How to Maximise the Upside and Minimise the Downside of Your Challenge

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts about achieving more by rethinking failure. In this post we see how you can overcome the motivational slump characteristic of tough STEP goals, how to remove the possibility of failure, and how to maximise RAMP goals.

Two weeks out from the end of the trans-Atlantic rowing race we were losing badly. We were 70 miles behind the leaders.

We had tried catching them but nothing had seemed to work. The effort just to keep up was immense and it was looking increasingly like we were putting ourselves through hell for no particular good reason. There was a huge temptation to stop trying as hard and coast into the finish. After all winning is everything, and no one cares how far behind second place comes.

This is classic STEP thinking.

In the last blog I introduced the idea that challenges are RAMPs or STEPs based on when you get the benefits of taking on the challenge. When more effort leads to more benefit (like going on a diet) then it’s a RAMP. When it’s all at once, like defusing a bomb, it’s a STEP.

In this blog we’re looking at how you might use this idea to help you figure out:
- if you should continue when you’re in the middle of challenge and it doesn’t look like you’re going to make it
- if you’re wondering if you should even take on a challenge because you might not complete it
- if you should even take on a tough challenge
- how to approach your challenge when it’s a RAMP
- how to deal with the risk of serious failure if your challenge is a STEP

What to do if you have a STEP goal and feel your motivation is about to switch off:

The first problem with STEP goals is their the ‘all or nothing’ nature. If you think that you won’t make the target in the timeframe then you won’t take it on. Or if you are underway, and start to have doubts, then your motivation plummets and you’ll probably bail early.

I have a coaching client that wanted to lose a certain amount of weight in a certain period of time. He began to lose weight … but not fast enough. Feeling like he was going to miss his target - he stopped - even though he was losing weight. He couldn’t see that he was on a RAMP, the more he did the better off he was. His self-imposed deadline was an illusion.

You see this motivation collapse in sport. After a closely fought first half a team comes out for the second half, lets a few points in, loses confidence and then the landslide begins.

Happens in tennis too. You might have seen Nick Kyrgios at the Shanghai Masters. Nick made up his mind that he wasn’t going to win and stopped trying. When he returned the ball at all he just pat-a-caked it back over the net. It’s a very strange thing to watch. Not surprisingly he was booed and heckled by the crowd.

But from his point of view he’s being completely logical. Let’s assume that he is correct in that he can’t win the game. Why shouldn’t he just throw it? Why shouldn’t he save himself for the next game. What is he missing?

The answer, I believe, is that he thinks the match is a STEP, but really it’s a RAMP. He thinks that if he can’t win then there’s no point being out there. When in reality the better he does, the closer the game is, the better off he is. By failing to provide entertainment to the crowd he reduces his brand, his future appearance fees and alienates himself from his fans and his sponsors. Not to mention butchering his self-respect.

So his thinking is clearly dysfunctional right? You wouldn’t be like that would you? Do you play like Nick Kyrgios or Roger Federer when you look at your filing tray? When you think about tidying the garage?

The first thing to do, when your motivation is failing is to check your assumption that your challenge is worthwhile if and only if you meet some arbitrary target. Are you getting nothing from persisting?
But what if you really are in a STEP situation? You’re half way through the year and it’s clear that, barring a miracle, you’re not going to make your annual sales budget. When it looks like all the additional effort you’re going to put in is now going to be a waste of time because you can’t salvage the situation.

Then it’s time to widen the goal posts a bit. Time to give yourself more than one way to win. Can you make the challenge less like a STEP and more like a RAMP? Here’s what I mean.
Trailing second, only 10 days out from the end of the trans-Atlantic rowing race, Jamie and I had a long discussion about what we should do. Do we keep trying to win when we could just take it easy, cruise to the end and look like we could have come first if we had been so uncool as to want to try hard?

We realised that what we needed to was to give ourselves another goal that was obtainable. In fact, to have a cascading series of goals, each a little less ambitious than the last. Here was our plan
1. We were still going to try to win the race. If we couldn’t win the race then our goal would be to;
2. Come second by so close they hadn’t had a chance to have a shower (psychologically a dead heat). If not that then we would;
3. Try and break the old world record. If not that then we would;
4. Leave everything out on the water, they would have to scoop us up out of the boat at the end – because we didn’t want to take it easy and then find out later that something had gone wrong with their boat and that we could have won if we had kept pushing.

This way if it looked like we weren’t going to make the first goal then we could just move to the next one -we still had reason to keep putting in maximum effort. We’ve turned our STEP challenge into a (lumpy) RAMP.

You don’t have to wait until things are going off track to come up with new targets. You could just set ‘Good’, ‘Better’, ‘Best’ targets at the very start. Sometimes companies set their staff ‘goals’ and ‘stretch goals’ for the same reason.

Or we can do away with targets all together. That’s right, you read correctly. Goals without targets (or targets without deadlines). This is an ‘improvement goal’ and that’s a topic for an upcoming blog post.

When you’re wondering if you should take on challenge because you doubt if you will be able to complete it?

So you want to clarify by asking yourself what the situation is by asking:

What do I get out of taking on this challenge? What exactly are the benefits and when do I start getting them? Does it really matter if I don’t quite reach my target?

You might be surprised by how often the answer is no, it doesn’t matter. Your challenge is a RAMP, in which case, you should probably go for it.

