<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=291370464960901&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">

THE #1 SUCCESS HABIT TO TRANSFORM YOUR LEADERSHIP
Discover the single most important habit to upgrade performance to record heights!

saleshabit

Table of Contents

The Impact of Willpower

Radishes and Cookies

Willpower as Muscle

The #1 Success Habit to Develop: Reflect and Write

The Times When True Success Stories Are Written

Case Study: Aptive - Donnie Moser

Change for Good

References

 

Many leaders think off-days are an unavoidable aspect of professional work. But offdays can turn into off-weeks. And off-weeks turn into off-quarters, which turn into off-years, sending your company back into the dark ages.

Companies with too many off-days struggle with an overabundance of excuses for bad work or poor productivity, team members who aren’t driven to improve, and employees who point fingers at managers or coworkers rather than directing their critique inward. Companies with too many off-days lack willpower.

Willpower is at the core of success, and it’s experienced on an individual level even though its impacts are far-reaching. Some people display it at a very young age, as early as preschool, but most don’t. How then can people without this skill - and it is a skill - attain a strong will?

In this special report, you will discover how human performance experts have learned to understand willpower, how willpower impacts your performance at work, and how to increase the willpower you can access to improve performance in all aspects of your life.

As a result, you will become more self-aware, more intentional, and more focused in the ways that you evaluate your performance against your expectations.

The pathway to achieving greater willpower starts by applying the #1 Most Important Success Habit in your companies and teams

To best understand the #1 Habit, you’ll read about three different human performance studies that track how we’ve come to understand self-control, internal resolve, and the nature of willpower.

As you read, think about how they apply to your organization.

  • Do you see yourself in any of these studies?
  • Do your employees behave like any of the participants?
  • How can you use this research to prime your teams for success?
  • How will the findings in these studies change the way you coach your employees?

After that, you’ll see our analysis of the research, and we’ll take you through the most important habit that emerged from the literature.

Reaching for success has never been easy, but soon after reading this report, you’ll find that you are not unequipped to meet the challenges you and your team face on a daily basis. The people who succeed are the ones with the resolve to keep pressing forward, even when times are tough and things look hopeless. To do that, you need a principle to rely on and an action plan to activate when you feel like giving up. This #1 Most Important Success Habit is that action plan; it will change your work, your organization, and your life for good.

 

The Impact of Willpower

In 1970, a research study at Stanford University sought to better understand instant gratification with an experiment that has since been named the “The Marshmallow Test.” In the test, children were offered a single marshmallow, but were promised that if they didn’t eat it right away but waited a short period of time, they would be given two marshmallows. Researchers left the room and observed the children through a one-way mirror. (Mischel & Ebbesen, 1970)

girl-window

Left to themselves, only ten out of the original thirty-two children were able to delay gratification for the maximum wait time, fifteen minutes. (Mischel & Ebbesen, 1970) The results of the study helped researchers understand the way children cope with delayed gratification and allowed for speculation about reward and delayed gratification in humans as a whole. While impressive, the true impact of “The Marshmallow Test” wasn’t discovered until a follow-up study was performed on the original participants. (Mischel, Shoda, & Peake, 1988)

Researchers found that twenty years later, the results of “The Marshmallow Test” from preschool children were discovered to be an indicator of “self-regulatory competencies.” Specifically, this follow-up study showed that children who waited the maximum time limit scored better on the SATs. Further follow-up studies showed that children who passed the marshmallow test were higher achievers, had lower BMI, higher educational attainment, and showed, in general, better life outcomes than children who failed the test. (Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990)

If you think about the direct reports that you lead, would you be able to identify who is a one-marshmallow worker and who is a two-marshmallow?

These follow-up studies led to an explosion in research about delayed gratification, self-control, and willpower. “The Marshmallow Test” seemed to indicate that willpower was an attribute of successful people, an innate skill from early childhood possessed by less than a third of all people. The frightening conclusions drawn from this research - that lifelong willpower and success might be genetically predetermined, or else locked in at a young age-led human performance experts to further investigate the source of willpower, whether it could be taught, and whether individuals could change over time from a one- to two- marshmallow kid.

 

Radishes and Cookies

A response to “The Marshmallow Test” came out of Case Western University in 1996, seeking to answer these questions on the nature of willpower. Participants in the study entered a room that smelled like freshly baked cookies. Some were allowed to eat the cookies. The experimental group, the people whose willpower would be tested by the experiment, were allowed to see the cookies and see their peers eating them before they were handed a plate of radishes to eat instead. (Villarica, 2012)

The experimental group was understandably upset; some even vocalized their contempt for the experiment. Next, all participants were given an overly complex, persistence testing problem to solve. The results showed that people given the radishes made much fewer attempts and spent much less time solving the problem than people given the cookies. (Villarica, 2012)

Application Exercise:

What is the “plate of radishes” at your company? Is it a broken chair that gets passed around the office? A desk in an inconvenient location? A task that no one wants to get stuck with?

