Positive Psychology and Coaching

My MAPP colleagues and I were discussing the number of books on happiness being published at the moment: Lyubomirsky's "The How of Happiness" is the latest. Great book, shame about the sunny yellow cover...

Is it possible, we wondered, to broadcast the important positive psychology research findings, i.e. the ones that might make a difference to the way people live their lives, without it being accused of being merely happiology, or moralistic? For example, research tells us (if our grandmothers haven't already) that earning large amounts of money doesn't make a significant difference to our happiness levels. It also shows that building strong relationships (with friends and family, between generations, in the community and at work) is one of the most important things we can do to improve our well-being. Yet the vast majority of us still act like money is the be all and end all.

It's a difficult call, we concluded, especially when the media the world over insists on calling it happiology, as this recent article from PressTV in Tehran illustrates.


Choosing the right Positive Psychology interventions

We also discussed whether Lyubomirsky's emphasis (Chapter 3) on the importance of choosing activities to fit your lifestyle was useful or not. If, as a coach, you leave it up to the client to choose their own interventions, the chances are they won't go for the ones which look too simple, such as keeping a gratitude diary, yet activities like this can have a profound effect.

Opting for more difficult ones (such as meditation) straight off might need a great deal more perseverance. It's worth discussing these potential difficulties with your client before deciding what approach to take. Experienced coach and trainer, Lucy Ryan, suggests advising clients to try the simple interventions first - they have nothing to lose, and a great deal to gain, after all.

Life Lists: Goal Achievement and Happiness

As we mentioned in this post, it seems that Seligman's 3 pillars of happiness and well-being (positive emotion, engagement and meaning) may soon be joined by two more, namely positive relationships and positive achievement.

I doubt many would argue about positive relationships being a corner-stone of happiness and well-being, although you might be interested to know that there is remarkably little published scientific research into this field. But the importance of positive achievements seems to have people divided.

In the business world, goal-setting has been the back-bone (along with a smidgen of good luck) of company and personal prosperity since the dawn of time. Call it strategy, business planning or personal development planning, it's all about creating a new, more successful future. To some, particularly coaches, goal-setting and accomplishment is vital, it's what successful coaching is all about. When we were training as coaches, one of the first things we learnt was how to help clients (or coachees) define where they want to be by setting their goals clearly and then to help them achieve these goals. After all, how can you get where you want to go unless you know where you're going in the first place?

Goal-setting is also making its way into normal life; you will no doubt have noticed yourself the proliferation of books and articles about so-called Life Lists, those 101-things-you-must-do/see/experience- before-you-die type lists. Earlier in the year for example, the New York Times published an article called 10 Things To Do Before I Finish This Article. If you google 'Life Lists', you'll retrieve millions of entries, such as the original 43things.com, which invites you to publish your own Life List and which contains everything from the quirky ("build a trebuchet") to the frankly quite dull ("organise my filing cabinet"). You can get Life List websites which list the things you need to consider when making your list. Curiously, in my google search for UK Life Lists, three of the top ten were by bird-watchers; it left me wondering whether twitchers are happier than your average UK resident. Perhaps that could be the subject of my MAPP dissertation.....

There are even people who make their living out of their Life List, such as John Goddard, aka 'The World's Greatest Goal Achiever'. This is a man who has achieved 109 of his 127 life goals (you should look at them, this is not a man who needs to organise his filing cabinet...). Interestingly, his 126th goal was to marry and have children - he now has five. My question is, how on earth does he get time for them, in between scaling Mount Kilimanjaro, retracing the steps of Marco Polo and Alexander the Great, and exploring the Amazon river?

And going back to coaching for a moment, Caroline Adams-Miller, the well-known US life coach, author and Pennsylvania MAPP graduate, specialises in goal-setting theory and happiness in her coaching practice, based on the research evidence that identifying and achieving ones goals can increase your well-being (e.g. Locke 2005). Miller has also set up a very successful website where people can make a public statement about their goals, called Your100things.com.

But Life Lists don't attract support from every quarter; there are some who think that making a list of what you want to achieve in life actually detracts from what life is all about, i.e. living. I don't often listen to BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day on the Today programme, but this one by Rhidian Brook about Life Lists caught my attention, particularly Brook's claim that "They provide us with a kind of short cut to meaningful achievement and self-fulfilment". I'm not sure that's the case at all. Surely it depends to a large extent what your goals are (materialistic? altruistic?), whether they are realistic goals or just wild dreams, and how relentlessly you pursue them. Many Life Lists I've looked at contain a mix of goals which cover all Seligman's pillars of well-being (creating pleasure, engagement, meaning and good relationships).

And anyway, who is it who said that 'Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans'?

Standard Chartered's business case for focusing on employee strengths

According to Debbie Whitaker, Standard Chartered's Head of Sustainability, 'everyone has talents that we wish to leverage'.


This is a bold statement, considering Standard Chartered is a bank with over 60,000 employees in 56 countries. Their reasons for focusing on talent are fourfold:

i) greater growth potential
ii) better people performance
iii) increased employee engagement and
iv) attracting and retaining talent.

