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Tag: positive psychology

Passionate temperaments and questioning minds

Published August 24, 2008 by Jo Jordan

So, are you moody and is that positive?

Last week, I stumbled across a YouTube video of Dr Kay Jamison speaking on her work on Exuberance.  Dr Jamison teaches in the States and in Scotland.   Her life work has been on mania and depression and she has recently extended her work to the happy, intoxicating feeling of exuberance.

Just listening to here and her language is balm for the soul.

Passion, imagination, greatness – the great, high emotions.  We don’t study them in psychology and psychiatry but in theology.  We give more credibility to suffering than joy and vital positive emotions.

What are our words for passion for life?  Infectious enthusiasm.  Contagious joy. Exuberance lures us from common places  . . . delight is its own reward.  Adventure its own pleasure.

. . . to quicken, draw together, exalt and celebrate.

in that pleasure is power.   . . it excites, it delights . .

A leader is a person able to create infectious enthusiasm.

A leader is incapable of being indifferent.

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Psychology, chaos theory, complexity theory, happiness and Batman?

Published August 14, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Michael Keaton as Batman in Batman (1989)Image via Wikipedia

Any of these topics – psychology, chaos theory and complexity theory – is heavy reading on its own.  All three together?

David Pinctus’ new blog explains chaos and complexity theory in psychology and is tucked away at the end of the Self-Help blogs on Psychology Today.  David’s blog is probably far too heavy reading for the typical self-help audience.  It is important reading for anyone interested in positive psychology and where this new field is going.

  • Psychology has traditionally looked for linear models.  We look for phenomena that grow bigger or smaller in direct proportion to something else.  Happiness is likely to be a non-linear phenomenon.  A small thing can make us very happy; a large event can wash over us.
  • Psychology assumes that my behavior is essentially unconnected from yours.  Our models require all our observations to be independent of each other – do you remember that distantly?  Though much of the positive psychology empirical research is still conducted in the ‘old school of research’, it is our interconnections with others that are more interesting.
  • Psychology has difficulty with time.  We are taught simply to use time as sparingly as possible in our models.  As a consequence we have little idea “what will happen next” or how long anything takes.  If tomorrow is a result of today, how do we describe that trajectory?

David Pinctus explains “non-linear dynamical systems“.  Though he hasn’t talked directly about positive psychology as yet, listing him under “Self-Help”, tells it all.

He also devoted three posts to a series on Batman.  Ordinarily, you would have had to drag me along kicking-and-screaming to a batman movie.  I hated it too!  But his review gave the movie depth I wouldn’t have fathomed on my own and a useful way of thinking about the deep, festering conflicts in many organizations.

I am glad to have a blog written by an academic who has deep mastery of the methodology in this field and who writes well. I am subscribed, watching, reading and learning!

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Simultaneity: The future is an arrow that arrives at our feet

Published August 8, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Yesterday, I posted on my difficulty explaining the simultaneity principle in positive organizational scholarship and extrapolating the implications for organizational design.  If you can help me, please do!

Today, I followed up a review about a book on New Zealand history in The Economist.  I’ve extracted this quote wholesale:

“Christina Thompson is a New Englander from a trim town outside Boston with a white church and a green. Seven belongs to the Ngapuhi tribe and his family lives in a ramshackle settlement at the end of a dirt road. Ms Thompson is an intellectual in the tradition of the Enlightenment, an editor of the academic Harvard Review. Seven, with his belief in ghosts and aliens, is the very man that tradition hopes to enlighten. She weighs options and makes plans. He sees the future not as an arrow he shoots ahead of him, but as an arrow that arrives at his feet.”

The future is an arrow that arrives at our feet.

I intuit it.  Who can explain it further?

UPDATE:  I first thought of this as the future coming from behind me.  Now I think of myself as standing still and the future coming towards me.  How about you?

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Is engendering curiosity a pertinent goal in positive psychology?

Published August 6, 2008 by Jo Jordan

How do you explain the simultaneity principle of positive psychology?

Last week, I gave a talk on positive psychology to psychology students at the University of Buckingham. I structured the talk around the five principles of appreciative inquiry which I used to explore positive psychology and the poetry of David Whyte some months ago.

As I linked each principle to what we might do in our lives, when we coach others, and when we design organizations, I felt a little inadequate on the simultaneity principle.

How can we simply explain ideas of emergence and exploring one’s relationship with the world to beginners in our field?

Is curiosity the quality we are hoping to create in our approach to life?  Is curiosity a virtue to be engendered in organizations as part of job design?

Continue readingIs engendering curiosity a pertinent goal in positive psychology?

