Not Good Enough? Not Smart Enough? Not Pretty Enough?

Round & Round & Round It Goes

The voices in our heads can be real buzz-kills. “I’m not whatever enough.” I should be (doing) X, I should be (doing) Y, I should be (doing) Z.

WinterSome call this voice “the gremlin” or saboteur. Others look at it is as a radio station that plays recurring tunes of self-limiting beliefs embedded into our subconscious minds.  Whatever you call it, these voices have harmful effects.  Positive psychologists sometimes suggest that it is our own, self-deprecating mind chatter which holds us in the bonds of ordinance. Our thoughts and belief systems can become our realities.

Summer   Limiting beliefs lead to procrastination and laziness, dampen and destroy dreams, and bring down morale. Successful people who exhibit high levels of grit have learned to combat these limiting beliefs by changing the hardwired thinking patterns – replacing them with more constructive and positive ones. This takes attention, intention, and will.

How Do People Stop The Voices in Their Heads?

Journal1) Journaling.  Students in seventh grade were asked to write about an important value—like being smart (or an unimportant value in the control group) for just 15-minutes several times throughout the year. The intervention improved the end-of-semester grades for the African American students and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40% in the experimental group, presumably by lowering the self-threat associated with confirming the negative “not good/smart enough” belief systems associated with stereotype vulnerability (see work by Claude Steele). Just this week, researchers noted that improvements continue through eighth grade. The students who benefited had nearly a half-point higher grade point average than struggling peers in the control group.

This middle-school intervention study was run by researchers Geoffrey Cohen (University of Colorado), Julio Garcia (Colorado), Valerie Purdie-Vaughns (Columbia University) and Nancy Apfel and Patricia Brzustoski (Yale) and focused on journaling.

2) Focusing on Mindset and Learned Optimism.  Anther answer to stopping the voices is to actively focus on your growth mindset, as Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck would suggest (see Got Grit? Start with Mindset by Emiliya Zhivotovskaya and “Brainset” – Neuroscience Examines Carol Dweck’s Theory by Nicholas Hall).  At an even more basic level, people can counter the voices by self-training themselves in learned optimism self-talk as founder of positive psychology and University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman would suggest (see Learning Optimism by Doug Turner and Is feeling better as easy as ABC? by Nicholas Hall).

Microphone3) Focusing on Positive Self Thoughts. Psychologists Shelley Taylor and David Sherman suggest in a paper last year that the processes surrounding self-enhancement and self-affirmation are the key to how psychological health is maintained, or restored, after a threat. It is also key in fueling the ability to set and maintain energy around goals.

4) Activating Hope. Believing that you have positive strengths and talents allows you to feel good about yourself, even through stressful times, because you can pull from a bank of resources that make you uniquely you. A heightened mindfulness of your general attributes may facilitate performance by boosting your sense of self-worth—what Diane McDermott and C.R. Snyder (1999) call mental willpower. This can start simply by making a list of accomplishments you have had in your life.

Specific Techniques

While you are probably way past middle school, some of your internal gremlins may have lingered in one form or another since then. Ready for them to be gone?

I work with clients all the time to change their belief systems. Just the other day I was speaking with a woman who says she wants to meet the man of her dreams. When I asked her if she thought it what possible, the silence was deafening. It all starts with the belief.

Saying “Could.” Another client of mine is going through career transition. He has all of these belief systems that tell him what he should be doing. One way to easy some of that “should” anxiety is, according to mainstream author Louise Hay, to make a list of them.  For example, “I should be making over 6 figures, I should be working in finance, I should be wearing a suit and tie to work everyday.” Then, reread the list, but this time replace “should” with “could” and then ask yourself, “So why don’t I?” Usually, the responses are “because I don’t want to” and then viola! Some of the self-inflected stress is removed and space is cleared to proceed in creating the life you most want to live.

Reframing in the Moment.  There’s also the work of Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte (The Resilience Factor) on reframing using real-time resilience. Whenever you’re in a situation where you want to feel better, you can work through some mental calisthenics, like these (see The A.P.E. Method to Get Out of a Bad Mood by Senia Maymin):

    “A more accurate way of seeing this is …” (Look for alternatives.)

    “That’s not true because…” (Look at the evidence.)

    “A more likely outcome is … and I can do … to deal with it.” (Consider the implications and perspective.)

Be bold and be daring as you experiment with your life—be open and willing to see what works best for you. And perhaps even ask your friends and coworkers for some help and accountability.

References:

Carson, R. (2003). Taming Your Gremlin (Revised Edition): A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way. Collins Living; Rev Sub edition.

Cohen GL, Garcia, J., Purdie-Vaughns, N., Apfel, N., & Brzustoski, P. (2009). Recursive processes in self-affirmation: Intervening to close the minority achievement gap. Science, 324, 400-403.

Hay, Louise, L. (1999). You Can Heal Your Life (Gift Edition). Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.

McDermott, D. & Snyder, C.R. (1999). Making Hope Happen: A Workbook for Turning Possibilities into Reality. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications.

Reivich, K, & Shattẻ, A. (2002). The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles. New York: Broadway Books.

Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape the intellectual identities and performance of women and African-Americans. American Psychologist, 52, 613-629.

