Category: POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, WELLBEING & POETRY

Who’ll help me build a wiki of positive vocabulary?

Published June 23, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Once I got bitten by a dog. I have got some wonderful scars on my back to prove it. It was my own fault though. I know about dogs. I like dogs. And I am a psychologist after all.

What happened was this. I went to see a man, not about a dog, but to get some currency for an obscure country I was visiting. He wasn’t in and his wife, who didn’t know me came to the door. She had a one year old male Rottweiler, who after all was still a puppy. The dog happy to be out the house, bounded down the drive to the gate and barked away merrily. As I left, without the currency, and pondering where to get some, I was walking away from the woman towards the dog.

Mistake: I was between a one year old male dog of an aggressive breed and its female owner AND my mind was elsewhere. Before I knew it, the dog had attacked me from behind. I was used to dogs, so despite the pain, I swung round, got him by the neck and clouted him. A little too ferociously. The dog whined, caught my hand, and bit me gently this time.

The dog was clearly signaling to me

you are hurting me and I will have to protect myself

I get the message that I hurt you.

Life hurts

When people whine – grown ups or children – in the first instance, that is what they are saying. Life hurts! Some sympathy and action to relieve the hurt, if possible, is due so they catch their breath, take stock, and get themselves together.

Now I am tough as the next guy. I was walloping the dog after all with blood pouring out my back. I certainly think in life when you fall down, you have to pick yourself up again. There is a time for tears and a time for drying tears.

The same rules apply for celebrations. There is a time to be pleased by success and flattery. There is a time to put the success aside and set new challenges.

So what is the point of this post?

I find a lot of reports in the press that happiness makes you miserable. What a silly argument, by definition! In their determination to prove the point, they don’t stop to understand the view they are trying to dispute.

Positive psychologists stress there is no point going over negative events over and over again. Apart from the fact you are likely to embroider what happened, all you are doing is rehearsing what went wrong. Your golf swing gets better with mental rehearsal – so does your capacity to be miserable!
Positive psychologists also stress that there “is a time for everything” – tears have their place. So does sensitivity. Positive psychology should not be equated with ‘therapy culture’ which assumes that there is something wrong with us when we experience shock, disappointment, rejection, bereavement etc. We may need company; we may need consolation; we may benefit from reflection; we may value the wisdom of others – but there is nothing wrong with us – this is a normal process of life.

Vocabulary of positive psychology

But we don’t necessarily use a positive and poetic vocabulary – in fact as psychologists-in-training, we are encouraged to be dry, detached, unemotional and possibly, boring.

Wiki

I have opened a little positive psychology wiki.

Will you help me to build a dictionary of positive, active, lively vital language that everyone can share?

There is no password. Just follow the link, and add an entry when the mood takes you!

3 Comments

5 questions to ask when we initiate an online community

Published June 22, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Image via Wikipedia

Wise Web Developers from High Wycombe

I am delighted again by the wisdom that flows from High Wycombe. Paul Imre commented on my post about SwarmTeams and the exercise we did comparing soccer and work.

An online community as a rope

This time Paul used the analogy of a rope to think about a “social media community”. The rope becomes stronger the more we add strands. The rope has a past (so easy to forget) and the rope has a future when it begins to “think” for itself.

I think the first two points are useful to remind clients.

Ties with a community require constant participation – social media is a “hands-on” business.
A community has come from somewhere and is going somewhere.

How does the rope think? In two ways.

In a swarm – which for people not from UK is a social media community built up around an SMS system similar to Twitter – we communicate peer-to-peer – this is not unlike birds flying in a flock. P2P messaging allows us to follow the general direction of the flock, keep up, and not bash in to each other.
- So we “think” by keeping in position by bouncing messages off the people immediately around us.
- We also think, when gradual changes in what we do make the flock sweep and swoop across the sky.
- This is what the pundits call low-level emergence. The flock looks as if it is intelligently following a leader. They are just following each other! And they are doing it without bashing into each other.
- This kind of coordination would be particularly useful in a fleet of taxis for example, who could communicate where passengers are during rush hour.
The message board on an SMS system, that we can see by logging on to a computer, gives us the second level of thinking. The message board allows us to scan the overall pattern of the messages and make higher level changes – and any member of the swarm can do that. It is the equivalent of one of the birds in the flock saying “guys we passed that church half an hour ago – can we check our bearings”. My fleet of taxi drivers might scan the message board at the end of the day and observe, say, that it could be worthwhile having one person in a location to alert other taxis. For so many purposes, we don’t need a specialist to do this – we just need the message board and some motivated people.

