Generally Thinking

Category: Positive Psychology

  • Carlos Sainz and the Surprising Sadness of Second Place

    At the start of the 2021 Formula 1 season, Ferrari had a mountain to climb.

    Despite being one of the most well-funded and prestigious teams on the grid, they’d massively underperformed the previous year. Well, they were doing great, until… ahh, how shall I put it… a “potential irregularity” was discovered in how their engine was operating (others might say “They got caught cheating”).

    After this came to light, regulations were changed, engine adjustments were made – and then Ferrari’s performance dropped massively. They went from being one of the top 3 teams, to being just a middling one.

    This whole situation probably caused sleepless nights for a lot of people. But I’d wager none more than Carlos Sainz Jr.

    Picture of Calros Sainz Jr.
    Carlos Sainz Jr. at McLaren

    You see, 2021 would be Sainz’s first season at Ferrari. He’d moved there from McLaren, a British team experiencing quite the opposite turn of fortune in 2020 – previously middling, McLaren were now on the ascendancy, and were in contention to take Ferrari’s spot as the number 3 team on the grid.

    It seemed like Sainz had jumped ship… right onto one that was sinking.

    So you’d think, that if Sainz managed to finish in second place for Ferrari, he’d be ecstatic. This would be true of any race, but especially if it happened in Monaco, the most glamorous event of the calendar. Not only would it be a great personal achievement, it would suggest that perhaps Ferrari weren’t a sinking ship after all.

    So why, on May 23 2021, after he did finish second at Monaco, did Sainz describe the result as “Bittersweet”?

    This isn’t the first time that second place has been a source of sadness for Sainz. It happened previously in Monza 2020, when Sainz was still at McLaren. He was in second place and chasing down the leader, getting closer every lap… but unfortunately for him, he couldn’t get past.

    You can hear the radio chatter between Sainz and his engineer in those final laps of that race here (his comments start at 1:19).

    Not a happy chappy, is he?

    To put that Monza race in perspective, finishing fifth or sixth would have been a good result in that McLaren car at that time. To finish second was an incredible result. If you’d offered him that before the race weekend, he’d have bitten your hand off. He should have been over the moon, but he was disappointed. Why?

    Comparisons influence emotions

    A study published back in 1995 might have the answer. The idea is that the happiness we get from something isn’t based on an objective assessment of that thing. It’s based on what we compare it to.

    The researchers, Victoria Husted Medvec and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell, and Scott Madey of the University of Toledo, studied the happiness shown by medal winners of the 1992 Olympics. They had undergraduate students rate how happy each person looked in the medal ceremonies, and other footage from after the winners of the events were announced.

    If happiness was based on an objective assessment of circumstances, you’d expect gold medallists to be happiest, then silver, then bronze, right? But that’s not what they found.

    The gold medallists were happiness incarnate, as you’d expect. But weirdly, the bronze medallists were happier than the silver medallists. The reason for this might be what the athletes are comparing their results against.

    Top down map of the Monaco track
    The Monaco circuit – a source of both joy and sadness

    The silver sadness effect

    The researchers believe that when you win silver, you compare yourself to gold. You focus on the one single person in the whole entire world who beat you – rather than the billions of others over whom you just proved your superiority! This was clearly what was on Sainz’s mind after his second place finish at Monaco. As he said after the race:

    “You know, the bittersweet feeling is still there because I had the pace to put it on pole or at least to win this weekend, and the fact that in the end we didn’t quite manage, is not great.”

    The result was bittersweet because he’s changed his comparison point. Before the race fourth might have been a great stretch goal, and one he’d have been happy with. But due to a few mishaps, the fastest cars weren’t at the front where he expected them to be. Suddenly he found himself in second with a chance to win – and that became his new reference point. How he finished in relation to that reference point determined how he felt.

    The bronze bliss effect

    And why are the bronze winners apparently happier than the silvers?

    Perhaps it’s because they compare themselves downwards – not up. They are just happy to be up there on the podium, as part of the winner’s group – knowing that they were just one place away from not getting any recognition at all.

    This was clearly on the mind of Lando Norris of McLaren who finished third in Monaco, behind his former teammate Carlos Sainz. As Lando told Sky F1:

    “It’s incredible… it’s a long race, especially with Perez the last few laps, that pressure of seeing him in my mirrors after every corner. It’s stressful… I don’t know what to say! I didn’t think I’d be here today. It’s always a dream to be on the podium here, so it’s extra special.”

    As you see here, he’s comparing himself to fourth placed Perez – and he’s extremely happy with the result.

    (It’s not the whole picture obviously)

    Now of course there’s more to the story than purely finishing second vs third. And it’s not like every single person who finishes third is happier than the person in second. There are loads of other factors at play, like:

    • Who else is competing. It’d be interesting to see if there’s a difference when competing against uber-champs – like if you’re swimming against someone like Michael Phelps, would you be happier with silver because you didn’t see yourself as really in the running for the gold? (or maybe elite athletes just don’t think that way).
    • Your relative standing in the pack – if you’re a huge underdog who’d never dream of finishing 10th, never mind second, it might make a difference.
    • Your history – if you’ve never had a podium/medal, then getting that under your belt will bring its own happiness
    • How close the content was. If the best competitor was way out in front, and the second and third best grappled hard against each other with fourth place way behind them, then that second place might feel sweeter.

    So you have to think that this silver sadness effect is just one part of a complex web of factors that influence how athletes feel after the content.

    That’s if it exists at all, of course – we’ve only discussed one study here (although another study of judo fighters found the same thing). Still, the general idea that comparison affects our happiness (as well as things like our preferences and perceptions), is more broadly supported (whether you want to call it the comparison trap, the contrast effect bias, or whatever).

    Anyway, I guess the practical application of this is, try to look down on other people as much as possible.

    Just kidding!

    The practical application I suppose would be something like deliberately expressing gratitude, or trying to become more aware of the good things and people you have in your life. I think that often, if we’re a little pissed off or annoyed, we’ve talked ourselves into that state by focusing on all the crap that went wrong.

    So sometimes – not always, but sometimes – we might be able to talk ourselves out of it too, by changing our comparison point. Although, it might not work when you have more serious problems going on, or when things are super meaningful to you (like a racing career you’ve dedicated your whole entire life to).

  • Beyond money: towards an economy of well-being (Diener and Seligman, 2004)

    Beyond Money: Towards an economy of well-being is a 2004 paper by Ed Diener and Martin Seligman. Here are the key points.

    Overview

    Economic indicators like GDP and the employment rate are dominant when it comes to making policy decisions. Such statistics are important and relevant, especially when it comes to the fulfilment of basic needs – wealthier countries are more likely to provide food, shelter, and security to their citizens. However, economic indicators have a number of of shortfalls. Not only do they fail to provide the full picture of well-being in a society, but in some respects they may actually be misleading in that regard.

    Economic indicators should be balanced out with a wider range of statistics that give a clearer picture of how well a society is flourishing. These include well-being and mental health measurements, social capital, and human rights.

    Not only will this give governments a better idea of how to create effective policies, but improvements in these non-economic indicators will likely lead to improved economic performance in any case.

    Details

    A number of countries have developed their own national well-being index. The EU runs regular surveys measuring well-being, the UK introduced well-being measures under David Cameron’s government, and Bhutan was a trail-blazer in this regard.

