, insecurities, indecision, and timidity.” -Kilroy J. Oldster
  • “What is fear after all? It is indecision. You seek some way to resist, escape. There is none.” -Anne Rice
  • “It is in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.” -Tony Robbins
  • “When you make the best decision you can at a particular time, it’s never worth looking back. Getting stuck in ‘I should have’ or ‘I could have’ is only a waste of precious time and energy.” -Dr. Carla Marie Manly
  • “A real decision is measured by the fact that you’ve taken a new action. If there’s no action, you haven’t truly decided.” -Tony Robbins

* Source: Erin Bunch, “Decisiveness Is a Learned Trait—Here Are 11 Tips To Master the Art of Decision-Making,” Well and Good, March 22, 2021.

** Featured image: photo by Jon Taylor on Unsplash.

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

How to Build Confidence in Yourself and Your Leadership

by
confidence leaning back unsplash

Confidence is an enigma for many of us. We know it can help us in many ways. And we hold it in high regard, knowing it can make a big difference.

Yet we tend to view it as something innate–something some people have and others don’t.

The truth is that, while some people have more of a disposition toward confidence than others, it’s something we can all build systematically.

And we should.

Why? When we’re confident, we have conviction that we can succeed.

Contrary to what many people believe, confidence isn’t a fixed trait. We’re not either born with it or missing it. We can acquire confidence and build it over time. As we improve and develop mastery, we build confidence.

Our confidence can go up and down, and we can have high confidence in some areas and low confidence in others.

 

The Good Kind of Confidence

Note that we don’t want confidence for its own sake–confidence without the merits that cause us to earn it. What we really want is a realistic appraisal of our abilities so that we have an appropriate measure of confidence to match our abilities. And we want to build our confidence over time by improving our abilities and performance.

Confidence isn’t the same as arrogance. Arrogance is an attitude of superiority. When we’re arrogant, we exaggerate our importance. And confidence is certainly not narcissism (when we’re so absorbed in our own life that we ignore the needs of others around us).

Many people struggle with low confidence, for many reasons, including tough life experiences, temperament, cultural background, and more.

When we have low confidence, we pay a price, including: missing out on new opportunities, not stepping into our true power, and lowering our chances for success.

 

The Benefits of Confidence

“Your success will be determined by your own confidence and fortitude.”
-Michelle Obama, attorney, author, and former First Lady

Michelle Obama quote

Confidence has all sorts of benefits. For example, confidence can:

  • help improve our health and wellbeing
  • boost happiness, joy, and peace of mind
  • increase our chance of success in work and/or school
  • reduce fear and anxiety
  • boost attractiveness
  • help us remain open to learning and growing
  • increase motivation to continue practicing in pursuit of goals
  • help us gain credibility
  • increase our ability to make a strong first impression, put others at ease, and influence others
  • help us be more open to trying new things
  • lead to healthier relationships
  • help us develop greater resilience and our ability to perform well under pressure
  • increase our leadership capacity and effectiveness as well as executive presence, since followers tend to respond better to confident leaders
  • boost creativity and increase our willingness to take creative chances

Of course, confidence isn’t enough to set us up for success. We also need preparation, skill, effort, experience, resources, creativity, strategy, creativity, persistence, and even good luck sometimes. But without confidence, we may decline to begin or try. In that sense, confidence is essential for success over the long haul.

Take the Traps Test

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How to Build Confidence

photo by sydney Rae on Unsplash

“Self-confidence can be learned, practiced, and mastered—just like any other skill.
Once you master it, everything in your life will change for the better.”
-Barrie Davenport, author

Now that we know confidence is pliable, not fixed, and that it comes with so many important benefits, the next question is: How do we build it?

