The 3-Space model is a really flexible way of navigating transitions.
It is as relevant to elite athletes as it is to those in business.
Here’s how it works:
Imgine you have 30 or so seconds between work calls or meetings.
It is easy in that context to take the stress or emotion from one call into another. In turn this can impact behaviour in the next call, with the cycle potentially repeating.
This is a tricky challenge – 30 seconds is not long, after all!
And yet there are techniques that can help with fast emotion regulation and help us take more more effective action.
One of these is the 3-Space model.
Instead of doing nothing in the 30 seconds, divide the time into 3, roughly equal parts:
The First Space – Processing your emotions
In the first 10 seconds, try to tune into your body – what are you feeling? What thoughts are you experiencing? What emotions are you feeling? Where do these show up in your body?
The Second Space – Pausing to get present
In the next 10 seconds, see if you can intentionally pause to bring yourself into the present moment. You can do this by taking a couple of deep breaths, looking at the sky or touching a cold surface.
The Third Space – Picking your response
In the final 10 seconds your job is to intentionally pick the most effective behaviour in the next passage of time. For example:
Business: What kind of impression do I want to make in the next meeting? What are my objectives?
Home life: What kind of Dad do I want to be when I turn the key and open the door?
Sports: What can Ido to put pressure back on my opponent?
I wouldn’t say the effect of using the 3-space model is dramatic, but I do find its value tends to compound over time.
I regularly use it with my children, especially when tired, and it helps ‘lift and shift’ me away from reactive mode and towards being more connected to my values pretty reliably.
One of the biggest challenges I see when coaching teams is the gap between understanding what they should do to be effective together and how to do it.
The “what” has been widely disseminated through findings from the 2012 Google study, Project Aristotle. One factor stood out as being most important for effective teaming: psychological safety– the feeling and belief that you belong, can learn, contribute and challenge the status quo without fear of marginalization or punishment from your team [1]. And this makes sense. We need to feel safe in order to show up fully and take the risks that maintain relationships and outcomes without (too much) fear of negative consequences.
But what this research didn’t address as clearly is how team members can pivot from behavior as usual to increase their psychological safety.
To get to the “how,” it’s helpful to highlight why we humans feel psychologically unsafe in groups. In general, and especially in high-stakes social situations (like a team), people want to stay in good standing with their peers. At our core this makes us feel safe. As social creatures we are wired for belonging and affinity.
When we depend on others to maintain our good standing, it’s not hard for the threat level to get high (e.g., someone gives us the side eye or disagrees with our brilliant idea). Even more so when our team member’s opinions contribute to performance evaluation, influence our reputation, and potentially affect our financial stability and opportunities for professional advancement.
When this happens, our default tendency will be to see others as potential adversaries and to play safe and small to prevent any feared or unwanted outcomes. We become transactional in relationships, defensive, intolerant of ambiguity, unimaginative, reactive, anxious and exhausted.
In fact, the more psychologically rigid we become, the less we respond to stress, challenge and uncertainty in effective, context-sensitive ways[2]. Your group can end up where all good teams go to die- the slog of fear-driven tedium and lackluster performance.
Unless we learn to practice psychological flexibility, we become preoccupied with what we don’t want, instead of what we do. Ironically, this doesn’t leave anyone feeler safer.
…UNLESS WE LEARN TO PRACTICE PSYCHOLOGICAL FLEXIBILITY, WE BECOME PREOCCUPIED WITH WHAT WE DON’T WANT, INSTEAD OF WHAT WE DO. IRONICALLY, THIS DOESN’T LEAVE ANYONE FEELING SAFER.
When team members are preoccupied with what they don’t want, the team will become dysfunctional: they lack trust, fear conflict, lack commitment, avoid accountability and fail to track their results [3]. A team without psychological safety is known to increase communication breakdowns, employee attrition and decreases team performance[4][5].
