How to live more appreciatively

Here are three quick and easy things you can do to start living more appreciatively. Like anything else, it will take time to become a habit, but the small changes you make will combine and build up more quickly than you expect.

1. Keep a daily ‘gratitude journal’ in which you record things that you are grateful for (no matter how small) – this will have a positive effect on your well-being. Positive psychology researcher Dr Robert Emmons has found that keeping a gratitude journal for as little as three weeks significantly improves happiness levels. When you keep it up for longer, there are also positive effects on health, sleep time and social connectedness – see http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/emmons.
2. Treat problems as challenges – look for what you are grateful about in bad things as well as good. This in itself can be a challenge at first, but every problem is also an opportunity to learn.
3. Ask yourself ‘What do I need to learn from this?’ whenever anything bad happens. Asking yourself this question, and creating some space to allow the answer to emerge, will increase your self-awareness and help you to correct anything that you may be doing unwittingly to contribute to the problem.

The Benefits of Living An Appreciative Life – Part 2

2. Your luck will improve

Psychologist Richard Wiseman studied the attitudes and behaviour of people who considered themselves exceptionally lucky or unlucky. His book ‘The Luck Factor‘ documents his findings that the ‘lucky’ group actually made themselves lucky by creating and noticing chance opportunities, listening to their intuition, and creating self-fulfilling positive expectations.

Of course random events will still happen, but on average, people who live life in an appreciative way will be luckier, because they have created the conditions that allow luck to enter their lives.

3. You will feel better – and your abilities will improve as a result

When you look at events with an appreciative eye, you feel better about whatever happens. Feeling good is pleasant in itself, and it turns out that it has many benefits to your personal effectiveness.

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s research into the value of positive emotions shows that people who feel positive are able to think more strategically, they are more compassionate, more creative, more socially connected, more resilient, they make better decisions, and have better health. She has summarised some of her findings in this readable article: The Value of Positive Emotions

4. Easier goal-setting and knowing what you want

The positive reference experiences that we discover when we look at what is working well in our lives make it easier to clarify our vision of the future, and give a firmer, more realistic grounding to our goals.

Steve Andreas’ excellent book ‘Transform Your Self‘ shows how important positive reference experiences are in forming our expectations and even our sense of self. As you uncover and build on more of your own ‘positive core’, you will enable the self-fulfilling effect of positive expectations, and create still more reference experiences to build on.

Next – how to live more appreciatively…

The Benefits Of Living An Appreciative Life – Part 1

It’s often said within the Appreciative Inquiry community that AI is a way of seeing and being in the world, rather than just another toolkit. If you view AI solely as a toolkit, you are missing the point. So what can you expect when you start applying Appreciative Inquiry to your own life, and viewing the world in an appreciative way?

1. People around you will live up to your positive expectations

In their famous ‘Pygmalion in the Classroom’ experiment in the 1960s, Robert Rosenthal and Leonore Jacobson led elementary school teachers to believe that some of their pupils had unusual intellectual potential and to expect a ‘blooming’ in their academic performance. Sure enough, at the end of the year, their test results had significantly increased, compared to the children who had not been singled out. But in fact, the ‘bright’ students had been randomly selected.

This experiment has been replicated many times, in management settings as well as education. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

The only difference between the ‘bright’ and the ‘average’ students was that teachers expected them to do better. This expectation would communicate itself in subtle ways: in the questions the teachers asked, which students they called on in class, and the way they marked different students’ papers. Even the non-verbal aspects of their communication with students such as facial expression and voice tone would be subtly different.

In the same way, your expectations of your friends, work colleagues, people you deal with, and even yourself, will influence the responses and behaviour you get. Looking for the good in other people, and yourself, makes it more likely that you will find it.

New Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training dates

We have a new date for the two-day Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training:

Manchester 21-22 October 2009

Details here if you want to book a place: Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training

We’ve had rave reviews both from the public courses and when we’ve run it in-house – you know you’re doing something right when someone who has attended your course sends her boss on the next one!

If you have 4 people or more that you want to send on the course, think about running it in-house for extra cost-effectiveness.

Appreciative Inquiry on Twitter

Microblogging phenomenon Twitter.com has upwards of a million active users posting 140-character ‘tweets’ about what they are doing – some of them must be involved in Appreciative Inquiry, right?

Now you can be notified of every Twitter message that mentions “appreciative inquiry” and have a daily digest sent to your email inbox. It’s an easy way to see what other people are doing with AI.