There are many things we can do to build confidence, including:

  • focus more on areas of our capability and achievement, and less on areas of weakness and struggle
  • set and meet goals that lead to personal and professional accomplishments
  • switch off negative self-talk, self-criticism, and limiting beliefs
  • swap in positive thoughts for negative ones
  • face our fears and in the process build a sense of agency and capability
  • stop the unhealthy practice of comparing ourselves to others (and consider taking a break from social media, which tees up unrealistic comparisons)
  • continue learning, growing, developing, and building new capacities—working on areas where skills aren’t yet up to standards
  • engage in consistent self-care practices, since these give us grounding and energy
  • speak up for ourselves (self-advocacy)
  • stop thinking in terms of fixed traits (e.g., “I’ve always been bad at math” or “I’m not a confident person”) and start thinking in terms of different people with different interests, skills, and abilities—along with a growth mindset (noting that we can all develop our intelligence, abilities, and talents)
  • think about a time when we felt high confidence and ask how we’d act if we were feeling that way now

There are certainly other things we can do in addition to those noted above, and some of them vary by person or situation. For example, some people can use good posture and even “power poses” to boost confidence (see Amy Cuddy’s TED talk about this).

For others, it helps to dress in ways that can boost confidence, to visualize success, or to use affirmations about our dreams and capabilities. We’re wise to experiment and find out what works best for us.

“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage.
If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it.
Go out and get busy.”
-Dale Carnegie

 

What Confident People Do

When we feel confident, we act differently, and that novel behavior can lead to dramatically different outcomes. For example, confident people tend to:

  • make decisions more quickly
  • maintain optimism
  • take risks
  • admit mistakes
  • accept responsibility for choices and actions
  • avoid the trap of blaming others
  • celebrate others’ successes
  • experience fewer instances of envy and jealousy
  • laugh at themselves without beating themselves up, which can be endearing
  • accept compliments, instead of awkwardly deflecting them

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On Leadership and Confidence and Self-Efficacy

Confidence can contribute significantly to leader effectiveness, but especially when we have realistic perceptions of our effectiveness. Self-awareness is essential.

Unfortunately, many leaders are overconfident about their leadership abilities. According to researchers (Leanne Atwater and Francis Yammarino), this leads to many problems, including: unrealistic optimism, dismissal of criticism, blindness to flaws, lack of effort made to overcome weaknesses, and even narcissism.

By contrast, when leaders have good self-awareness and agree with the ratings of their followers, they’re better candidates for promotion and less likely to struggle with leadership derailers.

According to research by Bandura (1997) and by Luthans and Avolio (2003), confident leaders are more likely to welcome a challenge, to persist when they encounter obstacles, and to succeed.

 

Final Thoughts

We’ve seen that confidence has many important benefits—and that we have much more agency over our confidence levels than most people think. So why not engage in regular practices that will boost our confidence while uplifting our mental state and our ability to succeed and make positive impacts in the world?

“With realization of one’s own potential and self-confidence
in one’s ability, one can build a better world.”
-The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso

The Dalai Lama quote

Reflection Questions

  1. Do you currently feel confident about the areas that matter most to you now?
  2. In what areas would you like to build your confidence?
  3. What will you do, starting today, to build your confidence in certain areas?

Wishing you well with it, and let me know if I can help.

 

 

 

– Gregg Vanourek

 

Tools for You

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Confidence

  • “Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.” -Mahatma Gandhi
  • “Self-confidence is the first requisite to great undertakings.” -Samuel Johnson
  • “Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.” -Norman Vincent Peale
  • “One important key to success is self-confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.” -Arthur Ashe
  • “Confidence doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s a result of something … hours and days and weeks and years of constant work and dedication.” -Roger Staubach, former professional football player
  • “With confidence, you have won before you have started.” -Marcus Garvey
  • “When you have confidence, you can have a lot of fun. And when you have fun, you can do amazing things.” -Joe Namath, legendary quarterback
  • “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • “People who ask confidently get more than those who are hesitant and uncertain. When you’ve figured out what you want to ask for, do it with certainty, boldness, and confidence.” -Jack Canfield
  • “If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.” -Vincent Van Gogh
  • “Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they’re yours.” -Richard Bach, writer
  • “If I have lost confidence in myself, I have the universe against me.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • “If you have no confidence in self, you are twice defeated in the race of life. With confidence, you have won even before you have started.” -Cicero

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Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

What Are You Avoiding?

by

Avoidance. We all do it, whether it’s keeping away from someone or not doing something. What are you avoiding?

