747: How to Get Out of a Rut, with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

We all get into a rut sometimes. Once we notice we're in one, our tendency is to work really hard to get out of it. In this episode, how starting with something tiny is often the better bet. This is Coaching for Leaders, Episode 747.

Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders and I'm your host, I'm your host, Dave Stohoviak. Leaders aren't born, they're made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. We all get caught in ruts. We want to move forward on something. We want to try something new. Maybe we do try something and then it doesn't work. And we experience the frustration we all run into in our lives and in our work. And we don't necessarily move forward. Today, a conversation on not only how to get out of a rut, but to move forward through it. I'm so pleased to welcome Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She is an award-winning neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and writer. She is the founder of Ness Labs and the author of its widely read newsletter, a researcher at the ADHD Research Lab, and an advisor for the Applied Neuroscience Association. She is the author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Anne-Laure, what a pleasure to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me, Dave. The pleasure is mine.

The last part of that phrase from the subtitle of the book, A Goal Obsessed World, I've been thinking about that because if someone had asked me 15 or 20 years ago, how do I get moving? How do I get out of a rut? I inevitably would have responded and said, well, you need to set a goal. And I would have probably pulled out that SMART goals framework that all of us have heard many times. And Yet, as you say, we tend to get obsessed with goals. And I'm curious, from your perception, where do we go wrong with them?

Goals are great if you already know where you want to go, but that's a very small subset of situations in life. And the problem with goals in the traditional sense of the term, and especially those rigid frameworks like SMART goals, is that they're designed to really to give you a sense of certainty, to make you feel like you know where you're going, you have a plan, you have a vision, and now all you need to do is to execute. And again, there are some situations, a very small subset of situations where that's the case. You just need clarity, you need a plan, and then you just need to work hard and you will get there. But we know that in today's environment and our modern world. Things keep on changing, we keep on changing. And so clinging to that illusion of certainty is actually going to limit your potential.

You invite us, instead of thinking about things through the lens of goals, if we're trying to move, do something different, is to consider crafting a tiny experiment. What is a tiny experiment? Look like?

I'm really glad that you started by asking me about goals first, because I think a really good way to understand tiny experiments is in contrast with those linear goals that we're taught to use. So when you have a goal, you're focused on the outcome. You want to get to a specific result. Whereas when you design an experiment, just like a scientist, You start not from a specific destination that you have in mind, but from a hypothesis that you might have. You might wonder, what will happen if I try this? Is this going to work? Is that the right approach? And you design an experiment to find out. And to design a tiny experiment, you need two ingredients, the exact same ingredients that a scientist is going to need when they design an experiment in the lab. When you design an experiment, you need to know what you're going to test and for how long. What is the trial period? So you need an action and a duration. And this is how I define a tiny experiment in my book. This is how I say you design a mini protocol for experimentation. You say, this is the action I'm curious about, and this is the duration, this is the trial period I'm going to test that action and see what happens.

We're so used to goal setting that I think oftentimes we overcomplicate this. I know I do when trying to do experiments with things. Could you share an example or two of what a tiny experiment actually sounds like and like where someone would start with it? Just, just to get our heads around this, because I think sometimes we do overcomplicate this.

Okay, so let's say you're a manager in an organization and you've been interested in thought leadership. So you could design a goal of saying, I'm going to start a newsletter and I'm going to have 20,000 subscribers by the end of the year. That's a goal. Here's the plan. Here's the vision. Or you could design a tiny experiment by choosing an action and a duration. And here the action could be I will publish a weekly newsletter until the end of the year. That's going to be my duration. And throughout this experiment, I'm going to pay attention to both the internal and the external signals of success. And by that, I mean that we're usually very good at looking at external signs of success. So again, in that case, the number of subscribers, the numbers of likes, of comments, but the internal signals such as How does it feel? Do I like it? Is it intellectually stimulating? Those signals, those internal signals, are equally important. And so when you conduct your experiment, you withhold judgment until the end, but you pay attention throughout, just noticing what works and what doesn't. And at the end of the experiment, you can decide whether you want to keep going, or maybe you want to tweak your approach, or maybe nada, you've tried it, you know that you don't like writing a newsletter. And if you're still interested in thought leadership, you might look into experimenting with something different, maybe public speaking. It—