Taylor, S. & Sherman, D. (2008). Self enhancement and self-affirmation: The consequences of positive self thoughts for motivation and health. In Shah, J. & Gardner W. (Eds.) Handbook of Motivation Science (pp. 58-70). New York: Guilford.

 

Round & Round & Round It Goes

                                                                       ~By Louis Alloro, MAPP, M.Ed.

The voices in our heads can be real buzz-kills. “I’m not whatever enough.” I should be (doing) X, I should be (doing) Y, I should be (doing) Z.

Some call this voice “the gremlin” or saboteur. Others look at it is as a radio station that plays recurring tunes of self-limiting beliefs embedded into our subconscious minds.  Whatever you call it, these voices have harmful effects.  Positive psychologists sometimes suggest that it is our own, self-deprecating mind chatter which holds us in the bonds of ordinance. Our thoughts and belief systems can become our realities.

Limiting beliefs lead to procrastination and laziness, dampen and destroy dreams, and bring down morale. Successful people who exhibit high levels of grit have learned to combat these limiting beliefs by changing the hardwired thinking patterns – replacing them with more constructive and positive ones. This takes attention, intention, and will.

How Do People Stop The Voices in Their Heads?

1) Journaling.  Students in seventh grade were asked to write about an important value—like being smart (or an unimportant value in the control group) for just 15-minutes several times throughout the year. The intervention improved the end-of-semester grades for the African American students and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40% in the experimental group, presumably by lowering the self-threat associated with confirming the negative “not good/smart enough” belief systems associated with stereotype vulnerability (see work by Claude Steele). Just this week, researchers noted that improvements continue through eighth grade. The students who benefited had nearly a half-point higher grade point average than struggling peers in the control group.

This middle-school intervention study was run by researchers Geoffrey Cohen (University of Colorado), Julio Garcia (Colorado), Valerie Purdie-Vaughns (Columbia University) and Nancy Apfel and Patricia Brzustoski (Yale) and focused on journaling.

2) Focusing on Mindset and Learned Optimism.  Anther answer to stopping the voices is to actively focus on your growth mindset, as Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck would suggest.

At an even more basic level, people can counter the voices by self-training themselves in learned optimism self-talk as founder of positive psychology and University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman would suggest.

3) Focusing on Positive Self Thoughts. Psychologists Shelley Taylor and David Sherman suggest in a paper last year that the processes surrounding self-enhancement and self-affirmation are the key to how psychological health is maintained, or restored, after a threat. It is also key in fueling the ability to set and maintain energy around goals.

4) Activating Hope. Believing that you have positive strengths and talents allows you to feel good about yourself, even through stressful times, because you can pull from a bank of resources that make you uniquely you. A heightened mindfulness of your general attributes may facilitate performance by boosting your sense of self-worth—what Diane McDermott and C.R. Snyder (1999) call mental willpower. This can start simply by making a list of accomplishments you have had in your life.

Specific Techniques

While you are probably way past middle school, some of your internal gremlins may have lingered in one form or another since then. Ready for them to be gone?

I work with clients all the time to change their belief systems. Just the other day I was speaking with a woman who says she wants to meet the man of her dreams. When I asked her if she thought it what possible, the silence was deafening. It all starts with the belief.

Saying “Could.” Another client of mine is going through career transition. He has all of these belief systems that tell him what he should be doing. One way to easy some of that “should” anxiety is, according to mainstream author Louise Hay, to make a list of them.  For example, “I should be making over 6 figures, I should be working in finance, I should be wearing a suit and tie to work everyday.” Then, reread the list, but this time replace “should” with “could” and then ask yourself, “So why don’t I?” Usually, the responses are “because I don’t want to” and then viola! Some of the self-inflected stress is removed and space is cleared to proceed in creating the life you most want to live.

Reframing in the Moment.  There’s also the work of Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte (The Resilience Factor) on reframing using real-time resilience. Whenever you’re in a situation where you want to feel better, you can work through some mental calisthenics, like these:

    “A more accurate way of seeing this is …” (Look for alternatives.)

    “That’s not true because…” (Look at the evidence.)

    “A more likely outcome is … and I can do … to deal with it.” (Consider the implications and perspective.)

Be bold and be daring as you experiment with your life—be open and willing to see what works best for you. And perhaps even ask your friends and coworkers for some help and accountability.

Originally Published on www.Pos-Psych.com

References:

Carson, R. (2003). Taming Your Gremlin (Revised Edition): A Surprisingly Simple Method for Getting Out of Your Own Way. Collins Living; Rev Sub edition.

Cohen GL, Garcia, J., Purdie-Vaughns, N., Apfel, N., & Brzustoski, P. (2009). Recursive processes in self-affirmation: Intervening to close the minority achievement gap. Science, 324, 400-403.

Hay, Louise, L. (1999). You Can Heal Your Life (Gift Edition). Carlsbad, CA: Hay House.

McDermott, D. & Snyder, C.R. (1999). Making Hope Happen: A Workbook for Turning Possibilities into Reality. Oakland: New Harbinger Publications.

Reivich, K, & Shattẻ, A. (2002). The Resilience Factor: 7 Keys to Finding Your Inner Strength and Overcoming Life’s Hurdles. New York: Broadway Books.

Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape the intellectual identities and performance of women and African-Americans. American Psychologist, 52, 613-629.

