E041: Self Regulation

now on to this episode. Hello. This is James, and this is Jane,

and here we are again with another episode of The World of Work podcast. We're up to, like, Episode 41 now. Can you imagine that? I

can't believe it's taken us 41 episodes to get to the episode that I really wanted to make. Oh, it's incredible.

And you know what? We're 41 episodes in, and I don't think we've really quite got, like, the bikes and the equipment and the volumes and all

that stuff started yet either. What are you saying? It took us, like, an hour to get set up today. I

wouldn't say that at all, but I do like the microphone still. I like the microphone. It's been a long time since we've done this. It feels a little bit different. Now. Does it feel rusty a

little bit? I mean, what's it been like, eight weeks or something? Yeah, I guess so. That's what

happens when you front load the summer specials. Pretty exciting. All right, so I guess just usual, check in stuff, start us off. So as ever, you guys can get in touch with us on Twitter. You've got us at the WoW podcast. We're still there. We've got our new website out. We do. It's www, World of work.io. Yeah, I remember telling people we were going to do that, like ages ago, but it's here now, and

we probably should explain because it might feel a bit confusing that this episode is in the middle of the series, but we recorded it after we recorded the rest. So that's why it's been a little a little while, and it sounds a little bit like we're rusty, because actually, we recorded all the rest of the episodes from this series, and then we did this one a little bit later, because there's quite a lot to it. And

also, I was in the middle of my exam, yeah, that's right, and that was okay, wasn't it? And

I didn't fail. Yes, my entire magical life is, don't come last. No, I did all right, I did good. So I'm excited. Yep,

and I guess just a little recap on the series. So a series itself is all about kind of self development and trying to help individuals get better at, I guess, fulfilling their potential and being happy and all those kinds of stuff. So we thought self regulation was really an important part of that. As ever, with this episode, we're going to follow the same format, but we have in the others. So we'll be doing a bit of a definition piece. We'll have a research round up. We'll then go on to have a list of a week, some stories from a keyboard, a few final thoughts, top tips, and then we'll check out. But just before that, really quickly. Jen, anything exciting happening in your life in the last couple months? So much exciting.

Firstly, I'm going on holiday. Oh, nice, which never used to matter to me, but really matters these days. Good, quite excited about that. Secondly, I've had my exams and the results, and they were okay, good. One of them was much more than okay, so I'm pretty chuffed about that. Yeah, and I'm rocking up to do my research project. So yeah, it's been, it's been really busy. Oh, and I moved house and moved into what is our new studio? Yes. And I say that with a snigger, because we are currently sitting in my living what will be my living room, surrounded by Bare plaster, almost bare plaster walls, ladder behind James, and yet, we've still set it up like a little Bucha studio. It's fun. So, yeah, loads. What about you? Well, the same.

I mean, it's just been really busy. I've been, I've been coaching a couple of kind of interesting people in the business world with interesting problems, and I find that the most exciting. So I always like, I really enjoyed those sessions. I've had a lot of fun with that. Recently, I took all of June off, basically, I mean, I went out to states and spent a month. Oh, yeah, I remember, yeah, I know, right, like visiting people. So that was fun, obviously. Website out, we set up a company, so now we're actually a company. Yeah, that is true, yeah. Website company.

Who knows what's happening? Yeah, it's exciting. Exciting, yeah, so that's it, I guess. And of course, there's been a lot of other little bits and pieces, but, but we're having fun. So should we talk about self regulation? Yes, let's because, you know, quite close to my heart. Yeah, this is one of, like, Jane sort of passion topic. So it's kind of exciting.

Define passion topic. Yeah, well, lifetime struggle. Let's go with that. That feels more appropriate, maybe,