Many big organisations are sceptical of applying Strengths at work, yet Standard Chartered's experience shows that it can make sound business sense.

A strengths-based approach to management has been operating in the organisation for the past 7 years, using Gallup's StrengthsFinder tool. Whitaker describes a strength as the combination of talent, skill and knowledge, which motivation can transform into world-class performance. In her words, given equal skills and knowledge, talent is what differentiates superior performance from the rest.

So what does Standard Chartered actually do differently to other organisations? Well StrengthsFinder wasn't designed for recruitment purposes, but it can be used to ensure good role fit and that's exactly what has contributed to Standard Chartered's success.The essentials for a salesperson, for example, are good product knowledge and to be able to negotiate and close a deal. But if the salesperson has the additional talents of competitiveness and building rapport with customers, they can become a world-class performer. Not only does Standard Chartered look for specific skills and knowledge, they take innate talents into account too.

It has to be said that there are several definitions of a strength, and the one used here is based on Gallup's research. The VIA-IS or CAPP definitions are different; as always you need to be clear what you are trying to measure.

Standard Chartered also focuses on building employee engagement, and like Royal & SunAlliance which we featured here, they take volunteering seriously, offering two days paid leave for staff to contribute to voluntary organisations.

What the Standard Chartered story shows is that focusing on strengths can make a big difference to the business and to the people who work there. And applying Positive Psychology at work shouldn't be something you do in addition to everything else. Look at your existing people-related processes (e.g. recruitment, development, coaching, mentoring and so on) and see how a strengths-approach would make a positive contribution.

Seligman at Positive Psychology Conference 8th Nov

You'll be delighted to know that Martin Seligman is the keynote speaker at UEL's one day Positive Psychology Conference on Thursday 8th November. Also speaking are Dr Susan David, an Emotional Intelligence expert, Dr Alex Linley, founder and Director of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology, Dr Gurnek Bains, CEO of corporate psychology consultancy YSC (Young Samuel Chambers), as well as our very own Dr Ilona Boniwell who established and leads the UK's first MAPP programme at UEL. Details below.


Positive psychology, well-being and business: Cutting-edge science for organisational success
Thursday 8 November at the University of East London, Docklands, with Professor Martin Seligman

UEL would like to invite you to a special one-day conference, Positive Psychology, Well-being and Business, featuring a keynote speech from world-renowned psychologist Professor Martin Seligman, founder of positive psychology.

Positive Psychology - the scientific study of well-being - is increasingly recognised as having major, lasting benefits for business. Evidence shows that employees with higher levels of well-being are more focused and engaged with their work; are better team-players; have higher levels of motivation; have less illness and absenteeism; and perform better overall.

This new thinking explicitly challenges the conventional wisdom that fixing a weakness is essential to improving performance. Rather, positive psychology concentrates on what drives and motivates success. Globally, many major organisations are implementing the findings of positive psychology and strengths-based performance management in the workplace, helping them to grow and succeed. This conference will enable you to learn how to put these findings into practice in your own business or organisation.

Whether you are involved in business, human resources, social and corporate responsibility, communication, organisational development, marketing, executive coaching, training or business consultancy, this conference could make a valuable contribution to your operational and staff development.

For more details and to register, visit www.uel.ac.uk/positiveconference or contact Sue Meade on 020 8223 4428.

Do let me know if you plan to go, I'd be delighted to meet up with you there.

The Benefit of Positive Emotions at Work

Have you ever thought that emotion has no place in the world of business? Well here's some research that might cause you to stop and think. Do you want to see quickly and easily how positive or negative emotion impacts your current thinking style?

Take a look at these four groups of shapes - for each one do you think pattern A is more like B or C?

According to Barbara Fredrickson's "broaden and build" theory, in this visual processing task people in positive moods are more likely to choose B (global) every time. Fredrickson and Branigan's research* shows that positive moods facilitate more creative, flexible, big-picture thinking, in which positive people remain open to new information. As a result, the number of behavioural options open to them increases.

People in negative moods, on the other hand, are more focused on the detail of a situation, have a more rigid thinking style in which their thought-action repertoire is narrowed. These people are more likely to say pattern A is like C (local).

The good news is that while a positive emotional state is only momentary, there is evidence to suggest that the effect is cumulative, thus you can increase your flexibility and resourcefulness over time.

It's crucial for workplace success to remain as flexible and open to new ideas as possible, so the broaden and build theory has serious implications for business. Specifically you may want to consider how you can foster positive emotions before and during brainstorming sessions, when you want to create as many innovative ideas as possible. In problem-solving situations too, consider what action you can take to sustain a positive frame of mind while you're generating new solutions.

Next time you're in one of these business situations, notice the impact your mood has on your thinking style. In coaching we've noticed that clients who maintain a positive outlook are far more likely to generate ideas than those who allow a negative mood to dominate. Try it for yourself, and let us know how you get on.



* Fredrickson, B.L., & Branigan, C. (2005) "Positive emotions broaden the scope of attention and thought-action repertoires"

Now Discover Your Strengths...Then What?

