Practicing Positive Psychology Coaching (eBook)

Assessment, Activities and Strategies for Success

Robert Biswas-Diener (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2010
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
9780470881934 (ISBN)

Infos

Discover proven strategies for applying positive psychology within your coaching practice

Written by Robert Biswas-Diener, a respected researcher, psychologist, life and organizational coach, and expert in positive psychology, Practicing Positive Psychology Coaching presents a wide range of practical interventions and tools you can put to use right away in your coaching practice.

Each intervention is clearly outlined and, where appropriate, illustrated by case studies from organizational and life coaching. Providing unique assessments that can be used to evaluate client resources and goals, this practical guide introduces tools unique to this book that every professional can use in their practice, including:

• Findings from new research on goal commitment strategies, motivation, growth-mindset theory, and goal revision
• A decision tree for working specifically with Snyder's Hope Theory in the coaching context
• An easy-to-use assessment of 'positive diagnosis,' which measures client strengths, values, positive orientation toward the future, and satisfaction
• Measures of self-esteem, optimism, happiness, personal strengths, motivation, and creativity
• Guidance for leading clients through organizational and common life transitions including layoffs, leadership changes, university graduation, middle age, and retirement

Filled with reflective exercises for use in your own personal and professional development, Practicing Positive Psychology Coaching also includes guidance and recommendations for marketing a positive psychology coaching practice.

Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener is known as the 'Indiana Jones of positive psychology,' becuase his studies on strengths and happiness have taken him to such far-flung destinations as Greenland, Spain, Kenya, Israel, and India. He is the coauthor, with Ben Dean, of Positive Psychology Coaching: Putting the Science of Happiness to Work for Your Clients (published by Wiley) and, with his father, Ed Diener, of Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth, (published by Wiley-Blackwell). In 2005 Dr. Biswas-Diener founded Positive Psychology Services, LLC, a training and coaching consultancy. He and his colleagues train thousands of professionals in approximately 15 countries annually.

Autor

ROBERT BISWAS-DIENER, MS, holds a master's degree in clinical psychology from Pacific University and, in 2005, founded Meridian Life Coaching, LLC, to provide life coaching services to a wide range of academics and professionals. He is known as the "Indiana Jones of positive psychology," with his studies taking him to such far-flung destinations as Greenland, Spain, Kenya, Israel, and India, where he has worked with remote groups of people traditionally overlooked by researchers. He is the coauthor, with Ben Dean, of Positive Psychology Coaching: Putting the Science of Happiness to Work for Your Clients (published by Wiley) and, with his father, Ed Diener, of Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth, (published by Wiley-Blackwell).

Inhalt

Acknowledgments vii

Chapter One Education to Empowerment: An Introduction to Applying Positive Psychology Coaching 1

Chapter Two Using Your Best to Make You Better 19

Chapter Three Harnessing Positivity 39

Chapter Four Making Molehills out of Mountains: Coaching Goals and Hope for the Future 59

Chapter Five Positive Diagnosis 75

Chapter Six Positive Assessment 99

Chapter Seven Gray Hairs and Gravestones: Positive Psychology Coaching Across the Lifespan 125

Chapter Eight The Practice of Positive Psychology Coaching 145

Endnotes 153

Author Index 163

Subject Index 165

Textauszug

CHAPTER TWO
Using Your Best to Make You Better

Take a moment and think back to your childhood. In particular, remember those physical education classes you took in primary school. Perhaps you were made to run around a track or do calisthenics, or maybe you were lucky and were allowed to play dodgeball. Regardless of the particular athletic activity you engaged in, there is a high likelihood that, at some point in your education, you were forced to choose team captains and pick sides. In some ways, this activity is the cruelest part of childhood. Here’s how it worked in my school: The PE teacher asked the single most athletic boy (Jude Nolen) and girl (Megan Schott) to be captains. Then, Jude and Megan took turns choosing the most talented, most athletic children. Jeff Miller usually was the first to be drafted. Then Troy Price. Then Susan Sheridan. And so the selection process went until about the halfway point—when all the athletic and semi-athletic kids were chosen. Then, the strategy turned toward limiting the potential damage caused by the athletic dead weight of the awkward and uncoordinated children. I won’t be so unkind as to name these kids, but trust me when I say I remember their names even better than I can recall the names of the top picks. It is particularly interesting to note how naturally this selection process is, how intuitive: Strengthen your team by recruiting the most skilled players, until it comes time to limit the deficits by attending to personal weaknesses.

Interestingly, the way children divide up for sports teams is pretty much the same way organizations recruit for talent, sport clubs recruit for superstars, and—to be honest—the way most of us choose a spouse. When shopping for a mate, for example, most people typically focus on the good; the things that are most attractive about the other person. Perhaps it is a sense of humor, trustworthiness, or plain old good looks. You will notice that—when it comes to matters of the heart—a person almost never focuses exclusively on the negative traits. No one says, “I am so excited to be marrying Tom. The thing I like most about him is the fact that I can live with his messiness. I am also really looking forward to a lifetime of not being dragged down by his occasional angry outburst.” When it comes to the things we value and the goals we most hope to accomplish, we have a natural tendency to focus on strengths, because we have an intuitive understanding that it is strengths that will help us be at our best, give us the greatest sense of meaning, and enjoy our lives to the fullest.