as you were saying that, I was thinking how often, because so many of us have been trained for goal setting and many of our organizations do that, that we do put a lot of our attention on the outcomes, the lagging indicators, right? And And it's not that we don't want good outcomes, of course, but it crowds out a bit of thinking about and noticing the leading indicators. The— is this working for me? Do I like it? Am I finding joy in it? Is it play to my strengths? And I think like intuitively, we sort of know we should be paying attention to those things. But because we're so focused on the external, the outcome, we don't notice sometimes those critical aspects of the leading indicator that is this really working for us?

Absolutely. And what you see with very smart, very ambitious people is that quite often they look back and they hit all of their, their KPIs, those performance indicators, and they don't feel so good. Maybe they're a little bit burned out, they're exhausted, they're overwhelmed, or maybe it required a lot of trying to coordinate things with your team, and it just doesn't feel that good. And when you think about it, is it really success if you manage to hit those KPIs but you sacrifice your own mental health in the process? I personally think that no, that's not the case. And if we want to be successful in a sustainable way, it's very, very important that yes, we have those external indicators. They can be very useful, especially if you want to stay aligned with your team, but those internal indicators are wholly important.

We've used the word experiment a couple of times already in this conversation, and the reality of experimenting is it means there's trial and error. And you write in the book, we don't just set our mind on a target and blindly power through. Instead, our brain converts the information it perceives into action. It uses feedback loops to constantly adjust our trajectory as we make progress. This feedback loop is so well established, it is considered the theoretical cornerstone of most modern theories of learning. And then you add, we don't go in circles, we grow in circles. This is, this is all part of how we learn. And yet, as I think about all that, it's also kind of maddening, isn't it? Like to go through that process.

It is. It can be. It can be maddening to go through this process if we have a very linear vision of what success is supposed to look like. If we think that we're currently standing at point A and we need to get to point B as quickly as possible, and that this is success, then yes, having to go through all of these cycles of experimentation, iteration, learning, making mistakes, and trying to do better the next time. Can be frustrating. But if we consider that success is completing each of these cycles, and each time you complete a cycle, having learned a little bit more about yourself, about your work, about the world, then all of a sudden that process can become very enjoyable.

Getting us to Make that shift toward here's what I think the outcome should exactly look like to really being more present in the learning process itself is, is hard for a lot of us. I know it's hard for me. When you see people who have done the previous thing a lot and they start to shift and they are able to do that better, What is it that's different either about their thinking or their actions?

It really boils down to our relationship to uncertainty. We've been taught in school and at work that uncertainty is bad, and when you're uncertain, you need to do everything you can, everything in your power to reduce that uncertainty as much as possible and get back to a place of clarity. Uncertainty. People who are comfortable with experimenting, and that includes scientists, yes, but a lot of other people who have developed an experimental mindset and who work in environments where change is the only constant, for, for these people, uncertainty can actually be exciting. There is almost a sense of juiciness whenever they're faced with something they don't understand because they know that when they are in a place of uncertainty, there is an opportunity for growth. There's an opportunity to learn something new. There's an opportunity to explore. That's the shift. Every time you find yourself in a position where you're not quite sure how to proceed, instead of trying to escape that liminal space as quickly as possible, pausing for a second and saying, Ooh, interesting. What can we learn here?

