For decades, resilience research has focused mainly on how negative emotions like sadness, anger, anxiety, and frustration interfere with our ability to recover quickly from adversity. Accordingly, Adaptiv's original resilience training programs helped people build resilience primarily by learning to spend less time in these negative emotions. (Check out our November, 2011 blog post for more on this.)
In the late '90's, psychologists like Marty Seligman, Ed Diener, Barbara Fredrickson and Andrew Shatté began taking a closer look at the impact of positive emotion on resilience and general well-being. By the early 00's, research findings suggested that spending more time in positive emotions like happiness, contentment, pride, interest, and love had a lasting positive impact on mental and physical health. Of particular interest to Adaptiv, Fredrickson's Broaden and Build Theory made a compelling case for the power of positive emotion to boost resiience.
Based both on findings from our own field studies and from Positive Psychology research, we developed methods and processes to help people become more resilient by learning to feel more positive emotions, tap into their positive workplace and personal values, and find more meaning in both their work and lives at large. In late 2007 we piloted a new version of our one day resilience training that introduced 3 new skills: Harnessing Positive Emotions, Tapping Into Positive Icebergs and Creating Connection. And today, these 3 strength- building skills have become an integral part of our resilience training programs.
Research shows that experiencing positive emotions in a ratio of 3:1 over negative emotions has a significant positive impact on resilience. If you'd like a new way to boost your resilience, here's an exercise you can try. First, pick a positive emotion that you'd like to spend more time in. Then, every day for at least a week:
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Write down 3 positive things that happened each day.
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Create 3 positive things each day. Examples: Call someone you haven't spoken with; Show your appreciation for something someone did for you
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When you're in that positive emotion, milk it! Pay attention to:
- What you're thinking
- What you're feeling - both physically and emotionally
- What you're doing
- How motivated you are
Please let us know how this exercise works for you. Or share with us how you keep yourself in positive emotion!
Have you noticed how some days you wake up
feeling resilient - able to tackle the challenges
and opportunities that come your way with ease;
and how other days it feels like you're swimming
upstream? Like your resilience tank is on Empty?
Here are a few tips to help you keep your resilience tank topped up - especially when you most need the extra fuel!
If you've been to Adaptiv Resilience Training, practice one skill that you learned in class every day. If you haven't been to class, try these:
- Be skeptical of your thinking: What we think minute-to-minute has a huge impact on what we feel and do. Our thinking habits are powerful filters through which we view the world. The way things look may not be the way they really are. For instance:
- If your first reaction when something goes wrong is to beat yourself up, you may be a "Me" thinker. Before you rush to judgment, try to find one possible cause of the problem that's due to someone else - or circumstances.
- On the other hand, if you tend to point the finger away from yourself when a problem comes up, you may be a "Not Me" thinker. In that case, try to find just one possible cause that's more on you.
- Never forget that most bad times are temporary. If you find yourself seeing a challenge you're facing as fairly permanent, you'll be more likely to give up trying to overcome it. And chances are, it's your thinking style that's informing you. Before throwing in the towel, try to find just one thing you could do to positively impact the situation.
- After you've done everything in your power to address a situation, err on the side of positivity. There's compelling evidence that spending time in a positive emotion fills your resilience tank.
How do you stay resilient when your tank is on empty and the reserve light is flashing?
It was back in 2001 that we first wrote about the impact of staff reductions on the resilience of both victims and survivors. Now, a decade later we’re still dealing with the topic. It comes up in almost every Adaptiv resilience training workshop. And just last week, an Adaptiv Enews reader asked me how she could get back to resilience after a major downsizing at her company. Sadly, companies continue to cut staff, and how those left standing respond and recover continues to be a topic worth exploring.
This piece isn’t about how to maintain your sanity while doing the work once done by two or three – or more. We’ll cover that in a later post. It’s about how to retain – or regain - your emotional equilibrium after you learn that people you’ve cared about, worked along side of, and counted on, are suddenly gone.
Our work has shown that it’s how we think, on two different levels, that drives what we feel. Today we’ll look at how to get a handle on the emotions fueled by our surface thinking. Next time we’ll cover how our bigger, deeper belief systems – our Icebergs – can get in the way and how to recover.
Most conversations about the emotional impact of downsizing on remaining staff deal mainly with “survivor guilt”. Sure, some people may feel guilty, but others might feel sad, or anxious, or frustrated, or even angry. And expressing a so-called negative emotion in response to the loss of co-workers may be healthy. But if that emotional reaction starts to sap our resilience and interfere with our productivity, we need to take action.
