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Diagnosing The Workplace: Not Just An HR Podcast
Diagnosing The Workplace: Not Just An HR Podcast
What Is Some Practical Psychology That Can Improve How I Lead And Work With Others?
In this episode, we examine 3 psychological principles that can hopefully provide folks with a lens to allow for a better understanding of those we work with.
In this conversation, we explore:
- Affect Intensity
- Belief Perseverance (combined with the Backfire Effect)
- Self Sabotage
Our prescription for this episode: many interpersonal and professional conflicts arise from a lack of understanding of where a lot of our differences come from. If we take the time to consider the "why" behind people's behavior, we can bring more patience, grace, and solutions to the troubles of our workplaces.
About Our Hosts!
James is an experienced business coach with a specialization in HR management and talent attraction and retention.
Coby is a skilled educator and has an extensive background in building workforce and organizational capacity
For a little more on our ideas and concepts, check out our Knowledge Suite or our YouTube Channel, Solutions Explained by Roman 3.
Breaking down everyday workplace issues and diagnosing the hidden sickness, not just the obvious symptom. Our hosts, James and Coby.
[COBY]:Did we lose a patient?
[JAMES]:No, that's just my lunch.
[COBY]:Hey, thanks for joining us. I'm Coby, he's James. And let's get started with a question. What is some practical psychology that can help improve how I lead and work with others?
[JAMES]:So we've talked several times on this podcast and in a number of other forms about how we really try to take a three prong approach to our work, and especially in how we build our concepts and curriculum. And so we're always looking at things from the historical perspective. You know, how has the advice and trends over time shaped the way that we actually engage with work, or how has it shaped how the common perspective. And what's the common way of addressing these problems? You know, where do they stem from? How do they. How did we get to where we are now? We look at it from a perspective of my personal favorite, which is more of an economic development lens, where we're bringing in the perspective of how can we make decisions that are going to improve not only our business bottom line, but also our communities, and where are those small tactical investments that are going to have a compounding and scalable benefit over time? And then we always look at it from what Kobe's personal favorite, which is the psychological influences that shape our workplace, which I'm not going to go into detail on because this is really your wheelhouse, man. And so I want to let you kind of take the reins on this question, which is the focus of today's conversation.
[COBY]:Absolutely. So, like, I'm a huge psychology nerd. Anyone that's read, like, any of my writing or anyone that really knows me, kind of really, you know, has, I'm sure, has picked up on how I embed so much of, like, I have a cognitive, psychological approach to the work that I do, to the stuff that we build. And it's something that is. It is probably the primary lens that I view kind of the world through. And, I mean, it's kind of funny. Cause, like, there was a kind of defining moment in my life when, in all honesty, in reality after university, if a job offer had came kind of one day earlier, I probably would have. I wouldn't be doing this. I'd probably be working in academia, in cognitive psychology research and application. So it's a real passion. But I'm not saying I'm quite happy with where we are now, but it's something that has always stuck with me. And again, part of it was a focus of my undergrad. It's a major focus of my graduate degree, and something that I feel gives a lot of clarity to human interaction and to kind of communicating and working with others. But where I've taken so much of so much value from cognitive psychology has been in the work that we do around workforce development and organizational culture and change. So I think that it's going to be great for us to look at three different concepts or aspects that people really should know about that would provide some helpful insight, some clarity on some confusing kind of interpersonal interactions and kind of some of the things that kind of govern our workplace a little bit. So we're going to try and talk about these. I'm going to try and make sure that these concepts are really accessible and really easy to understand. So, James, absolutely. Call me out if I get too technical on stuff.
[JAMES]:My job is to ask questions, to try to help. Well, I mean, you understand these a lot better than myself, so I'm still. Some of these I'm more familiar with than others. So my role will be to ask you questions to help explain it, and then let's figure out how we can actually, how do we make these useful, you know, useful? Peer to peer useful as a manager, leading a team.
[COBY]:And really, how can knowing about some of these things improve interpersonal and professional relationships?
[JAMES]:So what you got for us?