Taylor, S. & Sherman, D. (2008). Self enhancement and self-affirmation: The consequences of positive self thoughts for motivation and health. In Shah, J. & Gardner W. (Eds.) Handbook of Motivation Science (pp. 58-70). New York: Guilford.

Against All Odds: Broadening and Building Resilience Across the Life Span

~by Sherri W. Fisher, MAPP, M.Ed.                      

We often categorize students by what they will have to overcome in order to be successful,  instead of appreciating what they already have.  What is success made of? It may not be what you think, and you may be measuring it without really knowing how today’s 6th grader might look as an adult.

In my work with children and families, people often tell me their secrets. This is the story of someone who knew nothing about Positive Psychology,  but who transformed a life of risk-factors into a life of success by using what we know to be empirically sound approaches to living a flourishing life.

The message of his life is summarized through research later in this post.

Timothy was born into a family of ten children, at the beginning of the Great Depression. His mother had been married three times; his parents were both alcoholics. Their family occupied a series of apartments in the poorest neighborhoods of Newark, NJ. From vacant lots the children collected milkweed stems that their mother boiled into a broth for their dinner. They regularly heard that they would never amount to anything.

 Beatings and other abuse were part of Timothy’s everyday life, and while he attended school, he was not considered a good student by any means. He learned to keep secrets about his life, and developed great skill at listening to and observing people. When he was 15, Timothy left home and never returned. He connected with a charity organization where a kindly man became a caring adult in his life. Timothy eventually graduated high school in a distant city. When his family did come looking for him, it was much, much later, and they were not coming to invite him home; they wanted money.

While still in high school, Timothy went to work in a leather-tanning factory where he found the long hours a great diversion from angry thoughts about the family he had left behind, the nine siblings he expected—and hoped—he would never see again.  When still underaged, he enlisted in the Navy where he was guaranteed a berth, consistent rules and expectations, and three square meals a day. 

Timothy met his future wife hitchhiking while on leave, and they eloped their way to beginning a 52-year marriage. The Navy was Timothy’s permanent address for years. His work there, during nearly 30 years and in several countries, remains classified, as he kept secret the work he did behind the closed doors of highest level security clearance. Timothy, his wife and their four children all graduated from college, and two of them even earned master’s degrees.

In his fifties, Timothy was diagnosed with incurable cancer and underwent an extreme operation and experimental treatments in hopes of prolonging his life for up to two years. He lived on for 19 years, despite each follow-up test being positive for spreading cancer, to see his eight grandchildren join the family, and to see the eldest one graduate from high school. For more than 15 years, he was also a Sunday school superintendent and youth group leader, and he mentored future military officers. These things he did even when living out of the country. When he retired from the military, Timothy even had two more successful careers ahead of him.

Timothy died a few days before his 77^th birthday, having beaten the odds that he would be a failure in numerous quarters of his life, and that he would die in his prime. (This is him on the slide below, with one of his grandkids.) Instead, he passed away quietly with his family close by, in his multimillion-dollar home, with no mortgage. He had paid for this himself.  Hundreds of mourners at his funeral—many of them who had been children and young adults he mentored—recalled  Timothy’s quiet strength, steadfast faith, and steady moral compass. He kept the secret of his childhood from nearly all of them, and they would never have guessed.

Timothy (not his real name) was a real person. Early on he had the presence of mind to leave his family and turn his life in a different way. Two longitudinal resilience studies indicate important reasons why Timothy may have been successful in his bid for a flourishing life. The first, by Emily Werner and Ruth Smith, looked at a cohort of nearly 700 male and female individuals across their age-span from perinatal to age 40. It was conducted on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. The second, conducted by George Vaillant, followed more than 450 men from poor, high crime neighborhoods in Boston, MA and more than 260 Harvard men, for more than 50 years. 

Here are some of the important findings of both these studies that predict resilience and recovery from high-risk childhood, and success as adults:

1)      Resilient siblings of dysfunctional families withdraw from family members meshed in problems. In this case, only Timothy escaped the patterns which led seven other siblings (two others died in childhood) to repeat the sins of the parents.

2)      Resilient people have a caring adult in their lives. This person does not have to be related to the young person. Timothy accepted charity and met a trustworthy, caring adult.

3)      Resilient people develop and value personal competence and determination. In fact, this is considered one of their most effective resources by resilient adults looking back to their at-risk childhood. Timothy made a plan to leave and did not look back.

4)      Resilient people show a strong capacity to work, even in childhood. This is a strong predictor of career success and out-predicts the negatives of poverty or a multi-problem family. Capacity to work also predicts satisfying interpersonal relationships and good mental health in adulthood. Timothy was never without work from the time he was 15 years old.

5)      Resilient people set goals for their adult life, even when they are children. They focus on career or job success, self-development and self-fulfillment. They strive for a happy marriage to a spouse who is a source of support and with whom they will have children, and aspire to owning a home. Timothy and his wife were married for 52 years, and owned several homes of increasing value during this time.

6)      Resilient people set high expectations for their children. These include school achievement, higher education attainment, happy families of their own, and the clear expectation that they will do things the right way, not the easy way. All of Timothy’s children were expected to perform well in school, acquire a post-secondary education, and marry and have families, which they did, happily.