I could have used this approach when I was having that dilemma of whether or not I should take part in the Tarawera 100k ultramarathon. Instead of going backwards and forwards on it I could just have asked if this challenge was a RAMP or a STEP. Let’s do that now.

What are the benefits? Why am I doing this? To see if I can run a 100ks sure, but also to run through some beautiful scenery, and feel the excitement of being part of an event. Also, there is nothing like having a race to focus your training as well. I will run farther training for this race then I will in the race itself, so that’s where the real benefit lies.

So does it really matter if I fall short? Well, no. Every step I run past 42 km would be a new personal best. There are no penalties. No public shootings of recalcitrant runners. If I want to pull out I just hobble to the next aid station. This challenge looks like a STEP but it’s a RAMP. So why not take part?

Deciding whether or not to take on the race on the basis of whether I may or may not cross some artificial target of 100km would have been completely wrong headed.

How to approach your goal it if is a RAMP

Why not see if you go even bigger?

I met an actress who said her goal for that year was to get an EGOT – This is an Emmy, a Grammy an Oscar and a Tony. Only a handful of people have every achieved this, and it’s normally the work of a lifetime. So to do it in a year is bonkers. But if she understands that - then it’s no problem.

This is because RAMP and STEP goals have different motivation profiles.

With STEP goals you’re motivated by the end getting closer. You’re in a permanent state of lack until you reach the target. You start off anxious and you stay anxious until success becomes assured. How far you’ve come doesn’t count for anything because the benefit can’t be banked until you finally reach your goal.

With a RAMP challenge – you are also motivated by the gap between your current position and the target, but you’re less anxious because you’re getting better and better off the more effort you put in. You’re climbing a cliff but in this case the ground is helpfully rising up underneath you.
Unfortunately, because of our perverse human nature, not having so much at stake means that sometimes our motivation in this type of situation is not quite as strong.

One way to compensate then, is to set higher and more exciting goals. So back to our actress. If this crazy goal motivates her more than a lesser goal, and if at the end she is going to judge herself by how much progress she’s made rather than how far she has left to go, then it’s an awesome goal. If your challenge is a RAMP it doesn’t matter how big it is as long as it motivates you.

A year ago I met a guy who was very overweight, and we got talking about goals for the year and he said that he wanted to lose weight, but that just having a lower number on the scales wasn’t really inspiring for him.  Which makes sense. When you think about it, unless you’re actually breaking floor boards there isn’t much benefit in losing weight. Nobody wants to be lighter (would you be happier in space?) no, they want to look better, move easier and live longer.

So he decided that he would make that his goal. This big bellied couch potato decided would train for an ironman in two years’ time. That’s a 3 k swim, 160k bike, then a marathon. That it was hopelessly ambitious didn’t matter. It was very exciting to him. So he started training.

And it’s working, a year later he’s looking ripped. And even if he doesn’t complete his ironman, or even get to the start line, he’s still lost a lot of weight and is much, much fitter.

The great thing about a RAMP goal - you can fall a little short and have nothing dramatic happen. The downside is that a RAMP challenge may not have the same level of white knuckle anxiety that we sometimes find motivating.  So why not see if making the challenge larger makes it more exciting?

How to approach your challenge if it is a STEP and the consequences are very real and distracting

Let’s say you’re lining up to do a back flip on your motorbike and you’re worried about landing on your head. Or you’re thinking about opening a new café but are worried about going bankrupt. Then there are things you can and should do to remove that possibility of catastrophic failure.
To be successful you should not have to risk everything on a single attempt. Very often it’s going to require making multiple attempts, adapting each time, before you become successful.
Broadly speaking there are two ways to do it- reducing the chance of failure or reducing the consequences.

1. Identify the weak spot and strengthen it
 Preparing for the trans-Atlantic race I took a great interest in any stories about things that had gone wrong with row boats at sea. I heard for example, that a crew had put out their sea anchor in rough seas, only to have the rope pull off the anchor point on the bow the boat. It hadn’t been made strong enough. So I had our boat builders reinforce that section so much that our fully loaded boat could have been dangled from that point. 
What’s going to ‘break’ on your challenge? How can you reinforce that? 

2. Build your skills - Practise in a safe way
Stand-up comedians, quite naturally, hate to bomb. The problem is that even the most experienced comedian can’t guarantee that the audience will love a new joke the same way that they do. So when a comic has a big show coming up what can they do to make sure that it goes well?
They practise in the suburbs. They go to the late shows at lesser known, dingier clubs. They try a joke out 2-3 times and, if it falls flat, then they bin it.

It’s the same for practising backflips on a motorbike. How do you think they train for that? They don’t just line up the young guys and the ones that we see are the ones that have survived. Instead they practise by jumping into a nice, big, fat, safe foam pit.

Does your challenge’s success rely on your skills? How can you practice safely? I’ve given various versions of my speeches several hundred times. I still practice, especially new material, and especially the start. My rule is that I’m only as good as my third best rehearsal. So I keep practicing until that’s really good!

3. Benchmarking
At a recent workshop I met a guy who was trying to figure out whether he should become a commercial pilot. He was already a private pilot, but he didn’t know if he should commit to making the next big step given the huge investment in time and money that’s involved. Specifically, he was just worried that he wouldn’t pass the practical and theory exams. So for him this was a STEP goal. How could he take the risk out of it?