[COBY]:All right, so the first one I want to talk about is the concept of what's called Affect Intensity. Now, affect intensity is something that most people probably haven't heard of, but it's actually something that can be incredibly insightful for people to know about when dealing with other people. So what affect intensity is, it's the degree that people feel emotion or that they process emotional responses. So a good comparison between to affect intensity, which is kind of, again, a kind of mental and emotional reaction, is with something a little bit more tangible that people are probably familiar with, which is pain thresholds. So some people have a very high tolerance for pain, and, you know, and something might, you know, and a pinprick might not even register where other people might have a very low tolerance of pain. A pinprick could be like, oh, my gosh, I'm dying, depending. Right? Yeah. That concept transferred over to emotional response is what affect intensity is. Some people deal or process emotions with a very high range. So, like, you know, so, like, so the bottom of their, like, their emotional lows and their emotional highs are very far apart. And they can experience a spectrum, a wide spectrum of emotions within, you know, within that. So, like their. Their greatest, you know, like, you know, the day they got married or met or the children were born or, like, that could be such a high. That would be like, you know, just a profound high. Then, like, you know, the loss of a loved one, you know, would be such a major low. But even within those kind of wide ranges, more common, everyday things like the barista got my coffee order right could really put me in a great high level mood where like, you know, my, you know, I've left on red on my text messages and it's really bumming me out. We put you in a pretty low because you have this really wide range of highs and lows.
[JAMES]:So is it. It's not just that some people have higher threshold for their highs and a lower threshold for the lows. And other people, you know, may not be able to reach those things. It's the same type of stimulus will affect them in different ways.
[COBY]:Exactly. Because those. So, so those that have that high range, what we call a high affect intensity. Your affect density is high, whereas the other kind of people might have a low affect intensity.
[JAMES]:And we're assuming this is a spectrum, not a one or the other.
[COBY]:Absolutely, yeah. So the degree that people. That people feel them on, there's not just. You're either column a or column b. But it's like the idea of lower levels and higher levels. Right.
[JAMES]:Gotcha.
[COBY]:Those with lower levels of affect intensity would, you know, the range that they can physically process emotion is much smaller. So in theoretically, someone with a really high affect intensity, you know, the barista getting their coffee order right, could have this. They could process that and feel that at the same level with someone with a low affect intensity at maybe, like, you know, or someone. So maybe the date someone got married, like, you know, they might be able to process at the same emotional level. I mean, I'm talking. I'm kind of being a bit, you know, a little bit.
[JAMES]:No, I hear what you're saying, though. I mean, the. If somebody's affect intensity is low and it, you know, kind of the emotional cap is at a certain place and somebody else who has a much higher cap, a normal, a regular interaction might reach that threshold. That's almost the maximum for somebody else.
[COBY]:Exactly. Which is why in our personalized and our work, the same catalyst, the same stimuli, the same event could have some people hitting a very emotional high and some people hitting a very low emotional high. And part of it is just because the person with a high affect intensity can process the emotion. It's so much higher. They feel it so much deeper. It's so much more. The affect on them is higher, whereas with low affect intensity, it affects them and they can process it at a lower level. So this is why some people might give you like, you know, kind of a quiet thumbs up to great news, where another person might be like, oh, my God. And OMG themselves as they walk around not being able to believe it.
[JAMES]:So I think that leads. Yeah, I think that leads into a really good next step, which is, what does this actually look like to other people and why does it matter for work? Because I think what's interesting, I mean, it's one more. It's one more way as a manager to be able to communicate and to be able to understand the people that you're leading. I think that's important to say upfront. I think it's also important to recognize if you have people on your team who are very high affect intensity and also people who are lower affect intensity. The people who are high affect intensity may come across as the drama queen. Or the. Just from somebody who's not used to experiencing the same highs of emotion, may regard their counterpart as overly dramatic or overly sensitive or, you know, these common interpersonal complaints that we hear. If you've led any team, I'm sure you've heard these. I don't like Jimmy because Jimmy is a lot. Yeah, right.