7)      Resilient people believe that failures will happen, but that you can always try again. Note that in the language of explanatory style, resilient people are not optimists—they don’t expect good things—but they do have high self-efficacy and take a long view when bad things do occur. That long view may have resulted in Timothy’s 52-year marriage and 19-year cancer survival.

8)      Resilient people are active in community service. Timothy gave back for years and years to support youth and young adults in areas that mattered deeply to him—the military and the church.

In George Vaillant’s model of adult development, Timothy successfully negotiated the “six sequential tasks”. These are

ü  Identity—separate from parents

ü  Intimacy—psychologically healthy involvement with a partner

ü  Career Consolidation—find work valuable to society, and both valuable and enjoyable to self

ü  Generativity—broadening social circle, providing care for the next generation

ü  Become Keeper of the Meaning—pass on traditions that link the past to the future

ü  Integrity—achieving peace and unity with one’s self and the world

Each of these broad categories is likely supported by applications we know and love in the Positive Psychology toolbox, such as good decision-making, building of habits, goal-setting, grit, deliberate practice, active constructive responding, learning your ABC’s, a strong social circle, a connection to something larger than oneself, and the like.

Perhaps the most important lesson from Timothy’s life is that we are not doomed from birth to live out lives of failure. Quality longitudinal research shows us that by middle age, most people, regardless of their beginnings in life, have turned out.

 **Portions originally published at www.pos-psych.com

REFERENCES

 

Vaillant, G.E., Aging Well. New York, NY: Little Brown; 2002

 

Werner E.E., Smith RS. Journeys From Childhood to Midlife: Risk, Resilience

and Recovery. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; 2001

 

Werner E.E., Looking for trouble in paradise: some lessons learned from

the Kauai Longitudinal Study. In Phelps E, Furstenberg FF, Colby A.

Looking at Lives: American Longitudinal Studies in the Twentieth Century.

New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation; 2002:297–314

Reflection: Key to Moral Growth

~by David N. Shearon, JD, MAPP

A new study by the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California reinforces the need to help students learn to reflect and practice reflection so they can figure out the kind of persons they want to be and focus on becoming those persons.

Researchers used brain imaging to watch the activation of different areas of the brain as subjects read compelling, real-life stories designed  to induce either admiration for virtue or skill or compassion for physical or social pain.  The brain images revealed that it took longer for the subjects to react to stories of virtue or of social pain than to stories of physical pain.  However, once awakened, the emotions of admiration for virtue or compassion for social pain lasted much longer.  No wonder the folk saying for comapssion is “walk a mile in their shoes” not walk two steps!

The researchers speculate on the impact of quick-changing media such as television news, but there’s no speculation about the impact of the positive emotions of admiration and compassion.  Consistent with other research, this study found that these emotions launched the subjects on upward spirals.  One of the researchers noted that many expressed a desire to lead better lives and some even refused the customary  payment for participation. 

Part of positive education is helping adults, teenagers, and children learn to be mindful, including awareness and acceptance of their emotional reactions as information about the world around them.  Resilience training, for example, includes learning when and how to listen to our “inner commentator.”  This learned habit of keeping a light touch on thoughts and feelings can bloom into a habit of reflection that allows us to fully experience our emotions, including the positive ones.  Further, positive education provides tools for choosing our pathways forward from our current thoughts and feelings, thus promoting hope, autonomy, and competence — key components of the good life!

Image: “Eye the compassion” by carf 

Short-term Gain: Could You Please Pass the Blame?

Short-term Gain: Could You Please Pass the Blame?

                                                                                    ~by Sherri Fisher, MAPP, M.Ed. 

Remember the game “hot potato” that you played as a kid? Blame is like that. No one wants to be left holding it, since you might get burned. As a result, we develop explanations for the innocence someone else will hopefully connect to us. You or a child you work with may have “reasons” for not having an assignment completed. “The dog ate my homework” comes to mind.

Inflating the Truth

Some reasons are somewhat “true”, at least in the eyes of the beholder. In the 1995 film, Clueless, here’s how one of the characters, Travis, passes the blame for being late: “Tardiness is not something you can do on your own. Many, many people contributed to my tardiness. I would like to thank my parents for never giving me a ride to school, the LA city bus driver who took a chance on an unknown kid and last but not least, the wonderful crew from McDonalds who spend hours making those Egg McMuffins without which I’d never be tardy.” Cher, the main character in the film, goes further when she fails to admit that she has run a stop sign. She uses reframing to put a positive spin on her faux pas when she says, “I totally paused” and then backs this up with an oblique explanation: “You try driving in platforms!”

The Passive Voice: Not-me, Always, Everything

All of us have times when we are clueless, and we, too, pass the blame to keep from feeling shame or embarrassment. Have you ever been late and blamed the traffic?  Your children?  Your spouse? Had a particularly tough day in the classroom and blamed the students? Their parents? Administrators? The economy? Do you find yourself using the passive voice, saying, “Well, yes, mistakes were made.” But by whom?

A key aspect of excuse-making is assigning control of the situation to extrinsic factors, thus shifting blame and, sometimes as a bonus, reframing oneself as a victim. This is short-term gain: It appears to solve a problem now, but does not deal with the actual one(s), or it creates new ones.