One way is to benchmark himself against people who had passed and failed. Knowing the average pass rate would tell him something. That would be a start, but he could do even better.
I suggested that he ask a couple of his most senior instructors about his flying ability. Based on their experience of pilots who had gone on to be successful and unsuccessful how did he compare? Was he in the definitely pass, definitely fail, or in a grey area in-between? If they didn’t have a good idea now, then how many more hours would it take before they could make a better prediction?

There are two tricks for benchmarking.
1.    Find examples that are most like your situation
2.    Look at failures as well. This is very important.

Let’s say that you want to open a café in a certain street. You have been inspired by another café in a nearby street that is clearly doing very well. Before you invest a cent wouldn’t you want to know what the chances of your succeeding are? For example if you found out that 60% of new cafés in the city close within two years and that all the cafés on your intended street had failed over the last 5 years then you would want to be really sure that you knew why you were going to be different?

It’s not enough to just look at the winners. Many business books make this mistake. It appears to make sense to look at companies who have succeeded and see what they have in common. But it’s meaningless unless you can also show that the companies that failed didn’t also have those characteristics. For example, often companies that succeed look like risk-takers. So the lesson then is if you want to succeed you need to take risks. But hang on. I bet that companies that failed look like risk takers too! So is the lesson to take more risks or to be more lucky?

When I was thinking of taking part in the trans-Atlantic race I certainly did some benchmarking and looked very hard at the background of people who had successfully made the crossing. You might think that it was only for hard core extreme adventurers, ex-military and so on. Nope. Turns out that husbands and wives had competed, mothers and sons. People who were really unprepared, who had built their boats in the bottom of their garden, had managed to get themselves across. Knowing that was hugely motivating for me. If they could do that, I could do it too!

4. Put less on the line – experimenting
Sometimes you just don’t know before you start whether or not an idea will be successful. It can’t be figured out from a spreadsheet, it has to be discovered. In that case, you might be able to experiment.
By experimenting I mean testing out your key assumptions on a limited scale, where failure is contained and expected. For example, before you launch your new business can you launch a pop-up store? Can you test demand online?

Before I took part in the trans-Atlantic race I thought I better see if I liked being out in the ocean. So I helped deliver a yacht from Auckland to the Bay of Islands. It wasn’t really the ocean, but at least I was on the water. I found that I didn’t mind being out on the waves but was very prone to sea sickness. Which was good to find out in advance!

5. Get a safety net
Most of the advice above focuses on avoiding disaster. But sometimes the risk comes from factors that you just can’t control. You might be the world’s best tight-rope walker but you can’t control a gust of wind. Does that mean you should give up on your dream of walking across the Niagara falls? I thought it did.

When I found out that six boats, twelve crew, had been lost trying to row across the Atlantic over the last 100 years I thought it was a real deal breaker. It was little comfort to me that all the boats had been found intact afterwards. And what had clearly happened was that a rogue wave had knocked the crews off the boat. I couldn’t control the ocean. I didn’t want to take a gamble with my life. My motivation plummeted.

Then I found myself talking on the phone to a guy who had just come back from a trek in Antarctica. He was a friend of a friend and someone said ‘You’re thinking of doing stuff like this, why don’t you call him up?’
So I called him up, I thought I should keep the first question broad, so I asked, ‘What’s it like down there?’.
He said ‘It’s ok.’
I thought, ‘Right. He’s one of those tough adventurer types, I better be specific!’ So, I asked, ‘Isn’t it cold?’
He said, ‘You know it’s going to be cold, you take warm clothes.’

I was stunned. I thought you had to get frostbite. It was some kind of law. But instead what he was saying was if I could see that something bad was going to happen, then I could do something about it.

Either to avoid the worst case, or if the worst case happened to reduce the impact.
It was true that I couldn’t predict when a rogue wave was going to hit. Or even stop myself from being swept off the boat by a ton of water. But I could make sure that I was tied on.

Not being able to control the possibility of failure doesn’t mean you quit on the challenge – all you have to do is make sure that you have a safety net. Some failsafe Plan B that makes the consequences of disaster survivable.

So that’s 5 ways to reduce the risk – there will be other ways. The key point is that just because you can find ways things are going to go wrong that doesn’t mean you have to abandon your challenge. There are always ways to reduce that risk.

Step or ramp?

Dilbert creator Scott Adams gave a blistering critique to the way that we normally approach goals.
‘Goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose ten pounds, you will be spend every moment until you reach the goal – if you reach it at all – feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words goal-oriented people exist in a state of near continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.’ – 'How to fail at almost everything and still win big'.

He’s talking about the traditional approach of treating all goals as if they are STEPS. Now you know better. I’ve found this simple distinction between STEP and RAMP challenges to be very useful, and I hope you do too.

Just this morning, I walked past my pile of filing for the hundredth time. I didn’t take on the goal of clearing the tray because I can’t see myself completing it. I want to ‘succeed’ at this task. I want to do a little work and then look at an empty tray and get that delicious dopamine blast of success. But since it is impossible to clear the tray then there is no point starting, because I don’t get any benefit unless the job is done.

This is STEP thinking – and it’s complete nonsense, and now you know what to do. I don’t have to complete this task, I just have to start it. If I put away one item I’m better off. What’s so hard about that? I don’t have to ‘succeed’ at this goal, any effort will produce some benefits. It’s cash just waiting there to be picked up.