Using Swarms at Conference

I also thought Paul’s question about when the “rope starts to think” takes us to something I commented about on the NLabNetworks blog – why didn’t we use social media more at the conference? It struck me that DMU had brought together a wide range of people from Leicester and wasn’t energetically linking the strands or developing a group that was “thinking”. After Bucks08, Paul came up with the analogy of a “dam” which stores potential. Toby Moores of Sleepy Dog wasn’t so taken with the image of “blocking”. But a “dam” is what we made when we put 150 people in a university building for a day. It is a pity that at the end of the day, we just let the water out. We should have at least used the water to turn a turbine or two.

The Swarm technology can be used to that effect. By capturing the tweeting for that group, we might be able to move up to another level of emergence where we see patterns, generate other contacts, etc.

So what are the five questions?

1. What will we do to add more “strands to the rope”?

2. Where did the community come from and where is it going?

3. What peer-to-peer decisions is the group making to “stay in position”and how are we going to join in?

4. How can we form an overall picture of the conversation and reflect it to the community so everyone can contribute to the group thinking?

5. How have we enhanced our future by joining and supporting the conversation (or did we just let the water run out – changing the metaphor, I know!)

Thanks Paul. Great heuristic.

Added this a few days later: What voices do you hear?

Social Media, HR and Member-driven Communities

Social Media is dominated in a fair degree by marketing. I am particularly interested in HR and communities like universities where customers and suppliers are the same people. If you would like to collaborate with me, or work with me commercially, please drop me comment. It would be good to expand the network of people interested in HR and social media in the UK.

One Comment

90% of people believe that work would be better if it was organized like soccer

Published June 20, 2008 by Jo Jordan

SwarmTeams

I was at the NLabNetwork meeting in Leicester, England, on Thursday. Ken Thompson demonstrated SwarmTeams, the peer-to-peer messaging system. He asked the audience to text their answers to two questions. And the answers showed up immediately for everyone to see on the messaging systems “board” (which was projected onto the big screen).

The questions

1. What would your soccer team be like if it was organized like work?

2. What would work be like if it was organized like a soccer team?

What would you say?

Do you agree with our answers?

The audience was clear. 90% said a soccer team organized like work would lose; and 90% said work organized like a soccer team would be an improvement.

What do you miss most in your workplace?

I miss the sense of triumph, that roared “Yeesss!” as we achieve something that was hard. I miss the quiet satisfaction of a fist-thump as a long road comes to an end.

I would like to start a catalog of experiences that people enjoy in team sports and then we can mix and match – what is more likely to be experienced in a team with quick, p2p messaging?

So I miss triumph? What do you miss?

One Comment

First steps to a deep understanding of positive psychology

Published June 18, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Learn to think like your tutors

When I went off to university, my father told me that I was going to learn to think like my tutors. That comment puzzled me for a long while. I had thought that I was going to think for myself. But of course that is what university does teach you – to follow a discipline. To give a simple example, I can add 5c to 5c and tell you that you have 10 c, or I can teach you how to count, and how to add. You can now think for yourself but following a schema that is also taught to others. It’s good. We can solve more problems, and we can communicate with each other.

Learn that there may be better ways to think about the world

The second thing we learn at university, if it is well run, is that many of the beliefs we grew up with are severely limiting. If our university did indeed ‘expose’ us to the universe, we spend the rest of our lives quite unsurprised when someone in the room presents a view that contradicts ours. Indeed, we learn to welcome such surprises. They are not only refreshing in their novelty, they also broaden the puzzles we can solve and the people we communicate with readily. Foreign travel can achieve the same effect but without a tutor to interpret and structure, the experience can be hit-and-miss.

