Happy New Year! As this is often a time when we reflect on our past achievements and set new goals for the future, I’d like to share with you some of the latest positive psychology research which you may find helpful.

• Focus on creating approach goals

According to psychology research, avoidance goals (those with negative outcomes which we work to avoid) are stressful because constantly monitoring negative possibilities drains our energy and enjoyment, eventually taking its toll on our well-being. On the other hand if we set approach goals i.e. those with positive outcomes which we work towards, our focus is on achieving the presence of something positive, which is more energizing and enjoyable. According to psychologists this ultimately leads to greater well-being too.

• Increase your intrinsic motivation

Being intrinsically motivated (i.e. doing something because you want to, not because you have to) is an essential part of goal achievement. Intrinsic motivation can be increased by ensuring that, in identifying and pursuing your goal, three basic psychological needs are met:  i) control, ii) competence and iii) connection. If your goal is not freely chosen, how might you change it so that you increase the amount of control that you have?  To increase your level of competence, why not seek regular and constructive feedback on your performance from a trusted friend, colleague or mentor? And how might you ensure that you have positive support from those around you in achieving your goal?

• Develop your self-control and commitment

Fortunately for us, self-control is like a muscle – the more you exercise it, the stronger it gets. This means that being more disciplined in one domain of your life can help you develop greater self-control in other areas. The key to self-control is to try to create new habits which simply become part of your day-to-day routine; after a while you don’t need much self-control at all.

Research into goal commitment suggests that it makes a difference to your self-motivation whether you focus on the progress you’ve already made, or whether you focus on the things that you have left to achieve.

• If you are fully committed to your goal, you can maintain your self-motivation by focusing on what you have left to do

•  But if your commitment is less than 10 out of 10, you can increase your self-motivation by focusing on what you have already accomplished.

Finally, remember that not all goals are equal in the well-being stakes: make sure yours are intrinsic, congruent and in harmony with each other.

Image courtesy of lululemon athletica

Thanks to Hearistic for the link.

It won’t surprise many of you who work in business that if you use the same approach to setting personal goals that you use at work for annual objectives, you’re far more likely to succeed.

This BBC article covers many of the key elements, which are often referred to in business by the SMART acronym: i.e. your goals should be:

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Achievable
R - Realistic
T – Time-based

So for personal goals:

i) make sure they’re well-defined rather than vague,
ii) make sure you can measure your progress towards the goal and tell when you’ve achieved it
iii) minimise the conflict between achieving this goal and other areas in your life. Take small steps.
iv) are you willing and able? Make sure you have enough resources (e.g. time, money etc) to achieve the goal
v) set a time for starting and finishing, and give yourself enough but not too much..

It’s interesting to see that, according to research by Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, men are 22% more likely to succeed when they set well-defined goals, such as losing a pound a week rather than just saying they wanted to lose weight.

Women, on the other hand, can increase their chances of success if they tell other people what their goals are. Sharing your goals publicly has really taken off in the US, with websites such as Caroline Miller’s your100things.com.

And if you want to take part in Professor Wiseman’s New Year’s Resolution Experiment for 2008, sign up here.

Good luck!

It won’t surprise many of you who work in business that if you use the same approach to setting personal goals that you use at work for annual objectives, you’re far more likely to succeed.

This BBC article covers many of the key elements, which are often referred to in business by the SMART acronym: i.e. your goals should be:

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Achievable
R - Realistic
T – Time-based

So for personal goals:

i) make sure they’re well-defined rather than vague,
ii) make sure you can measure your progress towards the goal and tell when you’ve achieved it
iii) minimise the conflict between achieving this goal and other areas in your life. Take small steps.
iv) are you willing and able? Make sure you have enough resources (e.g. time, money etc) to achieve the goal
v) set a time for starting and finishing, and give yourself enough but not too much..

It’s interesting to see that, according to research by Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, men are 22% more likely to succeed when they set well-defined goals, such as losing a pound a week rather than just saying they wanted to lose weight.

Women, on the other hand, can increase their chances of success if they tell other people what their goals are. Sharing your goals publicly has really taken off in the US, with websites such as Caroline Miller’s your100things.com.