    A lot of this has to do with psychologists putting a lot more effort into studying happiness around the turn of the century. A paper in 2004 by Ed Diener and Martin Seligman entitled “Beyond Money: Towards an Economy of Well-Being” summed up the research that was available at that time, making a case for such well-being indices.

    Here’s an overview of the key points in the paper.

    Key argument

    Economic measures give an incomplete and sometimes inaccurate indication of how well a society is flourishing. Policy makers should make the development of valid well-being measurements a priority, and use the data to inform policy.

    What is well-being?

    Psychologists define well-being as people’s “positive evaluations of their lives”, taking everything into account. These evaluations are affected by things like the amount of positive emotion people experience, how engaged they are in what they regularly do, how satisfied they are with their life situation, and how much meaning they get from their lives.

    More info on how happiness is measured here.

    What’s wrong with economic indicators then?

    They have their uses, of course, but they are perhaps over-used. The news tells you how the economy is doing every day. How often do they tell us how satisfied, engaged, or depressed people are?

    And what’s the point of a strong economy anyway? Ultimately, it’s to improve well-being – at least to a large extent. In many ways, then, economic indicators are a stand-in for happiness.

    That makes some sense. The richer you are, the more options you have. The easier you can meet your basic needs like food, shelter, and warmth. And the more options you have in general in your life.

    Centuries ago, when these basic needs were not as well met as they are today, a concern with the economy made a lot of sense. But today, we’ve basically got that covered.

    That’s not to say we should throw them all out. It’s just that they don’t correlate as strongly with well-being as they perhaps once did.

    For example, Diener and Seligman argue that in the 50+ years before the paper was published in 2004, GDP had increased steadily. At the same time, however:

    • Measures of well-being had remained relatively flat
    • Rates of depression had increased 10-fold
    • American children experience more anxiety
    • The amount of social connections people have had decreased
    • People report less trust in both other people and governments

    So why not measure and report on well-being directly?

    Limitations of measures of well-being

    But it’s not all rosy in the world of well-being measurement. There are some problems here too.

    • Multiple constructs: researchers measure different “forms” of well-being: satisfaction, positive emotion, negative emotion, depression – these are not necessarily equivalent.
    • Single answer questionnaires: a lot of well-being research just asks one question (How happy are you on a scale of 1-10?). The researchers argue that these are less reliable.
    • Data is usually cross-sectional: This basically means a measurement taken at one time. It’s better to measure the same people over time to track trends.

    They argue that we need more carefully thought-out measures, perhaps even different measures used with different populations (e.g., a different questionnaire for teenagers than adults receive).

    Relevant findings in well-being research

    Diener and Seligman then go on to summarise some of the relevant well-being research that could be relevant to policy decisions.

    National wealth and well-being

    There is a correlation between the two – richer countries tend to be happier. However, Diener and Seligman argue that there are diminishing returns – after around $10k GDP per capita, money makes much less of an impact.

    Governance and well-being

    Human rights correlate with well-being, as you’d expect. But since richer countries tend to have better human rights on average, it’s hard to say how much of an impact they have by themselves.

    Democracy, and greater involvement in the political process, also predict well-being.

    The perceived effectiveness and trustworthiness of governments was correlated with well-being.

    Political stability is also important, and in the short-term can be more important than the impact of having a democratic government system at all.

    Social capital

    Social capital in a society means high levels of trust and helping between people.

    Community boosts well-being – this can mean volunteering, club memberships, church attendance, and people socialising in general. Basically whenever people get together with positive intentions towards each other.

    Trust in a society is linked to higher well-being and lower suicide rates. Recent studies (at the time: 2004), showed declining trust in the United States.

    Religion and well-being

    Religious people tend to be happier than the non-religious, on average, both across and within nations

    Church attendance plays a role here – religion ties into the social capital effect.

    Money and well-being

    Higher income is linked to well-being, but it’s a slightly more complex situation than the mere correlation implies.

    Generally speaking, the poorer the country, the stronger the correlation. For example in the US, the correlation is .13 – it exists, and when we’re talking about policy decisions affecting 300 million people, it matters. But it’s not worth writing home about (about 1.7% of the variance in well-being accounted for by income).

    In the slums of Calcutta, however, the correlation is .45 (about 20% variance explained).

    Again, this probably comes down to the basic needs issue I mentioned earlier.

    The correlation probably goes both ways, also – a number of studies show that happier people do better in the workplace:

    • Job satisfaction and positive meed contribute to productivity
    • Happier employees change jobs less often and take less time off
    • Happier employees are more helpful and have better work relationships
    • The well-being of employees can predict customer satisfaction

    More on the impact of happiness on work success here.

    Materialism and well-being

    Also, there might be a negative impact of income on well-being. When people put too much focus on money and material possessions at the expense of other values, they may experience lower self-esteem and well-being.

    More on materialism here.

    Physical health and well-being

    Well-being correlates with health, not surprisingly. Better health means higher well-being.

    However, people tend to adapt to health conditions, and once they are used to them and able to cope, their well-being moves towards where it was before they got the health condition, sometimes all the way. However that’s not always the case, especially with illnesses that affect daily life, or which are/could be terminal.

    As with money, the health link might also work both ways, to some extent.

    • Lifespan is longer in countries with higher well-being and optimism
    • The outcome of certain illnesses can be predicted by well-being measures, especially optimism
    • People with higher well-being tend to report feeling less pain
    • Well-being measures are linked to better immune responses

    More on the link between happiness and health here.

    Mental health and well-being

    As noted earlier, mental health problems in wealthy countries had been increasing, even though they were becoming wealthier.

    Depression, in particularly, had increase 10x in the 50 years before the study was published. This is despite much better GDP, better living conditions, the internet, more music and pop culture, better education, and other benefits.

    This is the point of a well-being index – economic measures don’t capture this fact. If you used them alone, you’d thing everything was fine.

    A few more points. At the time of this study, Diener and Seligman (2004, remember) reported that:

    • 50% of a national sample had experience at least one mental disorder in their lifetime, 30% in the last year, and 18% in the last month
    • 16% of young adults in a British study were classed as having a neurotic disorder
    • Depression is the third highest cause of loss of “quality adjusted lifespan” (ie taking into account the life in the years, not just the years in the life). Behind only arthritis and heart disease, and higher than cancer and diabetes.

    Social relationships and well-being

    The need to belong is a psychological need, and when we don’t have positive, supportive people in our lives, we tend to feel very bad. The quantity and quality of our relationships are among the best predictors of an individual’s well-being. This was very well established by the research even back in 2004.

    Of course, economic indicators of progress miss the impact of social relations completely. In fact it can be worse – when policies are made with only economic indicators in mind, the outcome back be worse relationships.

    Some social indicators do exist – crime rates, marriage/divorce rates, gender equality and so on, but they don’t capture the full picture of the amount and quality of relationships that people have.

    Systems of Indicators

    Economic indicators clearly aren’t doing their job in terms of being adequate gauge of societal well-being.

    A number of other large scale well-being surveys are out there, carried out by the EU, Gallup, and others. But these aren’t quite there either.

    So what’s the answer?

    Well, it’s probably not a single indicator, but a system of them. Which covers a range of different variables, using a range of methodologies.