Learn that we are learning a system that we might replace eventually

From time-to-time, professions are faced with a paradigm shift. Physicists had a paradigm shift when Einstein moved beyond the physics of Newton that most of us learned at school. Whole professions are faced with a new way of thinking.

When I learned about Kuhn and paradigms in my first year at university sitting in Lecture Room 5 and day dreaming intermittently out the windows across the College Green and the Science Faculty to the skyscrapers in the city four miles away, I never thought that every thing I was working so hard to learn would be subject to one of these seismic changes.

First steps in the new paradigm for psychology

After I posted on the vocabulary of psychology, a philosopher friend of mine pointed me to Alan Watts on You Tube. Here is a link to a 15 minute explanation on vocabulary and how it is simply a schema we have adopted. The video begins talking about time and ends with this idea: is this a fist, or am I fisting.

To understand happiness, we have to think in terms of “happinessing” – as actions of ours. I’ll leave you to the video.

PS I won’t embed the video – it is very laborious to embed video in WordPress. The link will get you there just as fast.

One Comment

Vocabulary of positive psychology

Published June 17, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Image by foghornleg90 via Flickr

A good article here on savoring and a list of actions and the corresponding emotion we feel.

What did we take the time to marvel at today and did we feel awe?
What did we stop to give thanks for and did we feel gratitude?
Did we have five minutes to bask in a task well done, or a compliment, and feel pride?
Did we luxuriate in the bath, or the park, or some where else and feel pleasure?

It would be good to extend the list. I’ve just started a little public wiki for anyone who wants to join in.

Good clear article on positive psychology and coaching

Published June 17, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Here [UPDATE: Broken]

1. Presenting conditions [still negative unfortunately]

2. What we do

3. What we might benefit

UPDATE: Somewhere else I found a good heuristic on writing copy.

Why is the reader here?
Who is the author?
What is the service?
What is this a good idea now?
Why is the price reasonable?

It’s time for positive psychology to lay out its wares clearly?

One Comment

What psychologists can learn from social media

Published June 16, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Image by bowbrick via Flickr

Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion

I was trained as a psychologist and I ultimately trained thousands more in the same tradition.

To qualify as a psychologist, in most jurisdictions, we are required to master the art of the “lab report”. I had done A level Physics, so the format wasn’t unfamiliar to me. Indeed, the whole rigmarole was based on 19th century physics which psychologists were copying madly.

I don’t think it is bad thing to learn to write a lab report. I studied Latin too. Disciplined methodical thinking is important and if you learn how to follow one method, you realize that you can learn to follow any method. And it is much much easier for students to write up experiments and surveys than handle qualitative studies which are usually too demanding for the 20% 6 month load that most students have allotted to the task.

Holistic Thinking

That said, we have to unlearn a little too. Psychology leaves us two unfortunate ways of thinking. We are analytical – we break people into parts. And we are trained to believe that what we are studying is separate from us – a thing. Most unfortunate when we are talking about people.

A few years after we qualify, we generally stumble over the insight that we have to retrain ourselves to look at a set of data, not as data, as but as a person with hopes and fears, history and future, and most of all a purpose and morality that is not a reflection of our purpose in the interaction.

Even harder to do, is to understand that we are not separate from the person we are “testing”, “counseling”, or “coaching”. We have our own stories, yes. But why should ours be sacrosanct or privileged and totally unaffected by the person with whom we are working? And, can that ever be? Can it ever be that two people in the same room, or reading a blog post written by another, don’t share some past and importantly some future?

What psychologists can learn from social media

We are affected by our clients. In the realm of social media, marketers are struggling with the same idea. I found this excellent quote:

“To succeed in Web 2.0, your site cannot be an optional layer added to people’s lives. It must be inserted directly into the lives of the consumer.”

If we we are in their lives, how can it be that they are not in ours?

