Progress-focused

Giving written feedback using the plus, the arrow, and the question mark can make your feedback more useful and the process of giving feedback more pleasant. Many people frequently receive written feedback to what they have written themselves. Written feedback can fulfill an important function. Other people may have more knowledge and a different perspective which may enable you to learn from them. Also, feedback may help you check whether what you have written is clear and comes across as you intended.

Is there such a things as civilization? Or is what we call civilization an illusion and would we be wiser to return to our natural state?  A central theme in the discourse about progress was the difference between the views of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and the French philosopher (from Swiss origin) Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Hobbes view people as naturally cruel and violent, in other words as bad. In his book Leviathan , he explained that the solution for this problem is a monarchy or other form of government which represents the will of the people and has the monopoly on violence.  He saw civilization as a way of curbing people's badness.

I came across a beautiful example of activating a student in a progress-focused manner.  Tina teaches high school students in a special boarding school. During the brief period (usually several months) in which these students are at the boarding school they work independently on their subjects most of the time and whenever they need some help or explanation Tina and their colleagues provide it to them. Of course, every now and then the students also have to take tests. Tina frequently uses progress-focused principles and techniques such as growth mindset interventions and autonomy supportive interventions. Every day, she writes brief observation/reflection diary entries, both for her own purpose and to inform her colleagues about what happened on that day. I have read and remembered one of the recent entries in that diary. I went something like this.

New research suggests how people may work in solitude on very ambitious goals and feel good about it.  Some famous artists and scientists from the past must have set extraordinary ambitious goals for themselves and must have worked for extremely long periods of time in solitude on their work and discoveries. For example, it is known that Isaac Newton, generally viewed as one of the greatest scientific geniuses of all time, who was highly productive as well, spend many years working in relative solitude. I have sometimes wondered how such people have managed to accomplish such things and to what extent they experienced gratification about their life style. I came across two articles by Thuy-vy Nguyen which give a clue about how some people are able to lead and bear such lives.

Which lesson can we draw from the Stanford prison experiment?  The Stanford prison experiment , designed and conducted by Philip Zimbardo in 1971, is one of the most famous experiments in psychology. In the basement of Stanford University an imitation of a prison was built. Students who participated in the study were randomly assigned the role of prisoner or guard. Zimbardo himself also participated in the experiment in the role of superintendent. The standard interpretation of the findings of the study is something like: after a while prisoners started to behave helplessly and submissively while guards started behaving cruel and abusively. The experiment was stopped after a student who conducted interviews in the imitation prison objected to the cruelty of what was happening.

© 2003, Coert Visser As a manager you have just led a meeting. John brought forward a proposal to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. He did this convincingly and enthusiastically but seemed to leave very little room for his colleagues Michael and Peter to respond. You want to talk to John about this...but how?

Several years ago, I introduced the technique of ' finding the plus behind the minus '. The basic I idea behind it is that when people express themselves negatively (through a complaint, a reproach, or criticism) there is always something positive behind that negative expression. That positive thing is something which they find valuable or important, a value, a principle, a goal, of whatever you want to call it. Briefly, the technique comes down to searching for that plus behind the minus. In our progress-focused training programs we frequently practice this technique with our participants, especially in cases which deal with resistance of conflicts. When you are trying to help people in a conflict situation to express the plus behind their minus this has several benefits. First, they themselves find it helpful and pleasant to be able to explain more clearly what their preferred situation is. Second, it will be more acceptable and clear for the other person or people involved...

One of the important parts of the progress-focused approach is to make visible what has worked in the past. Progress-focused coaches, for example, ask their clients questions about their past successes. When those clients find examples of past successes they generally become more positive and optimistic. Furthermore, they often come up with some ideas about how they might take a step forward. This might sound a bit strange. Why would something which has worked before not be visible right away? Why should you make an effort to make it visible? You have already experienced it, haven't you? And it was a positive experience. Why wouldn't you remember it, anyway? 

A while ago I wrote about the importance of combining hope and critical thinking . Hope without critical thinking is naïveté; critical thinking without hope is cynicism; lack of both is apathy, is argued in that post. That combination is not only important in general in life but also, and especially when we read about approaches or methods which are claimed to be able to improve our life or our work. One of the reasons for me to think about this topic is that I received an interesting mail by David Creelman  which I will summarize below. David started saying that scientific rigor is important because it discredits cherished false beliefs and snake-oil solutions. He went on to say that also more serious concepts and approaches like work engagement, the innovator's dilemma, and the growth mindset come in for criticism. He said: "I feel it's only a matter of time before someone writes a harsh critique of the growth mindset." He then pointed out that there is a risk...