How to Use Your Character Strengths in New Ways - Part 1

Have you completed the VIA-IS online character strengths survey yet? We find it an excellent starting point for coaching conversations since many people are completely unaware of their strengths, so it can be an instant confidence boost, as well as providing insight into where to make changes to increase overall life/job satisfaction.

Having identified their strengths, many people think 'What now?' so in this post we look at new ways of applying strengths day-to-day. We start with the most common top strengths shown in the UK (Linley et al 2007):

Women: 1.Fairness 2.Kindness 3.Open-mindedness 4.Curiosity and 5. Love of Learning
Men: 1.Open-mindedness 2.Fairness 3.Curiosity & joint 4th Love of Learning and Creativity

FAIRNESS:
i) Act as a mediator - stay impartial in a disagreement between friends/colleagues despite your beliefs
ii) Allow someone to say their piece without interupting them
iii) Notice when you treat someone based on a stereotype or pre-conception: resolve not to do it again.
iv) At least once a day, admit a mistake and take responsibility for it
v) At least once a day, give due credit to a colleague you don't particularly like


OPEN-MINDEDNESS:
i) Every day, pick something you believe strongly, and think about how you might be wrong
ii) Play devil's advocate - discuss a work-related issue or business problem from the side opposite to your personal views
iii) Go to lunch with a colleague who is different to you in some way
iv) Go to a multi-cultural event or to a different church/religious event


KINDNESS / GENEROSITY:
i) Do a random act of kindness every day. Make it anonymous if possible.
ii) Send an e-card to a different friend each day
iii) Pick up the whole bill when you are out with friends
iv) Ring a friend/family member/colleague specifically to find out how they are. Ask them how their day was and actually listen to the answer before telling them about your own day.
v) When driving, give way to pedestrians; when walking, give way to cars


CURIOSITY / INTEREST IN THE WORLD:
i) At lunch, eat something new that you never otherwise would have tried
ii) Ask questions in a meeting (if you don't usually), or find a work-related online forum (such as the CIPDs) and ask questions there
iii) Travel to work by a different route
iv) Go to your local library and pick and interesting-looking book - spend 20 minutes skimming it
v) Read an interesting article in your professional/trade magazine
vi) Go to a meeting or lecture on a topic you know nothing about


LOVE OF LEARNING:
i) Read a different newspaper to the one you would usually read
ii) Find a mentor in a different department at work and set up a regular meeting
iii) Think of an area of the business where you know very little and find a colleague who is prepared to help you learn about it
iv) Take up a new hobby
v) Watch your children playing and reflect on how one learns through play
vi) Find a colleague at work who has a skill you want to learn and model them


CREATIVITY:
i) Keep a journal or work on a picture or a poem
ii) Find a new word everyday and use it creatively every day
iii) Pick one object in your office and think of new uses for it
iv) Wear a new combination of clothes/ shirt & tie to the ones you usually pick
v) Enrol in a pottery or painting class


These are just some examples of activities you can try, you don't have to do them all! In fact, it's recommended that you pick one activity and stick with it for a couple of weeks. And if you find after a couple of days that it's not working for you, switch to something else.

We'll cover the remaining 18 VIA strengths in subsequent posts. In the meantime, we're always looking for new ways to apply strengths in practice, so please send us your comments.

Thanks to Professor Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis, and the students in his psychology class at the University of Virginia for many of the suggested activities.

Positive Psychology Coaching and Flow

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to attend a Performance Coaching Masterclass with Myles Downey, organised by the Academy of Executive Coaching in London. Downey founded the School of Coaching in 1997 and has recently acquired 100% ownership. His book, Effective Coaching: Lessons from the Coach's Coach, has been in my Top 3 since I started coaching and has been a crucial influence on my own approach ; in it he presents a compelling argument for non-directive coaching, in which the key role of the coach is to facilitate the coachee's (or client's or player's)

1) awareness, through actively noticing, and
2) responsibility, by allowing them to actively follow their own interest, make their own choices and decisions.

Awareness and responsibility are essential components of engagement and developing intrinsic motivation, and are therefore crucial to coaching effectiveness and success. Anyone working in business change management and transformation knows that change cannot occur effectively without them.

At the Masterclass, Downey performed two demonstrations, one in which he coached someone to catch a tennis ball one-handed. 'What's that got to do with business coaching?' you might ask. Well, it was a visible and powerful demonstration of what sports psychologist and coach Tim Gallwey referred to as The Inner Game, which is simply

Potential - Interference = Performance.

By getting the coachee to notice and focus their attention on the ball and how it is in flight, interference (in the form of fear, doubt, lack of confidence about ability etc) is removed and the coachee enters a flow state, in which they are more creative, insightful, relaxed, intuitive and objective. Rather than worry about dropping the ball and trying too hard to catch it, the coachee's focus is temporarily placed outside themselves, resulting in visibly improved performance.

With his emphasis on strengths and developing potential I would describe Downey as a true Positive Psychology coach. If you want to understand more about the role of Positive Psychology in coaching read Effective Coaching ; just be aware that the book was first published in 1999, before the term 'Positive Psychology' really came into regular use. Your coaching practice will be re-energised as a result.

