Energy Management: If-Thens
In This Episode
Trying to manage your energy, but fall into the same old burnout boosting habits? Listen to this episode of the LeaderLab powered by LifeLabs Learning to learn how to use the power of If-thens to deliberately make better choices.
Transcript
Vanessa Tanicien, narrating: Hello, and welcome to the LeaderLab, the podcast powered by LifeLabs Learning. I'm your host and also a LifeLabs leadership trainer, Vanessa Tanicien. In each episode, my Labmates and I distill our findings into powerful tipping point skills — the smallest changes that tip over to make the biggest impact in the shortest time. On this episode of the LeaderLab, we're continuing the conversation on energy management and what we can do to avoid burnout.
Vanessa Tanicien: To remind us what burnout actually is, is those general feelings of negativity around work or possibly around engagement with others and we feel that physical exhaustion. And it just doesn't feel good. So today to help us out with energy management to avoid that burnout, is Robleh Kirce. He's the head of research at LifeLabs Learning and has been studying leaders and teams for over 10 years. He's done work for organizations like NASA, Google, and Coinbase, and he's also recently purchased an Oculus Quest 2. So we're happy to have him out of virtual reality and back in this actual reality.
Vanessa Tanicien: Welcome back to the lab, Robleh. I am really thrilled that you're here to talk to us about energy management. I know you have a lot of tricks up your sleeve. So what have you brought to the lab today?
Robleh Kirce: Vanessa, I'm super excited to be here as well. Because I get a chance to share with one of my favorite concepts, two words that sounds like it's four, implementation intentions. It's a mouthful, I know, but it is one of my favorite site concepts, both for its simplicity and its application in life, in the workplace. So rather than keep using that term of implement intentions, let's just call it If-thens. We want a name that's as simple as the concept is.
Vanessa Tanicien: I love it.
Robleh Kirce: I want to give you, also, a simple definition for If-thens. But to give you this, I want to give you an illustration of what it looks like. Just get a goal in mind; any goal in mind would do.
Robleh Kirce: You might think about energy management, "I'm spending too much time on social media." Off then what we'll do is, we'll set a general do your best goal. What happens is, I put some effort in and we see what happens.
Robleh Kirce: But next week, there I am spending as much time. I can see it on my report. Thank you, Apple. Now instead of doing that, what I would suggest is just one small tweak structure in the If-then format.
Robleh Kirce: If I have spent 10 minutes on the social media, then I get up and fill in the blank, take a walk, call somebody, do something that's good for you and your energy.
Vanessa Tanicien: So in order to save ourselves from dooms scrolling and other energy draining behaviors, this if-then is going to bring us to using our willpower in a... Or rather, not even relying on willpower. Now that I think about it, I'm remembering the concept of ego depletion. And ego depletion means exactly what it sounds like — that our willpower just diminishes over time and our ability to make good decisions just diminishes along with it. So this idea of the If-then, and using it to automate behavior to manage energy is very attractive.
Robleh Kirce: That's actually one of the beauties behind If-then goals. Even when we do experience ego depletion, this is something that continues to be useful. So it's great for generating goals, setting habits. You can use it in a lot of places. Energy management is certainly a great target.
Vanessa Tanicien: So before we begin our own little experiments around If-thens, I'm curious, where did this concept come from, how has it generally been talked about?
Robleh Kirce: So Weber and Gollwitzer are two researchers that have really been looking at this for over a decade now. It's probably closer to two decades. And what they have found is that, there's four obstacles that pop up in terms of completing the goals that we set for ourselves. And what they found is that implementation intentions can be helpful in overcoming each of those obstacles.
Vanessa Tanicien: I'm curious what this looks like in practice. How does one use an If-then, how would I go about infusing this into my life, really?
Robleh Kirce: You can think about it at the life level, you can also think about at the team or organizational level. Anytime you're wanting to build a habit, you want to set some environmental cue that reminds you to do the things that you said you wanted to do. So let's say, "I'm going to Italy, and I would like to learn Italian." Am I really going to learn Italian? Probably not. But if I set a structure where I say, "If it's 7:00 PM and my alarm goes off, then I take the next hour and I study Italian. You never know, I might pick up a few words."
Vanessa Tanicien: Got you. So let's move into the realm of using this for our energy management needs. Would you be willing to guide me through this?
Robleh Kirce: Vanessa, I thought you'd never ask. I'm very happy to run you through an experiment. Just to get us started here, you, as I, as I'm sure many other people are experiencing some stress in 2020. So let's start there.
Robleh Kirce: Let's start with the problem that we feel. And I'm going to ask you to share maybe just two or three things that have been causing you some frustration. There are signs that let you know you're experiencing some fatigue at work.
