Happiness Advantage Principle 5

PRINCIPLE #5

The Zorro Circle -- How Limiting Your Focus to Small, Manageable Goals Can Expand Your Sphere of Power

According to legend, Zorro was not always that swashbuckler able to swing from chandeliers and overpower ten men with the slash of his sword. At the beginning of the film The Mask of Zorro, we see him as the young and impetuous Alejandro, whose passion far exceeds his patience and discipline. His quest is to assail villains and right the injustices of the world, but he desires to do so immediately and spectacularly. The higher he flies, the farther he falls, until he soon feels out of control and utterly powerless. By the time the aging sword master Don Diego meets him, Alejandro is a broken man, a slave to drinking and despair. But Don Diego sees the young man’s potential and takes him under his wing, promising Alejandro that mastery and triumph wil come with “dedication and time.” In the hidden cave that serves as Don Diego’s lair, the elder sword master begins Alejandro’s training by drawing a circle in the dirt. Hour after hour, Alejandro is forced to fight only within this small circle. As Don Diego wisely tells his protégé, “This circle will be your world. Your whole life. Until I tell you otherwise, there is nothing outside of it.”

Once Alejandro masters control of this small circle, Don Diego allows him to slowly attempt greater and greater feats, which, one by one, he achieves. Soon he is swinging from ropes, besting his trainer in a sword fight, even performing a set of pushups over burning candles (not the most practical skill to hone, but cinematically impressive nonetheless). But none of these achievements would ever have been possible had he not first learned to master that small circle. Before that moment, Alejandro had no command over his emotions, no sense of his own skill, no real faith in his ability to accomplish a goal, and - worst of all - no feeling of control over his own fate. Only after he masters that first circle does he start to become Zorro, the legend. 

Circle of Control

The concept of the Zorro circle is a powerful metaphor for how we can achieve our most ambitious goals in our jobs, our careers, and our personal lives. One of the biggest drivers of success is the belief that our behavior matters; that we have control over our future. Yet when our stresses and workloads seem to mount faster than our ability to keep up, feelings of control are often the first things to go, especially when we try to tackle too much at once.  If, however, we first concentrate our efforts on small manageable goals, we regain the feeling of control so crucial to performance. By first limiting the scope of our efforts, then watching those efforts have the intended effect, we accumulate the resources, knowledge, and confidence to expand the circle, gradually conquering a larger and larger area.

Tending Plants and Careers: The Importance of Control

Feeling that we are in control, that we are masters of our fate at work and at home, is one of the strongest drivers of both well-being and performance. Among students, greater feelings of control lead not only to higher levels of happiness, but also to higher grades and more motivation to pursue the careers they really want. Similarly, employees who feel they have high levels of control at the office are better at their jobs and report more job satisfaction. These benefits then ripple outward. A 2002 study of nearly 3,000 wage and salaried employees for the National Study of the Changing Workforce found that greater feelings of control at work predicted greater satisfaction in nearly every aspect of life: family, job, relationships, and so on. People who felt in control at work also had lower levels of stress, work-family conflict, and job turnover.

Interestingly, psychologists have found that these kinds of gains in productivity, happiness, and health have less to do with how much control we actually have and more with how much control we think we have.

One of the best places to understand the effect of locus of control on performance is in the world of sports. Think about how the best athletes act in those ubiquitous post-game press conferences. Do they blame their losses on the sun for getting in the eyes, or the referee for making bad calls?  Do they attribute wins to their horoscopes, or lucky streaks? No. When they win, they graciously accept the praise they receive and when they lose, they congratulate their opponent on a job well done. Believing that, for the most part, our actions determine our fates in life can only spur su to work harder; and when we see this hard work pay off, our belief in ourselves only grows stronger.

This is true in nearly every domain of life. Research has shown that people who believe that the power lies within their circle have higher academic achievement, greater career achievement, and are much happier at work. An internal locus lowers job stress and turnover, and leads to higher motivation, organizational commitment, and task performance. “Internals,” as they are sometimes called, have even stronger relationships - which makes sense given that studies show how much better they are at communicating, problem-solving, and working to achieve mutual goals. They are also more attentive listeners and more adept at social interactions - all qualities, incidentally, that predict success at work as well as at home.

Losing Control: The Dueling Brain

Unfortunately, given how important it is to our success, we don’t always feel in control. Some of us are inherently prone to an external locus, and the rest of us can fall into that mindset the second we feel overwhelmed by too many demands on our time, attention, and abilities. To fully understand how this happens, we need to take a closer look inside the brain.

