Tag Archives: Behavior Change

Behavior Change

How to Change Habits: Jamming the “Flywheel of Society”

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William James

William James

William James, father of American psychology and brother of novelist Henry James wrote in his 1890 The Principles of Psychology, “Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.”

Though James seemed to look favorably upon the conservative element of habit, the drawbacks of thoughtless habitual actions are clear when people consume more calories than required to complete daily activities, purchase unneeded items, react with predictable emotions in contentious situations, and keep disadvantaged groups without advantages enjoyed by powerful groups.

Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg

Charles Duhigg’s bestseller, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, argues that habits are a significant part of most people’s daily activities – about 40% – and that even brain injured people can form habits.

The Power of HabitHe outlines the A(ntecedant) – B(ehavior) – C(onsequence) model, initiated by a cue or a trigger that signals automatic or habitual behavior.
In a novel situation, the person shifts to a problem-solving mode to develop an appropriate response — which may require creative thinking .

However, in a more typical situation, the person executes the habitual physical, mental, or emotional behavior or “routine,” which is then rewarded — often with a reduction in anxiety or discomfort.

Duhigg shows how dysfunctional habits can be analyzed for the cue, routine, and reward, then changed by modifying the antecedent, behavior or reward.

Albert Ellis

Albert Ellis

The A-B-C approach was popularized by Albert Ellis in his Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (RET), and outlined in his more than 50 books including Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy  Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Duhigg provides examples from marketing campaigns for well-known consumer products in the U.S., including Pepsodent toothpaste and Febreze air freshener.

Timothy Wilson

Timothy Wilson

Like Duhigg’s model’s reference to earlier behavior modification approaches, Timothy Wilson of University of Virginia’s Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, adapts principles of Aaron T. Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to change habitual interpretations, attributions, narratives and personal stories that lead to social problems including alcohol and drug abuse, teen violence and pregnancies, and social prejudice.

Aaron Beck

Aaron Beck

Wilson extracts and renames three empirically-validated behavioral techniques:

  • Story editing, to craft a more optimistic, hopeful story or interpretation about a situation, often using writing exercises
  • Story prompting, in which another person provides alternate, more optimistic interpretations based on data or “social proof” from  experiences in a similar situation
  • Cognitive Behavior TherapyDo good, be good, by “acting as if” the new behavior is a well-established habit, often through serving others in volunteer work.

RedirectRSA talk

Another look at habitual, even unconscious thinking in daily life is featured in a related post, Pattern Recognition in Entrepreneurship.

Douglas Van Praet

Douglas Van Praet

This discussion shares Douglas Van Praet’s guidelines to capitalize on unconscious cognitive processing and automatic buying behavior in Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing 

BJ Fogg

BJ Fogg

An earlier post, Hacking Human Behavior: “Tiny Habits” Start, Maintain Changes showcased BJ Fogg’s work on “tiny habits” as hooks to behavior change.
His approach draws on many of the same behavior modification principles featured in Duhigg’s and Wilson’s recommendations to analyze habitual cues, routines, and rewards.

-*How do you analyze and modify habits?

Related Posts:

How Can Dance Inform Business Thinking?

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Peter Lovatt

Peter Lovatt founded the Dance Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire, which combines his performance experience as a professional dancer with his training as a research psychologist.

In several TED talks, he marvels at his career trajectory because he “was rubbish at school,” and was relegated to Special Education classes, probably due to his undiagnosed ADHD.

His career demonstrates an innovative synthesis of disciplines with his current research agenda investigating the impact of dance on problem solving using divergent thinking and convergent thinking strategies.

Peter Lovatt at TED

Lovatt’s experiments demonstrated that volunteers who engaged in improvised dance movements solved divergent thinking problems more quickly than when they performed more structured dance maneuvers, or no movement at all.

Similarly, his work showed these volunteers increased their speed of solving convergent thinking problems after they engaged in choreographed dance moves.

These findings may not imply that innovation teams should engage in structured and unstructured movements at work, but it does support the positive impact of dance movement on neural processing speed and problem solving.