The first step is to be aware of what you’re feeling when you find out that your favorite colleague is gone. The next step is to understand the thinking that led to your emotion. Check this list of the common “negative” emotions and the surface thinking that causes them:
Emotion/ Typical Surface Thought"
Sadness / "This place won't be the same without him."
Anxiety / "I relied on her support. What if I can't deliver without her?"
Frustration / "I tried to tell them we couldn't afford to lose this person."
Anger / "I deserve an employer that values its people."
Guilt / "They deserve this job more than I do."
Embarrassment /"Now that they're gone, my weaknesses will be exposed."
Shame / "It's wrong to feel good when others suffer."
Once you've got a handle on the emotion you're feeling and the thinking that's fueling it, you can ask yourself if your thinking in this moment is either accurate or useful.
Let's say you're feeling Sad and your thinking is something like the example above. Just ask yourself, "What's one way I can think a bit differently about this that might make me feel better? Sure we will miss him. But we can stay connected outside of work so I can keep the relationship intact." With this slight shift in your thinking, you should find that you feel a bit less sad and a bit more hopeful about the future.
With some practice, you'll find that you can easily tune into your thinking and tweak it enough to break free of whatever emotion is getting in your way.
One final note: Resilience is not about being devoid of emotion. If you check your thinking and find that it's accurate, then don't try to change it. Let yourself fully experience the emotion - at least for a reasonable amount of time - and then move on.
How do you stay resilient when bad things happen to others?
I am a long-time Steve Jobs fan. For years I’ve admired his vision and brilliance as both an inventor and entrepreneur. Now, his passing has me thinking about his resilience, not just in his long fight with pancreatic cancer but throughout his entire career before and during his tenure at Apple. Jobs clearly displayed the strengths of a highly resilient person. Here’s where I think he might have scored on the 7 Resilience Factors if he’d taken Adaptiv’s Resilience Factor Inventory (RFI):
Emotion Regulation – Probably below the norm earlier in his career, and well above it in more recent years. He had a reputation as a hothead in his younger days but over time he obviously figured out how to stay cool under fire.
Impulse Control – Same as Emotion Regulation, because how we think drives both what we feel and how we react - especially in tough situations. I’m guessing that Jobs gained some conscious control over his thinking which in turn allowed him to use his emotions and behavior for greater effect and with less “breakage”.
Causal Analysis – Most engineers/inventors score high here and I think Jobs would have as well. This critical ability to accurately and comprehensively determine root causes of problems would have enabled him to tackle complex technical challenges, learn from his mistakes and ultimately create incredible products.
Self-efficacy – Self-efficacy is a core strength of entrepreneurs; there’s no doubt Jobs would have been off-the-scale high on this measure of self-confidence and belief in his ability to handle the challenges that came his way.
Realistic Optimism – Again, I predict a high score here, perhaps even a bit on the unrealistic side. Our work has shown that unbridled optimism can be a drag on resilience – extreme optimists tend to minimize risk and get blindsided by the bad stuff. However, in Jobs’ case, his high Causal Analysis would be a nice counterbalance to this.
Empathy –I’d figure on a fairly low empathy score. As brilliant, analytical, focused, and self-directed as he was, the ability to read the emotions of others was probably not his strong suit.
Reaching Out – Ultra-high Self-efficacy, Optimism and Reaching Out are the “trifecta” for entrepreneurs, so I’m betting that Steve Jobs would have scored high on this factor too. The ability and desire to tackle new challenges and opportunities was apparent throughout his career.
A final note: Every article I’ve read about Steve Jobs in the past week speaks to his passion and connectedness. This completely lines up with Adaptiv’s most current research – the more passion and purpose you bring to your work, and the greater your belief that your work makes a difference, the more resilient you will be. Period.
In Adaptiv Training we work with participants to uncover Iceberg Beliefs - rules we've developed about how the world should be, how we should be, how people should be toward us. We learn our Icebergs at an early age, mainly from our parents, and they become set in stone in our adult lives. Icebergs can be tough to detect - 90% of an Iceberg lies below the surface of our awareness. Some Icebergs have more downside than upside, and these non-resilient Icebergs are the ones that we want to first identify and then navigate around for greater productivity, performance and satisfaction.
