Dr. Jim Taylor's blog

The smartphone has become a ubiquitous status symbol of and tool for businesspeople doing business. In offices, on the streets, and in airports, what self-respecting businessperson doesn’t have their smartphone, whether a Blackberry, Windows Mobile device, Palm, or iPhone, at the ready to make the deal, provide support, change the plan, or just stay up to date on their company’s latest developments at a moment’s notice. The smartphone’s ability to provide businesspeople with instant access to others through email, text messaging, and phone has, in theory, saved time and made the business world run more smoothly by keeping everyone in a company connected all day every day. It can truly be a tool for increased communication, efficiency, and productivity.

The Unintended Consequences of Smartphones

Unfortunately, the smartphone also represents a corporate culture gone mad, in which it seems as if everyone feels they are so needed that they simply can’t be out of touch with work lest the company collapses without their constant input and output. The smartphone has, falling prey to the theory of unintended consequences, become a weapon against businesspeople that may actually hurts corporate discipline, focus, and productivity.

It has also created an upheaval in the already fragile fault line between work and life. This state of constant connectedness has blurred (or obliterated) the lines between work and life, creating family conflict and threatening any hope of peace and quiet when away from the office.

Who Owns Whom?

So do you own your smartphone or does it own you? Here are a few ways to tell:

• Do you take your smartphone with you wherever you go?
• Is your smartphone the last thing you look at before you go to sleep and the first thing you look at when you wake up?
• Do you make or take business calls regularly when away from work?
• Do your family or friends give you exasperated looks when you pull out your smartphone constantly?

If you answered “yes” to these questions, your smartphone likely owns you.

Smartphone Rules to Live By

Despite the obvious tongue-in-cheek tone so far, this unhealthy relationship with your smartphone has real consequences both at work and at home. At work, it can be a constant distraction – those notification beeps are like the sirens of Greek mythology – that prevents you from focusing on immediate tasks and responsibilities. At home, the constant ringing and beeping – or you just compulsively checking your email – is not only a persistent irritant for family and friends, but it also keeps you from being present in your life away from work.

Thankfully, there are some tangible steps you can take to break the grip that your smartphone has on you. Here are seven simple rules you can follow to help you regain control of your smartphone so it is once again a tool of efficiency and productivity rather than a weapon against your freedom and mental health.

Rule #1: Don’t look at your smartphone in the morning until you are ready to respond to it. Peeking at your email or phone messages before you have dressed or had breakfast can only create unnecessary distraction, worry, and stress. If you’re married with children, it will also prevent you from being engaged with your family before you leave for work. In fact, if at all possible, don’t even look at your emails during the drive to work; again, it would serve no purpose as you can’t—or, at least, you shouldn’t—be thumb typing during your commute (unless you’re on a train or bus and you can respond to your phone and email messages).

Rule #2: Don’t look at your smartphone during the day unless you are ready to act on it. It’s not uncommon for businesspeople to look at their smartphones as they head into a meeting or just before a conference call. The primary consequence of doing this is that you will be distracted from your next task. You will be thinking about what you found on your smartphone instead of focusing on the task ahead.

Rule #3: Turn off all smartphones during meetings. In fact, every company should have a “no-smartphone” rule for all meetings. There are few things more irritating, distracting, and productivity-killing than having people at a meeting looking at and typing into their smartphones. They are clearly not paying attention to the meeting and, therefore, unable to contribute in any meaningful way. It also distracts others at the meeting. It wastes time and prolongs meetings because no one is focusing on the agenda. Quality and productivity suffer too  because the lack of full engagement means that effective problem solving and decision making will be nearly impossible.

Rule #4: Don’t check your smartphone less than 30 minutes before you go to bed. If there are calls or emails you think you must respond to you, you will get to bed later and you’ll get riled up, so you’ll have a harder time falling asleep. The reality is that, in most cases, they can wait until morning, so best not to look. At best, commit to not checking your smartphone at all in the evening. At worst, choose a time between 30 and 60 minutes before bedtime when you take a last look at your smartphone.