yeah. I mean, you know, you say that people study the things that are relevant to them somehow in life. I think maybe, I think they definitely do that, though, I think that's definitely then, I guess I studied accounting. So there we go. I don't know, and economics and economics, yeah, I don't know what that means about my life anyway. So we're going to talk about self regulation, but we're going to start off with some definitions, as we always do. And because this is kind of like Jane's leading on this topic and doing a lot of research, I'm going to take you guys through a couple of definitions. We're going to try and go a bit faster with them. We're going to try and get the podcast. Down to maybe 45 minutes each in the future. So So yeah, we will do that. Not that we're going to try we will. I think that's an important part of self regulation, isn't it? You got to learn to stop speaking anyway. So some definitions for you quickly. So self regulation itself, what's that all about? Well, participatory, let me try that again. Participatory health, through social media has said that self regulation is defined as a process by which people incorporate behavior change into their everyday lives, and it involves self monitoring, goal setting, reflective thinking, decision making, planning, plan enactment, self evaluation and management of emotions arising as a result of behavior change. That's kind of a mouthful, but we're gonna, I feel like there's everything that covers like life, doesn't it? It's like, kind of being alive. Next up, we're going straight to emotional self regulation, which is a subset this comes from the Encyclopedia of child and behavior development, a pretty good read. It says emotional self regulation refers to the complex process of initiating, inhibiting and modulating the conscious aspects of emotion to effectively achieve one's goals. So, you know, that's a subset of this kind of stuff. And you'll see when we get into the content of this a bit of overlap and all this stuff. Then we've got another little one here. You might be asking yourself, well, doesn't a lot of this stuff just kind of sound a bit like self control? And you're not the first people to ask this question. So we found out that somebody called Stuart Shanker in 2016 said self control is about inhibiting strong impulses. Self regulation is about reducing the frequency and intensity of strong impulses by managing stress, load and recovery. In fact, self regulation is what makes self control possible, or, in some cases, unnecessary. So that's kind of good, isn't it? Like it shows how self regulation is a sort of a preventative way to to pre manage your way through some of these things where self control is a response in

a minute. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not familiar with Stuart's work, but I like, definitely like it. That's good, right?

It's good. And I'm going to rattle through three more quickly. Next up is ego depletion, which is a phrase that I kind of like, and this is from the British Psychological Society. It says that ego depletion, what are we saying about it? Well, it says this is the intuitive idea that self control, or willpower, is a limited resource, such that the more you use up in one situation, unless you have left over to deploy in another now, like this, idea is in and out of fashion a bit, but we'll come onto it in the research. It's just an idea to get into your mind. Basically, you know, willpower gets worn down over time you use it up and you run out of it, is what it's saying. Then next up, we've got self efficacy. And this is a definition from Albert Bandura, which will be relevant later. He says that self efficacy refers to an individual's belief in his or her capacity to execute behaviors necessary to produce specific performance attainment, right? So do you believe you can get stuff done? Do you believe you can behave in a certain way? That's what self efficacy is. And then, very lastly, and maybe my sort of favorite thing to chat about here is the illusion of control, and that's a cognitive bias. And we, I don't know that we talked about it when we've looked at some other things, but, but it's something that we've written about, certainly. And basically all we've said here is that this is a tendency of individuals to overestimate their ability to control events, right? So, like a lot of times, people think they're in control of a world, and they believe that actions lead to, you know, follow on actions and things like that. But in reality, it's not

always quite Is that like the people who like, say, Oh, I've, you know, been clean eating for two years, and I've never had cancer,

absolutely, I've been wearing my special elephant detection bracelet, or whatever, elephant deterrent bracelet, and never yet has no superstition come into that, particularly our sports. Well, you know what? Like baseball players in America, have you? Have you watched some of them? But, like, get up and walk to the back, they'll touch their nose, they'll jump in a circle. It's extraordinary, particularly huge one. It's very ritual. Particularly,

always fascinates me that in sport something that people have put more, probably more hours, yeah, any other profession because they start so young to put into it, they're the ones who are most likely to think it's up to the goals. I know it's weird habits or whatever. Yeah, there's also same socks every day, backwards, serve preparation in tennis is really, oh

yeah, yeah, the triple bounce, drop, shake, rubber, rubber. Yeah, all right, so that's me checking out a definition discussion, and I think we're gonna hand over to you to start us up. Yeah.

