Learn a new word: Abstinence Violation Effect

No, it's got nothing to do with THAT, get your minds out of the gutter for a minute.

I admit to not being familiar with this term until seeing the accounts of the demise of former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo's new venture - an app called Chorus. Chorus was a kind of a social fitness app where groups of friends would sign up/join up together, share their goals for exercise and other healthy behaviors, and remain motivated to keep up with these goals leveraging their friends on the app to keep them going (and accountable).

The idea for Chorus was that once your fitness goals were social and semi-public, you wouldn't want to let down your team and friends, (and risk some level of open embarrassment), by slacking off, or not keeping your commitments.

But as it turned out, at least for Chorus users, this wasn't enough to keep users of the app from continuing to engage with their goals and their teams. Once users began to fall behind, maybe due to illness or travel or work or because exercising is a real drag sometimes, they simply stopped checking in on the app altogether. You could say they ghosted their fitness teams. They would not come back to the app once they had felt like they failed, (and everyone else on the team knew).

Turns out this phenomenon has a name, (who knew?), called the Abstinence Violation Effect which can be described as when people hide from their support group (exercisers, people trying to quit smoking, people who buy too many pairs of sneakers) when when they fail to meet the group's expectations, instead of turning to the social group for help during these periods.

The Chorus app users who had lapsed in meeting their fitness goals never really came back to the app, and since everyone who has ever tried to stick with an exercise regimen has likely lapsed at one point, the demise of the app was pretty explainable.

Why bring this up, i.e. why should you care?

Probably just to serve as a reminder that just having a support group in place and available isn't enough for a person who really needs help - to exercise, to quit a bad habit, to start a better habit, etc. Just being there isn't going to help the person who has really withdrawn.

Setting smaller, tangible  goals along the way, with regular check-ins and rewards for effort and progress is probably going to give the user, (and the team) a better chance to remain engaged with the overall goals and with each other as a group.

The support group isn't there to 'help you get healther' it is there to help you walk 5,000 steps this Wednesday, to buy some healthy snacks on Friday, and to go with you while you attend a yoga class on Saturday morning. These kinds of small, incremental, but tangible kinds of things can help both parties remain connected and accountable to each other.

It is really easy to ghost a support group whose purpose is to 'help you get healthier'.

It is much harder to pull a no-show at a Yoga class on a Saturday morning when your workout pal is already there at the studio waiting for you.

Interesting stuff. And in case you were wondering, yes, I have purchased too many pairs of sneakers.

Have a great day!

Wanting to win is a great motivator. So is not wanting to come in last place

Over the weekend I was coerced had the opportunity to participate in a 2-mile time trial with my son's high school cross-country track team, and the results of which were pretty sad and interesting at the same time.

Let's step a bit to set some context. I heard about the Saturday morning time trial pretty late on Friday evening and was informed that the cross-country team coach encouraged the student runners to invite their parents and other family members to attend and even compete in the time trial, and in fact, many, many parents would indeed participate in the race. Armed only with that small bit of information, and since I am a very casual two or three times a week jogger, and I knew I could cover the two miles with collapsing, I agreed to show up early on run on Saturday morning.

Fast forward to the actual morning of the race and it turns out that no, 'many, many' parents were not intending to participate in the race. It was just me, one other older guy, (I say older, I probably had him by 8 or 9 years), and about 30 high school cross-county athletes lined up to race the two miles. 

My focus immediately shifted from ' I hope I can run a respectable time' to 'I can't let myself come in last place in this race', as a fairly decent-sized crowd of non-running parents, (as well as all the high schoolers), had gathered to watch the race (and eat donuts and bagels). 

After unsuccessfully feigning a pre-race injury in order to try and back out of the race, I was off and running with the 30-odd kids and the one-odd other old dummy like me tricked into doing this.

Here's how the rest of the race unfolded: first half mile or so I tried to stay connected to the back of the pack of kids, second half mile I lost contact with all but about five of the slowest kids, last mile or so I ended up passing a few kids, (most of whom I later found out were making their very first training run that morning).

And oh yeah, the other 'old man' in the race? He stalked me, about 15-20 yards back for most of the race and then tried to outkick me, (term used very, very loosely), in the last 50 yards or so. Once I realized this, I managed to speed up enough to hold him off at the tape. I ended up placing about 25th out of about 31 or 32. My time, while slow, was about one minute per mile faster than I would normally run.

What's the point of all of this, i.e., why place it on the blog?

I was thinking about how incented I was to raise my performance level not to win or even try to win the race, because there was no chance of that, but to a level where I simply would not be the worst performer. And it worked, to a degree.

The fear of being the worst, and having that be a public thing, drove me to perform better than I would had I been squarely in the middle of a typical pack of weekend 5K runners. I knew I had to push myself to beat even just one other person in the race and avoid the indignity of coming in last.

All performance is relative. It is true in running, and in most every other activity we take on that calls for measurement, (and rewards).  And motivation to perform to be the best, while certainly powerful and meaningful, isn't the only kind of motivation that can drive improved relative performance.

That's is from me. Happy Monday. Have a great week. 

I deny a problem with my attitude

You should stop what you are doing right now and watch/listen to 'Work For Food', one of the very best songs from one of the very best bands that never really made it big but absolutely should have, Dramarama.