And if you want to take part in Professor Wiseman’s New Year’s Resolution Experiment for 2008, sign up here.

Good luck!

It won’t surprise many of you who work in business that if you use the same approach to setting personal goals that you use at work for annual objectives, you’re far more likely to succeed.

This BBC article covers many of the key elements, which are often referred to in business by the SMART acronym: i.e. your goals should be:

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Achievable
R - Realistic
T – Time-based

So for personal goals:

i) make sure they’re well-defined rather than vague,
ii) make sure you can measure your progress towards the goal and tell when you’ve achieved it
iii) minimise the conflict between achieving this goal and other areas in your life. Take small steps.
iv) are you willing and able? Make sure you have enough resources (e.g. time, money etc) to achieve the goal
v) set a time for starting and finishing, and give yourself enough but not too much..

It’s interesting to see that, according to research by Professor Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire, men are 22% more likely to succeed when they set well-defined goals, such as losing a pound a week rather than just saying they wanted to lose weight.

Women, on the other hand, can increase their chances of success if they tell other people what their goals are. Sharing your goals publicly has really taken off in the US, with websites such as Caroline Miller’s your100things.com.

And if you want to take part in Professor Wiseman’s New Year’s Resolution Experiment for 2008, sign up here.

Good luck!

Are Positive Organisations some kind of Utopian drivel?

I can understand why many business leaders dismiss the goal of building a positive organisation as a bit pie in the sky. After all, the success of a commercial organisation is measured by a) how much money it makes and b) how much market share it has. Enterprise is all about competition; organisations which focus on being mutually supportive have no place in this environment…

Not-for-profits and public sector organisations, on the other hand, have different goals and operate in different arenas, ones where the concept of positive organisations can be more easily accommodated.

No wonder building a positive organisation is often considered inconsistent with the goals of commercial enterprises.

Well I think business leaders might be waking up to the fact that it’s not so pink and fluffy after all.

Tom Peters, one of the world’s foremost leadership gurus, and co-author of In Search of Excellence (which Bloomsbury called the greatest business book of all time), has written his thoughts on the idea in this short paper “Why Else Get Out of Bed in the Morning?” My suggestion is that you bear with the form (especially P1) and focus on the content. In typical Peters style, it probably raises more questions than it answers, but hey, we’re big enough and ugly enough to work those out for ourselves aren’t we?

I doubt many would argue about positive relationships being a corner-stone of happiness and well-being, although you might be interested to know that there is remarkably little published scientific research into this field. But the importance of positive achievements seems to have people divided.

In the business world, goal-setting has been the back-bone (along with a smidgen of good luck) of company and personal prosperity since the dawn of time. Call it strategy, business planning or personal development planning, it’s all about creating a new, more successful future. To some, particularly coaches, goal-setting and accomplishment is vital, it’s what successful coaching is all about. When we were training as coaches, one of the first things we learnt was how to help clients (or coachees) define where they want to be by setting their goals clearly and then to help them achieve these goals. After all, how can you get where you want to go unless you know where you’re going in the first place?

Goal-setting is also making its way into normal life; you will no doubt have noticed yourself the proliferation of books and articles about so-called Life Lists, those 101-things-you-must-do/see/experience- before-you-die type lists. Earlier in the year for example, the New York Times published an article called 10 Things To Do Before I Finish This Article. If you google ‘Life Lists’, you’ll retrieve millions of entries, such as the original 43things.com, which invites you to publish your own Life List and which contains everything from the quirky (“build a trebuchet”) to the frankly quite dull (“organise my filing cabinet”). You can get Life List websites which list the things you need to consider when making your list. Curiously, in my google search for UK Life Lists, three of the top ten were by bird-watchers; it left me wondering whether twitchers are happier than your average UK resident. Perhaps that could be the subject of my MAPP dissertation…..

There are even people who make their living out of their Life List, such as John Goddard, aka ‘The World’s Greatest Goal Achiever’. This is a man who has achieved 109 of his 127 life goals (you should look at them, this is not a man who needs to organise his filing cabinet…). Interestingly, his 126th goal was to marry and have children – he now has five. My question is, how on earth does he get time for them, in between scaling Mount Kilimanjaro, retracing the steps of Marco Polo and Alexander the Great, and exploring the Amazon river?