Lovatt extended this work to patients with Parkinson’s disease, known to disrupt divergent thinking processes, to validate his findings with normal volunteers.
He demonstrated that Parkinson’s disease patients improved the divergent thinking problem solving after they engaged in improvised dance sequences, and hypothesized that these patients develop new neural pathways to “work around” dopamine-depleted blockages.

Peter Lovatt leading dance experiment

Lovatt’s group found increases in self-esteem among participants in dance styles that:

  • Include more improvisational elements (“high degree of tolerance for not getting it right”),
  • Are gender or culturally neutral
  • Raise the heart rate
  • Are repetitive
  • Encourage looser fitting clothes (in contrast to ballet)
  • Are non-competitive

Related Post on impact of dance:
Oxytocin Increases Empathic Work Relationships, Workplace Trust, Generosity 

Twyla Tharp

MacArthur Fellowship and Tony Award-winning choreographer Twyla Tharp discussed innovation and collaboration through the lens of dance in two books with lessons applicable to business.

In The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life she asserts that creative expression requires perseverance, practice, hard work, “showing up,” and cultivating systematic habits to act upon innovative initiative.

This echoes the action-orientation advocated by Malcolm Gladwell in his observation of 10,000 hours of practice to develop virtuoso performance and by sports psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, summarized in these related posts:

Tharp’s The Collaborative Habit: Life Lessons for Working Together discusses both how collaboration can change the participants, and practical approaches to collaborative creation – which she acknowledges has not been completely smooth in some of her work with luminaries including Richard Avedon, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Bob Dylan, Milos Forman,  Norma Kamali, Frank Sinatra.
Two related posts on Collaboration are:

Dance provides a fresh perspective and metaphor for business challenges including problem solving, innovation, and collaboration.

-*How do you react to Lovatt’s and Tharp’s application of movement in problem solving, collaboration and innovation?

Squeeze a Ball, Improve Performance under Pressure

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Jürgen Beckmann

Improve performance under pressure by squeezing a ball or clenching the non-dominant hand before competition to activate specific motor regions of the brain, according to Jürgen Beckmann and his research team, who studied experienced soccer players, tae kwon do experts and badminton players.

The Journal of Experimental Psychology: General reported that right-handed athletes who squeezed a ball in their left hand before competing were less like to “choke under pressure” than right-handed players who squeeze a ball in their right hand.

Beckmann and collaborators Peter Gröpel and Felix Ehrlenspiel noted that when athletes don’t perform well “under pressure,” they may be focusing on their own movements rather than relying on automatic motor skills developed through repeated practice – or “muscle memory.”

They explained, “Rumination can interfere with concentration and performance on motor tasks … Many movements…can be impaired by attempts at consciously controlling them. This technique can be helpful for many situations and tasks.”

Iris Hung

Iris Hung

Other applications include business situations like presentations or negotiations, or helping elderly people improve balance by clenching a ball before walking or climbing stairs.
Iris Hung the National University of Singapore found additional applications: Avoiding the temptation of sugary snacks in a cafeteria, enduring physical pain, and disturbing information.

Hendrie Weisinger

Hendrie Weisinger, whose best-seller Nobody’s Perfect was the first of 8 books, integrates this finding with other research-based recommendations to manage performance pressure with “Nerves of Steel.” His new book is scheduled for release by Random House in 2013.

His other books, including Emotional Intelligence at Work and Anger at Work, along with video excerpts are available on his website.

-*How do you maintain performance when experiencing pressure?

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“Greenlight Group”: No-cost, Self-managed Support to Achieve Professional, Personal Goals

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Gary Burlingame

Gary Burlingame recently published a meta-analysis of 40 studies that demonstrate the efficacy of groups for a number of conditions, and Dennis Kivlighan noted that group success is associated with participants’:

  • Shared purpose
  • Common identity
  • Social support through interaction
  • Reciprocal influence of the members on one another
  • Interpersonal feedback to reduce idiosyncratic individual perspectives and attitudes.

Dennis Kivlighan

In addition, groups can benefit more people at lower cost than individual coaching.

An example of these principles at work was reported recently at a large Silicon Valley technology company.

Jennifer Hartnett-Henderson

Jennifer Hartnett-Henderson [@JHartnettHender] organized a “Greenlight Group”, based on Keith Ferrazzi’s model outlined in his book, Who’s Got Your Back?