Frequently, I have heard people say: "I'd rather not ask for help. I think I have to solve this myself." This way of this thinking surely has something admirable and sympathetic about it. Probably, people saying such things have a strong sense of responsibility. They think they should be able to solve their problem on their own without bothering other people. But I think it is good to be aware of another way of viewing asking for help. Asking for help can have many benefits, especially for yourself, but also for other people. Here are a few benefits of asking for help:

Previous research has already shown that the ego depletion model of willpower is too simple. New research suggests ego depletion may not exist at all.  A popular concept in modern psychology is ego depletion (see Baumeister & Tierney, 2012 ). Briefly put, the ego depletion model says that self-control or willpower depends on a limited amount of mental energy. When you try to concentrate or control yourself for a long time, according to Baumeister, you use this energy and you will slowly but surely run out of it. The more this resource gets depleted the harder it gets to keep controlling yourself. This ego depletion effect is supposed to be general. Each task which requires self-control depletes your resources and when this happens its gets harder to control yourself for whatever task or seduction. According to Baumeister, you then need to supplement your resources, for example by eating or sleeping.

It is understandable that exact sciences are generally viewed as the most difficult. But psychology may be harder in some ways.  One of my favorite science writers is Sean Carroll. He is a theoretical physicist at Caltech and author of the awarded book T he Particle at the End of the Universe which is about the discovery of the Higgs particle. Recently he surprisingly said: “Physics is by far the easiest science.” False modesty? Or it there some truth in it?

Since the beginning of the 1980's psychologist have done much research into happiness. Often instead of the term happiness terms like subjective well-being are used. I remember that I once read somewhere that Ed Diener, pioneer in the field, had chosen this name because it sounded more scientific that the term happiness. Positive psychology, which emerged around the year 2000, has emphasized the importance of happiness a lot and of finding out which factors foster it. Since then many books and articles have been publishes about happiness and its determinants. In those publications factors where often mentioned like: (1) expressing gratitude, (2) cultivating optimism, (3) building and maintaining relationships, (5) searching flow experiences, (6) practicing religious and spiritual activities, and (7) practicing meditation (this list is not exhaustive).

One of the most interesting aspects of the book The upward spiral by Alex Korb is thinking in terms of downward and upward spirals in human functioning. The concept of a spiral is based on what is called a positive feedback loop, a loop of cause and effect which continues and amplifies itself. A simple example of a positive feedback loop is a microphone which is held closely to a speaker. It will pick up the sound of the speaker and amplifies that again and again and again. The result is a shrill high tone. In human functioning these positive feedback loops can also happen in all kinds of ways. When the consequences of such positive feedback loops are negative we may speak of downward spirals; when they are positive of upward spirals. Such spirals can happen in many areas of life. I will give some examples. 

Frequent readers of this website know the Dunning-Kruger effect ( Kruger & Dunning, 1999 ). Briefly put this effects says: incompetent people do not know how incompetent they are. The reason for this is that in order to be able to know how competent you are at something you need to have knowledge about that competence domain. People who know very little about a topic do not realize how much there is to know about that topic and therefore how much competence they lack. The Dunning-Kruger effect means that people who are not so competent at something are inclined to overestimate their own competence. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as confident ignorance.

Neuroscientist Alex Korb has written an interesting book about depression called The upward spiral . A core idea in his book is that depression is not simply a state in which you feel badly but rather a downward spiral. What he means by this is that while you feel depressed you are inclined to do things which do not relieve your depression but maintain or aggravate it. Things such as physical activity, social contact, and thinking about happy memories, among other things, might help but are precisely the type of things which you are not inclined to do when you feel depressed. Because of this, it is easy to get stuck in a depressed mood.

For a long time, within psychology, the consensus has been that personality is hardly malleable from a a certain age on (which is supposed to be around 17 years old). This assumption was largely based on findings, in longitudinal studies, that peoples scores on personality questionnaire dimensions are generally rather stable. In other words, it seems that many people describe their personality in a rather stable manner throughout their lives. But does this justify the conclusion that personality is not very malleable? I don't think it does. That many people do not appear to change their personality a lot during their adult life does not prove that it is not possible to do so, at most it suggests that it does not appear to happen too frequently.