Sometimes we change the subject when it drifts into awkward territory. Other times we talk around hard topics. Or we put off that tough task.

Avoidance is a coping mechanism. Sometimes it’s helpful. Like when we see a downed power line or a snake.

It’s an inheritance from our evolutionary biology. Our nervous system gives us powerful signals to avoid danger, thus increasing our chances of survival. Avoidance is natural.

“Truly, there is nothing more common, routine, and human than
avoiding discomfort, uncertainty, or the potential of ‘bad news.‘”
-Dave Ursillo, author

But this coping mechanism can be overused and become maladaptive. We avoid too many things, too often. Things end up getting worse, not better.

We avoid too many things, too often.
Things end up getting worse, not better.

There are two types: cognitive avoidance (when we divert our thoughts away from something, as when we’re in denial) and behavioral avoidance (when we move to keep away from something, or when we avoid acting, as with procrastination).

We often deploy both types of avoidance in difficult situations, and we’re not fully conscious that we’re doing so. It can become programmed behavior.

 

What We Avoid

There are many things that we tend to avoid, including:

  • uncomfortable thoughts or feelings
  • pain
  • discomfort
  • conflict
  • uncertainty
  • difficult people
  • hard realities (e.g., problematic health diagnosis, unwanted breakup, not meeting performance expectations)
  • challenging tasks
  • difficult conversations (e.g., about money, problems, a poor performance review, death)

Our avoidance may make things easier now, but over time things can fester, making them much worse over time.

 

Why We Avoid

We avoid certain people or things for many reasons, from biological to psychological and social. Here are some of the main reasons:

  • It feels easier to avoid certain things than to deal with them.
  • Sometimes avoiding something hard feels like a better choice than acting and possibly failing.
  • We feel afraid of certain things (like inadequacy, looking bad, imperfection, disappointment, shame, embarrassment, failure), so we avoid them.
  • When we avoid someone troubling or something difficult, we sometimes believe we can avoid the stress and anxiety associated with it.

Most of these reasons and beliefs don’t hold up under scrutiny.

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The Problem with Avoidance

“Avoidance is the best short-term strategy to escape conflict,
and the best long-term strategy to ensure suffering.”
-Brendon Burchard, best-selling author

Here are some of the main problems with avoidance. It:

  • leaves the core problem(s) unaddressed
  • can aggravate anxiety because we’ve allowed things to deteriorate further
  • can be very frustrating to others (e.g., spouse or partner), and make things worse for them too
  • leads to new conflicts
  • becomes a vicious circle, leading to more avoidance and attendant problems
  • can become a way of life, a bad habit pattern
  • undermines us by taking away our power and agency
  • can feed and validate the fears that we were trying to avoid, making it self-defeating
  • may lead to numbing behaviors like drinking, overeating, over-exercising, binge-watching, overwork, and more
“What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.”
-Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist

 

How to Stop Avoiding

So what to do about it?

First, note that, in some situations (like the end of an important relationship or work project), we do in fact need time and space to heal. It’s not avoidance to give ourselves room for that.

Here are 14 strategies for how we can reduce or stop maladaptive avoidance:

  • Recognize our avoidance behaviors—but without beating ourselves up over them
  • Seek their root causes (continue asking why until there’s no deeper why)
  • Engage in relaxation and self-care activities such as deep breathing, meditation, yoga, gardening, art, or journaling
  • Get support from a friend, mentor, therapist, small group, and/or coach
  • Process emotions by talking them through with someone or journaling
  • Divide the problem into smaller, more manageable chunks
  • Start with an easy task to get momentum and small wins
  • Give ourselves motivations, such as rewards for accomplishing tasks
  • Reframe a situation to note the positives and avoid focusing only on the negatives
  • Change our inner monologue, quieting the negative self-talk
  • Practice communication skills, including assertive self-advocacy and what author Susan Scott calls “fierce conversations“
  • Set deadlines and goals to commit to action by a certain time
  • Build action and proactivity habits, training our brain and helping us become a “doer” (see my article on “The Incredible Benefits of Being Action-Oriented“ and books like The Power of Habit and Atomic Habits)
  • Recognize that doing something we’ve been avoiding can feel amazing, giving us a sense of agency, accomplishment, momentum, and confidence

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Final Thoughts

We’ve seen here that avoidance, while natural, can make things much worse. It can lead to frustration, anxiety, new conflicts, bad habits, numbing behaviors, and a loss of confidence and agency.

