How Can We Survive and Thrive in a Fast-paced World? What is The Future of Well-being?
At Jalapeno, we believe that many of the skills that we help individuals develop to not only survive but also thrive at work should also be taught in the educational system. By doing so, we believe that we will be able to take a proactive approach with students in order to have a workforce showing higher engagement.
Through our work at Jalapeno, we realized that companies actually do understand the value of their people. After all, people are the foundation of an organization. We see that companies value their people so much that they spend approximately millions annually on employee training, benefits, health and engagement.
Even though companies spend so much time and money on these initiatives, they are still not getting an acceptable ROI, and unfortunately, companies are still losing millions of dollars due to lack of productivity and engagement.
WHY IS THIS THE CASE?
When doing our research on this, we came up with a couple of different findings:
- There is a definite gap between science and practice in the workplace
- Companies provide painkiller solutions to their problems. What we mean by this is that companies come up with short term solutions that have a great positive impact in the here and now, but actually have a negative impact when we think about the long term.
- Lastly, and our most significant finding is that in order to have sustainable engagement we need to have 50/50 shared responsibility between employer and employee. 50% on employers to change the environment, leadership and structure, which is usually 99% of employee engagement work instead of 50%. The other 50% should be empowering employees to engage themselves and have control over their own environment.
What we want to emphasize is that individuals should develop the skill to engage themselves.
What is that Critical Skill?
As consultants, we work with employees on an individual level and what we found is that employees do not perform poorly due to a lack of their own ability. This is the case for students as well. Poor performance is not necessarily due to lack of ability, rather, it is due to things such as:
- Poor planning
- Poor decision-making skills
- Poor time management
- Lack of self-discipline
- Lack of focus
In short, what we found is that :
When we analyzed the symptoms of individuals and companies, and why employees are showing this lack of skill, we discovered that most of the time, the root of the problem comes from a lack of self-control.
We live in a world that is so fast-paced, with so many distractions and instant gratifications that self-control becomes more and more critical for our success and well-being. A lot of research shows that we do not engage in self-control as much as we think we do, even when faced with simple problems.
We’re going to dig a little deeper into this right now with some quick activities.
You have only 5 secs for each question to solve it. Get a pen and paper, or your phone to record the answer for yourself.
A number/answer came to your mind for each of these questions. Did you answer 10 for the first question? yes, it could be valid for the next questions, and 24 days for the last question? The correct answer is 5, no not valid, 47 days. More than 50% of students at Harvard, MIT and Princeton gave the intuitive- incorrect- answers to these questions.
It is safe to assume that the intuitive answer also came to the mind of those who ended up with the correct number- they somehow managed to resist the intuition.
Why are we asking this question? These are just a few simple examples of how we operate on intuition with limited self-control. It does not matter how smart you are, most people go through the day to day experiences on autopilot and intuition
Let’s learn more about what we mean by self-control, why it is important and how it plays a role in our well being and happiness?!
What is self-control: The ability to change oneself by controlling and regulating feelings, thoughts, and actions to achieve personally significant goals is a major vehicle for personal growth and therefore, for well-being.( Rothbaum, Weisz, & Synder, 1982).
The value of self-control: Having the necessary resources, the right goals and the right motives are all important, but not enough. The ability to regulate our behaviour over time, make adjustments, overcome challenges, control side-tracking temptations, and stay on task are essential for goal achievement and having higher well being.
Having the necessary resources, the right goals and the right motives are all important, but not enough.
Our brain is constantly stimulated and has ZERO downtime. “Downtime is to the brain what sleep is to the body,” said Dr. Rich of Harvard Medical School.
Research suggests that our brains are evolving to become more easily habituated to constantly switching tasks- and less able to sustain attention.
“[our] brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive.
BUT many Brain studies show that our brain becomes surprisingly active during downtime. Periods of rest are critical in allowing the brain to synthesize information, make connections between ideas and even develop a sense of self.
We need downtime for a lot of things, and we need it to be able to regenerate our self-control efforts, so we know downtime is important — but why is it so important for self-control specifically?
Well, the straightforward answer is that we have limited capacity for self-control — but what exactly do we mean by this?
For example, many of us like to go for a pleasant walk while we think about many things, perhaps what we did yesterday or what we’ll do this week, but at any extreme, these two activities (that is, walking and thinking) seem to compete against each other for limited resources of self-control. Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist and economist, suggests a simple experiment. Next time you’re walking with a friend, ask them to compute 78 X 32 in their head. Most likely, you will see them stop for a minute to think about it. In my experience, I can certainly think while I walk; however, I cannot engage in heavy mental work that requires a load on short-term memory.
The point is that for most of us, most of the time, maintaining a coherent train of thought and engaging in effortful thinking requires a great deal of self-control.
Frequently engaging in tasks that require heavy cognitive efforts are not intrinsically pleasurable, and as such, we avoid them as much as possible.
So, why is it so hard to maintain this effort of self-control?
