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brinazzle · 4 years

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Most of us go through life unaware of how our environment shapes our behavior. When we experience “road rage” on a crowded freeway, it’s not because we’re sociopathic monsters. It’s because the temporary condition of being behind the wheel in a car, surrounded by rude impatient drivers, triggers a change in our otherwise placid demeanor. We’ve unwittingly placed ourselves in an environment of impatience, competitiveness, and hostility—and it alters us. When we take highly vocal umbrage at disappointing food in a restaurant by abusing a friendly waiter and making nasty comments to the maître d’—neither of whom cooked the food—it’s not because we regularly display the noblesse oblige of Louis XIV. Our behavior is an aberration, triggered by a restaurant environment where we believe that paying handsomely for a meal entitles us to royal treatment. In an environment of entitlement, we behave accordingly. Outside the restaurant we resume our lives as model citizens—patient, polite, not entitled. Even when we’re aware of our environment and welcome being in it, we become victims of its ruthless power. Three decades ago, when I started spending half my days on airplanes, I regarded being on a plane as the ideal environment for reading and writing. No phones, no screens, no interruptions. The constant travel wasn’t an annoyance—because it allowed me to be hyperproductive. But as the airlines’ in-flight entertainment offerings gradually expanded from one film on a single screen to universal Wi-Fi and fifty on-demand channels at my seat, my productivity dropped. What had been apocket of monastic serenity had become a glittering arcade of distraction. And I was tempted and easily distracted. Instead of getting work done or catching up on much-needed sleep while crossing several time zones, I’d watch two or three pointless movies in a row. Each time as I walked off the plane, instead of being happy to arrive safely on the ground, ready to charge into my next assignment, I berated myself over the time I’d wasted in flight. I felt that I had dropped the ball on being disciplined. I also noticed that where in the past I’d leave the airport feeling relaxed and rested, I was now more tired and enervated. It took me a couple of years to realize that the onboard environment had changed—and I had changed with it. But not for the better. If there is one “disease” that I’m trying to cure in this book, it revolves around our total misapprehension of our environment. We think we are in sync with our environment, but actually it’s at war with us. We think we control our environment but in fact it controls us. We think our external environment is conspiring in our favor—that is, helping us when actually it is taxing and draining us. It is not interested in what it can give us. It’s only interested in what it can take from us. If it sounds like I’m treating our environment as a hostile character in our life dramas, that’s intentional. I want us to think of our environment as if it were a person—as imminent and real as an archrival sitting across the table. Our environment is not merely the amorphous space just beyond our fingertips and skin, our corporeal being. It’s not a given like the air around us, something we inhale and exhale but otherwise ignore as we go about our routines. Our environment is a nonstop triggering mechanism whose impact on our behavior is too significant to be ignored. Regarding it as a flesh-and blood character is not just fanciful metaphor. It’s a strategy that lets us finally see what we’re up against. (In some cases, I advise giving our environment a name.) It’s not all bad. Our environment can be the angel on our shoulder, making us a better person—like when we find ourselves at a wedding or class reunion or awards dinner and the joyous spark of fellow feeling in the room overwhelms people. Everyone is hugging and promising to stay in touch and get together real soon. (Of course, that feeling often fades the moment we return to our regular lives—in other words, find ourselves in a different environment. We are altered by the change. We forget our promises. We don’t follow up. We don’t stay in touch. The contrast couldn’t be more stark. One environment elevates us, the other erases the good vibes as if they never happened.) Much of the time, however, our environment is the devil. That’s the part that eludes us: entering a new environment changes our behavior in sly ways, whether we’re sitting in a conference room with colleagues or visiting friends for dinner or enduring our weekly phone call with an aging parent. For example, my wife, Lyda, and I are not cynical people. Although it’s my job to point out people’s personal challenges during the workweek, in my “civilian” life I try to be a nonjudgmental guy. I make a conscious effort to accept people’s foibles and “let it go.” Lyda doesn’t have to work as hard as I do at tolerance; she’s always the kindest person in the room. Yet we become different people whenever we have dinner with our neighbors Terry and John. They are a droll, amusing couple, but their humor stems from a sour worldview. Nearly everything that comes out of their mouths—about mutual friends or political figures or the neighbors’ pets—is cynical and snarky, almost cruel, as if they were auditioning for a celebrity roast. As Lyda and I debriefed after