But what if you take on a STEP challenge and you do fail? That’s the last missing piece and that’s what we’ll be looking at in the next blog.

Understand this distinction and your goals will make a lot more sense

If we know one thing about goals, we know that taking on a goal means trying to reach a target. That’s the ‘S’ in SMART goals. That’s the ‘Specific’. But hang on. That’s wrong already. When we take on a goal it’s not because we like to set targets, it’s because we want to get some benefit. So when do we get the benefit? Is it all at once, when we achieve our target, or do we accrue it along the way? Perhaps, because we see it so often in sport and competitions, we tend to think that all our goals have that same sharp division between getting a lot of benefit and getting a lot of pain. If we don’t reach the goal then, we’ve not only failed, but worse – the whole challenge has been a waste of time. But is that really the case? Understanding failure leads to a new way of thinking about success Recently I was down in Wanaka and, wanting to go for a run, found myself at the start of the track that leads up to Royd’s Peak. The information board in the carpark said it was 8km to the top. In fact you could look up and see the route taking switch back after switch back, until there, above the snow line, above the yaks, above the Sherpas, blowing up in the Jetstream, the jagged summit of the mountain. It was getting late in the day – but I thought I would set myself the goal of getting to the top. I didn’t make it. It was getting dark when I got to the final ridge line and so I turned back a few hundred metres from the summit. Let me ask you a question - did I fail? Really? Isn’t the opposite point of view also true? Whatever answer you picked you’re right, and doesn’t that already give you a hint that there is something unhelpful about the way we think about goals and achievement? Why isn’t it bleeding obvious? Here’s my go at untangling it. I think that the answer is ‘Yes I did fail’. Success was reaching the top and I didn’t reach the top. Let me ask you a much better question. If I had known that I wasn’t going to reach the top should I still have taken on the challenge? To figure out the answer you’ve got to know what the benefits are, because achieving ‘success’, that is reaching the target, is not the same thing as the ‘benefits’. I was going for a run to burn off some energy, see some fantastic views and get fitter. Those were my benefits – getting to the top was my target. Regardless of the target every step I took up the track I got the benefits. You can characterise your challenge based on the relationship between effort in and benefit out. Most goals fall into only two camps, RAMPs and STEPs. For most challenges the more effort the more benefit. These are things like getting fit, losing weight, saving money, learning a language, or jogging up a peak. Let’s call these RAMPS. (If you think that this point is obvious then why is the pile in your in-tray so big and your garage such a mess? ;-) In some cases, though, there is a sharp line between success and failure. Like if you’re in the business of doing backflips on a motorbike, being shot from a cannon into a net, if you work as a blind knife thrower’s assistant or defuse bombs, or if you find yourself playing that weird Mayan ball game where they sacrifice the losing team. For these types of challenges, things are pretty normal until a moment of performance when you either get all the benefit or you don’t. Let’s call these type of challenges STEPS. I’ll give you some goals and you can tell me if they are RAMP or STEP. (Hint: If you fall a little short of reaching your target but you’re only a little worse off then it’s a RAMP. If you are much worse off it’s a STEP. • Tight rope walking the Niagara Falls. • Tight rope walking with safety leash across the Niagara Falls • Playing Lotto. • Losing weight • Studying for an exam • Making your sales targets • Quitting smoking Answers are: STEP RAMP STEP RAMP RAMP Quitting smoking – I’m calling it a RAMP because even if you aren’t successful quitting you at least had fewer cigarettes for some time. And given that the average smoker quits about 7 times before they finally stop, then you probably learnt something about quitting as well. On the other hand, if this is your last attempt to quit smoking then it’s a STEP. We think our challenges are STEPS – they mostly aren’t Most goals that we take on in real life are not do or die, winner take all STEP goals. In most of the actual goals we take on in life the more we achieve the better off we are, if we miss our target by 1% we still achieve 99% of the benefit. BUT WE TREAT THEM LIKE STEP goals. We treat our challenges as if they have the same reward profile of motorcycle stunts. This isn’t always a bad thing. Believing that you are taking on a STEP challenge is highly motivating – it’s a great tool to get the best out of yourself … until it isn’t. If you ever feel that you are NOT going to be successful, then your motivation plummets. It can mean that you won’t take on a goal that you might succeed at, and you quit early on challenges you should persist at. You also give yourselves a vicious psychological kicking when you fail at a STEP goal. In summary I’ve argued that we will make better decisions about which challenges we take on and which challenges we continue on if we are clear about WHY we are taking on the challenge – about the benefits we hope to get. I’ve argued that we have an unfortunate tendency to believe that we get all the benefits only when we reach the target. When in fact, much of the time, the more effort we put in the better off we are. This false apprehension of the situation isn’t always bad. Increasing the pressure on ourselves, can lead to higher motivation and better performance. But there is one big caveat – performance increases only as long as you think you can still reach the target. If you ever think you can’t then motivation tanks and effort stops. In the next blog post I look at putting this distinction to work. It turns out that it’s surprisingly helpful. I’ll be suggesting ways to keep motivation up even when it looks as if you’re going to fall short. And how you can approach doing a backflip on a motorbike, or any other challenge that might leave you broke and broken.

Why take on a tough challenge?

This is second part of a series of blogs showing how we can achieve more by rethinking our attitude towards failure. In this blog post I’m looking at why you might want to take on a tough challenge.

