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Category: POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, WELLBEING & POETRY

3 steps for citizen leadership during the financial crisis

Published February 6, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Economic reports for the week

The news of the week is the growing fear of sovereign default in Mediterranean countries and the possibility of a double dip recession.  I spent the morning reading up the economic commentaries and turning them into plain English.  As far as I understand what I read, our way of life is in supreme danger of falling apart.

We cannot afford to carry on the way we are.  We don’t have the money.  And the price of borrowing is likely to go up unless we can show clearly how we will pay back what we want to borrow.

The politicians are in a conundrum.  They want to defend Britain’s triple AAA rating.   And to do that they must achieve two goals.

#1  They must show on paper that we can pay back the money we borrow.

#2 They must show money-lenders that the people are behind them and won’t erupt in open revolt.

We need a plan on paper but it matters naught if we do not stand together. It matters naught if we are each trying to position ourselves to win out during the inevitable decline. The money-lenders are watching us.  Our very division will be our downfall.

Finding the will to stand together

So as ever, the issue is neither financial nor economic.  It is social & political.  How can we find the will to stand together?  How can we keep our heads when others are losing theirs?  How can we develop the collective trust to work out how to get through the next ten years?

Positive psychology in hard times

This is just the kind of problem that positive psychology deals with.

We want to know how the ordinary person, you and me, can exercise personal leadership when we don’t have confidence that formal leaders will exercise the leadership we need.   We want to know how to act sensibily when we really have no idea how things will work out.  We certainly want to act in the common good without being totally irresponsible about our own futures and the futures of our families.

3 steps for citizen leadership during the financial crisis

I’ve tried to distill the advice of positive psychologists into three steps.  What do you think?

#1  Keep our eye on people we respect.  Fill our minds with what does work and not with what doesn’t.

#2  Tell the stories of what does work.  Bring the best of the past with us.

#3  Layout out the things we do understand so that other people can understand the issues.  And help others who do not have the skill to layout knowledge in their area.

Is this the way to live positively in times which seem to call out the negative, conniving and complacent?  Is this the foundation of citizen leadership?

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Paolo Coelho on happiness and two challenges for psychologists

Published February 4, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Psychologists need poetry

I have one piece of advice for anyone who aspires to be a psychologist.  Read poetry.  Read good novels.

Your College or Department will jump your through a  lot of pseud-scientific hoops.  Jump through them but for a different reason to the one they give.  Jump through them because they will teach you how to ‘fail informatively’.  Yes. Fail informatively.

In the future, you will be able to handle unfamiliar situations by proposing one or more reasonable ways forward.  And then you can set up some experiments.  You can choose the best way forward.  And if you have set up your experiment well, the less favorable ways will also teach you a little more than ‘wrong way’.  This is the reason why you should study science.

To understand people, well, meet a lot of people and do things with them.  And read.

A good read is Paolo Coelho who also blogs and tweets.  Today he posted a 1 minute parable on the meaning of happiness.  It is an easy read.  The ending sums up the meaning of happiness.

For psychologists out there, this parable talks about two important psychological phenonena.

#1  Management of attention.

To manage one’s own direction and to pay attention to what is going on around us.

We need lots of practice at doing this. Computer games help us do this.  TV and reading books does not.  Sport helps us learn this.  Writing does not.  But speaking does.  Make sure you get lots of practice at learning to manage your attention so that you tackle frontiers with greater ease!

#2  We live at our frontier.

To define who we are by what we do.

Not what we feel, or believe.  But what we do in various contexts defined by who else is there.  We are our frontier.  We are our edge.

Perhaps we are a young man who cannot carry two drops of oil and look around a new place.  Or frontier is the new place, the new idea, and our own confusion.  It is here that we are ‘alive’ with our dreams and our hopes, our confusions and our sorrows.

This is a tough challenge for psychologists.  We have nothing to measure.  The definition may even be circular.  That is because psychology is not a thing. It is a goal or a purpose that is supremely personal.  Our goal is to live a our frontier.  The story of our frontier and our confusion is the story we all want to hear.

