My Top Three Favorite Success Books - All by Steven Pressfield

During our most recent Spring Sale, we offered organizations some amazing deals to encourage using the 20/20 Insight performance feedback system BEFORE training and our Strong for Performance follow-up reinforcement system AFTER training to ingrain the desired changes in employee behavior.

Steven Pressfield

Quite a few affiliate consulting firms promoted these technologies, and after the sale we awarded some nice prizes. One of the prizes was a set of books for the top ten selling affiliates during the period. All three books were by Steven Pressfield, my favorite success writer:

• The War of Art
• Turning Pro
• Do the Work

What I love about these books is that Pressfield doesn't try to re-invent the wheel. He just tells the truth about following your passion and focusing on getting the work done. And the stories he uses to illustrate his points are unforgettable.

I hope our busy affiliates find time to read them!

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2013. Building Personal Strength .

The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast

The title of Josh Kaufman's new book, The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything...Fast, seems too good to be true. Anything? In 20 hours? But as you read the book, you'll quickly appreciate that there's no "free lunch" or "snake oil" here. The method he describes is based on brain science and common sense. And if you do what he says, it will work. For several reasons, this is one of the most important how-to books I've ever read. Here's what I love about it:

He gets the brain science right. Skill acquisition is something that happens in the brain. If you want to influence the way you learn a new skill, you need to understand how learning actually works - in your brain. I've been studying behavior change, skill development and the human brain for over 25 years, and I can tell you this: Josh Kaufman did his homework.

It's a real how-to book. I recently read another popular book about learning, The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg. It does a fair job of explaining habits, but the No. 1 question any reader would have - "How do I change a bad habit?" - isn't addressed until the end, in a 10-page appendix. Explaining how to acquire skills is addressed throughout Kaufman's book - all 258 pages of it.

The book delivers. He presents a relatively simple approach to acquiring a skill as quickly as possible, one that is 100% aligned with the neuroscience of learning. He accomplishes this in the first 40 pages, then in the rest of the book he illustrates this method using six interesting skills he acquired during a single year. Throughout, he keeps it simple. At the end you're left with the thought: "I can do that."

He has a wonderful conversational style. It's as if this really friendly guy who knows what he's talking about is sitting across the table explaining things - without any of the boring academic or technical B.S. It's practically impossible to misunderstand his message.

He introduces his method by contrasting it with one of the themes of Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell's book became famous for the claim that if you want to become a world-class expert in anything, you have to invest at least 10,000 hours of practice. So now people everywhere are saying, "I'd better start putting in my 10,000 hours."

Kaufman makes a very important point: almost no one wants to become a world-class expert. All most people want to do is achieve "sufficiency," or "the capacity to perform well enough for your own purposes." The whole point of his book is that you can achieve this with about 20 hours of concentrated, intelligent, focused effort.

His method is to break the skill you want to learn into subskills. Then, do your homework to get background information about each subskill so you can practice intelligently and critique yourself. Remove all barriers to practice, then practice the most important subskills first - at least 20 hours each.

He then explains 10 principles of rapid skill acquisition. The first is to learn to do something you really love. That way you'll be motivated enough to do the required practice.

Another principle is to focus on one skill at a time. When I read this, I became a true convert. I've been preaching focus in my own work for years; it's a critical guideline that practically no one in the learning and development business mentions.

As for the other eight principles, well...read the book!

Even though what he promises is exciting and empowering, Kaufman is thoroughly realistic about his recommendations. "If you want to acquire a new skill, you have to practice. There is no other way. You can prepare. You can research. You can eliminate distractions and alter your environment to make it easier to practice. You can find intelligent ways to make your practice more effective or efficient. But, in the end, you must practice."

You gotta do the reps.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2013. Building Personal Strength .

Are You a Coach? 5 Reality Checks...