Tough doesn’t mean big. Your challenge can be pushing ahead with the orphanage in Cambodia or getting the bathroom redone. It can be choosing a new more satisfying career or it could be doing the GST return. What ‘tough’ challenges have in common is that you’re procrastinating on starting them. You want the outcome, but you’re blinking  because it involves certain hard work for uncertain reward and possible risk.

You might be thinking that this point is blooming obvious. I thought so too. Then I was giving one of my workshops about how to take on tough challenges, to a group of admin staff, and, so we could get into the fun stuff I asked the participants to come up with their own tough challenge. It’s a slightly awkward question, but most of the group started scribbling away in the workbooks. However, there was also a certain number of thin-lipped cold stares coming from people sitting mostly at the back. These people were very happy with just the way things are thank you very much.

This post is for them.

One of the first things I did, after thinking I might take part in the trans-Atlantic rowing race, was to go and see a sports coach, Jon Ackland.

I walked into his office and he had a huge white sheet of paper in front of him, with lots of little squares on it. It was my training plan, and he was busy filling all the boxes with how many hours of what I should be doing each day to get fit for the race.

He looked up from his desk and said, ‘Oh Kevin, I just need to know for your training plan, are you going to win the race or just take part?’

Given that I had only just decided I was going to be in the race this question seemed a little premature.

So I said ‘I’m going to try really hard and see what happens then.’  Which seemed a perfectly reasonable answer. But then he turned on me and said ‘No! No! No! That’s completely wrong! The only way you’ll have a CHANCE of winning this race is if you DECIDE to win. Then everything about the way you prepare for this race will change!’ He went on, ‘I don’t care what it is but I need to know now! Are you going to win? Or just take part?’

So he’s asking me to raise the stakes. He’s asking me to take on a HARDER challenge with a bright line between success and failure. And in fact has a very good chance of failure.

Hang on a second, why on Earth should I commit to a goal that I’ll probably fail at?

Risking failure sucks – but stagnation is worse

We consider taking on tough challenges because we want things to be better. We want a situation to be different. So how does that happen? Well, we could do nothing or we could do something.

For most people in most situations doing nothing is unlikely to be successful. That CV isn’t going to write itself. The bank account doesn’t stuff itself with money and the garage isn’t going to go fill itself with Lamborghini. Your life is certainly heading somewhere and when you’re in a moving car it’s generally better to have both hands on the steering wheel.

The problem is your brain is a reward seeking missile. Left to ourselves our natural state is to focus on pleasure, on the next bright and shiny thing, or what need to do right now to make sure that things don’t get a lot worse.

Unfortunately doing just what you want to do each day doesn’t result in a better life. (Just in higher video game scores and more weight). Improving our situation lies on the other side of sustained hard work and sacrifice.

So that’s the first reason why we take on tough challenges – to avoid stagnation and improve our situation.

Tough challenges are the doorway to some top shelf emotions

A Harvard professor, Teresa Amabile, recently had thousands of workers record what happened at work each day and also how motivated they felt. The days when motivation was at its highest were the days when progress was made towards a goal. The best part of your day is when you’ve achieved something. Accomplishment is the sweetest of emotions.

How do we get that sense of achievement? By taking on tough challenges. To prove me wrong you have to name me a worthwhile and easy challenge. To be rewarding, at some point, the challenge has to be beyond our reach.

Recently I was thinking about taking part in the Tarawera Ultra. A 100k running race through the forests between Rotorua and Kawerau. It would be an immense challenge for me. I had run a marathon a few years earlier, but this would be nearly two and half times as long. And it was only two months out so very little time to train. The most likely outcome is that I would nose into the mud at about the 45km mark. But wouldn’t it be an amazing achievement to get to the end? To run a 100km! Do I enter or not?

I didn’t know what I should do, but while I was going back and forwards on this I found myself looking at the FAQ page on the race website. It turns out that I wasn’t the only person who had this problem. In fact, the very first question was:

‘I don’t know if I can do this.’

In other words – why should I take on a challenge that I might fail at? Can you guess what their answer was? It wasn’t, ‘You can do it!’ – that wouldn’t have been true for everyone. It wasn’t, ‘You won’t know unless you try’. That’s true but doesn’t really address the question.

Their answer to the question was, ‘That’s the point.’

I liked that very much.

The reason that we take on these difficult challenges is to see what we are capable of. To have that exhilaration that comes from breaking our limits. If you knew you could run a 100km then what’s the point? It would be like … making a cup of tea, nice, but not exactly thrilling.

Let’s flip it around. What if you were physically prevented from taking on challenges that were beyond you? What if you were only allowed to do things that you already knew how to do, or had already done before? Only take on challenges that were 100% guaranteed of getting the outcome. Does that sound like a life? Or like a prison?

There is a question that I’m afraid gets asked far too often by motivational speakers, which is, ‘What would you knew if you couldn’t fail?’. I think it’s supposed to encourage you to think beyond your limits. Unfortunately, this question, if unconstrained, quickly leads to some absurd answers. What would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail? What would I do if I knew that I could only succeed? Jump off a tall building. Grab the guitar off The Edge at a U2 concert. Ask Beyoncé out on a date. That sort of thing. But inevitably I would die of boredom.

