Chapter 8
Leading Your Team from Habitual to Perceptual Behaviors

Leaders help the workforce to replace habitual behaviors with perceptual behaviors. It's not a topic that's often discussed in leadership books but it's very important. This is not an easy task but it is critical to recovering from adversity more quickly. At a very early age, individuals learn basic habits that are necessary to move through life's challenges. A complete list of habits is, of course, beyond the scope of this chapter.

Habitual behavior is using conditioned responses without regard to environmental factors that we consider psychological noise. In children, habits begin as basic reflexes and progress to conditioned reflexes such as walking, running, throwing, and catching. Extracurricular activities provide an environment for refining these particular habits. Classrooms enable students to develop good study habits. Cultural surroundings provide learning opportunities for behavioral and social habits.

People are constantly bombarded with talk about the need to have good habits. Every time you go to a corporate meeting, there's at least one session on executing habits, which is a good topic but can be overemphasized. There have been a number of programs on the habits of successful people, the most famous example coming from Stephen Covey's book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I know there are many more habits than that, and as people progress in the corporate world they begin to analyze which ones are necessary for performance.

Habits become ingrained in young people through a process similar to the memorization of facts. Through repetition, students can internalize knowledge, then they regurgitate those facts to score well on tests, make good grades—and consequently develop a false sense of security, which leaves them ill-prepared for a successful life, both personally and professionally. Education has become an environment for teaching to the test as opposed to teaching skills that are going to help children throughout their lives. As a result, people become conditioned to hanging their potential for success on the execution of correct habits, a very dangerous precedent to set.

In athletics, there are two types of sports, habitual and perceptual. In habitual sports, such as golf, gymnastics, ice-skating, swimming, and bowling, habitual execution will ensure a comfortable level of success. In these sports, an athlete tries to execute conditioned skills, regardless of environmental factors and the skill level of opponents. In the corporate world, salespeople are trained to execute habits like athletes in these sports.

At one recent convention where I was speaking, participants were encouraged to get back to basic habits. Bookstore shelves are packed with books promoting habits of successful people. Readers become conditioned to be habitual and may reach a comfortable level of success through this approach, but they will never really win. Harnessing habits means they are merely surviving at a performance level.

The habitual training that makes me most uncomfortable is that of parents training their children. It's also a bit uncomfortable knowing that many authors of parenting books do not have children of their own. For example, there's a program that appears regularly on TV about how to change your child's behavior in 30 seconds. I think it's obvious that person doesn't have children. I've always thought if you haven't been locked in the basement at least once by your child, you don't know much about parenting.

In many ways, the training espoused by these programs reminds me of Pavlov's dogs: hear the bell and salivate. Parenting is the consummate trial-and-error challenge. In short, habitual performances may enable one to perform, compete, and survive—but not to thrive. As a parent, the more habitual you are, the lower your probability of success.

Relying on habit is probably a good plan if one goes through life free from adversity. The basic flaw in this position is that an adversity-free life is nothing more than a fantasy. I don't say this to minimize the necessity of habitual behavior because habits are, in fact, the very foundation of our journey through life, both personally and professionally. Essentially, the consistent execution of habits only guarantees that people will reach a certain level of performance in all phases of their lives, at which point they will plateau. Progress stops and survival starts. Being a parent of four children, I realized early on that no two children are exactly alike, therefore raising them successfully cannot be accomplished using parental habits learned in classes. The children who are raised by parents to be perceptual in the environment and who learn to make decisions accordingly will mature more quickly and become more productive adults.

When I'm talking with young people, I always use the example of baby birds. If you were raised in the country like I was, you may have watched a bird's nest. We'd hear the baby birds chirping and see the mom come and feed them, and then fly away. After a few days the baby birds get up on the edge of the nest to eat. After another few days of watching the mom fly away, they sit on the edge of the nest and flap their wings. Soon, the birds flap their wings and try to fly, and they fall slowly to the ground. But the mom watches over them to make sure that they're protected while they learn to fly. After a day or so, they'll flap their wings and they'll fly high enough to reach the trees before they fall. And not long after that, you don't see them anymore because they're successfully flying from tree to tree. I've always told people it's virtually impossible to learn to fly between trees unless you've flown into them. In other words, adversity is a part of life. And if you're going to learn to progress and be better, you learn to fly around the trees.