[COBY]:Yeah.
[JAMES]:But I think it's important. I like the fact that there's actual a psychological theory behind it and not just Jimmy's a pain in the rear end, because I don't. And I don't like Jimmy. But we. The way that we're wired that there's something to this that's tangible, that it won't. Understanding this won't change it, but understanding this will at least allow us to respond with more grace than perhaps we would otherwise.
[COBY]:Well, it's also really good about managing your own expectations about how information is going to affect the team. So if you come in and some with great news and you have a higher affective density, then you might want that big reaction of, oh, my gosh, this is huge. And somebody on your team may not give you that reaction, and you might almost take it as an insult or as what's wrong with them or this. But the reality is they are processed. If they have low affect intensity, they are processing it as high as they can. It just looks different or just.
[JAMES]:It just hits people different. And it's not about that. They're not that. I like that. That's. I think that's a really good, tangible, realistic experience that managers have. You know, being excited about, you know, a project or, you know, or about sharing news with their team and not getting the reactions that they want and then interpreting how we don't challenge that because you shouldn't really challenge that. But we read into it from our own perspective. And our own affect intensity,
[COBY]:It cuts the other way, too, because if you go team with really bad news, you're going to get people having with higher affect intensity reacting very strong to what you expect, then someone with low affect intensity may not give you that same degree of reaction. So you may think they're more okay with it, that they're not as bothered by it because they didn't act out as much as you might thought they did. But the reality is they are feeling it just, and they may be as bothered by it, but they can't process the emotional impact of it. So they're might. They're no more on board than the person who's losing their mind about it. They just are reacting differently because they're reacting to the degree that they can because of having low affect intensity. So there is a lot of value in just realizing that when you're, you know, when you're learning about your team, you need to kind of hold them to their own benchmark. So if, you know, I've got eight people on my team and three are really high affect intensity, and if you were in the middle and the other ones are kind of really low, how don't hold the low people to the reaction of the high people. Hold them to their. To their historical. But how do they normally react? Yeah, is it is a mild grunt, an actual freak out first for someone with a low affect intensity or is kind of a raised eyebrow and a kind of a slight chuckle the same as someone, like, losing their mind, excited.
[JAMES]:So is this a subjective measurement that each person needs to help? Like, are there. I guess the question that I would have is how would I, as a manager, try to evaluate this without, you know, there could be other factors at play, right?
[COBY]:Absolutely. And, I mean, so, like, there are, like, some measurement tools. There's what's called. There's, I think it's called aim, which is an actual psychological assessment, but you don't really need to go into anything like that. Part of it is just, again, observable trends. We kind of all know, the person on our team that, or people that we work with that, again, are going to have a big reaction to something. We all know those that are not going to. I'm not saying that it's obvious that the only thing going on with them is their affect intensity, but it is something that we should filter this knowledge, we should filter our understanding of people through because we. Because, you know, we need to realize that, you know, low affect intensity people are not just robots and high affect intensity people are not just, you know, crazy, you know, emotional psychos. Right. There's the individual differences allow people to process and kind of experience emotions at different levels. And the best way for you as the coworker or you as a manager to be able to kind of have this help you is let it be another lens to view individual differences through. Maybe it explains why something. Why someone is one way that you might have chalked up to them just being a cold robot or over or lower dramatic person. But there's, you know, there is something that. That might be the reason for it, and it won't change it, knowing it won't change it, but it might help you create a better, more insight and understanding and how this can actually improve the way that you lead and work with other people.
[JAMES]:Yeah, this is. This is the one that I. I was not familiar with affect intensity before we started this. Started prepping for this conversation. So it's been a really interesting journey for me to kind of figure out what it is and then how it can actually be used in some way.