Someone asked me recently if I had anything to tell coaches—executive coaches, business coaches, life coaches, athletic coaches, managers, and parents—anyone whose role it is to help others perform better. I've been studying the neuroscience related to learning and behavior change for 25 years, and I've learned a number of crucial insights that, in my experience, are not common knowledge among coaches. For anyone who is truly interested in helping others make lasting changes in their behavior to get better results, here are five facts that are hard to ignore.

1. Knowing what to do is not the same as doing it. Even if you have given good advice, even if your clients agree with you and are strongly motivated strongly motivated to follow it—none of this means that they will start behaving this way. It’s because most situations in life don't allow for reflection and conscious decision-making. In the flow of performing or in a busy workplace, things often happen so fast that there’s little time to consider options. Most of the time, deeply ingrained habits kick in. People do things the way they usually do them—without thinking. If you want clients to consistently do something differently, they’ll need to ingrain your recommendations as a new habit.

2. It takes a lot of repetitions to rewire the brain for a new habit or skill. This is because ingrained skills and behavior patterns are triggered by neural pathways—interconnected brain cells related to the behavior. When any behavior is repeated often enough over time, the brain cells involved in the action will be stimulated to grow together. Once all the brain cells are interconnected, the habit will be ingrained. Only then will the new behavior pattern kick in automatically.

NOTE: This is true of positive, desired behavior patterns AND negative patterns such as bad habits. The brain doesn't know the difference. This is simply how the brain  works.

3. Most people get discouraged and quit before they can rewire their brains. Because the new way isn't a habit yet, at first your clients will often forget to do it. Instead, the old habits will kick in. Even if your clients make a conscious effort, in the early stages their effort will be unpracticed and feel awkward. These failures are an inevitable part of the behavior change process and can be quite discouraging. The disappointment clients feel is what I call “the crunch point." Many of them conclude that what you’re asking them to do doesn’t feel right and may not work for them. So they give up trying and fall back on what's comfortable. However, if they persist, eventually their success rate will improve as the new skill begins to wire itself. Then the skill will get easier and ultimately, the new pattern will become the default way of behaving. The effort to rewire the brain to improve a behavior pattern can take from three weeks to three years, depending on the complexity of the old pattern and how long it has been ingrained.

4. It's hard for anyone to make it through the rewiring process without coaching. It makes a big difference to have someone who cares enough about your clients’ success to give feedback, coaching, encouragement and accountability. This is the real reason they need you—to be there over the long haul to help them work through the crunch point and ingrain the new behaviors.

5. Core strength is always a component of success. Even if a client ingrains a new habit, without personal strengths and strong people skills the new behavior pattern may not be enough to bring success. Adversity is a fact of life; without patterns of personal strength, skill alone probably won't be enough to prevail. And nearly everything we do involves others. Being a skilled communicator is worth its weight in gold. So your client needs to be strong in these ways, too.

If you're in it for the long haul, you might be interested in this new coaching support technology.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2012. Building Personal Strength .

Remembering Two Heroes - One Long Dead, One Alive

One of the themes that runs through most of the blog posts here is this: Life is challenging, and it takes a strong person to do the hard things.

Recently I spent time remembering my time in Vietnam. The vast majority of my West Point classmates served in combat there. They faced challenges that most people can't even imagine. They had to do hard things.

I served in an area of Vietnam known as III Corps, which is the central part of that country. I wasn't assigned to an American combat unit. I commanded a mobile advisory team. Our job was to upgrade the combat capabilities of the Vietnamese Regional Force and Popular Force units around the town of Cu Chi. We lived and worked in the same villages where these soldiers lived.

I remember advising a Vietnamese captain and his unit one day on a mission to engage a Viet Cong unit that was known to be in our area. Sure enough, when we arrived at the location, we were taken under fire. The enemy was in a grove of trees on the other side of a swamp. I decided that the best way to engage them was with a gunship. I contacted the operation center by radio and requested air support.

AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter

About fifteen minutes later, the aircraft arrived. It was an AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter. I marked my position with a smoke grenade and gave the pilot a vector to the enemy location. He fired several rockets and his minigun into the area. This effectively silenced the Viet Cong's attack on us.