One of the most common Icebergs we see in corporate America is Perfectionism. A perfectionism Iceberg sounds something like, "I should get everything right.", or, "If it's not done perfectly it's a failure.". If you are a perfectionist, chances are you hold a similar belief. The upside of a perfectionism Iceberg is that it can motivate you to maintain high standards and produce excellent work results. The downside is that it can create huge amounts of stress and poor performance, especially when you lack the time and other resources needed to complete the task. Some extreme perfectionists can become paralyzed when trying to complete a project in the face of major resource contraints. They strive for perfection in an environment that simply does not support the standards they have set for themselves. And in the process they burn through their limited resources with little to show for their efforts. Their Iceberg has far more downside than upside and should be "melted".
One way for an extreme perfectionist to start melting their Iceberg is to lower their standards, which are almost always higher than their boss's expectations of them. While easier said than done, we find that many perfectionists find it easier than expected once they raise their Iceberg to a conscious level.
Some perfectionists have learned to enjoy the benefits of their Iceberg while avoiding the pitfalls. A participant in an Adaptiv resilience workshop in June told us that having identified her own perfectionism Iceberg in class, she's learning to embrace the upsides - her high levels of determination and striving for quality, while managing the downsides - self-doubt and stress caused by her overly stringent criteria for success. This is helping her feel better and even do better in a do-more-with-less environment.
Are you a perfectionist? Post a comment to let us know how you deal with your perfectionism?
I'm teaching a resilience workshop for Friends Life Care (FLC), a nonprofit Quaker organization that provides in-home health care, related personal-care services, and facility care to enrolled members. The workshop is part of VigR (Vitality, Independence, Growth, and Resilience) - a new program FLC has rolled out to develop greater wellness for members and the community at large. The VigR program offers 5 Enrichment Workshops – all research-based programs, including Adaptiv's “Boost Your Resilience!” program. FLC is a terrific organization and I'm delighted to be both a member and a facilitator for one of these workshops.
At Adaptiv we're developing a resilience course for the growing 50-and-older set. Since the participants in the VigR workshop are all either well along in their careers or well-retired, I was interested in exploring the nature of resilience for this group of “Baby Boomers and Beyond”. To paraphrase Marshall Goldsmith, I wanted to know if “what got them here was going to get them there”. So, in the first of our four weekly sessions, I posed a question: How do the challenges and opportunities you are facing in your life now compare with those you’ve experienced in previous phases of your life?
This led to such a lively discussion that we decided to revisit the question at our second session. Here’s what they've came up with so far:
First the challenges:
- Lack of energy - Work requires lots of energy. I'm finding it tougher to reach and sustain the energy level I need to keep up.
- Invisibility - Earlier in my life, I was the go-to person, both at work and in the rest of my life. Even though I'm smarter and wiser now, the younger folks at work don't ask me anything. Sometimes I feel like I'm invisible!
- More exercise - Exercise used to be an option. Now, not only do I need to work out 5 or 6 times a week, I've got to work out harder than ever just to stay keep my weight and conditioning in line.
- More focus on what's wrong - When we go out with other couples, it seems like we spend most of our time talking about our various pains, injuries and ailments, and what doctors we've seen. I call it the "organ recital"!
- Less control - When I think about the challenges that I faced earlier in life, most of them seemed fixable by me. Lately, I've been hitting up against stuff like caring for my sick and dying father, and worrying about whether my savings will last me. Some of the challenges just feel like they're out of my control, and that's hard for me to deal with.
Next, the opportunities:
- What doesn't kill you will make you stronger - I've been through some really tough stuff the last few years. I feel like dealing with it has made me more resilient.
- More time - I have more time now to spend with my family, and doing other things I didn't have time to do when working full time.
We're going to keep talking about this and adding to our list. We'll also be talking about what additional resilience skills boomers and beyond might need to survive and thrive.
What do you think? Will the resilience skills that got you where you are now going to get you where you're need to go? Let us hear from you!
All the best,
Dean
In my last entry we talked about employee engagement from the perspective of the individual and what you can do to boost your engagement independent of your company’s efforts. In this longer-than-usual post we’ll look at two client cases and introduce a model that helps explain why it may be easier to connect and engage in some companies than in others.
Background
While working with two client organizations to measure and boost their employees’ levels of job connection and engagement, we noticed an interesting phenomenon. In one company where we expected to find high levels of engagement, we found surprisingly low levels. In the other company we predicted low levels of engagement, but instead observed higher than expected levels. An analysis of the cases led us to what seems to be a reasonable explanation – differences in “signal-to-noise ratio”.
