Amanda Horne

What resources are available to design an organizational well-being strategy? To become informed you could read every article here on PPND and find the threads that to weave into your strategy. Or you could refer to the strategies that others have implemented. To get the ball rolling, here are some Australian examples of reusable strategies.

I want to add to Lisa’s review of the book Focus by discussing prevention and promotion focus. Both kinds of focus can sometimes work together. For example, with the goal to exercise more, promotion-focus gives people enthusiasm for the gain of better fitness, and prevention-focus keeps them vigilant in the long term to avoid losing the fitness they built up.

Last week my husband, our friend and I walked for three days on the Great Ocean Walk track in Victoria, Australia. Long walks make for great conversations. One of our discussions was about what makes a good life. How do we turn work, love, play, and service into good work, good love, good play, and good service?

Many people dread strategic planning sessions. But with a different mindset and framework, strategic planning can be energizing, interesting, and engaging. It could even be joyful. SOAR stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Aspirations, and Results. It is a strengths-based approach to strategic thinking that has many positive impacts. SOAR capacities can also be measured.

An executive with great skill at developing others and forming productive teams worried, “But this is a bit fluffy isn’t it?” Grant and Berg find that employees who are pro-socially motivated take initiative, persist in meaningful tasks, help others, enhance the well-being of others, perform better at work, and have more energy. So why do people think these skills are fluffy?

Civility is the subject of Christine Porath’s chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship. She presents the state of empirical research into civility in the workplace. She notes that there has been less empirical research into the benefits of civility than into the costs of incivility. She also makes several suggestions for building civility into workplace cultures.

This book helps coaches enhance their current coaching practices by applying a strengths-focus. The book does not preach. It leaves readers with a sense that they need to take what works, test it, be discriminating, and most of all be situational. The book is informative, practical, and will give all readers a wealth of ideas, approaches, thoughts, and techniques.

In Kim Cameron’s Deviance Continuum, designed for use in businesses and other organizations, normality or healthy performance is a mid-point between positively deviant and negatively deviant performance. Negative and positive deviance are aberrations from normal functioning, problematic at one end and virtuous at the other.

In his chapter of the Oxford Handbook of Positive Organizational Scholarship, Marc Lavine defines positive deviance as “uncommon behavior that does not conform to expected norms but would be deemed positive by a referent group.” He explores a number of examples of positive deviance, mostly in social services settings, and ponders ways to increase the uptake of the idea in business settings.

If virtuousness is excellence in the human soul, what comprises excellence in the soul of an organization or business?

It’s not unusual for me to hear from my coaching clients that one of their problems is that they need to speak up more and to think on their feet. Using a strengths mindset, I ask my clients how they benefit from being quiet in meetings and the advantage of not being so outgoing. When they reply easily and with energy (and usually with a look of relief on their faces) it reveals that their quietness is their strength.

Sha-en Yeo is a 2011 MAPP graduate who lives in Singapore. To bring a perspective from another part of the world, I interviewed Sha-en on her work in positive education, where she has been inspired to think of innovative ways of delivering the research in digestible pieces as well as ways to make people experience positive psychology, rather than just learn the textbook definition.

The Australian Institute of Business Wellbeing hosted the 3rd Australian Positive Psychology and Wellbeing Conference on 22-25 March 2012. The conference is run every two years, and each time moves to another city and is hosted by a local university. The theme this year was Positive 2012: Spotlight on the Future.

When you listen, are you really listening? Had you ever considered that when you’re listening well, you’re enhancing your health and the health of others? This last question might seem strange, since using good listening techniques is not usually thought of as a well-being practice.

In the days leading up to Christmas Day, some people like to use an Advent Calendar to count down the days, some with a small gift each day such as a chocolate. In 2011, Kurt Shuster turned this idea around to create the online Acts of Kindness Advent Calendar. Find out why and what he learned in this interview by Amanda Horne.

“Isn’t there a place in which we’re not positive or negative, but we’re neutral and objective?” This comment was made recently by a member of team in a discussion about how emotions, reactions, and behaviors impact team conversations and team relationships. This comment led to a broader discussion of how individuals can apply mindfulness practices to be less reactive and more constructive in workplace interactions.

Under the broad umbrella of Positive Psychology, Leary and Guadagno have related research and theories of the hypo-egoic state, a “psychological state characterized by relatively little involvement of the self,” to the achievement of optimal functioning. That’s not something you would typically find in a basic book on Positive Psychology or happiness.

At a recent leadership conference, a speaker discussed new research on high performance workplaces in Australia. He showed that some positive emotions are highly correlated with performance. However feeling loved rated as low, at almost equivalent levels in the high and low performance organizations. In the discussion, nobody mentioned the word, love. A no-go area? Contrast this to Geoff Aigner’s work on Leadership and Love, where he makes the case that leadership and leading is about growth, “…and things grow with love.”

Here are some statements from the Science of the Mind Forum held recently in Brisbane Australia with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, psychologist Paul Ekman, neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni, Buddhist scholar B. Allan Wallace, and psychiatrist Patrick McGorry. The panel was moderated by ABC Radio National’s Natasha Mitchell. Transcripts and recordings are available from ABC.

Continuing with the theme of covering some of the chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology and Work, this month’s article covers key points from Chapter 12: “More than…