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Is Optimism Contagious?

March 14, 2013 By Dr. Mike Gosling

This guest post is by Dr. Marshall Goldsmith of Leading News.

In the past I’ve talked about the value of optimism in life and at work, how the two intersect, and different challenges that crop up to sway even the most confident and consistent optimists. I examined a high-ranking executive who’d had some setbacks, but was able to get over them, excel further than another, shall we say, crabbier personality, and create significant value for his organization and workforce.

What’s interesting about this is that many of us are already irrepressible optimists, at least when the subject is ourselves. Psychologists call this “optimism bias,” and it’s one of the more well-researched concepts in behavioral economics. When people judge their chances of experiencing a good outcome — landing a big account, getting promoted, having a successful marriage, making a good financial investment — they estimate their odds to be better than average. When they consider the chances of something bad happening — losing a big account, getting fired, getting divorced — they assume odds lower than what they estimate for others.

Optimism bias inflates our self-confidence. It is the reason 90 percent of drivers think they’re above average behind the wheel of a car. It’s why some years ago when my two partners and I estimated our individual contributions to our partnership, the total came to more than 150 percent. It’s why almost all newlyweds believe there is zero chance their marriage will end in divorce, even when they know 50 percent of marriages self-destruct. This is true even for the newly remarried, who have already been divorced. It’s the reason most smokers, despite the surgeon general’s warning on every pack of cigarettes, believe they are less likely to die of lung cancer than most nonsmokers. Their optimism extends to believing they are better than others at cheating death.  It’s the reason new restaurants in big cities continue to open, despite well-documented failure rates as high as 90 percent. Restaurateurs know the numbers, but they do not think they apply to them.

Successful people also tend to be optimists. That’s a good thing too. Without it, people wouldn’t get married, or plunge their life savings into a start-up business, or devote 10 years of research to developing a cancer drug. A society that doesn’t take risks based on optimism is doomed.

But something happens to our optimism when we stop evaluating ourselves and begin evaluating our peers’ chances of succeeding. We’re not as optimistic when we take ourselves out of the equation. In fact, we can become pessimists and cynics. As evidence, gauge your level of optimism when you present one of your cherished ideas in a meeting. It should be high, or how else would you have the courage to air the idea in public? Compare that to your level of optimism when an arch-rival presents his or her best idea in the same meeting. It’s probably not as high.

You may greet the idea with skepticism, perhaps cynicism. You’ll compare its value to your idea and find it wanting. Part of this is predictable envy and competitiveness; we don’t mind a rival succeeding, but not more than us or at our expense. Part of it is the difficulty in being optimistic about someone else’s abilities where we have no control over the outcome. But much of it is simply our failure to be generous in extending our optimism to others. That’s the downside of optimism bias. We may see everything that could go wrong with the other person’s idea while remaining blind to what could go wrong with ours. It’s not a quality that we should hang on to.

If we can take the positive spirit inside us toward what we are doing now and extend it to what other people are doing — in other words, make our optimism contagious — then each of us has a better chance of becoming a person who can rise from a setback that might crumble others, a manager who doesn’t yield to the standard cynicism and negativity, and a leader whom others will follow.

Join Marshall and other speakers at the World Business and Executive Coach Summit 2013  >>

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Dr-Marshall-GoldsmithDr. Marshall Goldsmith was recently recognized as the #1 leadership thinker in the world and the #7 business thinker in the world at the bi-annual Thinkers 50 ceremony sponsored by the Harvard Business Review.  He is the million-selling author or editor of 31 books, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers, MOJO and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There – a WSJ #1 business book and winner of the Harold Longman Award for Business Book of the Year.  His books have been translated into 28 languages and become bestsellers in eight countries.

Originally published in Talent Management

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Marshall Goldsmith

Recognize The Pain Time Line

February 18, 2013 By Dr. Mike Gosling

Pain perception is about how appraisal triggers arousal (emotional response) in your body. Deepak Chopra explains that cognitive appraisal in the brain arouses only two impulses—pain or pleasure.

We all want to avoid pain and experience pleasure.  Therefore, all the complicated emotional states we find ourselves in are because we are unable to obey these basic drives. [1]

Pleasure seems to be managed well by most people and is a non-problem status. Pain though is any unpleasant sensory and emotional experience.  Acute pain is a normal sensation triggered in the autonomic nervous system to alert you to a possible injury.  Chronic pain refers to discomfort relating to injury, disease or emotional distress. Chronic pain persists and may exist in the absence of any past physical injury or body damage.

Examples of chronic pain include; arthritis pain, cancer pain, headache, lower back (coccyx) pain, and pain from damage to the central nervous system itself.

Pain felt in the body can be depicted on a pain time-line.

pain-time-line

Although pain affects your body’s responsiveness, its overall impact on you lies within you. Your perceptions therefore, are crucial in pain management.

All pain is felt in the body in the present—today. You cannot physically feel something yesterday or tomorrow. You can remember the pain of the past or anticipate a pain in the future, but you can only feel pain in the present.