Here’s how you can increase team psychological safety using 3 types of psychological flexibility skills:
Mindfulness When you are present and allow difficult emotional experiences instead of reacting to them, you immediately disrupt your default reactions to stress, such as becoming autocratic, perfectionistic, critical, passive, submissive or distant. On a team, learning to tune in and hang out with discomfort creates the “pause” and presence people need to stay focused on their relationships and the tasks at hand.
More specifically, a team member who is aware of their emotional experience and can tolerate difficult moments will add stability, predictability, resilience, and trust to the team.
Mindset Our minds are wired to make snap judgments – about people, problems and projects – that are often unhelpful. Buying into your thoughts and being fused with one way of seeing something can really muck up the chemistry and flow of a team. When you are able to expand your perspective and see problems, situations and people as complex and nuanced you create new possibilities.
A team member who can 1) hold their thoughts and biases lightly and 2) entertain multiple perspectives will add creativity, productivity, harmony and affinity to the team.
Meaningful Moves Without clear agreements about how to work together and what is to be accomplished, teams can easily lose their way. Navigating teamwork powerfully means staying clear about what matters and being willing to pivot to flexibly aligning your behavior with it in any moment. This agility allows everyone to move in the same direction, even when you come upon new challenges, hit dead ends, and explore new paths.
When team members consistently focus on what matters most, they are more likely to nurture their relationships and achieve meaningful results.
For more information on team coaching and psychological flexibility contact aprilia@drapriliawest.com.
[1] Kim, S., Lee, H., & Connerton, T. P. (2020). How Psychological Safety Affects Team Performance: Mediating Role of Efficacy and Learning Behavior. Frontiers in psychology, 11, 1581. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01581 [2] Hayes SC, Luoma JB, Bond FW, Masuda A, Lillis J. Acceptance and commitment therapy: model, processes and outcomes. Behav Res Ther. 2006;44:1–25. doi: 10.1016/j.brat.2005.06.006. [3] Lencioni, P. (2002). The five dysfunctions of a team. New York: Jossey-Bass. [4] Kim, S., Lee, H., & Connerton, T. P. (2020). How Psychological Safety Affects Team Performance: Mediating Role of Efficacy and Learning Behavior. Frontiers in psychology, 11, 1581. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01581 [5] Escell Institute. (July 12, 2022). 4 Ways For Managers To Increase Psychological Safety https://ecsellinstitute.com/4-ways-for-managers-to-increase-psych-safety/
When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. Paul Virilio
Ever since humans started rising up the food chain, our progress as a species has made our lives both easier and harder.
Sure, we have electric tin openers. But how many giraffes forget to buy batteries for their child’s toy cherry picker on Christmas Day?
Take the invention of farming roughly 12,000 years ago, suddenly we were able to support much larger families, and a huge explosion in population followed.
But farming was also a trap.
Compared to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle it was harder work with longer hours. But with more mouths to feed there was no going back…
Language is another example. Perhaps the great human invention, it allows cooperation at scale and turned us from frankly quite puny apes into the planet’s most deadly predators.
Yet at the same time language is a double-edged sword.
Unlike say, wombats, language allows us to ruminate on the past, to worry about the future and to compare ourselves unfavourably to others.
Language allows me to write this post in the conscious certainty that one day I will have to leave everything and everyone I love in this world.
Wombats don’t think like that, or if they do they’re being very stoic about it.
Finally, let’s take modern inventions like smartphones, videoconferencing and social media.
These are all astonishing achievements that bring many benefits. But on balance, would you say these inventions have made us happier necessarily?
When you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.
The point is that our progress as a species has not always been good for us.
And this is why improving mental health is so often about going back to basics…
Five mental health basics
Most of us know this stuff, but the problem with knowing something is that this is not where the battle is won.
Like it or not, humans evolved with a basic set of needs which we need to make happen. And unless we do them, we will not be happy, healthy, or perform at our best.