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Do you double-guess yourself? Get a mentor!

Published August 4, 2008 by Jo Jordan

The puzzle of politicians and other ambitious people

Many years ago, a student of mine, Phil, asked a simple question: why do people elbow their way onto committees and into public positions, and then not do what they have yelled, screamed, kicked, agitated, mobilized to do?

Isn’t it odd to put so much energy into something and then not do it?

A study of student politicians

Phil’s study was simple.

Students spend a lot of time in queues. He used his queues to find student leaders who had promised publicly to do something for their club or society the very next day.

He was looking for

  • elected leaders (who had volunteered for that job out of all the public posts available in a University)
  • volunteered to their task
  • offered and promised to do it in front of other people
  • expected to do it and complete the next day.

He found his leaders as he queued for lunch or the library or whatever and secured their agreement to be interviewed fully that evening in their study-bedroom and then again, the following evening, after the task was completed.

Two interviews : one before and one after an action that they had promised publicly to a valued group.

Findings

This is what he found:

Success rate

  • 100% of students were totally confident that they would start and complete the task the next day
  • 100% began the task
  • 50% succeeded completely (yep, only 50%)

Effects on confidence

  • 95% turned up for the post-event interview and two who were late courteously left notes rescheduling
  • The confidence of those who completed remained high.
  • The confidence of those who had not completed had plummeted (as we would expect).

Reasons for success and failure

  • When we analyzed what had gone wrong, in every instance, students had tripped over their own naivety. They tried to buy 100 T shirts of the same color without a prior order, for example. Or they hadn’t realized that long distance calls need to be pre-approved.
  • It seemed luck whether someone tripped over a practical detail or not; and therefore, luck whether they had succeeded in their task or not.

Response to failure

  • Though it was essentially luck whether they succeeded or not, if they had tripped up, their sense of self-worth (or self-efficacy) plummeted. The students had no way to see the pattern of events and no way of knowing that their success or failure was down to luck.

Intrepretation

In the West, we are always being told to take responsibility for our lives. I am not sure I buy into this view. I think it is more important to understand cause-and-effect, and what can be influenced, and how.

In the case of these students, they had now way of seeing the overall pattern – after all that is why we were doing the research.  But, an experienced mentor or coach could help them interpret their own success or failure.

This is the advice that they would have got from an experienced mentor

  • If the day had gone well, good – enjoy the buzz of success and set a new challenge in the morning.
  • If the day had not gone well, sorry – you are feeling down, take note of what went wrong, Learn That You Cannot Anticipate Everything, and set a new challenge in the morning!

Without a mentor, life gets tough

How can we possibly distinguish between what is “down to us” and what is the normal ebb-and-flow of life without a good mentor?

Having good uncles, aunts, pastors, teachers, bosses, company-appointed mentors probably influences a youngster’s prospects in life more than anything else.

More than money, more than good looks, more than brains, more than personality. I didn’t put parents on the list because we might be too close to the action to advise young people well.

The big question that people might ask is where are the mentors today? Where do we find mentors as we go through life?

What is the process of mentoring in the UK today?  How do people following very different paths from their parents find mentors?

I’d be willing to argue that the strength of a modern society is our ability to mentor youngsters who come from very different backgrounds from ourselves.

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Is the essence of a happy life a point-of-view?

Published August 2, 2008 by Jo Jordan

I read a great post this morning suggesting the Clay Shirky has it wrong.  We don’t really have a cognitive surplus, or we cannot make use of the cognitive surplus, because people prefer desultory entertainment to purposive action.

Positivism vs constructivism

The author writes in a scholarly genre: dealing with facts and evidence in a positivist way.  I almost responded likewise.

What if the author, Steve, looked at the world through other eyes?

What if the mytho-poetic tradition, a la Joseph Campbell and the Hero’s Journey, are correct and we like to hear a narrative?

  • Does that explain why we prefer to watch stories about someone?  Rather than a read explanations of some thing?

What if we like to write stories in a narrative (even though it was beaten out of us at college)?

  • Would we feel more cheerful, me and Steve included, if we were allowed to tell stories about
    • action,
    • purpose,
    • calling,
    • doubt,
    • triumph?
    • All the human attributes banned from psychological reports?

Positive psychology and the narrative

Positive organizational scholarship, for example appreciative inquiry, are quite clear that a positive approach includes social constructionism – in other words, our voice and the voice of others.  The positive principle is expressed not only as something positive and not negative, but as something purposeful, compelling, engaging, enduring, exciting, soothing, validating.

