Ed Batista on the "Impulse to Hurry" Hack: Slow Down and Avoid Mistakes

Ed Batista is a prominent Executive Coach in Silicon Valley who counts technology company CEOs and leaders in various fields as his clients. He coaches senior executives who are facing a challenge or who would like to be fulfilled and effective in their roles.

Ed is also a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, teaches a course called “The Art of Self Coaching”, and used to teach “Interpersonal Dynamics” (popularly known as “Touchy Feely”), the schools’ most popular elective. 

In today’s episode, he talks about  “The Impulse to Hurry is a Signal to Slow Down” hack, which helps people avoid mistakes rooted in cognitive bias. If you’ve ever felt the pressure to check something off your to-do list quickly, or felt the need to “get it over with” when having to deliver bad news, this episode is for you!

Ed has been blogging since 2004 and has a wealth of resources, as well as game-changing and practical thought leadership on his site: www.edbatista.com. If you can’t hire Ed as a coach, his blog provides generous insight into “The Art of Self Coaching”, “Touchy Feely”, and his thoughtful approach. We highly recommend it! 

You can also follow Ed on Twitter at 
https://twitter.com/edbatista

Transcript

Agnes: [00:01:33] Hi, Ed. I'm so excited that you are our guest in this episode. 

Ed: [00:01:41] Agnes, I cannot say how excited I am, because it is just truly a delight to be able to talk with you, especially given how long we've known each other and how much work we've done together in the past. So  I was truly excited to be asked and delighted to be here.

Agnes: [00:01:57] Same here, as I shared you being, we've known each other for 20 years. You've been a mentor, my own executive coach, a generous colleague. And it's just a treat to have you here. And I can't wait to  know what you're going to share with us.  Can you start by telling us a little bit about  who you are and what you would like people to know?

Ed: [00:02:18] Yeah. So I am, I'm an executive coach and that is basically  how I spend almost the entirety of my professional time. I launched my coaching practice back in 2006. Later that year I re-engaged with the Graduate school of Business at Stanford. And then in 2007 took on a leadership coaching role there.

And some years later became a lecturer. And so these days I still have a relationship with the business school. I only teach a class that I launched in 2015, the Art of Self Coaching. That's that's all I do down there at the business school anymore. But I spend  99% of my time working with senior leaders who are facing some sort of challenge in their professional lives, want to be more effective and more fulfilled.

So that's my, that is my primary identity. Professionally. 

Agnes: [00:03:10] Great. Thanks for sharing. And I'm excited to hear more because of your experience   especially with C-suite leaders and startup founders, really understanding , what are things that  work well with them in your coaching?

We all ask our guests this question, if you knew me well, you will know that dot dot dot. How would you complete that sentence? 

Ed: [00:03:30] Yeah, I thought that was a great question. I, and I would emphasize the distinction between my professional life and my personal life. If you if you knew me well, you would understand that my professional life hasn't really changed that much as a result of the pandemic.

 My personal life has changed completely, it couldn't be more different. So my practice was always roughly 25% virtual. I saw most of my clients in person in downtown San Francisco but it was fairly easy post pandemic to transform my practice into an entirely virtual practice.

And these days I see people, I see a lot of people. I have video, I talk to a lot of people via phone, right? And my work with clients really hasn't changed that much, other than the medium, through which we're working over the last year. 

My personal life just has completely changed.

So my wife and I moved to San Francisco in 1990, right after college. And we essentially thought we were there for the rest of our lives. A few years ago we realized we're, we're interested in spending more time elsewhere, and we began to, to travel up to the North Bay a little bit more, to Sonoma county, Mendocino county.

But we basically assumed that our professional obligations would keep us rooted in San Francisco. And then the pandemic hit, and for a variety of reasons, we decided to relocate. So we, we have moved to a farm in the sort of far Northwest corner of Marin County, where, it's, it's very much a working farm.

There's a working sheep operation and a cattle operation here. We are not responsible for the sheep or the cattle. Those are taken care of by other people, but  I live in a farm house in the middle of a set of pastures and my wife grew up on a farm. So this is a very, it's a very familiar experience to her.