So the way we've approached the research is to firstly acknowledge that it self regulation overlaps loads of stuff, some of which we've already talked about in other podcasts, some that we're going to talk about in the future, and it's like everything we talk about, it's actually a little blurry, where the lines are and what people are talking about. And what we've done is we've picked out four or five models in different contexts to talk you through. So just starting with something I really like from the self regulation. For accomplishment website, which is basically where they've sort of looked at self regulation and looked at all the things that overlap around it. And so they've got a list, and there are others that I don't even think they mention, but certainly they've got self talk, they've got metacognition, they've got self control, which you've already made mentioned as being relevant. They've got motivation, which we did pretty much a whole series, whole episode on, a whole episode on, but we did motivation theories, we did, we executive function,

emotional regulation, yeah, all of those things. And so it's really important to understand when we talk about self regulation. Firstly, context is everything. So different people have built different models around different industries and sectors, although I would argue that a lot of them are the same thing or similar. Yeah, sorry, researchers, but it does feel like that. First, I feel like I've read like six things and they've been the same, yeah. It's like, what's it like, health and cognition? Yeah. So

the ones we've picked out, learning is a really big one, because lots of people trying to understand how to help the education sector people learn. So learning has got loads of stuff about self regulation, self regulated learning health huge, because they're looking for behavior change, and they're looking how to regulate behavior that gives you better health outcomes. Fine, so there's been lots of money put into that. So that's like, take your insulin and stuff like that, you know, yeah, and

walk every day and take your drugs like making sure that people don't do risky behavior and stuff like that. What about eating five fruits and vegetables a day? Does that count? Do you

want to get into a fight about the arbitrary nature of five so that? Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna pick up a health model, which I think is really useful. We're also gonna pick up an emotional model of self regulation. We're gonna look at COVID, a little thing from cognitive neuroscience about the failure of self regulation and the balance model. And if we got time, we're gonna pick up a Bandura model as well. But if we don't get time, we will leave it for you, for something to look at. But there's loads, and this is like five things out of a bunch. And I'm not necessarily going to pass judgment on the quality of the academics the research. This is about which models I like and which I think might be repeating themselves, but I think there's some interesting stuff in here. So we're going to start with the environment of learning, and we're going to start with Barry Zimmerman, which, because I just like Barry Zimba Zimmer Barry Zimmerman has been prolific in looking at self regulation, learning and a lot of this stuff. And I want to share with you his phases of self regulated learning, because I think that I think they're actually relevant to everything and learning in terms of learning about ourselves and our behaviors, as well as the traditional sense, which is the environment of learning and study and education. And I think I think it's relevant across everything. So he has a cyclical three phase process, and he has self reflection, forethought and performance. So he argues that there is a self reflection phase, which includes self judgment and self reaction, so judging yourself and reacting to that, then the forethought phase, or the prep phase, it gets called in some places, which is around task analysis, analysis and motivational beliefs. So setting goals based on so you've reflected right now, what am I going to set my goals around? And why would I want to do the motivational beliefs? So what is what? Why am I doing this? Why am I sentence goal? And will it? Will it be the thing that drives me forward, and then a performance phase, which is effectively where you execute your self control, or your self instruction, or your attention focusing and your strategies and you observe. So there's a performance phase where you need to not only be executing your strategies, but also observing you. Then move on to reflecting and taking some time out to look back and go, Okay, did this work? How do I feel about it? Do I want to do this again? And then you move into, back into a full thought phase of, okay, so what am I going to do differently? What am I going to do? Is this still motivating? Is this still something that I want to improve? And so I think it's really interesting, because when you think about the practicalities of when you improve on self regulation, sometimes you will stop, and you might get a bit better, but then go, well, that's enough. And I think there's a piece around checking in with your motivation under that forethought period, right? He goes, he's basically saying, Have I done enough now for this no longer to be something that I'm motivated to achieve? Yeah. And I think that's really interesting, yeah. So I like that one a lot, so and, but I will also caveat it with it is nothing more complex than figure out how to how you might approach the problem. Have a go at approaching the problem and managing it. Did that work, and are you happy with it? Are you going to do anything differently next time? I mean, it's not complicated stuff. Yeah, it's a big name. But I do think there's a call out around checking in with motivation that I think you particularly like. And also you have to bear in mind that he started his work at a time where we really didn't understand a lot of this stuff. So, you know, it's a lot of this stuff is building on other things. So the next one I want to talk about is in the field of emotional self regulation. And I think this is quite important, because so. Much of what we talk about in self regulation is related to emotions, and managing your emotional response to things, and quite often, it's the thing that people associate most closely with self regulation

now, and also, like in the workplace, that's the stuff that happens in the moment when sometimes happens you've got maybe a negative emotional response.