Rule #5: Don’t do your smartphone when you are doing life. In other words, don’t look at your smartphone if you are interacting with others, doing something that is supposed to clear your mind of work, such as exercise, meditation, having a meal, watching a movie, or hanging out with family or friends. There is nothing more annoying to family and friends than to be with you when you are making business calls or responding to email—why are you even with them if you’re with them in body only? It’s okay to check your smartphone periodically, but ONLY IF you don’t interrupt more important life stuff and ONLY IF you are expecting something that you may have to act on quickly.

Rule #6: Don’t use your smartphone when it would be rude to do so. You may think that you are important (and you may truly be), but that doesn’t give you license to be disrespectful of others. Restaurants, grocery stores, and public transportation are some of the most frequent settings for rude smartphone behavior. As someone who travels regularly, there are few things more annoying than some business type who doesn’t realize that he (almost always a man) is using a cell phone not a yell phone and, as a result, shares his phone conversation with the rest of the gate area or airplane. If you absolutely must take a call in a public place, be aware of the loudness of your voice and try to move away from people if at all possible. And a practice that I use is to cover my mouth when speaking on my phone in public. I was hoping to start a trend here, but this attempt at mobile phone etiquette hasn’t caught on yet.

Rule #7: There are exceptions to the above rules. The reality is that there are times when you have to be available no matter where you are or whom you are with. You may be on call, there may be a crisis, or a big deal is in the pipeline.

Understand that these rules are not set in stone and can be modified to fit your own particular needs. What is important is that you have rules that guide your smartphone-use behavior and to establish these rules over your smartphone as the default rather than the exception, so deviating from them requires deliberation and conscious choice.

Letting Go

Your dependence on your smartphone is a habit that develops through repeated use. So you can think of separating from your smartphone as breaking an old habit and ingraining a new one; it takes commitment, discipline, and repetition to change. You will find that there are many upsides to regaining control of your smartphone. The people in your life will welcome you back from the smartphone precipice and actually want to be around you. You will be more relaxed, more engaged in life, have more fun, be a whole lot happier and, despite your great fondness for your smartphone, you may just find more interesting and enjoyable things to do with your time.

We live in a culture in which many parents feel tremendous pressure to “fast forward” their children’s development. Unfortunately, in their efforts to speed up their children’s development in school, sports, and the performing arts, parents are in danger of setting them up for failure and slowing rather than speeding up their development. By placing your children in achievement settings in which they are overmatched, you may be inadvertently inhibiting, rather than facilitating, their interest, achievement, and enjoyment in the activity.

An essential question to ask as parents is: Why would you put your children in situations in which they are overmatched? One reason may be that you have an inaccurate perception of their capabilities. Let’s be honest here. Parents are decidedly poor judges of their children’s abilities; most parents believe that their children are the brightest, most talented kids out there. You may use peer comparisons in your judgments. You may think, “My Stephanie is a better math student than Annie next door, so she’s ready to take an advanced class.” Your own ego and achievement needs can cause you to overmatch your children. Because of your emotional investment in your children, you may have difficulty accepting that your children are not gifted or special academically, athletically, or artistically. And just wanting the best for your children may push you to push them too hard, too fast, and too far.

Wanting to accelerate development to get “a leg up” in the race to the top is another common reason why parents overmatch their children. In our society where competition and achievement are so revered and rewarded, you may feel pressure to give your children any advantage by putting them on what you believe is the fast track to success. This urgency shows itself in the need to get your children involved in unnecessary private lessons, gifted programs, special tutoring, and other extracurricular activities. And don’t even get me started on eight-year-old traveling sports teams!