[COBY]:No, and again, I hope that to you listening that this is something that may, again, be another little tool in your toolbox of how you understand people to might, you know, be just to give you that little bit of extra insight that might, again, improve your interpersonal, professional relationships. All right, so let's move on to the next concept. This one we may end up taking a little while to talk about. It's what's called Belief Perseverance. Now, belief perseverance is about maintaining a belief despite new information that firmly contradicts it. So it's the idea of you have a belief of you or perspective, a thought, and even when confronted with information that debunks it or that totally contradicts it, and you're kind of proven wrong, you hold on to that belief, and in some cases, the belief, the firmness that you hold that belief can actually go so far to the extreme that you actually believe in it more. Your belief becomes stronger than it was before. You're presented with information, and that phenomenon is known as what's called the backfire effect. So the idea of belief perseverance is you believe one thing, and let's say you believe in unicorns, and the idea that you're presented with logical, empirical data that says, honestly, unicorns don't exist. They never have, and this and that. And instead of you going, okay, you convince me, I changed my mind, you almost double down. And you either. If you double down and say, no, I believe in it more, that's the backfire effect. If you just say, no, you know what? I still believe in it no matter what you say, that's belief perseverance. So belief perseverance is holding on to it, and your belief strengthening is actually what is called the backfire effect.
[JAMES]:So I've got a couple. I just want to jump in with a couple questions, because as you're talking about it, I'm assuming that this is not a cognitive process. This is not like they're not going through the same stages that you just described of. No, I'm going to disregard that, and I'm going to choose to continue to believe. This is not a conscious response. This is a…
[COBY]:Well, the thing is, it's not a rational response. It's an irrational response, which basically means it's an emotional response. It's not a logical conscious. I've decided to ignore this. It's my emotional response to hearing this information is going to be to protect myself, either out of fear, out of embarrassment, or out of anxiety. It's. I'm choosing to go into, either go into denial and not accept that this is happening, and just, again, out of fear of protecting myself from the feelings around fear or embarrassment or anxiety or kind of whatever the negative feeling that we're trying to avoid is. And it becomes an emotional reaction to a logical tool to a logic based argument. And that's when things get messy.
[JAMES]:And I. Yeah, because you can. You just cannot argue emotion with facts, right?
[COBY]:Yeah.
[JAMES]:It not saying one is right. And, you know, emotions wrong and facts are, the emotional responses are incredibly powerful. And I believe that, like, our intuition and the way that we respond with our emotions is very healthy and very much a good thing. But if somebody has a firmly held emotional belief, trying to dissuade or persuade somebody who's holding an emotional belief with purely a factual based argument, or what you believe to be a factual based argument is not going to. They're not going to connect because you're trying to. There's a misalignment there. And I think that's one of the big takeaways with this particular concept, is that understanding that when this happens, it's often emotion based. And the trap that we fall into as co workers or as managers is that we try to take a systematic, logical, factual, whatever, evidence based approach to dissuading somebody of a firmly held emotional belief.
[COBY]:Yes. And again, not to kind of go off at the risk of going off and onto a tangent or down a path that we really shouldn't go down. This is probably one of the most prevalent, like, you know, difficult things to process with our current political climate that we're in.
[JAMES]:You're opening a can of worms!
[COBY]:Yeah. We're going to move away from this very quickly. But the idea of somebody holding on to a belief, then, you know, and just because we present the people with clear, logical evidence does not mean that it will persuade them.
[JAMES]:Or sometimes we believe to be clear, logical evidence. Because, again, these are individual beliefs.
[COBY]:Absolutely. But you're right. Using a logical, evidence based argument to an emotional reaction does not really work. And when we get into the backfire effect and we double down on the beliefs, largely what happens is that we're trying to avoid the negative feelings of potentially being wrong. We don't want to process that we could be wrong. So we tend to use a form of projection, which is assigning your own unacceptable feelings or qualities onto someone else. And we think, well, no, I can't. Again, we don't think this consciously, but the idea of. It's almost like the logic of I can't process that I could be so wrong about this for so long. So my feelings of negative. My negative feelings about how wrong I am, I'm going to project that on the person telling me the contradicting information and so that they must be wrong, so I must be even more right. And that's kind of some of the logical process behind the backfire effect. But it really can be something that, again, I don't want to get into the political stuff, but this.