Well, it's the thing that most often affects other people. Yeah, I guess, like, visibly, yeah. I quite often. I, for example, I, for me, self regulation issues tend to be much more cognitive, and they tend to be much more about just bad habits, right and and not finding quicker processes and stuff and not and repeating the same problems. But I, when I witnessed emotional self regulation failure that tends to have a bigger, longer, quicker, more, more acute impact, whereas my procrastination just drives everyone up the wall. But the emotional self regulation quite often arouse or then, yeah, so you totally end up wanting to as particularly HR, want to fix it so the process model of emotion regulation is based on the modal model of emotion, and that argues that emotion, the generation of emotion, occurs in a particular sequence situation. So the sequence begins with something happening, real or imagined, that is relevant to your emotion attention you would, you then direct attention towards that situation. So you're like, oh, and appraisal, you'll then evaluate and interpret it. And then there's a response. So you generate an emotional response, okay, now, because emotional response can cause changes to that situation. So someone shouts at you, you respond. You shout at them. It changes fundamentally change the situation from being the innocent party, potentially where someone shouts at you, you're now complicit, so their response will change. So you have to recognize and a lot of a lot of the research at the beginning was about understanding that it's these things all interact with each other, yeah, but the process model of emotion regulation argues that you can correspond what happens with that situation, attention, appraisal and response. And they argue what happens is you have these are strategies that you will use, knowingly or unknowingly to manage your regulation. So there's a situation selection piece, right? Which is where you avoid situations that create emotion, right? So that happens before the process, right? If you know someone winds you up, you just avoid them, for example, or in more serious cases, if you tend to come to butt heads with someone, metaphorically, in the organization, you might avoid leaving them in your project team. Yeah, you know, you just avoid the situation. Then there's situation modification, which is exactly what it says on the tin, which is you try and change the situation you're in. And then there's attentional deployment, so distracting distraction techniques, okay, so trying to move that around. Then you've got cognitive change, which is about changing how you view things and how you interpret them. And then you've got response modulation, which is learning to manage your response. So just to go through this again, situation selection, just making it so that you don't, or you do, or you change the situations. You access situation modification. How can you change the environment? So people often use heart humor, fine, yeah. You can laugh at them, yeah. So if you, if you, if you change the situation fundamentally, by adding in something that's in a way to you will end up without that situation becoming something else. So then there's intentional deployment, so things like distraction, but also worry. So this is about when you negatively manage it, right? So you might worry it cognitive change, where you might distance yourself again. You might reappraise the situation. You might say, Okay, hang on, can I take a step back? Can I think about what's going on and see the big picture? And then you've got response, response modulation, and that might be exercise. They talk about how you can use exercise to downgrade your response, right? Because you go and you take a walk, and actually, it's not just the distancing, it's also the physical, yeah, absolutely. But also examples of negative response modulation might be drug use. They might be alcohol, yeah, they might be smoking. I would argue that smoking was an almost instantaneous response to me and a habit to to crack into when, very specifically, when there was an uncomfortable atmosphere in the office. Yeah, okay, I would remove myself. And I was, it was distancing, but it was actually, it wasn't about distancing. It was bad atmosphere, right? Yeah. I was like, I just, this is and you, you treat yourself these days, right? Self market. So I think it's a really useful model, and it's a really good explanation of how, in. Emotional model works, and then how regulation interacts with it. So I really like how they explain that. I thought that was really useful. And then we're going to move on to the health model, because I thought that was relevant. And so health sector has had loads and loads and loads of work put into it around this stuff. And I would argue, is probably the grassroots of it. It's really complicated. A lot of it, I would say, and the sort of father of all of this levanthol model is from 1980 so it's proper, in comparison some of the other stuff. It's proper. And the you know this it, he uses the feedback loop as a part of the understanding, and we've seen it before. And he argues that there is stimuli, it creates both a cognitive and emotional representation. For both of those, we have coping responses, yeah. And the coping responses around cognitive representations are educational and health educational coping responses and will and also can create health outcomes. So the idea is, you have a coping response, your will, your health outcome will change. So for example, you can choose to reduce your level of sugar in your food, right? Based on the information that you take on that your doctors are telling you that this will help your risk of diabetes, sure, okay, you will then have a health outcome, and that educates you, because you'll go, Okay, so I've been to the doctor, and he's told me that my risk has dropped down, yeah. And so that educates you and informs your your coping mechanism, but also informs how you feel about the stimulus. Yeah, right, which makes total sense. And then the other side of the model that he talks about is the emotional representation, and the way that you cope with those emotional representations, but how they interact with health outcomes as well. So although so comfort eating would be a classic example, you may cognitively know that something is bad for you, and when you adjust your behavior, it may work. But if the emotional response to a situation is such that you associate it with comfort eating, then you may go off and still do that. So you have to find coping responses for both, yeah, okay. And there is a separate, these are two separate loops, which I really, I think, is really interesting. It's good to think of a COVID Well, and it really helped me think about when we were talking, James and I had a chat yesterday, and I we would yesterday, and we were talking about, what's the difference between emotional self regulation and self regulation? That's

