The Power of Moments

by Chip Heath

  The professors brainstorm privately for about 10 minutes, and then they share their answers. At the CDI in July 2015, a professor who taught an animal behavior course said, “I want them to know the scientific process. If they see some animal doing something interesting, they can come up with a way to work through the scientific process to study it.”

  A health sciences professor said, “I want them to be connecting and collaborating with colleagues. They will feel confident reviewing new research and being part of ‘journal club’ meetings.”

  A math professor said, “I want them to think of math as fun and interesting in its own right, not just practical. . . . When they see a link to a math story, I want them to click it.”

  Palmer scrawls their answers on a whiteboard at the front of the room. Everyone catches on immediately to one pattern: Very few of the answers are content focused. The math teacher, for instance, did not say he wanted his students to remember the Chain Rule; he said he wanted them to retain a natural interest in math.

  Now Palmer is ready to help them trip over the truth. He reminds them that they’ve just written down their top goals for their students. Then he asks them to pull out the syllabus they brought to the institute. How much of your current syllabus will advance your students toward the dreams you have for them?

  There’s an awkward silence in the room. George Christ, a biomedical engineering professor, remembered the moment with a chuckle: “You look at your syllabus, and you go, ‘Zero.’ ” Most professors discover exactly the same thing. It’s a head-slapper of a moment.

  Deborah Lawrence, an environmental sciences professor, said, “I quickly realized that the syllabus was useless to me—it wasn’t covering any of my objectives.”

  Palmer’s Dream Exercise is a brilliantly designed moment that compels professors to trip over the truth. Their own truth.

  The differences between the “before and after” syllabi from the CDI are often striking. (To see an example of a complete syllabus before and after the CDI, visit http://www.heathbrothers.com/CDIsyllabi.) One physics syllabus, which began as a perfunctory overview of the topics and subtopics in the course, transformed into something inspiring. These are its opening paragraphs:

  Why do bridges and buildings stay up? Why do bridges and buildings fall down? How should buildings be built in an earthquake or a hurricane zone? What are some of the forces that bring them down? What is a force?

  Physics can describe everything that we see around us, when we know how to look! An airplane flying is a study in pressure and drag; a collision turns into a problem in momentum; a rainbow becomes an awesome show of refraction and dispersion; an earthquake illustrates shear forces and flexibility; bridge construction is about heat and expansion; a concert hall is the interplay of reflection and interference.

  This class will give you the tools with which to approach these and many more exciting problems relevant to your world. Training yourselves as physicists, you will see the world as a complex interplay of forces and principles. You will learn and understand fundamental principles of physics.

  From 2008 to 2015, 295 instructors participated in the Course Design Institute. They rated the experience 4.76 out of 5.0. All 295 of them—not one exception—said they’d recommend the course to a colleague.

  One instructor from 2011 wrote, “In two words, it was life altering. This may seem overblown, but it is 100% true. I came in thinking I had a handle on my course, but realized very soon I needed go back to the drawing board. The result is exponentially improved.”

  Bear in mind that professors are not prone to strong emotional reactions. The Course Design Institute provides the motivational jolt and concrete direction they need to revamp their courses.

  Sometimes, in life, we can’t get our bearings until we trip over the truth.

  * * *

  I. Kar believes that it’s a mistake to soft-pedal the word using medical terms such as feces, or more kid-friendly terms such as poop or doodoo. When he works in new countries, he makes sure to ask for the crude slang term for shit. He wants the word to shock.

  6

  Stretch for Insight

  1.

  Lea Chadwell had been baking for only a year when she began to daydream about starting her own company.

  In her day job, she worked at an animal hospital—the same place she’d once brought her dogs for medical treatment. After visiting a few times as a customer, she realized: I want to work here. She begged for a job, and four months later, a role as a vet tech opened up.

  Nine years later, though, she felt like she’d maxed out the pay raises and promotions available to her. She also worried it was a young person’s job. “Am I really going to be wrestling golden retrievers when I’m 65?” she wondered.