You may already be familiar with this term, which comes directly from the study of signal detection. The original work in this field was done in the 1950’s by scientists studying the difficulty military radar operators had discriminating between actual aircraft and background clutter on their radar screens. The higher the signal-to-noise ratio, the easier the signal (in this case an aircraft) is to detect. The lower the ratio – either due to weak signal, high noise levels, or both – the more difficult it is to detect. Over the years, signal detection theory has expanded and been applied to modeling and predicting human decision making in the midst of uncertainty.
So, how does this relate to employee engagement? Think of all of the factors that create job connection and engagement as the signal, and the things that interfere with these factors as noise. With this in mind, let’s take a look at the two client cases:
Case 1
This client is a global pharmaceutical firm with a historically solid pipeline of brand name drugs and a positive market reputation. The target employees were sales representatives selling patent-protected vaccines to pediatricians. One of these vaccines protected children against a life-threatening disease and was the only one of its kind on the market. If the salesperson did not sell the vaccine to a physician, that physician’s patients would not receive it. With this and other effective products in its arsenal, this sales organization achieved high levels of performance and experienced rapid expansion. Most every day, these salespeople could clearly see how their efforts contributed to something much greater than themselves. Based on these factors – think of them as a strong signal – we expected them to be highly engaged. But our survey results told a different story. The group we measured showed much lower than expected levels of resilience, job connection and satisfaction. So we took a closer look at what could be getting in the way.
After several years of explosive growth in revenue and profits, the group’s performance had sagged due to increased competition, decreased customer access and a weak economy. Further, the company had announced a massive reorganization that shifted responsibility for a large part of the group’s customer base to a different internal sales organization. The reorganization included a significant reduction in staff within our target group, with about half the downsized employees reassigned to other groups and half to be released. Think of these factors as the noise in the system - more about this shortly.
Case 2
This client is a regional telecommunications company. The target employees were sales representatives selling voice and data communications systems and services to businesses. The sales team was coming off a good year but quotas had increased dramatically and the recession was taking its toll. Plus, the new sales plan made it tougher for reps to achieve their prior year’s earnings even at 100% of quota attainment. With this scenario in mind – think of them as a weak signal – we expected low levels of engagement. But again we were surprised. Survey results showed solid levels of resilience and job satisfaction, and job connection levels were much higher than expected. So, we needed to dig more deeply into what was happening within this organization.
Despite the current business climate and results, this company’s customers were extremely satisfied. The company website contained pages of unsolicited testimonials from its customers, touting consistently high levels of service. The sales organization had a great relationship with its installation and support teams which meant that most new installations and upgrades were accomplished with minimal service disruption to customers. In addition, company leadership was committed to sales and management development, with active training, coaching and mentoring programs in place. The company was focused on developing high levels of sales team effectiveness and cohesiveness.
Observations & Conclusions
In the first case, although the “engagement signal” was high, the noise level made it difficult for the sales team to detect. While these reps had enjoyed several years of high levels of connection and job satisfaction, they “lacked the muscle” to effectively navigate the high levels of adversity and change they were facing. And because of a low signal-to-noise ratio, they fell off the engagement wagon.
In the second case, the “engagement signal” was relatively low, but so was the noise level in the system. Despite the tough external environment, the company clearly communicated its commitment to the sales organization, and these reps still had a line of sight to their contributions to the customer. In this case, a high signal-to-noise ratio helped the sales reps more easily maintain their levels of job connection and satisfaction.
To us, a signal detection model nicely frames these results. At least in these two cases, the higher the ratio of signal to noise, the higher the level of employee engagement. How is the signal strength in your organization? What's the noise level and how does it get in the way of employee engagement?
In the next post, we’ll talk about some things you can do to boost job connection and engagement despite a weak signal or high levels of noise in your organization.
All the best,
Dean
So much has been written about employee engagement - just about every HR journal and vendor newsletter continues to cover the topic. And for good reason. A recent Blessing White study reports that fewer than 1 in 3 employees worldwide are engaged. An Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) report lists engagement as one of the top 10 critical issues in 2010 and again in 2011. But we've noticed that most of the coverage focuses on what leadership and management need to do to raise the engagement level of their people, without much attention given to how employees might be able to "engage themselves".
Since 2007, Adaptiv has been studying the impact of employees' level of engagement on their resilience and job satisfaction. To date, we've surveyed about 6,000 individuals, from senior level individual contributors through mid-level management.