Emotional Well Being

A new campaign,Growing Strong, has been launched by the children's charity NCH to raise awareness of the importance of children and young people's emotional well-being to their ability to improve relative life chances and fulfill their potential.

In NCH's survey of over 2000 adults in the UK, 6 out of 10 said emotional well-being (having empathy, confidence, resilience,self-awareness, good social skills and being able to manage your feelings) was important or very important in deciding what they themselves had achieved in life. Other key factors were education and family stability. In fact, emotional well-being was more important that IQ, physical health, family income, where you live or social class.

These findings support the view that there is a growing need to ensure emotional well-being in order to maximise people's life chances. At 10 Consulting, we believe that this applies to adults as well as children: building emotional well-being is a key feature of our positive psychology coaching.

CIPD and NLP

The other day I received the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's enewsletter, and was pleasantly surprised to see NLP mentioned . Many business people, and HR staff in particular, that we have met in the last few years have been pretty dismissive of the benefits of NLP, that's if they have heard of it at all. Even more surprising is the amount of coaches who reject it. You can't get away from the fact that NLP (like coaching) is an unregulated field and in many cases this puts people off. Plus it comes with a whole load of jargon, which some Practitioners like to hide behind.

Anyway, it turns out that the CIPD is now offering two NLP courses, one of which is coaching with NLP.

Although there are some Practitioners who actively cultivate the perception that NLP is a fringe activity, Jenny and I have always been convinced of its business benefits, and have used it successfully in many of our coaching assignments. We see it as an approach which you can easily incorporate into day-to-day life.

The fact that CIPD has 'accepted' NLP is the first step towards it being taken seriously by the business world. Three cheers for that!

More on Your Legacy and Your Contribution

The other day I came across the most fantastic video-blogger on Youtube – a 79 year old called Peter, aka Geriatric1927 . You must listen to this interview with him on the World Service , which is also posted on Youtube. Musing on the fact that what started out as a bit of fun has turned into quite a responsible role, Peter says “I do believe that I’ve encouraged more older people to copy me and have a go and therefore widened the age range of people who use video-blogging, and so I could go out of this world feeling that I have contributed something”.

What a brilliant contribution to have made.

On a similar note, I heard Charles Handy speak last year, he’s one of my favourite management gurus. (he brought “unconditional positive regard” into management-speak years before anyone else). Anyway, the point is that, reflecting on his life and his contribution to the world, Handy mentioned that he writes letters about his view on life, as well as everyday stuff, for his grandchildren to read when they’ve grown up. I thought what a fantastic “legacy” idea this was, a bit like Geriatric1927 on Youtube.

In the meantime, I can thoroughly recommend having a go at writing your own legacy (see this blog entry for details). We use this technique with many of our coaching clients; here are some of their comments:

“It was a very creative way of finding out what really matters to me”

“I was surprised by what came to mind, it wasn’t what I was expecting and it has helped me get my work:life balance sorted out”

Counting your blessings and Writing Wrongs– how to increase your well-being

When Jenny and I were completing our Certified NLP Practitioner’s course, one of the exercises we were required to do was to write a Daily Journal. Part of the Daily Journal focussed on confirming 3 outcomes for the following day, the other part focussed on reviewing the past 24 hours, identifying the best bits and the learning points. John Seymour , our trainer, was confident that this exercise would make a difference to our lives, and informal research amongst our peer group at the time confirmed this to be the case.

Around the time I started writing my journal, I read an article, ‘Writing Wrongs’ , in the first issue of Psychologies magazine by Professor David Servan-Schreiber of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. In the article, about the value of writing things down, he quoted a clinical study which showed that “...those (patients) who had spent just 20 minutes a day writing about their problems, for three days in a row, were feeling better, taking fewer drugs to relieve their symptoms and seeing their doctor less often”. His ‘journal rules’ are as follows:

1. The journal must remain strictly confidential
2. It must be honest (don’t waste time lying to yourself)
3. You must write it on a regular basis…and stick to your timetable.

As a Positive Psychology student, my interest is weighted more towards counting my blessings than writing about the negatives. Nevertheless, I don’t doubt the value of ‘Writing Wrongs’ in specific contexts (and, interestingly, I thought Servan-Schreiber’s explanation of the impact of the process of writing on images stored in the brain made sense of why NLP works).

If, like me, you are keener to try identifying good things in your life than you are to dwell on the bad things, here are the instructions for a 10-15 minute exercise, courtesy of Chris Peterson*

1. At the end of each day, before going to sleep, write down 3 things that went well during the day. Do this every night for 1 week.
2. The 3 things can be of relatively small importance (my friend told me a brilliant joke) or relatively large importance (my friend just got married).
3. After each positive thing, answer in your own words the question “Why did this good thing happen?”

You may be interested to know that Peterson’s own research shows that if you continue to do this exercise beyond the suggested 1 week, you can increase your happiness and decrease your symptoms of depression over the long-term. 10-15 minutes of your time every day doesn’t seem like a lot to ask for such a reward, does it? Go on, have a go, you know you’re worth it....