It's a very unfamiliar experience for me. I  I have, I'm still in the process of figuring out well, who am I living on this farm , out in the distant countryside, it's a very rewarding experience, but it's also been a    a very surprising and unexpected experience. If you told me pre pandemic that I'd be living on a farm , I would've said no way. There's no way that's possibly happening. And yet here I am. 

Agnes: [00:05:29] Yeah, I always envisioned you as the San Francisco man. So to you live here in a farm is a different picture, but I love it. It sounds very idyllic. And I guess one of the benefits of working remotely, being able to do that and make a dream happen.

Yeah. 

Ed: [00:05:45] That's what  makes it possible. And it also  it feels like it's allowed me to be to be very focused. I mean, my life has always been fundamentally organized around being able to show up and be in the best state of mind and body to work with my clients, and actually living out here allows me to manage that even more effectively, just  not having to, not having to commute, not having to navigate through downtown San Francisco.

And so it's actually, in many ways it's been quite a learning experience. Like what are the conditions that allow me , that then enable me to do my best work. And, I've also just learning a ton about living on a farm. Quite a surprise. 

Agnes: [00:06:21] I imagine. So I wanted to ask you   what is a concept or framework or idea around emotional intelligence that has worked for you and your clients?

Ed: [00:06:33] Sure. Sure. So  I think of this as something of a mantra that I believe has a couple of different components that we can talk further about. But the overarching mantra is this idea that "The impulse to hurry is a signal to slow down"

. And that's not necessarily true 100% of the time under all circumstances, but what I've certainly observed in my work with every one of my clients at various times and many, many times in my own life.

That particularly under stressful conditions, we can find ourselves triggered in a certain way that , leaves us feeling behind and we've got to catch up. We've got to hurry. And so often, that's mistaken.  That's, that's not it  that that's not an accurate perception of what's happening around us and what we need to do as a result.

And that is often when we tend to make mistakes.  We tend to rush through something.  And as a consequence make a cognitive error. We tend to speak vociferously or with a lot of emphasis. And we miss emotional cues or we send emotional signals that we don't intend to send.

We  we, we just try to get something off our plates or check something off the to-do list and realize, oh, that was actually counterproductive. I didn't need to do it now. And so I' ve spent a lot of time working on myself, but also with clients to first retrain ourselves to recognize, oh, this, this impulse to hurry is so often a mistaken signal.

So rather than giving into it, rather than feeling under the influence of that impulse; Can I actually retrain my response and allow a little light bulb go off and say, Ooh, I'm feeling the need to hurry. That's a signal to slow down. And of course there's a lot of work that goes into this.

It doesn't just happen automatically. It's absolutely not just a, an intellectual process. It's not like the mere awareness of this is going to translate automatically into action, but that's a starting point. 

Agnes: [00:08:26] Well, I mean, it seems easy, so relevant. I mean, I relate personally to that sense of wanting to hurry and having to catch myself, trying to actually slow down.

And as I, as you mentioned, kind of really challenging the assumption that you have, that you're behind, right. That we have to catch up. And you mentioned like  it's not just an intellectual exercise. You have to be conscious about. How to make it happen. And so what would be some tips to kind of catch yourself and then find ways to challenge that assumption, but also slow down?

Ed: [00:09:01] You bet. So I think of it in sort of, there's kind of three buckets  in a, in a broader sense. 

We can expand our self-awareness and, and understand the conditions under which we're likely to feel this sense of hurriedness, where we're likely to feel triggered that way. 

We can also bear in mind some very specific tactics to, to employ in the moment.

And over time we have to build our capacity for emotion regulation.  That's really the, kind of the foundational practice that allows us to even recognize, Ooh, this, this feeling, this, this emotion of needing to hurry is something that I can regulate. I don't just have to  give into it.

This sense of increasing our self-awareness , the part of that is just understanding, well, what are the conditions under which I'm likely to feel like what  may, in some cases it's talking with a particular person, somebody  kind of escalates our sense of anxiety or urgency.