a really good model explaining about how emotion interplays. And I think we, because there is so much information out there, I think we sometimes forget that cognitive evaluation of that information and actually targeting whether it's working, whether it's helping us, we tend to focus on the emotional side instead. And I worry sometimes that we need both. Yeah, I think we do. So moving on from that, the last model that I want to talk about is the something that is from a very recent paper. Well, not recent, 2011 Henderson and Wagner did a piece of work from the cognitive neuroscience in failure of self regulation. So what's going on in your brain when your self regulation fails? Right? And they argue that you're there are threats to self regulation, right? And that might be cue exposure. So we just talked about that, right? Something happens, and there's you use that as a cue. We talked about cues quite a lot in the series already, and so you're exposed to a cue, and that may lead to overwhelming impulses in your prefrontal control. And so basically, your prefrontal control just buckles over that cue, because you're used to that cue, right? And the other thing that happens to threats and self regulation is a lapse in activated consumption, right? So there's pros and it's positive and negative behaviors, right? So where I don't know, I go on holiday for two weeks and I've been running every day, there's a lapse in that habit, yeah? And therefore the impulse to continue to lapse overwhelm my prefrontal control, right? Yeah.

Okay, so is it kind of saying that your sort of emotional aspects of things and your your sort of gut instinct, whatever you want to say, ends up winning, and you just lose the ability to force yourself to do stuff through your rational thought process? Because

that would well, I think so. But I think it's really important to understand the difference between the control element and the function being impaired. So they would then argue that other stuff, like negative moods, resource depletion. So resource depletion, alcohol consumption, is the most straightforward. And also brain damage. Prefrontal brain damage is where your function is impaired. And there is a difference between these two, and we don't sometimes. And it's interesting. We had a conversation yesterday. We were talking about what fits in self regulation, what does, and this has really helped me. Yeah. So there is a difference between your function being impaired and your impulse is overwhelming. And the previous Health Model talks about how you manage your impulses, right? And you talk in that that quote that definitely. Mission about, how do you reduce the how you can almost make those impulses go away, is what that quote says, the difference between self control is self regulation and what? What the balance model argues is that, well, yes, you can make those impulses go away, which will not overwhelm your prefrontal control, but also if your function is impaired, yeah, which is a totally different it's a totally different thing, yeah, but it's those threats that you have to understand. Different threats have a different impact on different people. So depending on what the issue is, and the argument is that whatever, both of those things lead to your prefrontal and subcortical circuit being broken, and that leads to your self regulatory failure, right? So the bit of your prefrontal brain is failing because either there's some stuff around your control systems that you've let go, like lapsing on holiday or hanging out with the guy that's changed the rules a bit, whatever, yeah, versus stuff like negative moods resource depletion, which might have a much bigger impact the function is impaired, and how, that's how, that's how it happens. And it's, I just think it's really interesting, because it's great. I suspect it relates as well to which types of self regulation, coping strategies work better in what situation. Yeah, it's great to see that there's different types. Anyway. Look, it's quite complicated, but there's a nice, nice nice diagram, which I'm gonna, we're gonna replicate and reference, because it's interesting. I kind of like it, and it's a really interesting piece of work. So we'll, I think we'll link to the the paper, because I think it's relatively straightforward. And then, just lastly, a very quick mention for Bandura, because he's so prevalent in all this stuff. And I just really wanted to mention go way back when, to the 90s, he was kind of bringing all this stuff together. And he talks about a system of self regulation of motivation and action, and he talks about standards and reflective influences. And things he talks about is the performance dimensions, so the different ways that we think about how we want to do things. So quality, productivity, originality, sociability, deviancy. These are all types of function that we want to in a context, improve or not prove. He talks about the quality of your monitoring. So how are you taking the information based on your behavior? So do you have an honest picture of what you're doing and what you're not doing? And then he talks about your own personal standards, your referential standards. So what's the norm? So this is when you judge against what your standards are versus what someone else's standards are. So if everyone around you smokes but you're still not okay with it, that's where those two things are different. And he talks about the motivation being the valuation of activity. So how important really is this to you? And then he talks about the reaction, self reaction, so evaluating your own reaction, and whether you are choosing a rewarding or punishing approach, or whether you're choosing not to react at all. So I know this is humans and not dogs, but we were talking about my dog this morning who's behaving really badly, and I have a choice to ignore her. Yeah, I have a choice to give her reward for when she's good, or I have a choice to punish her when she's bad, or I can take away good, or I can add and that's links back to the reinforcement stuff we've spoken about. Absolutely, absolutely. And