(BTW, a much better question is, ‘How much better would you feel about your challenge if you could figure out a way to control the risk?’ That’s what we’ll be looking at a later blog in this series.)

Tough challenges are a tool to get the most out of yourself

I’ll offer one last reason for why you want to take on tough challenges and it’s to do with the psychology of performance.

I’ve already introduced Jon Ackland, my coach for the trans-Atlantic race. Like all good coaches Jon was very dogmatic about winning. He would spend a lot of time impressing upon me the importance of winning. He would say things like, “You’ve got to win, it’s all about winning. Participation is for pussies. There’s no second place there’s only first loser!’ And so on.

That didn’t seem quite right to me. Sure winning is important but is it an absolute?

So I pushed back, ‘Hang on! It can’t be ALL be about winning. What if you were in a marathon race and you only won because your main opposition wasn’t there?
Or you lost because they cheated?
Or you were winning until you swerved to save a small child?
Winning can’t always be everything. Losing can’t always mean failing.’

But he wouldn’t have that. And so we went back and forth about this until finally he said something that stopped me in my tracks. In a moment of extraordinary insight he resolved the dilemma between winning vs participating.

He said, ‘Of course winning isn’t everything. The best that you can do is the best that you can do. But you can’t get the best out of yourself unless you commit to a difficult goal.’
That’s it! To get the best out of yourself you need to commit to a tough challenge, to tell yourself that achieving it is … well if not everything then very important. But to stay sane part of you has to remember that, at the end of the day, the best you can do is the best you can do.

Make sense?

So, three reasons that you might want to take on a tough challenge:
- To grow your skills and capabilities;
- To find out what you’re capable of; and
- To get the best out of yourself.

Hmmm, just re-reading that I haven’t been quite consistent, that last point only works if you’re taking on a big goal. Getting yourself over the line just to make your bed isn’t really getting the best out of yourself.

But I’ve spent too much time already trying to make this argument to finesse the points any further. If you already believe me that taking on a tough challenge is worthwhile I hope you’ve long since
skipped over to the next post. If you were indifferent before you started reading then I’m not sure words on a page are going to convince you.

I know because I’ve been this guy (see image of bloke on sofa) and he’s not listening.

We might know that taking on tough challenges are good for us - but just knowing usually isn’t enough to get us to take action. He’s not thinking about the benefits, he’s focused on the risks and the pain, especially the pain of failure. And that’s what we’re going to be looking at in the next post.

How to achieve more by being smarter about failure - intro

This is the third in a series of blogs about how to achieve more by rethinking failure. In this post I make a distinction about goal targets and goal benefits and explain how that leads to a new way to thinking about your challenge.

If we know one thing about goals, we know that taking on a goal means trying to reach a target. That’s the ‘S’ in SMART goals. That’s the ‘Specific’.

But hang on. That’s wrong already. When we take on a goal it’s not because we like to set targets, it’s because we want to get some benefit. So when do we get the benefit?

Is it all at once, when we achieve our target, or do we accrue it along the way?

Perhaps, because we see it so often in sport and competitions, we tend to think that all our goals have that same sharp division between getting a lot of benefit and getting a lot of pain. If we don’t reach the goal then, we’ve not only failed, but worse – the whole challenge has been a waste of time. But is that really the case?

UNDERSTANDING FAILURE LEADS TO A NEW WAY TO THINK ABOUT SUCCESS

Recently I was down in Wanaka and, wanting to go for a run, found myself at the start of the track that leads up to Royd’s Peak. The information board in the carpark said it was 8km to the top. In fact you could look up and see the route taking switch back after switch back, until there, above the snow line, above the yaks, above the Sherpas, blowing up in the Jetstream, the jagged summit of the mountain. It was getting late in the day – but I thought I would set myself the goal of getting to the top.

I didn’t make it. It was getting dark when I got to the final ridge line and so I turned back a few hundred metres from the summit.

Let me ask you a question - did I fail?

Really? Isn’t the opposite point of view also true?

Whatever answer you picked you’re right, and doesn’t that already give you a hint that there is something unhelpful about the way we think about goals and achievement? Why isn’t it bleeding obvious?

Here’s my go at untangling it. I think that the answer is ‘Yes I did fail’. Success was reaching the top and I didn’t reach the top.

Let me ask you a much better question. If I had known that I wasn’t going to reach the top should I still have taken on the challenge?

To figure out the answer you’ve got to know what the benefits are, because achieving ‘success’, that is reaching the target, is not the same thing as the ‘benefits’.

I was going for a run to burn off some energy, see some fantastic views and get fitter. Those were my benefits – getting to the top was my target. Regardless of the target every step I took up the track I got the benefits.

You can characterise your challenge based on the relationship between effort in and benefit out. Most goals fall into only two camps, RAMPs and STEPs.

For most challenges the more effort the more benefit. These are things like getting fit, losing weight, saving money, learning a language, or jogging up a peak. Let’s call these RAMPS.

(If you think that this point is obvious then why is the pile in your in-tray so big and your garage such a mess? ;-)

In some cases, though, there is a sharp line between success and failure. Like if you’re in the business of doing backflips on a motorbike, being shot from a cannon into a net, if you work as a blind knife thrower’s assistant or defuse bombs, or if you find yourself playing that weird Mayan ball game where they sacrifice the losing team.

