DaveShearon

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!

"Other People Matter" - "Social Networking in the Digital Age"

Gordon Crovitz' column in today's Wall Street Journal has the second phrase in quotes above as its headline.  The first is Chris Peterson's summary of the key findings of positive psychology.  Mr. Crovitz notes that rising number and attendance at business conferences, and focuses on the D: All Things Digital Conference sponsored by the Journal's Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.  The point is that even the leading lights in technology like to get together in person.  I would have enjoyed hearing Bill Gates talk to a crowd around an outdoor table about his efforts to improve American high schools and eliminate malaria in Africa!

In another interesting aspect, the conference bans PowerPoint presentations!  Instead, panelists and questioned, intensively and persistently, by the organizers and attendees.  As an educational strategy, I like it.  I've become a bigger user of PowerPoint as I give more presentations, but I struggle with it.  I try hard to use it as a visual aid to a story, not my personal notes about what to say next.  And that makes creating a presentation MUCH harder.  Right now, I'm working on a 30-minute presentation on Positive Psychology and Law that will be recorded for delivery online.  Yikes!  That's tough!  I'm focusing on the interactive tools I will have available.

Distance learning, telecommuting, and webinars are all great.  But, I suspect that as we learn, work, and meet more with folks who are physically distant from us, the desire to get together with them in person occasionally will grow.  Other people matter, and their avatars are insufficient as a complete substitute.