    For example, a wide-scale cross-sectional survey, combined with a subsample studied using the Experience Sampling Method (basically buzzing people in their phones a few times a day to ask how they feel, rather than giving them one big questionnaire at a single point in time).

    Such a system of indicators would have to:

    • be policy-focused
    • fairly represent all stakeholder groups in a nation
    • Include broad and narrow aspects of well-being
    • Have a set batch of questions that remain stable over time (to allow long-term comparisons), as well as shorter-term scales that can be added and removed as needed

    The authors didn’t discuss the specific variables that should be included in such a survey, and left that as a topic for another day.

    Well-being instead of money?

    The authors conclude by pointing out that we’re not getting rid of money anytime soon. It’s too entrenched into our culture, has a proven track record, and furthermore, well-being isn’t a panacea that’s going to come along and solve everything.

    One of the challenges will be finding a balance between the two – building economic stability without negatively impacting well-being in the process, and pursuing well-being without sacrificing the benefits that the money economy has brought.

  • The evolution of gratitude

    Photo by Tim Dennel

    We humans intuitively know how important it is to express gratitude. “Thank you” is one of the first phrases we teach our children, and it’s a key thing to learn when we visit a foreign country. There is part of us that would just feel really bad if we didn’t express gratitude when someone has done something for us (well, for most of us at least).

    Try going a week without saying “thank you” to anyone. Not your spouse, not a work colleague, not the barista at Starbucks. Imagine how uncomfortable you’d feel! Somehow we just know that this would be upsetting to others, and also bad for us too – we’d get a reputation for being rude, and people would be less likely to help us out in the future.

    Where did this strong instinct and understanding come from? Is it something we simply learn from a young age, and have drilled into us? Maybe, but some researchers think it’s an evolved trait – we’re simply born with a gratitude instinct.

    A paper from 2008 by Michael McCullough, Marcia Kimeldorf, and Adam Cohen called “An Adaptation for Altruism? The Social Causes, Social Effects, and Social Evolution of Gratitude” looked into this idea a bit.

    Gratitude: a prosocial emotion

    First, they define gratitude – it’s a positive emotion that comes when we feel we have benefited from someone else’s actions. The researchers label gratitude as a prosocial emotion – in other words, the whole reason it’s there is to nudge humans to act in prosocial ways.

    There’s a lot of research supporting this idea. One experiment was particularly clever. Researchers created a situation where some of there participants thought that they’d received some money from another participants. Other participants thought they got this money by random chance.

    Then, the participants were given some more money, and told that they could either keep it all themselves, or share it with their partner. As expected, the ones who thought they’d been gifted the money earlier were far more likely to share it in the second part of the experiment.

    When asked why they wanted to share the money instead of just keep it all for themselves, they simply said they wanted to express their thanks to the other person, and this was their way of doing it.

    So as we see, gratitude makes people kinder – at least, towards people who have already helped them in some way. We call this reciprocity – a fancy word meaning you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.

    Gratitude is everywhere

    So let’s get back to the topic of evolution.

    If gratitude was an evolved emotion, you’d expect to find it everywhere – and you do. Just as there’s no culture without anger, love, or joy, we haven’t found one without gratitude. But we can go back even further than that – some researchers have even looked for evidence of gratitude in animals.

    Now, this is very tricky to do. Is your cat grateful after you feed her? It’s easy to imagine that she’s happy about it, but grateful? Since cats can’t say “Thank you!”, how would you know?

    Well, it’s hard to say for sure. But one way is to think about the idea of reciprocity. In another study, researchers set up a food puzzle for chimpanzees, that couldn’t be completed alone – they needed help from another chimp. When watching them work on this puzzle, the researchers observed that chimps were most likely to help another chimp if that chimp had helped them out previously.

    Did the chimps do this because a feeling of gratitude compelled them? Who knows. Emotions are a common tool of evolution, used to nudge behaviour – so it’s certainly possible. But it doesn’t have to be. If the helping was nudged by an emotion, it might have come from a feeling of indebtedness, for example.

    Why would gratitude evolve?

    Another way of thinking though whether a particular trait is an evolved adaptation, is to consider, what’s the purpose of it?

    We have to be careful of just making up nice sounding evolution stories here, but with that said why might gratitude evolve? According to the Selfish Gene view of evolution, there would have to be a benefit to the genes that lead us to feel gratitude. MucCullough, Kimeldorf, and Cohen thought this boils back to the concept of reciprocity again.

    As a tribal species, we couldn’t survive on our own – we needed help from other people. This can lead to imbalances – what if you’re doing all the helping, but no one’s helping you? That wouldn’t be fun. Maybe you’ve had a job like that. On the other hand, if everyone’s helping you out, but you’re not lifting a finger to help anyone, then that’s fantastic for you (you’d be an arsehole, but it’s still good for you) and bad for everyone else.

    So, perhaps we’d evolve a way of balancing the books, so to speak. A way to know who we should be helping, and by how much. The researchers think gratitude might have been one part of the solution to this problem – that is, maybe it evolved to help facilitate fairer exchanges.

    If this was true, we’d expect two things. First, we’d expect the strength of the gratitude we experience to be proportional to the benefit we got. Second, we’d expect to feel more gratitude towards strangers than to people we’re related to.

    To the first point, this is something we know intuitively, but studies back this up too. One experiment was set up in a similar way to the money sharing one earlier – participants got a gift that they were told was from another person, and later had a chance to pay the giver back. This time, they varied the amount people received in the first place – people receiving larger gifts were more generous when they had a chance to repay the favour than those who received a smaller gift.

    To the second point, why would we expect to feel less gratitude towards relatives? It’s because we share genes with our relatives, and so there’s another system already “built in” to make sure we help them (according to a theory known as kin selection). So, gratitude doesn’t need to “switch on” as much to achieve helping between relatives (although it would help our relationships if we expressed it more often anyway).

    A study from way back in 1977 suggests there might be something to this, although this was based on hypothetical scenarios (basically just asking people, if a stranger or a relative helped you out, who would you be more grateful towards). So this study at least doesn’t give super-solid support for this point.

    So where does that leave us? Darwin had suggested that gratitude was a universal emotion, which other primates experience. We’re not quite at the point where we can say that’s true, but based on behaviour, so far it seems they at least experience something that does the same job.

    References:

    Bar-Tal, Daniel & bar-zohar, Yaakov & Hermon, & Greenberg, Martin. (1977). Reciprocity Behavior in the Relationship Between Donor and Recipient and Between Harm-Doer and Victim. Sociometry. 40,. 293-298. 10.2307/3033537.

    McCullough, M. E., Kimeldorf, M. B., & Cohen, A. D. (2008). An adaptation for altruism: The social causes, social effects, and social evolution of gratitude. Current directions in psychological science, 17(4), 281-285.

    Suchak, M., Eppley, T. M., Campbell, M. W., & de Waal, F. B. (2014). Ape duos and trios: spontaneous cooperation with free partner choice in chimpanzees. PeerJ, 2, e417.

    Tsang, Jo-Ann. (2007). Gratitude for Small and Large Favors: A Behavioral Test. The Journal of Positive Psychology. 2. 157-167. 10.1080/17439760701229019.

  • Can being an expert undermine your performance?