You may also feel the need to “keep up with the Joneses;” if you aren’t doing as much as other parents, then you must be a bad parent and your child will suffer from your “neglect.” Unfortunately, you may not realize that development can’t be rushed; your children have to be allowed to develop at their own pace. Most experts believe that pushing children too quickly up the developmental ladder actually slows their progress by taking the fun out of their participation and reducing their motivation to learn. Also, by focusing your children’s efforts on areas for which they are not prepared, you prevent them from focusing on areas for which they are ready and need to learn to be successful later on. The result is that they don’t develop the foundation of experiences, knowledge, and skills necessary to get them ready for those later activities.

The noted University of Chicago psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi developed a simple and elegant theory of motivation and achievement that shows the danger of overmatching your children.? He argues that if children’s ability surpasses the demands of the activity, they will get bored and lose interest. This is common among bright students who are not adequately challenged in school. But if the demands of the activity far exceed your children’s ability, that is, they are overmatched, they will feel frustrated in their efforts, likely fail badly, and, as a result, be fearful and resistant to future efforts.

How you react when your children inevitably do poorly because they are in over their heads may affect whether they are hurt by the experience. Instead of understanding that your children’s difficulties are rightfully caused by being overmatched, you risk blaming them for their “failures.” If you don’t understand that your children are in over their heads, you might even develop, however unintentionally, the perception that your children are slow or incapable-rather than just normal-and then subtly convey this belief to them. Consistent exposure to circumstances in which your children feel that their ability is surpassed by the activity’s demands will eventually make them feel incompetent. If these experiences are frequent, this sense of incompetence may result in lowered self-esteem which can generalize to all aspects of their lives.

Some time ago, I attended a junior tennis tournament that had attracted a number of fairly high-level players. It had been organized to ensure that every player would play at least three matches over two days. When I arrived at the tennis facility, I saw a father warming up his daughter on the court. It quickly became clear that this young player had not been playing long and was not very skilled. In her first match against the fourth seed, she lost 6-0, 6-0 and won only a handful of points. She came off the court in tears and, though her father was supportive and encouraging, it was obvious that he was disappointed too. Her other two matches followed a similar pattern: She didn’t win a single game and won only a few points. After each match she was upset and, while the other girls talked or played cards with one another, she was off to the side with her father looking very sad. This girl was clearly overmatched and the tournament was obviously not a fun or motivating experience for her. Not surprisingly, I didn’t see the girl at tournaments the remainder of the summer.

Challenge Your Child

Achievement is a process of small steps rather than big leaps. As a coach I worked with put it, “Success is a marathon, not a sprint. What matters is where you finish, not where you start.” You should do everything you can to ensure that your children, foremost, have fun, which will encourage them to stay interested and motivated in the achievement activity. Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the ideal scenario to accomplish this goal is for the demands of the achievement activity to slightly exceed your children’s capabilities. This relationship challenges and motivates children by enabling them to see that if they push themselves a bit beyond what they believe themselves capable of and persevere in the face of those achievement demands, they will be successful.

You can play an essential role in this process by creating Csikszentmihalyi’s these ideal achievement scenarios for your children. First, have a realistic understanding of your children’s capabilities. Second, have a realistic understanding of the demands of the achievement activity. For you to gain this information, become an informed consumer and advocate for your children. You can’t be an expert in education, sports, and the arts. Yet that expertise is necessary to produce the ideal achievement situation that will nurture your children’s development. So, seek out the best information to meet your children’s needs and maximize their achievement experiences. Knowledgeable resources, such as teachers, instructors, coaches, and more experienced parents, can provide objective feedback about your children’s capabilities and the appropriate level of an activity to help set up Csikszentmihalyi’s ideal achievement scenario for your children.

