Progress-focused

As humans, we don't just think about what is happening in our lives here and now. We also have the ability to think about the past and the future. How we think about the events in our life has a lot like how we feel. Research has shown that self-distancing can help reflect on past negative events in our lives. Recent research looked at the effect of self-distancing when thinking about a feared future. 

“I need to control myself.” This simple statement raises a profound question: Who is the “I” that needs to control, and what is the “myself” that needs to be controlled? How can someone be one and the same, yet appear to be made up of many different parts? This confusion shows up not only in language, but also in our thinking about the self. Think of terms like “self-coaching” or “self-compassion.” Who is coaching whom? Who is showing compassion, and to whom? This raises the question: What is the true self? In this article, we’ll look at three key theories that help us better understand the self: mindset theory, self-determination theory (SDT), and Douglas Hofstadter’s idea of ​​the self as a “strange loop.” 

Researchers Orvell et al. (2020) further investigated the effects of self-distancing. They investigated whether distanced self-talk also works with intense emotions and vulnerable people. 

Research from self-determination theory suggests that autonomy-support by educators, teachers and managers contributes to the well-being and functioning of children, students and staff. What about the effects of supporting your own autonomy? 

Whether you see the benefit of cultivating wisdom in work situations depends on whether you believe that wisdom can be developed at all. Recent experimental research has shown that the important components of wisdom are indeed malleable. In a new book chapter, Igor Grossmann (2020) lists what is known about the malleability of wisdom. He also offers suggestions for how wisdom can be cultivated at work. 

Below you will find an ordered overview of research updates from the past 3 months. The links point to 100 - 200 word summaries of the studies. They are in Dutch. To read them in English, use the translate button (upper right).

Igor Grossmann was born in the Soviet Union, grew up in Ukraine and Germany, and studied in Germany and the USA. Currently, he is the director of the Wisdom and Culture Lab at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is one of the leading researchers in the field of wisdom research (view his Google Scholar profile ). His work focuses on demystifying wisdom and modeling of cultural change. He also co-hosts the On Wisdom Podcas t and initiated worldaftercovid.info . In this interview we will talk about topics like what wisdom is, why there now appears to be an ever-greater call for wisdom, how individuals may reason and act more wisely, and how wisdom may be taught. 

Intelligence is relatively important in both psychology and Western societies. Two Canadian psychologists have pointed out the importance of other aspects of our cognitive functioning that they consider to be just as important and have wrongly received less attention. One is Keith Stanovich who argues for much more attention to rationality. The other is Igor Grossmann who points out the great importance of wise reasoning. In two new articles that he co-wrote with colleagues, he explains what wise reasoning is, why it is so important and how we can teach it. 

By looking at your problems from a distance, by taking a third person perspective, you may come to wiser judgments. A powerful tool for making progress in many situations in the perspective-change technique. This tool enables you to look at your situation from a third person perspective. In progress-focused coaching we use this principle by asking perspective-change questions. An example of such a question is: "How would other people notice your situation will have improved?" In this article I describe evidence for the motivating effect of visualizing such a third person perspective. In this article I describe how you can use perspective changes to prepare for difficult conversations. A new publication demonstrates that it is easier to come to wise judgments when taking a third person perspective.