Something You Should Know - Negotiation Strategies for Regular People & Brain Hacks to Get Things Done That You Hate To Do

Episode Date: March 11, 2019

Decision making is easy when you have to choose one of two options. However, when you add that third option (or more), it is amazing how the decision making process can fall apart – even for really smart people. This episode begins with an explanation as to why that is. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3469751/Why-clever-people-make-baddecisions-Having-options-creates-noise-brain-leads-irrational-choices.html Even though many people say they don’t like to negotiate, the fact is we all do it every single day. We are constantly negotiating with co-workers, the boss, kids, friends, customer service and even the occasional car salesman. Since we all have to do it, you might as well discover how to do it better. Listen to hear some great advice and insight from G. Richard Shell, professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, academic director of Wharton’s executive training programs on negotiation influence and persuasion and author of the book Bargaining for Advantage : Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People (https://amzn.to/2ERQcno) Taking photos at a funeral seems like a bad idea. Hardly anyone does it. But maybe we should. Listen and I’ll explain why those photos may one day become quite significant if someone would take them. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/5-reasons-you-should-ask-someone-to-take-photos-at-a-funeral_n_5b9f3a6fe4b03a1dcca76e67 Every day we have to do things we don’t like to do. Those are the things you hate and wish would go away - and they often get put off until later. Eventually though, they have to be done. So here with some help for getting those things accomplished is Lara Honos-Webb, PhD and author of the book Brain Hacks: Life-Changing Strategies to Improve Executive Functioning (https://amzn.to/2IYWGoC). This Week’s Sponsors -LinkedIn Jobs. For $50 off your first job posting, go to www.Linkedin.com/podcast -Calming Comfort Blanket. For $15 off the posted price, go to www.CalmingComfortBlanket.com and use the promo code: something.  -Care/OF Vitamins. For 50% off your first month of Care/Of Vitamins go to www.TakeCareOf.com and us the promo code: something50  -Geico. To save money on car home or renters’ insurance go to www.Geico.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, why smart people sometimes make really dumb decisions. Then, expert advice on negotiating through life with your kids, your mate, your boss, and yes, customer service. Sometimes, especially with customer service, you're dealing with people who people get angry at all day, every day, and I've found that being nice, they'll be on your side. And they'll give you more by being nice than if you get emotional with them. Then, taking photos at a funeral. Should you?

Probably. And smart tools to help you get things done that you'd probably rather not do. A lot of these tools are really meant for those things. And it can be doing your taxes, of course, cleaning the car out. It can be reading those emails that were not urgent. Those are things that help maintain our life, but we don't tend to have a lot of enthusiasm for. All this today on Something You Should Know. When it's time to make a hire for your small business, naturally you want to find the best person for the job.

And odds are that person is on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Jobs makes it easy to get matched with quality candidates who make the most sense for your role. LinkedIn Jobs uses knowledge of both hard and soft skills to match you with the people who fit your role the best. People come to LinkedIn every day to learn and advance their career, so LinkedIn understands what they're interested in and what they're looking for. Which means when you use LinkedIn jobs to hire someone, your matches are based on so much more than just a resume. Now, the matches are based on skills and background, sure,

but also interests, activities, and passions. Matching lets you quickly get a group of the most relevant, qualified candidates for your role. That way, you can focus on the candidates you want to spend time talking to and make a quality hire you're excited about. Post a job today at linkedin.com slash podcast and get $50 off your first job post. That's linkedin.com slash podcast. and get $50 off your first job post. That's linkedin.com slash podcast. As a listener to Something You Should Know,

I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines

so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, something you should know,

I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something you should know with Mike Carruthers. You know, every time I sit down to work on the next episode and I look at the episode number that I'm working on, it just amazes me. This is episode 259. It seems like we just started this and we're now at episode 259 and still going strong. Our audience continues to grow. We're still ranked high in the Apple podcast charts and everybody else's charts.

And in large part, it is thanks to you for listening and for telling your friends about it and keep doing what you're doing. First up today, have you ever noticed how very smart people sometimes make very bad choices? Why? Well, it appears to have something to do with the number of choices. When you have to choose between two things, the choice is easy. It's either one or the other. But when a third option, option C, is introduced that is less appealing than option A or B, people may change their initial choice, even if it seems irrational. And the reasons for this have puzzled psychologists for years.

