DaveShearon

Happiness, worry, & resilience

Judith Warner in today's NYTimes writes about politics, but in the midst includes these two paragraphs:

This aversion to joyful anticipation is a feeling I know very well, and not just in relation to politics. Anticipating the worst – from birthdays, other holidays, vacations – is kind of my modus vivendi.

It is a habit of mind so natural and ingrained – and seemingly self-protective – that I’ve never thought to change it. Until this week, when a friend pointed out that, if one were to think like a realist instead of a knee-jerk pessimist, enjoying the moments in life when good things might be about to happen makes sense.

Ms. Warner's passage reminds me of the construct developed by Julie Norem: "defensive pessimism" -- lowering expectations in risky situations and doing lots of planning to avoid the worst.  It's a strategy for managing high levels of anxiety.  I would echo Ms. Warner's phrase of "seemingly self-protective."  The result may be more to protect one from success than from failure!  My classmate Caroline Miller reports that it is regret over goals not pursued -- perhaps from anxiety -- that is the hardest hurdle for her coaching clients to clear.

Karen Reivch, Andrew Shatte, Jane Gillham and others however, have offered an alternative approach in their research based on Seligman's explanatory style.  This approach involves flexible, realistic, pragmatic optimism with the capacity for putting anxieties in perspective.  Their work is is popularly available in The Resilience Factor and The Optimistic Child.  It's what I teach when I work with lawyers or educators.  I've seen the results and the research on the resilience approach and highly recommend it if anxiety about the future is hampering your enjoyment of life or holding you back from setting and reaching personally meaningful goals.

A lesson while fishing...

My monthly post is up over at Positive Psychology News Daily.  

Chasin' your goals!

Here's another in the series on Positive Psychology through Country Music, this time in honor of the late Jerry Reed.  The first lines to this song are:

East bound and down, loaded up and truckin!

We gonna do what they say can’t be done.

We’ve got a long way to go and a short time to git there.

I’m east bound just watch ole Bandit run!

My classmate, Caroline Miller, is an expert on goals, and she's helped me re-evaluate their importance.  Caroline says the toughest regrets her clients face are those about goals they did not pursue.  Goals can generate focus, determination, energy, and excitement.

So, how 'bout you?  Any crazy, wild, can't-be-done goals pulling at you?  What are you trying to do that "they" say can't be done? Or have you lost the ability to feel the pull?  No guarantee you'll succeed, but opting for the safe way often isn't very successful either.  What's going to be your story?

These don't have to be pointless, daredevil style goals.  Maybe you want to do something that matters.  I once ran for and won a seat on the Nasvhille School Board because I wanted to make a difference.  Resigned for the same reason.  Now I'm working to improve lawyering and education.  Seems crazy sometimes, but it sure is energizing!  Is something like that pulling at you?

Who's your Smokey?  Who's going to try and stop you.  I'm not talking about those who have reasonable expectations of you -- family and loved ones.  We've all got responsibilities to meet and we need to meet them -- but that's not the complete barrier to pursuing those crazy, demanding, challenging, meaningful goals we sometime make it out to be.  No, I'm talking about those out there who're going to want to stop you because, well, maybe just because!  Or maybe you scare them.  Or threaten them.  Whatever.  If you lead, some will accuse you of bad motives and personal character flaws.  Who's your Smokey?

And who's your Snowman?  Or your Bandit?  Are you hauling the load, or clearing the path?  Who's on your team?  Maybe yours aren't solo goals. 

If something's been pulling at you, if you've got a goal you've been fighting, you might want to give it another think.  If you've lost touch with your goals and are just sort of going through the motions, "fidgeting till you die" as Marty Seligman says, then maybe now's the time to re-engage.  Build some well-being, re-configure your explanatory style, dig into your strengths, nurture your relationships.  I suspect you'll find some goals glimmering into sight like stars on a moonless night. 

OK.  Enough preaching.  Sometimes that Baptist-since-birth thing just gets the better of me!

Hope y'all are doing well! 

What's in a bunch of words?

Surfing around, I noticed some posts in the political realm using word clouds on candidate speeches.  Made me wonder how my web sites might come out.  First, I went to www.shearonforschools.com -- the website I set up when I was running for the school board in Nashville and then maintained while I was on the board and for a couple of years afterwards.  I pulled all the text I had written (over 15,000 words), ran it through http://wordle.net, and got this:

I pulled all my book notes off that site (over 64,000 words) and got:

That seems about right to me.  I thought, talked, and wrote more about students as a board member.  I read and studied about how teachers and schools can change so they work better. 