When we want to do the maths, then we look at whether we were in a situation that covers the whole gamut of emotions and whether we were able to respond appropriately as events unfolded.  Or were we like the young boy, first forgetting the context and then forgetting his task.  Can we recover from confusion and distress or do we get stuck?  Are we so scared of life that we insist that it be plain sailing all day and every day?

Do we approach our frontier or do we hang back?  And under what conditions are we able to approach our frontier and learn to carry the oil and look around despite our initial confusion?

Yes, positive psychologists do know something about this.  But so do poets.  Begin with them.

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If our words for happiness and sadness were different, we wouldn’t feel muddled

Published February 4, 2010 by Jo Jordan

I want to follow up Gaye’s comment

“ I’ve not seen happiness or sadness as fixed points. My own experience told me long ago that both come and go. While I’m not that good at going with the flow, I remind myself of that old Quaker saying “this too shall pass”.

However, I find it hard to be so accepting of grief and hurt and sadness and pain, and I am surprised at the anger I feel in the cold-blooded way that many casually brush all those feelings aside with this quote from Gibran, as if one compensated for the other. Contrast yes, but compensate no.”

I don’t disagree with Gaye. I would like to extend the thinking.

Empathy

Discussions about happiness become complicated when we are entangle questions about the nature of happiness and sadness with our ability to understand the happiness and sadness of others.

We vary a lot in our ability to empathize with others. We are also more empathetic in some situations and less in others. I suspect that we find it easier to be empathetic when we have been in a similar situation to the one we are observing.

Quite often we look for empathy from people who are simply don’t understand. They are out of their depth.

Belonging

If someone does not have experience to understand our distress, it does not really matter. What matters is that guiding them may be an extra task when we are already strained.

What really matters is when they are in power in some way. Their lack of empathy denies our reality and we experience rejection on top of grief. In theory, the two together could be sufficient to spin us out of the natural butterfly loop of life and out of the natural recovery from grief as time passes.

Appreciation

Almost in contradiction, but not completely so, close relationships such as marriage are more likely to flourish when one partner helps the other partner elaborate good times. Yes, listening in bad times is important. But of more importance is drawing out positive stories in positive times. Recounting good stories deepens our understanding of how good things work and our capacity to come back into the butterfly loop of flourishing when we have spun out of the orbit is widened.

In plain language, when we are struggling with the awfulness of life, we need the good times as a map to find our way back into the natural cycle of happiness and sadness. Becoming trapped in either is illness.

Semantics of happiness

The real issue is the ‘theory’ that we brought to the discussion. When we define happiness and sadness as separate and different, then we ask how much of one should we have and how much of the other should we have.

If we had a word in English to define happiness and sadness and the seasons of our life as one thing, stretching in a straight line or in that looping butterfly shape, we would ask different questions.

If someone is sad, then we act accordingly knowing that there will also be a time when they are happy and we will act accordingly them too.

I like Khalil Gibran’s words because he illustrated this notion of oneness. We find it hard to grasp the idea because of the words that we begin with.

If we had started with a different kind of word, we would have a totally different understanding. What that word should be, I don’t know, but flourishing and thriving are good starts. Languishing is the opposite of flourishing.

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Happiness & sorrow are two sides of a coin; it’s in the maths

Published January 31, 2010 by Jo Jordan

4 puzzles of positive psychology

I forgot to finish my series on the 4 puzzles of positive psychology, but I was reminded by lines I read in Khalil Gibran.

The maths of happiness

Old school

It is easy to forget that everything written about psychology is based on an underlying mathematical model.  Psychologists like measuring things and as soon as they do, they’ve made an assumption, whether they realize it or not, about the shape of the thing measured.

Much of our work uses as straight line – like the ruler we used as school.  We fill in questionnaires. We get points and we get a score. We think of intelligence, for example, as being a straight line.  We have more. We have less.   And we can describe our intelligence as a point on that line.  A point.