one particularly mean-spirited dinner, we marveled at the sarcastic comments we made. It wasn’t like us. We searched for reasons for our unusual behavior, concluding that the only variable was the people we were with and the setting we found ourselves in. In other words, the environment. In the same way that people talk more softly with a soft-spoken person, more quickly with a fast talker, our opinions were fundamentally altered inside the dark conversational bubble created by Terry and John. Sometimes altering one factor can turn an ideal environment into a disaster. It doesn’t change us. It changes everyone else in the room and how they react to us. Many years ago I was speaking at an off-site gathering of partners from a consulting firm. Although my previous work with this firm had gone well, this time something wasn’t working. No give-and take, no lively laughter, just a group of very smart people sitting on their hands. I finally realized that the room was too hot. Amazingly, by merely turning down the temperature in the room, the session got back on track. Like a rock star demanding red M&Ms in the dressing room, I’m now a bit of a diva about insisting on a cool environment for my presentations. I’ve learned how one tweak in the environment changes everything. * The most pernicious environments are the ones that compel us to compromise our sense of right and wrong. In the ultracompetitive environment of the workplace, it can happen to the most solid citizens. I remember working at a European conglomerate with a top-performing executive named Karl. He had a dictatorial management style—obsessive, strict, and punitive. He was openly gunning for the CEO job, and he drove his staff mercilessly to further his career. His mantra was “Make your number.” He’d write off anyone who contradicted his “number” or said it was unrealistic. To those who remained loyal, he’d scream, “Do whatever it takes!” Not surprisingly, his team started taking shortcuts to make their numbers. Some went from borderline unethical to clearly unethical behavior. In the environment Karl created, they didn’t see it as moral erosion. They saw it as the only option on the table. Eventually, the truth came out. The scandal cost the company tens of millions of euros and even more in reputational damage. Karl’s defense was, “I never asked my people to do anything immoral or illegal.” He didn’t need to ask. The environment he created did the work for him. Our environment changes us even when we’re dealing one-on-one with people to whom we’d ordinarily show kindness. Weturn friends into strangers, behaving as if we’ll never have to face them again. I was conducting a 360-degree feedback survey with a woman named Jackie about her company’s chief operating officer some years ago when she and I got sidetracked into a discussion about the emotional toll of her job. Jackie sounded like she wanted to unload some deep issues, so I listened. She was an in-house lawyer at a sales organization, specializing in employment matters. One of her duties was to negotiate separation agreements with departing sales executives, whether they were leaving of their own volition or not. “It’s not my favorite part of the job,” she said. “I’m dealing with people at a fragile moment in their careers. Most of them have no immediate prospects. And I represent the company’s interests, not theirs.” Jackie specifically wanted to talk about an executive who’d been let go. She’d gone to college with the man, reconnected with him after they began working at the same company. They talked on a regular basis, occasionally socialized. It was Jackie’s job to hash out the terms of his departure. The severance package was contractual and generous. The negotiable part was determining how much of the ongoing revenue stream from the man’s sales accounts would go to him and how much to the company. For reasons she couldn’t articulate, Jackie took a hard position with the man. Over several weeks of back-and-forth emails and phone calls, she used all her negotiating wiles and leverage to ensure that the company got the lion’s share of sales commissions from the man’s accounts. At first, I didn’t see why she was telling me this. “You were doing your job, being a professional,” I said. But she was clearly troubled by the memory of her behavior. “That’s what I tell myself,” said Jackie. “But this man was my friend. He deserved some compassion. Instead, I argued with him over a grand total of twenty thousand dollars, a sum of money that wouldn’t have made a dent on the company’s bottom line but would be significant to a jobless friend. Who was I trying to impress? The company didn’t care. It’s the most painful regret of my career.” I’d like to report that I had wise and consoling words for her that day. But this happened about ten years ago and the environment’s malign power wasn’t obvious to me at the time. I see it now, of course. As a lawyer, Jackie was trained to be adversarial. She was accustomed to arguing and negotiating over minor deal points. In a sales environment where everyone’s measuring who’s up, who’s down, who’s squeezing the last dime out of a deal, Jackie wanted to show she was doing her part. It demonstrated her value to the company. Unfortunately, that same ruthless bottom-line environment fostered the aggressive behavior that blurred right and wrong for Jackie. In her zeal to be a professional negotiator, she behaved like an amateur human being. Some environments