Winners are the people who desire a higher level of existence. Leaders demonstrate the ability to approach every day with the intent of learning more, accomplishing more, and getting more fulfillment from life and from their team. These are the people who use habits as a platform to be perceptual. You can stop here if you're happy being a creature of habit. If you want to achieve more and reach a higher level of performance and fulfillment, then you need to become perceptual. Every day brings the opportunity for a leader to help his or her team members to reach beyond their customary, routine activities. Adversity or, as I call it, mud in the water, requires us to use habits to become perceptual.

Now, perceptual behavior is externally focused, attending to environmental factors and then responding with appropriate actions. This feedback loop has the effect of modifying habitual actions.

At this point in the chapter it should be obvious that the more comfortable lifestyle is one of consistent, habitual execution. The basic problem with this hypothesis comes from environmental factors. That psychological noise we discussed in Chapter 7 constantly challenges the success of habits. Those who are comfortable and complacent must find an environment conducive to accepting their habitual lifestyle. That is possible, but it's not likely that such an environment exists.

The alternative is to become so confident in your habits that you can manage and modify them to facilitate performance in a changing environment. These are exciting people, committed to perceptual behavior. Risk takers are those who thrive on stress. These people live on the emotional edge.

Perceptual people use anxiety as an asset as opposed to a liability in performing tasks at hand. It seems that in reviewing the normal life cycle there are at least two determinants to perceptual development.

Several research studies from a few years ago indicated that infants who were sedentary seemed to learn more quickly than those who were active. If this is true, I would suspect that long-term follow-up research would indicate that those children who were active would be better able to apply their knowledge than the more sedentary youngsters.

Knowledge without application and development of habits through mimicry both inhibit perceptual development. Exploring one's environment in combination with knowledge facilitates the learning of life skills, enabling a person to become more perceptual.

When basic habits are not successful, perceptual children are able to modify them to be successful in different environments. This holds true especially in the corporate environment where every day may be different and the same habits will not be successful. So it's very important that a leader help people use their basic habits as a foundation and then learn to be perceptual within the environment.

When I have an opportunity to address teachers, I encourage them to use their expertise, whether it's math, science, art, music, or anything else, to teach children life skills. These skills enable them to get closer to their potential in an ever-changing world and to recover more quickly from unexpected adversity.

Another potential detriment to perceptual development is technology. Technology may be our greatest asset, but it also may become a liability to our development. Education has become more efficient while it has also lost its effectiveness. Too many children are spending more time on their computers and less time being active in their environment. They skip learning basic skills that might lead to perceptual behaviors and instead depend on technology to provide them with everything they need.

In some universities, students are required to have a laptop computer, which enables them to not attend classes. Lecture notes and slides are provided online. This mode of education is very similar to homeschooling, which is a social-development tragedy for children. Many homeschooled athletes with whom I work lack the life skills needed to live in the real world. A large percentage of those students are efficient and intelligent, but they are not prepared to use their knowledge in a perceptual way. Technology could be beneficial to young people if it is part of the educational process, but it does not constitute a total solution. The same holds true in a corporate environment. You can go into an office and find that everyone's on the computer; no one's talking and communication suffers dramatically because of technology.

I had a corporate person call me to work with one of his most technically skilled employees who was really struggling in the work environment. He told me she had not talked with her supervisor for three months. When I got there, he showed me where her desk was located. And I asked him, “Where's the supervisor located?” Well, as it turned out, she was probably only three or four feet away in a cubicle. They texted back and forth; they didn't actually talk.

So after work one afternoon, their manager, who had hired me, and I removed the partition between the supervisor and the worker. When they came in the next day, they were surprised they had to sit and look at each other, which forced them to begin communicating verbally. The bottom line was the problem between the two of them was resolved within eight hours. When their habitual reliance on social media was disrupted, their communication became more perceptual because they had to read each other.

The transition from habitual to perceptual behaviors is very clearly observed in sports, making sport participation at any level a valuable experience. Basic behaviors get athletes to a certain level of success, but the top athletes are able to expand habits into perceptual movements. The resulting behavior depends on several factors in the competitive environment, including an opponent's talent and an athlete's perception of what it takes to win.

