3 Steps to Stop Resulting

This is episode 284 of the Empowered Team podcast. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast where we explore how to optimize your performance in career, sport, and life. And now your host, executive coach and life strategist, Kari Schneider.

Welcome. Welcome to the Empowered Team Podcast.

I am your host, Kari Schneider, and.

Today we're going to give a you the three best ways to stop resulting. Now, that doesn't sound very compelling to start with if you don't know what resulting is. So I'm going to let you in on the secret of what is resulting. Resulting is this really interesting concept that is from Annie Duke. And this is from the book Thinking in Bets, making smarter decisions when you don't have all the facts. Annie Duke is a researcher and she has done tons of research on poker and statistics and decision making and leadership. And this cool concept called resulting really landed for me, so I thought I would share it with you. So before we go forward, I want to define resulting for you so that you have a sense as to where it might be happening in your life, why you might want to stop it, and how it's impacting your future. So resulting is the tendency to judge a decision, a decision's quality, or a decision that you made in the past solely based on its outcome, without considering the factors and probabilities that informed the decision. Okay, so consider this. You are basing the decisions quality solely based on the outcome. Now, I'm going to go back to a definition I've shared with you in a previous podcast on how to make effective decisions. As what is an effective decision? It's a choice. This is my definition. A choice we have made with the best. The a choice in which we have made the best decision we can with the time, energy and information that we have. So the decision itself is neutral. It's not good or bad or right or wrong. Now, according to Annie Duke, she's in alignment with that concept that the decision is neutral, that in fact we're deciding after the fact whether it's a good or bad decision based on what happened. So what she'll do in large groups of people, she'll go through and she's presenting or doing research, she'll ask people, think of the last year. Think of all the best decisions that you made. Think of all the worst decisions that you made. Narrow it down to one or two of the best decisions you made and one or two of the worst decisions that you've made. And when she describes this in her book, she describes it as that not one time has Anyone separated the decision and the outcome. When she asks this question about the worst decision and the best decision, she'll ask why was that the worst decision? Why was that the best decision? And ultimately they will answer that, well, it was the best decision because this amazing thing happened in the as the result. It was the worst decision because this awful thing happened as the result. And that is exactly what she would call resulting. Is is this judging of the decision based on the outcome, judging on the decision based on what happened afterwards, even though there are so many outside for and that the decision is just pointing to probabilities, we might have made an amazing decision. We might have made the best decision possible. And yet it could still have an outcome that wasn't the greatest outcome. Excuse me. I know that this has happened for myself in hiring people. I've gone and done due diligence in hiring somebody when I know I'll need someone. I've gone through the most wonderful candidates. I have done all of the things that are necessary to find the right person. And then lo and behold, the outcome was that they were hired. And then they may have moved cities and left. And the result is that I'm starting all over again. And I could have made that mean that the decision I made to hire that person in the very beginning was not the right decision. But the truth is, is that it was the right decision based on the people, based on the timing, based on the information that I had the that was the best candidate. I simply did not know and they did not know that they were going to end up moving a short span of time later. So what do we do? What do we do in this situation and why is this a problem? Let me give you an example here so that you can consider things that are going on in your life now. You may not be hiring right now, you may have been in a situation like that in the past. But there's little things that go on from a day to day basis. And it's things like this. For the longest time, as our older kids were getting older, we wanted them. I wanted them to learn how to cook, I wanted them to learn how to make their own lunches. But the only way that they were going to do that is if they started actually doing it themselves. And in order to do that, we had to teach them a few things about making lunch or about making dinner. And my husband was the king of lunch making. He would lay out all the stuff for the lunches. He'd have a little mini assembly line and away he'd go. And sometimes, rarely, he'd have one of the older kids help him, and then they would go boom, boom, boom, and get it all done. And all the kids would have their lunches made. And this is, you know, this is a decade ago. However, at one point I said, well, you know, they're old enough and each of them has helped you. Now you're gonna have to actually have them do it so that you don't have to do the lunches. And that was such a hard thing for him because there might have been a time or two when the delegation was made, somebody was told to make lunches, and then somebody didn't have their snacks, or somebody forgot the lunches, or somebody's lunch was forgotten, or somebody's lunch was made wrong with the wrong stuff that they don't like in it. And so there was a result. And then that's the result that would have us have the tendency to go, oh, that decision to have somebody else do it was the wrong decision because the outcome wasn't what we really wanted it to be. Now, it doesn't mean, and this is where I'm going to go against the grain here. It doesn't mean that that was the wrong decision or a poor decision. It just means that we didn't quite get to the result that we wanted and yet we didn't just