But now a team of international researchers believes it has found the answer. And it's down to what they call noise in your brain. Just as it can be hard to concentrate while somebody's playing loud music, making a choice becomes harder when you have more alternatives to choose from, even if those alternatives are quickly dismissed. So, for example, if A is preferred to B and B is preferred to C, well, then it would seem obvious that A should be preferred to C. But that's not how we process the decision. We tend to look at the choices more like a

game of rock, paper, scissors, where the choices differ in a circle, not a straight line. Decisions become influenced by irrelevant factors and we can end up making a poor choice. And that is something you should know. As you live, you negotiate. It's part of getting through the day. You negotiate with your kids, with your spouse, co-workers, your boss, store clerks, and yes, even car salesmen. The word negotiation does have a negative connotation for some people. To negotiate is sometimes thought of as sleazy or cheap, but not to my guest. Richard Schell is a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and he serves as the academic director of Wharton's Executive Training Program on Negotiation, Influence, and Persuasion. He's also the author of a book called Bargaining for Advantage,

Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People. Hey, Richard, thanks for coming on. Thanks, Mike. A pleasure to be here. So clearly you have a different and more positive view of negotiation. How do you see it? I think of it as really a kind of persuasion process, and people generally don't have much trouble with persuasion as a concept. It's just that it's a kind of persuasion that's happening when you also have one other thing that has to happen. And that one other thing is you have to decide who gets what share of something. So it may be who gets what share of the one piece of pie that's left over, or it may be the money that is in the salary pool. But whatever it is, something has to be allocated and divided.

And whenever that happens, then negotiation is not just an option. It's a requirement. Everybody involved is going to be negotiating whether they like it or not or if they know it or not. So my attitude tends to be, well, if you have to be negotiating when you're deciding who's going to do the dishes or who's going to pick up the kids or who's going to contribute what amount of time to what activity at your local community center, I'd say it's better to be skillful at it than not. And skillful doesn't mean manipulative or tricky. Skillful means that you do it consciously and you do it with an awareness that there might be some extra emotions or tension involved because you're having to allocate something. And then you manage those tensions so that they don't hurt the relationship and you get a fair deal and people feel good about it when it's over. So I think it's not a question of whether you do it, it's whether you do it well.

There is so much talk about when people discuss negotiation that it's important to have a win-win negotiation. I've always had trouble with that concept because that's not always possible and I'm not even sure it's so desirable. Yeah, it's sort of a silly idea for someone to say, let's go down to the car dealership and have a win-win negotiation when we buy our car, because your goal is to get the car you want at the least possible price. So that's your goal. Your goal is not to have a win-win negotiation, or it shouldn't be. I think your question also raises an interesting question about personality types.

And I've done a lot of research on this. And the world divides into personalities. Everybody has a different one and different kind of tendencies. When it comes to negotiation, some people tend to be very competitive and some people tend to be very competitive, and some people tend to be highly cooperative, just by personality. It's their disposition. They're agreeable people or they're kind of goal-oriented, driven people. When it comes to negotiation, if you happen to be a cooperative person in general, and you ask yourself, how can I make this a win-win situation, then you're almost certainly going to concede too much too soon, too often, and in the wrong way. Because you're

already a good person who's already empathetic and worried about the relationship with the other person and making sure they like you. And if you then add on top of that a negotiation goal that the other side feel good, you're just doubling down on something that you've already pretty much on autopilot to do. So I think it's actually dangerous for cooperative people to be too explicitly concerned about win-win because they're going to be doing half the work for the other side already. On the other hand, competitive people often disregard the relationship factor in negotiations and are just, you know, full steam ahead and ready to, you know, break through all the barriers and doors to get what they want. And that can often be a mistake. You can be too strong, too hard, not careful or diplomatic enough and, you know, create irritation where you don't need to and leave opportunities

on the table to create better relationships when you should have. And so for that kind of person, this phrase win-win as a goal, as a sort of reminder, might actually be helpful, because it reminds them that the other side's feelings matter, and they ought to be somewhat concerned about leaving the relationship in good order. So when you go into a negotiation, and maybe this is more of a formal negotiation, but it probably applies to any, what is it you go in thinking? What is the mindset? What is the preparation so that things come out your way or at least closer to your way than you might otherwise get?

