Do you find yourself opting for short-term comfort over long-term gain a little too often these days?
If you're anything like me, you can probably scan your life and spot evidence of these short-sighted choices everywhere you look. My Netflix cue is way too long and the books on my nightstand are way too dusty.
Even when it comes to worthy long-term goals that genuinely impact our overall health, efficacy, and wellbeing, too many of us are making the repeated choice to play it safe and cozy instead of acting in our own best interests.
So, why the heck do we do this?
Because, believe it or not, your brain is holding you back. As a coach, I get a front-row seat to the psychological habits and mental programming that hold us back. And the one bias that most commonly stands between us and our full potential? Loss aversion.
Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that causes us to evaluate the pain of loss with more intensity than the pleasure of an equivalent gain, making us prioritize avoiding immediate discomfort, even if it means missing out on potential future benefits. In short, our brains are programmed to focus on avoiding short-term pain at the expense of long-term gain.
Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that causes us to evaluate the pain of loss with more intensity than the pleasure of an equivalent gain, making us prioritize avoiding immediate discomfort, even if it means missing out on potential future benefits. In short, our brains are programmed to focus on avoiding short-term pain at the expense of long-term gain.
Anyone who’s made the unwise decision to start a habit of snacking on caramel popcorn late at night will certainly recognize the impact of loss aversion on a waistline...so I hear.
Now, let’s go from the couch to the office to see how this plays out in our professional lives.
How many times have you told yourself that you just need to get through your to-do list, and then you will focus on the important-but-not-urgent tasks that have been patiently waiting on the back burner? How often do you prioritize whittling down your inbox instead of coaching and mentoring your team? Oh, and what about all the times you block off your calendar for focused time to actually work, only to allow it to be cannibalized by even more meetings?
Most of us routinely sacrifice our long-term interests - namely, our professional efficacy, our working relationships, and our sanity - in favor of avoiding the short-term pain of prioritizing these efforts. We tell ourselves we will get to it eventually, but the stress and increased demands of our jobs make a compelling case for focusing on short-term relief.
So, we put our heads down, try to plow through, and ultimately end up creating conditions where we compromise the quality and integrity of our future selves.
How do we escape the impacts of loss aversion ?
The Basics 👇
The first step in taming loss aversion is recognizing that our brains overestimate the short-term pain of prioritizing our long-term best interests. We can be a bunch of drama queens in the office with no perspective about what it really takes to lead a balanced professional life with more room to focus on future gains.
Challenge your assumptions about how painful it will be to reprioritize by committing to the thing you’ve been putting off in bite-sized doses.
Make yourself leave the office for a few minutes a day to chit-chat with colleagues, sacrifice emailable agenda items during tactical meetings to create time for strategic collaboration and problem-solving, and dedicate consistent time during your one-on-ones for some coaching and mentorship. Implementing these small steps may challenge your assumptions about the pain of prioritizing your long-term best interests.
Ready for more? 👇👇
If reigning in our estimations of short-term pain is the starting point, getting clear about the future leader we hope to be is the next level.
Picture your retirement party someday and imagine what you hope your colleagues will say about you when that day comes. Do you want them to say you were a prompt email responder, or do you want them to say you cultivated their potential? Will your coworkers say you kept workflow moving, or will they say you helped the team, and your company innovate for the future? Will you be known for perfect slide decks, or influencing stakeholders to make sound decisions?
In the end, we aren’t remembered for the tasks we accomplish but for the contributions we make to others. Think about the contributions you hope to make through your professional efforts and honestly ask yourself if your daily life at work reflects your priorities. If not, it may be time to prioritize what really matters.
Expert Level Mastery 👇👇👇
So, you’ve challenged your assumptions about short-term pain, connected to a future you that hopes to contribute something meaningful through the work you do, and want to know what a black belt in defeating loss aversion looks like?
If so, I’ve got you. (Actually, it's Dwight D. Eisenhower that has your back on this one.)
Experts at balancing short-term incentives with long-term gains use some form of the Eisenhower Matrix to prioritize tasks based on urgency and importance. His matrix divides tasks into four distinct quadrants.
Urgent and Important Tasks: These are the crises, deadlines, and problems that require immediate action, and are critical to achieving your goals. These are the tasks that should land on your to-do list to prioritize and complete as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Not Urgent but Important Tasks: These are tasks like strategic planning, professional development, relationship building and proactive work – that are important to your long-term success - but don’t have immediate deadlines. They are also the most susceptible to derailment from loss aversion! To avoid keeping these important tasks on the back burner longer than they should be, leaders should schedule dedicated time (aka time block) to focus on these tasks.
Urgent but Not Important: Non-critical emails, attending unnecessary meetings and constant interruptions fall into the category of tasks that may require immediate attention, but don’t significantly contribute to goals. Hint: We often overestimate the pain of not immediately responding to these interruptions. Everything in this category should either be delegated to someone else or engaged with boundaries. Limit time spent on these tasks and strengthen your ability to walk away in favor of more important uses of your time.
Not Important and Not Urgent: If it’s not important and not urgent, why are you doing it? Busy work, inefficient systems and processes, and numbing out with distractions on the internet would all qualify as wasted time and effort that should be eliminated whenever possible. If it’s not important and not urgent, have the courage to find a way to stop doing it. Your future self will thank you!
So, what are the takeaways here?
Basically, our brains make us unnatural long-term goal achievers, especially when a little hardship is involved. We’re programmed to avoid pain, so we overestimate the pain of prioritizing our long-term best interests in favor of short-term comfort.
The name of the game in effective leadership is developing strategies to prevent loss aversion from running the show at work…and maybe kicking that late night snacking habit along with it!
It is entirely possible to retrain yourself to prioritize long-term gains, even when the short-term pain feels like it’s staring you down like an impossible to-do list.
Start small, be intentional, and for the love of all things holy, stop treating your inbox like a life-or-death situation! Most of us are not performing triage in the ER. No one will suffer if Bob has to wait for the TPS reports.
The tasks are always going to be there, but the meaningful stuff that will represent your legacy can’t sit on the backburner if you hope to lead a professional life you’re proud of.
So, the next time you feel loss aversion sneaking in, remember to ask yourself: Is this about avoiding discomfort now, or am I building the career and relationships I actually care about? Here’s hoping you arrive at that retirement party with long lines of colleagues who can’t wait to toast the difference you’ve made in their lives. You’ve got this.
Danielle Terranova is the voice behind Leadership Lessons with Danielle.
She has been an executive coach since 2015 and owner of Terranova Consulting, LLC since 2019.