Senia.com Positive Psychology Coaching

I routinely think:

• What is the next big win?!?!
• Where can we do new, interesting things?!?!

I think about this for my career coaching clients - “Where can they have the most impact? Where can they move to what they most want?”

I think about this for myself - “What’s the most effective thing for me to do this week to move forward for next week? What can I do tonight that’ll make me better during the hoops game? What can I do to make the most exciting experience ever for this community I’m working with?”

Margaret Greenberg showed me some interesting keys to progress recently. You may remember Margaret from her Margaretisms. You may also have seen her journalistically-marvelous article on Toyota’s positive business practices in today’s Positive Psychology News Daily.

Margaret and I and two colleagues did a radio program together a few weeks back. I had sent out the questions for us to answer as a group. One afternoon, Margaret had a little extra time, and she replied to each question in detail, and sent them back to me. “So what?” you might be saying. “Big deal? She prepared for the program.” Yes - a month in advance!

So what happens in your brain when you complete a step of a project?!

Well, ACTUALLY, that was the subject of my Masters thesis at UPenn in ‘06. What happens once you get some movement towards a goal is that the goal moves to your subconscious thought. And then, it actually PROGRESSES within your subconscious thought - as long as you have helped it out and put it there with enough ammunition - with enough detail and information for your brain to be able to mull over that thought. Some of that thinking continues to go on under your conscious level.

A lot of that thinking is called Level D thinking, and often when your consciousness meets some of those thoughts that have culled from the subconscious progress of the thought - often, then you have an intuition about the problem at hand.

So, one of the things that Margaret is doing by allowing herself to prepare for something early is that she sets her subconscious brain to help her think about those thoughts. She also REMOVES STRESS at the last minute. Finally, she allows herself to do projects that are very good, and thus actually get them done rather than seeking perfection. Have you heard the phrase, “The great is the enemy of the very good”?

I was once riding on an Amtrak train a decade ago, and came across an article that was titled or subtitled, “Discipline Gets You Freedom.” And I thought about it then, and still believe it now. It’s what gets me to the finish line - the discipline, the slow and steady.

And to me, that means something very practical:
* Doing something for 15 minutes to two hours each day.

That’s it. You may remember it from these posts on how to accomplish anything and on expertise being trainable. Literally, that is the slow and steady. Doing it each day.

So here I am again. :)
Hi.

“When you get into a tight place and it seems that you can’t go on, hold on — for that’s just the place and the time that the tide will turn.”
~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

She could well be describing The Dip. If you’ve never heard about it before, read this brief and sweet post about point B by Seth.

What if tonight while you were sleeping, a miracle occurred? And that which appeared to be a problem went away.

How would you know in the morning that the miracle had occurred? What would now be different?

Try this with a friend. Each of you tell each other what problem you’d been having. Then ask each other, “What if a miracle occurred, and overnight it went away? What would be the immediate signs the next morning that it had gone away? What would the world be like? What would you feel like?”

Try it. This one works best when I don’t explain it but you just give it a shot.

Also try it here in the comments - what would the world feel like today if something wild had occurred during the night and your problem suddenly went away?

Wonderful Friday to you!
Senia

I first heard this question in the context of appreciative inquiry at a conference a couple of weeks back.

There’s a delightful series of experiments about the power of owning something. One experiment goes like this:
* Students walk into an experiment and they are given a MUG.
* Other students walk into an experiment and they are given a PEN.
* Then a student gets the choice to switch his MUG for a PEN or a PEN for a MUG.
Almost nobody switches! They like the choice that’s been made for them.

Most behavioral economists explain this as the endowment effect - once you own something, just that owning it starts to make it more valuable to you.

I also think there’s a degree of automatic reaction and cognitive dissonance. What do I mean and why am I throwing around buzz words?
* Automatic reaction. Jon Haidt studies automatic reaction - the idea that sometimes you just react and later use your brain to rationalize why you may have reacted in that way. I believe the students just don’t want to give it away (whether because they don’t like change, whether because it’s more valuable to them now, or whether for no reason at all).
* Cognitive dissonance. “Well, I don’t want to give up my mug really. Maybe that means I like the mug more. Maybe that means the mug is more valuable to me.”
* Why buzz words? Because these two buzz word pairs signify EXACTLY the meanings of why people might be saying one thing but acting in another way. These words are like useful shortcuts right now.

So NO to “my MUG for your PEN.”

In another study (and this is from memory), some students were given a mug and then told that they could sell it. The mug cost about $5 at the campus bookstore, and all the students given the mug were willing to sell it - but at an average prce around $7!!! Other students were told they could buy a mug, and these students chose prices at which they would buy the mug - they chose about $3 per mug! So the value of the mug can depends on what eyes you look through.

Seth Godin makes this endowment effect very real and very immediate in his Loss vs. Gain story. In sum - he found “the perfect” domain name. He wanted it. He made a bid on it. The seller wouldn’t take $600 for it. The seller was very happy with his own endoment effect for that domain name. Seth was sad. It’s just this blasted endowmnet effect!

One of the best pieces by The Economist I’ve ever read on any topic is a blog post called Un-Endowing the Endowment Effect. The post states, “Now a new paper scheduled to appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Economic Review argues that this asymmetry might not be as formidable as it seems.” It looks like once you change a few things, the endowment effect may disappear. What would one need to change? Well, something that psychologists rarely like to hear in experimental settings … if the words used when handing the object to a student are different, that makes a difference. Also, if a student can be unobtrusively in signaling an interest to trade, that can make a difference. And if a student can inspect the other good before committing to the exchange, that can make a difference.