* Peterson, C, A Primer in Positive Psychology(2006) p38.

Your Legacy

I was reading Professor Chris Peterson’s “A Primer in Positive Psychology” book last night – this was light relief after many nights of trying to get to grips with the terminology in the academic papers for my MSc in Applied Positive Psychology – anyway, he outlined a well known personal development technique called ‘Your Legacy’. It’s a different slant on Seligman’s January Retrospective, which we talked about on the blog a few weeks ago.

Here is Peterson's version of the Legacy exercise:

• Take a clean sheet of paper and a pen (or create a new document on your PC)
• Think ahead to your life as you would like it to be, and especially how you would like to be remembered by the people closest to you. What would you like them to say about you? What accomplishments and personal strengths would they talk about? Try not to indulge in fantasy, but don’t be modest about what you would like your legacy to be either.
• Write a couple of paragraphs, maybe 100-150 words or so.

• Look back at what you’ve written and ask yourself the following two questions: What can I realistically do to bring about my legacy, which is within my control? What am I currently doing now which will move me towards this goal?

Keep what you have written safe, and read it again in a few month’s or a year’s time. Ask yourself whether you have made progress towards your goal. If not, feel free to change your legacy if new goals have emerged – it belongs to you, after all.

And then here is our version of the Legacy exercise, which you may want to do with a close friend in case you find it unsettling. In our experience, the difference between the writing exercise and the doing exercise can be very illuminating, so you may want to do both, and compare results after:

1. Establish a timeline somewhere in the room, noting where the present and the future is represented.
2. Step onto the timeline wherever today is represented, and move along it until you get to the day of your funeral.
3. Stand there for a moment, noticing what is going on: what are people closest to you saying about you? How are they remembering you?
4. What are you saying about yourself?
5. When you have noticed everything there is to notice, move back to the present.
6. In the present, ask yourself what aspects of your legacy you have noticed. How is your legacy different to what you expected? How might you want your legacy to be different? What can you do now to bring about a different legacy?

What our coaching clients find is that this exercise helps them get things in perspective, helps them focus on what they really want out of life, and often brings into sharp contrast the difference between how they are living their life now versus what they really want it to be.

We'd be very interested to hear how you get on with these exercises, and if you experience different results using them.

The power of perception and the management of expectations

1. Netherlands
2. Sweden
3. Denmark
4. Finland
5. Spain
6. Switzerland
7. Norway
8. Italy
9. Republic of Ireland
10. Belgium
11. Germany
12. Canada
13. Greece
14. Poland
15. Czech Republic
16. France
17. Portugal
18. Austria
19. Hungary
20. United States
21. United Kingdom
Source: Unicef
Key points at-a-glance
Methodology behind report



Having lived in the Netherlands, when my son was aged five until he was seven, I feel compelled to comment upon the recent Unicef research revealing that the Netherlands came out top of a Unicef league table for child well-being. The UK coming last, or 21st.

The Netherlands is a great place to live in my view - if you are Dutch. I am not talking about Amsterdam here. Amsterdam is in a world on its own and cannot be compared with the rest of Holland.

If I take the key measures of the study in turn and try to make objective comparisons between the Netherlands and the UK I find that there is as much ‘unsaid’ that bears examination as follows:

