When you stand up to speak, are you thinking about the incredible opportunity you have to present? Or are you focused on what could happen if you screw up? In their book, Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, The New York Times bestselling authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman take a look at two different mindset orientations and how they affect outcomes.
The first is gain orientation: people who are focused on what they stand to gain and are driven by the thought of success. The second is prevention orientation: people who are focused on what they stand to lose and are driven by the fear of failure. Research clearly shows that one focus is statistically better than another, but we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s try learn more about gain orientation versus prevention orientation.
Gain Orientation: Driven to Succeed
Bronson and Merryman say that those with a gain orientation:
- Brush off details
- Are confident they will succeed
- Don’t need more information because they think that it would only make them guarded and unwilling to take risks
- Are eager and work fast
- Excel under time pressure
- Perceive the competition as animating and thrilling
- Respond to (and learn most from) praise and feedback that highlights what they’ve done well
- Are able to maintain motivation for the long haul
Prevention Orientation: Driven to Avoid Failure
On the other hand, those with a prevention orientation:
- Absorb all the details, since they believe that focusing on them cuts down on mistakes
- Like to resolve ambiguities before moving on
- Need as much information as possible
- Are often underconfident
- Are vigilant and work meticulously, avoiding risks
- Work best without time pressure
- Perceive competition inherently as a threat and, ultimately, a great stress
- Learn the most from feedback that highlights their mistakes
- Are more likely to lose motivation along the way
So which of these sounds the most like you? If you are asked to develop and deliver a presentation, where does your focus lie? Read through the above lists again, and think specifically about presenting. Then try to categorize yourself as either gain oriented or prevention oriented.
Which is Better?
I mentioned earlier that research shows pretty consistently that one focus is better than another in regards to positive outcomes. If you guessed gain orientation delivers better results, you’re right. Study after study has proven that athletes, students, and speakers who approach life with a “nothing to lose” attitude more frequently win. Melissa Womble, Ph.D., a neuropsychologist specializing in sports psychology said, “It’s been estimated for baseball that mental factors determine as much as 80 percent of the fluctuations in day-to-day performance.”
I teach at Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville. Recently, our men’s baseball team made it to the College World Series for the first time ever. We had high expectations for them. But as the series played out, they were upset twice by lower-seeded teams. When skilled and capable winning teams shift their focus from what they stand to gain, to what they stand to lose, it’s often the beginning of their downfall. I can’t help but wonder if a different mindset would have led to a different outcome for them.
If only we could all just choose to always be gain oriented, right? While this might not be possible all of the time, what we can do is to recognize which focus we are more prone to have, and to shift to a gain-orientation mindset as often as possible.
Help for Those of Use Who Are Prevention Oriented
If you are prevention oriented, you might find presentations difficult because their very nature highlights some of the things that bug you. You can’t possibly have all the details or avoid all the risks. Plus, you’ll be in front of an audience, so it will seem like any little mistake you might make is on display for everyone, something which makes a prevention-oriented person very uncomfortable.
Bronson and Merryman would probably place presentations in a category that they call “threat situations.” These situations occur when “expectations are very high [and] you know you’re being judged and you can’t make a single mistake.” So you focus on “trying to prevent catastrophe rather than initiate a success.”
You might also find that if even if you start out as gain oriented, that could shift. Studies have shown that your focus might have something to do with your age. Researchers found that “younger adults show a predominant orientation toward the promotion of gains, whereas goal orientation shifts toward maintenance and avoidance of loss across adulthood.” As we get older, we are less willing to take risks because we think we have more to lose. So we focus more on maintaining what we’ve already gained. We also grow increasingly afraid of making mistakes.
Mistakes
Mistakes are a big part of whether we are gain oriented or prevention oriented. Did you know that your brain sends out about 7-10 microvolts within 50-500 milliseconds of you making a mistake? The minor electrical charge comes from your anterior cingulate cortex and it’s goal is to help you recognize and correct the mistake and to help you make sure you avoid it next time.
That system works fine unless you stay locked into that charge. If you keep rolling the mistake around in your head again and again, you uproot your brain’s healthy & natural system with an unhealthy & unnatural one. Instead of recognizing the mistake as something that helps you learn, you begin to rewrite the script and you start thinking that you did something wrong and you equate that with who you are. Yikes. This is one of the most dangerous tendencies of a prevention-oriented person. But it’s one that we can work to correct.
As you try to focus more on succeeding (rather than failing), you’ll begin to view mistakes as part of the learning and growing process. After all, they are really just small hiccups you encounter on the way to bigger and better things. But if you catch yourself focusing more failure, mistakes will seem larger than they really are. They will seem to hold incredible power to either derail you or to stop your progress altogether. For the gain-oriented person, mistakes are simply speed bumps. For the prevention-oriented person, mistakes are complete road blocks. Shift your focus and embrace inevitable mistakes as part of the process.
Let’s end today with some reminders no matter what type of focus you tend towards.
Some Encouragement for Prevention-Orientation Folks
- You can’t mitigate every single risk in a public speaking situation. At some point, you simply have to stop planning and gathering info.
- Recognize that you can still produce great work even if you don’t have as much time as you’d like.
- Don’t hesitate to be confident in yourself.
- Engage in some healthy competition from time to time. And don’t beat yourself up if you don’t come in first.
Some Warnings for Gain-Oriented Folks
- You might have a tendency to push off details as unimportant. They aren’t. Take a lesson from prevention-oriented speakers and gather as much info about your speaking situation, environment, and audience as you can. This will only serve to help you.
- Not all competition is healthy, even if it feels thrilling.
- Even though you love that feeling you get being under a time crunch, allowing yourself more time to prepare will give you a better end product.
- Weigh your risks more carefully. Everything that looks like an exciting opportunity will be naturally attractive to you. But not all risks are worth it. Examine them more closely.
We hope you’ll approach your presentations with a gain-orientation focus as often as you can. It’s a winning mindset. One that might not always come naturally, but one we can all work to embrace more often.
Ready to take your presentation to the next level? We can help.