  She spent every weekend in the kitchen, making Swedish cookies, pastries with exotic spices, flavored brioches. Friends and family started telling her, “You should have your own bakery!” (Which is the kind of advice you give when you expect free samples down the road.)

  One day in 2006, her husband, Sam, heard a story on the radio about a business that allowed you to “test-drive” your dream job. For a fee, Vocation Vacations could arrange for you to spend a few days shadowing people who were living your dream. The jobs available for visit included cattle ranching, managing a bed-and-breakfast, owning a winery, and—there it was!—starting a bakery.I

  Chadwell jumped at the opportunity, flying to Portland, Oregon, to work with the owners of a bakery and chocolate shop. It was like being able to rent a mentor. She loved it and returned home determined to start her own bakery.

  She took classes at night to refine her skills, eventually earning a certificate from a local culinary program. In 2010, she was ready: She opened A Pound of Butter. She made custom cakes for birthdays and weddings and supplied pastries to local restaurants, working evenings and weekends while she kept her job at the animal hospital. Eventually, she planned to open a full retail shop. “I would daydream about how the bakery would be,” she said. “I thought that would be something I could do for the rest of my days.”

  Carved cakes were her specialty—Chadwell had majored in sculpture in college. She conjured impeccable Thomas the Tank Engine cakes and Disney princess cakes for kids’ birthday parties.

  Slowly, though, the charm started to fade. Baking cakes for her own family was fun. But baking cakes for demanding customers was stressful. She treated sick animals by day and handled nervous brides at night. She felt stuck in an endless cycle. “I needed more business so that I could afford the bakery, but I didn’t have time to bake, because I couldn’t afford to live on the bakery,” she said.

  One weekend, racing against a deadline, she finished putting the last touches on a buttercream wedding cake and loaded it into her car. Just as she prepared to drive off, she realized she was about to leave the front door of her unoccupied bakery wide open.

  It was her lightning-bolt moment: I’m making myself crazy being this stressed out. And she realized, “I wasn’t in love with baking anymore,” she said later. “It was like this albatross of butter around my neck.”

  She was almost 42 and she wanted one career, not two. She saw it in a flash: “If I do this ‘right,’ and get loans, and have a storefront, I will never come back from this if it fails. I will never financially recover. . . . I’m not passionate about this enough anymore.”

  She folded A Pound of Butter after about 18 months. Her bakery-owner fantasy was over.

  She didn’t bake a cake for years afterward.

  This is not the ending we crave. We want likable entrepreneurs to succeed. We want daydreams to come true.

  Did Lea Chadwell fail? In some ways, yes. But it’s not quite that simple. Chadwell doesn’t regret starting her bakery, and she doesn’t regret closing it. What she gained was the insight that comes from experience. She came to accept, she said, some qualities that made her the wrong person to run her own business. “I’m unorganized. Impractical. Fickle. . . . While
these traits make me a great candidate for a Wacky Friend, they are just awful to try to form a business around. I suspect if I hadn’t quit, I’d have failed, and it actually really sucks to admit it. But, there’s the painful lesson I’ve learned. I’m great when I’m working for others; they rely on me. Working for myself? I’m a terrible boss.”

  Psychologists call this “self-insight”—a mature understanding of our capabilities and motivations—and it’s correlated with an array of positive outcomes, ranging from good relationships to a sense of purpose in life. Self-insight and psychological well-being go together.

  Chadwell’s self-insight was sparked by a classic “crystallization of discontent” moment—the moment when she almost drove away from her bakery with the door wide open. In an instant, the fragments of frustration and anxiety she’d experienced were assembled into a clear conclusion: I’m not good at this. It’s not me.

  Compare Chadwell’s moment with a second one experienced by a woman who, in college, decided to study abroad in Rome. “I was a small town girl, terrified of things like public transport as well as the daunting task of working in an environment where people did not speak my language,” she said. “I remember arriving and the whole place overwhelming me. . . .”