are designed precisely to lure us into acting against our interest. That’s what happens when we overspend at the high-end mall. Blame it on a retail experience specifically engineered—from the lighting to the color schemes to the width of the aisles—to maximize our desire and liberate cash from our wallets. What’s really strange is that the mall environment doesn’t jump out at us like a thief in a dark alley. We have chosen to place ourselves in an environment that, based on past experience, will trigger the urge to buy something we neither need nor want. (This is even more predictable if we go without a specific shopping list—and put ourselves at the mercy of random, undisciplined consumption and a vague feeling that we can’t leave the mall empty-handed.) In overspending we fall into a trap that we have set for ourselves. The environments of a casino or an online shopping site are even less safe. Very smart people have spent their waking hours with one goal in mind: designing each detail so it triggers a customer to stay and spend. Other environments are not as manipulative and predatory as a luxury store. But they’re still not working for us. Consider the perennial goal of getting a good night’s sleep. Insufficient sleep is practically a national epidemic, afflicting one-third of American adults (it’s twice as bad for teenagers). Sleep should be easy to achieve. We have the motivation to sleep well. Who doesn’t want to wake up alert rather than foggy, refreshed rather than sluggish? We understand how much sleep we need. It’s basic arithmetic. If we have work or class early the next morning and need six to eight hours of sleep, we should work backward and plan on going to bed around 11 p.m. And we have control: Sleep is a self-regulated activity that happens in an environment totally governed by us—our home. We decide when to tuck in for the night. We choose our environment, from the room, to the bed, to the sheets and pillows. So why don’t we do what we know is good for us? Why do we stay up later than is good for us—and in turn not get enough sleep and wake up tired rather than refreshed? I blame it on a fundamental misunderstanding of how our environment shapes our behavior. It leads to a phenomenon that Dutch sleep researchers at Utrecht University call “bedtime procrastination.” We put off going to bed at the intended time because we prefer to remain in our current environment—watching a late-night movie or playing video games or cleaning the kitchen—rather than move to the relative calm and comfort of our bedroom. It’s a choice between competing environments. But because we don’t appreciate how our environment influences our choice, we fail to make the right choice (that is, go tobed). We continue doing what we’re doing, victims of inertia, unaware that getting a good night’s sleep is not something we deserve because we’re tired but rather something we must earn by developing better habits. If we understood how our environment can sabotage our sleep habits, we’d change our behavior. We’d stop what we’re doing, turn off our cell phones and iPads and laptops, banish the TV from the bedroom, and turn in for the night—as if we planned it. How we learn to change our behavior from bad habits to good ones, through discipline rather than occasional good fortune, is the subject matter—and promise—of this book’s remaining pages. But first, I have one more piece of disturbing news. Our environment isn’t static. It alters throughout our day. It’s a moving target, easy to miss. If we think about our environment at all, we probably regard it as an expansive macrosphere that is defined by the major influences on our behavior—our family, our job, our schooling, our friends and colleagues, the neighborhood we live in, the physical space we work in. It’s like a borderless nation-state bearing our name that reminds us who we are but has no influence on our decisions or actions. If only that were true. The environment that I’m most concerned with is actually smaller, more particular than that. It’s situational, and it’s a hyperactive shape-shifter. Every time we enter a new situation, with its mutating who-what-when-where-and-why specifics, we are surrendering ourselves to a new environment—and putting our goals, our plans, our behavioral integrity at risk. It’s a simple dynamic: a changing environment changes us. The mother who, in the environment of her home, leisurely makes breakfast for herself and her kids before sending them off to school and transporting herself to work is not the same person who, immediately upon arriving at the office, walks into a major budget meeting headed by her company’s founder. There’s no way she could be. At home she is more or less chief of her domain—and exhibits the behavior of an ultraresponsible leader, caring for her family, expecting obedience, assuming respect. It’s a different environment at the office. She may still be the same confident and competent person she was at home. But, wittingly or not, she fine-tunes her behavior in the meeting. She’s deferential to authority. She pays close attention to the statements and body language of her colleagues. And so it goes through her workday, from situation to situation. As the environment changes, so does she. There’s nothing inauthentic about the woman’s behavior. It’s a necessary survival strategy in a professional environment, especially if you’re no longer in total command of your situation. It wouldn’t be