Igniting Positive Change
Coaching guided by the PERMA Model can yield interesting results. This article explains 3 steps to incorporate PERMA in a coaching setting.
This is an article I recently wrote for the Positive Psychology Program – aimed at coaching practitioners, but you might find some of the questions in the article useful for your personal use as well!
A couple of years ago a former colleague recommended a book that she knew of from her time at McKinsey. I downloaded it onto my Kindle, but I never found the time to read it until recently, when I began browsing the introduction and realized that the ideas presented in the book were completely in line with my passion for all things positive. As I read each chapter, and read the case studies, I found myself thinking that everyone should make the time to read it!
The book is called “How remarkable women lead: a breakthrough model for work and life” by Barsh, Cranston & Lewis (2009) (or read this summary if you are pressed for time!).
While the McKinsey research that lead to the writing of the book and the development of the Centered Leadership Model was originally very much focused on women, the model can be and has since been applied in practice to male and female leaders.
Talent, the ambition to lead, as well as the ability to adapt and change may be the basis for a successful career, but those at the top benefit from additional skills that are not necessarily discussed in a typical career development conversation! And while the model particularly focuses on developing leaders, I really believe that anyone can benefit from the lessons shared in the book.
Those leaders that stand out from the crowd have often developed capabilities in five interrelated areas:
Meaning: “finding your strengths and putting them to work in the service of an inspiring purpose”
Energizing: “managing energy, or knowing where your energy comes from, where it goes, and what you can do to manage it”
Framing: “positive framing, or adopting a more constructive way to view your world, expand your horizons, and gain the resilience to move ahead even when bad things happen”
Connecting: “identifying who can help you grow, building stronger relationships, and increasing your sense of belonging”
Engaging: “finding your voice, becoming self-reliant and confident by accepting opportunities and the inherent risks they bring, and collaborating with others”
(Descriptions quoted from the above-mentioned 2008 McKinsey summary report “Centered Leadership – how talented women thrive”)
So what’s in it for you? My take on this as a coach is that you can use this model to really quickly assess what areas in your work & life will help you in your career development, and which areas you might want to invest in.
Why not get started now? Step 1: Rate your satisfaction with each of these areas on a scale of 1-10. Step 2: Based on your assessment, what areas do you think might benefit from additional attention and care? Step 3: What can you do today to move the needle in the right direction and increase your satisfaction rating in these areas by one or two points?
Ensuring your career is meaningful to you, taking care of your energy levels, building a support network, learning how to bounce back from adversity and speaking up for what you believe in are all really positive steps to take and will benefit you not only at work but also in your personal life. And it will make you more authentic – after all, when you know who you are and what you are passionate about, you become so much more credible and inspirational!
Have a great week!
Best,
Sarah
N.B. the book “Centered leadership: Leading with Purpose, Clarity & Impact” was published in 2014 (Barsh, J., 2014, Crown Business), and McKinsey offer their Centered Leadership Program to all leaders looking to develop their skills.
With potential stressors coming at us from all angles, both at home and at work, it’s really important that we learn to deal positively with life’s adversities. We all know people who just seem to bounce back from anything that life throws at them, no matter how bad. This week I’ve been really touched by Sheryl Sandberg’s tributes to her late husband, and really admire the strength she is showing in dealing with a situation that must be truly awful. And then there are those who seem to be dragged down by the smallest event, however insignificant it might appear from the outside.
The good news is, you can choose which camp you want to be in. While there is no magic wand that will guarantee you will overcome negative events with ease every time, there are some things you can do that will help you get in that positive and resilient frame of mind – even when faced with the worst.
But first of all, how do you recognise if you need to become more resilient?
If the answer is yes to one or more of the following questions, you might benefit from applying some of the ideas described in the second part of this article.
Sign 1: When faced with certain situations, do you fall into the same negative thought patterns and behaviours over and over again?
Sign 2: Once you calm down again, do you sometimes find yourself thinking that your reaction to a situation was over the top?
Sign 3: Do you frequently feel one of the following in certain situations: anger, sadness, guilt, anxiety or embarrassment?
So what can you do about it? Above all, you can learn to recognize how you react to and interpret events – and you can learn to challenge your unhelpful thoughts. I find these following three actions from Reivich and Shatté’s (2002) book “The Resilience Factor” that I want to share with you particularly helpful.
Recognize your thought patterns and identify your reactions. The first thing you need to do is recognise what you are thinking, and what reactions these thoughts are triggering. How do you react when things go wrong? Typically we display one of five reactions which you can recognize by listening to the thoughts that are going through your mind in the moment. We may experience anger (“how dare he/she!!!”), at other times we might react with guilt (“I am a bad person”) or embarrassment (“I feel so stupid”), or even with anxiety (“I am afraid”) and sadness (“I feel really down”). It might be a combination of them. Spend some time making a note of your reactions – both your thoughts and your behaviours. Can you detect a pattern?
Identify your underlying beliefs. Reivich and Shatte describe how certain reactions are linked to certain underlying beliefs. We experience anger when we feel our rights have been violated, and guilt we we believe we have violated another person’s rights. We feel sadness or even depression when we experience a loss of self-worth or a real world loss (such as bereavement). Fear of future threats lead to anxiety and fear (think of stage fright, or nervousness before an important meeting). Finally, when we compare ourselves negatively to other, this can lead to feelings of embarrassment.
By recognizing why we feel what we feel, we can more easily check if this reaction makes sense or not, or if it is time to challenge ourselves to replace the unhelpful thoughts with more helpful ones.