Here’s the 5 most important:
1. Social relationships. The theme of this year’s Mental Health Awareness month is loneliness. And quite right – our ancestors simply did not survive without the support of a group.We’re wired for connection, and that’s the real, face-to-face, full-fat kind, not the online, semi-skimmed kind.
2. Daylight. Our internal body clocks require daylight in order to recalibrate each day. Without this daily recalibration from light, we start to slip out of sync with our own biological rhythms and we become less happy and healthy (this is a great 3 min video on the subject).
3. Movement – our ancestors only rarely got stuck at their desks for 10 hours a day. In fact, it is estimated they walked around 15,000 steps a day (according to Fitbit’s early data). We evolved to solve problems on the move, not sitting at a desk. (I like this clip about the perfect anti-learning environment).
5. Set boundaries. Our ancestors weren’t being messaged at 11pm about this amazing berry tree their old school friend just found in Italy. Unless we can find a way to place some boundaries around our working hours or commitments, none of us is going to be happy or healthy.
I know you know this stuff.
But knowing is not where the battle is won.
So now I’m off to take that walk, and I hope to see you there.
What will it take for you to define this year as a success?
Is it about what you achieved?
Is it about getting a promotion or an increase in salary?
Is it about whether you felt happy?
What if we expand to a larger scale? What would it take for you to define your life as successful? Would it be whether you became a CEO? Or made a million dollars? Or got married and raised some children?
It can be easy to focus on these external markers of success or failure and believe that this is the route to happiness. One problem with this is that the research suggests that we over estimate the impact of these events (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). We think that if we get the good job and nice house, we will be happy, so we pursue those goals. But happiness actually seems to be much more about:
“Contacting the present moment fully as a conscious human being, and based on what the situation affords, changing or persisting in behavior in the service of chosen values” (Hayes & Smith, 2005)
Psychological flexibility invites us to define success differently. It involves developing an internal yardstick for measuring success. Choosing your values and then intentionally putting those values into action based on the needs of the situation.
Using this yardstick, external achievements start to matter less. What matters more is: How much am I showing up as the person I want to be?
And paradoxically, measuring success by whether you’ve lived your values and whether you were the person you wanted to be, is actually more likely to create richness and meaning in life (Aaker, J, Baumeister, R, Garbinsky, E & Vons, K, 2012).
This year, try using these three questions to define success:
Was I present?
Did I show up as the person I want to be?
Did I notice with kindness those moments when I wasn’t being the person I want to be and adjust my behaviour accordingly?
Dawson, D. L. & Golijani-Moghaddam, N. (2020) COVID-19: Psychological flexibility, coping, mental health, and wellbeing in the UK during the pandemic. Journal of contextual behavioral science. [Online] 17126–134.
These people have undermined the idea that habits are about repetition (“21 days to build a new habit!”) and introduced the more accurate idea that it is how we feel during any given behaviour that creates a habit.
Yet this conversation also misses some key variables.
The first is that how we feel is often not within our control. We are usually better off trying to control the context around a behaviour instead.
The second is that it is sometimes not the habit itself that is key, but the timing and sequencing of a behaviour that matters most.
And this is why I believe what people most need in 2022 is a reset coordinated not by habits, but by high-performance routines.
What is a high-performance routine?
Well, let’s start with the opposite.
At some point in the last 20 months many of us have fallen into routines that we didn’t really choose or design.
For whatever reason, what started off as a sprint became a marathon and we became locked in routines where we worked harder and longer, became more sedentary, and days all blurred into one. To assess your own routine, how many of these bullets resonate?