  Four weeks later, she had convinced a shop worker that she was Italian. (She blew her cover, unfortunately, when she couldn’t come up with the Italian word for “hair tie.”) By the end of the experience, she had transformed. “I came back different,” she said. “I was far more confident and far more willing to take calculated risks. . . . I became unafraid of travelling or living anywhere else.” She lives in London now.

  Her defining moment—convincing the shop worker that she was a “native”—is almost the mirror image of Chadwell’s. She realized: I can do this. I can be this person.

  Both women experienced moments of self-insight sparked by “stretching.” To stretch is to place ourselves in situations that expose us to the risk of failure.

  What may be counterintuitive is that self-insight rarely comes from staying in our heads. Research suggests that reflecting or ruminating on our thoughts and feelings is an ineffective way to achieve true understanding. Studying our own behavior is more fruitful.

  “Wouldn’t I make a fabulous bakery owner?” “Could I hack it in Italy?” These are important questions but impossible to answer in one’s head. Better to take a risk, try something, and distill the answer from experience rather than from navel-gazing. Action leads to insight more often than insight leads to action.

  Learning who we are, and what we want, and what we’re capable of—it’s a lifelong process. Let’s face it: Many of us became adults—with homes and jobs and spouses—long before we really understood ourselves. Why do we react the way we do? What are our blind spots? Why are we attracted to the kind of friends and lovers that we seek out?

  Self-understanding comes slowly. One of the few ways to accelerate it—to experience more crystallizing moments—is to stretch for insight.

  2.

  In the spring of 1984, Michael Dinneen was serving the last night of his psychiatry rotation at Naval Medical Center San Diego. He had completed medical school in 1982 and was in the second year of his residency training, which would allow him to become a fully certified psychiatrist.

  The patients on the psych ward had serious illnesses—schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression—and most of them were in locked rooms. Many had tried to hurt themselves or others in the past. As Dinneen made his rounds, he encountered a patient who had earned the freedom to walk around on his own. The man was scheduled for discharge the next day.

  He stopped Dinneen and said, “I have some things I’d like to ask you.”

  Dinneen replied, “I’ve got some things to take care of, can I come back in 15 minutes?” The patient nodded, and Dinneen continued with his rounds.

  Ten minutes later, a “code blue” call came over the intercom, meaning a patient needed resuscitation. Typically the announcement directed staffers to a specific floor and room within the hospital. But this time it directed them to the exterior courtyard. Dinneen rushed outside.

  Sprawled on the ground was the patient he’d just spoken to. The man had jumped from the third-floor balcony onto the concrete walkway. Dinneen and other staffers sped to his side and tried to resuscitate him. When he didn’t respond, they rushed him to the ER. He died shortly thereafter.

  Dinneen walked slowly back toward his office in the psych ward. He was shocked and racked with guilt. I’m a complete failure, he thought. I should have known he needed me.

  He called the residency training director, Richard Ridenour, to report on what had happened, and took some time to comfort the staff of the psych ward. Exhausted, he prepared to go home, feeling emotionally unable to finish out his shift.

  In the meantime, Ridenour had arrived at the hospital. He asked Dinneen to go over the whole story again. “My full expectation after giving that report,” said Dinneen, “was that it would be used for disciplinary action.” Having a patient commit suicide was rare; having one commit suicide in the apparent safe haven of the hospital was even rarer. Dinneen was not sure he’d be allowed to practice anymore.

  Instead, Ridenour said, “Okay, let’s get back to work.”

  He led Dinneen to the operating room, where they picked out some clean scrubs and a white coat. Then they returned to the psych ward.

  And Ridenour, his mentor, stayed with him the whole night.