The type of goals you have affects the amount of self-control you need to achieve them. When you want to achieve goals you need to be able to concentrate on the activities which help to make progress in the direction of those goals. This is not only the case with work-related goals (how can I finish that article on time?) but also with personal goals (how can I eat healthier?). Remaining focused on the activities needed to achieve goals requires that you can direct your attention. In the psychological literature this type of skill is usually referred to as self-regulation.

Nowadays we hear a lot about racism and how bad it is. Famous football players, in a UEFA campaign, are sending the message to say 'no' to racism. By using the word racism we refer to the underlying concept of race. Races, subspecies, exist throughout biology. We all understand, perhaps not precisely, but roughly what is meant when we talk about human races and racism. I say that we understand roughly what is meant, because we all associate the term race with concepts like the with race, the black race, the Jewish race, and the Asian race. I say that we do not know precisely what is meant, because we do not know exactly, for example, what makes someone a Jew, and whether Chinese people and Indian people belong to the same race. It also gets confusing when we think about the race of president Obama. Does he belong to the 'black' race? That is what is often said ("the first black president' of the United States) but what about the fact that his mother was '...

Parents, teachers, and managers play an important role for respectively children, students, and employees. They not only have a facilitating, helping role but also a directing role. They pay attention, show understanding, they help and facilitate, they give a good example and they clarify expectations and set limits. When they fulfill their role effectively, the individuals they work with will be likely to function and develop well en feel good. These individuals are likely to engage in what they find interesting and important and to behave in well-adjusted ways and offer useful contributions.

Self concordant goals, goals that fit with your interests and values have many advantages. How do you get them? It is not only important that people set goals but also what types of goals they set. Within Self-Determination Theory the term self concordant goals has been introduced. Self concordant goals are goals which are consistent with the developing interests and values of the individual. When goals are self concordant people fully endorse these goals. They are autonomously motivated to pursue them.

In 1979, Steven Weinberg (81) won the Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the unification of the weak nuclear force an electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles. Recently, he published an interesting book, To Explain the World , about a subject that has fascinated him for a long time: the discovery of science. First, the book takes us to the old Greeks. The civilization in Ancient Greece is generally divided into three era's: the Archaic era (roughly from 800 to 480 BC) with Athene as its center and great thinkers like Thales , Heraclitus , and Democritus , The Classical era (roughly from 500 to 323 BC) with Athens as its center and Socrates , Plato , and Artistotle as its main philosophers, and the Hellenistic era (from 334 tot 30 BC) with Alexandria as its center and Euclid , Ptolemy , and Archimedes as its greatest thinkers.

An assumption in the progress-focused approach is that all people can make progress wherever they are. For children, this is easy to understand. They are constantly learning and exploring and we constantly see them make fast progress and in many ways. Middle aged people also show all sorts of progress both in their private lives and in their careers. From age 30 to 40 we begin to see clear signs that some physical and cognitive functions no longer progress but actually start declining. Does this mean that everything is destined to go downhill from that age on? No, this is a too pessimistic view. Recent publications (for example this one and this one ) show that certain capabilities indeed decline from a certain age but other capabilities peak at a higher age and some do not peak at all (they can continue to grow stronger). Harvard researcher Laura Germine summarize how cognitive capabilities peak at different ages in this picture:

Being able to concentrate and to keep concentrating is necessary when you are doing an important or difficult task. Doing such a task requires that you fully focus on that task and are not distracted or start mind wandering. When your mind wanders when you are doing a difficult task you must divide your attention between the task and the mind wandering. This means you are doing two things at the same time; you are multitasking. Research has shown that we are rather bad at multitasking. When we are mind wandering when doing a challenging task our performance will suffer. Such tasks require that we keep our focus on the task.

Angela Duckworth is a psychologist researching grit. Grit is the quality of people to work hard and keep focusing on their long term goals, or their long term passions. Grit consists of two aspects: resilience, the ability to continue after setbacks, and consistent long term goals or passions. People with much grit are less easily distracted and conquer setbacks and obstacles more effectively (one study this was found in is Duckworth et al. (2007) . In a study by Duckworth & Quinn (2009) grit was found to be a better predictor of academic success than IQ and, surprisingly, grit was negatively correlated to IQ.