THRIVING ON CHALLENGE NEGATIVE VS. POSITIVE AUTHENTICITY & ABUNDANCE ONLINE COACHING

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1 THRIVING ON CHALLENGE NEGATIVE VS. POSITIVE AUTHENTICITY & ABUNDANCE ONLINE COACHING Positive Psychology $11.50 US What the scientific study of happiness has to offer the coaching world, and vice versa Integrating Positive Psychology into Your Coaching The Power & Pitfalls of Positive Thinking Positive Leadership in the Workplace VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4 DECEMBER

2 Q&A Positive Coaching A Harvard expert puts positive psychology and coaching into perspective Following is an excerpt from a recent telephone interview conducted by choice publisher Garry Schleifer with Carol Kauffman, PhD, PCC, founder of the Institute of Coaching at Harvard Medical School, honorary vice-president of the Society for Coaching Psychology, and chair of the Harvard Coaching Conference. In response to Garry s questions, Carol offers valuable insights about positive psychology and its benefits to coaching. Garry Schleifer: What is positive psychology? Carol Kauffman: First, it is the study of what is right with us, which is what coaching is all about. [Traditional] psychology has been really focused on what s wrong with us, until lately. So positive psychology is the study of what is right with us. It looks at the nature and impact of positive emotion, positive traits and positive institutions. That s the overview of the content. But the definition I like the best that builds on this is that positive psychology is the study of the conditions and processes that lead to florishing and optimum performance. And if you think of what coaching is, that s what it s about. Positive psychology is the study of the conditions and processes that lead to florishing and optimal performance, and coaching is making that happen, creating the conditions and processes that lead to you feeling and doing your best. VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4 29

3 Positive Psychology GS: How did you get into positive psychology? CK: I remember the exact moment. It was January I was standing in the mailroom of my office and the Journal of the Psychology Association came in. I have it right here in front of me, actually. It says, Specialty on Happiness, Excellence and Optimal Human Functioning. I took it to my office and started reading articles on Introduction to Positive Psychology, Evolution of Happiness, Optimism and Self-Determination Theory, which is the core of how you fit positive goals. It was at that moment that I realized there was a name for what it was that I was interested in and that there was a whole science and a bunch of very famous psychologists who were studying the things that actually mattered to me. GS: How did you get into coaching? CK: I was becoming a positive psychologist. I had a peak performance training program I conducted. I Build your Collection Increase your knowledge base choice Magazine is one of a kind. Back issues are available, but quantities are limited. To purchase back issues or subscribe, go to or call us at to order. worked with a lot of athletes and performers and I did what I thought was coaching; and what it really was, I was just putting positive psychology back into my old model of therapy. So it was sort of positive therapy. Then I went to a coaching workshop. It was run by Mentor Coach. In that day I realized how wrong I was that there was a whole different skill set. That is when I really started integrating positive psychology into coaching. Really from that day on, I terminated most of my positive clinical practice and really began a positive coaching practice. GS: How does positive psychology support the profession of coaching? CK: As we re kind of evolving into a more sophisticated coaching world, more people are wanting coaches to be able to articulate the theory, the methods and the research basis to what they do. In essence, positive psychology gives coaching another set of scientific legs to stand on because 30 VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4

4 Positive Psychology Positive psychology gives coaching another set of scientific legs to stand on. many, many, many of the things that are basic core coaching competencies have a huge amount of very solid empirical research that supports them and coaches don t know it. So for me, as a practicing coach, it was really very helpful. The automatic thing we think of as coaching is, you hold your clients as whole and resourceful. GS: Naturally, creative, resourceful and whole according to the Co-Active Coaching book. CK: That s right; that is my favorite coaching book, actually. There is a huge amount of research that shows when you do that, it has profound influence on your client. When you are working with someone and your expectation is they are creative, resourceful and whole it elicits a whole set of behaviors and a way of being as a coach, which then in turn elicits a whole way of being and set of experience skills in the coachee. Positive psychology and coaching go far beyond what we do behaviorally. It translates into what we emanate to the client through how we are seeing them and connecting to them in a way that has profound impact. Most coaches don t know there s this body of research that supports this assumption. GS: How does your coaching differ because of your connection with positive psychology versus someone that does coaching without a positive psychology background? VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4 31