Now, think of ways that you can remove that “plate of radishes” from the workplace if possible. Consider how that might improve the performance of your team members or employees.

What is the “plate of freshly baked cookies” at your company? How can you give everyone access to that “plate of cookies”?

This study was groundbreaking because it proved that willpower isn’t a talent that some are born with, but a general strength that is used in many tasks and situations. The research showed that willpower is an internal source of energy instead of a fixed attribute that successful people exhibit from early childhood. (Villarica, 2012)

 

Willpower as Muscle

The 1996 cookie-radish experiment proved that contemporary models of willpower were out of date. The urgency to find a new model permeated the entire human performance community

Enter Megan Oaten and Ken Cheng, two Australian researchers interested in the impact of exercise on the development of increased self-regulation, a form of self-control. (Oaten & Cheng, 2006)

In their experiment, Oaten and Cheng took a group of self-declared couch potatoes and instructed them to follow a prescribed exercise regimen. With the exercise regimen, participants had to think deeply about their behavior and record what they were doing. At first, the couch potato subjects weren’t very good at recording (or exercising, for that matter). But as they got better at recording, they got better at exercising. The two habits progressed together.

But here’s where things got startling. Beyond their improved performance in the exercise regimen, researchers began to see improvements in other aspects of the participants’ lives. (Oaten & Cheng, 2006)

If you had to guess, what other areas of their life would you suppose saw improvements?

Reflect for a moment on this question.

If you had to guess, what other areas of their life would you suppose saw improvements?

Well, for one, they smoked fewer cigarettes. They also drank less alcohol, watched less TV, studied more, and made more progress on their other personal goals. Think about it. None of these changes were the purpose of the research study. Moreover, several changes were completely unrelated to Oaten’s and Cheng’s focus on exercise. (Oaten & Cheng, 2006)

Oaten’s and Cheng’s response was to perform the study again on new subjects using a focus that didn’t risk priming subjects to take actions to improve their health. The focus of their second experiment became improving financial budgeting through a prescribed budget/ savings regimen. Again, with the budgeting exercise, participants were required to think deeply about their behavior, record their performance, and compare it with the expectations set by the regimen. (Oaten & Cheng, 2007

The same transformation occurred in the financial management study. Skill at reflection and writing improved in tandem with skill in meeting the expectations of the budgeting regimen. Interestingly enough, the same secondary effects happened. Participants smoked and drank less, exercised and studied more, and made more progress on personal goals. (Oaten & Cheng, 2007)

This study’s greatest finding was that the manifestation of our willpower in one area spills over into all aspects of our lives.

 

The #1 Success Habit to Develop: Reflect and Write

Between Oaten and Cheng’s two studies, reflecting and writing was the only prescribed habit that remained the same between them. Each participant was required to evaluate their performance based on their predetermined expectations, whether those expectations were for finance, or weight loss.

What the general improvements in each participant’s quality of life showed human performance experts then, and continues to teach us now, is that the activity “reflect and write” is a way that individuals can foster willpower. It’s the self-control equivalent of doing bicep curls. Time spent reflecting and writing strengthens a weakened will. It builds up the reserve of willpower that you maintain internally.

It’s important to recognize that this kind of reflection goes beyond mere freeform journaling. In the two Oaten and Cheng studies, participants were evaluating their performance. They were comparing their success with a set of expectations and measuring their progress over time. Reflecting and writing was a critical thinking exercise to them. To take this success habit and turn it into a rote chore is to rob it of its potential to transform you.

When you think, reflect, and write critically about your behaviors, what you accomplished, what you did that worked and what didn’t, and how you performed against your expectations, you shift your locus of control inward. You put the ball in your court. Rather than making your difficulties someone else’s problem, you confront them yourself, head-on. Each participant who reflected and wrote in Oaten and Cheng’s studies became the author of their own success and fortune. It allowed them to change their circumstances by first changing themselves.

 

The Times When True Success Stories Are Written

When we take these concepts and apply them to business, we start to see a familiar situation unfold.

Everyone feels like the Wolf of Wall Street when times are good. Everyone feels like a superhero when things run smoothly.

But when things go bad... when the market crashes... when the competition catches up... when you miss sales opportunities because you’re off your game... when you lose productivity to finger pointing, blaming, and infighting... these are the times when true success stories are written. These are the times when the whole world sees who waits five minutes to get their second marshmallow. These are the times when you have to eat the plate of radishes before you can have the fresh-baked cookies.

