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!
Browsing Tags motivation
Positive change agents – principles for enjoyable success
We’ve used these principles to guide our positive change projects for years. 
These principles are keys to motivating busy people.
- Take the time to make goals clear and compelling.
- The easier it is to contribute the more people do it.
- Make starting steps doable and clear.
- Make sure people feel confident enough in their role.
- Frame goals, directions and other communication positively.
- Steady guidance at a strategic level keeps people on track and confident in success.
- Make questions specific, positive and generative.
- Keep focused on your top priority goal. Ensure that you’ve applied all the resources you need to to this goal.
Join the Positive Change Revolution!
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!
Optimal balance of positive & negative
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.
- Low performing teams communicated 1 positive for every 3 negatives – 1:3
- Medium teams averaged 2:1
- High performing teams ranged from 6:1 to 11:1
- Too much positive, 12:1 or more, “calcifies a team”, making necessary change and adaptation difficult.
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!
“Resilience” thoughts from my mentors
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!
Shifting the complex balance of decision making
Teeter Totter Effect
Influencing decision-making is challenging if you don’t have direct power.
Even when you do it can be incredibly difficult if there are enough demotivators present. Many of the factors influencing decisions are unconscious, making it challenging to even sway oneself. If you doubt me…
CHOOSING TO LOSE WEIGHT: What percentage of dieters reach their goals? Even though we have high control, it would seem, over what food we put in our mouths, there are many other factors acting as demotivators against the “lose weight” goal. We eat for many reasons including emotional ones that counterbalance the desire to look good.
USING THE TEETER TOTTER EFFECT: Part of the success of influence rests upon our ability and willingness to put more motivators on the teeter totter, and take demotivators.
MOST CHANGE EFFORTS FAIL: As many as 70% of mergers and acquisitions lose profitability. A majority of those are due to culture clashes. These are situations where there are way too many balls on the demotivating side, and they were ignored, not understood, or assumed to not make a difference. Plus, there is rarely enough personal reasons for people in the organizations to work hard to make it work.
Free illustration handout click Teeter Totter Effect
FOCUS: Often helping people focus more strongly on the aspects of the change that motivate them personally are key to gaining buy-in to a major change. Also reducing the things that make them want to avoid your changes as if they were poison.
For ideas on how to have a positive influence see other blog posts:
Feedforward – influencing future good action
I’d LOVE to hear your ideas on how to tip the Teeter Totter to positive action. Please comment or send me an email.
Using classical music to inspire – video
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.
Deep full-life transformation
There is an organization that helps their clients truly transform their lives. The Care Center in Nashua, NH.
Their clients move from…
fear to confidence
despair to hope
and
homelessness to security.
I’ve had the deep honor of interviewing a number of their past clients. Almost every one has talked about living a life of fear,
in a home where the mother’s and children’s physical safety was always questioned…
or one step away from living on streets…
The Transitional Housing Program (their flagship service) is a tightly run process that truly gives the women and their families every opportunity and every tool that they need to transform their life.
They told me that the major ingredient the clients must bring to it is their own grit. They must also believe in the future life they want for themselves and their children. They have to adapt to the supportive guidelines, heal their emotional wounds in therapy, learn new parenting skills, and improve the way they deal with finances. When they did all of this, they succeeded.
I noticed that what usually first drove the women to the Care Center was fear and pain. What then helped the successful ones to transform their life was a vision of greater health, security and well-being for themselves and their children.
There are powerful lessons for all of us in changing our own lives.
- Let the fear motivate you away from the danger; and then use the love for self and others to motivate to greater things.
- Be willing to adapt to radically new ways of doing things.
- Be grateful to those that offer you help – and take advantage of all the resources you can on your journey.
In the next few weeks I’m going to post video of some of the interviews, so that you too can be inspired by these heroic women.
The Power of gratitude – the benefits of giving thanks
Giving thanks
Happy Thanksgiving!
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It is an opportunity to pause and take stock of what I am grateful for. In addition to turkey I can fill myself with the warm realization of what is good in my life.
Gratitude has a profound impact at work as well.
The obvious benefits of gratitude are:
- When we thank others, it reinforces the behaviors we most want
- It helps others to feel good about the way they impact us
- We strengthen our relationships with those we’re grateful to
The less obvious, but equally powerful benefits are:
- We positively change our own brain chemistry! Gratitude, and the mental images of things we like, trigger the release of endorphins and other biochemicals. These help us relax, recharge and refocus. We are then able to think more creatively, flexibly and positively.
- These same changes influence our tone of voice, facial expression and even the words we use. Making us far more likely to positively influence others
- There’s increasing evidence of a correlation between positive attitudes and health and longevity. That’s delightful.
- Positive, grateful people tend to be more popular. I don’t know about you, but I find that helps me in so many ways.
I’ve found that I can hone this skill to the point of proactively looking for what I like about people and what they do and then causally mentioning these things in conversations, during trainings, etc. Sincere references like this help build rapport, enable others to feel safe opening up with me, and often engender return positivity.
Here are three ways you can use this power this week:
- Gratitude List: Create a list of the people you are grateful to and why.
- Gratitude Letter: Write a letter to someone who has positively influenced your life. Sending it makes it even better, although just the writing is enough to shift your own perspective.
- Mention sincere praise to five people a day for the next two weeks. This helps it become a skill you can use any time, and hopefully a popularity-growing habit will form!
You depend on good relationships for almost everything you do in life. You might as well hone the powerful of gratitude to be happier, more successful and heck, it might even help you live longer!
For more information on building resilience through influencing yourself go to my post on this topic.
There’s also a great article in the Wall Street Journal on this topic.
Conference room combat to improv jazz – true story
This is a true story of Improv Leadership creating more dynamic presentations.
This is a guest post from a good friend and colleague of mine, Eric. He is a senior healthcare architect who has mastered the art of co-design with his clients using improv leader and solution-focus techniques. Here’s his story:
My work as a healthcare planner requires a capacity to talk about complex medical issues and translate those issues into a spatial solution for my firm’s clients; there is, of course, never enough time, space or money!
In the past, those meetings have been “conference room combat” for me, now they are “improv jazz”!
The difference?
- I have come to recognize that the best solution is not “my solution” but is truly owned by the folks who will use the end result (the implemented plan). By freeing myself up from the presumption that, as the “planning expert” I must generate the “best plan”, I create the opportunity for me to participate freely in the dialogue. That dialogue, in turn, is free to head into unexpected turf and unconventional, but effective solutions.
- Once I frame alternatives as potentials for them to review, criticize, examine, take apart and reassemble, clients actually respect my professional skills more, rather than less. It removes the “yes/no” charge from discussions about solutions, and directs the discussion into the wonderful grey area of “what if?” where true can emerge. We focus intuitively on the positive and the potential, and view obstacles as opportunities to be mastered!
- By engaging in dialogue, my clients understand that I view their expertise and experience as critical to the process. When clinicians are invited to participate, they focus on real issues, rather than “grandstanding” or politicizing the process.
In “conference room combat”, someone may appear to win, but ultimately, everyone loses. The end product suffers. By creating an environment that allows fluidity of thought everyone has a voice at the table, and the result is an improvisational work session that can truly lead to better, more dynamic and optimal solutions.
Eric R. Lautzenheiser, AIA, ACHA
Director of Health Facilities Planning
If you have a story to share and want to be a guest blogger here, let me know.