It’s Up To You

As the parents, you have the responsibility to create an environment in which this healthy relationship between your children’s abilities and the activity’s demands can develop. The following recommendations may be helpful:

• Don’t project your own achievement needs on your children. Let them find their own reasons to participate and give a strong effort;
• Maintain a healthy perspective on why your children are involved in achievement activities: to have fun, learn skills, and prepare them for later life;
• Don’t be seduced by our toxic culture of achievement that causes you to feel anxious or inadequate if your children are not the best at something;
• Don’t allow yourself to do anything for your children out of pressure to be seen as a “good” parent; being a good parent means doing what is best for your children;
• Get a life! If you have a life that is meaningful, fulfilling, and joyful, you won’t become overinvested in your children’s lives; and
• LIGHTEN UP!! If you are positive, relaxed, and light about your children’s efforts, so will they be.

And the irony is that by following these recommendations, not only will your children develop as fully and quickly as they are capable, but they will have more fun, be happier, and appreciate you more as well.

To read more about how to raise successful and happy children, click here.

I was recently interviewed by an Australian sports magazine and, though it focuses on endurance sports, the interview is clearly relevant to athletes and coaches in all sports.

What unique challenges present the athlete of endurance or multi-sport events?

In the case of single endurance events, such as marathoning, the unique challenge is keep the mind strong and in control when the body begins to break down and rebel against continuing. Late in long races, for example, after 20 miles of a marathon, the body says, “I get the point, we can stop now.” It communicates this message loudly in the form of pain. If the mind gives in to those messages, then you will slow down or stop, thus immediately failing to achieve your goal. But if you can ensure that the mind resists those messages and commands your body to keep going, then the body will respond (assuming sufficient fitness and manageable conditions) and you will reach your goal. Multi-sport events have that same challenge plus the demands of having to master and focus on several different skillsets and physical demands. For example, triathlon requires that you master three different sports (swimming, biking, and running), handle effectively the difficulties of the transition, fuel well with food and drink throughout the event, deal with mechanical problems on the bike to boot.

Which strategies have you identified as most beneficial to addressing these performance inhibitors?

The single most effective strategies for dealing with the physical and mental challenges is preparation. When I work with athletes who have a specific race goal, I want them to be able to say to themselves at the start line, “I’m as prepared as I can be to achieve my goals.” Not only does quality preparation ensure that you will be up to the physical demands of the event, but, just as importantly, you will have developed the motivation, confidence, focus, and emotional tools to handle the mental demands of the race as well.

How relevant is personality to the selection of strategy or method used?

Personality is a rather amorphous quality. We can’t change personality (and there’s even some question whether we each have only one unique entity called a personality). At the same time, most of us naturally adopt training and race strategies that fit our personality. For example, some of us like to train alone, while others like to be a part of a group. Some like to be alone before a race to focus on their preparations, while others like to socialize to be keep their minds off of the race and stay relaxed. Over all, though, I focus more on psychological attributes (e.g., motivation, confidence, intensity, focus, emotions) and mental tools than personality.

When is intuition more important than strategy (in relation to pushing past your limits)?

Intuition is a double-edged sword. If you are a seasoned endurance athlete with years of experience under your belt then intuition can be useful and perhaps even trump strategy. But there is a risk that the intuition, for example, to pick up the pace early in a race because you feel good, is based more on immediate feelings rather than what is best for later in the race when it really counts. Many “newbies” make this mistake and change their race plan midrace and the end result is usually not good. Pushing past your limits should occur in training, not races. In races, you should simply race up to the limit of what your current fitness will allow you to do. I encourage athletes with whom I work to develop a race plan based on their fitness and then have a plan B if problems arise (e.g., need to slow down because of a headwind on the bike) and a plan C of going faster if they are feeling good late in a race.

What is the value of intrinsic motivation and how does it work?

Intrinsic motivation for most endurance athletes should be the only reason to be out there. For Olympic and professional endurance athletes, extrinsic motivation, in the form of the money and fame, can help a little, but even for those athletes, what ultimately drives them comes from deep inside. Parents often provide extrinsic motivation for young athletes and this external push can range from helpful to destructive. Ultimately, for most endurance athletes, they should be out there because they love the sport, enjoy the challenges, and gain fulfillment from working hard and achieving their goals.