    As with bilingualism, it’s generally assumed that being an expert completely beneficial and has no downsides to performance. However we know that expertise tends to be domain specific, for example, chess grand masters can memorise chess boards far more quickly and easily that novices, but on standard cognitive tests tend to fare no better. In fact, if you arrange chess pieces to positions that would never be encountered in an actual game, again their recall is no better than chess novices, showing just how domain-specific expertise can be. But surely within a given domain, expertise can only be beneficial?

    Castel, McCabe, Roediger and Heitman suggest not. They gave 40 students a memory test consisting of eleven animal names and eleven body parts. The twist here was that all the animal names were also NFL team names, like dolphins, colts, seahawks and bears. After the memory test, participants were given an NFL quiz, and the group was split into two, those scoring above and below the median on this test, to give high expertise and low expertise groups in the domain of NFL knowledge.

    The results on the memory test for the two groups was then compared. Indeed, the NFL experts remembered more of the animal names than the non-experts, while there was no difference between groups on the body parts test. So far so good, however, the researchers also tested for incorrect answers — NFL animal team names and body parts that were not part of the original test. The results indicated that the experts were much more likely to make incorrect guesses than the non-experts. The authors suggest that this represents memory errors, the domain-relevant information of the experts got in the way of their accurate recall of the animal names. Since there was no difference between groups in body part experience, false answers were about even between groups on that test.

    Is this really the case though? Or was it that the experts consciously noticed that the animal names belonged to the NFL teams and simply reeled off as many as they could remember during recall. Perhaps it was not a case of the existing schema interfering with memory, but a recognition that they already know these names, so why bother taking the extra effort to think back and recall? Why not just reel off my schema? I wonder if the results would be the same if participants were told that they would score 1 point for a correct guess, but minus 1 point for an incorrect guess, which might increase the incentive to actually recall. In other words, maybe this effect is a conscious strategy used in situations where there’s no cost to an incorrect answer.

    However, there are other studies that support the authors’ conclusions, which I haven’t read so perhaps my question has been answered before or since. Either way, it’s an interesting thought that the knowledge base acquired by experts might be detrimental in certain tasks.

    ref:
    Castel AD, McCabe DP, Roediger HL 3rd, & Heitman JL (2007). The dark side of expertise: domain-specific memory errors. Psychological science, 18 (1), 3-5 PMID: 17362368

  • Why are some people more driven than others???

    Some people just have that “Get up and go” don’t they??? This goes by many names – self-control, grit, motivation, drive, persistence, work-ethic. When it comes to succeeding in a particular pursuit, this thing is a pretty important factor, too. One study found that self-reported grit was more important than IQ in predicting a number of outcomes in eighth-grade students:

    Self-discipline measured in the fall accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television (inversely), and the time of day students began their homework.

    It’s a pretty common trait among successful people, too. Will Smith is a pretty successful guy by most standards. Why is that? Here’s what he has to say about success:

    Why are some people driven like this, while others are happy to tread water? Will Smith is clearly a very competitive guy with a huge work ethic. Where other people would be happy to take a day off, he keeps on working. Where other people slow down, he speeds up. Sounds exhausting! What is behind such a huge amount of effort?

    Genetics

    I don’t believe that this is a fixed trait, because different people in different cultures and environments will react differently. But I do think genetics play a role. Many traits studied by psychologists have a strong genetic component, according to studies of twins. So maybe the traits that lead to being driven also develop more easily in people with a certain set of genes. I’ve never believed the idea that “All people are created equal.” Clearly, some people are born with better aptitudes in different areas than others. We’re not all born with the same mental blank slate, onto which we can develop in different directions.

    Intrinsic Motivation

    I’ve talked before about the difference between intrinsic motivation (something you do for its own sake) versus extrinsic motivation (something you do for a reward). Could it be that lack of drive is simply a symptom of doing something for a reward, as opposed to doing it for the pure pleasure of doing it?

    Michael Jordan talks in his autobiography about how the massive amount of effort he put into training was fun. For him, getting up early every day to practice free throws was scarcely an effort. Not that it’s right to say he has no work ethic — of course not — only that what seems on the outside to be a strong work ethic and “forcing” of behaviours is sometimes less so from the inside.

    The key thing to keep in mind here is difficulty. In the video above, Will Smith mentions the idea of talent versus skill, of honing your craft for thousands of hours until you’re a master. This gels with Ericsson‘s work on deliberate practice, and the well-known (thanks to Malcolm Gladwell) idea that it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to reach mastery, regardless of the starting skill level. Deliberate practice is different to just doing the activity. It is doing it at the outer limit of your ability. It’s working on those hard, frustrating aspects that actually take effort. If you find a pentatonic scale difficult but could jam along to “She Loves You” all day long, then working on the former contributes to your 10,000 hours but the latter does not.

    If your craft is something that naturally appeals to you, and you enjoy, so much the better, but you’ll still have times you don’t want to practice, or you’d rather relax, or where you’ve reached a plateau that is hard for you to progress past. Therefore, to the extent that skill level plays a role in success, it stands to reason that grit, persistence, and work ethic is going to play a role in success regardless of intrinsic motivation. As beneficial as it may be, don’t make the mistake of thinking that intrinsic motivation is necessarily synonymous with “high” motivation. I read books for intrinsic reasons, but I don’t always want to read.

    You could say therefore, that success can stem from something that you’re intrinsically motivated to do, but either doesn’t require high levels of skill, or you already have high levels of skill in. As long as it’s not something mundane like eating. If you can find something like that, you’re home free, so it’s worth considering if any activities like this exist for you.

    However, there is a trap here. If you’re looking for external success via something you’re intrinsically motivated to do, it could very easily switch to something you’re extrinsically motivated to do when you start seeing it as a path to external rewards. This is particularly dangerous, because as Dan Pink explains in his book “Drive”, motivation for activities only tends to be increased by external rewards when these are rote, boring, repetitive tasks. Ability on tasks that require creative thought or effort tends to be stunted by the promise of rewards. Maybe that’s why a musician’s second album is usually worse than the first?

    Purpose / Meaning

    Maybe some people have a greater sense of purpose behind them, and this provides the motivation for them to keep going even through difficult times. Survival is one such purpose. It’s hard to imaging Chinese factory workers doing 18 hour days in terrible conditions for any reason other than to survive. If they had a few million in the bank, that would seem like an absurd course of action.

    Being anchored to a purpose might keep people going. When they feel like they want to take a break, they remind themselves of what they are trying to do, and they suddenly feel the urge to continue. This makes sense to me. I think our bodies keep energy in reserve, even when we feel very tired, just in case something of high importance becomes salient. Many a times I’ve been walking down the street, tired and hunched, when I see a pretty girl walking the opposite way. Isn’t it funny? I suddenly find the energy to walk upright and stick my chest out a bit!

    I imagine this as a kind of evolutionary reserve power store, just in case something comes up that might influence our ability to survive our reproduce. But because our brains are adaptable, and self-programmable, we can “install” a number of rules so our brain learns other occasions it should access our reserve power. The ability to build a sense of purpose might be one such thing. Of the top of my head, I can think of one study that backs this up, where people who reviewed their core values did better in a self-control task than people who didn’t.

