Senia.com Positive Psychology Coaching

We asked this question yesterday at the first meeting of the Happiness Club NY.

We listed pretty much every method we could think of that’s used to study people. If you can think of other methods, please add them:

• Asking people: QUESTIONNAIRES. Are you happy, and do you know it? Yes, this is a great method, and this can often lead us to find correlations: we can ask people about their salaries and we can ask them about their happiness. But the one caveat about correlations is that they are not causations - we don’t know which came first - people were happy, and so they got higher-paying jobs or people had high-paying jobs and became happier? One of my favorite studies conducted as a correlation study is this study about very happy people - showing they tend to have strong, quality relationships.
  
  
• Asking people: QUALITATIVE. Some researchers want to get a qualitative sense of a certain aspect of a person’s life. These researchers sometimes ask open-ended questions in order to get more open information. George Vaillant has studied adults of all ages from 20 to 80, and has asked them open-ended questions to get more information. Usually the information is “coded” after the interviews…. for example, an interview about what makes a good life (this is a Paul Rozin example) may yield an answer like “The good life is when you are surrounded by family, when you’ve raised your children well, when you are generally healthy.” This might be coded as “FAMILY, RAISE CHILDREN, HEALTHY.”
  
  
• Having people do activities: CAUSE-AND-EFFECT studies. Inviting college students into the psychology lab to sit in a lab and interact in an experiment. A good example of this is the candy bar experiment that Gilbert writes about in Stumbling on Happiness: on the first day of class, students were allowed to choose candy bars for the following four weeks of the course. Most students chose a variety - M&M’s one day, Snickers another. In following class weeks, they were asked whether they wanted to keep their original choice (i.e. In week 2, they were asked whether they wanted to keep week 2’s choice which happened to be almond joy), and most students changed back to their original favorite choice (say M&M’s). So variety is not always better. This is a case-and-effect study.
  
  
• Beeping people: EXPERIENCE SAMPLING METHOD - Psychologist Mike Csikszentmihalyi is the author of Flow and many other books, and has used the experience sampling method in many studies. The method involves beeping people (and was first used in the 1970’s! when beepers were very uncommon), and asking people to write down at that moment what they were going, how they felt, and other aspects of the experience. Through this method, Csikszenmihalyi learned a lot about times when people are in flow, the state of complete absorption (often in bed with their spouse, at work, at their hobbies, and when driving).
  
  
• Asking people to remember their day: DAY RECONSTRUCTION METHOD - Psychologist Danny Kahneman uses this recently, and so have many other researchers. This is asking a person at the end of the day to divide the day into segments (for example: woke up and did the mornign routine(teeth, shower, etc), commuted to the office, had first meeting with team (1 hour), worked at my desk (3 hours), lunch…), and then to rate different aspects of those segments.
  
  
• Asking people over time: LONGITUDINAL. George Vaillant, author of at least three books on longitudinal studies, including Aging Well, has studied a group of people from age 20 through their 80’s. There is some type of information that is possible to find through longitudinal studies that is not possible to find in other ways. For example, Chris Peterson working with George Vaillant found that optimism in a person’s 20’s can predict physical health at age 60+. How is this possible? The researchers can see whether the people in the study have an optimistic way of writing about events, and then the researchers can examine physical health markers decades later.
  
  

What other methods do you know? Thanks!

This is part of the series of addressing interview questions, and how to answer them.

Today is Question Friday, please let me know What is the interview question you most dread?

And I’ll be addressing these next week.

S.

We asked this question yesterday at the first meeting of the Happiness Club NY!

QUESTION: If you had been Marty Seligman, Mike Csikszentmihalyi, and Ray Fowler when they met in 1999 to discuss a new subfield in psychology that would study what is right with people, what topics would you have wanted to put on the table? What topics would you want to study?!