Much better, then, to work at recognizing our avoidance tendencies and systematically eliminating them. The problems won’t go away on their own, so why not deal with them directly?

 

Reflection Questions

  1. What have you been avoiding lately?
  2. Are there deeper issues underlying your avoidance?
  3. Which of the 14 strategies for reducing or stopping avoidance will you try?

Wishing you well with it!
–Gregg

Tools for You

 

Related Articles

 

Postscript: Inspirations on Avoidance and Action

  • “Avoidance coping causes anxiety to snowball because when people use avoidance coping they typically end up experiencing more of the very thing they were trying to escape.” -Alice Boyes, PhD, author, The Anxiety Toolkit
  • “It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run but, it will never make you less afraid.” -Dr. Harriet Lerner
  • “Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” -Dale Carnegie
  • “The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.” -Amelia Earhart
  • “The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.” -Meister Eckhart
  • “Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” -Napoleon Hill

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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for living with purpose and passion) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Crafting Your Life & Work online course or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!

What Are Your Leadership Derailers?

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Here’s the thing: we all want to be better leaders.

But too often we focus on what to do as leaders while neglecting what not to do.

That’s where leadership derailers come in—the things that take us off track and inhibit our leadership effectiveness. If we want to be good leaders, we must be aware of our derailers and begin working on them.

“Most books about leadership tell us what a person ought to do to become effective and powerful. Few tell us what to avoid. But the latter may be even more valuable because many people on the road to success are tripped up by their mistakes and weaknesses.” –David Gergen, political commentator and senior advisor to four U.S. presidents, from his book, Eyewitness to Power

10 Common Leadership Derailers

Here are ten common derailers, based on my research and work with leaders from many different industries, sectors, countries, and stages of career development:

  1. Avoidance: avoiding difficult tasks, situations, or conflicts.
  2. Burnout: becoming run-down and feeling exhausted, often due to lack of self-care.
  3. Bottleneck: feeling you must make all decisions or taking on too much work yourself, causing delays.
  4. Delegation: not entrusting tasks to others sufficiently, leading to reduced motivation.
  5. Feedback: not providing feedback well or often enough, or not soliciting it enough or receiving it well.
  6. Insecurity: lacking confidence about leading or feeling unqualified to lead; being unassertive.
  7. Perfectionism: setting unrealistic expectations for yourself or others; needing things to be flawless.
  8. Procrastination: putting things off until later or the last minute.
  9. Short Game: failing to invest in the future and deciding important things without considering the long term.
  10. Workaholism: being addicted to work and struggling to switch it off or stop thinking about it.

While these are common derailers, there are many more. In fact, I’ve identified more than sixty derailers that inhibit leadership effectiveness.

What are your top leadership derailers? And what will you do about them?

See our new Leadership Derailers Assessment to find out—and then get to work on improving your leadership.

Leadership Derailers Assessment

Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. A critical and often overlooked tool for your leadership development.

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Reflection Questions

  1. What do you struggle with as a leader?
  2. What will you do about it, starting today?
  3. Who will you ask for help?

This always works best when colleagues openly discuss it together. We all have derailers. We all have work to do. So get real. And get busy with the important work of intentional leadership development. Reach out if you think I may be able to help.

–Gregg

 

Tools for You

Leadership Derailers Assessment

Take this assessment to identify what’s inhibiting your leadership effectiveness. A critical and often overlooked tool for your leadership development.

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Postscript: Inspirations on Leadership Derailers

  • “Instead of learning from other people’s success, learn from their mistakes. Most of the people who fail share common reasons, whereas success can be attributed to various different kinds of reasons.” –Jack Ma, Chinese entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist

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++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on leadership and personal development. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations (a winner of the International Book Awards). Check out his Best Articles or get his monthly newsletter. If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!