A teacher who says, “The students didn’t follow the directions” has passed the blame as adeptly as the student who says, “We weren’t warned that there would be short answer questions mixed in with the multiple choice.”  The teacher has missed the opportunity to examine the way directions are worded and the student has missed the chance to reflect on study strategies and comprehension of content. In this way it is possible to pass both the blame and the guilt with no resulting gain.

Why You May Need to Disbar Your Internal Lawyer

While reframing is often the best way to get out of your own way, the blame “reflex” may be preventing you from a necessary change.  Stop defending yourself; failing to accept responsibility keeps us from being able to change habits that impede our personal, academic and professional growth. Whether you are trying to change yourself or someone else (see Part I of this series, Turning around the Hidden Power of Blame), you already know that it’s very difficult. According to William James, three things need to be engaged for us to change: attention, habit and will. In other words, you need to notice what you are doing in order to stop doing it so much; you need to develop an alternate and more effective habit; and you need to develop staying power (often “won’t” as opposed to “will” power).

Cultivating Mental Balance

If you’re ready to swap blame for attention, habit and will, here are some Positive Psychology tools to help you.

 

• First, notice how often you find that you blame “circumstances” like the weather, as opposed to other people, for your inability to have more of what you want. You can’t change some things in your life, but you can nearly always change your response to them, whether things or people.
• Next, you need to attend to the habits of mind that are reinforcing your resistance to change and create new ones.
• Finally, you will need to have the will to stick with an empirically-based coaching program. Note that you may want the nudge of someone besides the face you see in the mirror.

 

 Sometimes you will need to stick with a program much longer than the six weeks it was tested and shown to have correlations to improved well-being. For example, I have been meditating for about seven years, preceding my MAPP program by a few years. Meditation in combination with other tools from Positive Psychology (Tell Me Something Good, Strengths Buttons, Mood Repair Tool Kit) has been more powerful and transformative than meditation alone in my experience.

 

According to Wallace and Shapiro (2006), there are four processes underlying mental balance. These are conative (becoming aware of and setting intentions, goals and priorities) attentional (mediating inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity as cultivated through mindfulness), cognitive (viewing the world without imbalances of thought or attention—See Penn Resiliency Program), and affective balance (cultivating loving-kindness, empathetic joy), equanimity and gratitude).

 

Making Change

Are you “totally pausing” through the stop signs of life? After she totally pauses, Cher goes on to side-swipe several parked cars and later fails her driver’s test which she then blames on the man testing her. It’s easy for us to see how she is clueless as she stands before her mirror.

But making changes of any kind is a balancing act. All behaviors, even ones with undesirable outcomes, often have a hidden benefit. Blaming, for example, has the benefit of letting one look into the “rose colored mirror” where you are the fairest one of all. Perhaps to receive this message you may pass the blame quite a lot, but not end up getting more of what you really want. Think about what you’d like more of, and how you can change your contribution.

 

References

Wallace, B.A. and Shapiro, S.L. (2006). Mental balance and well-being: Building bridges between  Buddhism and western psychology. American Psychologist, vol. 61, no. 7, 609-701.

 

Originally published as Short-term Gain: Could You Please Pass the Blame?  at www.pos-psych.com

From Ho Hum Holidays to a Whole Lot of Fun

                                                                             ~By Louis Alloro, MAPP, M.Ed.

Communitas is a ritual-building process that inspires and revitalizes while reaffirming relationships within a community, state University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues. According to Anthropologist Victor Turner, building communitas is an essential step to activating a community to healthy family functioning, healthy child development, and other dimensions of well-being. It also creates positive emotion, which according to psychologist Barbara Fredrickson and mathematician Marcial Losada, builds upward spirals for individuals and groups.

Here is an example of some of the work I’ve done with my own family as an action researcher to build communitas and expand positive emotion. As we approach Passover and Easter, perhaps you will consider the power you have at building new positive traditions within the culture of your own networks. I call this Social-Emotional Leadership, which begins with your decision to stand up for the well-being of those you love.

Ho Hum Holiday

I have had the good fortune of being born into a large, Italian family, for which I am utterly and completely grateful. With aunts, uncles, and cousins, we are thirty members strong. Traditionally, we see each other at holidays, which are always about feasting and merriment; the events are orchestrated around the plethora of food and the drink. The men of the family typically flock to the television to watch the sporting events du jour; others of us less interested in sports stay in the living room to eat and imbibe or to kibitz about the food and drink. My siblings and cousins agreed: this tradition was feeling old.

I realized the need for Social-Emotional Leadership within my own network two years ago when I saw one of the youngest members of our clan exhibiting some troubling behaviors on Easter. This young boy joined the men in the family room in a friendly betting pool that my Uncle Charlie, a patriarch of our family, organized in good fun for the baseball game. But as this young boy joined in, I noticed his physical and emotional responses to first thinking he was winning and then, through a sudden turn of events in the game, thinking he was losing these seemingly “friendly” bets. His emotional and physical reactions were quite bothersome to me; I saw him embody real excitement and then real rage almost within the same moment.

Most bothersome was that we allowed his emotional roller coaster to continue without intervention. In fact, none of the other adults seemed at all fazed by his reactions as if a pink elephant were right there in the family room and we were all navigating around it, or worse, not even noticing it at all.

