Yet another great podcast from RadioLab that got me thinking.
In an interview with the famous psychologist Walter Mischel, the Marshmallow experiment is re-enacted.

In this well-known experiment, 4 year-old children were left alone in a room, sitting in front of a single marshmallow prominently displayed on a table (in other variations, Oreo cookies were used). They were told that if they could wait and not eat the marshmallow until the experimenter returned, they would get two marshmallows.

The goal of Mischel was simple: to demonstrate that 4-year olds can have self-control. That was proven. But the real surprise came further down the road. A correlation was found between the number of seconds a child can delay gratification as a 4-year-old and how they are doing later on in life. For example, years later, kids who as children waited the longest (20 minutes, the duration of the test) and therefore got the second marshmallow scored on average 210 points more on the SAT test than those kids who waited for just one minute before gobbling the marshmallow and therefore did not get the second marshmallow. The results were significant. And as these 250 kids became adults, the monitoring continued; even today, more data gathering continues. The differences between those who as children could delay gratification and those who could not are evident and impact all areas of life, from education level to Body Mass Index.

Here is the interesting twist.
If you see clips of children sitting alone in front of the treat, trying to resist the urge to eat it, you can see that they are all in agony – there is no difference here between children that can delay gratification and those who cannot. In other words, the treat is equally tempting to all–if some children can resist, it is not because they are any less attracted to the treat.

What you see is that the children who were successful just found better strategies (tricks) to distract themselves: shushing oneself, kicking the table, singing songs, counting, turning the chair and facing the wall, pretending the marshmallow was a cloud or a UFO and playing with it. They were able to turn a “hot stimulus” in a “cold stimulus”. The children who succeeded had a better bag of tricks.

And here is the best part: in a follow up experiment, Mischel tested another group of children. He then taught a trick to the children who were less successful in this task: he instructed them to put a frame around the cookie and pretend that what they were seeing was just a picture (a technique very similar to the NLP techniques I teach in my stress management workshops). It worked! All of a sudden, these children were able to delay gratification!!

And that is what happens in life, too.
My clients find themselves stuck, because they are facing a problem for which they have not yet developed a trick; or maybe they have, and they forgot; or maybe it is a situation that requires a little fine tuning of tricks they already have.
So they go for the quick solution: they eat the marshmallow–they do what they can.
Consequences will follow.

My job as a coach, then, is to help clients develop their tricks to solve their problems–
not teaching other people’s tricks, not teaching theories about human behaviors, not giving advice.
Each trick is unique, i.e., works well for a specific individual in a specific situation.
That is why I love coaching: I love to see the tricks my clients come up with!

How do I help clients come up with new tricks?
By asking solution-focused questions!
Is your preferred future to have the 2 marshmallows? What would be different from you? Have you ever been in a similar situation? How did you deal with that? Imagine a miracle happens and you complete the task successfully, getting you the second marshmallow. How would you know a miracle happened, how would you know that this time you will be successful? What’s the first little sign? What else is different? What are you doing differently?…

As Mischel puts it in the interview: it is highly likely to be like most things in life are turning out to be: yes the wiring makes a difference. Yes the experience makes a difference. And the wiring and the experience are interacting and changing each other.

My job as a coach is to make sure that my clients have the experience that makes a difference!

To listen to the whole podcast go here.
For a great and simple summary of ideas on how experience plays a role in the development of intelligence, even in adulthood, watch this video by Coert Visser.

Tags: children, coaching, development, marshmallows, Mischel, RadioLab, strategies, tricks

Opportunity is nowhere..

or…

Opportunity is now, here? :)

Tags: Opportunity, tricks