[JAMES]:But there is. There's value in the illustration, because unless you've been hiding under a rock, you can probably relate to conversations like this. I don't care what your political beliefs are. We have all encountered this particular phenomenon. One thing that I want to ask you about, or kind of how I see it, is it's not so much about the person being scared of being wrong, it's the implication for other how that being wrong affects so many other firmly held beliefs, because very few. I don't think we can hold opinions in a vacuum.
[COBY]:Right.
[JAMES]:Our opinions are, and our beliefs are a intermingled web of a lot of different things. And this is my assumption, and please correct me if I'm getting the psychology wrong, but my thought would be that it's the strain that happens of being confronted with. What does this mean for everything else that creates that?
[COBY]:So, so the. The degree of the negative feelings definitely plays into the prevalence of belief perseverance. So let me give you an example. If you believed unicorns were real, just because it'd be kind of cool, and you're presented with evidence, you're like, hey, I don't have a lot invested in it, all right? I'm wrong. Unicorns aren't real. Moving on. If you've taken out a massive bank loan for your unicorn ranch, and you built your whole life around being a unicorn rancher, and this is the. Your whole life is invested in this, that's a much harder pill to swallow. And the implications, like you said, the degree that you were invested in this, what this means for every other decision that you've made is when I can't process how devastating being wrong is going.
[JAMES]:To because it's just about the unicorns. It's about the. The impact this is going to have on my livelihood and my family and every ripple effect of that.
[COBY]:Yes. It's like, it's what I've tied my. It's the dock I've tied my boat to. I can't. It's this ability I've created. It's part of the identity I've carved out for myself. And that. And that is so hard for me to challenge and not become overwhelmed that it's just easier for me to accept the denial of the information and say, you know what? No, I'm gonna believe it anyway because I kind of have to. Because of the implication of it.
[JAMES]:And that, again, not in a conscious manner.
[COBY]:Our brains speed through that logic chain that I just said, and they just said, nope, you're wrong. Because, you know, they. Because that's just the only acceptable output. Right. And because part of it is that is. Again, I'm going to throw another cognitive thing out there. We talk about this in our change management program is a concept called cognitive dissonance.
[JAMES]:Right.
[COBY]:Cognitive dissonance is the perception of dealing with contradictory information and the mental toll it takes on having two contradictions in your head. So, like. And it is stressful to hold two conflicting ideas in our heads. And often one of the ways that we protect ourselves from that stress and anxiety is we fall into denial. A good example is like, you know, I believe that all life is sacred, but I also love me a hamburger. So to deal with that kind of cognitive dissonance, we often just don't think about those two things together. We just keep them.
[JAMES]:Don't think about how the hamburger's made or what is.
[COBY]:Exactly. We just get into denial that they're plucked from the burger tree. So it's just, we just don't think about it. So again, dealing with cognitive dissonance, denial is one common reaction, but another one, depending on the degree that we are invested in that knowledge, belief perseverance can be, you know, it is a common way that we go. Now, the real question is, what do we do about it? So with belief perseverance, part of it is we just need to understand that sometimes one of the things we have to overcome when we're talking about change, whether we're changing minds or whether we're changing views, whether we're changing organizational processes, is that some people get very attached to a belief or a position or a view or a way of doing things. And just presenting them with the logical reason to change isn't enough. We have to create the buy in for them to be willing to unpack what this means for me and try to help them and facilitate the idea that, you know, the way things were before, what you believe before was fine. But this new shift is actually going to better for everybody, and we're going to help you get there.