For high stress conditions how do you advise athletes prepare?

Preparing for adversity in training is the only way to succeed in the face of adversity in a race. Difficult conditions are not really the issue in a race because everyone has them. The key is how people respond to them. If you have two athletes of equal ability and one sees, for example, rain and wind as a threat that scared and intimidates them and the other as a challenge that they know they can overcome, the latter athlete will be more successful. Training for adversity has two benefits. First, you gain experience in how to adapt the adversity, so in a race, you can make necessary adjustments to, for example, your cycling or running pace in a headwind. Second, you develop the confidence that you can overcome these challenges so that, in the race, you are motivated and excited when confronted by them.

What have you discovered works best for managing emotions?

Endurance sports bring out the most powerful emotions because, late in a race when the body begins to break down, our emotional defenses get peeled away and we feel emotions more acutely than during most other times in our lives. Those emotions can range from very negative (e.g., anger, frustration, despair) to very positive (e.g., inspiration, pride, elation). The first thing is to accept that all emotions are a normal and healthy part of the endurance-sport experience. Second, to explore the cause of the emotions. Having a Ph.D. in Psychology, I believe that all emotions, especially negative ones, tell us something about what’s going on in our lives. We should consider those race emotions after the race and examine what they mean to us. During the race, emotions can tell us something about how we are doing at that point. For example, it’s common between 60-90 miles of the bike in an Ironman triathlon that you will experience an emotional crisis. This is the point in the race when it hits you that you’ve been out there for many hours already and you are really tired and in pain, yet you also have many more hours (and a marathon!) ahead of you. Sadness and despair are typical here. Experienced Ironmen know two things about this “pit of despair.” First, it will pass at about 90-100 miles as the end of the bike comes into sight. At that point, a sense of relief and elation are common. Second, an emotional crisis is often associated with a nutritional crisis; when you feel that way, force yourself to eat and drink. These same ideas can be applied to any powerful emotional experience in an endurance event.

Can mental training help enhance recovery for improved performance?

Absolutely. Part of mental training is having the discipline to allow yourself to recover. Too many highly committed endurance athletes come back to intense training or another race too soon. They don’t allow their bodies and minds to recovery from the damage incurred. After a significant effort, the best thing to do is to direct your focus onto some other valued aspect of your life that you may have sacrificed for your training and race preparations, for example, relationships or hobbies. Also, relaxation exercises can speed the physical recovery. And mental imagery of future races can keep your mind sharp and focused while the body recovers.

What role should a coach or trainer play in developing & implementing these techniques in practice?

Ideally, the coach or trainer has experience with the mental aspects of the sport and can build mental training into your regular training, for example, the use of positive self-talk during track intervals or focusing skills when working on technique. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that few coaches or trainers have that kind of awareness or knowledge of the psychology of sport. It is best to seek out such information yourself in the form of reading, lectures, or direct work with a sport psychologist and then incorporate those strategies into your training and races.

How can athletes prevent their drive for success to lead to overtraining or burn out?

I often work with endurance athletes who are overly motivated; too far or too hard isn’t far or hard enough and recovery is for wimps. Ultimately, these athletes will end up injured or burned out. To combat these attitudes, you must realize that rest and recovery are essential parts of training. I encourage mandatory rest days, required time away from the sport following a big race and, very importantly, for athletes to listen to their bodies. When you are usually very motivated, but on any given day, feel tired and sluggish, you will gain more from taking the day off or doing only a light workout than trying to grind through a hard workout.

How often do athletes overthink a situation and is there any merit to the saying “No brain, no pain”?