One of my clients is a world-class, professional tennis player. He serves in excess of 135 miles an hour, and he supplements that serve with exceptional basic, perceptual skills. If he could not change his game during a match, he would be okay but not exceptional.

Another client is a great baseball pitcher. By learning to modify his pitches during a game, he's progressed from being a good pitcher to a great pitcher who holds several season and post-season records, and he was recently voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. I have witnessed him change his grip or his arm movement in the middle of a game to be more effective in that particular game.

A few years ago, a Major League Baseball (MLB) team with whom I worked signed a college player who was acknowledged to be one of the best hitters in the college ranks at that time. He had tremendous basic skills and a beautiful swing. When he reached the major-league level, he found that his basic swing was not good enough, but could not adjust it to hit against MLB pitchers. His explanation to our hitting coach was that his basic swing had been good enough through his high school and college years and he wasn't going to change it. His career was over less than a year after he was forced to become perceptual.

One reason why less than 2 percent of the players signed by professional teams make it to the major leagues is that they have great basic skills but are unable or unwilling to become perceptual in their performance. Other present and former high-profile athletes such as Pete Maravich, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James, to name a few National Basketball Association (NBA) players, and Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, and Brett Favre in the National Football League (NFL) are examples of exceptionally perceptual athletes.

Too many times, a college education provides basic skills but doesn't help students progress to the perceptual level they need in a corporate environment. Therefore, when people start professional jobs, they expect to be successful because they have good basic skills. It's a leader's job to help those people build on basic skills to reach a perceptual level. If leaders don't do that, then they're not doing a good job. There's nothing better for a leader than to have a team of players who have strong foundations and are willing to learn to use them to be perceptual. Obviously basic talent is a prerequisite to being successful, but equally obvious is that talent plus the ability to be perceptual takes you to another level.

A corporate environment offers daily opportunities for people to become perceptually active. As I mentioned, I've attended sales meetings where participants are encouraged and even directed to go back to their habits. This is troubling because it doesn't address how people can use their habits to become more perceptual in their performance. There's no doubt that people with solid habits perform at a relatively successful level and are usually very efficient. However, efficiency may not be the answer to long-term success.

In the past, a few companies stood above the rest simply because their products were the best. This has changed drastically. Like it or not, to stay in the marketplace, everybody in the company has to be good. The quality across companies is basically the same.

A critical question in the corporate world today is: If everyone has equal products, what separates us from the rest? The answer is simple. Efficiency is not good enough. You must also be effective. More companies are emphasizing the development of relationships. Customers are buying from people and companies they like and trust, those that can break from basic habits and help them solve problems. This changing dynamic makes it critical that corporate employees and management become more perceptual regarding co-workers and clients.

There are many universities that provide degrees in professional selling, corporate coaching, or life coaching. These I think are misleading degrees because they teach strong habits, but the students with the degrees have very few life skills.

Poor communication skills are the fertilizer for conflict. Good communication skills are the perceptual skills that breed winners. It also seems that corporate people who are perceptual are happier with themselves than those who depend on habits.

A great environment to distinguish between perceptual and habitual people is the airport, especially when there are flight delays. Habitual travelers are more likely to exhibit rage, attack the gate agent verbally, throw things, and use their cell phones to complain to friends who live thousands of miles away. So much wasted energy leads to an unhealthy lifestyle.

The perceptual travelers, however, will read a book, strike up a conversation with a stranger, take a quick nap, find a space where their children can move around and explore, or plug in the computer to get some work done or play a game.

Let's return to our parenting example because that is one undertaking that requires exceptional perception. As previously mentioned, parenting classes and books sell well but offer little practical knowledge. One reason they are popular is because parents are searching for answers to the challenges kids face in the educational environment. Many of these books present solutions to generic issues, which are unlike the ones people encounter in the real world. And the bottom line is that most people parent in the same way they were parented. We coach the way we were coached.