As we go about our daily lives, our actions are often determined by the brain’s two dueling components:  our knee jerk- like emotional system (let’s call him the Jerk) and our rational, cognitive system (let’s call him the Thinker). The oldest part of the brain, evolutionarily speaking, is the Jerk, and it is based in the limbic (emotional) region, where the amygdala reigns supreme. Thousands of years ago, this knee-jerk system was necessary for our survival. Back then, we didn’t have time to think logically when a saber toothed tiger jumped out of the underbrush; instead, the Jerk readily leapt into action. The amygdala sounded the alarm, flooded our body with adrenaline and stress hormones, and sparked an immediate, innate reflex - a “fight or flight” response. It’s thanks to the Jerk, really, that we are all sitting here ten thousand years later.

In particular, when it comes to decision making, the jerk often gets us in a lot of trouble. That's why, over thousands of years of evolution, we have also developed the Thinker, that rational system in the brain that resides mostly in the prefrontal cortex. This is how we use to think logically, draw conclusions from many pieces of information, and plan for the future. The Thinker’s purpose is simple, but it reflects a huge evolutionary leap: think, then react.

Most of our daily challenges are better served by the Thinker, but unfortunately, when we’re feeling stressed or out of control, the Jerk tends to take over.

Hijacked at Work

At this point you might be wondering, what does all this brain activity have to do with achieving our goals at work? Quite a lot, actually. Psychologist Daniel Goleman, author of the groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence, has extensively studied the toll this emotional hijacking can take on our professional lives. When small stresses pile up over time, as they so often do in the workplace, it only takes a minor annoyance or irritation to lose control; in other words, to let the Jerk into the driver’s seat. When this hijacking occurs, we might lash out at a colleague or start to feel helpless and overwhelmed or suddenly lose all energy and motivation. As a result, our decision-making skills, productivity, and effectiveness plummet. This can have real consequences not just for individuals, but for entire teams of organizations. At one large company, researchers found that managers who felt the most swamped by job pressure ran teams with the worst performance and the lowest net profits. A failing economy can be a powerful trigger for emotional hijacking, too. Neuroscientists have found that financial losses are actually processed in the same areas of the brain that respond to mortal danger. In other words, we react to withering profits and a sinking retirement account the same way our ancestors did to a saber-toothed tiger.

Regaining Control, One Circle at a Time

So how do we reclaim control from the Jerk and put it back into the hands of the Thinker? The answer is the Zorro Circle. The first goal we need to conquer - or circle we need to draw - is self-awareness. Experiments show that when people are primed to feel high levels of distress, the quickest to recover are those who can identify how they are feeling and put those feelings into words. Brain scans show verbal information almost immediately diminishes the power of these negative emotions, improving well-being and enhancing decision-making skills. So whether you do it by writing down feelings in a journal or talking to a trusted coworker or confidant, verbalizing the stress helplessness you are feeling is the first step toward regaining control.

Once you’ve mastered the self-awareness circle, your next goal should be to identify which aspects of the situation you have control over and which you don’t.

Putting it All Together

We often feel the most stress, or the most emotionally hijacked, when we stare into the void of our jam-packed to-do list, in-box, or desktop. One look at the towering pile of papers looming on our desk, or the 300 unread e-mails, and our feelings of control fly right out the window. As a freshman proctor, I advised more than my fair share of disorganized students, who ranged from the typically untidy to the pathologically messy. During my second year on the job, the fire department reported one of my students, a tennis player named Joey, because his room was so full of old pizza boxes, empty bottles, scattered newspapers, and falling towers of textbooks that it couldn’t pass a fire code inspection. Not only was his room an incinerator waiting to happen, the fire inspector feared Joey might have trouble escaping his own room in the case of an emergency (not to mention in the case of class).

A cluttered desk is fundamentally no different from a cluttered in-box - a problem that haunts too many modern workers. In both instances, the things of our lives have gained control over the functionality of our lives, and productivity suffers as a result. I had just given a talk to the employees of a larger manufacturing company when one of the senior executives, Barry, invited me into his office. We weren’t even inside the door when he began apologizing for the clutter; his office looked like a four-year-old had been playing “paper tornado.” But Barry had an even bigger problem on his mind:  his e-mail. He confessed that this in-box contained over 1400 messages, which had piled up over the last two  months while he worked on an all-consuming project. Now that the project was over, he knew he had to start addressing the pileup, but the mere thought of it seemed to strike fear into his heart. I studied the problem over his shoulder as he scrolled through all his unread messages. Three minutes later, he was barely through a quarter of them. “I’ll never dig out from under this mountain,” he said, “I might as well contract a computer virus that just destroys my whole computer.” His stress level was so high at this point that every new e-mail sent his body into a reflexive stress response. Just thinking about it made him feel nauseous. Not only did he want to avoid dealing with his e-mail, he was so overwhelmed by the situation, he didn’t feel like doing any work at all.

So I told him to forget everything that had been written before today and to respond only to each new e-mail as it came in. After three or four days of tackling only new e-mails, once he started to feel in command of the situation, he could go back through the e-mails of the day before and address those.

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