Here are the answers from yesterday:

EXPERIENCES we can study - such as thoughts, emotions…

• Internal vs. external happiness
• Consistency in Happiness over time
• Studying hobbies, flow experiences
• Exercise and happiness
• Weightloss and happiness
• How to move on from a bad thought
• Conscious happiness, awareness
• Optimism and adjusting thoughts and controlling thoughts
• Pleasure
• Meaning
• How to increase happiness
• Happiness in marriage, in relationships, in long-lasting friendships (also “group”)

INDIVIDUAL TRAITS AND CHARACTERISTICS we can study

• Drive, motivation
• Responsibility, reliance
• Personal will
• To what degree is happiness determined at birth? - Chemical and neurobiological components of happiness
• Generational: if your parents are happy, are you?
• Focus
• Studying traits of good leaders
• Studying traits of successful people
• Studying traits of philanthropists
• Studying optimists (also “experience”)
• Difference between individual and community happiness (also “group”)

GROUP AND COMMUNITY issues we can study

• Happiness at work, fun at work (LOTS of interest in this topic)
• Is happiness cultural?
• Does happiness have socioeconomic factors?
• Is there a ripple effect to happiness - if you’re happy, then are others?
• Happiness and children

OBSERVATION: What’s interesting is that the list we came up with has a lot of questions that the original founders of positive psychology came up with too. And it’s not really a coincidence that even though we were sitting in a Columbia Business School classroom, we came up with the fewest categories for “group.” Similarly, in positive psychology, group and organization issues have been the least studied.

You might be wondering why we separated our questions into those categories. Well, first we brainstormed a lot of topics we would want to study, and then we used the three “pillars” of positive psychology to group all our brainstormed topics.

See you at the next Happiness Club NY meeting on July 11, Wed eve - for a discussion about “Is there any magic techniqut to positive thinking? And what if I don’t want to think positive?”

Link: What is Positive Psychology?

I was speaking with a friend today, and she said a great combination of words, “networking really is aimless, isn’t it?” And I thought that was so correct, so right on.

By the time you have a goal with networking, it’s no longer networking. It’s sales or starting a transaction or even developing a business relationship. But at that point, it is NO LONGER networking for the sake of networking.

This is fasconating to me because I often have very fun discussions with people without knowing at all how we might one day work together, or have our lives intersect again. No, networking doesn’t have to be all that - the next job, the next project. Networking can be just two people who have a great time speaking with each other … Aimlessly!

Announcing the Happiness Club NY! FIRST MEETING ever!
Wednesday, June 20.

This game is directly from the The Resilience Factor by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte.*

Example:
“I’ve given this proposal to my boss a half-hour late. He was expecting it. I knew when the deadline was. I just wasn’t finished. And now he’ll be freaked out - he’ll yell at me - he might even fire me. I might have no money to live on. I’ll have to go ask friends for handouts. I’ll have to give up renting my apartment.” This type of downhill spiral thinking is a prime example of a situation in which this exercise can be used.

When:
* When a situation appears overwhelming.
* When you get into a 3am discussion with yourself ruminating and catastrophizing about things that can go wrong.
* When you may be blowing up a very nasty concrete situation into a prolonged many-year huge-consequences event.

Goal of the Game:
To “take the edge off” (as Karen Reivich says in trainging teachers in resilience techniques). To nip anxiety before it grows into self-created stress. To be able to function in a situation even when it seems overwhelming.

How Long to Play: 20 minutes.

Players: Alone, with one person, or with many.

Materials Needed: Paper and pen. Or a new Word document.

HOW TO PLAY:

Worst Thoughts - Best Thoughts - Most Likely - Preparing for Most Likely.

1) Write down your worst thoughts.
* Write down the triggering situation (e.g. I handed in the proposal a half-hour late), and all the resulting possible worst-case situations.

2) Estimate the probabilities of your worst case scenario.(optional: Karen and Andrew are very big on this step, but I don’t think this step is as important, so I call it optional).
* Getting fired 1%
* Having no money at all .001%
* Etc.

3) Write down your best-case scenarios.
* In the above example, “I handed in the resport late, but the boss’s boss was there, and he saw it at the time it came in, and he thought it was wonderful and offered me a promotion, now I make 26x more than I ever did, and I live in a $5 million home, and I go to the race track on the weekends.”