Everything feels like a priority
You hunker down for hours in front of your screen, taking few breaks
Some days you hardly move from your desk (a good indicator is less than 5,000 steps per day)
You feel constantly distracted, pulled between different priorities
You reach midday and realise you’ve not been outside
Work often bleeds through into the evenings, weekends and holidays
You find it hard to switch off and / or sleep
You often feel tired in the morning
You feel guilty that some areas of your life are being neglected
You worry about the impact of all of the above, but are anxious that if you work less you will feel even more overwhelmed
This is what I call the ‘flat line’ way of working where we work in a continuous, often dysregulated way, without any real structure or boundaries. In this way we ignore our own body’s need for recovery and instead ‘push on through’.
The ‘flat line’ can work for a while, but over the longer term it becomes an insult to high-performance and dangerous to mental health (primarily because it’s a very unnatural way to work).
Worse still, in this context potentially helpful new habits can seem like an extra burden.
For example, imagine telling someone who is overburdened that they need to start doing meditation. Even though meditation might help, in the short term it is likely to feel like another burden; one more thing to do (and possibly fail at).
Meditation – just one more thing to fail at
High-performance routines are different for 3 reasons.
1. Routines create their own rhythm, with one part of the routine enabling the next. Habits are easier to stick to when part of a routine.
2. Individual behaviours become much more powerful when part of a routine. What was an isolated behaviour becomes a meaningful pattern, linked to our biological rhythms as well as our long term values and goals.
3. Routines create a sense of control; of everything having a time and a place. And this creates the positive feelings for change to be sustained.
In the next few weeks, I will be publishing a series of posts on high-performance routines as well as giving away my new e-book on the subject.
In the meantime, I would encourage you to consider what an ideal daily routine would look like for you.
You could start by downloading the template below and seeing if you can identify what your ideal daily routine would look like if you had complete control over each day.
I did this for myself and with many clients last year, and the results were always revealing.
So values are qualities. Words like: curiosity, kindness, courage, compassion, generosity.
Take a moment to think about this. What words would you want your friends to use when they describe you to someone who hasn’t met you? What qualities would the best version of you express so consistently, that this is how people describe you to others?
This is what I would want people to say about me:
‘Rachel is really kind and wise. She is incredibly non-judgemental. She loves to learn and is very curious about what makes people tick. She is easily moved to laughter or tears. She enjoys the simple things – a lovely cup of green tea; a beautiful flower; spending time with the people she loves.’
This is aspirational. It is who I want to be in my relationships with others. Some of the time I display those qualities but others I don’t. My intention, over time, is to be more and more like that person. And when I am not the person I want to be, I hope that I can notice those moments with curiosity (I wonder what is going on for me here?) and self-compassion (It is disappointing that you … but you are human, aren’t you?).
It is helpful to repeat this activity for different areas of life. You might consider how you want to show up at work. How you want to approach your own self-care and health. What qualities you would like to express in your relationships with your loved ones.
If you are struggling to think of the ‘right’ words. Russ Harris has a good list of suggested values in this free handout (go to page 23 & 24).
Spending time deeply considering what you value actually helps you to live those qualities more consistently, as it makes it clearer what you’re aiming for.
It may be that considering how you want show up, freaks you out. If it does… that is okay. Take a breath and don’t panic. You don’t need to nail this in one sitting. You can try different values on for size and adjust them. And remember, this is aspirational – you don’t have to be expressing these values currently. Just give yourself some time to consider – What do I choose? What qualities matter to me?
If you are feeling stuck, try taking the VIA Character Strengths test, designed by positive psychologists, Martin Seligman and Chris Petersen. That might give you some clues about which values give you a sense of flourishing.
If you would like some more suggestions for defining your values, these worksheets are really good:
Once you have chosen about 8-15 qualities that you feel describe the person you want to be, then you can use them as a compass to guide your behaviour. Remembering that you don’t have to do this perfectly – you are human and you will have many, many moments when you don’t show up as the best version of yourself. Do be kind to yourself in those moments.
“In this very moment, will you accept the sad and the sweet, hold lightly stories about what’s possible, and be the author of a life that has meaning and purpose for you, turning in kindness back to that life when you find yourself moving away from it?”