The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far From the Tree

But when I stood back to observe, I realized that the behaviors the boy was exhibiting were very much in line with what has been modeled for him by me and other members of our network. Compulsive behaviors (those that bring us to extremes—away from what Aristotle marks as virtue), including but not limited to gambling, are a recurring, multi-generational issue that affects our network; why would we expect a child’s reality to be any different unless we wanted it to be so?

The apple not falling far from the tree is no problem, so long as the tree is strong and deeply rooted in a nourishing bed of soil, tended to and cared for, by the hopeful gardeners who live off of it. Social-Emotional Leaders are hopeful gardeners.

A Whole Lot of Fun

So last year on Easter, I decided to act as a Social-Emotional Leader – to introduce a new custom that could be built into our tradition in addition to our traditional celebration. I invited my family’s participation in a Nintendo Wii tennis tournament. Everyone participated in the bracket—three generations–even those who were most reluctant. As teams were up to play, they got a practice round to get the feel of the Wii and then it was on to the tournament. In no time, teams were devising strategies and having real fun.

My nephew, Michael, and cousin, Tracy emerged as victors and during the final round of the tournament, the energy and excitement that came from the family room was a palpable sign that my objective was reached. As a result, interest in other indoor and outdoor games was generated that day and groups naturally formed to participate. This shows the contagious effect of positive emotion and that as social capital is built, it starts to grow exponentially.

What’s In This For YOU?

As we approach religious holidays this season, I urge you to consider what you bring to the table as a Social-Emotional Leader, should you choose to be. Put on your action researcher hat and consider what happens when you elicit positive emotion, intentionally, and how this space could help you create a new tradition for the culture of your network. My advice to you is to be creative, use your strengths, and leverage another Social-Emotional Leader or two to help you along the way.

As one of my coaches Mike Litman is fond of saying, “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.” I’d love to hear your stories – so please email me the results of your efforts. Have fun and good luck.

Images: All images used with permission of Louis Alloro.

References:

Alloro, L.J. (2008). Shift happens: Using Social-Emotional Leadership to create positive, sustainable cultural change. University of Pennsylvania Scholarly Commons.

Fredrickson, B. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 300-319.

Fredrickson, B. L., & Losada, M. F. (2005). Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing. American Psychologist, 60, 678-686.

Gergen, K. (1999). An Invitation to Social Construction. London: Sage.

Haidt, J., Sederka, J. P., & Kesebir, S. (2007). Hive psychology, happiness and public policy. In Posner, E., and Sunstein, C. (Eds.), The Journal of Legal Studies.

Turner, V. (1995). The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures). New York: Aldine DeGruyter.

Portions of this originally published by Louis Alloro on Positive Psychology News Daily.

What is the top thing we can do to improve schools?

What are the ways in?

In 2007, McKinsey published a report titled How The World’s Best Performing School Systems Come Out on Top. In the report, McKinsey looks at the top performing schools in the world, and concludes that three things differentiate the best:

1. Teacher quality

2. Teacher development

3. Ensuring that the system can deliver the best possible instruction to every child 

So, what is the #1 Top Action We Can Take?

Knowing these McKinsey results, what is the strongest lever?  What is the biggest bang for the buck?  There may be evidence that teacher development can change schools with the most impact for the most ease.  For example, Geelong Grammar School in Australia has focused on Positive Education, including as part of that the Positive Education Training Conference for teachers.

What if schools running professional development workshops – for teachers and administrators and a learning series for  students and parents – could make those strides to grow the beauty of schools and prevent possible pain to individuals?  What if these seminars were based on the research findings of positive psychology – and to include the whole system?

What if the alien form Mars could report this:

Children are enjoying some type of information.  They are smiling.  The adults are smiling.  There is a bidirectional construction of knowledge.  Everyone is learning.  Everyone is eager to return each day.

Author’s Note: If you’re reading this and thinking, “Yes! That’s what we need,” consider contacting me and my colleagues at Flourishing Schools to come and deliver workshops for your local school (or learning organization of any kind). You never know how just one phone call on your part could positively influence an entire system or community . . .

Portions of this originally published by Louis Alloro on Positive Psychology News Daily.

There’s An Evidenced-Based Solution

In leading a bandwagon on Positive Education, Martin Seligman is fond of asking audiences he speaks to the following question: What do you most want for your children? (And if you’re not parents, consider it hypothetically – what would you most want most for your children to have in life?). Happiness? Good health? Fulfillment? Love?

Seligman then juxtaposes it with the following question: What do schools teach? Discipline? Science? Responsibility?

But suppose we can have both? This is what he means by Positive Education. In addition to what we traditionally teach in schools, Positive Education involves the teaching of character and strength, virtue, self-awareness, self-efficacy (not self-esteem), resilience, flexible and accurate thinking, strategies for high quality connections, and optimism wed to reality.

With the advent of Positive Psychology, these constructs are now grounded in theory and science – with evidenced-based interventions to build these capacities and in turn, make life more worth living – more pleasurable, more engaging, and more meaningful.

It has been shown that happier people have better relationships, earn more money, and live longer than unhappier people. If we’re finding ways that make people happier, doesn’t it make sense we teach this in schools?

Portions of this originally published by Louis Alloro on Positive Psychology News Daily.