    The need for success itself might serve this role for some. Why would Will Smith rather die than get off a treadmill before you? You could imagine some negative motivations behind this, like not wanting to feel like a failure, or status consciousness taken to such an extreme level that people would rather try to beat everyone that simply deal with that issue. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Competition can be a tool, something that you use to motivate yourself but deep down understand is essentially meaningless. Beyond competition, the desire to contribute and to serve might provide that purpose. There are many examples of people being willing to put themselves through hell, even to die, for a purpose. This is something we’ve been reminded of in recent years but the mechanism has always existed.

    If this is correct, the action step here is to install a purpose into yourself, to find the meaning behind what you want to do. There are two ways. One is to determine your values, beliefs and convictions, and pick your direction based on them. This makes sense but is very difficult. If you ask yourself “What do I value?”, “What do I believe?”, it would be hard to know if the answer is “real,” and not something that has been pushed into your head from one of the 10 zillion sources we’re bombarded from in daily life. How “deep” do you have to go to find your true purpose, if there is such a thing, and where does it even come from?

    The other way is to take your direction, and integrate your values into it. This strikes me as a temporary solution at best since the two probably won’t fit together very well. It’s unlikely you be pursuing a path that’s in line with your core values and not know it on some level. The reverse is probably true as well, if you’re going in a “wrong” direction there’s probably a little niggling feeling that pops up occasionally (but you bash it back down with the perks of the job).

    Have I missed anything?

    What do you think about this? Why are some people more driven than others? This isn’t an extensive list, just a few ideas – what have I missed?

    Also, what do you think about the “how” side of things. How does one install a sense of purpose for instance?

    Here’s another question – can the lack of purpose, motivation and genetic propensity be overcome through “techniques?” If you set goals, go over your values, plan your time, etc., is that enough?

  • Awareness of the body is related to intuition – but can sometimes lead to the wrong decisions!

    A few months ago I did a little experiment. For a month, I tried to make all my decisions based on intuition and gut feeling, rather than logically thinking things through. This proved harder than it sounds, and some interesting things happened. It was quite a freaky experience, in the sense that many things worked out pretty well, even though I had no idea where all these decisions were going to end up. Some pretty big changes happened that month, including decisions about how I earn a living and where I live, so if you wanted to do something similar, think hard about that. Or trust your gut, whatever.

    During this month I looked for ways to improve intuitive decision making. Most of what I found related to psychic intuitions, and I tried some of these exercises. Unfortunately the scientific literature is pretty sparse on this topic, so I was pretty interested to hear about Barney Dunn and colleagues’ (2010) recent paper looking into how interoception influences intuitive decision making.

    If you’re wondering, interoception is not a hit film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It refers to the amount that people are aware of their own bodily sensations. Surprisingly, I found that there’s a little controversy in psychology over when bodily responses occur in the decision making process. The debate is over whether bodily signals influence decision making, or whether they are simply a product of it. This is what the paper was looking into, through two tests of whether accuracy in a cognitive processing task is related to the ability to perceive the feelings in the body.

    In the first test, participants were shown a set of images, which evoke different emotions (e.g, fear, neutral, positive). For each image, they self-rated the images for valence (positive to negative) and arousal (whether it makes you feel more alert or more sleepy/dull). At the same time, they were hooked up to an ECG machine, measuring their heartbeat. Next everyone had to count their heartbeats over various time frames, while an ECG measured their actual number of heartbeats. This tests their interoceptive skills.

    What they are doing here, is comparing the bodily response to the pictures with the actual response indicated by the ECG. The hypothesis is that in people with high interoceptive sensitivity (as measured in the heartbeat counting task), the difference between actual and reported arousal would be closer than that of less interoceptive individuals. And this is what the results showed, for the arousal ratings but not the valence ratings.

    The second study is much more interesting. Participants play a simulated gambling game. Four decks of cards are presented, two of which are profitable on average, two of which aren’t. Over time, participants should get a feel for which decks help them win and which help them lose. And so they did – overall. people showed a preference for the profitable decks, and this got stronger as the game went on. Just like in the last study, this intuitive decision making was related to the degree of interoceptive sensitivity the participants had.

    These results support the idea that interoception can improve intuitive decision making, at least in the conditions these things were measured and tested in here. Perhaps improving interoception in people might also improve their decision making in this task? It would be interesting to compare some experienced meditators to novices.

    Be warned, however, that interoception can be a mixed blessing, depending on whether the intuitions are leading you to good or bad decisions. For 27% of people in the second study, their intuition was leading them to the unprofitable decks!

    That’s a pretty tough one to explain. Why would your intuition lead you to a negative outcome? Perhaps there’s some interplay between the intuitions and your beliefs about what’s good and bad. Maybe you’re a shy person who doesn’t want to get excited in public, and your intuition leads you to decision that prevent you having to jump for joy in front of other people.

    I emailed Barney Dunn to ask about this, thinking low self-esteem might explain this effect. He said “While we didn’t directly control for self esteem, the effects still hold when controlling for depression and anxiety. You might expect depression in particular to be a proxy for low self esteem.” So maybe I’m wrong, but either way it doesn’t seem to be a simple intuition = good, no intuition = bad formula. It might be more complex than that.

    Ref:

    Dunn, B. D., Galton, H., Morgan, R., Evans, D., Oliver, C., Meyer, M., Cusack, R., Lawrence, A. D., Dalgleish, T. (2010). Listening to your heart: How interoception shapes emotion experience and intuitive decision-making. Psychological Science, 21, 1835-1844

  • Six Success-Enhancing Behaviours that Good Moods Bring You

    Just like Santa Clause, happiness brings gifts with it too – and you don’t have to be good all year to get them!  In the last three articles, I’ve discussed a paper arguing that happiness leads to success, through a better career, better relationships and better health.  This works in part through behaviour – positive moods promote positive behaviours – ones that are friendly to success.  The evidence suggests six broad categories of behaviour that result from happiness.  Here they are:

    1) Positive Perceptions of Self and Others

    Happy people are optimists, who tend to have higher self-esteem.  They think well of themselves and the different areas of their life; family life, romantic life, education, leisure, and so on.  This positive attitude spills over onto other people too – happy people tend to like other people more.

    So what comes first, happiness or high self-esteem?  You’d think it was self-esteem, but in fact it’s a little of both.  Self-esteem does bring happiness, but being satisfied with your life also brings self-esteem and confidence.

    2) Sociability and Activity

    Happy people tend to be more extraverted – more outgoing, active and energetic.  Positive emotion is described my some researchers as the ‘glue’ that holds the different aspects of extraversion together.  Happiness is associated with more formal and informal social activity, including voluntary activities, time with friends, learning new skills and taking classes, and even being more informed about politics.  Happier people seem to be more informed and interested in learning new things.

    If people are induced into a positive mood (they usually do this with uplifting videos), they are more likely to start conversations with a ‘stranger’ (who was actually a confederate, working undercover for the researchers).  So there you go, if you want to be more social, cheer up.  It works.

    All those new skills and contacts would certainly be useful in trying to become successful, plus people with a larger social network tend to be luckier, too.

    3) Likability and Cooperation

    Are cheerful, upbeat people fun to be around, or just plain annoying for being so cheerful?  The former is actually true – happy people are liked more than unhappy people.  They are also perceived more favourable by people – they are seen as more intelligent, competent, friendly, assertive, less selfish and more moral.  People in happy moods are also more approachable and inviting to others.

