Status: a more accurate way of understanding self-esteem.

Recently, I was in Singapore attending the Asian-Pacific Coaching Conference.  One of the workshops I attended was about the growing field of neuroscience.  The work presented is from David Rock and his book Your Brain At Work.  After voraciously reading this book, I jumped onto Mr. Rock's blog and found some insightful pieces.

What follows is an entry from Mr. Rock's blog.  Enjoy!

Status: a more accurate way of understanding self-esteem.

As well as sometimes taking on a life of its own, the other trouble with status threats is how easily they can occur, generating a strong threat even in minor situations. Say you are at a meeting with a colleague, and for the first time in your working relationship, he asks to follow up with you about a project. It's likely you will interpret his request as a threat to your status: Doesn't he trust you? Is he checking up on you? Your threat response could make you say something harmful to your career.

Remember that the limbic system once aroused makes accidental connections and thinks pessimistically. Just speaking to your boss arouses a threat. If you manage someone, just asking how his or her day is going can carry more emotional weight than one might think. I propose that many of the arguments and conflicts at work, and in life, have status issues at their core. The more you can label status threats as they occur, in real time, the easier it will be to respond more appropriately.

On the way up

I interviewed an international ballet dancer who used to be a member of the London Royal Ballet. She told me how she was often bored and frustrated as one of many dancers, even though she was in a world-class troupe. That all changed when she moved to a smaller, less known, troupe in her home city, but now was the leading soloist. She explained, "Finally I am the highest paid dancer in the company. I am the one at the front of the room. The minute you're at the front of the room, there's no boredom at all. The focus is on you, the space is your space, you feel at the top."

Studies of primate communities show that higher status monkeys have reduced day-to-day cortisol levels, are healthier, and live longer. This isn't just monkey business (sorry for the pun.) There is an entire book, The Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot, illustrating that status is a significant determinant of human longevity, even controlling for education and income. High status doesn't just feel good. It brings along very real rewards, too.

Status is rewarding not just when you have achieved high status, but also anytime you feel like your status has increased, even in a small way. One study showed that saying to kids "good job" in a monotonous recorded voice activated the reward circuitry in kids as much as a financial windfall. Even little status increases, like beating someone at a card game, feel great. We're wired to feel rewarded by just about any incremental increase in status. Many of the world's great narratives (and some of our not so great television franchises) have status at their core, based on two recurring themes. These stories involve either ordinary people doing extraordinary things (giving you hope you could have higher status one day) or extraordinary people doing ordinary things (giving you hope that even though may be ordinary, you are basically the same as people with high status.) Even an increase in hope that your status might go up one day seems to pack a reward.

An increase in status is one of the world's greatest feelings. Dopamine and serotonin levels go up, linked to feeling happier, and cortisol levels go down, a marker of lower stress. Testosterone levels go up too. Testosterone helps people focus, feel strong and confident, and even improves sex drive. With more dopamine and other "happy" neurochemicals, an increase in status increases the number of new connections made per hour in the brain. This means that a feeling of high status helps you process more information, including more subtle ideas, with less effort. With the reduced threat response, you are more able to think on multiple levels at once.

People with higher status are better able to follow through with their intentions more-they have more control, more support, and more attention from others. Being in a high-status state helps you make the connections that your brain expects to make, which puts you in an upward spiral toward even more positive neurochemistry. This may well be the neurochemistry of "getting on a roll."

Getting and staying on a high

You can elevate your status by finding a way to feel smarter / funnier / healthier / richer / more righteous / more organized / fitter / stronger or by beating other people at just about anything at all. The key is to find a "niche" where you feel you are "above" others.

If you video recorded a standard weekly team meeting in most organizations, you might find that a large percentage of the words spoken every are intended to edge an individual's status higher, or edge other people's status lower. This bickering, the corporate equivalent of sibling rivalry, largely happens unconsciously and wastes the cognitive resources of billions of people.

The ongoing fight for status has other downsides. While competition can make people focus, there's will always be losers in a status war. It's a zero sum game. If everyone is fighting for high status, they are likely to feel competitive, to see the other person as a threat.

If you want to have a potentially threatening conversation with someone, try talking down your own performance to help put the other person at ease. Another strategy for managing status is to help someone else feel that his or her status has gone up. Giving people positive feedback, pointing out what they do well, gives others a sense of increasing status, especially when done publicly. The trouble is, giving others people positive feedback may feel like a threat, because of a sense of a relative change in status. This may explain why, despite employees universally asking for more positive feedback, employers seem to prefer the "deficit model", pointing out people's faults and performance gaps, over a strengths-based approach.

These two strategies-putting your status down and others' up-only help other people with their status, and may actually threaten yours. So where can you get a nice burst of confidence-inducing, intelligence-boosting, performance-raising status around here, without harming children, animals, work colleagues or yourself?