I teach a week-long program of negotiation for executives and diplomats and, you know, Navy SEALs at Wharton. And so you've just asked a question about what's the resort of a negotiation expert. Preparation depends on the situation and the other people you face. In general, you ought to always prepare your goals. You always ought to have a sense of where you're headed, you know, what your outcome looks like, and be fairly specific about that.

You then have to kind of map the social situation that you're in and understand the relationship dynamics on both sides of the table. Let me just put this in a simple example. So it wasn't too long ago that I went out and bought a new car. You know, when a negotiation teacher goes to buy a car, it's like a PhD exam. I have to be really, if I'm going to be entitled to teach a subject, I have to do this right. Yeah, you better have gotten a really good deal on that car. Oh, I think I did. But honestly, the first thing I did was talk to my wife about what kind of car, you know, we had a 10-year-old Toyota Camry. And so, you know, what kind of car

did she think would be a good car for us? Just the fact that I consulted with her on this question is kind of part of every negotiation. It could be a very complicated State Department one or a very simple go-get-a-car one. You always want to start by talking with your own team about what their goals are and where this fits. So there was that. And then, of course, it's a car. So there's lots and lots of information out there

about what the new cars are going for, what the price ranges are going for, what the price ranges are, all the details about their different quality and bells and whistles. And so the next thing was to prepare and set a goal of what I wanted. And that required some research. If you don't go in knowing what you want, especially if you're a consumer, you'll be talked into wanting something. Because the salespeople are really highly trained, and they're not going to necessarily sell you a pig and a poke, but they're going to sell you the car they want to sell as opposed to the one that you know you want to buy.

And so it really helps to be prepared. So I did all that work. And then finally came time to actually do the price thing. And these days, if you're going to buy a car, and I'd already done a little drive around, you know, with a few different things that, you know, when my preparation was going on. So I really knew exactly what I wanted. And so then I went to the web. And all you have to do on some of the websites now is put in the car you want, and the zip code you live in. And then there are a series of dealerships that will pop up. And you get to choose, do you want to send this request to how many dealerships? So I, you know,

picked six that were within sort of a 20 mile radius of my house in Philadelphia and immediately set up an auction. It wasn't an auction where I was selling something. It was an auction for who was going to win the business that I was going to buy? The most important thing in that negotiation for me was that I was very honest with every dealership that I talked to. And I told them truthfully, I was going to buy a car that day. And so it was just a question of who was going to sell it to me. I'm talking with Richard Schell. He is a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania

and author of the book, Bargaining for Advantage, Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People. You know, Care-of has been a sponsor of Something You Should Know for a while now, and I've always thought, how come no one came up with this before? It's such a great idea. Care-of is a monthly subscription vitamin service that delivers completely personalized vitamin and supplement packs right to your door.

And so what happens is you take this online quiz. I took the quiz. It took about five minutes. And you find out your personal, scientifically-backed vitamin and supplement recommendations. And this is important

because 90% of people fall short of FDA-recommended guidelines for at least one vitamin or nutrient. But which ones? You don't know. I didn't know. But you will know once you take the quiz. Then, your Care-of subscription box gets sent right to your door with your personalized daily packs. I think this is the best part. Everything I need in one daily pack, personalized for me. And here's a little icing on the cake to make you feel good.

A portion of every sale goes toward the Good Plus Foundation, which provides expectant mothers in need with valuable prenatal vitamins. For 50% off your first month of personalized care of vitamins, go to takecareof.com and enter the promo code SOMETHING50. This is a great deal. 50% off your first month of personalized care of vitamins. Go to TakeCareOf.com and enter the promo code SOMETHING50. That's SOMETHING50.

People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool.