New school of positive psychology

Positive psychology tosses that assumption of as straight line out of the window.  Mostly.

We stop seeing something like intelligence or happiness as being more or less.  We discard the line.  And we definitely discard the point.  Points will now signify illness. And what’s more, serious illness requiring hospitalization and round the clock care.

The new school of positive psychology psychological phenomena in terms of “flourishing” or “languishing”.  Are we moving around the world freely, or are we stuck in the mud unable to move in any direction?

The mathematical model that we now use describes what is means to be flourishing.  It is a model of movement, not a model of stillness.  It is a model of action & reaction and how we change from one moment to the next.  It is not a model of how we stay the same.  If we are a fixed point, then the new model regards us as ill.

Kahlil Gibran came to my rescue to explain the combination of happiness and sorrow  in poetry

“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful, look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.”

Sorrow and joy are two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other.  When our life is all one or all the other, we are ill.  We are living in a make-believe world.”

Personal, persistent & pervasive

But being what we are, we humans tend to think that “what is” will continue forever.  When times are bad, we tend to feel that bad times will continue forever.  We often feel that a situaton is “personal, persistent & pervasive” when in reality is nothing more than  a natural oscillation that in this moment is giving us particular pleasure or sadness.

The danger is that in our anxiety we might bring our worst fears to pass.  The trick of a flourishing life is to mourn that which should be mourned but not to over-generalize and claim that everything else is also a source of sorrow.  Nonetheless, over-generalizing is a trap that we all fall into sometimes.

Happiness is not a point – it is constant movement between many points

Enough for now.  The important idea to grasp is that happiness is not a question of a mark on a ruler.  Happiness exists only in contrast to sorrow; so it coexists with sorrow.  Oscillation between the two, and all the points in between, is normal and healthy, because without sorrow, it would not be possible to be happy. It would not be possible to appreciate happiness.  If nothing changed, if nothing ever changed, we would not even notice it were there.  It is impossible to be happy all the time because if we were, we wouldn’t notice.

Not a contraction; just maths

It is not a contradiction to say that happiness includes sorrow.  It just depends up on the maths that you assumed at the beginning  : a line of fixed points or constant movement in space.

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Hacking then and now

Published January 31, 2010 by Jo Jordan

The wheel has turned.

Corpus linguistics, then

Twenty years’ ago, I put together a corpus of English Language with the help of the English Department at Birmingham University.  Books were scanned by hand and we culled the misreads by hand working through the night wearing every item of clothing we possessed to make our computer budgets stretch further.  We used several mainframe computers switching from one to another to complete different tasks.

Then we moved the whole bang shooting match back to Zimbabwe on computer tapes and carried on analysing the content using UNIX.

Munging, now

I had forgotten the word grep.   Well youngsters don’t grep anymore. They search for ‘regular expressions’. They’ve never heard of computational linguistics.  They talk about the semantic web.  They munge.

And they are doing fine work using HTML mark up and linguistic markers to search the web for information such as the schools attended by Conservative MPS or the names of officials who have signed off large grants to private companies.

When will hacking stop being a hobby?

Open data has surely begun though it still seems to be at a hobbyist level.  While academics are moving (wisely) from analysis to design (synthesis), hackers want the cut-and-thrust of a quick sortie – a raid on the establishment.

One of the growth areas on the next few years will be learning how to test the quality of answers provided by hackers.

Hack.  Your business depends on it.

In the meantime, learn to hack.  Because if you don’t, you’ll be hostage to the views of the world they put forward.

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Myers-Briggs and Executive Coaching

Published January 28, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Gaye asked me to interpret “INTJ”.

LIFO Test

I am sure you remember the LIFO?  An oldish test that casts people into 4 type?

  • Controller-Taker (extraverted neurotics)
  • Adapter-Dealer (extraverted stable)
  • Conserver-Holder (introverted stable)
  • Supporter-Giver (introverted neurotics)

Myers-Briggs

The Myers-Briggs is also old.  It is based on Jung’s types from circa 1920.  The test itself was developed and published after WWII.