Using a “snowball” recruitment strategy, she brought together five individuals from different internal organizations, in varied roles and job levels.

The goal was to meet six times as a team over a 90 day period, to help each other achieve their most challenging professional and personal goals by giving each other feedback, supporting each other, and holding each other accountable to progress.

She outlined the benefits of “Greenlight Groups”, and executives at the company were impressed with the value proposition when they learned about it via “word-of-mouth”:

  • Self-manage career goals with no-cost peer support
  • Achieve personal goals
  • Access confidential peer support, feedback from trusted advisors

Over the six meetings:

  • Two participants transferred to new internal roles at higher grade levels
  • Two participants achieved greater work-life balance by reducing number of weekly work hours to less than 55 per week
  • Two participants dramatically increased social media presence
  • Two participants explored internal and external career opportunities
  • Two participants explored monetizing entrepreneurial opportunities
  • Two participants initiated weight-reduction program
  • One participant initiated exercise program
  • One participant increased exercise time and performance

This example suggests the value of self-organized, mutual-assistance groups to achieve professional and personal goals over a defined time period.

-*What self-managed career development programs have been effective in your workplaces?

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“Nudging” Compassion, Resilience to Reduce Conflict, Stress

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David DeSteno

David DeSteno, directs Northeastern University’s Social Emotions Lab, where he investigates cognitive and neurological mechanism related to social behavior.
In Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us , and at his PopTech talk, he shared how he investigated whether evoked compassion and empathy is associated with reduced aggression.

He described experiments in which volunteers solve math problems for money.
In some conditions, one of DeSteno’s associates posed as another volunteer and noticeably cheated to earn more money than the real volunteer.
In other conditions, the confederate abided by the rules.

For some experiments, the cheating confederate, a professional actor, evoked empathy and compassion by saying that she was  worried about her brother, who was just diagnosed with a terminal illness.

In these situations, the volunteers were less likely to intentionally inflict discomfort on her in the following study of “taste perception,” a measure of aggression.

In this experimental trial, the volunteer measured a discretionary amount of extra-hot sauce into a cup for the cheating or non-cheating confederates to taste.

Volunteers poured five times more hot sauce for cheating confederates than non-cheating confederates, but they treated cheaters who evoked empathy the same as non-cheaters.

DeSteno noted most people are willing to help others who have some similarity to them, such as a shared identity of sharing a religious faith or hometown, or even are moving together as in conga lines, military drills.

He suggested that movement “synchrony causes separate identities to merge into one,” and demonstrated this trend in a music perception study, where volunteers in the same room tapped their hands on sensors when they heard tones.

In some conditions, the tones were synchronized so the volunteers were tapping at the same time as other volunteers, and in other conditions, the tones were independent.
De Steno found that 50% of volunteers who tapped at the same time were willing to help other volunteers, whereas 20% of those who tapped at different times helped others.
He concluded that volunteers felt more similar by tapping together, so felt more compassion, and were more likely to help others.

DeSteno is investigating social media like Facebook as a platform for sharing similarities to reduce aggression in conflict, cyber-bullying, victims of distant natural disasters.

He  said uses Cass Sunstein’s and Richard Thaler’s idea that small behavioral and organizational changes can “nudge” people to healthier, safer, more productive, and prosperous habits outlined in Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness 

Their practical recommendations for designing effective “choice architecture” are consistent with DeSteno’s research-based findings:

* Align incentives with desired outcomes
* Identify possible alternative outcomes in familiar terms
* Provide default options that favor desired outcome behaviors
* Offer prompt, relevant feedback about choices and outcomes.
* Expect deviation from the targeted outcome, and build in ways to prevent, detect, and minimize this variance.
* Structure complex choices to reduce the difficulty of decisions-making

-*How have you seen “similarity” affect workplace collaboration and support?

-*Where have you seen organizations implement “choice architecture” to encourage employee behaviors toward positive goals?

BJ Fogg

See related Post –  “Tiny Habits” Start, Maintain Changes

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Performance Excellence linked to Recognizing, Preventing, Correcting Failures — and Coaching

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Atul Gawande

Atul Gawande a Harvard Medical School professor, surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and New Yorker staff writer, investigated excellent performance across disciplines in search of ways to improve global medical care.
His findings suggest simple behavior changes, such as following a structured checklist, can avert poor performance and related negative outcomes.