And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning,

a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star

cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go Network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. So Richard, I know you say that part of skillful negotiation is to tell the truth, but tell the truth slowly. So explain what that means. It means you tell people what you're willing to tell them that's true at each stage of the process. So you go into the dealership and they say,

how much money do you want to pay? And you tell them the truth about your aspiration. I don't want to spend more than $28,000 for the car as I start this process. And then as more information comes out, you maybe learn to trust the other person a little bit. They tell you the truth about something that they didn't have to tell you. You might then reveal a little more about the truth from your side that is going to help set the foundation so that the negotiation that ends solves the problem that you really have. Every time you start lying in a negotiation, I think,

it distorts the potential outcomes that you might have. And you find yourself in a box later on where you really would rather have the truth be the way you're going to proceed, but you already lied, so you don't have the truth there without losing all your credibility. And it's just a mistake. So telling the truth slowly just means like turning over cards on a deck if you're playing a game of cards. Each card is a true card. You're not dealing from the bottom of the deck, but you don't put the whole deck face up at the beginning. A lot of times in negotiation, especially like when you're negotiating for something with customer

service, emotions quickly arise and things go off the rails because people start yelling at each other. How do you avoid that? How do you get what you want when you're dealing with somebody like that whose job it is to maybe not give you what you want? You raised a couple of interesting issues there. One is what about emotions and how do they play into the process? And the other is dealing with someone who doesn't want to negotiate. So let's deal with emotions first. So my motto on that one is never lose your emotions.

Use your emotions. If you lose your emotions, you're likely to overdo something, say things you regret, ruin the relationship, make it harder to come back the next day if the problem still needs to be solved. You set yourself up for having to apologize. There are all kinds of things that can happen when you lose your emotions. I think using your emotions is a good idea. Sometimes you're entitled to be angry when the other side has misbehaved, but using your emotions means you can be emphatic. You can get angry, but you get angry in a control way. I think sometimes, especially with customer service, you're dealing with people who people get angry at all day, every day. And so getting angry just puts you in a category with a lot of other people they don't want to help.

And I've found, especially if you're doing this on the phone, that being nice and being empathetic with their situation as being someone who has to handle this can often get you to be on, they'll be on your side, and they'll give you more by being nice than if you get emotional with them. I always like to imagine what the other side situation is and then how best to move them to help you. At the end of the day, if there's someone who simply doesn't want to deal with you, you move on. You say, I need to talk to somebody else. And I want to talk to the supervisor. I want to talk to the owner. I want

to talk to someone who can make a decision because I don't think you understand the situation. One of the frustrating things I find today is a lot of negotiations now happens by email. You don't actually talk to anybody. You have to write it. And it seems somewhat removed from, it just seems unnatural. What are your suggestions? Well, email negotiations, I think, are especially fraught. I recommend never doing any kind of sensitive negotiation on email, especially a dispute where people have different perceptions of what's going on, because that email is going to be very, very blunt, easily misunderstood because there's no tone to it that's going to be shared the way a conversation can be. So I like to avoid them if I can.

On the other hand, email is great for confirming information, for setting up meetings and phone calls. So if it's an important negotiation over some important stakes, I would always push to talk on the phone before I'd agree or let myself be talked into negotiating on email. If there's no other option, then I would just be very, very careful how you write it so that the other side is aware that you're aware, this is the way negotiations work, that the relationship matters and that you're trying to be civil and cooperative in getting whatever the thing is resolved. But in any consequential negotiation I've ever been involved in, including car sales and disputes over customer service or whatever, I almost always end up on the phone.

And the email may be the first round, but it just ends up being an email to set up a phone call. When you look, and you have a unique vantage point being someone who teaches this and who's really studied this. What do you see as kind of the big mistakes people make when they think they're negotiating or they think they're negotiating well and they're really not? What are they doing wrong? Well, I'd say the biggest problem is they don't prepare. It's really easy to think and be very overconfident in, you know, your level of preparation and sort of go in and wing it and then find out, you know, that you really, you know, don't have your goals clear, don't understand the standards or the fair price range that's going on. And then you're just sort of swimming upstream. So number one, you can hardly ever over-prepare for a negotiation.