[JAMES]:And I think my advice from a management perspective on this is actually going to be a little less generous than I usually am. I mean, obviously, when our work, we take a very people centered approach to everything. And however, the way that I see this playing out in the workplace can be very damaging. And I'm not talking in extremes, I'm talking, let's think about it from a standpoint of trying to battle a culture of complacency. Where we. How I have encountered this so many times where we've been working with teams that are trying to move forward, there's either change is being imposed on them and it's a, this is just how things are going to be. So we need to come together as a team and move forward, or it's a much smoother process of, we're trying to generate, buy in for the change and bring people along. However, when you have that ingrained complacency, and that people are really attached to that safety, that I don't want to change because I am comfortable with my job, I'm comfortable doing things the way that I've done it for the last 20 years. Why would I change? Obviously, the first step is to try to bring people along. It's trying to understand what those reservations are and to generate buy in that will resonate with the person to help them come along. However, at there comes a point where complacency unchecked can lead toxic behaviors and that cannot be allowed to fester in an organization. It poisons everyone around them, it poisons the individual who is engaged in those behaviors, and it poisons the rest of the team, and it can spread like a cancer if it's not dealt with. So while this may all come down to belief perseverance, and there is a psychological theory behind why all of this is happening, sometimes we need to just use the tools that we have at our disposal. If people are so unwilling to change that they are not only hurting themselves, but they're hurting those around them, then it's time to look at our discipline and termination policies. Progressive discipline first, ideally. But ultimately, it's not worth hanging on to. Poison, right?
[COBY]:Yes, I mean, you're right. So, like we talked about a climate of complacency a couple podcast episodes ago. In our culture of innovation. One, and one of them, one of the warning signs for that is the rigid thinking, which really kind of does kind of couple nicely with belief perseverance is that there's a rigidity to what is, what are. What are you willing to believe or what are you willing to follow? And that's one of the major sign of it. And you're right, I think probably the most, one of the most practical use of understanding belief perseverance will be in combating acclimate of complacency in our workplaces. And it is the idea that you're right, knowing about belief perseverance and the backfire effect and even cognitive dissonance is helpful to consider what is behind the actions, the pushback. But it doesn't excuse it. It's a reason not an excuse.
[JAMES]:Reason not an excuse is an excellent way to put it.
[COBY]:No, so I think that is very helpful in that knowing that there is an emotional component to people holding on to traditional ways of doing things that has to be considered and addressed, and which. And you can't just mandate emotions to change. So it's why you need to do more work on the buying inside, not just from a logical standpoint, but also considering the emotional impact.
[JAMES]:But I think, again, I used this line with our last concept, and I think I'll probably end up using it again. Understanding that this is not just Jimmy being a frustrating, irritating, whatever else you want to put on that chain of language allows us to approach this with hopefully less frustration, less anger, less resentment, and extend more grace. We still have to deal with the situation, but understanding where this is coming from and that this is a emotional response to a firmly held belief at least allows us to approach the conversation not as well. This person is just. They're just stubborn, and they're just trying to irritate me and they just don't want to do. People aren't just anything. we are complex. So extend grace where you can.
[COBY]:And hopefully this will give you a little bit more of a tactical approach to resolving these issues rather than just, you know, getting yourself all frustrated and potentially just, you know, and handling it, like I say, with less grace than you probably could. All right, so let's move on to our last concept I want to talk about, which is the concept of self sabotage. So what? So what self sabotage is it's when we essentially get in our own way and we end up, like, tanking our own actions, that will be the best thing for us. It's we. The name is pretty descriptive into itself and that we will make decisions that are going to eventually that will hold us back. They may be, you know, they're often short term, short sighted, prioritizing our short term comfort decisions at the end, sacrificing what's best for us in the medium and long term, or what's the best thing to do for others. And it's something that is quite prevalent in our kind of our own career progression when we kind of take what is, you know, we overvalue the safety of our current situation and don't put ourselves out there, but so also. But it can be a very difficult thing to. To experience when you were watching someone do else that you work with or care for go through it. But the one thing that I should really say is that the real danger with self sabotaging behavior is that it's subconscious. People don't consciously think, I'm going totally burn this bridge. I'm going totally, you know, like, just keep procrastinating until nothing, you know, until everyone gets mad at me and I lose my job. It's that the rationalization to maintain those short term comfort zone becomes logical and becomes a very natural, easy thing for us to do. The path of least resistance in some way that the person who's engaging in it doesn't realize that it's happening or that they're doing it. And they think to them, well, no, this is the most logical. This is the best thing for me. When in reality it's them avoiding the negative feelings that come with change or come with, or the fear that might come with doing something new or not willing to sacrifice the short term comfort to obtain the long term success.