  • For example;

Where were you, what did you feel, and what you do when you first heard the news of the September 11, 2001 disaster in New York, USA—the October 12, 2002 bombing in Bali, Indonesia—the train bombing in Madrid, Spain on March 11, 2004?  What did you feel over the next two to three days after each event?  Did your body feel normal?  What do you feel today when you recall those events?

All emotion is felt in the present at various levels of intensity; low, medium and high. Each time you experience a negative emotion—such as a hurt in the present, anger or resentment from a memory of the past, or fear and anxiety from perceived pain in the future—you are adding to your store of stress. The stronger (higher the intensity) you feel an emotion in your body, the greater the amount of stress and adrenalin that accumulates in your body.

Deepak Chopra explains the cycle of emotions that begins in the present (reality)—where only pain and pleasure are felt—and ends in complex emotions centered exclusively in the past, such as, guilt and depression (our perceived reality).

The cycle that gets repeated countless times in everyone’s life is as follows:

  • Pain in the present is experienced as hurt.
  • Pain in the past is remembered as anger.  Anger starts with an internal or external event and is the subjective experience of physiological arousal (stress response) to negative appraisal of the event.
  • Pain in the future is perceived as anxiety—a lessening of mental relaxation, associated to the alert reaction.  Fear, and its manifestation, anxiety, is a painful emotion caused by impending danger or an evil event—a state of alarm, dread of something, or anxiety (extreme worry) over life changes.
  • Unexpressed anger—redirected against you and held within—is called guilt.
  • The depletion of energy that occurs when anger is redirected inward creates depression (Principle 62).

The cycle of emotion tells us that stored hurt is something we all have experience of to some degree, and is responsible for considerable adrenalin arousal. Chopra argues that, “Buried hurt disguises itself as anger, anxiety, guilt, and depression.” To live in the present we need to learn to avoid the easy emotion—anger, and deal with the hurt that is more difficult to confront.  Unresolved anger will only grow worse, feeding on itself.

Sometimes you can cause another person pain by what you do or say. This external event may be intentional or unintentional, and may also create a pain for you; guilt, remorse, shame, and regret—that is, stress. For example, people who use ineffective communication (Principle 39) often drag up “history” in arguments to hurt their partner. Their perception is that their partner has hurt them or is “blaming” them in some way. They are using a conditioned response, to ease their own pain felt in the present—not realizing the physiological impact their behavior is having on their own body.

Pain is communicated to others through language, posture, withdrawal, and abuse, including physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. In an integrated model of the cognitive, affective, and physiological aspects of emotion, pain is manifested as negative emotion (accumulated stress) and can lead to nervous illness.


[1]        Chopra, D 1993, Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, New York, Harmony Books, p. 186.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: pain time line

How Do You Deal With Your Emotions?

February 17, 2013 By Dr. Mike Gosling

Emotions are bodily signals that alert you to changes in your internal or external environment. Emotions are feelings with thoughts attached to them.

Your interpretation or appraisal of your feeling in your body gives rise to an emotion. This is what I describe as EAR—Identity: Event—Appraisal—Response. Each event in your life is appraised in the GAP between event and response. Positive appraisals are a non-problem status—Emotion is regarded as “normal”. Negative interpretations cause your body to experience nervous arousal—emotional constipation!

You react to negative emotion somewhere along a “pain time-line”, where anger is at one end and anxiety at the other. If you have an avoidant emotional style you will feel more anxiety, fear and bewilderment than most people. If you have a reactive emotional style you will feel predominantly emotions of anger, frustration and resentment.

At either end of the “pain time-line” you will experience severe nervous arousal (adrenalin floods) which will promote ruminating over thoughts, worrying incessantly, avoiding situations and people that give you pain or reacting in a way that impacts adversely on others.

Dr. Robert L. Leahy of The American Institute for Cognitive Therapy has given us a schema of how our emotions can lead us down different paths. How do you deal with your emotions? Are they a non-problem status for you or do you ruminate over things or perhaps binge drink to deal with bad feelings? Please comment below.

emotions

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: normal or negative emotions

If Life Coaching is the Answer, What is The Question?

February 12, 2013 By Guest Blogger

By Suzanne James  – Life Coach

The question I hear most often is, ‘Why does coaching work? I don’t get it. It is too simple.’ I hear this from clients, and people who are new to coaching. It seems that nothing happens except a bit of journaling and brainstorming in many sessions. It doesn’t look like the coach invests a lot of effort, but the results are measurable, and there is ample evidence to support the successful approaches to coaching.

This article is designed to help people understand the fundamentals of coaching. This brief introduction to coaching may help you determine if coaching is right for you, and help you find a coach.

Collective Wisdom
The relationship between the coach and coachee is unique. No other discipline creates a parallel interaction. Most other disciplines use the mentor and the disciple, the teacher and student, the doctor and patient. These all create a pyramid or a Vertical relationship. The relationship in the life coaching interaction is even different from sports coaching. There is a two tiered approach to this strategy.