Just sign up to tweetlater.com’s ‘keyword alert’ service (it’s free) and set their ‘keyword alert’ service to track the phrase “appreciative inquiry”. Simple as that!

If you want, you can follow me (Andy Smith) on Twitter – if my colleagues at AI Consulting start Twittering I’ll add their details too!

Seth Godin on the value of Dreams

Marketing guru Seth Godin (well worth a look if you haven’t heard of him) has just posted a blog entry which is obviously relevant to the Dream stage in the AI cycle:

If your business is a dream come true for customers, you win. Game over.

Check out the entry here: Like a dream come true

A question to amplify positive emotion

“How does it feel to realise that?” is a great question to ask in an appreciative interview whenever someone tells you about some ‘lightbulb moment’ or a time when they made a real difference.

This week I was facilitating an Appreciative Inquiry session for Dreamcatchers, a small charity that does solution-focused youth work, to help them clarify their ‘brand’ and how to communicate it to various stakeholders (more about how to use Appreciative Inquiry in branding in a future posting).

The management team were deeply into appreciative interviews (using a variation on the ’standard’ appreciative interview questions) when a late-comer arrived – so I stepped in to conduct his interview myself. As often happens, it took him a while to warm up to the question “What has been the best experience of working in the Dreamcatchers?”  At first he came out with a fairly generic answer about making a difference to people’s lives. In fact we had completed the interview sheet when he said “I’ve just thought of another one.”

He went on to tell me about a presentation he and a colleague had done about guns, gangs and girls in gangs – a girl who saw the presentation had come up to him months later and said that it had saved her from joining the gang she had been on the fringes of, and helped her to straighten out her life. He realised more fully than before that the work he was doing really made a difference to people’s lives, possibly saving that girl’s life and maybe – through her example – having a positive influence on the lives of other girls that he’d never even met.

So I asked him, “How does it feel to realise that?” What does this question do? Firstly, it encourages the interviewee to become aware of how they feel about the realisation. It amplifies positive emotions – which, following the Positive Principle and Barbara Fredrickson’s ‘Broaden and Build’ theory, make an individual more effective and are vital for positive organisational change. Secondly, the enhanced emotion will tend to make the memory of the realisation more vivid and easier to recall in future, so it becomes a reference experience that strengthens the individual’s self-concept and identity, helping them to be more motivated in their role.

I originally came across this question in NLP, where it is used in therapy or coaching to help a client ‘lock in’ a breakthrough or realisation and prevent them from forgetting it and slipping back into the pre-breakthrough state.

Naturally, since the question explicitly asks the person to focus on their feelings, you would only ask it about ‘positive’ events and realisations.

Interview with David Cooperrider: exceptionality, essentiality and equality

Dr David Cooperrider is the originator of the Appreciative Inquiry method. In this interview with Jennifer Salopek he talks about how AI started and sets out the AI philosophy in clear and easily-understood terms:

Appreciative Inquiry at 20: Questioning David Cooperrider

Appreciative inquiry addresses three fundamental facts about human beings: exceptionality, essentiality, and equality.

Exceptionality means that all of us are exceptions to the rule. No two human beings are exactly alike. Appreciative inquiry tries to measure each person’s uniqueness, and people resonate and respond to that. Management methods that see people as interchangeable cogs create resistance to change.

Essentiality refers to everyone’s need to feel needed-to feel essential, but not central. We like to feel that we would be missed. Unfortunately, a recent Gallup poll found that only 20 percent of employees believe that their company knows and values their strengths.

Equality means that we each want to share our voices. People must feel that they have a right and a responsibility to lift up their visions of a better world.

Sir Ken Robinson: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

This is a TED talk by creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson, in which he calls for a radical rethink of our education system to nurture rather than undermine creativity. From www.ted.com.

If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

Appreciative Feedback Form

Have you ever wondered how you could use the 4-D appreciative inquiry format for gathering feedback? This is a draft of what we will be sending out to people who have completed our courses.

One of the virtues of making the 4-D structure explicit in the form is that it acts as another reminder for the students.

Feel free to adapt the questions to your own needs.
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Now that you have had some time to reflect on and use what you learned on
the Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training, it may be the
appropriate time to ask for some feedback. We are road-testing a 4-D
feedback request structure – feel free to copy or adapt it if it works for
you:

1. Discovery
What did you appreciate about the course? What were the best aspects for
you?

2. Dream
What would the course have been like in an ideal world?

3. Design
What practical changes could we make to the course to make it better?

4. Delivery
How have you been using the Appreciative Inquiry methods you learned on the
course? What are you doing differently now?

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Let us know what you think!