And we have the research shows that the better you prepare, the better you do. So it's linear. The second thing people don't do enough of is listen. So you have your preparation, you know your goals. What you don't know is what the other side's thinking. And a great negotiator typically is someone who's good at asking questions, open-ended questions, and listening, and then feeding off the answer to get some more information from that. It's like a good investigative journalist might be. A third thing that people commonly make mistakes on is they have themselves a closed mind about what's going on,

and the other side actually offers them stuff but they aren't paying attention and instead of expanding the deal to include some other ideas and terms and possibilities they just keep zeroing in on this one competitive dynamic that they're trying to get and and just don't pick up on things that could add a lot of value. One of the things people often hear when they hear experts talk about negotiation is know when to walk away. And do you think that walking away, I remember hearing somebody say, you know, very often, more often than not, when you walk away, someone says, well, wait a minute.

Come on back. Come on back. Very often, you know, walking away is not really terminating the negotiation. It's simply testing the other side's resolve on the position that they were on. So I believe that you should always be willing to walk away. It's almost never the case that you absolutely have to have whatever it is that you happen to be negotiating about. So a good walk-away attitude is a very strong asset in negotiation. Beyond that, you can realize that there are two kinds of walk-aways. One walk-away is, I think this is, you know, you're not listening to me.

I'm telling you that I need this term or condition or I need this price, and you just don't seem to be hearing me. So I'm just going to, you know, walk away. And if you want to get back in touch with me, here's my phone number, here's my email, I'll be welcoming your contact. That's one walkaway. The other is, it's over, and I never want to hear from you again, and this deal is finished. So try the first one before you get to the second one.

Is bluffing ever a good idea? Of course it is. Bluffing is, I say that I'll pay, I want to pay X when I'm really willing to pay X plus 3. I think in many negotiations, if you don't have some built-in margin in the way you're asking for the price, people will misunderstand it. They'll actually think you're being very stubborn when, in fact, what you're really being is just fair, but you're not willing to budge. So bluffing actually helps the process sometimes because it gives people a way to give and take that makes everybody feel good about how the process concluded. Everybody gives up a little bit. I know that often people will think the best thing to do is to go in and say, okay, look, we could sit here and negotiate all

day long and go back and forth, or we can just agree right now on a price and let's not negotiate. But as I recall, that almost never works. You know, negotiation is like a dance. It's an interaction. It has a kind of ritual-like feeling to it. People know what they're doing when they're negotiating, and they kind of have expectations as to how it's supposed to work. And if you walk in and say, here's how we're going to negotiate, we're not going to negotiate. I'm going to tell you what the price is. I'm going to say it's fair, and you're going to say yes. That's the subtext of saying, let's not negotiate.

Let's just agree that something's fair. Because the other side is likely to go, well, how can I trust that that's the case? And do I know you well enough to have this be a way of resolving this? It could be that between people in a small town where they know each other very well, that that is a perfectly reasonable way to conclude it because they do trust each other and they do know each other very well and they have a common expertise on what the fair price is. So it happens. But in the general run of things, most people don't trust each other well enough to be able to conclude matters that quickly.

And they need a little give and take for the dance to work. Yeah, and it is a little give and take for the dance to work. Yeah, and it is a dance, and I really like watching skillful people do it, to watch great persuaders persuade. Richard Schell has been my guest. He is a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He's academic director of Wharton's executive training programs on negotiation, influence, and persuasion, and he is author of the book,

Bargaining for Advantage, Negotiation Strategies for Reasonable People. You'll find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes for this episode. Do you ever have those nights when you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep? I do, which is why I tried the Calming Comfort Blanket by Sharper Image. It's this luxurious weighted blanket that helps you relax so you can fall asleep and stay asleep naturally. It's made with super soft velveteen material and designed to promote a sense of calmness and relaxation.

When you're under this blanket, you experience that great feeling of being hugged, which is as soothing for adults as it is for children, which is why my son Angelo borrowed mine off my bed and now I have to go get another one. Calming Comfort is 100% machine washable and it's dryer safe. And all I can say is it works for me, my wife, and my son when he steals it off my bed. The Calming Comfort Weighted Blanket comes with a 90-day anxiety-free, stress-free, best night's sleep of your life guarantee from Sharper Image.