Getting a status-rush without harming others' status

There's only one good (non-pharmaceutical) answer that I can find so far. It involves the idea of "playing against yourself." Why does improving your golf handicap feel so good? Because you raise your status against someone else, someone you know well. That someone is your former self. "Your sense of self comes online around the same time in life when you have sense of others. They are two sides of same coin," Marco Iacoboni explains. Thinking about yourself and thinking about others use the same circuits. You can harness the power of the thrill of "beating the other guy" by making that other guy (or girl) you, without hurting anyone in the process. To play against yourself gives you the chance to feel ever-increasing status, without threatening others. I have a hunch that many successful people have worked all this out and play against themselves a lot.

In summary - I think it's time we rethink self-esteem. Status appears to be a more accurate way of thinking about what self esteem is really about. It's a highly dynamic issue. By rethinking self-esteem we can create more accurate ways of intervening with those struggling with low status, like changing one's environment, or finding domains of life where one can experience higher status, or learning to play against yourself.

Cofronting Bad Behavior

Dear Crucial Skills,
 
I am having problems at family mealtimes. My husband's table manners are not good—he eats like a hungry animal and spoils the dining experience. I have done my best to ignore his behavior over the years, but my teenage daughter is upset by it and I think his manners are getting worse.

Disgusted

Dear Disgusted,

I read your question at the end of my workday, so it was on my mind when I sat down to dinner with my wife. I can be guilty of poor table manners—eating too quickly, taking large mouthfuls, and talking while I chew. And I don't always react well to being reminded about my table manners. After all, it's not like I'm spilling food on the floor or eating with my hands.
I see three challenges in this conversation. First, you don't want your husband to feel attacked or disrespected. That's not your goal, and it would provoke defensiveness. Second, you're dealing with an entrenched habit that will take some time and attention to change. It won't be a single conversation. And third, because your husband will need reminders, you run the risk of coming across as a nag. Somehow you need your husband to take responsibility for making the change.

Find mutual purpose. Before the discussion, consider your mutual purpose. What purpose does your husband share for making the change? What goal does your husband have that his eating habits are impeding or thwarting? For example, many couples see family meals as opportunities to communicate and connect. Do you and your husband share this goal?
In addition, your husband may have other goals that are thwarted by a slow dinner. Maybe he is rushing to get to an activity. Or maybe the current dinner conversations are less about communication and connection than about tasks and assignments. Are there ways to make family dinners more convenient and pleasurable?

Describe the gap. Start by explaining your positive intentions, and then describe what you expect and the behaviors you are observing. Avoid inflammatory language, e.g., "You eat like a hungry animal."
Here is an example: "I'd like to see if we can use our family dinners to connect more as a family, especially with our daughter. Is it okay if I share some specifics that I think would help?" Give your husband a chance to respond here. You want to create safety so he won't feel attacked.
Be ready to present your issue. For example, "I have noticed that you eat very fast, making dinner time feel more like a race than a time to be together. I'd like us to spend more time together over meals, and to include more conversation. Are you aware of how fast you eat?" Again, give your husband time to respond. Listen to his perspective, but don't lose track of the issue you want to address.
Be ready to respond and reinforce the behavior you want to change. For example, "I would like you to slow down when you eat and help all of us take advantage of the time we have together."
Check with your daughter before you bring her into this discussion. Make sure you aren't hiding behind your daughter—that you present this issue as your concern. But also, don't keep your daughter's concerns a secret from your husband. Every father has a right to know when he's spoiling a relationship with one of his children.

Get his buy-in on the broad issue, and then ask for permission to remind him. Our eating habits are both personal and tough to change. We've practiced them so often that they've become a part of our automatic pilot. Even when we want to change, we fail to notice when we slip into our old ways. Ask your husband whether it's okay to remind him when you see him slip, and together develop a cue that won't be embarrassing. For example, you might use a question like, "What was the high point of your day?"

Actually remind him. It's inevitable your husband will slip, and exhibit his bad table manners. Let's suppose you see him take a giant bite out of a pork chop, argue a point while balancing a meatball on his tongue, or pick his back molars with his index finger. Use your cue, and, if necessary, talk to him later in private. Remind yourself that when your husband slips, it's not because he doesn't care. It takes time to change long-standing habits.

Focus on a positive vital behavior. If you determine that one of the purposes for having your husband eat slower is to improve family connections during meals, then you can take some positive steps that will help promote the kind of exchange you desire.
I'll share one strategy you can use to promote dialogue among all parties at the table. I learned it from Al Switzler, my VitalSmarts colleague. It's a game that's designed to build and practice conversational skills.

Having a conversation is like playing tennis. One person serves up the topic, and then you both volley the conversation back and forth. The goal is to keep the conversation in play. If I serve up the topic, then your role is to respond to my volley in a way the keeps the conversation alive. After a while we switch servers, so the other person has to come up with topics to discuss.
Imagine that you, your husband, and your daughter practiced this conversation game for at least part of your dinner meal. It's incompatible with speed eating, and it contributes to your long-term mutual purpose. Try to have your husband, not you, take the lead on explaining and initiating this kind of activity.

Finally, be patient, and put this problem into its proper perspective. Many habits are much worse than bad table manners, but few are harder to change.