In other cases, it's at certain times of day or certain days in the week, there are just certain moments in certain settings under which our tendency to feel rushed is going to get triggered. It's also helpful to understand: what are our unique physiological responses,    emotions or physiological events before they register in consciousness, something happens.

We encounter a scenario or a situation, and neurotransmitters are released in our brain and have a, sort of a cascading series of effects on our bodies which influence the registering of a conscious emotion. And so in a lot of circumstances we can sort of sense something. We can feel something physiologically quite literally.

And if we can train ourselves to recognize, oh, that's my tell, that's my physiological sign that I have this sense of urgency. And I'm rushing that, can I just feel my body a little bit more clearly or  can we make ourselves more aware of cognitive biases?

 We all have different ways of thinking that are not entirely accurate. We're all subject to different cognitive biases and just recognizing what are our  what are the ones that affect us personally? 

   Most literally there's one, the psychologist, Daniel Kahneman talks about the fact - in his great book Thinking Fast and Slow -  talks about the fact that we're actually very bad at envisioning what he calls missing data.  We, we tend to assess a situation or a scenario. And we extract  a very , a very small number of data points.

And then we construct an explanatory narrative to it, to explain to ourselves what is happening in this scenario to make meaning of it. And we do that almost instantaneously and we, what we fail to do habitually is stop slow down and recognize others. Probably a bunch of additional data that I don't have that might explain the situation differently.

Or the data that I do have maybe quite suspect, I may not be all that accurate. I mean you know, a classic example is when we don't get a response from somebody   we send a message to somebody via some channel and they don't get back to us under, in a timeframe that feels desirable to us.

And so we immediately start to construct a story to explain this, and typically those explanatory narratives are negative and self-protective. So we often make a bunch of negative assumptions that this person is not getting back to us , in the, in a timeframe that feels reasonable because a whole host of negative and self-protective reasons.

And yet  what we fail to do is stop and say, well, what are, what's the missing data here? What's the data that might explain this situation in a whole different way. Like who knows maybe.  They're offline or they're unavailable or they're sick or something much more important or even tragic has occurred in their lives.

It doesn't occur to us to kind of challenge that narrative. So that's a type of cognitive bias that we can be more aware of. Also though in the moment there are certain immediate tactics that we can employ to slow ourselves down. One is known as reframing. What psychologists call cognitive reappraisal  that  the, the, the set of assumptions that we are bringing to a given scenario and a given set of circumstances are going to deeply inform our emotional response to that set of circumstances. It's very much connected to the cognitive bias that I just mentioned. So if we can be a little bit more aware of the assumptions that we're bringing to a to a given interaction, to a given scenario, to a given situation, we can then challenge those.

We can say, Hey, those, those aren't necessarily accurate. Let me surface and illustrate the story that I'm telling myself to explain this circumstance and conceivably reframe it,  tell myself a different story to understand what's what might be going on here. Very much related to this though, is simply talking about our feelings.  In fact, it's a lot harder if we say we have to do all of this work ourselves,  internally, alone.

If we're able to surface some of these feelings, especially around a feeling of being rushed, a feeling of having some anxiety or a sense of urgency that makes it a lot easier for us to manage those feelings. And, and slow ourselves down in the process , and that won't happen automatically.

It requires first our ability to access these emotions, label them and feel comfortable sharing them with other people. It also requires a culture in which it is okay to talk about your feelings and yet, you know what we know from actually a host of social psychology and neuroscience research, is that talking about our feelings is a very reliable way to manage those feelings much more effectively.

Yeah. I mean, occasionally we are able to kind of,  hit pause in an interaction,  take a deep breath, go for a walk around the block. But in many circumstances we can't do that.  We can't necessarily leave the meeting or leave the conversation in which we're feeling this sense of urgency.

And so just being able to verbalize that and share those feelings with another person with the people who are present with us can be a reliable way to manage those feelings. And one last thing I'll say is that over time, we've got to build our capacity for emotion regulation, and there some just foundational practices that enable us to do this.

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Ed Batista on the “MESS” Hack to build Emotional Capacity

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Michael Wenderoth on "The Other" Hack: Show Up, Be More Powerful, and Drive Better Results