Our engagement survey focuses on why people stay with their employers, and we've identified 3 distinct levels of connection to the job: Level 1- pay & benefits; Level 2 - the work, the people, the company; and Level 3 - making a difference, the greater good. Our findings, while not surprising, are extremely clear: the greater the connection, the higher the resilience and job satisfaction.
But measurement is only the first part of the process. Building engagement is the crucial second part. Here are a few steps you can take to boost your own or your employees' connection, resilience and job satisfaction:
- Ask yourself why you stay with your company - be brutally honest. Write down each reason in detail. Determine whether you are connected mainly at a Level 1, 2, or 3.
- Ask yourself what are the things that get in the way of connecting at a higher level. Write them down.
- Come up with one way you can think differently, or one thing you can do differently, to boost your connection. Write it down and practice it daily.
- Reach out to a co-worker that seems more connected than you. Ask them to talk to you about how they connect and engage.
- If you're still having a tough time seeing how your work makes a difference: Go to your company's website, or Google your company's name. Spend a few minutes looking for things like customer testimonials, press releases and articles describing good things that the company is doing locally and beyond. Find a story that resonates and post it where you can see it every day.
Please let me know how these tips work for you. And if you have other ideas about how we can boost our own engagement, please let me hear from you!
All the best,
Dean
After last week’s ice storm, I had officially had it with the Winter of 2010/11. I’d just finished chopping the ice away from my front door and rescheduling yet another client meeting because of the weather. Working in my home office – with the main power out and the noise from my generator outside making it hard to think – I took a break to read a new post on my sister Ellie’s blog.
Ellie runs an online marketing/PR firm and is a terrific blogger. In her post, titled “Snow Time Like The Present: OMG”, she talked about the toll the out-of-control winter weather was taking on her business and life at large (you can read her post here).
Ellie’s piece brought to mind The Serenity Prayer –
“Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
We reference it in our training and coaching work because it so neatly defines what we mean by resilience. When facing adversity, some of us stay in too long beating our heads against things that we can’t really do much about – staff cuts, budget constraints, the weather. Others of us fail to see where we’ve got some leverage and quit too soon, missing real problem solving opportunities. Either way, we burn precious resources, including our ability to stay focused, energized and optimistic.
The Serenity Prayer can provide a simple roadmap for effectively steering through the day. But when we lack the wisdom to know the difference between what we can change and what we can’t, our serenity - and our resilience - go right out the window.
So here’s a quick tip for how to get it right more of the time:
- If you’re spending too much time and energy on a given problem and not getting anywhere, ask yourself, “What’s the likelihood that I can gain any more leverage on this situation right now?” If the answer is low odds, then put your attention on another challenge with a clearer, more immediate path to success.
- If you find yourself dead-ended and ready to quit problem solving, ask yourself a simple question: “What’s one more thing I can do right now to move this situation forward?” If something concrete comes to mind, act on it. If not, ask a team member or friend for their input – especially someone that often has a different point of view from yours.
How do you find the wisdom to know the difference? I’d love to hear from you.
All the best,
Dean
Over the holidays, I noticed a predictable spate of articles in various journals – Forbes, NY Times and the Wall Street Journal to name a few – reminding readers of the power of optimism, especially for entrepreneurs and other business leaders. In every case, the author, whether psychologist, business coach or consultant, stressed the importance of re-framing most any event in our lives in positive ways. One writer referenced Seligman’s learned optimism work from the early 1990’s to support the notion that the more optimistically you can explain an event to yourself, the higher your self-esteem and the better you’ll feel and do in the world. The writer went on to cite Richard Branson and Ben Franklin as epitomes of optimistic thinking. I get why these stories tend to appear at holiday time, but I have to disagree with both the message and the examples used in this one.
As powerful as the effects of positive thinking may be, research done at Adaptiv Learning has shown that excessive optimism can actually compromise problem solving and undermine resilience. We’ve shown that extreme optimists tend to underestimate risk and get blindsided by the bad stuff. Realistic optimism – being hopeful and seeing the future as bright, but within the bounds of reality – trumps over-optimism every time. So for years we’ve encouraged people to think as optimistically as they can, but always within the bounds of reality.
As far as holding Sir Richard and old Ben up as exemplary optimists, I would wager that each of them would approach every challenge or adversity with a steely-eyed realism – first accurately assessing a situation and its causes and then applying their resources where they were likely get the best results. Only then would they let their positivity brim over. Optimistic? Absolutely! Starry-eyed? Never!