1) Material Well-Being
Apparently the study has looked at levels of child poverty, which are above 15% in the UK. The BBC reported in 2003 that 1.1 million children lived in households with less than 40% of the national average income. But, the national average income of the UK is substantially higher than The Netherlands, so more people have more money in the UK and therefore expect more from life. The Dutch Government’s Polder model has seen economic success in terms of controlling the explosively high earnings seen in free-market economies. One of the consequences of this is that the majority of people in Holland live in broadly the same style of housing, known as ‘row housing’ and do not subject themselves to social comparisons as much as Brits. do – An Englishman’s home is his castle and judging by today’s house prices; his downfall. How many Brits. Are living beyond their means, trying to keep up with the Jones’s? A factor Bridget blogged about on 24th Jan, Glittering Prizes. No wonder parents in UK don’t have time to be at home with their kids; they are too busy working to cover the cost of the mortgage, which brings me neatly on to my next point….
2) Family and Peer Relationships
Firstly, lets not forget that we are comparing countries with populations of approximately 60 million and 16 million – not exactly apples and apples comparisions. I think the Dutch probably invented work:life balance. They are used to flexible working and are by law from working too many hours – and they by and large, stick to it. Public transport works and is not expensive so you can rely on it to get you home on time.
The cultural expectation is that everyone sits down at 6pm – on the dot - to eat a fairly basic family meal (meat and two veg). This is followed by coffee and a biscuit or piece of cake at around 7:30pm. If you are invited to socialise with the Dutch you are invariably asked for Coffee – not dinner. Another way to avoid the social pressures of the endless dinner parties the Brits. are prone to throwing. Brits are certainly more attached to having a good social life and sadly that often excludes the kids.
Another factor could be the high divorce rate in the UK. At the risk of sweeping generalisations, I wonder if fewer people would become divorced in the UK if they couldn’t afford to. With a heritage in Calvanism, some Dutch are frugal by nature and subscribe to a fairly strict code of conduct – despite what we hear about their liberal nature.
3) Health and Safety
I can tell you that the Dutch equivalent to the National Health Service is second to none – once you get into the system; a factor that I found quite difficult as a foreigner. Once you get in it however, you are referred with ease to specialists and the paediatricians are really excellent. That said, don’t expect to go there with your own ideas of how your needs should be met. There is a process, a system and that’s how it is.
As to general health and safety well, if you as a child are asked questions about this and you have never lived anywhere else – how can you possibly know the answer? I can tell you that I, as a Mother, have observed some of the slackest rules for the safety of children in Holland. I have seen kids in outdoor play parks without restraints on fairly dangerous rides. I have witnessed accidents in unsupervised play areas; enough to turn you grey.
Yes, its safer for your child to be outside in the Netherlands than in UK – biking is a pastime as well as a main mode of transport, with bikes having the right of way over cars, a factor I found particularly infuriating when you are behind cyclists at three-a-breast.
There is almost certainly less violence in Holland. Although the assassination of Pim Fortuyn in 2002 shocked the nation and there seems to have been some pockets of racism springing up; even in rural communities.
4) Risk Behaviours
What about healthy eating? Well I can tell you that if I consumed the amount of cheese on a daily basis I would be in trouble, even a biscuit a day with coffee and I’d be back at Weight Watchers. The Dutch being amongst the tallest in the world must be genetically disposed to consuming vast quantities of what to other people is fat-inducing or heart-attack inducing. That said, they typically do not indulge in binge-drinking as do the Brits. – ah, another pitfall of that social life again.
We all know about the success of the Dutch model of legalising Cannabis which is readily available in Amsterdam and beyond. That said, I never saw much evidence of it being used outside of Amsterdam; but then I didn’t frequent many night clubs either!
5/6) Educational and subjective well-being
Notably the Dutch kids did not apparently fare well in educational well-being, but they did say they liked their teachers. They also had a very good sense of overall well-being that British kids did not. Obviously they perceive themselves to be happy and well off even if others might say otherwise. Why should this be? More content parents, More satisfied with their lot. No social comparisons. And on the other side of the coin: Less ambitious, Less social, More myopic?
And the moral of the story?
Be that as it may, Dutch kids are apparently happier and that’s what we all want in life isn’t it? Evidence from our coaching would suggest that to be the case. We frequently work with people to find out what they really want from life and using our experience in Positive Psychology help them to reframe a previously held negative position into a more positive outlook on life. If you say you are happy then you are. This approach has to be good for our kids; the more positive parenting we can offer the more well-balanced and happy our kids are likely to be.
For more information on our coaching programmes designed to elicit a positive outlook or deal with cross-cultural issues, please see our services page on our main website.

For a humourous view of life in the Netherlands read: The UnDutchables, Colin White and Laurie Boucke

More on Comfort Zones

As I was doing some research on the web today I came across a coaching website which had this unusual strapline:

“Step inside your comfort zone – there are no prizes for being uncomfortable”.

Hmmmm.....It’s well known in the world of personal development and coaching that if you want to grow and develop, you have to take small steps outside your comfort zone from time to time. By doing this you expand your capabilities and come to the realisation that, yes, actually, you can achieve more than you have done in the past. You need not be bound by your limiting beliefs.

In our coaching we see far greater results from those people who do stretch themselves out of their comfort zones. Coaching gives you the time and space to reflect, to learn, it increases your self-awareness, and gives you the confidence and support to take positive action that you would never have dreamed of doing before.

For a coach to claim that it’s fine to stay where you’re comfortable seems to me to be quite crazy...On the other hand, perhaps I’m just taking it all too seriously...

To find out more about our approach to coaching, click here

Stuck in a rut? Questions to ask to help you get out...

Last night I went to an Open University Business School South Coast Alumni Network event - a presentation by Curly Martin , one of the UK’s leading life coaches. She was energetic, passionate and persuasive about the benefits of life coaching both for the client / coachee and for those in the audience who might be considering life coaching as a profession.

Prior to the session starting I got chatting to some of the other delegates about coaching in general, about the difference between directive and non-directive practice and about coaching principles, one of which is that the client / coachee already has all the resources they need themselves. Martyn Stainer, co-incidentally a Resource Group Manager at BAE Systems and I were considering what you do as a coach when you ask your client/coachee a question and they respond with ‘I don’t know.’ How do you help them without giving them an answer on a plate?

Curly neatly addressed this issue during a concise and effective demonstration of life coaching with a volunteer from the audience. One of the questions Curly asked was, ‘ And what action are you going to take?’ The answer came back, ‘I’ve been thinking about it, but I don’t know.’ Curly wasn’t phased by this at all, she didn’t make a suggestion or give advice. What she then asked was, ‘Well, if you did know, what would it be?’ This is a very useful little NLP question, which works by getting the client/coachee out of an I-don’t-know-the-answer rut for a few seconds, which is often long enough for a creative solution to emerge.