It casts us into 16 types as follows.

  • Introverted or Extraverted (I or E)
  • Sensing or Intuiting (S or N)
  • Feeling or Thinking (F or T)
  • Judging or Perceiving (J or P)

Myers-Briggs and Executive Coaching in business

The test is still widely used for coaching and people often know their ‘type’.  And as with all personality classifications, we are also quite ‘fond’ of our type and believe it is the best type in the world!

Introverted – Extraverted is quite easy to follow: we like to spend time alone or feel better in company.

Sensing types like dealing with hard data.  They will often be in jobs which deal with facts and figures though a surprising number of accountants and engineers are N and see the world as patterns.  In the HRM world, the high S will be trainers and OD specialists.  The high N will deal with strategy and more abstract issues, quite possibly being quite out-of-it on the front-line work.

Feeling and Thinking is also obvious.  Feelers and Thinkers have a hard time understanding each other.

Judging and Perceiving can be confusing.  Judging people are planful but also judgmental.  Things must be just so but they also get things done.  Perceivers let things ‘unfold’.   They go with the flow.  I used to tell people visiting Zimbabwe to be High J, be ultra planful, but expect everything around you to be high P and go with the flow.  High J need to be doubly planful so they can adapt readily.  High P, of course, ignore High J and just smile sweetly and carry on as they were regardless.   Judgers also have to be careful not jump to conclusions and should always stop to think and ask themselves: Do I have all the relevant information?  Have I looked at this from all points of view?  Simply, they need to listen to the high P who see the bigger picture much more easily.

The interpretation of the types becomes a lot more sophisticated with what-you -see and what-you-get following some complicated patterns.

For most purposes, it is instructive to know someone’s preferred style.   But it is that, a preferred style.   By understand the ecology of preferences in an organization, we learn to appreciate people who “jump” in a completely different direction to ourselves and to build a mixed team around us.

Here is a link to an online Myers-Briggs questionnaire.

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A poem for INTJ ‘s everywhere

Published January 27, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Sense of Something

I am like a flag in the center of open space.

I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live

it through

while the things of the world still do not move:

the doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full

of silence,

the windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.

I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea.

I leap out, and fall back,

and throw myself out, and am absolutely alone

in the great storm.

Translated by Robert Bly

Rainer Maria Rilke

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Lao Tzu to Contemporary Management via Psychology

Published January 27, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Suspicious of poetry

As a young psychologist, I bought into the notion that psychology must tell us something that is not common sense.  Many leading psychologists still think this way.  I don’t think it is right.  The profession is setting itself apart from the world, above the world, beyond the world.   It is now other worldly.

We should be more like management scientists.  You know those tough guys who schedule the plans and manage the electricity grid so an airport never has more planes and people than it can cope with and the national grid doesn’t fall over when we all make supper at the same time?

Hard core scientists don’t set themselves up against common sense.  They support common sense.  Maybe they also read poetry.

Bridging the divide between poetry and management

That being said, maybe we need some prose to help people take the first steps.  Writing coach, Joanna Young, tweeted this Lao Tzu quote today.

Kindness in words creates confidence.

Kindness in thinking creates profoundness.

Kindness in giving creates love.

LaoTzu

The core of contemporary management thinking

Sounds soppy, but these words from 1500 years ago are the core of modern management thinking.

Kindness in words creates belonging and the possibility of collective efficacy.

Kindness in thinking leads to creativity and strategic clarity and hence provides the bedrock of common action.

Kindness in giving creates the common ties that allow resilience and flexibility.

Some time on Google Scholar and you will drown in academic references.

Leadership, management, human resource management

Leadership:  who are we journeying with and why are they essential to our journey?

Management: which way are we going and what can each of us do to help?

Human Resource Management: who feels secure with us and will be with us tomorrow?

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Humorous MP reminds HRM of their responsibilities

Published January 26, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Do you follow your MP?