In a recent talk at Harvard, he said, “people that were focused on achieving something more than competence…weren’t smarter than anybody else, they weren’t geniuses…Instead they seemed to …come to grips with their inherent fallibility—fallibility in the systems that they work in, and with what it took to overcome that fallibility.”

Gawande discusses three elements of better performance in Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance

  • Diligence – Attending to details, to avoid errors and overcome obstacles.
    Gawande offers a rationale for checklists and principles for their optimal structuring in his The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
  • Doing Right –Ensuring that skill and will and incentives are aligned to drive excellent performance
  • Ingenuity – Deliberate, mindful monitoring of potential and actual failures, continuously seeking innovative ways to improve performance and solutions

All of these elements can be improved with attentive coaching observation and feedback

Gawande distinguishes making mistakes because we don’t:

  • Know enough (ignorance)
  • Make proper use of what we do already know (ineptitude)

He notes that because we have extensive access to information, ignorance occurs less frequently than ineptitude.
In addition, he argues that both can be improved by systematic analysis through tools such as checklists to detect, avert, and remedy failures.

Geoffrey Smart

The application of systematic checklist-based analysis was linked to Internal Rate of Return (IRR) in Geoffrey Smart’s study of investments by Venture Capital (VC) firms,  The Art and Science of Human Capital Valuation

He described the VC firm’s approach to assessing the “human capital” that would lead new ventures in seven categories:

  • The Art Critic – The most frequently-used approach in which the VC assesses leadership talent at a glance, intuitively, based on extensive experience.
  • The Sponge – Conducts extensive due diligence, researching and assimilating information, then decides based on intuition
  • The Prosecutor – Interrogates the candidate, tests with challenging questions and hypothetical situations
  • The Suitor – Woos the candidate to accept the leadership role instead of analyzing capabilities and fit
  • The Terminator – Eliminates the evaluation because the venture is funded for the best ideas, not the originators, who are replaced
  • The Infiltrator – Becomes a “participant-observer” in an immersive, time-consuming experientially-based assessment
  • The Airline Captain – Uses a formal checklist to diligently study past mistakes, which rendered the top average Internal Rate of Return (IRR), 80%, in contrast to all others, which were 35% or less for all of the other types.
    This approach had 10% likelihood of later having to fire senior management, whereas the others had at least 50% likelihood.

Smart said that Venture Capitalists said that two of their most important mistakes are:

  • Rushing to close a deal and investing insufficient time in analysis of the talent and the deal
  • Being influence by “halo effect”

Both Gawande and Smart present evidence for the value of systematic reminders to execute all elements required for expert performance, to prevent failure and alert to potential failure points.

-*How do you improve performance?
-*What value do you find in expert coaching?

See related posts on Performance Improvement:

Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated and

Anders Ericcson’s Making of an Expert in The How and Who of Innovation 

K. Anders Ericcson

Task structuring tools:

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Related Post:
Developing a SMARTER Mindset for Resilience, Emotional Intelligence – Part 2

Power Tactics for Better Negotiation

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Selena Rezvani

Selena Rezvani

Selena Rezvani points to research documenting women’s tendency to negotiate for salaries, promotions – and even task-sharing in relationships, less often than men in Pushback: How Smart Women Ask–and Stand Up–for What They Want

Her book offers guidelines to speak up assertively while developing the resilience and “thick skins” many in sales have mastered.

These recommendations echo those suggested in research studies and popular articles, and perhaps more Machiavellian, realistic, and perhaps disconcerting come from one of her endorsers, Stanford University Graduate School of Business Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer.

Jeffrey Pfeffer

Jeffrey Pfeffer

He analyzes individual power dynamics in corporate hierarchies, and offers recommendations to acquire and use power in Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don’t 

Power-Jeffrey PfefferIn Rezvani’s book, Pfeffer notes that “Power is about 20% conferred and 80% taken.
Good things don’t come to those who wait; they come to those who ask, negotiate, and push.
For women—or men—to get what they deserve, they must get over the platitudes and attitudes that hold them back.”