Vanessa Tanicien: I know that my energy takes a complete nose dive when I'm in more than three meetings in a row. That idea of back-to-back meetings has never been a friend to me. I would also say, when I'm on a really tight deadline and I'm waiting on some materials to be coming from colleagues. And then generally when I realize as that I'm being argumentative in meetings, those are the things that really signal to me that, "Vanessa needs to pick herself up."
Robleh Kirce: Yup, yup. For sure. So you've got some environmental conditions that are causing you some fatigue, and also causing you frustration at the same time. Out of those ones that you shared, which feels like the most useful one for us to talk about today?
Vanessa Tanicien: I think probably the back-to-back meeting fatigue. It's something that I want to learn how to deal with in a more productive way.
Robleh Kirce: Something that I think in response to COVID, a lot of us are experiencing more of. So let's start there. And if we use this as the if in the If-then. Meaning, if I'm in three meetings back-to-back then what is something that you could do that would help restore some of that energy for you?
Vanessa Tanicien: I'm laughing to myself because the first thing that came to mind was, I should be packing snacks, but I'm not even. This reminds me of our conversation around time distance in cover and glucose availability. Go ahead and check that out if you haven't taken a listen. But honestly, it's probably because of that that I'm a little bit low energy in those spaces.
Vanessa Tanicien: I think the other thing is preparedness. If I'm in back-to-back meetings, I need to be prepared to contribute and then also be prepared to wrap things up so I can be fresh for the next one.
Robleh Kirce: So what I hear from you is that, there are some things you could do before you have the three meetings that would set you up for going through those three meetings better. Right?
Vanessa Tanicien: Yes.
Robleh Kirce: Effectively, what our If-then would be here is, if I see in advance that I've got three meetings back-to-back, then I grab some snack packs and I prepare for those meetings before I start any of them.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yeah. That was pretty easy, actually, to do that quick assessment.
Robleh Kirce: Almost too easy. Let's add one extra layer to it. Because anytime we're establishing If-then, there's three hidden questions in there. It's the where, the when, and the how. When will you realize that you've got three meetings back-to-back?
Vanessa Tanicien: I would probably notice that the day before. If I'm on my game looking at my calendar, the day before is when I would take stock.
Robleh Kirce: So you've got the time in mind. How specifically will you prepare the night before?
Vanessa Tanicien: You're really drilling me, man. And I know it's all in my energy interest. I would probably say, take down notes for each of those meetings and then throw an apple or a cheese stick in a very accessible space.
Robleh Kirce: Sounds like that's probably going to take you, maybe five or 10 minutes, jot down a few things that you want to say for the meetings, make sure you've got some cheese and some apples around. And now you're more prepared for the following day.
Vanessa Tanicien: Yes I am. I already feel a little bit more buoyed by the experience of getting ahead of it. Just with that small change, it's making a huge impact.
Robleh Kirce: I'll get you with a proactive If-then.
Vanessa Tanicien: So that felt really good for me. And I'm curious, how can we translate this into the workplace? Because as a leader, I would love to be able to use If-thens with my team.
Robleh Kirce: It's great for individual application and our own lives. It's also great for helping in managing teams. So my suggestion is that if you're a leader, you're going to want to follow basically the same line of questioning that I asked here. What are some of those signs of fatigue for you? Asking that of my direct reports. Then asking them to think about, what are some of the things that they could do that would make those experiences a little bit better for them? Once we got that in mind, you're probably going to have to ask a few follow-up questions, force them to get specific about, when are they going to do this? How are they going to do it? And maybe even where, are they going to be doing this in the kitchen, the living room? Make sure that they let us know.
Vanessa Tanicien: So it sounds like the If-then is the top structure for a small plan that's going to help us manage our energy in general.
Robleh Kirce: That's exactly right. It's a simple strategic planning tool.
Vanessa Tanicien: The littlest babiest version of it, and I'm obsessed.
Robleh Kirce: Yeah. It's very cute.
Vanessa Tanicien: That brings us to our LeaderLab listener experiment of the episode. So Robleh, how should people be using If-thens in their laboratory of life?
Robleh Kirce: There's two things I want you to keep in memory, if and then. Where the if is that thing that's causing you some fatigue or frustration, and the then is what you want to be doing instead. It's the stuff that's going to give you some energy, give you that boost that you're looking for. Now, just remember when you're getting clear about your then, make sure it includes the when, the where, and the how.
Vanessa Tanicien: And that's a wrap of another episode of the LeaderLab. Make sure to subscribe and share this with at least one other person, so we can all benefit from better energy management. Doom scrolling, be damned. If you'd like to hang out with us on social, go ahead and find us on LinkedIn or on Twitter @LifeLabsLearn. And to bring training to your team, head on over to lifelabslearning.com. See you in the lab next time.