Association for Psychological Science. News Release July 22, 2008 Reflecting on values promotes love, acceptance
Cohen, G. L., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., & Maste, A. (2006). Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap: A Social-Psychological Intervention. Science 1, 313(5791), 1307 – 1310.
Cohen, G.L & Sherman, D.K. The Psychology of Change: Self-Affirmation and Social Psychological Intervention Annual Review of Psychology 2014 65:1, 333-371
Creswell, J. D., Welch, W. T., Taylor, S. E., Sherman, D. K., Gruenewald, T. L., & Mann, T. (2005). Affirmation of personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological stress responses. Psychological Science, 16(11), 846-851.
Crocker, J., Niiya, Y., & Mischkowski, D. (2008). Why does writing about important values reduce defensiveness? Self-affirmation and the role of positive other-directed feelings. Psychological Science, 19(7), 740-747.
Hayes, S. C., & Smith, S. X. (2005). Get Out Of Your Mind & Into Your Life: The New Acceptance & Commitment Therapy. Oakland, CA, New Harbinger Publications
Nelson, S. K., Fuller, J. A. K., Choi, I., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2014). Beyond self-protection: Self-affirmation benefits hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(8), 998-1011.
Wilson, K. G., & DuFrene, T. (2010b) Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong: A Guide to Life Liberated from Anxiety. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger
Do you have some activities that you just avoid? You never quite get them done and you feel bad about not getting them done?
It could be cleaning out the kitchen cupboards; sorting out your email; exercising; updating your LinkedIn profile; cleaning your car…
We know we should do it, but we kind of don’t choose to do it.
And that would be okay, but if you are like me, your mind sometimes uses this lack of action as evidence that you are lazy, disorganised, neglectful…
I drive a 5 year old car. I almost never wash it. It is usually messy on the inside too. Hats, sunglasses, shoes (including, I am embarrassed to admit, a pair of red Crocs), sundry shopping bags and wrappers from chocolate bars are scattered around the seats and floor. Discarded bits and pieces that found their way into my car but never seem to find their way out.
Why is my car like this?
The logical reason is that having a clean, tidy car is low on my list of priorities. Now and again I write ‘Clean out car’ on my job list for the day, but other, more interesting (Write blog post) or more urgent (Invoicing) tasks crowd it out.
Even though I often have ‘good reasons’ for not cleaning out my car, when someone else sees how messy my car is, my ‘I am not good enough’ story pops up. I worry that they will see me as lazy and disorganised. (Which sometimes I am, but I don’t want other people to know that!)
I could use this concern to motivate me. I could clean my car to avoid the pain of other people’s judgment. In ACT terms this is an avoidance move. An avoidance move is where a behaviour (e.g. cleaning the car) is about avoiding painful internal stuff (e.g. fear of other’s judgement). There is a lot of research to tell us that a life that is organised around avoiding unwanted emotions isn’t healthy. It is clear that repeated avoidance doesn’t lead to a rich and meaningful life. So, perhaps, for me, having a messy car might just align with my values?
This is where is gets tricky. Just because cleaning my car could be an avoidance move, it doesn’t mean that ‘not cleaning my car’ is a move towards my values.
It depends what I do instead of cleaning out my car. If, instead of cleaning my car, I engage in activities that link to my values – writing a blog post; spending time with people I love; learning something new – then, over time, those choices will likely help me to build a rich and meaningful life.
But if, instead of cleaning out my car, I obsessively watch videos of Beyonce, trying to figure out if she and JayZ are happy or not. Then it is likely that I am caught in avoidance, which is usually a bad idea.
So what do we do, when we are in the grip of avoidance? The first step is to take a breath and notice. How are you feeling in this moment? When you pause, see if you can notice, with curiosity and kindness, the whole range of thoughts and feelings that show up. And then, pause some more and see if you can notice what thoughts or feelings you might be avoiding.