The concept of strengths, it turns out, is one of the most exciting areas of positive psychology research and application. Strengths, as we will see shortly, are where our greatest successes happen, where we experience enormous growth, and where we enjoy a burst of energy and happiness. So good are strengths, in fact, that there has long been a clamor to focus more heavily on them. In the late 1960s, for example, management guru Peter Drucker1 said, “To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths…. These strengths are the true opportunities. The unique purpose of organization is to make strength productive.” This sentiment was echoed years later by former Gallup CEO Don Clifton: “… Gallup has discovered that our talents—defined as our naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behaviour that can be productively applied—are our greatest opportunities for success.”2 Clifton was instrumental in establishing a scientific basis for claims that strengths are an effective way to engage clients and workers. Today, a number of blue-chip companies are investing heavily in a strengths focus—everything from strengths-based recruitment to strengths-based management and strengths-based outplacement. As a coach or consultant it is in your interest to know that there is increasing interest in the science of strengths.

Activity: Of What Are You Most Proud?

It is easy for me to say that strengths lead directly to success, but is it really true? It makes intuitive sense that our greatest successes are the product of our best qualities and not necessarily of overcoming our weaknesses. Why not put this theory to the test? Take a moment and think about the thing you are most proud of—perhaps it is a business success, or the way you work hard to maintain your health, or maybe it is your 20-year marriage. Try to think, in particular, of a specific moment of tremendous pride related to a way that you yourself behaved. That time you said just the right thing or made a terrific decision. Chances are, as you take stock of these shining moments, the vast majority of them are the direct result of your strengths being at play rather than resulting from you overcoming a weakness. Your proudest moments are almost certainly related to you being at your best.

Before passing too far into the territory of strengths, it makes sense to spend a little time defining this elusive concept. I do not claim to have a monopoly on the definition of strengths, nor do I have a monopoly on strengths coaching or strengths models. What I present here is, in my opinion, a very useful way to look at strengths. I am far more interested in this as an easy-to-understand model than I am in arguing that it is the single truth about strengths. With that caveat aside, let’s jump in! At the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP) we look at strengths as the product of evolution.3 This means that certain qualities—those that are useful for individual and group functioning, such as leadership, creativity, and forgiveness—may actually have biological roots as well as be handed down to us through socialization. Each of us has a number of “preexisting capacities” that can be drawn out by various situations to make us perform at our best. In fact, rather than complicate the idea of strengths with a long discussion of related topics like talents and skills, we try to keep it simple. At CAPP we say that strengths are “our pre-existing patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that are authentic, energizing, and which lead to our best performance” (see Figure 2.1).

Figure 2.1 Strengths lead to best performance

It is important to understand what we mean by authentic and energizing. By authentic we mean that the strength is descriptive of the true individual. Here’s an example: I am a morning person. This is not a trait I ever wanted, worked for, or asked for. In fact, I find morning people as annoying as you do! And yet, I cannot escape the fact that no matter what time I go to bed I naturally pop awake at 6 in the morning, fully rested and ready to take on the day. The time between the moment I open my eyes and the moment I spring out of bed is less than a second! Despite the fact that I am clearly at my best and most energetic early in the day, every once in a while I get it into my head that I should be a night person. After all, night owls are cool. These are the folks who stay up late, go clubbing, and socialize until the wee hours of the morning. During these misguided periods I promise my wife that I will attend late-night parties and then struggle to stay awake. But it is just not authentic. I find myself nodding off, making excuses to go take a nap in the car, or desperately wishing I were home in my pajamas. Strengths work in much the same way: Each of us is dealt a metaphorical hand in life, and it is this hand we are forced to play. Some of us are creative, others are empathic; some of us are persistent, others are funny. One of the most crucial aspects of working with and developing strengths is making sure you and your clients are working with strengths that are authentic.

Take-Home Lesson:

Strengths are not aspirational! As much as we might want a particular strength, it is far more effective to focus on and work with those strengths that come naturally to us. It is in our best interest to be honest with ourselves and work with those qualities we have, rather than those we wish we had.

When we refer to strengths as energizing we are not necessarily talking about some new-age meaning of the word energy. We simply mean that when strengths are in play they are noticeable for the engagement, energy, and enthusiasm they generate. When people are using their strengths or when they are talking about a situation in which they used their strengths, they tend to come alive, become increasingly animated, more physically communicative, and more alert and excited. Energy is a hallmark feature of strengths and fundamental to identifying them. A person might be good at organization, being persuasive, or comforting others, but unless it is something that gives them an emotional boost or a little burst of energy then it is probably not a strength.

Take-Home Lesson:

Energy is a hallmark feature of strengths. When people use or discuss their strengths they tend to experience a burst of enthusiasm. You can use energy as a marker to recognize when strengths are in play.

The idea of identifying strengths for use and development is not merely an academic concern. Strengths are those personal attributes to which we owe the lion’s share of our successes and for which we are most often recognized and admired by others. The ability to spot and label a strength in another person is a crucial skill in recruitment, management, parenting, teaching, mentoring, and—of course—coaching. If strengths are the currency of success, then it is worth building your literacy in this area.

Developing Yourself as a Strengths Coach

At its...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 5.8.2010
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Arbeits- und Organisationspsychologie
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Psychologie ► Klinische Psychologie
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management
• Schlagworte: Business & Management • Psychologie • Psychology • Psychology Special Topics • Psychotherapie u. Beratung • Psychotherapy & Counseling • Robert Biswas-Diener, Meridian Life Coaching, positive psychology, Ed Diener, Happiness, Martin Seligman, authentic happiness, Laura Whitworth, Karen Kimsey-House, Henry Kimsey-House, Phillip Sandahl, co-active coaching, Patrick Williams, Diane Menendez, becoming a professional life coach, professional life coach, developmental change process, coaches work with clients, coaching alliance, life purpose work, coaching conversation, life coach, coaching relationship, coaching clients, applied positive psycholo • Spezialthemen Psychologie • Training & Human Resource Development / Coaching & Mentoring • Training u. Personalentwicklung / Coaching, Mentoring • Wirtschaft u. Management
• ISBN-13: 9780470881934 / 9780470881934