Enough is Enough: The Crisis in Education

Last month I attended a conference that Yale School of Management put on called Creating Levers of Change in education. NYC School Commissioner Joel Klein gave the keynote address. In it, he made three points:

1. We have a crisis in public education.

2. We don’t have to have a crisis in public education.

3. If we keep having the same dialogue, we won’t change the reality.

The difference between this education crisis and other national crises, like the threat of terrorism or the failing economy, he says, is that we’re not all in this one together. Skin color, popularity, and zip code determine the quality of education kids receive. 

I love Klein’s points – especially the third one, as it reminds me of the work of David Cooperrider who says that, “Human systems move in the direction of the questions they ask.” What questions do we ask regarding the state of our schools?  I have one:

If an alien came from Mars and dropped into a school, what would they report? That kids come, half awake, to watch adults work?

Is it no wonder that school often feels bad for kids?

As a student, I often felt I wasn’t good enough: who I was and what the world expected me to be were at odds. As a result, I felt marginalized and alone at school. I felt voiceless.  Only later did I learn that feelings of “not being good enough (or smart enough, or good looking enough, or whatever enough)” were too common for school children.

And then I became a teacher. Finally! On the other side of the desk. A dream I had since as long as I could remember. But there, much to my chagrin, I saw many students—and teachers and parents with similar plights: sad, alone, and depressed—rat-racing, getting by—not enough.

So I wonder: what answers can positive psychology offer? It is after all, the reason I was drawn to this discipline. If we can positively influence the way people think and behave, we can change the culture of schools.  

Stay tuned for more on how I think this can happen . . .

Portions of this originally published by Louis Alloro on Positive Psychology News Daily.

Flourishing Schools Welcomes Louis Alloro, MAPP, MEd: An Interview

(Portions of this interview originally posted by Sherri Fisher at www.pos-psych.com)

Louis Alloro has joined Flourishing Schools

Louis Alloro, MAPP graduate and character education consultant to schools, has developed an innovative approach to helping you and your community thrive.

Social-Emotional Leadership (S-EL), his framework with which groups can contribute to their own positive change, is about developing new traditions, customs, agreements and language with those in our primary networks, from families to classrooms to the larger communities where we live and work. 

Woven into the transcript below are practical steps you can take to live as a Social-Emotional Leader, bringing attention and consciousness to the things that we all may habitually fail to notice—thereby increasing flexibility and accuracy within the ways we live.

Sherri: Louis, what is S-EL?

Louis: S-EL is a framework with which groups of people, even as few as two, can intentionally create their own betterment—and that of their relationship. The theory is simple: As Social-Emotional Leaders emerge to look out for the well-being of others, we will help each other become our better selves. In turn, becoming our better selves will make the groups we comprise stronger. As social beings, what Jonathan Haidt calls “hive creatures”, we need this support of others to contribute to our positive growth and evolution.

Sherri: How is this more than just being nice? What does that mean – “to look out for the well-being of others”?

Louis: It means being a true friend – inspiring, authentic, honest, comforting, challenging, hopeful, realistically optimistic, and wholly appreciative. It’s simply being an accountability partner. Consider a woman who needs to lose weight because it is affecting her physical and emotional health. A Social-Emotional Leader could be someone with whom she sets SMART goals and the resulting social accountability is what gives her the nudge to actually do it.

Sherri: Like the coach—or the reliable friend—we all could be!

Louis: Right. Individual Social-Emotional Leaders live in what Robert Quinn calls “the fundamental state of leadership.” This is simply a state of ever-increasing levels of integrity. Our Social-Emotional Leaders help us bring balance and focus to that task. They bring our actions in line with our values.

Sherri: In that sense, we all need Social-Emotional Leaders. And we all can be Social-Emotional Leaders, right?

Louis: Yes! And many people already are. Think about the mentors and coaches already in your life and consider the role they play in helping you build on your strengths and stay motivated. Sometimes they are your truth tellers, other times your cheerleaders and always possibility generators.

Sherri: What do Social-Emotional Leaders do? How can our readers become Social-Emotional Leaders themselves?

Louis: Social-Emotional Leaders take people already on their teams (at home, at school, or at work, for example) and ensure that they are all playing the same game. S-EL is the “game” that could help us evolve more positively—that is, to help each other become more virtuous as true “Aristotelian friends” would.

Sherri: So to recap, Social-Emotional Leaders nudge those they care about to operate from a positive paradigm. What are the steps involved?

Louis: First and foremost, they invite people into that possibility, very intentionally, and simply, through dialogue. Further, in every interaction, they use, model, and talk about their own strengths, so that others can potentially learn how to activate similar, complimentary strengths. Character strengths lead to integrity. We know from empirical research that strengths can be built.

Sherri: So Social-Emotional Leaders “steer” positive change by using an appreciative approach—building what is already good, making it better. How would a Social-Emotional Leader do this?

Louis: One way is to kindle curiosity with the people around them about what’s already good, thereby creating psychological and social capital to enable positive change. I think one of the first steps is to build authentic positive emotion. Who doesn’t like to have fun? Barb Fredrickson’s work can be applied here. The broadening and building effects of positive emotion can create the space to begin generative conversations about well-being, values, and strengths. As David Cooperrider says, “Human systems move in the direction of the questions they ask.”

Sherri: So, give us an example. I understand you have been conducting action-research with your family.