As you were saying that, I was thinking, wow, how much I aspire to be that kind of a person. And then if I look at my life and my daily schedule and how things are organized, I think, wow, there's a lot of things where I really like certainty, you know, or at least the illusion of certainty, which of course is what it is. It's not really certainty at all. And Is it enough for someone like me who like really likes certainty and structure to carve out a bit of time where I say, hey, in this space, I'm willing to be uncertain, I'm willing to try something? Or is it better perhaps for someone like me to actually put myself in a space, in a culture, in a team, in an organization where there's a lot more uncertainty to to train more like a scientist would of, of just seeing data. And I don't know if that's even an either or, Anne-Laure, but I'm just curious how you think about that.

Thanks so much for asking that question because it is a common misconception when people hear about my work for the first time. When I tell people to develop an experimental mindset, some people might think that what I'm saying is to experiment with absolutely everything in your life, and that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you should make sure that at any given time you have at least a little bit of space for experimentation, either in your personal life or in your professional life or in both. The space you can give to experimentation is probably going to be correlated to the— your sense of psychological safety at this time. So if you feel pretty stable in general across a lot of domains in your life, then you might feel a little bit more comfortable experimenting in others. Equally, if things are very uncertain, you're very stressed, you have a lot of deadlines, then there might be only a very, very little bit of space for experimentation. In that case, you can keep it very, very small. One tiny experiment that I give to people when they tell me, I have zero bandwidth, I can't experiment right now, things feel very chaotic, I need this sense of certainty, even though, as you said, I know it's an illusion, but right now it's very comforting to have my routine, my to-do list, and to just go and execute.

Right.

And I tell them, well, what about the tiny experiment of saying, I will not bring my phone into my bedroom for the next 10 days? Because sometimes experimenting can be about removing something. And it can be, again, in your personal life. You know that's something that might— probably, that's the hypothesis here— might help with your sleep and then help with your mental health and help with your productivity. So that's good, and it's not adding anything. So you can modulate how much space you give to experimentation in your life depending on how you feel at the moment. The one recommendation I give to people is to make sure that, again, it can be very, very, very tiny. That's why my book is called Tiny Experiments. But there should be at least some level of experimentation in your life and work.

I'm so glad you said that. I was just having a conversation with a leader in our community last night about the fact that a lot of times we think about leadership development, which is of course what so many in our community are doing, as I need to start doing something. And we forget that a lot of getting better at things is stopping to do something. I love the example of like just stopping bringing the phone to bed at night as a personal practice and an experiment. It's 30 seconds. It's just one small behavior. And you, you hit on something that I think is like so big on this, which is space and margin. And you highlight metacognition as really helpful for us. And you write in the book, the more data you have to reflect on, the greater the insights gained to excel amid uncertainty. For example, when you notice an instinctive response to pause and consider it, you're then able to separate it from the tangle of other factors that may be in play. At that point, you can evaluate whether it is a response you want to act upon. And as I think about that, I think it comes back to what you said is like a lot of times we just don't make the space to do that, do we?

Well, to be fair, life is busy for a lot of people. And so it is very tempting not to do that. That being said, we also spend a lot of time again scrolling on our phones and, and doing other things to cope with the stress. And so what I tell people is that try to replace a little bit some of these coping mechanisms with, with some more positive ones. And developing a metacognitive practice is one of those positive ways to make sense of the chaos and to understand what you want to focus on next and where you want to spend your time, your energy, and your attention. And in the book, I share a very simple tool that allows you to practice metacognition on a regular basis. I call it Plus Minus Next, and you'll see that the name is very descriptive here. It has 3 columns. In the first column, Plus, you write everything that went well. In the second column, everything that didn't go so well. And in the last column, Next, with a little arrow, everything you want to focus on next. And some people do that every morning. Some people do that every week. Some people do that every quarter. I even use it for my annual review. The idea here is to pause and to consider first what's going well, which means that you're taking the time to acknowledge that you did some good work and some things went pretty well. And so It's really about celebrating the wins, which very often we don't do. We don't take the time to do. Second, it's about also being honest with yourself in terms of what maybe didn't work so well, what could have been improved, and that's the minus column. And what I love about this tool and what makes it so powerful is that it's not a static snapshot of the plus and the minus. It encourages you to think about the lessons that can be extracted from the plus and the minus so you can iterate. That iteration is the basis for those growth loops, those cycles of experimentations, the ones that allow you to grow in circles instead of going in circles. So I highly, highly recommend first making a little bit of space for metacognition. It doesn't have to take a long time. It can be 5 minutes every week on Sunday evening or Monday morning. And second, if you don't have a tool yet, you can use Plus/Minus/Next, but there are many other tools out there that you can use.