Pfeffer debunks the hopeful idea that the world is fair and just,  and counsels those seeking to have the power to “get things done” to promote themselves, avoid giving up or delegating power, but instead,  give up the wish to be well-liked.

Because the work world is not fair, Pfeffer says that intelligence, performance, and likeability alone are not the most important factors in advancing in an organization.
Instead, he argues that ambition, energy, and focus drive key power behaviors:

  • Self-promotion and seeking organizational visibility
  • Building relationships, networking, and supporting the immediate manager
    Cultivating a reputation for control and authority by managing information and first impressions (halo effect, attention decrement, cognitive discounting, self-fulfilling prophecy, biased assimilation)
  • Embodying powerful demeanor in speech, dress, posture

Useful skills in acquiring power are:

  • Self-reflection and self-knowledge
  • Confidence and self-assurance
  • Ability to “read” others by empathically understanding their perspectives
  • Capacity to tolerate and remain calm in conflict

Although power is valuable to enable execution and results, there are downsides and “prices to pay” for having and using power.
Often, the costs of power are not fully considered or anticipated by those who aspire to it, so Pfeffer usefully suggests the following drawbacks of power:

  • Loss of privacy due to public scrutiny
  • Loss of autonomy
  • Necessary investment of time and effort that might be spent in other ways, such as with family, maintaining a healthy lifestyle, pursuing non-work interests
  • Trust, confidentiality, conflict-of-interest, ethical dilemmas
  • Possible intoxication with power as an “addictive drug”
Kathleen Kelly Reardon

Kathleen Kelly Reardon

It's All PoliticsPfeffer’s Stanford University colleague, Kathleen Kelly Rearson shares specific examples of skillful, modulated application of power in her book, It’s all Politics.

-*How do you ask for what you want at work?

-*What power tactics do you employ to influence your negotiation outcomes?

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Positive to Negative Feedback Ratios – 3:1 @ work, 5:1: @ home

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Sandra Mashihi

Sandra Mashihi

Kenneth Nowack and Sandra Mashihi provide “evidence-based answers to 15 questions about leveraging 360-degree feedback) in a recent article in Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research.

Kenneth Nowack

Kenneth Nowack

Their first question was “Does 360-degree feedback do more harm than good”?
Nowack and Mashihi concluded that found “poorly-designed 360-degree feedback assessments and interventions can increase disengagement and contribute to poor individual and team performance.”

Specifically, individuals can “experience strong discouragement and frustration” when feedback is not as affirming as anticipated.
In addition, negatively-perceived information may be discounted and disregarded.

John Gottman’s studies of positive-to-negative interaction ratios in marriage suggest that intact and well-functioning marriages have a a 5:1 ratio, and research by his colleagues, Schwartz and team, found a similar effect for 360-feedback sessions, though the ratio was closer to 3:1 to encourage  enhanced individual and team performance, individual workplace engagement, effectiveness, and emotional “flourishing,” according to Frederickson and Losada.

Proportions of negative feedback and interactions that exceed these ratios can interfere with insight and motivation and diminish willingness to engage in work-related practice and performance effectiveness.

Barbara Fredrickson suggested in Positivity: Groundbreaking Research Reveals How to Embrace the Hidden Strength of Positive Emotions, Overcome Negativity, and Thrive that this 3:1 ratio of positive to negative feedback is a “tipping point.”

Research by Eisenberger, Lieberman & Williams demonstrates the physical and emotional impact when the balance tips toward an overload of negative feedback: the same neurophysiologic pathways associated with physical pain are triggered.
Under these circumstances, volunteers report higher levels of physical pain and demonstrate diminished performance on a cognitively-demanding task, according to Chen, Williams, Fitness & Newton.

Anyone providing evaluations or 360-degree feedback may organize and “titrate” negative (“constructive”) feedback to remain within tolerable ratios so that those receiving this coaching can assimilate and execute recommendations.

-*What ratios of positive to negative feedback do you apply in helping others improve performance?

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Kept Up at Night by Intrusive Thoughts of Work: Elusive Sleep

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According to the US Center for Disease Control, about 70 million Americans have some type of sleep disorder, and I noticed this when colleagues in three different meetings discussed their variations of disrupted sleep.
One person described waking up in the middle of the night with “brain whirlies,” whereas others reported waking up with anxiety about Excel spreadsheet accuracy.