Right now, Something You Should Know listeners can go to calmingcomfortblanket.com and use the promo code SOMETHING at checkout to receive $15 off the displayed price. Again, that's calmingcomfortblanket.com, promo code SOMETHING. And because you can't put a price on a, that's calmingcomfortblanket.com, promo code something. And because you can't put a price on a great night's sleep, go online now at calmingcomfortblanket.com and use the promo code something for your special discount.

Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went

to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices,

and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and

family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. As self-evident as this may seem, you have things to do, tasks, jobs, errands, responsibilities, that you enjoy doing, that you look forward to. And then you have other tasks, jobs, errands, and responsibilities that you hate to do, that you'd rather not do, that are drudgery or difficult or eat up too much time.

And that's where executive functioning comes in. Wikipedia says executive functioning is selecting and successfully monitoring behaviors that facilitate the attainment of chosen goals, which means basically knowing what you want and staying focused on getting things done, particularly for the purposes of this discussion, getting things done that you'd really rather not do, that you'd rather avoid. And as it turns out, there are some brain hacks you can use to help you stay on task and get those things done. Clinical psychologist Dr. Lara Honus-Webb has some strategies that will improve your executive functioning and basically get your brain to cooperate with you so you can better achieve what you say you want to achieve. Lara is the author of a book called Brain Hacks.

Welcome, Lara. Oh, thank you for having me here. I'm really excited. So when I hear the term executive functioning, I think, well, that must be what CEOs of big companies do. That's how their brain works. The best way to think about executive functioning is being the boss of your brain. So I think you're kind of right about CEO. And what it means is that you are in control of your emotions, that you can create goals and you can get your goals. It's about not being pushed around by every whim or emotion or impulse, but having a plan and making that plan happen. You know, it almost sounds like the definition of maturity. You know, this is what grownups do. Well, yes. And in fact, executive functioning

does not fully develop until the age of 25. So in some ways that's true, but what we know is that we are what some people are calling a crisis of cognition, meaning even for adults with all of the technology and all of the distractions, the ability to stream Netflix all day, every day, that all of us are having problems with executive functioning staying on point. And who hasn't had that experience? And you know what I do when that happens to me, when I'm having trouble staying on task is, and I don't know if this is a good idea or not, but I just give myself permission to goof off. If I'm having trouble concentrating, I'll just go do something else, say it's fine, and come back to it later. Actually, that is a fantastic strategy, because there is one thing that's called attention

restoration. And that means that we do need those natural breaks. And sometimes the reason we feel a lot of resistance to get started is because we think, oh, no, I'm going to have to do this for two hours. But if you say, oh, I'm just going to do this, and then I will take a break, and like, I love how you say goof off, then you have less resistance. But it also restores our attention, just in the same way as if you were lifting weights, you would want to take a break in between reps. So a real common buzzword people use when talking about achieving goals and all this is focus. And so what do you mean by focus? What is focus? So what is important about focus, again, is that this idea of what are you not paying attention to? And so you mentioned, like, let's say you just have a simple task to do,

which is, oh, I have to go respond to that email that I've not done for two days. And then you go, you sit down at your computer and you have a tab up and you get an alert saying something happened on Facebook and all of a sudden you're all over the place. So focus means that you have a goal and you take the next step to actually achieve that goal. And, you know, on a very concrete level, one of the things in terms of technology and working on your computer is we're recommending that people

don't have up all their tabs, that they minimize all the level of alerts that they get about what's happening on social media. So in the terms of a definition, it's about doing what you intended to do in that moment. Which sometimes is so hard to do. It's weird. It's like, okay, this is what needs to get done. And somehow, it's hard to do it. Well, okay. So the other thing that interferes with focus is called resistance. And this is kind of a silly example, but it comes up all the time. People who cannot keep their car clean. And so they may say, okay, I'll even write it on my schedule. You know,

I will at 10 o'clock today, I will go down and clean all that junk out of my car. And then that time comes and they have that resistance is that feeling. I just don't feel like doing it. I can, you know, I have more important things to do or more interesting things to do. And so there's some pretty simple strategies for overcoming resistance. And one of them is, what are the benefits of doing this? And what are the consequences of not doing this? And a really powerful one is, you know what, I don't have to clean out the whole car. What I'll do is I'll just go down there and I'll, for two minutes, I'll take stuff out and order it. And then you can see anyone can do anything for two minutes. So what happens is you go down, you've overcome that resistance, you stay focused. But the brain hack here, the real trick is that sometimes just getting started, you'll keep going.

