…pure inspiration…

One of our March blogs looked at the subject of legacy and making a contribution ; we featured the fabulous Peter, aka Geriatric1927 , who posts his own unique videoblogs on Youtube. Well, he’s popped up again, this time as part of the band, The Zimmers, who stormed into the UK Singles Charts at Number 26 this week with a brilliant version of The Who’s “My Generation” . Believe it or not the lead singer, Alf, is 90.

You might have seen The Zimmers featured on Tim Samuels’ BBC2 documentary last week, Power to the People: The Great Granny Chart Invasion. What an inspirational bunch of people. This is positive ageing in practice.

The other day I came across the most fantastic video-blogger on Youtube:  a 79 year old called Peter, aka Geriatric1927 . You must listen to this interview with him on the World Service , which is also posted on Youtube. Musing on the fact that what started out as a bit of fun has turned into quite a responsible role, Peter says ‘I do believe that I’ve encouraged more older people to copy me and have a go and therefore widened the age range of people who use video-blogging, and so I could go out of this world feeling that I have contributed something’.

What a brilliant contribution to have made.

On a similar note, I heard Charles Handy speak last year, he’s one of my favourite management gurus. (he brought ‘unconditional positive regard’ into management-speak years before anyone else). Anyway, the point is that, reflecting on his life and his contribution to the world, Handy mentioned that he writes letters about his view on life, as well as everyday stuff, for his grandchildren to read when they’ve grown up. I thought what a fantastic legacy idea this was, a bit like Geriatric1927 on Youtube.

In the meantime, I can thoroughly recommend having a go at writing your own legacy (see this blog entry for details). We use this technique with many of our coaching clients; here are some of their comments:

• It was a very creative way of finding out what really matters to me

• I was surprised by what came to mind, it wasn’t what I was expecting and it has helped me get my work:life balance sorted out

When Jenny and I were completing our Certified NLP Practitioner’s course, one of the exercises we were required to do was to write a Daily Journal. Part of the Daily Journal focussed on confirming 3 outcomes for the following day, the other part focussed on reviewing the past 24 hours, identifying the best bits and the learning points. John Seymour , our trainer, was confident that this exercise would make a difference to our lives, and informal research amongst our peer group at the time confirmed this to be the case.

Around the time I started writing my journal, I read an article, ˜Writing Wrongs’, in the first issue of Psychologies magazine by Professor David Servan-Schreiber of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. In the article, about the value of writing things down, he quoted a clinical study which showed that “..those (patients) who had spent just 20 minutes a day writing about their problems, for three days in a row, were feeling better, taking fewer drugs to relieve their symptoms and seeing their doctor less often”. His ‘journal rules’ are as follows:

1. The journal must remain strictly confidential
2. It must be honest (don’t waste time lying to yourself)
3. You must write it on a regular basis and stick to your timetable.

As a Positive Psychology student, my interest is weighted more towards counting my blessings than writing about the negatives. Nevertheless, I don’t doubt the value of Writing Wrongs in specific contexts (and, interestingly, I thought Servan-Schreiber’s explanation of the impact of the process of writing on images stored in the brain made sense of why NLP works).

If, like me, you are keener to try identifying good things in your life than you are to dwell on the bad things, here are the instructions for a 10-15 minute exercise, courtesy of Chris Peterson*

1. At the end of each day, before going to sleep, write down 3 things that went well during the day. Do this every night for 1 week.
2. The 3 things can be of relatively small importance (my friend told me a brilliant joke) or relatively large importance (my friend just got married).
3. After each positive thing, answer in your own words the question ‘Why did this good thing happen?’

You may be interested to know that Peterson’s own research shows that if you continue to do this exercise beyond the suggested 1 week, you can increase your happiness and decrease your symptoms of depression over the long-term. 10-15 minutes of your time every day doesn’t seem like a lot to ask for such a reward, does it? Go on, have a go, you know you’re worth it….

* Peterson, C, A Primer in Positive Psychology(2006) p38.

I was reading Professor Chris Peterson’s ‘A Primer in Positive Psychology’ book last night – this was light relief after many nights of trying to get to grips with the terminology in the academic papers for my MSc in Applied Positive Psychology – anyway, he outlined a well known personal development technique called ˜Your Legacy”. It’s a different slant on Seligman’s January Retrospective, which we talked about on the blog a few weeks ago.

Here is Peterson’s version of the Legacy exercise:

• Take a clean sheet of paper and a pen (or create a new document on your PC)

• Think ahead to your life as you would like it to be, and especially how you would like to be remembered by the people closest to you. What would you like them to say about you? What accomplishments and personal strengths would they talk about? Try not to indulge in fantasy, but don’t be modest about what you would like your legacy to be either.

• Write a couple of paragraphs, maybe 100-150 words or so.

• Look back at what you’ve written and ask yourself the following two questions: What can I realistically do to bring about my legacy, which is within my control? What am I currently doing now which will move me towards this goal?

Keep what you have written safe, and read it again in a few month’s or a year’s time. Ask yourself whether you have made progress towards your goal. If not, feel free to change your legacy if new goals have emerged -  it belongs to you, after all.

And then here is our version of the Legacy exercise, which you may want to do with a close friend in case you find it unsettling. In our experience, the difference between the writing exercise and the doing exercise can be very illuminating, so you may want to do both, and compare results after:

1. Establish a timeline somewhere in the room, noting where the present and the future is represented.
2. Step onto the timeline wherever today is represented, and move along it until you get to the day of your funeral.
3. Stand there for a moment, noticing what is going on: what are people closest to you saying about you? How are they remembering you?
4. What are you saying about yourself?
5. When you have noticed everything there is to notice, move back to the present.
6. In the present, ask yourself what aspects of your legacy you have noticed. How is your legacy different to what you expected? How might you want your legacy to be different? What can you do now to bring about a different legacy?

What our coaching clients find is that this exercise helps them get things in perspective, helps them focus on what they really want out of life, and often brings into sharp contrast the difference between how they are living their life now versus what they really want it to be.

We’d be very interested to hear how you get on with these exercises, and if you experience different results using them.

Bet you thought Jenny and I were so busy elsewhere that we’d forget to come back to you on the subject of Achieving Your Goals – no chance! after a few minor diversions including Jenny getting her cat seen to and me organising Hugo’s 5th birthday party, (not to mention the proper work in between of course) – we’re back on track.

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)