there's a matrix, there's a matrix, and all of that stuff, but this is about how you do it for yourself, and it's all the same stuff. There's so a lot of it is common sense. Yeah, it crosses over with so much other stuff. But the one thing I want to say about all the research, from my perspective, is it feels like common sense, because we're building on 30 years of research, right? So we all sit here going, Oh, that's really obvious, yeah, but it wasn't in 1980 right? So what do you think that's my that's my take on some of the research. I know there's a

lot there. Yeah, I think it's, I think it's a really interesting area. I think it's an interesting area. I think it's an interesting field. I think, like you said, a lot of it feels like common sense and and one of the things that I think is really interesting is that, you know, having spent a fair bit of time reading up on behavior change recently, I think it's really interesting how much of an overlap there is between the stuff we're looking at in self regulation and some of the interventions in behavior

change. So sometimes I feel like the psychology is the theory and behavior change went out and operationalized it. Yeah.

And so for me, the interventions are, how do you identify the points of influence within a self regulation framework, and how do you push them to lead to changes in behaviors and actions? So I think that's really interesting. I've got similar views to you around the fact that a lot of it seems like the people are basically saying the same stuff in different models. And I'm not an expert, right? And if you get into it, I'm sure there's nuance, difference and things like that. But I guess looking through it all, it's led me to have kind of one big question I'd like to ask you, which hopefully we've got a couple minutes to address, which is this stuff's all well and good, and it talks about different processes and things you can do. Is it possible to get better at self regulation if you practice? I mean, this series is about personal development. Can you develop your self regulation? So I'm gonna give you my opinion. Okay, that's fine. I'm

also gonna say that article that I mentioned has a whole, like three paragraphs on, okay, exactly what they think. And I. I would encourage people to read. So my perspective is that depends on what the issue is. I think, Okay, I think the obvious thing is, if you've genuinely got consistent failures in your prefrontal Yeah, yeah. So

I think it's much harder, I think. But I think when you when the really funny thing is, when you draw something to a diagram, even about yourself, I think it gives you a way of thinking about things. And so when I was thinking about my own behavior with two of the models, actually the emotional stuff and also the health One, it helps me to be really cold about in a good way, clinical improve, my COVID, cognitive about some of the cues rationalize it, doesn't it? Yeah, there are cues in my life that I can positive cues and negative cues that I have learned from looking at this kind of stuff. And so yes, I do, but I would argue is that, is that, yes, it's better. My self control is not better, my self regulation is Frank, and I would argue smoking is a great example of that. But I would also argue, in a work context, there are many things as a manager, yeah, that I learned to remove the cues. Yeah, I remember to react differently. I deliberately adapted. There's lots of this stuff that I think people do all the time. I

think we do it instinctively, or we work it out ourselves to some extent. Yeah, the difference

is, and for me, this would be my learning from all of this research, all of this research, all say there is a there is the feedback loop in some form, absolutely. And my plea to everybody work in a workplace, particularly in a busy workplace, is if you do not take the time to reflect on yourself and others behavior and what's happened and situations and information, you will not find the patterns, and you will absolutely be a broken record, and you will react the same way again and repeatedly.