That's such a good example of people who don't clean their car. And I know people like that where really it wouldn't take much to bend over and pick up the straw wrapper and the cup and all that. And yet people don't. And so what is it that, is it a priority problem? What, what prevents you from just doing it? I think it's that we make it into a big thing in our brain. And so that's why one of the most is going to be one of the most powerful, what I call super skills is chunking. And it means taking something that seems like a big job and making it a small job. So for example, cleaning the car, if you say, I'm just going to do it five minutes every day, nobody's going to have that much resistance to the five minutes. Or so for example,

let's say you have a big project that's due. One thing you might do is say, okay, well, before I can do the whole project, I actually just have to go get this resource and that book in order to, you know, make the references that I need. And it's just one little step rather than, and then I have to figure out the whole thing from the beginning to the end. So chunking is going to be a super skill that's going to allow you to overcome that problem of seemingly simple things that we take forever to get to. Well, that example of for every day, I'm just going to take a few minutes and do this. My experience is that that lasts about two days. And then the third day, I either forget to do it or something else comes up. And it's hard to stick with. Yeah. So this is one thing that is a

powerful tool for executive functioning and ADHD is prompts. And so this can be and I have a funny story to tell, which was there was this person who was driving their car and they had a huge piece of furniture on the top of it. And they went through a very low ceiling parking garage and, of course, ruined everything that was on top of their car. And so one of the things that we talked about was he had to keep a little three by five card that said thing on top of car. And it seems really humorous, but truthfully, we all need reminders. And it can be a three by five card, but we also have our cell phones that we can program to give us reminders. I mean, we have artificial intelligence in the palm of our hand to give us reminders anytime we need them. Well, because it seems that like when you say to yourself, you know, the car is messy. It's really important that I clean out the car. It's important then. But three days later, maybe it's not so important.

Something else is more important. And that's what gets left off the list. Another way to think about it is how good will I feel just to have this off my back? Sometimes the motivation isn't even the clean car. It's like, I don't want this hanging over my head anymore. And so helping yourself to remember how good will I feel when this is done? Yeah, I bet. I think at least for me, that's a big one. That's really big. It isn't so much that the car is cleaner than it was before. It's, I don't have to worry about it, at least for a while, because it's done, it's off the list, and now I can move

past it. Exactly. And that, it's funny that sometimes, you know, this is one of the things that depletes our attention, are the things we're not doing, because they hang in there with, like, we feel guilty about it, and we feel bad about ourselves and those are two negative emotions that are not going to help us to stay focused because we know that negative emotions interfere with focus it's interesting and i don't think it's just me i think it's human nature how something that we don't want to do all of a sudden becomes attractive to do when faced with something even bigger that we don't want to do. For example, so you have a closet, you haven't cleaned it in months, it's a mess,

you know it needs to be cleaned and you never clean it. And then now you have to do your taxes. And so faced with taxes, all of a sudden, I think I have to go clean the closet first. Who wants to do their taxes? You know, that is such a, that is one thing that is truly, nobody wants to do that. By comparison, cleaning the closet seems more easy. And although before you didn't necessarily want to clean the closet in contrast to taxes it seems like a good thing to do but really in that situation as you're saying it is a distraction

and so one of the ways that you can handle that is to realize that with the taxes it's never going to be something that you like and saying what's at stake if I don't get this done what happens if I don't get my taxes done? And then it's like, okay, that will be more paperwork. And what are the benefits of getting the taxes done? Well, the best benefit of getting taxes done is you just have to stop thinking. You get a break from it. You're done with it. You get it behind you. And so it is almost like our brain wants to choose something that's easier. and we fool ourselves that we're being productive when actually what we are doing is we're avoiding taxes.

And so in that situation, you can also say cleaning the closet is really just me avoiding taxes. So let's get real. Doesn't just having a well thought out to do list solve a lot of this? I know for me, if I have a list of things and I know I can go down the list and cross them off as I go, I'm just much more likely to do it. Well, I think that a to-do list can be helpful. One of the things that I recommend is that whatever kind of to-do list that you have, every day you have three high priority tasks.