For these types of challenges, things are pretty normal until a moment of performance when you either get all the benefit or you don’t. Let’s call these type of challenges STEPS.

I’ll give you some goals and you can tell me if they are RAMP or STEP. (Hint: If you fall a little short of reaching your target but you’re only a little worse off then it’s a RAMP. If you are much worse off it’s a STEP.

·      Tight rope walking the Niagara Falls.

·      Tight rope walking with safety leash across the Niagara Falls

·      Playing Lotto.

·      Losing weight

·      Studying for an exam

·      Making your sales targets

·      Quitting smoking

Answers are:

STEP

RAMP

STEP

RAMP

RAMP

Quitting smoking – I’m calling it a RAMP because even if you aren’t successful quitting you at least had fewer cigarettes for some time. And given that the average smoker quits about 7 times before they finally stop, then you probably learnt something about quitting as well. On the other hand, if this is your last attempt to quit smoking then it’s a STEP.

WE THINK OUR CHALLENGES ARE STEPS – THEY MOSTLY AREN’T

(Hmmm, that was supposed to be a person in a cash grab booth!)

Most goals that we take on in real life are not do or die, winner take all STEP goals. In most of the actual goals we take on in life the more we achieve the better off we are, if we miss our target by 1% we still achieve 99% of the benefit. BUT WE TREAT THEM LIKE STEP goals.

We treat our challenges as if they have the same reward profile of motorcycle stunts when really they are more like cash grab booths. This isn’t always a bad thing. Believing that you are taking on a STEP challenge is highly motivating – it’s a great tool to get the best out of yourself … until it isn’t.

If you ever feel that you are NOT going to be successful, then your motivation plummets. It can mean that you won’t take on a goal that you might succeed at, and you quit early on challenges you should persist at.

You are also much more likely to give yourselves a vicious psychological kicking when you fail at a STEP goal.

IN SUMMARY

I’ve argued that we will make better decisions about which challenges we take on and which challenges we continue on if we are clear about WHY we are taking on the challenge – about the benefits we hope to get.

I’ve argued that we have an unfortunate tendency to believe that we get all the benefits only when we reach the target. When in fact, much of the time, the more effort we put in the better off we are.

This false apprehension of the situation isn’t always bad. Increasing the pressure on ourselves, can lead to higher motivation and better performance. But there is one big caveat – performance increases only as long as you think you can still reach the target. If you ever think you can’t then motivation tanks and effort stops.

In the next blog post I look at putting this distinction to work. It turns out that it’s surprisingly helpful. I’ll be suggesting ways to keep motivation up even when it looks as if you’re going to fall short. When you should take on a much larger goal, and how you can safely approach doing a backflip on a motorbike, or any other challenge that might leave you broke and broken. 

How to get the most motivation from your motivational speaker

Recently I saw an invitation to an event where a panel of industry experts were going to talk about mental toughness, something that I would normally rush to see.

Then I saw the format – it wasn’t going to be a presentation, it was going to be exclusively a question and answer session. Oh dear, that seldom works. You’ve seen them yourself. Most Q&A sessions (with some exceptions - see below) can be variable to say the least. 

But that did raise an interesting question - how do you get the most motivation from a motivational speaker? How do you get alignment between what your organisation needs and what the speaker deliver? How can you shape the event and guide the speaker to ensure that you get the best return on your investment?

This is a process that I’ve been through a few hundred times so here are my thoughts about some good questions and not so good questions that you might try asking or avoiding when briefing your next speaker.

“Here’s, ideally, what we want you to achieve.”

This is sweet music to the ears of most speakers. Most speakers, and all the good ones, are very keen to bring the most value to you as a client. We don’t want to ask you ‘How did it go?’ afterwards, we want to know that it went well beforehand.

So it’s very important to be clear as possible about what you would like the audience to be thinking, feeling and doing after the presentation. The other place to start is …

“Here’s what the problem is. Here’s the history of actions we’ve been taken.”

A good speaker is more like a consultant. They should be able to assess the situation and use their tools (anecdotes, observations, facts and activities) to help bring about change.

It’s very important to know what else has been done so that the presenter’s materical can best fit into the solution. They should also be able to tell you about the results that you can expect.

Not every speech starts with a problem!If the purpose of the event is just to for example, reward clients – that’s absolutely fine. But that’s quite different from an event intended to improve teamwork. They both should be entertaining but one will have message.

Which brings us to which messages and how many.

"Here's the 15 points we would like you to make."

Can you remember the last time you heard a motivational speaker? How many points can you remember? Probably not many. A speaker can fire about six idea bullets, you want them all to hit a target.

If you have any ideas for what those bullets should be, ie how you would like it addressed that’s great, the speaker will have some as well. If you’ve been to the speaker’s website and seen the range of speeches advertised then don’t be concerned about mixing and matching different elements. Speeches are put together as ‘modules’ and most of the time the relevant chunks can be swapped between.

One of my clients recently got very specific. Here is what they asked me to cover.
-    The importance of goal setting
-    How do they get excited about their goal?
-    How should they plan to achieve it?
-    How should they reward themselves?
-    Something about resilience

Done and done!

“What do you talk about? What points do you make? And how do you make them?”

It might seem obvious but this is a good question.