And yet it's so simple to, to stop. And as you say, like 5 minutes a week, just taking that time. And I thought interesting, you mentioned in the book that you use this with your team when you're doing reviews, one-on-ones. This is the framework for having conversations about how people grow and get better, right?

Absolutely. Every single week I have my one-to-ones with the members of my team, and this is Exactly how we start the meeting. I just tell them, okay, plus minus next. They prepared that in advance. They walk me through it. It's great because it means that they took at least 5 minutes of self-reflection before showing up to the meeting, and then we can have a much more constructive conversation.

I think it gets back to what you said earlier. We don't go in circles, we grow in circles, and that this is a process. It's a consistency over intensity. In, in the process of continually coming back to it. And by creating a little bit of that space, then it illuminates what's the next step. And if we've got a next step, then we've got something else to try and the next version of the experiment to move on.

Absolutely. The other powerful aspects of this kind of repeated metacognitive practice that you do I think every week is actually a really good frequency, is that after a few weeks you will start noticing patterns. So something that happened to me, that happened to members of my team, is that sometimes it's been— we notice it's been maybe 2 or 3 weeks in a row where we see the same things in the minus column that keeps on popping up. And so that tells us that this was not a one-time problem. There is something here that keeps on happening. There's an underlying issue that needs to be addressed. And so instead of just ignoring that, in the next column, we can say, okay, let's try something. And we can even design an experiment sometimes saying like, let's, let's experiment with something that we think, that's the hypothesis, is going to help with that underlying issue. And at the end of the duration of the experiment, in our next one-to-one or in a couple of weeks, let's review the results together. Did that experiment work? Did that underlying problem go away? Is it better? Or maybe it didn't work. Let's try something else.

We administered a survey of our listeners recently, and one of the statistics that came out of that is that about 60% of our listening audience has a graduate degree, as you and I do. And so we tend to be people, as, as many senior leaders in organizations are, tend to be people who've been highly educated. And that's why I highlighted this next sentence in your book where you say, "The secret to designing growth loops is not better knowledge or skills, but your ability to think about your own thinking, question your automatic responses, and know your mind." And I highlighted that because I think in a way that's actually harder for someone who's had a lot of formal education because a lot of us have been conditioned that the more we know, the better grade we get, the more knowledge we have, the more we've memorized, that the more successful we, we will be. That's been the narrative in our society for a long time. And that's all good. And in a way, it gets in the way of doing this a little better, of sometimes making that margin of examining our own thinking and questioning our responses. And like you said, noticing those patterns, it, it's, it's a little bit of a leap of faith.

Oh, absolutely. It's, it's very comforting again, to go back to what we know. And our education can sometimes turn into a crutch because we think we have those frameworks, those mental models. But we know the most successful people are the ones who are able to update their mental models as they go based on the current data, the current context. So it is extremely important as a leader to know that, yes, your education is helpful, But really, the most important thing you were taught was how to think, learning how to learn. And that's the skill you should keep on using as you grow and evolve throughout your career.

I was so fortunate to be in the audience for an in-person presentation you gave a few months ago, and I was so struck by the power, the simplicity, but also the intention behind your work and the invitations to start small and the tiny steps. And I'm And it's influenced a lot of my thinking on how not only my own work, but working with our clients in recent months of really inspiring folks, hopefully a bit, to create that margin, that space. So thank you so much for that. And I'm, I'm curious, as you have put this book together, put together all your research in recent years, and you of course are spending so much time now talking with people, giving presentations, working with clients, I'm curious what you have changed your mind on in the last year or two around your work.