Yeah, you know, it's hard to change, but you need to get data and insight and feedback if you're gonna

and the satisfaction of not reacting or reacting positively something that you have previously not managed well is a beautiful thing. Thanks for that feedback. I value it something like that. No, not that. I might punch someone that would come. I

would sound sarcastic, and that's a great example. I learned that it doesn't get the reaction I want. Yeah. I just need to go, yeah. Okay, yeah. All right,

cool. Well, I'm gonna move us on in our in our effort to check in, check out at 45 minutes, we're gonna jump on so I'm gonna go quickly onto a list, and then we'll go on to stories from a keyboard. The list this week is it's really simple, but we wanted to put it in because it allows us to share something else with you online as well. So all I'm going to do is talk you through something called the self regulation questionnaire for adults, which is the SRQ. It's from Brown Miller and Lewandowski in 1999 and this is a tool that you can use to assess, to some extent, your self regulation. But tools got 63 questions on it, and I'm going to read through all of them quickly. Now I'm joking. I'm totally taking 63 questions. I'm just laughing at my little joke. I'm really sorry, but 63 questions cover seven different categories. So that's the usual thing. You score yourself between one and five, how much you agree with different statements. But the underlying thing that the tool is actually trying to get to is these seven different areas. And we'll share a link to it, but we think the areas give you an insight in terms of what it's trying to get to. And I'll just read them quickly, and then we'll go on to stories. So the first area is around receiving relevant information. So how good are you at, sort of reading signals and understanding your cues and seeing what's going on? Number two is around evaluating the information and comparing it to norms. So part of this self regulation is about fitting into social norm behaviors. So how good are you at evaluating information you receive and using it to interpret what the correct social norm is and comparing the information to what you'd normally expect. The third point is around triggering change. So you know, when stuff comes in, how do you respond to it? How do you trigger your changes? What do you do? The next piece is around searching for options. So you know, once, once that train change process is started, how do you really evaluate the different options and find new ones? The next point, point point five, is around formulating a plan. So now that you've assessed the situation and started to think about options, how do you develop a plan to help you achieve that objective? Then next we've got implementing a plan. So how good are you at actually following through and delivering on the plan that you've created? And then the last stage is around assessing the plan's effectiveness. So that's that sort of self feedback retrospective piece. So that's all we wanted to say. Just wanted to get it out there so you can share the link. And so let's jump on to stories from the keyboard self regulation. Would you like to kick us off? I think you should, because I like yours. I don't like yours, but interesting. Yeah,

okay, it's one I've touched on before, but I just think it's. Interesting little one, one of the people that I worked with at one point in every feedback conversation meeting, would cry. And, you know, within the way that we tend to work in a corporate environment, crying isn't a sort of social norm. It's not, you know, that sort of expected type of behavior, and it makes it hard to have conversations. So it was just a bit of a strange behavior, and it's one of the things that would happen regardless of the type of feedback conversation that was taking place. Even if you get involved in something that is potentially positive feedback, it's sort of overwhelmingly emotional, and leads to crying, which makes it hard to carry on with a conversation. And I just thought that was an interesting example of a sort of inability to self regulate in that environment and and one of the reasons I think it's an interesting example is because it's indiscriminate between positivity and negativity in that frame, so I don't really have any deep reflections on it. I think it's not for me to do that. I just thought it was one to share as an example.

Yeah, yeah. I think it's a really interesting one. Yeah, because it's, it's getting in the way for everyone. Yeah, it's for all parties involved. You know, I've,

I've worked with someone who not, not responds to feedback in that way, but has certainly quite a lot. But they've always been, like, able to just sit there and go, just ignore, ignore conversation. It's just a bit of reaction. And I always do think that's a brilliant example of actually being able to regulate. We could absolutely carry on with the conversation. She was what it was a bit disconcerting at first, but she was also absolutely in control of it. And she was like, It's fine. It's just a bit of a reaction I have, yeah, and the way she described it, which I thought was great, was, you know, when people flush in interviews, flash in interviews, yeah, that's how she said it's that for me it feels, it doesn't feel, I'm not really conscious of it, yeah, but I know it's happening, yeah? Interesting. So that's interesting. What about you? Um,

I guess the bit that I would probably my experience of failure would be consistently within my inability to not dominate meetings with my opinions, particularly when it was a subject I knew much better than everyone else, so it's much easier for me To be in meetings when I don't know the subject. Are you a better meeting participant when you have less to say,