    My favourite variation on a classic saying goes like this: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know – and how much they like you.”  Success involves other people, being likeable and well thought of can only be beneficial.

    4) Prosocial Behaviour

    A great deal of research now supports the idea that happy people are more generous and charitable.  They just have a greater interest in helping other people.  This goes hand-in-hand with the authors’ original idea that happiness indicates conditions of abundance, so to speak (see the first post in this serious, second paragraph down).

    Why is prosocial behaviour helpful to success?  It makes people more likeable, strengthens social bonds and networks, and brings future profits through the principle of reciprocity (you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours!).

    5) Physical Well-Being and Coping

    Positive moods are associated with healthy behaviour both long and short-term – happy individuals are less likely to take drugs and eat unhealthy food in the future, and recent positive moods are associated with less cigarette and alcohol use, as well as better quality sleep and more exercise.  One study exposed participants to the cold virus, and people who generally have a more positive emotional style were less likely to develop a cold from it.

    Another interesting finding, is that happy moods help you resist temptation when you’re trying to quit something (eg, smoking, junk food).  If you’ve ‘given in’, then before you continue your indulgence, do something to bring your mood up.  Watch an uplifting film, a sitcom you like, count your blessings or do some other self-help technique.

    According to researchers, this replenishes the deflated ego, giving you more will power.  Just don’t use a pick-me-up that reminds you of the thing you’re trying to abstain from! (eg if you’re quitting junk food and you normally eat in front of the TV, don’t watch TV to boost your mood).

    Happiness also seems to have a direct effect on health.  Although there is little evidence at present, concepts related to happiness like humour and optimism have been shown to increase immune system efficiency.  One study found higher antibody activity on days with more positive moods than negative moods.

    A happy disposition also leads to better coping during life’s difficult times, probably through the increased optimism and hope that tends to come with happiness.

    6) Creativity and Problem Solving

    The studies that exist on happiness and creativity suggest that the two tend to come together in people.  There is a need for more research in this area, but is seems that it is moment-to-moment happiness that is beneficial to creativity, rather than happiness as a trait.  In other words, if you take a person who is usually in a bad mood and cheer him up, he should be more creative while his mood is good – even though his disposition might be as grumpy as the dwarf of the same name.

    Of course, you can always bring up the ‘troubled artist’ stereotype to challenge these findings – and in some studies, people in sad moods are more creative than people in a neutral mood – but it’s the cheerful ones that usually show the most creativity.  But it’s a valid challenge to the idea, and the apparent conflict might just be due to different definitions of creativity.

    The reason that happiness is good for creativity may be that it broadens your perception and thinking somewhat.  This is in opposition to ‘negative’ emotions, which narrow your potential thoughts and actions down as a survival instinct, eg. fear makes you escape or hide, anger makes you retaliate against a transgressor, and so on.

    When it comes to complex problem solving, however, the findings are quite mixed.  In some mental tasks, negative moods are more effective, in others, positive ones are.  The difference seems to be because good moods increase a person’s reliance on heuristics (heuristics = rules of thumb, stereotypes, or mental shortcuts) – rather than slowing down and thinking the task through carefully and analytically.  So positive emotions are perhaps better when there is existing knowledge and heuristics that can be applied to a task.

    Why would good moods increase your use of heuristics?  Perhaps because if things are going well for you, it makes sense to use heuristics you’ve already used, because these are probably what got you the success in the first place.

    But don’t start listening to your Radiohead albums before you do your evening Sudoku puzzle, thinking that the intense depression will help you out.  If you’re in a positive mood you can still access your analytical side; you just have to do it deliberately.

    Conclusion

    The point of these four posts was to hopefully give you perspective on happiness that you might not have taken before.  In summary:

    • It’s an action signal just like other emotions
    • The actions it signals are ones that help you move towards goals
    • Therefore, good moods are not solely a result of a consequence of success (although they certainly are that), they are part of the cause of success.

    Remember – ‘happiness’, in the paper I got this information from, is defined by frequent positive emotions and infrequent (but not absent) negative emotions – a slightly different definition than I’ve used previously.

    Even though ‘negative’ emotions are not that pleasant to experience, it’s easy to imagine that they serve a useful purpose, that when you’re scared it’s to keep you safe, to keep you from doing things that your mind associates with danger.  If you didn’t have fear, you’d get into a lot of trouble.

    Likewise, happiness has a purpose too.  It’s not just there so that you can feel good!  It’s a signal, information about your circumstances.  You’re progressing well towards your goals, you have resources, allies and security.  Because of this, happiness nudges your behaviour in a certain direction.  Unlike fear, though, the direction is towards goals, not away from them.

    Your mind then opens up a few mental resources for you; makes you more interested in goals, more creative, and gives you a positive outlook on any negative things that might be going on, so that they don’t interfere with your advancement.

    Happiness is not a guarantee to success, of course, but the point is that it plays a measurable role.  It’s one piece of the puzzle.  If you’re suitably convinced of this, you’ll probably want to read How to be Happier, to find tested ways of increasing your happiness.

    This series was based on the below paper published in Psychological Bulletin by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King and Ed Deiner – three big names in positive psychology.  It was a huge effort, they analysed 225 studies with over 275,000 participants in total!  All three researchers have books out so if you like the stuff in these articles, stick their names into Amazon and see if there’s something you like!

    Apart from the side-splitting humour, all the points in this article came from this reference.  If you’re looking for the original studies, get the pdf of the above reference and do a Ctrl+F (or Apple+F) to search for the finding you’re looking for.  Then find the study in their reference list.

    Recommended Reading:


    References:

    (1) Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Deiner, E. (2005). The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success? Psychological Bulletin, 131/6, 803–855

  • How to manage your weaknesses

    There’s a big focus on weaknesses in the world these days. It seems like people want to balance themselves out by developing their weaknesses – to become rounded. Previously, I’ve argued that it’s best not to be rounded, that we’re better off focusing on our strengths. But if we do this, we will still have weaknesses, so what do we do about them? That’s what this article is about.

    First of all, why this focus on weaknesses, why are they so alluring? I want to suggest an explanation for why we’re so weakness-focused, and offer some suggestions on working around weaknesses, mainly garnered from the book ‘Now, Discover your Strengths‘.

    A potential employer wants to know your limitations to help decide between applicants. But even after you’re employed, you’ll hear about ‘development’, ‘areas that need work’, and so on. In certain roles this is unavoidable, because there’s a minimum standard of performance that is expected. But we’ll often see development programs with the aim of rounding off individuals, rather than trying to create specialists. This might be due to our inherent negativity bias.

    Our negativity bias is well documented by researchers. There are paragons of positivity in our species, for sure, but most of us are pretty focused on the negative. Not necessarily in a debilitating way; its more of precautionary thing. It makes sense because we evolved out in the plains of Africa, where what you don’t know might kill you. Where being ostracised from the group means potential death, not just pointing and laughing in the playground.

    “The mind reacts more strongly to the bad than to the good.”