5 Positive Psychology CK: In many ways in terms of the deep part in the spirit of coaching, it doesn t differ. I really think that positive psychology and coaching are such natural bedfellows that in certain ways the spirit of the coaching is similar. What I get to have, because I am familiar with this body of research, is an additional set of ways to think about how I m going to bring the best out of my client. It gives me a greater range, depth and flexibility of choices that I can make. It helps me know thoughtfully why it is that what I m doing might really help my client. For example, one of my clients is talking about something very difficult that they have to do that they feel unable to do. Now there are lots and lots of coaching skills one uses with that. Here s one that we might do reflexively but we wouldn t know what it is we re doing. As my client is feeling stumped and lost and depressed, I might just go to the normal question that we would ask: Can you tell me about a time when you were successful at meeting a challenge like this? But what I would know is that s not just calling up memories that the person can build on. What s really key is when they re talking to me, I do everything possible to help that person access a resourceful state and feeling good about themselves and in particular trying to feel some positive emotions. So in the flavor of my questioning, I will help that client feel happy in some way. And what will inform me in that is there are dozens and dozens of studies that show when someone is experiencing positive emotion, they are more naturally able to see the big picture. They will then be able to make creative leaps connecting things together. They will experience themselves as having a wider range of I feel really supported by knowing that there s a lot of objective evidence out there that supports this very light and loving perspective. choices in what they can think and what they can feel and what they can do. And so instead of just automatically asking the person to helicopter up for a minute and take a look at this from a bigger perspective, I know that by having the person think about the issue they want to work on and helping them feel better, they will automatically helicopter. Naturally, a coach will do a lot of that it s just that I feel really grounded because I know there s a whole set of evidence-based practices that help support me in the decisions I m making. That said, I still do use my, what we call intuition but what I think of as intuition is the ability to synthesize a lot of information quickly and make a choice through the question that you ask. It makes me more skilled, I think. There s also a whole section of positive psychology on the study of strengths. There are now about a million people who have taken the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths and I also have some very particular coaching techniques and skills I use that are based in that area of positive psychology. Remember the first area I talked about was studying positive emotion and the impact of positive emotion, which is the example I just gave. The second area is identifying strengths and working with that. I ve been working on a coaching model based on this one strength inventory which I really love because it s very good and also it s free which is the Values in Action Signature Strength Survey. And I have a coaching model, a very simple model, that I use with the VIA and that s another sort of knowing that for me positive psychology expands the repertoire of what coaches have to offer. 32 VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4

6 GS: Can you give me an example of an application and impact your positive psychology and/or coaching had on one of your clients, possibly in a way that distinguishes it from what might have happened without positive psychology? CK: [I was] working with a team and in this case it was a team of hospice nurses. They have kind of a depressing job because everyone dies that s what it s about. If you look for a win, they say, what do you mean, a win? everybody died. And positive psychology would say, how could you help these people access some positive emotion in a way that would serve them? Research suggests that if you can have six pathways to a goal, you are the most likely to have optimal performance. In normal coaching with a hospice nurse team, I might be looking at ways they could support each other better. I might be looking at the deeper purpose and meaning in their work; that s pretty basic. Positive psychology would then say, what can you do to make these people feel emotionally better in a way that will then give them greater resource and depth because they re working with dying people all the time? One of the things I pulled on with that group is a very simple skill of reversing Positive Psychology the focus. You want to be able to reverse the focus from the positive to the negative and back. One of the research bodies in positive psychology that I think coaches obviously know about, is the whole area of gratitude. So I just said, what would be something you could do before your meetings that would make you all feel better? Someone came up with the idea of, why not read the letters the families have sent us. Normally they would get these nice letters, somebody would read them and they would be filed away. What the group started doing was beginning every hospice team meeting reading two or three thank you letters that the family members had sent them that week before starting their meeting. They said it felt very transforming and a completely different experience because, yes, they knew all the patients would die but also they were very much connected to what their work would do for the families. It made them feel better about themselves and each other and more creative in the ways that they could help the clients. GS: Can you give me an example of individual strength-based coaching? CK: Very often I will have given someone the Values In Action Inventory of Strengths. What happens is, when you work on the test and then you go through some of the VIAtraining that I do, people get a sense of one of their top strengths. So, say one of your top strengths is curiosity; you re very interested in everything. Another one of your strengths might be kindness. Another one of your strengths might be spirituality. Now let s say you re facing a difficult challenge. You have to fire someone or you VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4 33

7 Get new clients. Manage existing clients with ease. The only client management system that brings new clients to you. Find out how at noomii.com Sign up today and get 3 months free This offer is for Choice readers only. Register with the discount code CHOICE Offer expires Jan 31st, No long-term contracts; cancel at any time. Questions? Call us toll free Positive Psychology When asking powerful questions to my clients, I am informed by their strengths in a very clearly articulated way and not just being informed by my sense of what their strengths are. have to engage in a really strong conflict with someone. In addition to all the other things we can do, what positive psychology and in particular strengths coaching suggests is you can do the following: When the person is thinking about the difficult thing they have to do, you literally point to their top strengths and you simply ask, How could you use your curiosity to help you in this situation? And you let the person build on their resourcefulness that they can access through that particular strength. When you re done with that, you can say, Now how can you see accessing and using your kindness in a new and deeper way to achieve your goal? How could you see and use your spirituality in a new and deeper way? It takes that general approach (how could you use your strengths, or when have you been successful in the past) and it just opens a bunch of doors to get people talking about it. For example, my second top strength is love of learning and love of teaching. Recently I did have to fire someone, which goes against everything I want to do. I then said to myself, how could I think about this? How could I use my love of learning and teaching to help me do this difficult task? When I thought of that along with my capacity to care about people, as in, this is an opportunity for me to really teach this person and share with them what it is that has gotten them in difficulty in this situation. If I could do so in a spirit of teaching, then all of a sudden instead of feeling awkward and mute and guilty, there was a whole pathway of possibilities open to me because that was my top strength. For someone else, it would be really different strengths. The other piece of this that s useful to me is I then, when asking powerful questions to my clients, am informed by their strengths in a very clearly articulated way and not just being informed by my sense of what their strengths are. It also helps jumpstart your empathy. GS: What does linking positive psychology and coaching do for the coaching profession? CK: [Most importantly] it does provide scientific legs so that if you re trying to defend what you re doing to a company or corporation that wants harder evidence, you have it. We don t have to make it up, we have it. Second, it gives you a wider range of skills that you might be able to learn from or you 34 VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4