Studies conducted by psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues have shown that all the facets of voluntary effort, that is, physical, emotional, and cognitive, all draw from a shared pool of mental energy. As such, though their research, they have repeatedly found that self-control is tiring. If you force yourself to do something, chances are that you will exert less effort in subsequent tasks. In one particular experiment, participants were presented with both healthy foods, such as celery and radishes, as well as chocolate and cookies. One group was asked to eat healthy food while resisting the temptation to indulge in the chocolate. This group gave up quicker when presented with a challenging cognitive task, compared to the control group. Another study showed that any number of mental distractions can impair the self-regulation process, leading to failed self-control efforts. The researchers found that dieters, smokers, and individuals with drug addictions experienced failed self-control efforts when faced with emotional distress, negative moods or environmental stressors such as excessive noise or overcrowding. This shows that self-control is a limited resource that can be used up.
So, why do we see this? The explanation lies in the interaction of two systems involved in mental control — system 1 and system 2
In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains the tension between two systems of thought that are related to our mental control.
System 1 is fast, unconscious, and automatic. It involves associating new information with existing patterns, thoughts, and mental maps, rather than creating new patterns for new experiences.
System 2 is slow, conscious and requires mental effort. This system is more logic-based and requires us to form new patterns from the information that we receive. As such, this system is much more reliable than system 1
What we’ve seen in our experience, and what research has shown, is that engaged people operate on system 2 most of the time. They are more alert, more intellectually active, less willing to be satisfied with superficially attractive answers, and most importantly, are more skeptical about their own intuition. These people are also more engaged in a “flow” state of mind. Through his research, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly defined flow as a “state of concentration so deep that they lose their sense of time and themselves, and of their problems” — In fact, the joy that individuals felt when in flow was so great, that he later called this the “optimal experience”.
This begs the question, what is the relationship between self-control behaviour and well being, happiness and success?
In one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, Walter Mischel and his students presented four-year-old children with a cruel dilemma, now known as the Marshmellow Study. A confederate sat down each child and placed a marshmallow in front of them. They could either eat the marshmallow right there and then, or they could wait for the confederate to come back; if they hadn’t eaten the marshmallow by then, then they would receive a second one. The choice was simple, wither have that immediate gratification and eat the marshmallow, or exert self-control and reap the benefits later on. Now, lets fast forward ten or fifteen years later, a difference between those who resisted the temptation and those who did not emerge.
Those who resisted the temptation displayed higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, especially their ability to reallocate their attention effectively. As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs, had higher intellectual aptitudes and higher psychological well-being.
In our own experience, when a client presents a conflict between two employees, we automatically think about giving them conflict resolution training (system 1 taking over). However, it requires much more effort to think about what the root cause of the problem is, which usually goes way beyond the immediate conflict being observed (this is normally a symptom of something that’s wrong with the system).
I wanted to conclude by saying that throughout history, we have struggled millions of years against ice, fire, floods, wild animals and invisible microorganisms that appear out of nowhere to snuff us out. To protect ourselves, we designed weapons to enhance our quality of life, but those same weapons also turned around and destroyed us. As some diseases were curbed, others appeared. Nowadays, technology is advancing, through AI for example, which has encouraged us to use our system 1 more than ever, while downgrading our system 2 thinking. However, if we develop the skills mentioned throughout this presentation, such as self-control and its associated behaviours, we can leverage these technologies to establish more deliberate, human skills such as higher-level thinking, which can result in more positive outcomes in our lives. This is not to say that we should be engaging in system 2 all of the time, but we should be mindful about when we’re engaging in system 1 so as to not let it distort our decisionmaking process. We are bombarded by information, requests, news, emotions, etc. Which are all great. We do believe that technology is, in many ways, enhancing our quality of life. However, as we mentioned, we have limited mental capacities; therefore, the information we take in is extremely important and will determine our quality of life. The final point I want to make is that how we feel about ourselves and the joy we get from living, ultimately depends on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experience. Relying on intuition served its purpose in evolution when we quickly had to determine in which environments we could let our guard down to save energy for when predators were around, but this is different as technology evolves. We have little influence on how technology will change the environment, but we have full control over how we manage the information given to us by AI and other technologies. However, this requires a great deal of attention and critical thinking, all stemming from self-control efforts.
No great improvement in a lot of mankind is possible until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought. — S.J. Mill
We are Jalapeño Employee Engagement, a team of strategists, researchers, designers, and web developers and diverse consultants who share a passion for making work better. Based in Vancouver, British Columbia, we work closely with companies both at home and around the world to bring our vision of a better workplace to life. We spice up companies’ performance and engagement, resulting in higher productivity and profitability for your company. We love ideas, data and helping companies uncover the hidden potential of their workforce. By using data and science, we measure the pulse on your peeps. We craft tailored, visually beautiful (you’re welcome) and easy to understand reports to make the data accessible. Then we don’t leave you high and dry; we mentor teams along the way and make sure there are accountability and movement in the right direction.
Our mission is to help companies tap into this unrealized potential of what the workplace can be and to use data to drive happier, more engaged and more involved workplaces.
We can’t wait to hear about your challenges and how we can help. Let’s have a conversation