William Dement

William Dement

Many people are familiar with William Dement’s ground-breaking studies of REM and NREM sleep, sleep “architecture”, sleep disorders as the Director of Stanford University Sleep Research Center, and many may know of his research on sleep deprivation’s impact on mood, immune system functioning, work productivity and even public safety.

In fact, he asserts that 33% of traffic accidents and most all major industrial accidents are related to human error based on sleep deprivation.
Dement also shows the relationship between sleep apnea and heart disease and stroke.

He outlined his research and advocacy in The Promise of Sleep: A Pioneer in Sleep Medicine Explores the Vital Connection Between Health, Happiness, and a Good Night’s Sleep 

Test your Sleep Savvy with his questionnaire by answering the following statements with “true” or “false”:

  1. Depriving people of dreams causes mental illness.
  2. Drowsiness, that feeling when the eyelids are trying to close and we cannot keep them open, is the first step and not the last step before we fall asleep.
  3. Generally, people need to sleep one hour for every two hours awake.
  4. Insomnia is a disease.
  5. The purpose of sleep is to rest the body, especially the muscles.
  6. Although sleep needs vary, people who sleep about eight hours, on average, tend to live longer.
  7. If you are well rested, it should take about five to ten minutes to fall asleep.
  8. The single symptom most frequently found in all severe sleep disorders is daytime fatigue.
  9. Sleep gets lighter and more fragmented as we age.
  10. We know what sleep is for, how it works, and how it affects us on a cellular level.

1,2,4,5,7,10 are false
3,6,8,9 are true

Rosalind Cartwright

Rosalind Cartwright

Fewer people may be aware of Dement’s mentor, Rosalind Cartwright, who founded the first accredited Sleep Disorder Service in Illinois in 1978 and wrote The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives 

She amplified Dement’s linkage of sleep hygiene with normal mood when she noted that sleep dampens negative emotions “so the next day begins with a calmer frame of mind with which to face the waking world.”

Cartwright recommends behavior modifications to “reclaim healthy sleep” and suggests a three-week “sleep camp” including:

  • Evaluating  risk of sleep disorders
  • Managing sleep “crises”
  • Keeping a sleep diary
  • Measuring  sleep debt

Echoing  the encouragement that “there’s an app for that,” technologists have summarized the most highly-rated Sleep Apps to measure sleep architecture , quality, and duration, and  recommend possible behavioral changes to improve sleep quality and related daily experience:

-*What helps you optimize your sleep experience?
-*Which “sleep myths” do you think are NOT myths?

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How Gaming Can Help You Live Better and Longer

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Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal

Game designer Jane McGonigal’s TED Talk that gaming fulfills the basic human wishes expressed by dying hospice patients:

• Work less hard
• Stay in touch with friends
• Let myself be happier
• Have the courage to express my true self
• Live a life true to my dreams

She discussed a practical game, Superbetter, she developed following her own experience of Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which left her bedridden, in persistent pain, and suicidal for more than a year.

Based on her love of “Special Missions and Secret Objectives”, she developed four research-based challenges to increase her resilience and capabilities:

• Physical
• Mental
• Emotional
• Social

She asserts that these tasks help players strengthen abilities to remain motivated and optimistic even in the face of difficulty challenge, and boost physical and emotional well-being.
McGonigal links these capabilities to strengthening social support, increasing stamina and willpower.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that McGonigal’s twin sister and fellow Ph.D., Kelly McGonigal, conducts research at Stanford University on methods to increase willpower and compassion, and to reduce stress and pain.

Her recent book is The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It

Jane McGonigal seems to triumph in this Jane vs. Colbert face-off …though he may have tried to distract her by mentioning that she is “a girl, and an attractive one at that…with that Big Hair…”

Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert

Six-time Stephen Colbert guest, Hayden Planetarium astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s commented that “you’re lucky to come away with your skin when you appear on Colbert’s show.”  Jane seemed to come away with her skin intact.

-*How have you seen gaming improve lives?
-*To what extent do you concur with the hospice patients’ wishes – and implied advice to younger people?

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