I initially wrote the book to help people mostly in their personal lives, and I didn't expect how useful— I could see it, but it's not something I had spent so much time on before the book came out in a, in a business context. And 80% of the work I've been doing since the book came out is actually with organizations, with teams, with leaders.

Huh.

Which I didn't see coming really. So that's been really interesting. And I'm currently doing quite a bit of work trying to translate more directly the concepts from Tiny Experiments to a business context, because right now most of the, the leaders who are using those frameworks at work are kind of just guessing how to apply that work. And so I feel like I can help. Since I designed the original framework. But that's been really surprising. And it really shows the power of sharing your work with others because then the feedback you get can kind of bring it into a direction that you didn't really think about at first.

You continue to do your own growth loops through your own tiny experiments as well through this process. Anne-Laure Le Cunff is the author of Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World. Anne-Laure, thank you so much for your work and inspiring all of us.

Thanks so much for having me.

If Anne-Laure's perspective was helpful for you, 3 other episodes I'd recommend. One of them is episode 376, How to Become the Person You Want to Be. James Clear, bestselling author of Atomic Habits, was my guest on that episode. We talked also in that conversation about how traditional goal setting often doesn't work so well for a lot of folks anymore, and the traditional SMART goals that we talked about in this conversation, and how we can think a bit differently through taking on a new identity, through starting small. So many echoes of what we heard today from Anne-Laure Le Cunffff, Episode 376, a great complement to this conversation. Also recommended Episode 507, How to Change Your Behavior. BJ Fogg was my guest on that episode. His research out at Stanford Finding many of the same patterns that rather than starting big when trying to make a shift on a new habit or a new way of doing something, actually starting small is the thing that works more consistently for people to make a new habit, behavior, skill sustainable. Episode 507, some key invitations from him on how to begin. And then I'm also thinking about episode 540, how to create space. Juliette Foote was my guest on that episode, and we talked about 4 key questions that she invites us to ask of ourselves in order to create a bit more space and to be able to do something new. Oftentimes we don't stop and just ask ourselves the question. She really inspires us to do that in that conversation. Again, a good complement to what we talked about today. All of those episodes you can of course find on the coachingforleaders.com website. We send the entire episode library to all of the podcast apps and services that we can find out there to be able to distribute the show. However, It's not possible on most of those to be able to search for episodes by topic, and that's why the free membership on coachingforleaders.com exists so you can find what is relevant to you right now. We are filing this conversation under personal leadership, also under habits, so that we can really make it easy for all of us to be able to take next steps. And we have dozens and dozens of categories inside the library, inside the free membership. Whatever you're looking for right now that will help you in your leadership is most likely inside of our library somewhere. Not only that, but multiple versions of different episodes and perspectives. Go over to coachingforleaders.com, set up your free membership. It's going to give you access to the entire library, searchable by topic, plus access to all of my interview notes, the free audio courses, my own personal library, and a bunch more inside the free membership. Just takes a few moments to set up. coachingforleaders.com is the place to go. And when I do hear from people in our community who say that they're in a bit of a rut, Often it's because they're at an inflection point in their leadership. They have a new role, a new team, they're in a new organization, and they are finding that what worked yesterday doesn't work today anymore. It means a change. It means a need to elevate. That's the focus of the Coaching for Leaders Academy— elevating leadership through the inflection points that we all experience in our careers. If you happen to be at an inflection point right now, and our support and my support may be helpful to you of elevating through it, I hope you'll go over to coachingforleaders.com/academy. Details there on next applications and more about our program. Again, coachingforleaders.com/academy. Coaching for Leaders is edited by Andrew Kroger. Production support is provided provided by Sierra Priest. I'll be back next Monday for our next conversation. Thanks as always for the privilege to support you, and I hope you have a fabulous week.