Louis: Yes, and I’m learning a lot which is helping me build the S-EL model. To thirty extended family members (and a family business), I offered the invitation, then helped create positive space, and now I am slowly introducing the tools that could enable our own flourishing. Baby steps are important, as is leveraging other Social-Emotional Leaders. We have a slew of them in my network and I bet you do too.

Sherri: What did you do with thirty people?

Louis: The first thing I did with my family involved setting up a Nintendo Wii tournament on Easter this past year. Instead of the normal eating and drinking that typically consume our family events, we stepped out of that box and created a new custom, which generated lots of positive emotion for all three generations attemding the party! We have since organized other fun and engaging events, like a field day this summer, which has created the space for us to have a more formal discussion using the VIA (which everyone took) and other tools of positive psychology.

Sherri: How do you see S-EL working at school?

Louis: Schools are an extension of homes and can teach the tools to emerging Social-Emotional Leaders. Imagine groups of families doing this type of work I am doing with my family and the collective efficacy that could result. Schools are a natural gateway for S-EL – the place where the tools of positive psychology could be disseminated in educational programs that transcend the walls of the school and into the homes it supports. It is the place from which a call-to-action could engage an entire community.

Sherri: Can you give us an example of a Social-Emotional Leader at school?

Louis: Imagine a girl trying to improve her grades but making excuses for why she can’t seem to get down to work. A Social-Emotional Leader would kindle curiosity by asking questions that she may not have considered, like, “What would it look like for you to succeed here and how can I help you make this happen?” As such, her Social-Emotional Leader could be a peer, her parent or a teacher—hopefully combinations of each. The tragedy is in letting someone like this fall through the cracks, growing up feeling like a loser or failure, because that is a real risk. Or a student in a school community working to become more “green” might ask another student, “Do you need that plastic top on your cup? Or that straw? You will only be sitting 20 feet from the drink machine. Perhaps we can save the plastic.” It’s a question, not a requirement. This sort of leadership lets a person choose positive social change because he can see his role in it.

Sherri: Tell us about your preliminary research with students.

Louis: We conducted interviews at an independent school in the US, and illustrated that some students naturally know how to be good Social-Emotional Leaders, but that they are often taking a risk in standing up for someone else (or the environment)—a risk that doesn’t necessarily involve a formalized and intentional or even widely accepted “way of being” in their community. But they do speak up and take the risk. 

Sherri: It’s all about giving people the choice – the call, the invitation to be, as Ghandi entreats us “the change they wish to see in the world.”

Louis: Exactly. Social-Emotional Leaders have the questions – not necessarily the answers. They help us envision what could be, and lead us in baby steps to get there. In other words, they help us see the abundance, the possibility, and the hope for a better, coactively designed future. They invite us into that possibility.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Begin today!! –Invite someone you care about into an appreciative dialogue –Ask powerful and appreciative questions –See the abundance and possibility in a future you intentionally create –Model strengths through positive social change –Grow in integrity and flourish !

Here’s to you, Miss Robinson – Students love you more than you may know! Peak-End Rules and Our Teachers

Do you have a memory of a teacher who really made a difference in your life? For me, it was Miss Robinson, my third grade teacher.

I vividly remember one moment when she greeted me at the classroom doorway. She always had something nice to say to me, but that day was special. I don’t recall the words she said, but I can still remember the feeling, and smiling from ear to ear. She was probably capitalizing (active constructive responding) on something I said. I placed an anecdote about this moment in a book that Sherri Fisher, Dave Shearon, and I are writing.

This is an illustration of the peak-end rule, studied by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. He claims that people tend to remember and judge past experiences based what they were like when they were at their peak, and how the experience ended. The peak experience can be either pleasant or unpleasant.

In January, my father and step-mother called to tell me that they had been introduced to Miss Robinson by a mutual friend. Miss R. had retired about 10 years ago after many years as a teacher and building principal. Hearing the last name “Yeager” jogged her memory and she asked if they had a son. Then it all came together for her. “Yes, I had John in third grade. He was a very quiet boy.” She asked my father to please remember her to me, and to also ask me what I remembered about her class.

Soon after, I called Miss Robinson and told her how important that moment in the doorway was to me, and how much I still value the memory after almost 46 years. Her strong, low pitched voice echoed with gratitude. At age 77, she hadn’t lost the spark in her voice. Then, something very interesting happened. The sensory experience of hearing her voice transported me back to third grade and a time she held me responsible for some “off task” behavior in class. She was tough at times, holding us accountable, but was always fair.

Another example of the peak-end rule came from an unpleasant memory in first grade. The boys and girls in my class had all been escorted to our respective lavatories. Not needing to “go” at that time, I went in and just washed my hands. Twenty minutes or so, after returning to the classroom, my brain and body signaled me that it was time to go. So, I raised my hand and asked my teacher for permission to go to the rest room. Her answer was an emphatic “NO! You already had your chance.” Well, I showed her! Unfortunately, the shame of a yellow puddle under my desk wasn’t a memory I would choose to keep.

So, here’s to you Miss Robinson, my third grade teacher. And here’s to you, my first grade teacher. As an educator for the past 33 years, I have never once refused a student’s plea to use the rest room. Thanks for the memories!

(Text originally published 3/11/2009 at Positive Psychology News Daily. John writes on the 11th of each month.)