Many people think that to be an endurance athlete you have to be either crazy or stupid to endure such pain for so long. But most endurance athletes I’ve met and worked with are very intelligent people. The reality is that stupid or crazy people don’t last long in endurance sports because they either get seriously injured or burn out fast. The downside to intelligence is the tendency to overthink, but only a certain kind. I believe that endurance sports require considerable thinking because they are so complex and so demanding for so long. You must be constantly thinking during training and racing to monitor what is happening. The danger of overthinking is when that thinking shifts from process (i.e., what am I doing now to maximize my performance?) to outcome (i.e., what if I win, or lose, or don’t finish, or get beat by my buddy). Overthinking about outcome causes anxiety, distraction, and doubt, all of which will hurt your performances. As for the adage, “no brain, no pain,” I just don’t think that works in the long run. The reality is that you can’t avoid pain for very long; the body just screams louder and louder until you listen. Ideally, you should use the pain as information to make changes during training and races. Do I need to slow down? Do I need to adjust my body position? Is this injury pain? Does this pain mean I’m working hard and achieving my goals? Pain can be either a powerful tool for race success or a dangerous weapon for race failure. How you think about it determines which it is.

When it comes to dealing with failure or past defeats what is key to remember?

Simple: lessons learned. When you have a bad race it’s natural to be disappointed, but staying that way will only prevent you from overcoming the failure in the future. After a few days, the bad feelings will hopefully pass and then you can ask yourself: What went wrong? With that knowledge, you can make changes in your training or race tactics so you don’t make the same mistake again.

Do you have a preferred method of dealing with distractions?

There are several ways to deal with distractions. But first you have to understand how they work. Distractions usually come from a worry or concern you have, whether the conditions, a rival competitor, or a problem you’ve had in the past. Also, you can’t just not think about a distraction (try not thinking about a pink elephant). First, if the distraction is a problem you have had, find a solution. Problem solved, no more distraction. Second, find something else to focus on rather than the distraction (so think about a blue hippo). We, as humans, can’t focus on more than one thing at a time, so if you’re thinking about a blue hippo, you’re not thinking about a pink elephant.

What are top ten barriers to performance and & can you list their constructive counterpart?

Here goes: 1) Low motivation in training: finding a deep reason to want to work hard and prepare well; 2) Lack of confidence: quality preparation, exposure to adversity, seeing progress in training, support from others, positive self-talk, and incremental success; 3) Anxiety: relaxation techniques, deep breathing, music, having fun, focus on the process rather than the outcome; 4) Distractions: mental imagery, keywords, reminders written on your equipment; 5) Negative emotions: understand where the emotions are coming from, reconnect with positive emotions related to why you enjoy training and competing, look to others for inspiration; 6) Pain: use pain as information to make changes, connect pain with positive thoughts (e.g., this means I’m working hard toward my goal) and positive emotions (e.g., inspiration, pride); 7) Poor preparation: quality coaching, structured training program, others to train with; Going out too hard: have a race plan based on your fitness level, staying focused and disciplined in your pace early in the race; remembering the race doesn’t really start till much later (e.g., 85 miles of the bike in an Ironman, 20 miles in a marathon); 9) Injuries: get diagnosed soon and correctly, stick with your rehab program no matter how good you feel, think long term, be patient; 10) Overtraining: mandatory rest day, periodized training, listen to your body. Wow, I did it!

Can you tell us about The Power of Prime and how it can help athletes experience more joy and better results for their efforts?

The Power of Prime is a concept that I developed that is the foundation of my work with high achievers in sports, business, medicine, law, and the performing arts. It involves three essential ideas. First, prime performance, which I see as very different from the popular goal of peak performance. I define prime performance as performing at a consistently high level under the most challenging conditions. Second, well being, which involves achieving three states: physical health, life balance, and happiness. After a life of high achievement in sports and business and a work focus in helping people reach their highest levels of success, I have learned that success without well being isn’t success at all. Much of my work now is on helping people find both success and well being. Finally, change, which lies at the heart of all efforts toward achieving success and well being. I have developed a model for how people change and a process for encouraging change.

To read more about the psychology of sport, click here.