By Tyler Reimschisel, MD
This fall in the Tips for High-Impact Teamwork series, we are discussing the topic of emotional regulation during teamwork. In my last article, I offered several practical approaches for emotional regulation during teamwork, based on the work of many experts in the field. We focused primarily on regulating emotions such as anxiety and anger. In Part II of this review, I will provide approaches that may be helpful to you in managing emotions such as a lack of motivation, procrastination and a lack of willpower.
One of the most challenging emotions to manage can be a lack of motivation. From the team’s perspective, it can appear as a lack of engagement in the team’s activities, social loafing, poor attendance, or attending to other things when the team is meeting and working together.
To address this issue, I have found that many individuals focus primarily on the emotional state itself—not being motivated. But as Elizabeth Grace Saunders points out in her Harvard Business Review article, titled “How to motivate yourself to do things you don’t want to do,” motivation is not the only reason individuals can have for doing something. In an example of reframing, which I reviewed in my last article, several other reasons beyond a feeling of motivation could prompt us to do things we don’t want to do (Saunders, 2018). These could include choosing to do something because it will lower our anxiety, reduce our stress, bring financial gain, benefit someone else, avoid a negative consequence or make you feel good about yourself. So, even if we do not find that work inherently motivating, reappraising the situation to find other factors that resonate with us can help us complete the work.
As I mentioned above, when we lack motivation, we typically focus on the absence of a feeling as the root cause of our problem. At face value, this seems reasonable because we know feelings and emotions drive behavior. If we want to improve our behavior, it makes sense to work on changing our feelings and emotions first.
However, it can also work in reverse. In other words, simply taking action, regardless of our emotional state, can directly influence our emotions because feelings and behaviors interact as a reinforcing, bidirectional loop.
Based on the behavioral activation approach, we know that “…by deliberately practicing certain behaviors, people can ‘activate’ a positive emotional state” (Villines, 2021). So, we do not necessarily need to feel a certain way before acting or behaving as we would like. Instead, if we simply begin taking small actions or behaviors towards the goal or intended outcome, our actions can start to positively influence our mood and feelings.
But how do we implement these action-taking steps? One approach Saunders offers involves leveraging the help of other people. You could work with someone to do part of a project, ask someone else to take on a piece of the project while you work on a second piece, request that someone keep you accountable to progress on the task or schedule a time when you are around others who are diligently working (Saunders, 2018).
A second approach is to lower the activation energy required to make progress on the work or address potential barriers that prevent you from doing the work. This could include setting a goal to work on the task for just 10 minutes a day or deconstructing the steps of the project and then completing one step each week. If you have trouble finding time to work on the project, you can block out a small amount of time on your calendar each week to devote to the project tasks.
A third approach she recommends is linking the unpleasurable aspects of the work with a pleasurable reward or experience. For example, once you complete one element of the task, you can reward yourself by taking a break, going on a walk, talking to a friend or working on a fun hobby. Similarly, an approach that sometimes works for me is to complete the work in a setting that is pleasant, so I frequently try to do work on my outdoor patio or at a coffee shop that serves a great macchiato or cappuccino.
Although Saunders does not mention this in her article, I also want to offer another technique that I have found to be very important when I am feeling unmotivated. If you find yourself getting discouraged because you cannot seem to get everything completed that you wanted to, and this is leading to a general malaise or lack of motivation, then maybe you should reflect on whether you’re setting unrealistic expectations for yourself.
Maybe you need to plan to get less done on a workday, give yourself more time to finish a major project or otherwise set more manageable goals for yourself. After I lower what I am demanding of myself from the superhuman range, I have found that this can lead to a sense of accomplishment that is itself an antidote to a lack of motivation.
Let’s turn now to approaches for managing procrastination. It may seem odd to include techniques for addressing procrastination in an article on emotional regulation. Although procrastination may initially appear to be a time management or laziness issue, Pychyl, a researcher in procrastination, observes, “Procrastination is an emotional regulation problem, not a time management problem” (Lieberman, 2019).
I find it very interesting that researchers in this field frame procrastination as a problem with managing negative feelings or moods around a particular task. If that is true, then ongoing procrastination actually feeds on itself. We avoid doing something because we have a negative feeling toward the task. Yet by not doing the task, our negative emotions are only exacerbated (Lieberman, 2019).
The basis for this seemingly irrational behavior is what Pychyl refers to as “the immediate urgency of managing negative moods” instead of working on the task itself (Lieberman, 2019). We may avoid doing the task because it is unpleasant or would bring up feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt. By avoiding these negative feelings, procrastination actually provides a reward in the form of momentary relief from those negative feelings, and researchers believe that this reward is what creates a cycle of procrastination that can become a detrimental habit.