get there yet. And it's hardest to see in our own lives. So I'm going to give you three ways that you can prevent resulting. First, I got to tell you another story, because I think that the stories and the examples really end up making it real for you. If I keep going only with the theory, only with the research, only with the expert examples, only with the my opinions, then you don't get to see how it really applies in real life. And that's why I want to give you some of my real life examples in this past year. Real life. You can hear my throat. It's not because I have a cold. It's not because I'm sick. This is part of the autoimmune illness that I was diagnosed with a over a year ago now. I could have said, well, that was a bad decision to record this podcast because my throat is just acting up, the autoimmune illness. Or maybe there was a trigger in something that I ate, but it's causing me to not have my normal voice. So maybe that was a poor decision to do the podcast today because my voice wasn't on point. That would be an example of resulting, because the result that I'm having is a scratchy voice or one that I have to clear my throat occasionally. However, if I made that judgment about my decision, it's going to impair my future decisions potentially because it's going to be put into the pool of information that I'm using to decide something next week, next month, next few months. And that's where resulting becomes very hazardous, is when we start to use the, the judgment we made on the decision because of a poor outcome. We use that as information for future decision making. That's where it becomes problematic in developing ourselves, in developing our businesses, in our workplaces, in our families. That's where we're not actually thinking in ways that are bringing in accurate information. Example of this is again with this graves illness. I went through really challenging spans of time where I had a very hard time driving. It was very demanding, very stressful for me to be able to drive. My cognitive abilities weren't there. I had a hard time with groceries, I had a hard time socializing, especially in individual session set settings where there were people that I wasn't really familiar with. Another really challenging one. When I started to actually travel, this is one of the last things that I was struggling with. It was booking flights, looking at calendar dates and then looking at the, the decision makings on the, on the flight information and comparing and doing that live time. I really struggled with the brain fog I would have if it was at the end of the day, which it often was, I'd have trouble with making the decision or I'd have a headache, come on. And my eyes would struggle with these are all symptoms from the autoimmune illness. So I made a decision to ask for help, which is a hard decision for me to do. But I asked my husband to book the flights for me. Now then I have a flight booked. But I didn't say, hey, can you run by me the options that I have and then book the flight. I just said, can you book these flights? I can't see to get this organized in my head right now. Can you help me with this? And his version of helping is fix it, solve it, get rid of the problem, crush it, crush the problem. So instead of coming to me with options, he booked the flights, he had them all booked. And then I look at the flights and I might have booked something slightly different because of the time change, because of some of the other travel around it. So I have the potential to see that outcome or result as maybe not the outcome I wanted exactly. And then have the potential to judge the decision and Say, well, that was a bad decision. I should have done it myself. I don't want someone else to book my flights next time. Now, that would be an example of resulting. And if I did that, then I would take that same information going forward and not ask for help. If I was in the same situation or a similar situation, or maybe it's a completely different situation contextually, but I might still be asking for help from someone. I might still have this lingering, this. This aftertaste of, well, I have to do it myself. Someone else can't help me. Now, I'm using these examples because these are the examples that my clients, myself, overachievers, leaders with a lot on their plate. These are the things that tend to happen for us. And this is one area that we tend to do, this resulting practice, especially when it comes to asking for help, especially when it comes to someone else doing something that we know we're really good at. However, the overall result can only improve if we keep giving someone else the chance. So the decision to not allow someone else to do that again, or not allow someone else to make the lunch or not allow my husband to help, it ends up causing not the ultimate outcome that I want, it ends up impairing that. So the impact on decision making, according to Annie Duke, is this. It can lead to incorrect conclusions about a decision's merit. A good outcome doesn't always mean the decision was wise, and a bad outcome doesn't necessarily imply a poor decision. So how do we mitigate this? We have to emphasize the importance of evaluating the decisions based on the information and reasonable available outcomes or outcome possibilities at the time, rather than just the one outcome that we want. So I want you to put this in context in that we're making over 30,000 decisions a day. There's research from Cornell University that says that There are over 220 decisions per per day about food. 220 decisions a day, just about food alone, Never mind the 2000 decisions that we're making per hour. So we're constantly filtering out these decisions as whether or not they're good or bad decisions. And what we do is we automate them. We automate them because it's too much energy for our brains to keep filtering out decisions. So if we automatically or if we automate a decision very quickly based on the outcome, then we're in the case of repeating that decision, repeating that decision, repeating that decision, E. Or not repeating or avoiding that decision, avoiding that decision, avoiding that decision based on a good or bad outcome. And that's where the red flag for me comes up, this is where