Because we can get lost in our to-do lists and we may not have a good strategy for figuring out what's a priority and what's not a priority. I mean, like you said, on your to-do list, it could be get taxes done and clean closet. Obviously, that's not going to help you focus and do the most important thing first. But it does seem that writing things down in some kind of order makes it more likely that things will get done than it all just sits in your head and I don't know what to do next. Oh, absolutely. So, you know, one of the things I recommend is that like on a Sunday night, write out pretty much everything you want to get done for the rest of the week.

And then what you do is on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, you write in three tasks for each day. And that way, you know, your highest priorities on Monday, things that are not so timely on Friday. And so then you put three main tasks on each day. Now that doesn't mean you're only doing three tasks. That means those are the things that once you knock those out, you know, you're on track, you're on target. So absolutely, you know, use to-do lists, but you don't want to have a 15 item

to-do list sitting in front of you every morning you wake up. What do we know? What does science tell us about the ability of your brain to stay on task and do a good job for how long? And before performance starts to suffer? You work for 25 minutes and then you take a break for five minutes. But really what I have found is you have to find your own what I call focus dose. And I think you can also think of is this a really hard task or is this an easy task? So you can find your own focus dose. And for some people, it's 25 minutes. For some people, it can be an hour. And for some people, it's 15 minutes. And then you do want to restore your attention. And the healthiest things to restore your attention are going to be some

kind of physical movement. And believe it or not, time in nature restores attention. And then go back to a task. Well, I know everybody's different. But I know for me, that when I once I get into a task, even if it's something I don't particularly like, although it helps if I do like it, but even if I don't like it, that before I can stop and take a break, I've got to get to some milestone. I've got to get to some logical stopping point. I can't set like a timer and say, okay, I'm going to stop now. I can't do that. No, I think that that says a lot of good things about you. And I think that that's a good point

that you say something that is a really important point, which is what I call the jet stream, which is we easily pay attention to what we're interested in. And so what I mean by jet stream is that when a plane flies in the same direction, the same direction as the wind, they go faster, and they take less gas to go the same distance. So when you're interested in what you're doing, you don't actually want to have these forced breaks. And it seems like you are really interested in what you do. And so a lot of this idea of chunking things down and taking breaks is for those, you know, paperwork type tasks that are required for us to maintain our life, but are not necessarily where our jet stream is. So that is a

fantastic example that you're giving. And when we are interested in something, we can pay attention for ours. Well, I guess that's proof that it pays to enjoy what you do. things. And it can be, you know, doing your taxes, of course, something that most people don't like. But, you know, for other people, as we said, it can be, you know, cleaning the car out. It can be reading those emails that were not urgent. Those are things that help maintain our life, but we don't tend to have a lot of enthusiasm for. Well, for me, your suggestion of thinking about getting something off your back, off your list, so you don't have to worry about it and think about what happens if you don't get it done. That's a real good motivator for me. And I think all these ideas will help people get done those things they need to get done

but don't particularly want to get done. Dr. Lara Honus-Webb has been my guest. She's a clinical psychologist and author of the book Brain Hacks, and you will find a link to her book in the show notes. Thanks, Lara. Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. It's considered pretty bad form to take photos at a funeral, but maybe we should take photos at funerals.

An article on the Huffington Post website a while ago made the case that not taking photos at a funeral is a big mistake that you may later regret. Sure, it's not a happy occasion, but life is full of all kinds of emotions, happy and sad, and remembering those emotional moments can be very satisfying later on.

You may not want to look at the photos anytime soon, but there will come a day when you will. Of course, a lot of people don't want their photos taken at a funeral. People cry, their makeup runs, and they don't look their best, so you obviously have to be respectful of people's wishes. But documenting the occasion provides a visual reminder of the love you showed and the care you took to honor and celebrate the life of your loved one. Without the photos, you will forget the details in time. And that is something you should know. If you haven't already, you can subscribe to this podcast.

It is free to do so. And that way you get all the episodes sent right to your device and you never miss a single one. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide

when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and

Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla

who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for the search for the silver lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.