  In recalling the episode later, Ridenour said, “I didn’t want to send a message to Mike that he had done something wrong. I wanted to send a message to him that he was fine. Let’s move on. It’s kind of like death in combat. Patients die on the triage table, you go on. There are other patients who are waiting in the wings. Maybe you can save them.”

  Dinneen said, “I don’t remember much from the rest of the night, but I do know that if I had gone home, I might have given up on becoming a psychiatrist.”

  More than thirty years later, Michael Dinneen looks back on that night as one of the defining moments of his life. It was the first time he had lost a patient. But what sticks with him nearly as much is what the night taught him about himself: I can endure.

  In Dinneen’s life, the episode was a negative peak (a pit). Barbara Fredrickson, one of the researchers who pioneered the “peak-end principle,” argued that the reason we over-weight peaks in memory is that they serve as a kind of psychic price tag. They tell us, in essence, this is what it could cost you to endure that experience again. Some people, like Lea Chadwell, discover that the cost is too high, and they choose to avoid facing those moments again. Others, like Dinneen, discover that they can survive the experiences, and that the potential negative peaks are outweighed by the positive.

  Note the other big difference between the stories of Chadwell and Dinneen. Dinneen never would have learned about his ability to endure had he not been pushed and supported by Ridenour. “I was expected to get back in the game,” said Dinneen. “He knew I had it in me to make it through that night when I didn’t know that myself.” Ridenour’s wise actions in the middle of the night transformed a moment of trauma into a moment of growth.

  Often it’s other people who prod us to stretch. You hire a personal trainer because you know she’s going to push you beyond your comfort zone. And this is the same quality we value about our mentors: They bring out the best in us. You’ll never hear someone say, “Yeah, the best coach I ever had was Coach Martin. He had no expectations whatsoever and let us do whatever we wanted. He was a great man.”

  Mentors focus on improvement: Can you push a little bit further? Can you shoulder a little more responsibility? They introduce a productive level of stress.

  To explore that idea, we gave some of our readers a challenge: Encourage someone whom you mentor to stretch. Jim Honig, a Lutheran pastor, reported giving his pastoral intern a challenge: “One of the highlights of the year is our Easter Vigil service on the night before Easter Sunda
y morning. I usually don’t schedule an intern to preach that service, usually choosing to do that myself. This year, I told the intern that he would be preaching at that service. I told him that it was an important service and that he needed to bring his best, but that I was sure he could do it.”

  Pastor Honig admitted he was hesitant about delegating such an important service. But the intern responded: He delivered one of his best sermons, Honig said.

  What are the “defining moments” in this situation? There are two. The first was the intern’s sermon at the Easter Vigil service. That’s a moment of elevation (raised stakes), pride, and insight (I can handle this). It was a moment created (or enabled) by Pastor Honig’s push. But Pastor Honig also stretched! He made himself vulnerable; he risked failure by trusting an intern with such an important moment. And as a result of taking that risk, he gained insight. “The rest of the staff knows how particular I am about the preaching task during Holy Week and Easter. So, they were surprised when I let others take some of the preaching load that week. They all rose to the occasion. It also gave me pause to reflect on how I might make that more of my practice. It’s something I’ve been working on and we are reaping the benefits.”

  3.

  Mentors push, mentees stretch. If you mentor someone—a student, an employee, a relative—you might wonder about the best way to give them a productive push. A good starting place is a two-part formula cited in a paper by the psychologist David Scott Yeager and eight colleagues: high standards + assurance.

  Yeager described a study in a suburban junior high school in which 44 seventh-grade students were assigned to write an essay about a personal hero. Their teachers then marked up the essays, providing written feedback.

  At that point, the researchers collected the papers from the teachers and split the essays randomly into two piles. They appended a generic note, in the teacher’s handwriting, to each essay in the first pile. It said, “I’m giving you these comments so that you’ll have feedback on your paper.” The essays in the second pile got a note reflecting what the researchers call “wise criticism.” It said, “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations and I know you can reach them.” (High standards + assurance.)