it can be very challenging because ultimately we're not getting the greatest information right, basing it on the outcome. We're not basing it on how great the decision was, the process that entailed with the information had, with the, the, the whatever ability, with the ability we had in the moment, we're not basing it on that. Instead we're just basing it on the outcome. So our human brains have this desire for certainty. We don't want to say, I don't know. We don't want to be the ones that say not sure about that. We love to have certainty and love to have order. There's a Nobel laureate and psychology professor named Daniel Hanneman, and he's the author of a book called Thinking Fast and Slow. And what he describes is a system one and a system two. There's the system one, which is our reflex and instinct, intuition, impulse, automation. That's system one. That's from our most primal brain. System two is our most developed part of our brain, our prefrontal cortex. I like to call this our badass super genius. System two is where we concentrate, we deliberate, we choose, we contemplate. That's slow, that's slow thinking. And that is where we have not only a lot of energy output to slow think. Because we're using this really energy intensive part of our brain, we're also typically flipping it over, deciding, looking at various things, systematizing, strategize, strategizing, and that takes so much more energy. However, the system 1 is the repo reflex, the impulse, the automated. And when we keep automating things that aren't necessarily best decision making, practice, then we're going to perpetuate outcomes that may not take us in the direction that we really want to go. So making more rational decisions isn't just a matter of willpower. It's also cutting down on some of the things that we've been automating, revisiting certain things. Now, I know this might sound contradictory because you know that there's lots of areas that I have automated personally and I ask you to automate, to save your energy and save your time. That's intentional. However, we have to re explore that occasionally so that we can take a look and not compete with one system of automation, our limbic system and our slow thinking system, which is our prefrontal cortex. We want to get intentional and decide, well, what's going to be delegated as automated and what's going to be delegated as a slow thinking decision and not have it be resulting or based on this ultimate outcome. Because the outcome doesn't mean the decision was poor, the outcome doesn't mean the decision was great. Let's dis distinguish on the decision alone and the processes that we used to to make the decision, the information that we gathered. And if you're uncertain about this, take, take a listen or a watch on YouTube to our podcast about how to make effective decisions. So here's what I want to boil it down to. It's this. This. Some of the three steps that I'm suggesting here come from my own experience. They come from having a lot of trainings from Tony Robbins. They come from another business person named Keith Cunningham, who has a book, it's wonderful. It's called the Road Less Stupid. And he advocates thinking time, actually dedicating quiet time alone and thinking, concentrating very fully, very focused on one particular thing to solve or to expand upon. So thinking time. So these are our tools and, and also other resources that I use from Byron Katie to Brooke Castillo to all sorts of learnings that I've done. I've narrowed it down to these three steps in order to help you stop resulting because it's going to affect your future, it's going to hold you back from the direction you really want to go. It's also going to have you mislabel certain decisions that you've made and that's going to affect your future pool of information. So to prevent resulting, we're going to do step one, clarify and verify. Every time we get important information, information that we need in order to make some sort of assessment that's meaningful to us, we want to clarify. We do not want to assume. There's so many times with leaders who are very practiced at making decisions, they're very, very smart people. I've done this many times as well. We get a tiny bit of information and then our brains want to fill in the rest of the sentence or the following two sentences because our brains think we already know what's going to be said. We want to save time, we want to save energy. So we fill in the blanks. We don't bother listening to the rest of what's being said or we don't bother to ask further clarifying questions. And then we end up assuming. And you know the famous saying about assuming, it just makes an ass out of you and me. I hope that doesn't make this an explicit podcast just by saying that word. Anywho, what this means is we want to ask clarifying Questions. So number one, clarify and verify. It sounds like. So it's can I get more information? You said this and I would like to know this and this. And then they give you more information that's clarifying so that you can have more information to clarify the point and then you verify. So I'm hearing that that means blank and blank. Clarifying and verifying can be a conversation with a co worker. It can be clarifying verifying with your spouse. It can be. So for instance, the other day we were having people over for dinner and I, my husband sent a voice message to me, said hey, I'm going to stop by Costco or I can. He said I can stop by Costco and if I do, is there anything that you want? So I'm assuming that he may not stop by Costco and if he does, he's only doing it because he wants certain things. I made an assumption. So I send a message back and I assume that if he's going to go by Costco, he doesn't want to listen to a voice message. He's going to want to quickly look at a list. So I figure I'm going to make it easier for him. And I put a list on there and I say this, this, this and this. And one of the things on there was quinoa. And then I left in my message, I said, if you're going to Costco, then why don't you grab some of this quinoa that we get so that we don't have to cook potatoes. But that's what I said and I assumed that he knew that I was talking about the kind of quinoa we'd purchased that's pre prepared