So how do we break the cycle? Several options have been shown to be effective (Lieberman, 2019). These include identifying a better internal reward than avoidance, such as forgiving yourself in the moment for procrastinating, so you are able to face the situation without guilt.
Similarly, being self-compassionate during high-stress situations can lead to better motivation and personal growth. You can reframe the task by considering something positive about it, recalling how they completed something similar in the past, and thinking about how good it will feel once it has been completed. Self-awareness of the feelings you have while procrastinating and fully experiencing them can help the feelings dissipate so you can work on the task.
Lastly, you can focus on just the next action and think through it before actually doing the task to calm yourself and be fully prepared for the task.
Additional options that I have found very helpful involve changing your environment or social architecture to create barriers against procrastination on the one hand and facilitation toward completing the task on the other. For example, this could involve removing your phone’s email app while on vacation so you do not work when you should be relaxing, or creating a long password for logging into social media apps so they do not distract you when you should be working. If you want to exercise more regularly, you could wear your exercise clothes to bed so you are almost fully dressed for the gym in the morning. If you have a major writing assignment to complete, you could set up all of the books and other supplies you will need to complete the assignment the evening before you are scheduled to work on it. I have also found it helpful to stop reading in the middle of a chapter or stop writing mid-sentence so it is easier to restart a major project in the future (Pink, 2019).
Many of the approaches I have reviewed in my previous article and this one require a measure of willpower. Willpower is the capacity to exert self-control. One of the misconceptions about willpower is that it is fixed and limited for all individuals. However, in several compelling studies, researchers have found that willpower is more about whether we have a growth mindset or fixed mindset, not about an innate or hardwired capacity of our brain (Walton, 2011).
For example, in one study, Job and her colleagues found that performance on a series of difficult tasks was predicted by whether the subject thought willpower was fixed or renewable, not by the number of difficult tasks they completed in a row (Job, 2010).
In the study, individuals were asked to complete either an easy task or a hard task followed by a hard task. Doing two hard tasks in a row is much harder than doing an easy task followed by a hard task, and individuals who completed two hard tasks in a row made more errors on the second task than those who initially completed an easy task.
However, some people who initially completed a hard task did not make more errors when they completed a second hard task. These people tended to view willpower as a deep, renewable resource that was not limited. To help prove your mindset about willpower is malleable, the researchers conducted a follow-up study that showed teaching subjects that willpower is not limited can foster better self-control, less procrastination and better financial budgeting (Job, 2010 and Job, 2015).
How does your viewpoint about willpower influence your capacity for self-control? The researchers contend that: “People who think that willpower is limited are on the lookout for signs of fatigue. When they detect fatigue, they slack off. People who get the message that willpower is not so limited may feel tired, but for them this is no sign to give up—it’s a sign to dig deeper and find more resources (Walton, 2011).”
The researchers are careful to emphasize that willpower is not limitless. Nonetheless, they do show that with a change in our mindset, we frequently have more capacity than we realize to tap into additional willpower to help manage our emotions, do challenging tasks and go the extra mile with our team.
Throughout the past two articles, I have offered several approaches that could be helpful as you seek to regulate your emotions more effectively during your teamwork activities and other interactions. I realize some may not be right for you, and none of them will work for everyone. Nonetheless, I do encourage you to practice using many of them.
When I say “practice,” I don’t mean that you try one approach in a single situation and then discard it if it is ineffective. Instead, like all skills, they get better, easier, more effective and more automatic when we intentionally practice them on several occasions over time. None of them is magical, so please do not expect them to work perfectly the first time you implement them. Yet I am hopeful that with deliberate practice over time, you will find many of them helpful.
References:
Abrahams R and Groysberg B. “Advice for the unmotivated: how to reignite your enthusiasm for work.” Harvard Business Review, May-June 2024, 142-147.
Job V, Dweck CS, Walton GM. “Ego depletion – is it all in your head? Implicit theories about willpower affect self-regulation.” Psychological Science, 2010: 21(11):1686-1693.
Job V, Walton GM, Berkecker K, Dweck CS. “Implicit theories about willpower influence self-regulation and grades in everyday life.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2015: 108(4):637-647.
Lieberman C. “Why you procrastinate (it has nothing to do with self-control).” New York Times, March 25, 2019.
Pink DH. When: the scientific secrets of perfect timing. Riverhead Books, 2019.
Saunders EG. “How to motivate yourself to do things you don’t want to do.” Harvard Business Review, December 21, 2018.
Villines Z. “What is behavioral activation?” Medical News Today, October 25, 2021.
Walton G and Dweck C. “Willpower: it’s in your head.” New York Times, November 26, 2011.