[JAMES]:Of the three concepts we're talking about, this is one that I'm most familiar. Unfortunately, in my own life and in profession and the work. I mean, we're all guilty of this to some degree, right? Procrastination, avoiding making a decision until the decision is made for you, is making a decision. There's all of these things that are at play. But I'm really glad that you mentioned fear, because that has been the biggest theme that I have seen with self sabotage, is that oftentimes it's rooted from some fear. Fear of the unknown is a legit, like, even in terms of something that could be very positive for your career path, whether it's, you know, do x, you just need to finish x, y and z, and you are up for a promotion, but you procrastinate or you don't do it. Because the fear that comes from changing, the fear that comes from, well, I know what I'm doing now. What happened? And again, these are not always fully conscious thoughts. They are things that we process very quickly and come to a decision. We know what the conscious outcome of the decision, not necessarily all the. The thought chain that led us to that decision. As a manager, if you. This can be so, especially as a manager or as a mentor, seeing this behavior in somebody who you care about, somebody who you have invested time and energy in their personal or professional growth, and to see these behaviors can be so very frustrating and demoralizing and almost feel like a personal attack. Why won't they just do the bloody things that I need them to do so that they can continue to on the path that we've set? Yeah, but understanding that this is not a slight on you, this is not a. It's not even necessarily a conscious decision that they've made. If you can get to the root of the fear that's holding them back, is it? It could be fear of failure. We talk a lot about psychological safety and how important psychological safety is in the workplace to being, central to the employee experience and, but also that if we know that in our workplaces I can try something and I can, even if I'm not 100% successful, I'm not going to be ridiculed or I know that I'm going to be supported along the way. That is a major fear that we can eliminate for people by providing something that is a cornerstone of a healthy work culture. So this one I love and hate self sabotage. It's way too prevalent. But there are things that as a manager or as a mentor, if you can understand the fear and help your person to overcome those things.
[COBY]:And one thing that's really important to consider with this too is the correlation between the abundance of self sabotage and generational multi generation workplaces. Because this is more, there's a correlation between the prevalence of self sabotage and younger workers, not to say Gen Z innocent. Any young worker over generations tend to have a higher level of newer in your career.
[JAMES]:You are more likely because there's more.
[COBY]:To be afraid of.
[JAMES]:Yes.
[COBY]:You have less experience totally blowing it and you don't know what that's going to mean for you. So the, like, because again, we've seen, you know, like mentor problems with people, young people that are, that they're rationalized, say, well, you know what? The job has to me have to get up early in the morning. I'm not down for that. I'm not going to take the job. That type of ridiculous rationalization for a job that they went to school for and have a huge student loan for. It's, it's, it's a, it's the excuse they're going with because the best one they can come up with. But the reality is they're afraid of what success is going to look like, what the pressures are going to be on them. And it's they're holding on to something that might, they've convinced themselves is a rational reason, but it's totally not. And the person looking at it is going like, are you crazy? What is wrong? What is wrong with you? It is a defense mechanism against fear of change or failure. And if we write it off as just being a flaky young person, we're never going to actually get to. The true cause of it is that we have not done a good enough job eliminating the fear of change and the fear of failure and helping and normalizing that your comfort zone is something that is holding you back and that there are supports behind you to build a new comfort zone with this.
[JAMES]:Incorporated but let's be real, too, right? When we're young, you look at experienced professionals as people who have their proverbial stuff together. They know what they're doing. They're. They're professional. They are educated. They're experienced. They. They have this on lock. The truth is, nobody has a sweet clue what they're doing. We're all making it up as we go, and we are all failing and continuing to get better. And that realization of, if I am further along in my career, it's probably because I failed a lot more than you.