so that we don't have to cook more food. Food aside from the food we're already cooking. We have a pre prepared side dish and he comes home with a bag of uncooked quinoa. And so clearly both of us needed to clarify and verify. He made a decision on something and then had a poor outcome because it wasn't what I wanted and I didn't even care if he went to Costco, but if he was going, I thought it would make our lives easier to not have to cook as much. So clarifying and verifying is asking further clarifying questions, finding out further information. If you're on your own, this might be doing another Google search. It might be using AI. Verifying is making sure that what you found out is actually what you think it is. Is there a discrepancy between the other person and you this is usually between two people. However, it's such a useful tool. Clarify and verify. Do not assume because this will be very helpful in order for you to prevent yourself from resulting because it will add to your decision making abilities. The next step is number two. I would advise that you regularly this could be weekly, this could be monthly, this could be annually, depending on the context. Do an automation audit. Anything that you have automated, I'm talking how you brush your teeth, how you plan your clothing, how you book your appointments, how you do anything that's automated, you do an audit on that. Do I want to keep doing this this way? Because whenever you've automated something, you've stopped making conscious decisions about it. And if you've stopped making conscious decisions about it, then that's just going to keep going and going and going. And that automation is may save you energy, may save you time, but it also may hold you back from the direction you want to go. You may have to make a subtle tweak to your automation in order to get the results that you want. So make sure that you're not continuing to make the same automated decisions over and over that aren't taking you in the direction that you want to go. For instance, let's say you know you want to work out every day and so you do the same type of workout every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday. And it's great because you get your exercise in, you do your activity and you love it and it's done. But then you realize that the thing you really wanted, which was more energy, isn't really happening anymore. You're feeling pretty stale, you're feeling pretty stagnant, you're not finding that you even want to get up for the workout. But it's very automated, you just keep going through it. But you're starting to resent the system. That would be an example of it is time to redecide on what the automation looks like or make a tweak on that automation. So regularly, whatever. If it was workouts, maybe that gets audited every two months. If it is teeth brushing, maybe that gets audited every time you go to the dentist. If it is meeting structure. So say you have weekly meetings or bi weekly meetings at work and they're going a certain way, but it's starting to get. You're not having the impact, not having the results that you're looking for. Or perhaps it's getting stale as well. Maybe that automation gets revisited, audited every six months. So you decide the frequency. But please, if you're Going to be a deciding, intentional conscious human being. You're going to have to audit your automations. And I'm talking everything. I'm not just using automation for things we automate on the computer. I'm talking about the things we do habitually day in and day out in every aspect. Now that sounds like a daunting task. That's why I say use it contextually if it's going to the dentist, then automate your, your oral hygiene routine every time you go to the dentist. Next one, number three. In order to not be resulting pre decide as much as possible. Pre decide. Pre deciding is different than automating in that you've spent conscious time deciding so that you don't have to decide at a time when you know you're not going to be able to think as clearly. I'm going to say that again. Pre deciding is making that decision ahead of time because you know that if you were to make the decision later or at the time when you might need to, you're not as likely to think as clearly or as effectively or as efficiently. So an example of this would be, you know you're going to go into a negotiation in a meeting of some sort. You know that there are certain stakeholders at the table and you know that there are certain desires or demands from either side. You go in knowing where you are, you pre decide, you think about it ahead of time. I'm not just going to wait for more information in that meeting. I'm going to pre decide not only how I'm going to show up, I'm going to pre decide what I'm willing to work toward, what I'm not willing to work toward so that that can set the intention going in. You can even deliver the intention ahead of the meeting, ahead of the negotiation, so that other parties are aware of some of your intentions that you've purpose pre decided pre decide so that in the moment when there's more pressure, more stress, more emotional storm, perhaps, then you do not have the ability to think as clearly. So you want that decision making off of your, off of your shoulders, off of your back, and have it done ahead of time when you're quiet, calm, in your best state. So pre decide as much as possible. This could be something as simple as for me, it's setting out my clothes the night before in the morning, especially with this autoimmune illness. Some of the mornings for me have been not my usual pep and get up and go like I always have been able to do. I've been able to get up, go drive hard immediately, first thing in the day. With this autoimmune illness, I've had way more fatigue, very challenging sleep issues, lots of insomnia. So my mornings are not as great as they used to be. They're coming back though. However, I was always in a habit of setting out my workout clothes the night before. And so I made sure that I pre decided not only that my workout clothes are there, but what I'm going to wear the next day because I would have a hard time making decisions like that. And it was so much easier for me to do sometime around dinner time or mid