Finally, looking at this blog since the Fall of 2005 when I started the MAPP program, I get:

Interesting in that my sense is that my focus has turned more to lawyers, lawyering, and law schools over the last two years.  I suspect, however, most of that work has produced products such as materials and powerpoints for CLE presentations, memos, etc. -- none of which would show up here.  On the other hand, I do still do a good bit of work in the K-12 education world, including working with Superintendents' Study Councils through the Penn Graduate School of Education, the work with teachers from the UK in the summer of '07 and with Geelong Grammar School in Australia in January of this year.  And the continuing work with my colleagues John Yeager and Sherri Fisher at Culver Academies.

Dancing, Leadership, & Positive Deviance

Matt dances, he thinks badly, but watch:

So, he's doing his thing, and seems to be enjoying it, but that's about it, right?  What happened to your mood as you watched the video?  Did it go up a bit?  Did you want to dance?  Did you want to dance with Matt?  Now watch this:

What's the difference?  People, right?   Other people wanting to dance with Matt.  That's leadership.  Which video had the most emotional impact on you?  Which got the biggest smile?

At wherethehellismatt.com, Matt tells his story.  He wanted to travel, and did.  A friend suggested making a video of his bad dancing in front of places he visited.  His first videos were just of him dancing, and they went on his website where friends and family could track his travels.  Then he began to get emails from people all over the world who wanted to dance with him.  (In the first video, there's a woman in Bangkok and a little girl in Seattle who start to dance with him -- it's contagious!)  So, he went to Stride Gum with the idea of making a video with other people dancing and the second video is the result.

In his new book,Positive Leadership, Kim Cameron describes four strategies that can lead to positively deviant performance -- performance significantly and qualitatively above normal in a desired direction.  The first is cultivating a positive climate -- where positive emotions predominate over negative emotions in the work environment.  Barb Fredrickson's work shows that, in such an environment, people will have

• broader thought action repertoires and
• build physical, psychological, and social capital to enable future performance.

I've had a personal experience with this phenomenon.  After finishing my MAPP degree, two Tennessee attorneys, Andy Branham and Candice Reed, got me started doing a series of "Lawyering and the Good Life" seminars.  Shortly after that series finished, I had to hire a new Associate Director.  I received a resume from a very capable individual, but one who did not have a law license -- a job requirement.  I sent her an email and got back the reply that she did not have a law degree, but that she had attended one of the programs and left saying to herself that, if she ever got the chance, she would like to work with me.  So, when she saw the position announcement, she just sent her resume!  Now, she had seen me at my best for a short period of time, but in a setting that built positive emotions, and she came away interested in working with me.  Isn't that part of the response you want from those you lead?

Leadership is a bit like getting others to dance.  As a leader, are you dancing?  Are others joining you?

Morale, Change, and Positive Organizations

That's my July post at Positive Psychology News Daily.  It begins:

 This article is about morale and how organizations can help us change for the better.  Have you got any stories about great morale in an organization and its effect on the members?  Maybe how a terrific leader or group response to a challenge improved morale?  Let’s hear your story! 

Chris Peterson, a faculty member for the MAPP program, his research partner Nansook Park, and Patrick Sweeney of the United States Military Academy have published “Group Well-Being:  Morale from a Positive Psychology Perspective” in Applied Psychology: An International Review.  They note that the study of institutions that enable those things that make life worth living is “the acknowledged weak link of positive psychology” and suggest that research on “morale” as a group level construct can move the field forward in this area.  Since I am working now on a 90-minute presentation I will give at the 1L orientations of two law schools in Tennessee in August, this article connected with thinking I am doing both about organizations and initiating and facilitating individual change and growth.

The authors suggest that morale is both an individual and a group construct and should be studied at both levels with methodologically independent measures.  Peterson et al. note that positive psychology has made progress in studying other ordinary language concepts by articulating their dimensions and devising separate measure for them, e.g., happiness includes dimensions of pleasure, engagement, and meaning.  The components they suggest are:

Read the rest...

Thinking and feeling

Maybe it’s because I live in Nashville (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!), but I keep finding great expressions of positive psychology principles in country music.  One recent example is Dierks Bentley’s What Was I Thinking.  The song features a young man reflecting on a night out with a wild and crazy young woman and the things his emotions got him to do — a fight in a biker bar among them!  The refrain is a rueful ”Well, I know what I was feeling, but what was I thinking?”  (As I write this, you can see the music video and hear the song here, but the link likely will not be valid for long.