In coaching the coach assumes a relationship position that respects the brilliance and self-preservation instincts. The coach allows the coachee the freedom to build their own development strategy. There may be things wrong in your life, things you want to change. There are also a lot of good things. Some people are not aware of their strengths, but given the freedom to develop them, they quickly learn that they are stronger and more proactive than they once believed.

The second tier is the collective community among many ‘good’ coaches. The strategies utilize the wisdom of thousands of masters, and incorporate new strategies and the successful techniques of multiple therapies. This is combined with ‘competencies’. A coach does not get accreditation merely by earning their degree. They must prove their skills and abilities.

Coaches have influence over the coachee. This means that they how the power to effect another person’s life through indirect means. They teach people problem solving skills, and help them take a new look at their lives. This role is taken seriously in the coaching circles. Unlike therapy or counseling where a person can graduate and then work for years, coaches are forced to continually be coached, learn, and improve. This alters the mindset of a coach. By continually being coached they are less aggressive and authoritative. They posses many of the same skills as their colleagues, but their approach is different.

Developing
This word is used to reflect the coaches’ goal of bringing out the possibilities in someone. It is a progress, a journey, to cause to grow and increase. It includes elaborating and highlighting. A farmer plants a small seed, and it grows into a big plant. But the farmer only planted the seed. The plant grew on its own with help from the farmer and weather. In the same way, coaches plant seeds and then watch that seed grow to make sure it doesn’t wither or fade.

In many therapies, the therapist will teach the patient a set technique, or coping skill. They may help the person become aware of something and help them learn to deal with it. Coaches start with the same concepts, but instead of teaching people What to do, they work with them and help them learn How to do it. This leaves the coachee stronger and able to manage their own problems, identify opportunities, and avoid bad relationships.

The skills learned in coaching will bleed over into other aspects of a person’s life, strengthening their entire being, and creating a balance and sense of wellness. This is because coaching creates a catalyst relationship that accelerates performance. This is done by creating a partnership where the coachee defines what needs to be done, when, and how much effort to invest. This mimics the support that should naturally come from friends and family.

The coach wants to help people let go of what they have been doing all their life, and try something different. Instead of healing — think evolution. Instead of coping — think mastery of a skill set that empowers you.

The Session
These two elements explain why it is easier to work with a coach than to change behaviors by reading books, or by the DIY method. The coach may only brainstorm and it may look like you did most of the work. But the coach is constantly seeding new thoughts and new skills. They are coaxing out new possibilities from within. They are establishing a healthy relationship that you can model in the future.

Coaching is a by-product of today’s society. It is the result of our busy lives. We no longer take time for ourselves. The coach is here to help people take time to improve their lives, but also to help them focus and get the most out of the time invested. And to help them develop the skills needed to succeed. This is why the coaching session may not always be invested on the goals. Reaching your goals is only half the battle. Developing a strong sense of self worth is needed to keep the momentum flowing — even after the coaching relationship ends.

The Results
The session is about the process, the journey. However, the entire coaching relationship has one focus, the results. The ultimate objective is emotional maturity, transformation from a lesser to a greater state, and a more fulfilling state of being or doing. To repeat this in non coach language, the goal is to create a sense of wellness and balance, to empower coachees and increase their inner strength, to give them the problem solving skills to succeed, and to help them change destructive behavior.

Coaching only progresses as fast as the coachee can ‘get it.’ And it only focuses on the areas the coachee wants to focus on, at this particular moment. This is the secret to the success of coaching. To walk side by side with a coach until the coachee is strong enough, and is equipped with the tools needed to live a happier, more successful, healthier life.

The important thing to remember is that coaches are people too. It is important to find one with the mindset you want to develop. Make sure they feel like a friend and are open to your possibilities. This may require a few trial runs, but finding the right life coach is the first step to a better life.

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About the Author:
Suzanne James has 10 years experience as an online life coach and using the telephone to facilitate her coaching strategy. She has vast experience helping clients reset their core values, make changes in their communication and relationship styles, and take back control of their lives. There is a wealth of information on her website: http://www.suzannejames.com

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: coaching works, life coaching

Building Leadership For Health

February 12, 2013 By Dr. Mike Gosling

Dr. Peter Salovey, Yale University Provost, speaks at the 2010 Global Health Leadership Institute (GHLI) Conference, Building Leadership for Health held at Yale University. He extends an official University welcome and shares remarks on the psychology of leadership, drawing on his expertise in emotional intelligence and leadership.

If you’re thinking about becoming an Emotional Leader, then you need to understand your emotional leadership habits will be very different to what you’re accustomed to using. This is pretty much guaranteed for people who have adopted conditioned responses to events.

Make sure you check out this website on a frequent basis to see all of the new additions to Emotional Leadership.

For research on emotional intelligence, click here.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: building leadership for health, Dr Peter Salovey

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