Blog Post #2: Time to Pump it Up
Genuineness, Empathy, Unconditional Positive Regard. As much as we do not like to think of it, these are skills. Some of us are more skilled than others. We want to believe these traits come as naturally as language acquisition. But, like hitting a baseball, social skills are learned.

Building empathy requires a healthy brain that allows for emotional understanding and regulation. An underactive amygdala, for instance, creates the classic traits of psychopathy (Decety). A person lacks empathy and is unable to read emotions in others. They are gradually more withdrawn, and depending on their upbringing and environment, may either become a serial killer, become President of the United States, coach the New England Patriots, or simply seek a career on Wall Street.

Starbucks has helped to lead the cause in improving empathy in their employees. They hire individuals from troubled, abusive homes, former drug addicts and alcoholics—individuals who have struggled to hold down a job, who resort to crime and end up in the penal system. They are mostly high school graduates with little to no work experience. The rest of society looks down with contempt as these individuals lose social currency. Starbucks sees an opportunity.

In their first year, each Starbucks employee will spend at least 50 hours in a Starbucks classroom. They learn the skills that families, schools, and communities have failed to provide them. They learn mindfullness. The most important skill for Starbucks, however: Willpower. Willpower is self-control. It means abstaining from using drugs or alcohol. It also determines how you react to stressful situations. What happens when a customer yells at you? Willpower, researchers found, is a learnable skill. Like a muscle, it can be strengthened by increasing its threshold, but if used too much, there is less power left over (Duhigg).

According to Charles Duhigg in the video below, forty to forty- five percent of the decisions you make each day are habits. If you do an activity as part of a routine habit, you can gradually increase its threshold. To strengthen Willpower, you make it into a habit, make it automatic. Duhigg, in the his book The Power of Habit, calls this the Habit Loop. Here is how it works:

It involves three steps: the CUE, the ROUTINE, and the REWARD. The CUE is the trigger. When you get up every morning, you walk into the kitchen, boil water, and grind coffee beans for the French press. That is how you keep that coffee habit alive. Secondly, the ROUTINE is the physical, mental, or emotional part. In the case of drinking coffee, it is the actual drinking part. Lastly, the REWARD. This helps the brain figure out if the loop is worth remembering. After drinking coffee, you get that fuzzy awake feeling. YEEEEEOW, I love coffee! 

However, it does not matter if the habit makes sense—I have been biting my fingernails when stressed throughout my life. This provides a stimulus for when I become anxious. 

The brain creates habits to save energy. If you can learn to do things without thinking, you can spend more time thinking about other things. Imagine driving a car. Imagine a deer eating in a field, always on the lookout for predators.

So, what do Starbucks employees get out of the Habit Loop? Starbucks developed institutional habits. They created Willpower habit loops. To them, behavior is a simple, learned routine. When a customer gets unreasonable, an employee uses the LATTE method: They Listen to the customer, Acknowledge their complaint, Take action by solving the problem, Thank them, then Explain why the problem occurred. Instead of reacting emotionally, LATTE becomes the routine (Duhigg).

The point is, our choices in behavior are influenced by urges we barely recognize. Our brain stores them and creates habits. How do we change habits? How do we see things from some else’s perspective? How does a mother change how she reacts to support their ill-behaved child? How do you change how you deal with a roommate who seems to hate you? According to Charles Duhigg, if we can identify the CUE and REWARD, we can change the whole loop. Genuineness, Empathy, and Unconditional Positive Regard can be developed by this kind of change. 

I believe that Awareness Wheel is just another form of LATTE. When we see a trigger, we make a decision ahead of time on how to act. If we work hard enough, our brain muscles are going to work like this:

Resources:

Decety, J. (2010, August). The Neurodevelopment of Empathy in Humans. Retrieved February 03, 2017, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3021497/

Duhigg, C. (2012). The power of habit: why we do what we do in life and business. New York: Random House.