Today, however, kids are influenced more by peer groups than by parents. Decisions are more difficult to make, resulting in more difficult choices down the road. Parents have to be the most perceptual people in the world. It's a fine line to walk, instilling basic skills yet realizing that kids are going to be challenged daily. Consequently, parents must help their children to become more perceptual in their environment and behave accordingly, just like coaches and leaders do in sport and corporate situations. Parents must also remember that kids are going to make bad decisions that in the end enable them to learn how to recover more quickly and more effectively from adversity. Sometimes the most valuable learning experiences come from adverse situations. These situations are critical teaching tools for parents.

Other groups of people who encounter difficulties when they attempt to rely on habits are senior citizens and those with chronic illnesses. The environment may be a frustrating place for these people, primarily because they often are no longer able to execute their lifelong habits.

For example, I have multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is a very frustrating and devastating disease; the patient suicide rate is over seven times the national average. It's a disease for which there's no cure and it alters everything about how you go through life, even those things non-MS people never think about. Nothing meets the need to be perceptual more than having habits taken away. You have to be more aware of the surfaces on which you walk, of how you spend your energy, and of landmarks to help prevent you from getting lost. Multitasking is a thing of the past and planning ahead for events and vacations is very difficult. (I've always thought multitasking was a sign that a person was very average, pretty good at a lot of things, but not excellent at anything.) I've been living with MS for more than 12 years and am learning every day how to be more perceptive and creative to ensure that life is fun every day. There are too many symptoms to list here, but suffice it to say that for folks with chronic illnesses, it's is a daily challenge.

Age alone presents challenges to senior citizens. Now that I'm 72, I know that we cannot do many of the things we used to do. We must become more perceptive every day. Regardless of how many habits are taken away, the one trait that we all maintain control over is our attitude. There are no guarantees in life, but a positive attitude keeps the probability of success on your side.

Of particular importance in this area is that leaders understand that regardless of the task at hand, and in my case regardless of the medication I take, attitude is either your best friend or your worst enemy for the rest of your life. So it's critical that leaders who want to be up to date on the corporate techniques used in their environment still have a perception of the importance of the soft things in life, the intangibles—of which attitude may be the most important.

You know, in the context of the ideas presented in the previous chapters, it would seem that becoming perceptual is a natural consequence of lifelong learning experiences, but that's not true. The natural consequence is to be a very good habitual person. The critical challenge is to use this foundation to become a risk-taking person who accepts every situation and welcomes stress as an opportunity to increase his or her volume of perceptual growth.

What separates great race drivers from good drivers, great hitters from good hitters, great executives from good executives, great leaders from good leaders, head coaches from assistant coaches, happy people from sad people, productive people with chronic illness from sad people with chronic illness? The answer is that great, productive, happy people look forward to every day in order to flaunt their perceptual behaviors and to break away from habitual behaviors.

The more perceptual you become, the more successful you become in all areas of your life. As you become more equipped mentally, you recover more quickly from adversity. The more perceptual you become, the more you are able to recognize the same valuable qualities in other people. And the more perceptual you become, the more you recognize that the process of achieving goals must be fluid. The more perceptual you become, the more you learn how to surround yourself with people who support your emotional traits and help you massage habits. To become perceptual is an obvious challenge and will very often be uncomfortable, but the path to achieving success should include adversity.

When you become frustrated or anxious during certain situations, just remember that there are very few guarantees in life. One you can find in this chapter is that people with a solid foundation of talent who have learned how to use it in a perceptual way and who have positive expectations every day will always have a high probability of success. In real life, you cannot do everything you want. But by becoming more perceptual in your behavior, you can do more than you're doing today.

It's not a bad idea to list some of the basic habits that you've developed through education or life experiences, and then to take those habits and look very closely at each one to try to determine how it can be used in a perceptual way. It's a tough learning experience but very beneficial. And as a leader, if you can spot people on your team who have an overload of habits and just pick one habit to help them massage into perceptual behavior, then they will grow tremendously in a very short period of time. And as a leader, you'll grow as well because you become more aware of habits and how to change them.

Make no mistake, habits are a basic foundation. It's what I always tell people I work with: I don't care how good I make you feel mentally; if you can't play, you can't play. In other words, if you don't have talent, you can't play the game. And that talent is usually based on a good foundation of habits, but your productivity is based on how perceptive those habits become.

Habitual/Perceptual Behaviors

My Conditioned Habits

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Perceptual Plan (Alternatives to Habits)

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