When this time comes, if you don’t have some method in place to strengthen your willpower and keep you rooted to your goals, you will fail. The End. Without a strategy in place to maintain your performance and bolster your resolve, you will be overcome with fatigue, burnout, and apathy when crisis strikes.

You aren’t here because you’re okay with failure. You’re here because you want your team to be more than a one-marshmallow kid. A strategic method does exist. One that you can start using to strengthen your will today so that when hard times come, you, your company, and your employees have the willpower to excel despite adversity.

The Griffin Hill High Performance Journal and Priority Alignment Tool are “reflect and write” optimized for business teams and leaders. They combine all of the research discussed in this special report with additional human performance behaviors from Griffin Hill’s 30 years of research and development. The High Performance Journal gives you the framework to evaluate your performance by reflecting and writing in a way that promotes transformational change. So that by reflecting and writing, you begin to transform into a high achiever, capable of thriving through uncertainty, stress, and hard times. Using High Performance Journal will give your company the capacity to push through adversity with a critical thinking mindset, to get to the success on the other side.

And like the second marshmallow in the Stanford experiment, success is only minutes away. We have found that companies that spend as little as a few minutes every day in the High Performance Journal notice a positive change in the performance of their leaders, employees, and teams.

 

Case Study: Aptive - Donnie Moser

donnie-moser

Donnie Moser is a successful executive at Aptive. (He’s also an ELITE member in Griffin Hill’s Leader Success Revolution.) Aptive runs door-to-door sales teams selling pest control in places of the US overrun with pests. They do a great service to their customers by providing a solution to a dire need in these areas. Donnie’s team consists of about fourteen executives and around a hundred salespeople that he leads in his organization.

Part of his role is to be out with them. He’ll find a team in Austin, Texas and join up with that team for a few days, going with them on their door to door sales calls. Here’s Donnie’s experience with the High Performance Journal.

Donnie started the day by writing in the HPJ. Pumped and ready to go, he then went out with a salesperson and had a horrible morning. Rejection after rejection after rejection. Patterned rejection and criticism exhausts our reserve of willpower as surely as eating a plate of radishes with the smell of freshly-baked cookies in your nose.

Donnie, in a state of exhausted willpower, opens up his High Performance Journal, reflects and writes about his morning. In his entry, he vents about his awful experience, writes a powerful action commitment, and then writes what he is willing to commit to achieve that outcome.

Reflecting and writing changed Donnie’s state. It recharged his willpower muscles. The result was amazing. Donnie went out and had a record- setting afternoon.

Just the reflection and writing exercise in the middle of his performance day changed Donnie’s performance outcomes for the balance of his day.

 

Change for Good

When Dr. Scott O. Baird introduces the “reflect and write” method to new teams starting to use the High Performance Journal, he says, “It will change you for good. And by that I mean, it will change you permanently as you continue the habit, but it will also change you positively.”

If you and your teams struggle to meet your performance expectations and maintain willpower in the face of rejection and criticism, “reflect and write” using the High Performance Journal will turn the challenges you face into opportunities to learn, grow, and succeed.

“The number one success habit to develop is “reflect and write” in the high performance journal methodology. If a performer can do that, everything else in their life will change. It’s why we call it a transformational habit.”

Dr. Scott O. Baird

Dr. Scott O. Baird

Griffin Hill Founder

Start evaluating your performance, start thinking critically about your expectations, outcomes, and what those outcomes will cost, and watch the rejuvenating transformation of strengthened willpower spread from your work, to your entire company, and then spill over into every other aspect of your life.

 

References

Mischel, W., & Ebbesen, E. B. (1970). Attention in delay of gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16(2), 329-337. doi:10.1037/h0029815

Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Peake, P. K. (1988). The nature of adolescent competencies predicted by preschool delay of gratification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(4), 687-696. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.54.4.687

Oaten, M., & Cheng, K. (2007). Improvements in self-control from financial monitoring. Journal of Economic Psychology, 28(4), 487-501. doi:10.1016/j.joep.2006.11.003

Oaten, M., & Cheng, K. (2006). Longitudinal gains in self-regulation from reg ular physical exercise. British Journal of Health Psychology, 11(4), 717-733. doi:10.1348/135910706x96481

Shoda, Y., Mischel, W., & Peake, P. K. (1990). Predicting adolescent cognitive and self-regulatory competencies from preschool delay of gratification: Identifying diagnostic conditions. Developmental Psychology, 26(6), 978-986. doi:10.1037/0012- 1649.26.6.978

Villarica, H. (2012, April 11). The Chocolate-and-Radish Experiment That Birthed the Modern Conception of Willpower. Retrieved June 24, 2020, from https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/the-chocolate-and-radish-experiment- that-birthed-the-modern-conception-of-willpower/255544/

Take advantage of our Complimentary Membership Today!