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

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.

The 84% Solution: Part 1

What is the most important research from positive psychology for those interested in school leadership? 

There are lots of candidates.  Martin Seligman’s explanatory style construct is powerful.  He’s written The Optimistic Child, and Karen Reivich, Jane Gilham, et al., have built off that construct to develop a resilience program for middle schoolers that helps avoid the onset of depression. Carol Dweck’s work on self-theories of intelligence was also inspired by Dr. Seligman’s insights, and that work is extraordinarily applicable to the K-12 environment.  And the late Rick Snyder’s work on hope has also been successfully taught in a school setting with measurable positive results. 

However, positive psychology’s main message to school leaders, especially superintendents, is in what I call “The 84% Solution.”  The 84% Solution recognizes that school systems require more leadership than one leader can provide.  So, how does the superintendent, at the system level, and the principal at the school level, create a highly effective team of engaged leaders?  Answer:  the 84% Solution. 

One prong of The 84% Solution is to invest time and attention on the ingredients of the solution: the formal and informal members of the leadership team.  This is what Jim Collins in Good to Great called “getting the right people on the bus” and in the right seats.  Larry Bossidy, former CEO, has written that he routinely spent 20% of his time on people processes, going up to 30-40% when he was re-building.  Positive psychology can help with this part of the process by providing a strengths-based way of looking at individuals and their capacities.  Both the Values in Action Signature Strengths Survey and Gallup’s Strengthsfinder 2.0 are valuable tools in this area, but the key is developing a strengths vision.  That is, superintendents and principals can improve their leadership qualities by learning to see and think about those on their teams, or candidates, in terms of strengths.  Some leaders have strengths that make this transition easy.  Others may need to rely on members of their teams who have clear strengths vision or get the assistance of tools like the VIA or Strengthsfinder 2.0.  But the clear message of positive psychology is that getting team members in positions where they can act and relate every day based on their strengths will significantly improve the performance of the team. 

The second prong of The 84% Solution is the ratio of positive to negative interactions in the team.  Marcial Losada’s work has established the applicability of non-linear systems to leadership teams.  After studying highly successful, moderately successful, and unsuccessful business leadership teams, he has identified the ratios of positive to negative interactions that open up the necessary emotional space for creativity and high performance. 

Success requires a minimum 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions.  That’s five statements or actions of support, interest, and encouragement for every one of criticism, hostility, or sarcasm.  Mediocrity can be achieved with about a 3:1 ratio.  Below 3:1 and failure becomes the “point attractor” toward which the actions of the team will spiral.  So, 5 out of 6 interactions need to be positive, or 5/6, or, rounding up because you do not want to be on the wrong side of this ratio, “The 84% Solution.”  (Some may want to know if you can get too positive.  Yes, but it seems to be at a ratio greater than 11:1.  If the interactions of your team are more than 92% positive, you may want to do a reality check – but given our societal bias that thinking negatively proves you are smart, it is unlikely this will be a problem for most teams!) 

So, how is your team?  How are the teams in your schools?  Are you injecting daily doses of positive interactions into your leadership environment?  Remember that for every dose of negativity you or your initiatives generate, someone has to come up with five doses of positivity to keep the team functioning at a successful level.