Change

The desire to fit in is a powerful shaper of behavior. In some cases, social pressures serve us well. In other cases, social pressures are lagging behind their times. Here’s how to use social pressure to extinguish four unhealthy social norms.

This is another PPND tradition: to collect suggestions from authors about ways to start the New Year. Our authors have written about building habits, starting rituals, starting small and building on, goals, satisficing, moving to action quickly, and other approaches to making year-round healthy changes stick.

During last week’s Positive Education Summit in the UK, I was exceedingly fortunate to be invited by Martin Seligman to a dinner where the general topic of conversation was the future of positive psychology and positive education. At Seligman’s request, we stuck to the one-conversation rule which meant that everyone could hear and respond to everyone else’s contributions.

When we are dissatisfied with our jobs, often our first instinct is to say, “Get out!” The very next thought is, “I can’t!” Then we feel stuck, and the emotional downward spiral begins. There is something we can do that is more effective than simply enduring the pain while stewing in resentment. In the short term, we can try re-crafting our job until we can create a longer-term solution.

Since most business leaders are immersed in their own negativity bias, there is a distinct competitive advantage for focusing on the positive side of the science. Positive approaches remind us not only to give our attention to our most challenging customers and employees, but also to spend quality time with our best customers and employees. If you are in business, it is likely that your competitors are neglecting some of these opportunities. If you can do them well, you can indeed profit from the positive.

There are places where people live longer, happier and healthier lives. They are mostly in remote places such as Okinawa in Japan. On average, those who live in such places live 10 or more years longer than the average, enjoying active lives well into their 90s. What can we learn from these healthy people? The most important lesson is that people living in these geographic areas do not achieve this in isolation. The healthy choice is “the way we do things around here.”

It’s only now with sophisticated brain imaging that we are starting to see the neurological impacts of habits, giving us new clues into how to change them. While the elixir still eludes us, Charles Duhigg has brought us a few steps forward in his book The Power of Habit, discussing not only the habits of individuals but also the habits of organizations and societies.

This is Part Two of the coverage of the CoreChange AI Summit in Cincinnati covering the 4 D stages. Read comments by local activist Peter Block. See how Cincinnati (home of the VIA Institute) may well make history with plans to create the first ever Strengths-Based City.

Over 500 attendees participated in Cincinnati’s CoreChange Appreciative Inquiry Summit. The task? “Invent the New American City to Bring Peace, Prosperity and Health to our Core Neighborhoods.”

Read about David Cooperrider’s leadership and how he was persuaded to facilitate by Dr. Victor Garcia, a Cincinnati surgeon. Then come back Monday for more stories about a city-wide summit with a powerful agenda.

Yesterday I wrote about secrets of goal setting. A survey conducted a few years ago by consultancy FranklinCovey found that 35% of respondents break their resolutions by the end of January. Actually, I was surprised the figure wasn’t higher. So goal commitment is also an important area to examine more closely in positive psychology coaching for self or others.

I sympathize if you’re one of the estimated 35% of people who have already fallen off the wagon and given up on your New Year’s Resolutions, but help is at hand. Positive psychology coaching offers some useful insights into setting goals and sticking with them that might help just help you see them through.

It’s difficult to change. This is demonstrated by the number of New Year’s resolutions people make and how few of them actually persist. But what if most failures to change are not because of a lack of motivation, commitment, or willpower? What if understanding immunity to change could lead to lasting beneficial change?

I was very excited to be asked to review Sue Roffey’s latest book. Previously a teacher, Roffey is now an educational psychologist, consultant, and writer. The book’s aim is to go beyond what teaching manuals usually do, which is to provide ways to manage poor pupil behavior so that it doesn’t disrupt other students’ learning. This book also provides the strategies to foster positive pupil behavior.

This week marks the third annual Sustainable Cleveland 2019, an Appreciative Inquiry (AI) summit led by David Cooperrider for the city of Cleveland. I had the opportunity to interview one of the participants, Louis Alloro, who is also involved in SOMO Leadership, a business that emerged from the first Sustainable Cleveland conference held in 2009.

As an educator, one of the talks I was most eager to hear at the IPPA World Congress was the presentation titled Geelong Grammar School’s Journey with Positive Education. The Geelong Grammar School is Australia’s largest co-educational boarding school, and as its website now says, it is the world leader in Positive Education.

James McNulty and Frank Fincham challenge a key assumption of positive psychology, that certain psychological traits and processes are inherently beneficial for well-being. They say that context, so often ignored in positive psychology research, is paramount. They suggest that well-being is determined jointly by the interplay between those characteristics and qualities of a person’s social environment. They also aver that psychology is not positive or negative. Psychology is psychology.

During a recent course, an executive turned to us to say, “All this stuff is great and I want to change my behavior, but how do I make sure it sticks long term?” This is an important question for positive psychology practitioners. Reading an article by Brendan Koerner, I realized there is much that Alcoholics Anonymous can teach us about long-term change even in the face of addiction.

It’s Memorial Day, a time to think about people who are gone. It’s also a good time to think about posttraumatic growth, the experience of positive change that comes through struggling with loss. Growth emerges from struggling with a broken picture of the world, putting it back together in new ways. What kinds of posttraumatic growth are there? What behaviors or social contexts accompany growth?