Positive psychologists (as opposed to positive scholars) tend to retreat back to questionnaires to measure their strengths and virtues.  Just as happiness strictly refers to a life well-lived (not a mood, person or moment in time), I suspect someone better read than I can explain why a strength or virtue belongs in a narrative, probably as a ‘calling.’

In short, the Hero’s Journey, or narrative structure is still to be adopted by positive psychologists with vigor.

The essence of positive psychology is a point-of-view

Would I be going too far on this Saturday morning to suggest that the essence of a positive approach is a point-of-view?  We all want to hear who does what, and why.  What was their deep moral case for spending time the way we do.

And is it so wrong to relax by following the moral case of others?

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3 steps to positive HR with a recession looming

Published July 24, 2008 by Jo Jordan

UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.

Demand for HR increases with a recession looming

In this spring and summer of 2008, the northern hemisphere has been in a mild panic: fuel and food is increasingly expensive, banks and financial institutions are struggling to meet their commitments, and recession seems in the offing.  That feels depressing, doesn’t it?

I’ve just done a quick search on Google Trends of what we, the citizens, are saying.  Pop a few terms in yourself.  What patterns do you see?

  • Talk of recession rose sharply in January 2008 and has leveled off.
  • There has been a lot of talk about lay offs but less about job losses.  Semantics possibly, but also talk about what management does to us rather than what we experience?

It makes sense that people are more interested in HR when job losses are in the offing.  This pattern seems to be more pronounced in India and it is not possible to tell whether India is creating the global trend by force of numbers, or creating the trend by the direction of its attention, or simply the place with the most pronounced pattern.

The role of HR during a recession

Though it is an important concern, I am not particularly interested in whether there is a recession or not.  What concerns me is that we cannot create a good future until we can imagine it.

And I am concerned about the role we in HR play in helping people imagine a positive future.  People come to us when they are in trouble and feeling negative.  People come to us when they cannot see a way forward.  The graphs on recession, leadership, HR, hope and strategy show that people are not even looking for hope, strategy and leadership when they are looking for us!

Our key task

The challenge, for us, is that emotion is highly contagious.  Natural empathy will allow us to be infected by our clients’ gloom.

But they don’t want us to share their gloomy predictions.  They want positive action from us.  They want us to advise them and to act effectively on their behalf.  This is what concerns them.

  • What are their options and what can the firm do to help them?
  • What could we do with our skill base that we haven’t thought of?

Practical steps to positive HR in gloomy times

So if we are likely to reflect and perpetuate the gloominess of our clients, how can halt this process and restore a positive, forward looking, strategic atmosphere?

Here are three practical suggestions.

  • Make emotional R&R mandatory for the HR team.

Budget part of the day, part of the week, and part of the month for them to recover from toxic emotions and to restore their sense of what is “good and true, better and possible”.  Allow frequent “walks in the woods”.

  • Increase your budget for strategic thinking (not tactical response) and engage the organization in thinking through positive futures for all its staff.

After all, a firm that is healthy and thriving should be able to imagine positive futures for all the skill sets used in their industry.

  • Increase your budget for calming down line managers.

Stress causes defensiveness.  We try to control what we have and imagination flies out the window.  Stressed managers will quickly create a downward spiral.

And because supporting stressed people is extremely hard work, look after yourself.

Why I am positive

The positive news is that people are generally active and focused rather than passive and reactive.  People are less interested in abstract concepts like “recession” and much more interested in “what they are going to do”.

For young people, recession is not a bad memory.   They weren’t here during the last one.  A minor economic downturn is simply an adventure: something to be explored, something to be understood, something to be conquered and something to be enjoyed in the company of fellow travelers.

My call to action

My call to action:  Add an explicit positive agenda to your HR now.

  • Give your staff resources to recover from negativity.
  • Up the time spent on strategic HR and don’t stop until you have a positive vision for everyone in the company.
  • Work with senior managers.  When they are glum, they make everyone else glum, who then make them even more moody!

And make sure you have your quote of “walks in the woods”, positive mentors, simple pleasures and good home life.

Are you looking for a mentor or are you available to mentor an HR Manager trying to implement positive HR?

UPDATE: For an HR Managers perspective on the Recession, I have written a summary on a new post.

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Are we naturally positive?

Published July 23, 2008 by Jo Jordan

A handheld digital camera.Image via Wikipedia

Which would you recognize more quickly?  A candid photograph of yourself, or, a photo airbrushed in your favor?

It seems we recognize “better” images of ourselves more quickly.

I don’t find it terribly surprising that we prefer prettier pictures of ourselves.  What seems to be significant is that we recognize ourselves a split second sooner when we are looking good!