Other ways of tackling the I-don’t-know-the-answer response are:

1. Ask your client / coachee to think of someone they know whose skills, abilities or qualities they admire. Once they have someone in mind, ask them what this person would do in their situation.

2. Disney Creativity Strategy (Robert Dilts)
This is another NLP technique which allows the client / coachee to look at an issue from different angles. It involves anchoring four spaces on the floor, one for ‘Realist’ one for the ‘Dreamer’, one for the ‘Critic’ and a Meta position. Have your client / coachee step between the Meta position and the first three, considering their issue from that point of view. This technique enables people to identify other courses of action (as well as other potential downsides!).

3. Cartesian Logic questions – these are particularly useful when your client / coachee is stuck for an answer or is unsure about something. They help to test the boundaries of normal thinking, and loosen up limiting beliefs. You ask:

Q What would happen if you did XYZ?
Q What would happen if you didn’t?
Q What wouldn’t happen if you did?
Q What wouldn’t happen if you didn’t?

The questions allow your client / coachee to consider something from all possible angles, and might enable them to see both possibilities and limitations that they wouldn’t have otherwise.

4. Even as a non-directive coach it is OK to make a suggestion as long as you ask the client / coachee’s permission to do so first. Even better if you create an anecdote (‘I know someone in a similar position and they found XYZ helpful’), thus leaving the client / coachee free to decide whether they take it on board or not.

Finally, it really is worth persevering with your questioning in order to help the client / coachee come to their own decision about what action they’ll take, because they are far more likely to be committed to it. Having said that, if you test the level of their commitment (using a simple scale of 1-10) and they’re not on 10, remember to ask, ‘And what would it take to get you up to 10?’.

After all, people are far more likely to take action that they have thought of, and that they are fully committed to.

January Retrospective – More on Achieving Those Goals

Bet you thought Jenny and I were so busy elsewhere that we’d forget to come back to you on the subject of Achieving Your Goals…no chance… after a few minor diversions including Jenny getting her cat seen to and me organising Hugo’s 5th birthday party, (not to mention the proper work in between of course)…we’re back on track…

In today’s posting I’m going to share with you an interesting tool, devised by Dr Martin Seligman, called the January Retrospective. This is a bit like ‘Out with the Old, In with the New’ which Jenny described in her posting on 1st January, only in more depth.

Here’s how it works.

At the end of January set aside 20-40 minutes of quiet time to reflect on the previous year. Think about how your life has gone over the past 12 months. What has happened, what goals did you set yourself (if any) last year, and which ones have you achieved? If you missed some, what stopped you? What successes did you have, how did they come about? What good things happened that you’d forgotten about? Reflecting on those positive things, identify what difference they have made to you, and how do you feel differently now that they have happened. Consider what you know now that you didn’t know then. Consider also the negative things which happened – rather than dwell on them, think about what you have learnt from them, and how you have changed for the better because of them.

Once you have spent about 20 minutes on this (or more if you want), you need to organise your thoughts on one page that you can keep and refer back to. For ease, Selgiman keeps his record on his PC.

On a scale of 1-10 rate your satisfaction with your life in each of the categories which are of great value to you, and jot down a few sentences to sum up. Seligman uses the following categories:

Love
Profession
Finance
Play
Friends
Health
Generativity (leaving a meaningful legacy for the future)
Overall


Other categories could be:
Faith / spirituality
Learning / personal development
Relationships – intimate / family / friends/ community / business
Work / career
Health & Wellbeing
Fun / Hobbies/ Recreation
Self Esteem
Achievements
Contentment


Choose whichever categories are most meaningful to you. Because Seligman has been doing this exercise for the last decade, he also uses a category called ‘Trajectory’ in which he scrutinises the year-on-year changes and their course across the decade.

The idea is that you keep this summary of 2006 in a safe place until next January, when you go through the same process, reflecting on how 2007 was for you personally.

Over time, you will build up a fairly detailed appraisal of how you, and your life, is progressing, which is important for balanced decision making. And you will have reminded yourself of the positives, and reinforced the learnings too.



From ‘Authentic Happiness’, Martin Seligman PhD (2003)

Out with the Old, In with the New

Last year, I experienced a particularly unique and simple approach to goal setting. I'd like to share it with you:

1. On a piece of paper write 3 statements about your experience of 2006: Both Good :-) or Bad :-(

2. Once you have digested these statements, take note of your over-riding thoughts or emotions

3. Walk to a waste-paper bin

4. Tear up the piece of paper and put it into the bin

You may find this difficult to do, especially if you have had a good year - do it anyway. Last year is gone, and you will never get it back again; good or bad. This is a chance to experience 'closure'.

Now walk back to your work surface:

1. Take out a new piece of paper

2. Write 3 statements about your aspirations for 2007

3. Think about the first step you need to take to make a new start, or to continue with work-in-progress (it may be one overarching step or 3 distinct ones)

4. Begin

Enjoy the journey!

