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Shawn Achor is a dynamic speaker and writer on this topic.
His take, through the Harvard Business Review on positive intelligence is a fantastic example of putting the science of happiness ahead of outdated conventional wisdom.
Even though he is a “competitor” of sorts I can only speak highly of everything I’ve seen him put out there.
Rock on, Shawn! You are a major player in what I call the Positive Change Revolution!
Charlie has clearly articulated a powerful approach to creating a career you can love. It’s an approach that we have used successfully as well.
Our Story at Matchbox Group:
In mid-2009, when work slowed down dramatically, I did the same thing. We had all this free time on our hand so we decided to go out and do what we loved for free until people could pay us. We realized that the best thing for creating paying work, is when people have experienced good work of ours.
The ways that have worked for us:
Their mission is one we are passionate about
We like them as people and working with them was enjoyable
We have the time to do it
The benefits
My challenge for you
What can you do to create even more passion in your career?
I just read a wonderful post by a dear colleague, Schon Beechler titled Battling the Barrage: Ten Ways to Bring Positivity into Every Day.
I added two powerfully positive things I do in the comments below her post as well.
Creating positivity despite the bad stuff
Last year I blogged about this amazing nonprofit in “Deep full-life transformation“.
This video is a compilation of client interviews we made over about 6 months. Very inspiring!
We’ve used these principles to guide our positive change projects for years. 
These principles are keys to motivating busy people.
Many wonderful approaches create positive change. Here are a few, described by key practitioners.
David Cooperrider
Appreciative Inquiry
As described by the Appreciative Inquiry Commons: Appreciative Inquiry is about the coevolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations, and the relevant world around them. In its broadest focus, it involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable in economic, ecological, and human terms. AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. It centrally involves the mobilization of inquiry through the crafting of the “unconditional positive question” often-involving hundreds or sometimes thousands of people. In AI the arduous task of intervention gives way to the speed of imagination and innovation; instead of negation, criticism, and spiraling diagnosis, there is discovery, dream, and design.
AI seeks, fundamentally, to build a constructive union between a whole people and the massive entirety of what people talk about as past and present capacities: achievements, assets, unexplored potentials, innovations, strengths, elevated thoughts, opportunities, benchmarks, high point moments, lived values, traditions, strategic competencies, stories, expressions of wisdom, insights into the deeper corporate spirit or soul– and visions of valued and possible futures. Taking all of these together as a gestalt, AI deliberately, in everything it does, seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core”—and it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized.
Mark McKergow
Paul Z Jackson
Solution focus
As described by Dr. Mark McKergow and Paul Z. Jackson: Solutions Focus (SF) is an approach to change that is causing companies worldwide to sit up and take notice. Its primary focus is on uncovering and building on what is already working well – even in areas that are failing. Whether you’re a manager, a team leader, a coach or a consultant, you can use SF to generate immediate results. The SF approach is sometimes compared to Appreciative Inquiry. Both methods focus on what’s working; many people prefer SF for its incisive simplicity and applicability in all kinds of situations, big and small.
The solution-focused philosophy is an approach to change, centered on keeping things as simple as possible, doing what works and nothing else. We discovered it in the world of therapy, when in the late 1980s Steve de Shazer extended the earlier work of Milton Erickson and the Mental Research Institute to produce a tested yet minimal approach to change (for example de Shazer, 1988, and George, Iveson & Ratner, 1999). These same sources had earlier sparked NLP, to which solution focus might be seen as a younger, leaner second cousin.
Solution focus has since spread in the UK to the fields of education, social work, and child protection and is now making inroads to the organizational world.
Marcus Buckingham
Strength-based Leadership
As described by Tom Rath and Ashok Gopal: Nearly a decade ago, Gallup unveiled the results of a landmark 30-year research project that ignited a global conversation on the topic of strengths. More than 3 million people have since taken Gallup’s StrengthsFinder assessment, which forms the core of several books on this topic, including the #1 international bestseller StrengthsFinder 2.0.
In recent years, while continuing to learn more about strengths, Gallup scientists have also been examining decades of data on the topic of leadership. They studied more than one million work teams, conducted more than 20,000 in-depth interviews with leaders, and even interviewed more than 10,000 followers around the world to ask exactly why they followed the most important leader in their life.
In Strengths Based Leadership, #1 New York Times bestselling author Tom Rath and renowned leadership consultant Barry Conchie reveal the results of this research. Based on their discoveries, the book identifies three keys to being a more effective leader: knowing your strengths and investing in others’ strengths, getting people with the right strengths on your team, and understanding and meeting the four basic needs of those who look to you for leadership.
Join us in the positive change revolt!
I’m not talking about secret agents … positive change agents are actually in the middle of the action, right in the public eye. They take risks all right, but the kind that help people and organizations grow.
See how many of these statements describe you to find out if you’re a positive change agent, a positive change agent in the making, or needing a weeklong retreat with a gaggle of positive change gurus. Then click the number that fits below the list.
I’d love to hear more about how you create positive change.
No surprise to many of us… research has now shown that you need to be a lot more positive than negative on teams.
10:1 – Ideal Positive:Negative Balance
Using a “Capture Lab” researchers saw a strong average correlation between positive language and performance.
Sustainable marriages apparently need at least 5 times as many positive emotions regarding one’s partner as negative–5:1
This ratio is yet another reason to use positive change approaches such as Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Psychology, building on your strengths, Solutions Focus, and Positive Deviance.
BTW, I make no money off these links, but I do make money using these methods in our positive change consulting. We find these approaches not only more effective for our clients, but far more enjoyable for them… and for us!
In addition to having the honor of training others to increase Resilience, I’ve enjoyed learning from a couple of my mentors.
Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology talks about “flourishing” which is really at the heart of great resilience.
I’ve never met him, but I’ve learned a lot nonetheless.
This video explains the powerful of flourishing personally and globally.
Allen Hollander, who I’ve known for 20 years, has a great blog. His latest post explains the importance of how you interpret a traumatic situation. The more you are determined to learn from it, the more you can bounce back and grow.
I’m grateful to Allen, Martin, and all the other people who I’ve learned from over the years. Here’s to mentors!
This video shows Benjamin Zander in full glory presenting at TED.com. Being a world-class conductor, he speaks to influence and leadership using marvelous musical analogies. He has wonderful stories that are worth the video themselves as well. And his shoe salesmen joke is a classic example of looking for solutions.