[COBY]:Yeah, exactly. And so it's one of those things where you're right. Psychological safety and normalizing, you know, the, you know, that. The freedom to fail and that, you know, their support to help you through the uncomfortable transition period, those are things that can be powerful to combat self sabotage and actually can be something that should be really considered with organizations and industries that employ a very young workforce, because that's. And because the thing, too, is that is something where we need to understand that we've all, like, we've. We failed our way to where we are now, kind of, in a large sense.
[JAMES]:But it's not. You're not being rewarded for failure. Failure is a natural consequence of trying something.
[COBY]:Your success has got you to where you are, but your successes are built on all the failures.
[JAMES]:A lot of failures, right?
[COBY]:So the whole point is, a lot of it is to normalize that, because procrastination, short term thinking, fear of change, and the willingness to burn everything down to protect your comfort zone are the warning signs of someone going through self sabotage. And one of the problems is that pointing out self sabotage can actually lead to belief perseverance, because people will hold on to that. No, you don't understand. I need to sleep in every day. That's a deal breaker for me. That is them doubling down on belief perseverance, and holding that as the most important thing out of that fear of change or that short. Or that protecting that short term comfort zone that the person does need to be open to some degree to having their mind changed, to be able to kind of being presented. But combating that with discipline without understanding the psychological toll that's taking on people is often what leads us to the common mistakes that we run into with these problems. And it's something that we need to have a little bit more understanding and a clearer lens to view these things through, because that's going to be where the real success and the real improving again, how we lead and work with people is really going to come from understanding all of these psychological factors, because they just give some context to what is happening in your workplaces right now. They don't fix anything, but they give you a better understanding of where the real, true root causes of some of these problems are, so you can be more tactical and intentional in how you address them.
[JAMES]:Yeah, I think that's a really good kind of final statement, is if you understand that these are legitimate, actual psychological principles at play. Not somebody being highly emotional or acting like a robot, not somebody who just is doubling down and is irritating and frustrating and stubborn, not somebody who is willfully sabotaging their own best interests. Again, understanding where these are coming from, hopefully you will be able to respond with a little bit more grace and patience, rather than, as unfortunately we have done in the past, respond with frustration and anger.
[COBY]:Yeah, absolutely. All right, so I'll just kind of wrap some of these, although you did a pretty good job, do it. But I'll just put a little bit more context behind it just to tie up. So the question was, what's some practical psychology that can improve how I lead and work with others? Well, the three things we talked about were the concept. Well, the first one's a concept of affect intensity, the degree that people process emotional responses. People with higher affect intensity will process things at a much higher level and will feel things to a degree that people with a low affect intensity cannot, which is why a common catalyst or a common event will yield different results from people. And sometimes we misread the meaning behind those different results. But having a bit of clarity about sometimes people's reactions are based on how they process emotional responses can actually give us a nice lens to have a little more understanding about cutting people some slack and holding people to kind of, you know, maybe not the. The unified benchmark of what an appropriate reaction should be. Next. Next, we talked about belief perseverance, which is the idea of, despite new information being presented to us, we maintain our current beliefs. This is often done as a way to protect ourselves from the toll that confronting and changing our views or beliefs will have on not just our own views, but also all of the stresses and problems that might come from how ingrained this belief is in kind of our core identity or the life that we cargo for ourselves. And the last concept was self sabotage. The idea that we will sabotage our own best interest through procrastination, prioritizing short term thinking, fear of change, or the desire to protect our comfort zones. This is often because of a fear of change or a fear of failure. And when we are worried about that environment, we will often try to avoid the things that are really going to be the best thing for us long term. And the way that all of these need to be addressed and approached is to give you a little bit of context about what might be causing some of the frustrating interpersonal and professional relationships that you're in. What are the things that are hurting those? What are the things that are destroying morale? What are the things that are the common frustrations you deal with leading or working with other people? These don't solve those problems, but they give you some. So at least a new lens to view them through, and maybe again, a more tactical way to address them to have better results.
[JAMES]:Awesome.
[COBY]:All right, so that about does it for us. For a full archive of the podcast and access to the videos hosted on our YouTube channel, visit www.roman3.ca/podcast thanks for joining us.
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