With special thanks to Antonella Shorrock for first introducing me to this technique

Comfort zones

I caught part of The Choir (BBC2 9pm) on Monday night (11/12/06) - in a nutshell, 160-odd kids from Northolt High School (total roll about 1300) in West London audition to join The Phoenix Choir, to enter an international choral competition, the World Choir Games which will take place in China.

Like many choirs, the girls outnumber the boys; they don't have enough Tenors and Basses to balance the Altos and the Sopranos so the conductor, Gareth Malone (who usually conducts the London Symphony Orchestra's Community Choir and Youth Choir), tries to rustle up more interest, but he gets only six new names from asking everyone he sees in the playground.

So he asks the school's music teacher where he's likely to find some hidden talent; she is dismissive - according to her it would be highly unlikely to find any , in all the schools 1300 pupils. Richard is disappointed but not a man to be beaten (well, there wouldn't be a programme if he couldn't find enough singers...) finally, he ventures with some trepidation into the sixth form common room. He coaxes and cajoles several young men into being auditioned. One or two of these 16-18 year olds are pretty confident about their abilities, but in a self-effacing kind of way; surprisingly, most are pretty modest and lacking in confidence - in fact Gareth comments on how much more arrogant he was at their age.

Thankfully though, the school music teacher is mistaken - it's obvious from the auditions that there is a whole host of latent talent at Northolt School, talent which is just waiting to be recognized. Let's hope other teachers don't write off their pupils quite so quickly.

Having got 39 kids in total, these must be whittled down to 25, and 4 reserves to meet the competition rules. It is heartbreaking to see the disappointment of those kids who don't get through the second audition; you have to hope that they have a loving parent /family /friend /teacher to help them pick up the pieces afterwards.

Having spent a few months practising after school, one of the first major tests for the newly formed Phoenix choir is to sing in front of a live audience. These kids are absolutely terrified at the prospect, and even more so when they discover that their first live audience is to be the dreaded Year 11s; the fear that this induces is palpable. But, give them credit, they do their warm up and breathing exercises and give one of their best performances of Vivaldi's Gloria to date. And to give the Year 11s credit too, they soon stop giggling and snickering, they really listen, and give the choir a fantastic round of applause at the end.

What brought a real smile to my face though was the visible increase in the confidence of the kids in the choir when they finish this performance; they seem to have grown a couple of inches in the space of five minutes. They're relieved it's over, yes, but they have just done something they never thought they'd be able to do, they pulled it off, survived and feel more confident as a result. So here I think is an important lesson for all of us - in a nutshell if you want to gain confidence, you have to get out of your comfort zone. The results will be well worth it I promise you.

Watch next week's episode to see how they get on at the World Choir Games.

Visualizing your goals

Of course I'm an avid supporter of the Open University - I did my MBA at their Business School in the late 90's and have worked closely with them ever since. So I was delighted to read in the Independent yesterday (5 Dec 2006) that they are partnering the Trades Union Congress to provide a 10 per cent discount on entry-level university courses for TUC' members, all 6.4 million of them.

This is a fantastic opportunity to start your own personal development. Of course, balancing work life and studying can be pretty tough (I'd rather not be reminded of that now so you'll have to ask Jenny) especially if you also want to have some time for a social / family life, however, it also seems to be true that there is rarely any gain without pain (I wonder who really said that). Incidentally, one of the ways I got through my studies was to think 'If other people can do it, so can I'.

So, how can you motivate yourself to get started on what could in all likelihood be a life changing course of action? (....There are some truths to "Educating Rita").

A top tip, tried and tested by many of our coaching clients, is to visualise the outcome . Visualisation isn't a new technique, you probably do it frequently already although you may not be very aware that you do it. So for example if I ask you to think about what you had for breakfast this morning, or who your best friend was at school, the chances are that you'll remember this by creating a picture in your head.

So how can you visualise your goal? Well, you can do this in a number of ways: in your head by relaxing and mentally creating a picture of your outcome, you can get out your kid's crayons/felt tips/paints and start drawing, you can use the whiteboard or a flipchart in an empty meeting room, or put those magazines to good use by cutting out the photos which appeal to your senses and make a collage out of them.

Choose whichever method which appeals to you, put aside a good 45 minutes and as you're going through this creative exercise, ask yourself the following questions:

1. What it is that I want? Think about this in as much detail as you can.

Then imagine yourself having achieved this goal. Ask yourself:

2. When and where have I achieved this goal, and who is with me?

3. What has changed in my life as a result of achieving this goal?

4. What is my experience of having achieved this goal?

5. What has achieving this goal got me?

If you have plenty of time to spare, just go with the flow; you'll be surprised what springs from your imagination once you give it a free rein.

Once you're happy with the image you've created, spend 10-15 minutes reflecting on it. In our future blogs we'll explore practical ways to use visualisations to achieve goals.

Whichever visualisation technique you use, it will help you see and experience the goal for real, and create a very powerful motivator which is 100% personal to you. We've had lots of positive comments from clients who have tried visualisation, and whose personal images stay with them. We'd like to hear how you get on with it!