any different if this same woman were the head of the company. Leaders alter their behavior to suit the environment, too. The head of a major construction firm once told me that as an active defense contractor, with differing levels of security clearances for different government contracts, she had to be incredibly scrupulous about the information she shared across parts of her company. She was required by the federal government to compartmentalize what she said. She could share sensitive information over here but not over there, and vice versa. As a result, she was hyperalert to the link between her environment and behavior (failure to do so could not only hurt her company but land her in prison). As an exercise, I asked her to track her environment and how many behavioral personas she adopted as she went through a typical day. Nine, she reported back. She behaved like a CEO among her office staff, a public speaker at a PR event, an engineer among her design wizards, a salesman with a potential customer, a diplomat with a visiting trade group, and so on. Few of us are legally mandated to be so aware. This situational aspect of our environment is what I’ve been working on with my one-on-one coaching clients. It’s not that these very smart executives don’t know that circumstances change from moment to moment as they go through their day. They know. But at the level these people operate in—where nine out of ten times they are the most powerful person in the room—they can easily start believing they’re immune to the environment’s ill will. In a frenzy of delusion, they actually believe they control their environment, not the other way around. Given all the deference and fawning these C-level executives experience throughout the day, such misguided belief is understandable. Not acceptable, but understandable. For example, in 2008 I was hired to coach an executive named Nadeem in London. A Pakistani by birth, Nadeem had emigrated to the United Kingdom as a child, graduated from the London School of Economics, and had risen to one of the top five positions at a leading consumer goods company. Nadeem had all the virtues of a rising star being groomed for CEO. He was smart, personable, hardworking, respected (even “loved”) by his direct reports. But some chinks in his nice guy reputation had appeared. I was asked by the CEO to smooth them out. We all know people who get on our nerves and induce us to behave badly. Around such people, we’re edgy, nasty, combative, rude, and constantly apologizing for our uncharacteristic behavior—though we rarely attribute the cause of our errant behavior to such people. It was the same for Nadeem. When I interviewed his colleagues, a recurring theme came up. Nadeem was a great guy, but he lost his cool whenever he was in a public forum with Simon the chief marketing officer. I asked Nadeem what his issues were with Simon. “He is a racist,” he said. “Is that your opinion, or can you back it up with proof?” I asked. “My opinion,” he said. “But if I feel it, isn’t it a fact, too?” My feedback had said that Simon loved to bait Nadeem in meetings. It wasn’t racial. Simon was a self-entitled “toff,” a product of Britain’s privileged class and elite schools. He had a penchant for pomposity and biting remarks. The sarcasmwas his way of reminding people of his background, elevating himself while diminishing others. He wasn’t a fun guy to be with, but he was not a bigot. Nadeem overreacted to Simon. When Simon challenged him in a meeting, Nadeem felt that, given the decades of racial resentment and tension between Brits and Pakistanis, he couldn’t be seen as backing down. “If I take his crap, it makes me look weak,” said Nadeem. So he fought back. In Nadeem’s mind it was a racial issue, but he was the only one who interpreted it that way. Nadeem’s colleagues saw him as a vocal proponent of teamwork who wasn’t modeling what he was preaching. It was branding Nadeem as a phony. My task was to make Nadeem see that • his behavior wasn’t serving him well; • it was isolated to the time he spent in Simon’s presence; • it was triggered whenever Simon challenged him, and • he had to change because he couldn’t count on Simon to change. The big insight for Nadeem was that his behavior was situational, triggered solely by Simon. Every time Nadeem found himself in the “Simon environment” (that’s what he named it), he would go on high alert. It was a new level of mindfulness for him—and a critical (though not the only) factor in his swift change for the better. We’ll come back to Nadeem in Chapter 20 to learn precisely how he changed his behavior and, in turn, won back the respect of his colleagues and his nemesis, Simon. It’s an uplifting story with a shocking admission from Nadeem—and (spoiler alert) it neatly encapsulates the most important benefit of adult behavioral change. But for now let’s absorb and wallow in Nadeem’s hard-won appreciation that our environment is a relentless triggering machine. If we do not create and control our environment, our environment creates and controls us. And the result turns us into someone we do not recognize.   * I’ve since learned that David Letterman lowered his Late Show studio temperature to a chilly 55 degrees before going onstage. He experimented with room temperatures in the 1980s and discovered that his jokes worked best at 55 degrees, which makes the sound crisper and the audience more alert.

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