evening before I went to bed and it's all done. And when I get up in the morning, I can just focus on getting myself awake, doing my morning routines, my meditation, my workouts, so that I can be fully prepared for my day ahead. Pre decide as much as possible. Don't leave yourself in this vulnerable, precarious position of trying to make a decision when you have pressure on you, whether that's time pressure, whether it's emotional challenges, whatever it is, you don't want to be making the decisions then. So we want to give ourselves enough space and room for those decisions. And again, this is going to prevent some of the feelings of being, being labeling, judging the decisions based on what outcome happens. So the last thing is a bonus and, and this is something, it's a just a quick story. It's that my husband and I had worked really hard to come to a decision and come to the ability to be able to spend some time in Mexico and work from Mexico. And right before about, I would say a month or two months before we were going to do this, he was promoted to a CEO position of his company. And the decision in the moment he made was that he couldn't go to Mexico. And I supported him. We both made this decision. It was just this immediate, okay, I guess, I guess Maeve and I will go to Mexico. I'll work from there. You have a quick visit and you have to be on site to, to step into this role. And when we looked back on it, we realized that we had made, we had caused an outcome that was really challenging on us. Now the decision at the time was the effect of resulting for so long. The decision at the time was that, well, we automatically do what we think we need to do and we serve other people and we don't necessarily put ourselves first because we've spent so, so much time putting our children first, putting our business first, and we've had some good results. With that. The great results with that is that the business survived when most businesses wouldn't. The great results with that was that those children thrived and they were in sports and they had good food. And we were looking only at those results. And so we kept making decisions that emphasized dividing and conquering. We kept making decisions that emphasized others wants, others desires, others needs over our own. And so in this scenario, we ended up. This is the, this is one of the effects of allowing this resulting to happen. We keep thinking that because of the results, we've got happy, healthy kids. Because of the results of being able to thrive in work and thrive in business, we think that those decisions were good decisions. And then we keep making the same decisions instead of reassessing why we made the decisions. And if we still want to make decisions like that. And in hindsight, when we actually consciously looked back and analyzed it and separated the result and separated the decision, the result was fantastic. He got the CEO role. I spent some time in Mexico, but it wasn't the direction that we wanted to go. And when we really analyzed that and we looked back on it, we didn't give ourselves the gift of taking a moment because we knew that he wanted the CEO role. We knew that that was good for him and good for us. We knew we wanted to go to Mexico together, but we figured that that was the cost. And we didn't go and sit back and give ourselves the gift of time to decide something that was extra important or unexpected. Often times in these unexpected things, where other people have urgency, then we default to their urgency. Well, there was urgency for this decision because they needed to know if he was going to step into the CEO role. But all that we needed was an extra day, maybe even two days to get back to them on this decision and then ask for what we wanted. Because this is the thing, we often get polarized or we, we separate the. The idea or the result. Binarily we say, oh, it can be this or this. And that's what we did. But the truth was, when we looked back, if we had said, you know what, let's say he said, I'm really interested in this role. I would love to step forward. I've been working so hard as director of Sales for this amount of time. I've promised my family that we would spend some time in Mexico and work from there. I really want to fulfill from fulfill on that. That would be most important to me right now. So is it possible that I accept this role and delay the start time so that we start three weeks later in my official role. How does that sound? Can we negotiate that now? It doesn't mean that we would have gotten exactly what we wanted, but upon looking back and him being in this role now for two years, we're pretty certain that we could have had exactly what we wanted, or at least some version of what we wanted instead of what we got. Which was he started the role. I went to Mexico with Maeve. We were separate. He was on the verge of getting burnt out. We were really doing a disservice to our marriage and the connection time that we needed. And it really came from a history of resulting a history of not looking at the decision making processes and really being able to look at the merit of the decision on its own because we'd have a ha. We had had a habit of doing the resulting so I hope those stories land for you. I've gotten a little bit personal on this one. I've also continued to do the podcast despite the friction in my brain going oh, this podcast isn't going to be good enough because I've got a scratchy voice and I keep clearing my throat. However, I'm choosing consciously to continue to go forward with it and I hope that this podcast gives you the courage to separate out those results from the decisions that you've made and take a look at the decision making process and give yourself the gift of time. Utilize the three steps of clarifying and verifying, doing an automation audit regularly on your processes that you automatically do all your habits and pre decide as much as possible. Give yourself that gift of time in order to make any big important decision. I believe in you. You are empowered. Taking all this amazing purposeful action, being up to big things and you've got this. Keep going. Have a great rest of the your day. Great rest of your week.

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