For me, as I pause my YouTube video, I could notice that I don’t want to feel:
Bored whilst I clean out my car, or,
Anxious whilst I write a blogpost ‘What if people think it is stupid?’, or,
Challenged and a bit stressed as I try to master a new piece of theory.
Could I make room for those thoughts and feelings? And, if I did make room for them, and chose what to do next based on what really matters to me, what would I do?
Sometimes, just now and again, that might even be to spend ten minutes cleaning out my car.
Since March last year I’ve run well over 300 webinars with tens of thousands of people from all around the world, and everywhere the themes were similar.
After the initial burst of excitement of working from home, people talk about how relentless work is, and how much they miss some of the more informal, human sides of working in teams.
For many the past year has brought a kind of empathy gap, where work has become more transactional and less human, with many of the informal 2-minute conversations replaced by more formal hour-long Zoom calls.
There is therefore a need for teams to adapt and to think of new ways of protecting the ‘human’ side of office life.
Building on this idea, here are two tools that you can download and use with your teams; The Life Compass and The Key to Me.
Below you can find a brief explanation of each, as well as free templates to use. I hope you find them useful!
Tool 1: The Life Compass
This tool is to help people to understand what really matters to them (even in adversity); what kind of actions move them towards their values, and how stress can sometimes ‘hook’ them away from that direction. It is designed to help guide people through tough times, just like a compass.
How to use the Life Compass
Step 1: Have each person in your team complete their own Life Compass for themselves. You can download the template here.
You can see a compass that I completed – and which I sometimes use in workshops – below.
Step 2: Then, the group can complete a shared compass, to help them navigate through the project together.
You can download the Team Compass template here. We’ve also created a template in Mural here.
As with the individual compass, work round each quadrant to identify what matters, how the team gets hooked away from what matters and what course correcting might look like.
Tool 2: The key to me
This tool is useful for helping to build understanding and empathy across distributed teams. It’s also quite a fun exercise to do which can bring people together really well and remind everyone that we’re all just human beings doing our best.
The idea of The Key to Me is to create greater understanding of what gets the best out of each individual, as well as what kind of constraints and limitations homeworking brings.
It is an especially great tool for any team which is newly created or has new members (so long as they feel sufficiently psychologically safe to do so).
Here is a template in Mural for using The Key to Me.
And here is my own example created in Mural:
I really hope you enjoy using these tools – both of them have helped me. Let me know in the comments anything you would add or any questions you have.
This post was written by our friend and colleague, Eric Winters. Eric has written a fantastic self-help book based on ACT – Swipe Right on Your Best Self – which we highly recommend.
There’s a question I hear a lot during my workshops and coaching.
‘How can I be more confident?’
I ask people what they would do if they were really confident?
Well, they proclaim, if I was more confident, then I’d:
apply for more ambitious roles
begin new relationships that nourish
leave relationships that drain
ask for what I really want at work and need in love
say yes to more opportunities in life
say no to crossed boundaries
live a bigger, bolder life on my terms
I get why they think more confidence would help. But for most, it’s a misguided strategy. For many people, the problem isn’t a lack of confidence at all. It’s too much confidence.
Often people are too confident that if they take courageous action then they’ll:
entirely fail
look particularly stupid
be humiliatingly rejected
learn nothing whatsoever
suffer intolerably and never recover.
No wonder they hold back! Paradoxically, the solution isn’t more confidence. It’s being less certain. It’s being positively skeptical.
The next time you hear an inner voice whisper ‘better not, it won’t turn out well’, remember you have a choice. You can believe these cautious little lies and live small and safe, or you can be positively skeptical.
Actually, you don’t know:
how well this might turn out
what you’ll discover about yourself or others
who might respond positively
how others will be inspired by your courageous proactivity
how much confidence you may earn over time through experience.
The truth is, you don’t know for sure where positive skepticism and courageous proactivity will take you.
Working with ACT 