In the video, (embedded below, in all its 80s glory), the band's lead singer practically snarls the line 'I deny a problem with my attitude' as he tells the sad tale of how his life hasn't really worked out the way he had hoped for and planned.  It's a pretty sad tale as I said, not just for how things have turned out for the subject of the song, but for how it is almost certain to never get any (or much) better since he can't accept neither the responsibility for his circumstances nor the reality of his situation. But it is easy to miss all of that in the guitars and drums and catchy hook of the song.

And it is also hard when we are the guy in the song as it were, hard for us to realize sometimes when it is actually us who has the bad attitude or the bad idea or are the one that is simply being a jerk when it is much, much easier to blame the other guy, or our colleagues, or society, or the faceless and uncaring government.

We all hate Congress, but re-elect 'our' representative something like 90% of the time. Everyone on the road is a terrible driver, (except us). And I can't believe the guy in front of me in the express check-out line has 11 items!  Can't he read the sign that says '10 Items or Fewer?'. We'd never do that...

The first step in making work, workplaces, heck anywhere better, more civil places is for folks to own up to their own bad attitudes and actions. Admit it, you've been the guy to leave the coffee pot with about 3/4 of an ounce without firing up a fresh pot. Just own up to it. And if we can all start there, and not live in some kind of state of denial about how wonderful we are, things will get better. They have to. Unless all the jerks out there don't cooperate...

Dramarama, 'Work For Food' (email and RSS subscribers need to click through)

 Have a great day!

TEAM BUILDING ACTIVITY: Create your own motivational posters

We've all seen the incredibly ubiquitous line of 'Successories' posters that have graced workplaces all over the world in the last ten years or so. You know the classic high resolution shots of mountains or a crew team rowing on a picturesque river or a graceful eagle soaring above a beautiful valley.

These images are accompanied by inspiring maxims or slogans with words like 'Perserverance', 'Focus', or 'Trust'. These posters, (a classic example of one is on the right), are terrible.

They are terrible not in that we shouldn't try to find sources of motivation and inspiration, especially at work, but that they don't offer any meaningful or applicable insight into how we can actually become more motivated or engaged. 'A team is only as strong as it's weakest member' probably isn't going to motivate everyone on the team to get better. It will, likely, make everyone perform a quick mental exercise attempting to identify the actual weakest link and a scheme to get that weakest link kicked off the team (or fired).

I thought about these Successories posters not from catching one in the service center customer waiting room at the Chevy dealer, (although I am pretty sure there is one there), but from catching this piece on Laughing Squid - An Amusing Line of Self-Defeating Motivational Posters That Quote Morrissey Lyrics as a Source of Inspiration. These posters, sharing the same kinds of imagery as the Successories posters, are of course awesome. Drop a Morrissey lyric like "There are brighter sides to life and I should know, because I've seen them - but not very often" over a backdrop of a gorgeous blue ocean and you have an unmitigated win.

The Morrissey inspirational posters are fun, but I doubt, just like the inane Successories posters that you would actually get any value from tacking them up on the break room wall. But what I think would be fun, and perhaps even a little instructive in a way, is to have your staffs create their own versions of the Successories gimmick using the same kinds of stock images, but having the employees write their own taglines and calls to action that would be more relevant to your specific organization.

I will even get you started, (feel free to add your caption, slugline in the comments), with the classic 'Rowers' image sans the good folks at Successories (or Morrissey), telling you what to think about it.

What do you have?

I might go with 'CONFORMITY: If we all wear the same outfits we will be sure to head in the same direction (let's hope it's the right one)'

First snow

Woke up this fine Monday morning to the first real snow of the season (see badly lit pic on the right), with maybe an inch or so of the white stuff coating the ground. I am not sure how much more (if anything) we are going to get today, I generally don't pay too much attention to the weather forecasts. Because the weather is pretty much almost always the same as yesterday. In fact there is a study somewhere (I am too lazy to go searching for it at the moment), that suggests that simply predicting a repeat of the prior day's observed weather leads to better, and more accurate forecasts than the ones that are developed by computer models and meteorologists.

But there is one 'truth' about weather that I immediately thought about this morning when I saw the snow: That weather (excepting for catastrophic events like hurricanes or tornados), is only interesting two or three times each year. 

The times when weather is actually interesting, (and exciting and perhaps even inspiring) are the first truly warm day in the Spring, the first cold, clear, crisp day in the Fall, and if you live in such a place that experiences this, the first 'real' snowfall of the year.

Aside from those two or three days each year, weather is more or less the same as yesterday, and consequently less and less interesting as the days/weeks trudge along.

I am on record as being totally done with the cold and snow of Western NY winters and am ready to move to somewhere like Vegas or South Florida as soon as I can pull it off. But even I got a little excited and enthusiastic upon seeing the puffy flakes coming down this morning. And I hate snow. Truly.

What's the bigger, more generally applicable point to this? 

Probably not much of one, sadly. Maybe that it is important to remember that while every day, day after day, can sort of feel the same, that there still exists the potential and capacity for excitement in the ordinary.

This little bit of snow here this morning actually foretells about five months of cold, wet, messy misery for me. But for today, at least for a few hours anyway, it looks incredibly exciting and full of possibility.

Have a great day - and stay warm if your day is a snowy one!