A great example I can think of is road rage – some people feel really angry when they believe their right to drive safely or quickly have been violated, thereby missing the point that other people have certain rights and reasons to be on the road too! Recognizing this link might help reduce the anger felt by reframing the situation and finding alternative explanations – maybe the jerk who pulled in front of you was in a hurry to get to a sick relative, or maybe the person who was slow to move at the traffic light was dealing with screaming children in the back oft the car!
Know your thinking traps. Do you mind-read? Mind-readers tend to assume they know what the other person is thinking, and accordingly limit or adjust their behaviours.
For example, a person I worked with recently did not reach out for help for some paperwork they needed because they had already decided that this person would annoyed by their request. Now, this may or may not be the case, but it completely undermined my coachee’s ability to solve their problem, and chances are the administrator would actually have been happy to help!
Mind-reading is just one of the many thinking traps that we can fall into, along with jumping to conclusions, tunnel vision (rejecting evidence that would allow you to interpret the situation differently), magnifying/minimizing problems, personalizing (this is all about me), externalizing (this is nothing to do with me), overgeneralizing (this always happens to me), and emotional reasoning (the more emotionally charged I am, the worse the situation seems).
The idea here is to identify which are your typical thinking traps, challenge yourself to review the problem in a new light, and allow new evidence and ideas for solutions to come into play – which can completely reframe the situation and the challenge you are dealing with.
Developing resilience is all about how you frame the events that happen in your life – and this is something you can work on right now! It is about replacing unhelpful thoughts with helpful thoughts, changing the way you feel about events, and ultimately it is about finding new solutions to problems you previously thought were unsolvable. The three skills of (1) recognizing your thought patterns and identifying your reactions, (2) identifying your underlying beliefs and (3) knowing your thinking traps will help you take control of your thoughts and give you a more flexible outlook on life.
Now over to you – the next time you are feeling stressed or down – challenge yourself and notice how this empowers you to resolve your issues in a new and positive way!
Wishing you all the best,
Sarah
Great article on positivity at the workplace and how to achieve results with a different approach than usual… good read for leaders and HR: Positive Teams Are More Productive – HBR.
Have you ever had the nagging feeling that something is out of synch in your life? That somehow you don’t feel as if you can really be you – be it at work or in your personal life? And that you have struggled to make a decision because it does not feel right, possibly settling reluctantly for a situation or a course of action because you could not identify what actually was right for you?
I have had to face up to that uncomfortable feeling several times in my life so far (and I suspect it will happen again as time goes by…). In every case, I eventually felt as if I was a character in someone else’s movie, looking at myself from a distance and not recognising the real me any longer. Not a pleasant place to be in at all!
But even when you do realise that something is not quite right, it’s not always easy to identify where the disconnect is coming from.
I’d like to share a simple exercise with you that you can use to help you better understand what gives you meaning in your life, to help you pinpoint areas of friction, and as a result perhaps allow you to make better choices for yourself.
Find a quiet moment, grab a pen and a piece of paper and work through the following steps:
Step 1: Reflect on your values. Take a step back and reflect on what is important to you in life. Remind yourself of your values, and your strengths. List all of them.
You might identify freedom and flexibility, or the opposite, safety and reliability as your values. You might discover that you value honesty, or creativity, positivity, family or interpersonal relationships. Whatever it is, it’s important to be honest with yourself and identify what gives YOU – not anyone else around you – meaning in your life.
Write down everything that you can think of that is important to you in terms of values and how you like do things. Take your time … it’s key that you get this right.
If you struggle to think through your values on your own, you can also use an established tool to get you started. I like the VIA survey of character strengths questionnaire (you can find it here) that was developed within the positive psychology framework and acts as a starting point for many of the tools and techniques that aim to help people flourish in their lives.
If you’d like to take a more strengths-based approach you could take the Strengthsfinder 2.0 survey. I find this one particularly helpful in the context of work and career.
Step 2: Identify the roles you play in your professional life and your personal life. Most likely you will play multiple roles in your career and in your personal life. Following the model of the German psychotherapist and coach, Bernd Schmid (1990/2002), you can break out the areas of your life into three distinct areas: career/occupation, professional, and personal.
It’s easiest if you visualise this step, so draw three sections on your paper with each heading above. Then fill out each section.
For instance, you might have professional qualifications that are not part of your current occupation, so make a note of these in two separate buckets. I studied psychology (professional qualification), but worked in Human Resources for many years (career/occupation). In your personal life, you might be a mother, father, stepmother or -father, husband, wife, son, daughter, friend, athlete, voluntary worker and so on. Make a note of these in the third section.
You might be surprised to see how many different roles you play in your life!
Step 3: Compare your roles and your values. You might have already started thinking about this as you made a note of the various roles you play in your life: are your values and strengths aligned in all areas of your life? Can you identify any areas of conflict? Are there any areas of your life where you are trying to be (or do) something that doesn’t really work for you?
This part of the exercise might be tough for you if you are forcing yourself to face up to realities that you would rather not know. But remember, what you do with this knowledge is up to you – you might decide you don’t want to change anything for the moment, and you might take stock and decide to set a new course for your life.
In my case, I realised that my daily job in HR did not allow me to do enough of the things that I loved most. I had sensed it for a while, but it was not until I took the Strengthsfinder 2.0 survey which showed me that my strengths were not as important in my current role as I needed them to be, that it all clicked into place for me. And here I am some months later, doing what I love!
And now what? Now it is up to you! You might find that everything is wonderfully in synch and you really don’t need to change anything. You might find that by making some small adjustments, you can find ways to give your values more importance in your life. Or you might find that you want to make some big changes – in which case you might want to talk it through with someone, and get some additional support. The choice is yours!
Have a great week!
Best,
Sarah