The Latest in Positive Psychology

Hello everyone! Has it truly been an entire month since I’ve blogged about anything? Wow, where does the time go?  Sorry I’ve been away for so long, I’ve been “sailing as it were” (keep reading and you’ll understand the reference. I just happened to get an interesting metaphor from Robert Biswas-Diener – the Indian Jones of Positive Psychology. I felt this was a great way to help people understand the difference between weaknesses and strengths. All too often we are focused on getting rid of weaknesses, yet a better use of our time would be to focus on building our strengths. Read on and see what you think about the clever sailboat metaphor. I think this is a great way to get the message of Positive Psychology across and how to use our strengths in practice –whether working with athletes, students, C-suite executives this really sums up the philosophy of what we are trying to accomplish

Have a great week and I promise more to come!

Are you focused on the sails or the leaks?

by Robert Biswas-Diener of  Positive Acorn - www.positiveacorn.com

I recently assigned the students in my positive psychology  course to write a term paper about a personal goal. I assigned the paper on the first day of class and gave them the full ten weeks of the term to make progress toward their goal. I assured them that they would not be graded on the success or failure of their goal but rather on how much they learned.

It turns out that I, myself, learned quite a bit about the types of goals people like to set. I saw roughly a dozen papers dealing with poor eating habits, another eight focusing on debt and mis-spending, several on managing their time more effectively, and a couple on reigning in flaring tempers. In almost every case my students chose to focus on weaknesses and perceived personal failings. Wasn't this a positive psychology course? Where were the papers written about developing personal strengths?

People - especially managers and executives - often wrestle with the notion of fixing or overcoming weaknesses. This common sense view holds that weaknesses, because they are deficits, are the greatest potential areas of growth.  Most people overlook the fact that investing in overcoming weaknesses has a poor return on investment - because the effort costs are so great. A relatively better investment is learning to develop strengths. Even so, weaknesses should not be ignored.

To better understand the relationship between strengths and weaknesses consider the metaphor of a sailboat. If you have a leak (a weaknesses) you should generally keep an eye on it and attend to it in direct proportion to the amount it troubles you. Managing weaknesses will keep your "boat" from sinking, and it is therefore important to address weaknesses before the metaphorical 'leak' gets out of control. Strengths, by contrast, act more like the sails of a sailboat, and are more responsible for pushing a person forward toward their goals. Like real sails, strengths also need to be adjusted so that they are used in the proportions that situations warrant. Thus strengths and weaknesses act like two separate processes with two separate outcomes: managing weaknesses keeps you afloat and developing strengths pushes you forward.

When you consider your own strengths and weaknesses how much effort do you think you need to put into each?