8 can use the research to build those skills. I think it helps support what it is as coaches that we already know is true. For me when I m coaching, I feel really supported by knowing that there s a lot of objective evidence out there that supports this very light and loving perspective. We often mistake light and loving as not theoretically sophisticated, but it can give you more of a sense of appreciation and respect for the power of what we re doing. GS: You mentioned before that you have four steps of how you put positive psychology into practice. Can you tell us more about that? CK: The first thing I do, and I think we do this as coaches anyway, is I work on reversing focus; helping the person to switch from what is wrong with them or a situation to what is right. But the research shows, for example, that you can actually be too positive and that there is an ideal ratio of how positive versus critical or negative is ideal for optimal performance. That s not a thing we d normally know. For example, research shows that very often when you re working with high-performance teams, if there is a ratio of 3:1 (three positives to one challenge, criticism or negative), that leads to highest performance. If you have 1:1, it doesn t. If you have 10:1 10 positives to 1 negative it doesn t. So one way I apply that is I make sure that I continue to be challenging enough in my work with people and not just supportive. I think people make a mistake that being positive or a coaching attitude is one that is nice versus one that is highly warm, highly supportive and highly Positive Psychology challenging. To me, it guides me in that process of how to reverse the focus but not reverse it too far. So that s one is reversing the focus. Two is developing positive emotional intelligence. We know that people feeling good about themselves and feeling positive emotions makes them more resourceful, more creative, more whole. They live longer. They have better performance. You want to be able to know what are the things that make people feel good in a scientifically rigorous way, not just making it up. For example, they talk about discovering what makes people happy. How much of that is through emotion? How much of that is through engagement at work? How much of that is through deep purpose? How can you get sophisticated about how positive emotion impacts your performance and how to help each client access more of a sense of well-being? First reversal, second positive emotional intelligence. Third is through the strengths and the example I mentioned before. Through helping people to be able to articulate and build on strengths in a very focused way. The idea of how do you help people really identify what their strengths are, develop the range of strengths they have, piggyback one strength on top of another if one isn t naturally strong, and harness them but have a nice assessment tool to do that if people can t access it freely. Research supports that if people are trying to use their strengths in new ways, it increases their positive emotion as well as their sense of being able to get things done. VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4 35

9 Positive Psychology So reverse focus, positive emotional intelligence, access strengths and then how do you use positive psychology to heighten hope and access peak performance? There is a lot of research that talks about how people who perform the best and can withstand adversity the most have two qualities, both of which are coachable. They have a sense of what they call willpower or a sense that you can do something and second they have a sense of way power which is that there are many pathways to a goal. If you feel like you can do something but you only have one way in mind to do it, that may or may not work. If you feel like you ve got lots and lots of paths to go but you don t have any get up and go, that won t work. Coaching is uniquely able to help people with both willpower and way power; and positive psychology shows you that that is the way to optimum performance. It helps you organize what you do if you want to get people to optimal life satisfaction and optimum performance. And think about it, for way power as it were, we ve got brainstorming. We ve got all kinds of skills to help people to develop multiple pathways. Research suggests that if you can have six pathways to a goal, you are the most likely to have optimal performance. In terms of the sense that you can do something, there s a lot of work in positive psychology about what are the conditions necessary to access peak performance states. And among other things, you want an optimal balance of challenge and skill how hard your challenge is; how high your skills are and there are all kinds of ways then to make that balance work best for a client. You optimally want high challenge and high skill for optimal performance and you want to match that with someone s sense of purpose. But very often clients don t feel that their skill levels are fully developed in a certain area. Let s say you want to help that person feel more resourceful and whole. One way you can do that is, when someone is feeling unskilled in the situation, go back and help them reverse the focus. Help them access positive emotional intelligence and start feeling better. Help them remember and use their strengths. Then their sense of skill level goes up. They access that experience of resourceful, creative and whole and they re more able to meet the challenges that they re facing. That s how I pull it together. GS: What should coaches do to either find out more about positive psychology or implement things from positive psychology into their coaching? CK: We need more books to do that. I actually have a bunch of free articles on my main website [ GS: What s next for positive psychology? CK: What I m hoping positive psychology can do next is to partner with the coaching profession more effectively. For example, to have really high level, highly skilled coaches learn about positive psychology so they can take it to the next practice level. To really have people who are good at both out there would be great for the profession. 36 VOLUME 7 NUMBER 4