Please please please, go read this short Economist post, and especially the most delightful Economist words ever - the last line of this article!

Here is a Wired article on how Microsoft tested the game Halo 3 on 600 game players playing over 3000 times. Microsoft watched each interction, and documented each move in each game. Microsoft knows to the square foot where each player died in the game.

Why is this method useful for you if you’re not in the game space?

Because it works.
Because it’s methodical.
Because you can rely on it.
Because you’re constantly improving and questioning.
Because you get to know your customer better.
Because you’ll trust yourself more after you go through this prep.
Because your customers will trust you more after you go through this prep.

Karen Salmansohn, host of the daily radio program “Be Happy, Dammit” has invited me to guest-produce a segment of her program.

We’ll be focusing on HAPPINESS and WORK.

By the end of the program, you’ll know:
* Several new techniques for becoming happier at work
* What the research says about happiness at work
* The ONE main suggestion from each panelist for becoming happier at work

PANEL:
Margaret Greenberg, President of the Greenberg Group – an organizational effectiveness consulting and coaching practice
David J. Pollay, Syndicated columnist with the North Star Writers Group, and is president of TheMomentumProject.com, an international training and consulting organization
Doug Turner, Vice President of HR for the Washington, DC division of Balfour Beatty Construction company

Senia Maymin, Workshops and coaching for positive management and Editor-in-Chief of PositivePsychologyNews.com

All the guests are writers at PositivePsychologyNews.com.

DETAILS:
Monday (8-27-07), 8-9am
Sirius radio channel 114 (also called “Lime 114“)
To get a three-day free internet subscription, go here and click on “FREE ONLINE TRIAL” in the upper left area.

STATISTICS:
* “At work, I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?” Only 20% of people can answer YES to this question. (Gallup data)

* People feel that they enjoy leisure much more than work, but it turns out surprisingly that people achieve the state of “flow” - when they lose track of time and get “into the zone” - people achieve this more at work than in leisure.

FOUR SEGMENTS:
Here are the segments I’ve asked the panel to prepare for each of the four 11-minute segments:

1) How has your business outlook changed since learning about Positive Psychology?
2) What are your favorite findings in Positive Psychology that can be applied to business?
3) What are some findings that you WISH would be applied to businesses? That you wish businesses and individuals at work would take on?
4) What is the ONE THING you would recommend to someone listening to implement at work starting today?

Feel free to email ahead of the show with questions: senia [at] senia [dot] com

In coaching, I often think about how to ask a person questions so that I can understand more of his world. Sometimes it feels as if there are not enough details, or I don’t quite see a situation from her point of view.

In this case, it’s natural to want to ask, “Is there anything more you can tell me?”

But that question is often a dead-end because to a degree it presupposes that, um, no, there’s not anything more that the person can tell me. “Well is there any other way that you could structure your day so that you have healthier food around you?” Um, no, not really, I’m already doing everything I can think of.

Try this question:
“What is some other way that you could structure your day so that you have healthier food around you?”

What did I do differently here?
1) I made it an open-ended question. “What is some way …?” as opposed to “Is there …?”
2) I asked about some way as opposed to any way.

I know this sounds silly - it’s just ONE WORD. On the other hand, you unburden the word by making it open: SOME vs. ANY. You put a new pre-supposition in there. The assumption is that there is some way. Or perhaps together we could think of some way.

“What are some new ways that we could approach this company and this department if you want a job here?” “Well, I’ve already talked to my contacts there, and I’ve approached the person who has the same responsibilities as me.” “What might be some other ways?” “Well, I could contact someone else.” “Great, who might be some other people that you could contact? What might their roles be? What might they be involved with at the company?”

The openness of “some” and of open-ended “what” questions can move you closer to something true that leads to action. Enjoy!

Barry Schwartz says two things are the most important in life:

1) Knowing generally what you want to do (do you want to be a pilot or a doctor? a businessperson or an actor?), and

2) Knowing that ALMOST GOOD ENOUGH is usually GOOD ENOUGH.

If you generally know what you want and you move forward with things that are along your trajectory and moving you in the right direction, Barry Schwartz would argue that these two ideas will move you most effectively towards your goals.

As Paul Rozin says, “Happiness is all about expectations management.” And by knowing what you want, and that you are constantly moving forward in incremental steps, you do get closer!

We wrote before about the interview question that you may most dread, and there were some great comments there that we’ll go back to in future posts.

What is the question you consistently ace in interviews?!!?

And what are some of the ways that you address the question successfully?

At its best, “delegate” becomes “put people in charge!”

Managers often get very excited to “delegate,” and to get rid of boring responsisbilities. “Oh, when I hire this associate person, I can delegate all my planning to him or delegate all my morning market analysis to her.” Yes, sometimes the job that you have set aside for that person will free you fo exactly the things that you may least want to do.

On the other hand, sometimes you’ll need to delegate away exciting responsibilities to open yourself up to do more. It’s not always the boring chores that you delegate away, sometimes its just those that other people can do best for you.

A positive way to looking at “delegating” is “putting people in charge” - what can you put people in charge of most effectively? What can you be sure that someone will be proud to run as a process?

And people are different! What one person will love running another would be horrified to be anywhere near. So, have fun with the balance of it all!