  • I wonder if this holds when we are depressed?
  • And does it hold for verbal descriptions – do we recognize a positive account of our contribution more quickly than a realistic account?

I am fumbling here, but I suspect this may be very significant for managing social media campaigns?

Thoughts?

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5 slides on positive organization design

Published July 3, 2008 by Jo Jordan

Positive psychology, Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Organizational Scholarship, & Positive HR

Almost a year ago, I put together a set of slides to illustrate the concepts and process in Positive Organizational Design. If you are beginning to read around the field of positive psychology, appreciative inquiry, positive organizational scholarship, or positive HR, you may find them useful.

They are five slides, each with quotations, beginning with

  • David Cooperrider on Appreciative Inquiry
  • The link between appreciating your own unique contribution and possibilities emerging in the world around us
  • Conversations about strategy, affirmations of hope, and recognition of the possibilities in the present
  • Nonaka’s Ba and designing organizational spaces
  • Rilke’s Swan as a metaphor of the rightness of what emerges.

I am standing on the shoulders of giants here. The quotations are referenced but not my sources. Please do google the quotations to dig deeper into the original works.

I would welcome any feedback or elaborations.

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Law of attraction, positive thinking, and finding your dream job!

Published July 1, 2008 by Jo Jordan

In the summer, many graduates are looking for the job of their dreams.  This post has been very popular and I thought it would be a good time to repost it.  I will be speaking at the University of Buckingham on the power  of positive psychology and our careers on Monday 28th July.   I would be happy to address other groups around the Milton Keynes/Bedford area or talk with you by email or by phone.

Here is this very popular post which may help you find the job of your dreams.

A long back story

I took out Goodbye Mr Chips from my local library thinking it would be nice to relax for a couple of hours with this gentle, slightly sentimental, very inspirational movie. For non-Brits, this is a classic pygmalion, teacher story with romance thrown in. Think To Sir With Love, History Boys and Freedom Writers. I think when Yanks write pygmalion stories they are typically about basketball coaches. Britain has teacher stories.

Goodbye Mr Chips is a double-pygmalion story. Mr Chipping is an awkward “Latin master” in a “public school”. If you are non-Brit, read exclusive private school (or prep school in Americanese – a prep school here preps you to go to public school which takes you to the army academy or university).

Mr Chipping has two mentors. A charming relaxed fellow teacher and his wife. They are the catalysts in allowing Mr Chipping, or Chips as he comes to be called, to incorporate the softer side of his nature in his teaching style, reform the rugged-masculine-bullying culture of the school, and to encourage boy-after-boy, and their sons after them, to blend the feminine sides of their nature with the masculine demands of their school and obligations to country.

I thought I was borrowing the musical version with Peter O’Toole from the library. When I got home, I discovered I a new version with Martin Clunes, the star of the TV show, Doc Martin. He makes a marvellous Mr Chips with the mixture of clumsiness and kindness that we also see in Doc Martin. (He doesn’t sing btw, and nor do we hear the boys singing which we did in the earlier version).

The story seems slightly different too – but so be it. After this long back story, this is the quote I wanted to give you.

“I found that when I stopped judging myself harshly, the world became kinder to me. Remember I told you once, go out, and look around the world. Do that now. Only this time, let the world look at you. And the difference, I assure you, the world will like what it sees.”

Positive psychology is more than positive thinking

This is the concept which takes positive psychology far beyond positive thinking. It has echoes of the pygmalion effect, popularized in the musical My Fair Lady in which a flower girl becomes a lady. It includes the Galatea effect, ably researched by Dov Eden, who also researches the pygmalion effect in work settings. Basically, the Pygmalion effect is the effect of other people’s expectations on us. So a teacher creates clever pupils by expecting more of them. A teacher creates dull pupils by expecting failure and subtly communicating doubts and restricting the resources and time we need to learn. The Galatea effect works the other way around. It is the effect of our own self-perception. It is not that seeing is believing. But that, believing is seeing.

Is this new?

George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion 100 years ago. 150 years ago Goethe wrote:

The moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
– Goethe

The idea that we shape the future is so new to us in the west. The idea that the universe comes to us sounds a little new age.

Of course, we cannot do anything. We don’t want to do anything.

But there are some things, we want to do. And if we can imagine those things, if we believe in them deeply without effort, if they make sense, if they seem right in themselves, if we believe in them enough to take the first hesitant step,

if we believe in them enough to take the first hesitant step,

then the universe conspires to help us.

Skeptical?

This is tautological, of course. It will work because it is right and it is right because it works.

Ask only whether what you want is right, and why you would want anything that doesn’t work!

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