    Say you find a new fruit. If it’s safe, you get a bit of sugar and some nutrients. If it’s dangerous, you’re dead. Say you hear a rustling in the bushes. If it’s a friend, you get a laugh and a joke. If it’s a predator, you’re dead. Something negative was many times more hazardous than something positive was beneficial. Hence our bias towards the negative. The mind reacts more strongly to bad than to good. Don’t believe me? Ask a newspaper editor which headlines sell more papers!

    Maybe this is why if we see a weakness, we want to fix it. It’s human nature, your mind thinks it’s important to you, to your safety. Even though you’re not living in a nomadic tribe in the African savannah (unless tribes have developed laptops and wireless internet), your instincts are wired for that environment.

    What is a weakness?

    If a strength is a trait that can be applied productively in a given domain, a weakness is something that hinders performance in a given domain. My inability to efficiently operate an industrial crane is not a weakness in running this website. My time-management and organisation skills are.

    People are typically much better at identifying their weaknesses than their strengths. If you need help, you could look at your strengths questionnaire outputs and see what’s ranked near the bottom, or think about a particular task and see if there’s something specific holding you back.

    Managing weaknesses

    You might be able to fool an interviewer asking you what your strengths and weaknesses are. Well, technically, they know you’re fooling them, it’s just a matter of being a better fool than the next applicant. But if you actually do have weaknesses that are relevant to your career, side-project, hobby, or whatever, they may need to be addressed. How do you deal with that, given that we’re now ‘sticking to our strengths’? Here are a few ideas:

    1) Practice

    I know. I’m contradicting my previous articles where I said to spend your time working on your strengths. But if a weakness is really holding you back and you can’t get around it, one of the options is to improve it. As was said in Now, Discover your Strengths, this isn’t really a charge for glory and success, it’s damage limitation. If you really can’t get out of or delegate a monthly presentation, you’d better work on your speaking and communication – if only a little bit. You can also look into the skills and knowledge you’ll need.

    2) Create a Support System

    As I mentioned earlier, I’m not a naturally organised person. I don’t immediately know the most important thing to do, or use my time in the best way. To get around this, I’ve been following the Zen To Done course – to gradually adopt a decent organisation system. After 10 months, the aim is to be fully organised and more productive. That’s an example of a support system.

    Or take something like social intelligence. Remembering a person’s name the second time we meet them might help us come across as more socially intelligent. This is a common problem, I hear. Actually for me, it’s more that I’m weak at recognising faces than remembering names, but I can’t think of an example for that. Anyway, there are memory techniques and mnemonic tricks you can use to do learn names, as well as remember other things about the person to bring up and ask about – makes you seem warm and friendly. That’s another example of a support system to get around a weakness – it’s not going to make you Mr or Mrs Charisma, but like I said, damage control.

    3) Outsource

    Get a partner – outsource your weaknesses to someone else. This can work when starting a particular project or venture, or even within a role if there’s someone who’s skilled in one area and you in another. Outsourcing weaknesses is something we all do anyway, much to our accountants’ delight.

    4) Drop it

    Most of the time, a weakness isn’t a threat to you – maybe to your ego, but not to your safety. So maybe it’s time to let that go a little bit. If it’s something you can’t avoid, then you’ll have to develop it or outsource it. If it’s really important to you, then you have no choice either. But my personal opinion is that we should get over the idea that we have to be rounded people, ready for any situation that might come up. Unless your name is James Bond, it just seems like a great investment of time and effort, for very little benefit.

    Recommended Reading:

  • How to identify your strengths. Part 1: Self-Reflection

    I recently made a case that it’s better to “stick to your strengths” than to do “whatever you set your mind to.”  The main thrust of my argument was that even if you could do anything you set your mind to, it’s a slower, longer, and more frustrating road to excellence if you’re not using your strengths.  So why not pick the more enjoyable journey?

    “If you’ve never applied your strengths productively, you might not realise you have any.”

    A strength is just a particular way of processing information that your brain is good at.  A strength has to be applied towards a productive outcome to be noticed as a strength, of course, so you might not realise you have any, or you might see it as a weakness.  For example, neurotic worriers are superb at anticipating negative outcomes, they can often do this all day long.  While this might not make them great people to sit next to on the bus, their natural caution and prudence gives them excellent potential for strategic planning roles.

    Maybe you’re looking to shape your life around your strengths, maybe you’re just reading out of interest.  Either way, you’re probably curious as to what your own strengths are.  Allow me to cater to your intrigue, by presenting the two ways you can discover them:  Self-Reflection and Questionnaires.

    These are each pretty big topics, so I’ll explain how to use self-reflection now, and review the best questionnaires to use in a future article.

    By “self-reflection”, I don’t just mean sitting and thinking “Hmmm….what are my strengths?”  Research has uncovered patterns in how people discover their strengths, and this gives you areas in which to focus your self-reflection.  This option would be best for people who have a high level of self-knowledge to start with, or people who dislike questionnaires generally. 

    The advantage of self-reflection is that you’re not limited to a fixed set of potential answers – a questionnaire can tell you which are your top five strengths out of a total of 24, but it can’t tell you about anything outside of that model.  Reflection is harder work, but gives you that extra flexibility.  You can discover your strengths by reflecting on the following five areas (1):

    1) Spontaneous Reactions

    If it is true that strengths are your brain’s efficient processes, you’ll probably use them as a kind of default response to various situations.  When a problem comes up, do you analyse the situation or jump straight in?  If you go to a party, is your spontaneous reaction to woo those people you don’t know, or spend time relating to people you do?  Looking for common spontaneous reactions over a variety of situations can give you clues to your strengths.

    2) Yearnings

    For whatever reasons, each of us is drawn to some activities but not to others.  There are some activities that turn us off, and some we get excited about.  This is partly because we get more satisfaction from activities involving our strengths, and it’s easier for us to get into a state of flow when we’re using them.  

    When we’re yearning to do a certain thing, it’s in part because of the good emotions we expect to get from it, so this is a good avenue to look at when trying to identify strengths.  Think about your yearnings, and find the commonalities, but beware of what Marcus Buckinham calls “misyearnings”.  For example, a yearning to be an actor because of the anticipated glamour and fame, not for the joy of acting.  The yearnings you look for should be those relating to an activity itself, not the end result of it – things that you’re intrinsically motivated to do.  If you’re unsure, it can help to interview someone already in the role you yearn for, to see what it’s really like.

    3) Rapid Learnings

    Unfortunately, this is something I’ve never really experienced!  I’m quite a slow learner, I can’t think of many things I’ve picked up easily.  But many people try something new and find they progress quickly and naturally in it.  This rapid learning is indicative of an efficient brain area, and therefore a strength.  Think back over times you’ve picked something up quickly, or found you were a ‘natural’ at something.  Your strengths may relate to the skills required by that activity.

    4) Satisfactions

    As positive psychologists have discovered, using your strengths makes you happier.  Reasoning backwards, we find that the things that make us happy may involve our strengths.  Of course, not everything that makes us happy can involve a strength, otherwise you’d come up with a rather silly list, maybe including “being surprised”, “drinking beer”, and “buying a carpet”.  Obviously, these are not strengths.  You have to use common sense and maybe look at activities that are challenging to some degree, activities that you’d like to do again.   

    5) Energy

    You’re more likely to draw energy from activities that use your strengths than those that don’t.  This is why it’s so hard to go against the grain of your strengths long-term – these activities are draining rather than energising.  Ask yourself where you get your energy from.  What activities give you a buzz when you’re doing them?  If you can think of some, they probably involve your strengths.