I didn't know it then, but two of my West Point classmates were serving as Cobra gunship pilots in Vietnam at the time I was there.

Richard C. Hulse

One was Rich Hulse. Rich and I were friends all four years at West Point. We saw each other nearly every day and attended many classes together. The sad thing about Rich was that during his final month, just before graduation, he admitted to the authorities that he had gotten married. On the one hand, I found it hard to believe that he couldn't wait until after graduation to marry his sweetheart. Cadets aren't allowed to be married, and they have to sign a statement that they aren't married each time they return from a pass or leave. Rich didn't want to lie about it; he didn't want to violate the Honor Code. So he turned himself in, and they dismissed him from the Academy just days before graduation. So he didn't graduate with us. It was tragic.

But I respected him for having the strength of character to do the right thing. It cost him his degree and his Regular Army commission, after all those difficult years. But he kept his honor.

He became an enlisted soldier, but was soon accepted into Officer Candidate School and became an Army Reserve second lieutenant. Then he went to flight school and learned to fly the Cobra. Soon afterward, he was sent to Vietnam.

In 1970 his aircraft was shot down and he was killed in the crash. Rich Hulse was a man of character and courage. He did hard things and gave his life in service to our country, and I think of him as a hero.

The other classmate who flew Cobra gunships while I was there was Woody Spring. Woody and I knew each other as cadets. He competed on the varsity gymnastics team. He went to Vietnam right after graduation, serving in the 101st Airborne Division. Then he went to flight school and served a second tour in Vietnam as a Cobra pilot.

Sherwood (Woody) Spring

This was a side of Woody that I didn't know. He was fearless. Looking back on my combat experience I believe the most heroic among us were the helicopter pilots. Whether gunship pilots or medical evacuation pilots, their job was to show up at the most dangerous moments. No matter what was happening on the ground, they came through for us. All these pilots were amazing heroes.

Woody survived his tour and eventually got trained as a test pilot. Amazingly, after that he was accepted into the NASA astronaut program. In 1985 he rode the space shuttle into earth orbit, where he launched three satellites during 12 hours of EVA space walks.

So Woody did a lot of hard things, too. He's another of my heroes.

Since graduation in 1967, our life journeys have diverged considerably and I never saw either Rich or Woody again, even though unknown to any of us we were busy fighting the Viet Cong at roughly the same time during 1969-1970 in Vietnam.

Today, there are young people who are still doing hard things and getting stronger for it. They'll be the achievers and leaders of the future. Some of them may even become true heroes.

However, in deference to the truth, most kids these days are involved in nonsense and being cool and taking the easy way out whenever possible. They have no clue what honor is. It's hard to say what their life journeys will be like.

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2013. Building Personal Strength .

A Simple Quiz Reveals an Amazing Fact of Human Nature

A brief quiz...

Which will make the biggest difference for you to get what you want in your work and personal life?




A. What you look like - physical attractiveness, wardrobe, etc.











B. Who you are - Knowledge, skill, experience, wisdom, health & fitness






Did you pick B? I bet you did. "A" is really nice if you can make it happen, but where the rubber meets the road it won't get you very far, not even in your relationships.

Yes, "B" is where the action is, and you know it. BY FAR, most people pick B.

But you know what's amazing? When it comes to investing in themselves, most people spend much, much more time, personal energy and money on "A," trying to improve their personal appearance, than they do on "B," getting stronger as individuals.

Maybe it's human nature to avoid doing the hard things.

It's easy to get your nails done. It's hard to lose 25 pounds.

It's delightful to indulge in your favorite guilty pleasure. Changing a bad habit can seem frustrating and even painful.

It's fun to shop for bling. Mastering a new skill or area of knowledge takes long-term commitment.

Of course all people aren't like this. There are always the notable exceptions - lifelong learners, people who work on personal development, people who are so motivated to achieve their goals that they work on preparing themselves to make it happen.

What about you? Are you one of these notable exceptions?

Post by Dennis E. Coates, Ph.D., Copyright 2013. Building Personal Strength .