And going back to coaching for a moment, Caroline Adams-Miller, the well-known US life coach, author and Pennsylvania MAPP graduate, specialises in goal-setting theory and happiness in her coaching practice, based on the research evidence that identifying and achieving ones goals can increase your well-being (e.g. Locke 2005). Miller has also set up a very successful website where people can make a public statement about their goals, called Your100things.com.

But Life Lists don’t attract support from every quarter; there are some who think that making a list of what you want to achieve in life actually detracts from what life is all about, i.e. living. I don’t often listen to BBC Radio 4’s Thought for the Day on the Today programme, but this one by Rhidian Brook about Life Lists caught my attention, particularly Brook’s claim that “They provide us with a kind of short cut to meaningful achievement and self-fulfilment”. I’m not sure that’s the case at all. Surely it depends to a large extent what your goals are (materialistic? altruistic?), whether they are realistic goals or just wild dreams, and how relentlessly you pursue them. Many Life Lists I’ve looked at contain a mix of goals which cover all Seligman’s pillars of well-being (creating pleasure, engagement, meaning and good relationships).

And anyway, who is it who said that ‘Life is what happens to you while you’re making other plans’?

What was fascinating (apart from the photos of the first Apple ‘laptop’) was his certainty that in any expedition the journey (and in this case, the teamwork) is just as important as the destination. Businesses would perform a whole lot better if they realised this, he said.

How right he is. Many people we coach start with the perspective that ‘I’ll be happy with my job/life/self when XYZ happens’. Happiness is therefore seen as something to be achieved in the future which is conditional on completing a specific goal. Happiness is something that you can achieve in the future, and having some goals in work and life is crucial to personal growth, however the mistake often made is to focus so much on the reaching the goal in the future that you forget about the present.

You can also be happy now, in the moment. So remember that it’s the process you are following now that is as important to your happiness and self-development as the achievement itself, be that getting a new job, being promoted, losing weight or climbing Mount Everest.

In today’s posting I’m going to share with you an interesting tool, devised by Dr Martin Seligman, called the January Retrospective. This is a bit like Out with the Old, In with the New which Jenny described in her posting on 1st January, only in more depth.

Here’s how it works.

At the end of January set aside 20-40 minutes of quiet time to reflect on the previous year. Think about how your life has gone over the past 12 months. What has happened, what goals did you set yourself (if any) last year, and which ones have you achieved? If you missed some, what stopped you? What successes did you have, how did they come about? What good things happened that you’d forgotten about? Reflecting on those positive things, identify what difference they have made to you, and how do you feel differently now that they have happened. Consider what you know now that you didn’t know then. Consider also the negative things which happened and rather than dwell on them, think about what you have learnt from them, and how you have changed for the better because of them.

Once you have spent about 20 minutes on this (or more if you want), you need to organise your thoughts on one page that you can keep and refer back to. For ease, Selgiman keeps his record on his PC.

On a scale of 1-10 rate your satisfaction with your life in each of the categories which are of great value to you, and jot down a few sentences to sum up. Seligman uses the following categories:

Love
Profession
Finance
Play
Friends
Health
Generativity (leaving a meaningful legacy for the future)
Overall

Other categories could be:
Faith / spirituality
Learning / personal development
Relationships:  intimate / family / friends/ community / business
Work / career
Health & Wellbeing
Fun / Hobbies/ Recreation
Self Esteem
Achievements
Contentment

Choose whichever categories are most meaningful to you. Because Seligman has been doing this exercise for the last decade, he also uses a category called ‘Trajectory’ in which he scrutinises the year-on-year changes and their course across the decade.

The idea is that you keep this summary of 2006 in a safe place until next January, when you go through the same process, reflecting on how 2007 was for you personally.

Over time, you will build up a fairly detailed appraisal of how you, and your life, is progressing, which is important for balanced decision making. And you will have reminded yourself of the positives, and reinforced the learnings too.

From ‘Authentic Happiness’, Martin Seligman (2003)