There are broadly two types of speakers - ‘Event based speakers’ and ‘Subject matter experts’. Event-based speakers (like me!) talk about something that they did, like being an All Black, or becoming NZer of the year, or trekking to the South Pole. To provide a satisfying story experience they will necessarily have a beginning, the call to take on the quest, some obstacles, and a resolution. From this narrative ‘spine’ they can jump off and focus on different points. You might be expecting just a patty, but you're going to get a bun and some special sauce as well.

It’s a good idea, and quite fun, at the briefing to hear the speaker’s early ideas about how they are going to meet your aims, and hear the anecdotes they use to make their points.

You will also hear what the speaker typically talks about. When I describe how I shape my presentations and topics that are received particularly well, clients often decide that they would like those elements to be part of the solution too.

“You have 60 minutes.”

Duration and objective go hand and hand. In general the longer the presenter talks for the more value you get. Up to a point - the brain can only take in what the bum can handle. You know your audience and what their concentration span is. For some audiences an hour is a long time to be sitting, for others, up to 2 hours is fine (provided there is a brief stand up break in the middle). After dinner concentration spans are usually shorter.

Knowing the finish time is as important as the duration. Conferences almost always run late. If the speaker’s session starts late it’s essential to be clear whether sticking to the agreed duration is more important than finishing at the agreed time – for example, to let people catch flights.

“Tell them that they have to do X.”

This is tricky.

Every audience loves it when it feels like the speaker has tailored the content to them, recognises the event, the location, special things about the day, uses the conference theme, weaves in the company values and specific challenges and goals and adjusts the examples and anecdotes so that it best works the audience and organisation. This is all good.

On the other hand, it is possible to overly brief the speaker so that they start using the same words and phrases that management has been using to get a desired behaviour out of the staff. When this happens the speaker can lose credibility with the audience.

A speaker’s message should reinforce what the client wants, but do it in a way that appears happily coincidental. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say a client has a problem with teamwork and that different parts of the organisation are working in silos, with sales being the worst culprits. In this case it would be unwise for the speaker to say anything like ‘Sales – you’ve got to buck your ideas up and stop over-promising you’re stressing out the other teams.’

Instead, the speaker can relate a story about their own experience. I can weave in an anecdote about how Jamie and I faced this problem of conflicting priorities out in the Atlantic or in the South Pole trek, and how we resolved it. I can talk about a technique we used that was really useful for us. People will get the idea.

I’ve had feedback from the client where they’ve said, ‘My staff are finally saying to me things I’ve been trying to tell them for months!’ That’s a perfect outcome.

"Shall we have a 45min Q&A at the end?"

Absolutely, but we need to set it up so we dodge some potholes as Q&A’s can be awkward and unproductive.

In theory a Q&A with the speaker should allow the audience to probe deeper on the topics that interested them, and get clarity on how to apply the tools and techniques.
The Q&A should be where the rubber hits the road. Where the audience gets to throw a few stones at what’s been said, satisfy themselves it’s useful and get some specific help putting their plans in place to implement.

In theory.

Unfortunately, what happens in practice is when put on the spot people’s minds go blank and they are squeamish about talking in front of their peers. So they tend to go for safe questions. I nearly always get asked ‘What are you going to do next?’ Which is a nice non-threatening conversation starter, but talking about my plans doesn’t really help move them forward. (I should really respond ‘What are YOU going to do next?’!)

The audience can also get sidetracked. I was at a Q&A with the All Black coach Steve Hansen recently. The facilitator opened with something like ‘Now we aren’t here to ask Steve about rugby, we here to find out how he runs a high performance organisation.’

So the questions were mostly about rugby.

The last problem with Q&A sessions is that they get hijacked by people who have a certain niche issue that doesn’t apply to the majority.

Here’s a surefire way to improve the Q&A – submit the questions electronically during the presentation. There are some great solutions out there like ‘Slido’ that allow the audience to tap in questions from their phone. This can be done in real time during the presentation so the questions reflect the whole content, not just what was said just before the Q&A started. The app also allows audience members to vote questions up or down and so the presenter gets a bit of a poll on the question’s relevance.

The Q&A session should not be the whole session, there needs to be some content beforehand. It comes down to how adults learn best. The best way to learn is when you get tested to find out what you need to know, then get some structured content from a credible source, punched home with some powerful anecdotes.

Most of the time we miss the diagnosis part at the start (except if you get my ‘Breakthrough Workshop’!) but if the content is strong then it still works. A much more haphazard way of learning is to get the laundry lists of ideas, or random anecdotes that can come out of unstructured, uncensored Q&A’s.

‘Don’t mention the war!’ – dealing with sensitivities

A client was recently telling me about a speaker they had had who had made some good points, but had so offended the audience in the first five minutes that for the rest of the hour all of his wisdom fell on stony ground.

Companies have wildly different cultures. In some companies I’ve spoken too you could drop F-bombs all day and they would have thought you’re a vicar. In other organisations you can start a riot by using the wrong pronoun. Your company is probably somewhere in the middle. But if you have any sensitivities it’s really important for the speaker to know.

There may be some words in your industry that are real hot buttons. For example, sometimes franchisees like to be referred to as ‘branches’, other times that would be exactly the wrong word to use!

In one company I spoke to, I talked about ‘revenue’ – suddenly it felt like I had broken wind in front of the pope. It turns out that the correct term was something like ‘ledger value’.

Follow these tips and you’ll get the most motivation from your motivational speaker! I would love to hear your thoughts! Please use the comments below.

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