I always read the questions asked by my MP in the House.  If you don’t follow your MP, you might find yourself impressed.  They Work For You will send you emails directly to your inbox.

I quickly learned though not to bother clicking through to reading the reply.  But today I couldn’t resist.

Mark Lancaster (Shadow Minister, International Development; North East Milton Keynes, Conservative)

Can the Secretary of State estimate how many pages of guidance his Department has issued to teachers in the past 10 years and tell the House whether he considers it sufficient?

Edward Balls (Secretary of State, Department for Children, Schools and Families; Normanton, Labour)

I think that the answer to that is no-I have never sat down and counted all the pages of guidance. What I have done is reform the national curriculum to reduce the burdens on teachers and give them more discretion over the primary and secondary curriculums. It is a great pity tha.t, rather than support the national curriculum, the Opposition propose to abolish it.

Lessons for HRM and staff officers everywhere

Early in my career, I worked for a company whose CEO insisted that if those of us in HR wanted to change a page in the manual, then we need to walk around and change the page ourselves.  Physically walk from office to office.  Do you know how many manuals you printed and where they are exactly?  When did you last check that there is a manual at arm’s reach of every one who might need it?

This dictat taught me important truths about ‘being staff’.

  • Don’t get in the way of the line.
  • Don’t waste trees.
  • Don’t abdicate your responsibilities.

If we believe a policy is necessary, it is incumbent on us to show that it is necessary, effective and costs considerably less than the problem we seek to solve.

I know we have intranet these days.  That simply makes the challenge harder.  Do people know that we have changed the page?  Will they be able to find the page in a fraction of a second when they need it?  Are the steps that must be followed laid out from the point of view of a person on the spot?  Is the rationale clear?  Can an intelligent person understand the principle?

Is our advice good enough to make a difference?  Is our advice good enough to last a reasonable length of time?

If we were in the situation ourselves, would we be able to implement our own advice or would we find it wanting?

Our MP can defuse a bomb and be funny

Yes, indeed.  How many pages and do we regard them as sufficient?  Wonderful British humor.

No, the Minister is not reviewing the effectiveness of his policy or his policy machinery.  But then I didn’t think he might be.  I just needed confirmation that our MP, who does bomb-disposal in his spare time, is really this droll.  He is.

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Thinking about modern careers in the words of Khalil Gibran

Published January 25, 2010 by Jo Jordan

Fill each other’s cup but not drink from one cup

I am reading Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet.  His words on marriage might well be a manifesto for modern day careers and organization.

“Fill each other’s cup but not drink from one cup.”

Careers & work of the future

Switching to contemporary times, if you want to skate to where the puck will be rather than where it is now, find opportunities to work in exchange with others, “to replenish their cup”, rather than subsumine yourself to the goal of a larger institution or one boss or teacher.

Careers & sustainability

But also remember, Khalil Gibran’s words

“When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”

In prosaic contemporary terms, think about a wider system that provides enough to drink for everyone.  We don’t need to share one cup except when there is only one.  When we make many cups and fill each other’s cups, then we we are in a healthy place and we want to strive to make that so.

  • Take your cup, allow others to fill it.
  • Take your cup, and fill those of others.
  • Ponder those who have no cup and no one to fill it.

Using the old wisdom of Khalil Gibran to extend management theory

All this is obvious though not so if you teach management theory.  Old management theory charges us with drinking from our line manager’s cup and ultimately from the company’s cup.  There are legal reasons (and mainly legal reasons) for this.

We could also train young people to understand the company as a mega-system that must benefit all stakeholders ~ all stakeholders ~ if it is to sustain itself.

We can train young people to understand power, its use and misuse, and how to work thinkingly yet safely with people who deny others their own cup.  But never to give up their own cup.

I want to see young people exploring the whole system in their online portfolios.  I would like to see youth support systems put youngsters in situations where they must sort out which cup is which, who is filling which cup, and how they can act in small & gentle ways to drink from their own cup, to fill the cups of others, and to influence the wider econ-system.  It’s an important skill to learn and many of us lose it along the way.

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