Positive psychology vs positive thinking (flowingmotion.wordpress.com)

3 Comments

5 important features of happiness

Published June 12, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Image by M@rg via Flickr

Critical thinking must be rigorous. Otherwise it is just negative

I set up a comprehensive Google alert for happiness and I saw two reports today saying that thinking about happiness makes us miserable.

I don’t think these reports meant to be ironical. I think they meant to be critical, in a rigorous way. But frankly unless you are rigorous, then being critical is just proving the point – being negative for the sake of being negative.

5 points about happiness

I think it is helpful to repeat five points about happiness.

Emotion is highly contagious

Yes, emotion is highly contagious. It spreads from one person to another like wildfire. We carry it with us from one situation to another.

Negative emotions are more virulent than positive emotions. When something goes wrong, as it will from moment to moment, we do have to make a special effort not to project our dismay to the next situation, which, after all, might not have bothered us had the last five minutes been fun!

Some people are highly emotional intelligent

Some people are more ’emotionally intelligent’ than others. Of course they are. Why wouldn’t we vary in our capacity to read emotions? Why wouldn’t we vary in our ability to distinguish between what we were feeling about the problem five minutes ago, from what we are feeling about the situation we are confronted with now? Why wouldn’t we vary in our confidence and experience of emotional situations?

Emotional literacy is learned

Emotional literacy can be learned. Of course it can. We have trained our children from time immemorial to understand and display emotion. It is called good manners, character, backbone and all sorts of other things as well.

I was taught emotional literacy in school as well as at home. After all from 5 to 17. we spend a good part of our time in school. In sixth form, the time previously allowed for denominational instruction was given over exclusively to psychology classes.

Psychology is no longer about sick people only

What is new is that psychologists (a relatively new profession after all) no longer study negative events exclusively.

Positive psychology regards happiness and virtues, such as gratitude and hope, as normal, and we study them as positive emotional and mental experiences in their own right.

This is the exact opposite of the therapeutic culture which assumes we are finding living a little overwhelming. It is also the exact opposite of a view that we should be “hard”, “uncouth”, “non PC” or any of these varieties! As these two views think they are opposites, let’s move on!

The models we use to study these phenomenon allow us to think differently

Psychologists are using new models to explore phenomena such as happiness, zest, justice, etc. Psychologists are using ratios and recursive models. For people who still remember their “Methods & Stats” classes, I bet you hardly every used a ratio and I bet you never ever used a recursive model. That’s if you studied psychology. It you studied economics or geography this doesn’t apply to you. I also exclude from this bet people trained at graduate school in the States in the last five years.

We are happy when life is more positive than negative. Ideally, we want to hit a ratio around 5:1. At 11:1, or around there, we are delirious or “over the moon”. At 3:1, we are beginning to struggle. We are going to start to find life threatening. Life gets tough and hard and we develop tunnel vision. We focus on our problems and loose the capacity for joy, warmth, celebration, etc.

We are happy when our behavior shows requisite diversity – when we smile at what is charming, when we laugh at what is funny, when we grieve for what is lost, when we celebrate what is won.

Good manners isn’t suppressing these emotions. Good manners is expressing these emotions in a way that includes people around us. I don’t cry at a funeral to make others sad. I cry with others to share our grief.

Happiness isn’t silly optimism in the face of difficulties. Nor is it collapsing in a quivering heap. Happiness is responding to challenge and threat meaningfully. It is living – joyously when joy is warranted – courageously when courage is called for.

Hope this is of some use to somebody!

PS Happy people live longer – a lot longer. And they are nice to be around!

Eric Schmidt talking to Gary Hamel

Published June 10, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Listen (no pun intended – 70 minutes).

Notes:

Eric Schmidt is the CEO of Google. Gary Hamel is a Professor of Management at Harvard. Schmidt’s main message is that leaders of innovative organizations like Google must listen, listen, listen. A good listen!

3 Comments

JK Rowling @ Harvard commencement address

Published June 10, 2008 by Jo Jordan

One and two: Twenty minutes together.

Hat tip to Pos-Psych News.

Category: POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, WELLBEING & POETRY