Often, it is our emotions that help us realize, “Hey! Something’s going on here.”  One of the key resilience skills is the ability to do ABC analysis.  The “A” is an activating event (good or bad), though often we focus on “adversities” because how we explain such negative events seems to be very important.  The “B” stands for beliefs, or how we think about and explain the situation.  The “C” are the emotions and actions that come from those beliefs.  Recently, Sherri Fisher, John Yeager, and I have been working with TEACH(tm), especially as we work in the education field.  This acronym stands for Thoughts - Emotions - Actions - Consequences - Here we go again!  Thoughts lead to Emotions which power Actions which cause Consequences which start either an upward or downward spiral.  Some folks seem to work more easily with this representation than with with ABC.

Either way, the insight from the song is that our emotional reactions often are the clue that something important has happened — the “activating event.”  As in the song, we can often work backwards from our emotions to the thoughts that preceded and facilitated them.  The insight of cognitive behavioral therapy that’s captured and put to work in resilience training is that by working with out thoughts about a situation, we can also change our emotions.  Changing our emotions helps change our actions, thus consequences, and makes upward spirals more likely!

Enjoy the song, and hopefully now it will have a hidden message for you, and you don’t even have to play it backward!

cross-posted from PPND -- see the interesting discussion in the comments there

For more on resilience:

The Resilience Factor by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte

The Optimistic Child by Martin Seligman

Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman

Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child by John Gottman, John Declaire, and Daniel Goleman

Change your tv, change your life

 That's a line from a TV commercial I saw tonight for a brand of high-definition television.  That's just wrong on so many levels.  But, especially from the life-changing aspect. 

• Research shows that television viewing is below average in enjoyment for the optional activities available to us. 
• Most of us would gain by spending that time on other enjoyable activities that also help us achieve goals we value, such as good relationships with our friends, mastering a skill, etc.  See p 192 in Breaking Murphy's Law by Susan Segerstrom. 
• Not to mention how unhappy we could be with that tv if we actually spent much time and effort shopping for the "best."  See, The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz, or read one of his articles on his research here.

What do clients want?

On LinkedIn, I just ran across this question submitted by another user:

Over the past ten years I have consumed a fair amount of legal services in a variety of areas. I have found it difficult to find the quality of service I am looking for. In general, it just seems like lawyers are so busy that they don't have time to really understand their clients.

It also seems like a lot of the "problems" clients (including me) take to attorneys are not in fact legal problems. For example, when a partnership goes bad we go to an attorney seeking a legal solution when in fact the problem is really a business or relationship problem. Is an attorney really the best equiped/trained person to consult with in these situations? Perhaps we just don't know where else to turn.

I answered as follows:

Dan, I'm concerned that those of us in the legal field are not adequately equipped to solve the problems that clients present.  Rather, practicing lawyers too often screen those problems, pull out just the legal "bits", and assume those bits are their domain, only their domain, and nothing else is in their domain.  I've overseen continuing legal education (CLE) in Tennessee for two decades, gotten a Masters in Applied Positive Psychology, and spoken to lawyers about the relationship of well-being to productivity, collegiality, problem sovling, creativity, relationships, and health, and I'm still concerned about this area. 

I suspect what you want is more of a full-service counselor, one cognizant of legal specifics, but also fluent in interpersonal, social dimensions.  Sometimes, the most efficient solution is not through use of legal tools, but only a lawyer could know that.  So, better lawyering is about more than just proficiency as a legal technician.

 

Back to Culver!

Next week I'm off to Culver again to work with my colleagues John Yeager and Sherri Fisher in another set of Broaden & Build seminars.  We'll be in the room at the far right of the picture, just past the golf cart!

I haven't seen John since last Fall or Sherri since last summer, so I'm looking forward to catching up with them and just having a chance to visit.  Plus, one of the members of the latest MAPP class, Louis Alloro, will be joining us for the first part of the week.  I got to meet Louis in Philadelphia a few weeks ago when I was doing my final session with a group of school superintendents.  We had dinner together and he came to the session.  Impressive guy!  I'm looking forward to seeing him again also.

We'll be running the fifth (!) B&B seminar for Culver faculty -- don't know where this puts us in terms of per cent participation, but it's got to be pushing 70% -- From Sun - Tues.  Then, from Wed - Fri we'll be working for the second time with the counsellors and staff for Culver's summer camps.  I love helping people get a handle on the positive psychology constructs and figure out how to apply it to their work and their lives.  This will be fun!