    “Looking for your strengths helps you to see yourself from the outside”

    As you’ll have noticed, discovering your strengths through self-reflection is hard work; not something you can do in an afternoon.  You might have to spend a few weeks noticing your spontaneous reactions and satisfactions, and remembering your rapid learnings.  You’ll have to be perceptive in order to discover where you get your energy from, and careful not to identify any misyearnings.  

    The advantage of all this, aside from figuring out what strengths you have, is the extra self-awareness.  You’ve probably never thought of looking at yourself from the outside, to see how your elephant naturally reacts to things when you’re not directly instructing it.  An exercise like this will greatly appeal to those of you seeking self-knowledge.

    Others will feel this is too much hard work!  For you people, there are some good questionnaires which are well supported by research; these will give you a good idea of your strengths.  There are also some crap questionnaires out there too, so next article I’ll review the best ones to use.

    Recommended Reading:


    References

    (1) The first four (Spontaneous Reactions, Yearnings, Rapid Learnings, and Satisfactions), are recommended in Now, Discover Your Strengths by Marcus Buckingham and Donald O. Clifton.  
    The fifth suggestion (Where your energy comes from), is Alex Linley’s advice, which you’ll find in the book Average to A+, you might also like this free pdf file: Alex Linley’s Strengthspotting Tips 

  • How to identify your strengths. Part 2: Questionnaires

    Previously, I’ve explained why it’s best to stick to your strengths, and explained how to identify your strengths through self-reflection.  In order to use self-reflection, you’d have to be aware of your body and mind, watch how they naturally respond to situations, and take some extra time to sit and reflect in the ways I outlined.  This is all well and good, and many people relish that type of self-analysis.  Others, including my own good self, don’t find that quite so appealing.  Personally, I’d prefer to just fill out a questionnaire and get the results.  If you’re like me then read on, and I’ll tell you where to go next. First of all – in case you’re unsure which way to go – here are the pros and cons of each:

    For Self-Reflection/Against Questionnaires

    Questionnaires are fixed and rigid – Although there are many thousands of possible outcomes from a questionnaire, it is still blocked into a framework, and cannot tell you about anything outside of the framework.  Self-reflection is more flexible.

    Questionnaires are focused on psychological and social strengths only – So you won’t discover any physical abilities like reaction time or balance except through reflection.  

    Self-Reflection is more personalised and focused on you – Its outcome is based on your real-life behaviour.  Questionnaires, on the other hand, give you a best-guess based on your answers to questions – this has potential for error.

    Increased self-knowledge – You’ll surely learn more about yourself from doing this.

    For Questionnaires/Against Self-Reflection

    You may not have the words – If you don’t have a good vocabulary to identify strengths with, you might miss some, or not realise that a certain consistent behaviour can be applied productively.  Once you’ve very familiar with the strengths vocabulary, you might even try your hand at Talent SpeedReading, which could be useful if you’re in a managerial position.

    Personal taste – Some people find self-reflection difficult or boring.

    Backed by research – Yes, responses are fixed into a framework, but there are good reasons that this framework exists.  These models are not arbitrary: research has been done to test their effectiveness.  

    Saves time and effort – 45 minutes to 1 hr, versus 1 or 2 weeks.

    Of course, you can always do both, and see how the results compare.  There are two dominant models in the field of personal strengths.  These are Values In Action, coming from positive psychology researchers, and StrengthsFinder, based on research by Gallup.  (Note: There is a third model, Realise2, coming out of the Centre for Applied Positive Psychology on June 2nd 2009.  As I know very little about it, I’ll leave it alone for now.)

    Values In Action  

    Legend has it, a group of intrepid researchers went into the mountains one winter, taking with them food and every major scientific, philosophical and religious text ever written, from the north, east, south and west.  For a long time, there was no word.  Some feared the worst.  Then, the next spring, the researchers returned.  Exhausted and emaciated, they came down the mountain, carrying over their heads a glowing, 800 page tome entitled Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (CSV), which contained extensive information and background on 24 character strengths.

    I may have exaggerated this story slightly.

    In any case, these 24 strengths are grouped into six virtues.  To come up with this list of 24 strengths, the historical texts were examined, and commonalities were identified.  The researchers looked at what the great thinkers of our species agreed on, and tested these common ideas against a set of criteria of their own. 

    The end product is a model where the exercise and development of strengths leads to the achievement of virtue.  So it’s mainly concerned with developing good character.  

    The Values In Action model has an accompanying test, used to diagnose peoples’ “signature strengths”.  The test is called, inventively enough, the Values In Action Inventory of Strengths.  It is well supported by research, and a lot of effort has been put into making sure this is a valid and reliable reflection of human strengths. 

    For example, when the test is given to people in the military versus civilians, soldiers come out higher in strengths like teamwork, honesty and bravery (1).  Another example: executives tend to display less kindness and love, but higher leadership and self-control than their employees (2).  These findings and others like them are sensible; they show that the test is accurate.

    The VIA Inventory of Strengths can be taken at Authentic Happiness.  It’s free but requires registration (you also get access to a whole host of other tests) and it takes around 45 minutes to complete.  If you only take one test, take this one.  I recommend it because I’ve read much of the research using this model, so I know it’s been well validated and tested. 

    Also, studies have shown that when people use their signature strengths, as identified by this questionnaire, they get happier, and continue to get happier the more they use them (up to the 6 month point where the study ended, that is). (3) 

    StrengthsFinder  

    This is a more well-known approach to strengths, due to the popularity of the book “Now, Discover Your Strengths”.  Rather than focusing on good character and virtue, the authors have focused on the workplace, and job performance.  The model is based on a survey of 2 million people in just about all known professions.  Each participant was interviewed, then the data was analysed and compiled into what is known as StrengthsFinder.  

    If you’re interested in strengths to help you find or progress in your career, this is probably the model for you – it’s specifically designed for that purpose.  To develop strengths, you first must identify your talents.  Talents are defined as “any recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behaviour that can be productively applied”. 

    After discovering your talents, you practice them, learn complimentary skills and knowledge, and eventually the talent becomes a strength, which itself is defined as “consistent, near perfect performance in an activity.”    

    Like the VIA Inventory of Strengths, the test takes around 45 minutes to complete, and gives you an output of your top five strengths.  Unlike the VIA, the StrengthsFinder model includes a total of 34 strengths, rather than 24, and unfortunately it isn’t free.  

    To take the StrengthsFinder test you have to first purchase one of their books, StrengthsFinder 2.0 will give you access to the newer test, or an older publication like Now, Discover Your Strengths will get you into the older test (convenient links below).  These books are pretty cheap in paperback and worth getting if you’re interested in strengths.  Once you have an access code, head over to the StrengthsFinder website and log in!
     

     

     
    Recommended Reading:


    References

    (1) Matthews, M. D, Eid, J, Kelly, D, Bailey, J. K. S, Peterson, C. (2006) Character Strengths and Virtues of Developing Military Leaders: An International Comparison. MILITARY PSYCHOLOGY. 18(Suppl.), 57–68.

    (2) Character Strengths of Executives and Employees 

    (3) Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American psychologist, 60(5), 410-421.