I am a far better meeting participant when I know less. Yeah, okay. Because I'm, I will somewhat regulate I am. I find it very difficult not to correct people or not to give give them my point of view ASAP. And it hesitate. It's a work in progress, and I really struggle with it. And it took me sitting down and going, what's happening? Yeah, it took me literally sitting down and going, what is going on in my brain that I am so desperate that I can't let that comment pop. And I've discovered I really don't like it, and it's so funny, I really don't like it when people talk as if they're right and they're wrong, yeah, or they're all, they're talkers if they're right. And it's only one perspective, which is ironic, because I do it all the time myself. I do it all the time. So yeah, I've had to, I've had to actual, actually develop. And obviously I can't avoid those situations, particularly when you're not when you're in senior management role. So instead, if you go back to the emotional model, for example, I've used a lot of the feedback from the other models, but it's been the emotional adaption. And one of the things that I do with a lot of people I work with is I tell them if they've got similar or the opposite problem, we set them targets in meetings to speak. So for example, people who tend to dominate meetings aren't allowed to speak the first 10 minutes. Yeah, yeah. And, and their job is to make sure that nothing really important is on the agenda. Or they pick one agenda a topic, yeah, or they don't. They wait till they're asked, particularly if they're a prolific talker, you just say, wait till you're asked. Someone's gonna ask you, if you're smart and you know your stuff, they will ask particularly for, like, Why is she so quiet? Yeah, and it works every time, yeah, oh, that's good. That's a lovely, lovely story.

Should we jump on to some final thoughts? Yeah, top tips from you. Top Tips. Well, I've

got more of a thought than a tip this time. Okay, go for it. Okay, so I was thinking about this, you know, like Jane said, we had a chat about it yesterday, and I was thinking about it a little bit of a day. It a little bit of a day before, and what I kind of ended up thinking was that, you know, you can be really good at self regulation, but that doesn't necessarily make you a good person and mean that you're regulating yourself towards achieving outcomes that are good for you and and or good for others, right? So sometimes for, in my opinion, this is all, my opinion, the sort of emotional things that we have popping up and the things that we have that help us and steer us in life are things that slow us down or block us or prevent us doing bad things. So if I have a maybe a negative emotional response to the fact that I'm about to do something bad. Then, then that'll stop me doing it. And that's, you know, that's probably a good thing, but, but to some extent, if you can self regulate yourself through a whole bunch of difficult situations, that could enable you to do really bad stuff without tripping yourself up and slowing yourself down through the sort of social norms and cues but the rest of the world susceptible to So my example about a woman crying in feedback sessions. In some instances, crying is a powerful, helpful thing to do, and that's a natural mechanism of a body has to help us act in certain ways. And if you can suppress all these things, and if you can intentionally do it, then these tools can, I believe, be used to help you force yourself to do bad things as well as good things. So I think intention is important as ever, and that's kind of my reflection on this. I think intention context has become my mantra for the world. I think intention is so powerful. What

about you? So my top tip is taken from a team that I used to work alongside, but not in. And I learned a lot from them, and now I do it quite a lot, and that's enlist other people. This is always my advice, get other people to help you acknowledge where you struggle, to self regulate and get help. I've talked before about when I give up smoking and the people in the office, but this particular example I want to give of how I've seen it work and why I think it would work for you, is where there were some consistently late people at meetings, and the team came up with a joint coping strategy, which was one to try and discourage behavior by referring to them as time thieves and charging them I love right? It was like you're a time thief. How many times you've been a time thief

this month? I love this concept of, like, common language and stuff, yeah. And I think it's

really important to understand they were a really strong team, yeah, and they were really happy with each other. So this was not in any way feeling negative. It was about he's acknowledged he wants to get better at this or she has. So there was one, one that and I and they kind of set themselves a bit of a team target around it, okay, and then that person found it much easier to pull for the team than the individual. Yeah, that's good, yeah. So I, I'm a big believer in peer support, and peer support is powerful, right? And that whole collaborative effort for all the things, and not even to mention the power of acknowledging you're not perfect,

that's hugely powerful, right? Stick your hand up, say, I need a bit of help. I'd like to be a bit better. That's hard to do. So that's my top tip. Yeah, good. Well, I

like this. That's goodbye from me, and it's goodbye for me. It's a pleasure.