4) Write down the most likely implications.
Forget the worst, forget the best. Now, write down what are really the most likely implications. Will the boss get angry? Yes, likely. Will he fire you? No, not likely.

5) How can you handle these most likely implications?
Write down some steps so that you can handle the most likley implications. If you expect your boss to be angry, maybe send him an apology by email in advance. If you expect that the proposal may not get out on time to FedEx, offer to drive it to the last-closing FedEx in your state. Think of rational, actual steps you can take.

-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+

After you take the above steps, what often happens is that you … feel better.
What the above game does more than anything else is it can take the edge off a situation. It can make a situation more manageable. And in that time, you can take action, and more your life forward in other ways! Enjoy.

Image: Perspective.

The full version of the “Putting It in Perspective” exercise can be found on pages 168-185 of The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles.

I wrote about how the way you tell the story of your life - to yourself and to others - may affect how productive and successful you are in the future. One way to see which stories you’re telling and why you’re telling them this way is to ask yourself about some of your favorite stories that you heard as a child.

When: When you want to learn more about why you do certain things.

How Long to Play: 15-30 minutes.

Players: Alone, with one person, or with many.

Materials Needed: Paper and pen.

Goal of the Game: To be able to explain a current situation in terms of your thoughts from when you were a child. Why do this? Because sometimes seeing things this simply makes a current situation dissipate in power, which is what you may want.

HOW TO PLAY:
1) Sit down with your friends or by yourself.
2) Everyone write for 10 minutes: “What’s your favorite story from childhood and why?”
3) Everyone write for 5 minutes: “What current situation in your life might you be playing out like your favorite childhood story?”
4) If playing with friends, everyone share your favorite childhood story, why it was your favorite, and how it may affect your current expectations about any parts of your life.

(Since today is Question Friday, feel free to answer in the comments section! I’ll answer in there too - looking forward to hearing your answers!!!)

“This I conceive to be the chemical function of humor: to change the character of our thought.”
~ Lin Yutang

In a comment last month, Michael writes,

So, my question is: if success is often dependent on delayed gratification and happiness is often dependent on enjoying the present, as well as achieving some measure of success, then how do we reconcile all these things?

What’s your answer? I’ll start with mine, and would love to debate it.

Just like I wrote yesterday about doing exercise at 9:56pm on a Sunday to make sure I get in the right number of workouts for that week, I think you choose your battles. There are some things that you may be willing to delay gratification in - with the expectation of stronger gains in the future. I don’t mind not chilling and relaxing on a Sunday evening … as long as my cardio is stronger and my muscles more defined down the road.

I do mind having no weekends to myself - so that’s something I wouldn’t allow myself to do. In coaching, it’s easy to schedule people in on evenings, mornings, weekends. And I love doing early morning calls and evening calls, but I rarely, rarely do the weekend. That’s a sanity measure… even though to some degree delaying my weekends for a year might make the coaching business more exciting earlier, but - hey, why?

“Enjoying the present” - doesn’t this phrase sound like time passing slowly, like a river running. It’s almost, in answer to Michael - it’s almost that you may not be able to buckle down and do the discipline things unless you have enough psychological capital in you to be able to take those things on. And that psychological capital will come to a large degree from your taking good care of yourself, which may include enjoying the present.

To some degree, I see them feeding each other. What do you guys think?
Thanks!

It’s the same reason that I exercised yesterday - on Sunday - at 9:56pm (the very tippy top end part of the weekend).

There are some guidelines that I’ve set for myself. Such as posting a blog post daily M-F. Such as exercising five times per week (and Sunday was the end of the week). Such as eating healthily.

It doesn’t even matter what my specific guidelines are. It just matters that I stick to them.

I don’t know what the research is - but I do believe it - that focusing on one thing at a time when creating new habits is the way to go. I learned this lesson in rock climbing. And I use it across the board.

Talk to you tomorrow! S.