SOMO Leadership Labs

SOMO is planning some cool stuff for the new year — including the setting up of series of macro-learning labs for various groups of social and professional networks. We’re running these labs over a four-month period in businesses, schools, and community groups. Be a SOMO Leader and invite the dialogue within your network. Consider it Wellness 3.0.

The Macro Lab includes:
SOMO 101. Introduce opportunity vs. threat construct and provide an evolutionary and neurobiological understanding of why it’s important to learn how to think differently. Participants will challenge beliefs on change and engage in scientific research on flourishing and success, well-being, and happiness.

The Resilience Factor. Help participants get clear on what holistic health and wellness actually means for them and what science says about well-being. Facilitate a discussion on integrity/wholeness and challenge participants to get clear on what they intrinsically want more of in their lives, flipping what they don’t want to the positive opposite. Incorporate evidenced-based flexible and accurate thinking strategies that help participants detect thinking traps and reframe mindset from threat to opportunity (or pessimistic to optimistic).

Call to Action. Participants will learn the science of change, how the process works, and how it’s best sustained over time. We’ll incorporate tools on hope theory and goal-setting theory to help participants get clear on pathways towards the best possible future. Participants will also set up systems of accountability, crucial in any change process. We’ll measure explanatory style and grit (passion and perseverance towards long term goals).

SOMO KNO YO. Knowing your strengths helps build psychological muscle. This muscle has enormous impact on facilitating change and increasing engagement and productivity. Participants will learn to identify and spot strengths and use them to be more successful in overcoming challenges and achieving personal and professional goals.

Power of Full Engagement. Participants will learn to manage their energy by learning evidenced-based mindfulness strategies for aligning passion and achieving flow or optimal experience. This lab will incorporate some scientifically proven ways to lessen stress by switching up small things in our environments that will create conditions leading to intrinsically motivated, inspired, and sustained action over time.

Being Pulled by the Future. In this lab, participants will learn about how to build high quality connections with others using active-constructive responding and other evidenced-based tools in building effective networks. We’ll dive into what science says about building capacity to connect, attune, innovate, and collaborate. We’ll end with visioning and action planning for taking this material back into respective organization(s)/network(s) as change-agents on the ground.

Want more health and wealth ($+) for 2012–for you, for your social/professional network? Contact Louis@LouisAlloro.com or Adele@Currere.net for more information. Macro labs are launching in February!

All human action is goal oriented. Whether we’re getting ready for bed, preparing for an important meeting with potential customers, or creating a vision of a life with a new love, we are constantly choosing goals based on what is important to us (our values) and what we think we can achieve. By adding hope theory and goal setting theory to our list of frameworks for understanding positive psychology, we tap into two related constructs essential in helping individuals and groups of people live most functional lives.

The pursuit of goals has many components. Hope as an agent of change is arguably the first of these components as hope creates the space for new possibilities to exist. According to Lopez, Snyder, and colleagues (2004), “hope is a strength that fuels our pursuit of the good life” (p. 401). While all people possess the ability to have hope, variability—like different grades of fuel—certainly exists from person to person. The good news is that evidence shows hope is malleable (Lopez, et al., 2004), which is to suggest we can bring people to more “premium grades” of hope. Since hope is the “spark for and pathway to change” (p. 390) it is important to build it.

Lopez and colleagues purport that “accentuating” this agent of change is most easily accomplished within the context of healthy and supportive relationships. Jon Haidt calls us ultrasocial hive creatures. Marty Seligman classes us “termiteable”. Like termites and bees, we need each other for optimal functioning. So, this new year, we can help each other build hope by creating space in our families, schools, and communities that allow for infinite possibilities to exist for the many.

But how do we build hope? It is by developing capacities and competencies—by building strength—that people are able to live optimal lives. For hope to develop, a supportive environment is needed in which people receive basic instruction in goal pursuits from a positive model” (Lopez et al., p. 393). Lopez and colleagues (2004) propose four strategies for accentuating this state within a social context: finding, bonding, enhancing, and reminding. While this model was developed in light of psychotherapy, I suggest it is also applicable outside the clinical client-therapist realm, to any mentor-mentee relationship, including that which teachers and students share.

One way schools can aim to instill more hope into its culture is to engage in activities that help teachers and students find voice, or positive concepts of self. Research shows the power of telling stories in providing hope (Compton, 2005; Lopez, et al., 2004). It has been shown that people learn the “language of hope by identifying the goals, thoughts, pathway thinking, and agency sources referred to in their narrative.” With whatever strategy one uses to build this capacity, though, the process is nonetheless both cognitive and social. To that end, there is power in learning these tools (the cognitive piece) and then applying them (the social piece) within real life.

By applying strategies to build hopeful thinking, people find perhaps undiscovered possibilities to enhance their perceived capacities in life. But perception is not enough, as with that perception one must set specific goals so that these capacities can be built and the possibilities can become realities. As Locke (1996) surmises, “most people have learned, by about the age of 6, that if they want to achieve something” – a specific goal – “they have to pay attention to it to the exclusion of other things, exert the needed effort, and persist until it is achieved” (Locke, 1996, p. 120). This is arguably easier said than done; focusing of attention takes hard work, especially today given the multiple and competing discourses which vie for our limited attentions (Baumeister et al, 2006). People build their capacities by focusing their energies to learn new tools to apply during the sequences of life (James, 1899). It is important, then, for one to set challenging goals to increase performance in different domains (Locke, 1996). Like in athletic training, endurance is built by taking baby-steps towards achieving what is possible; one can’t expect to run a marathon without building up the capacity to do so over time, mile by mile.

It is important to note that goals have internal and external aspects. “Internally, they are ideas (desired ends); externally, they refer to the object or condition sought (e.g., a job, a sale, a certain performance level). The idea guides action to attain the object” (Locke, 1996, p. 118). Agency then bridges the gap between the internal and the external – what is desired and what is actually achieved. Without agency, people quite easily fall back into their regular (and often nonfunctional) ways of being. Locke’s goal setting theory relates back to Aristotle’s notion of “final causality” insofar as one’s purpose, which is arguably derived from hopeful possibilities, must ultimately lead to action–the pathways to reach the desired goals. Goals regulate and direct these pathways by narrowing one’s attention and focusing one’s effort on tasks, which slowly build one’s capacities. These tasks are akin to any endurance training and therefore success requires both wide-eyed consciousness, volition, practice, and patience. I have argued elsewhere that positive interventions bring consciousness and focus to thoughts, feelings, impulses, appetites, and actions in life that we perhaps habitually fail to notice. This clarity leads to the development of our own enablement—the skills to autonomously choose to activate and use our own agencies (Alloro, 2008). This is power.

Hopeful thought reflects belief that one can find pathways to achieve desired goals and become motivated, hopefully intrinsically and autonomously, to use those pathways (Brown and Ryan, 2004). Creating the possibility and building the capacity for agentic ways of being will build a positive cycle for one to gain more hope, realize more possibilities, set and achieve more goals, and live even more optimal lives. This will lead to positive motivation and makes the combination of Hope Theory (Lopez et al., 2004) and Goal Setting Theory (Locke, 1996) akin to the Broaden and Build Theory (Fredrickson, 1998) insofar as the logic of each contain elements of growth that alternate and aggregate throughout the sequences of one’s life. Herein lies the space for a positive, upward spiral: by shifting in the direction of what is possible, it has been shown that people do better academically and athletically, are in better physical health, are better problem solvers, and are psychologically more adjusted (Lopez, et al., 2004). Who doesn’t want that?

Louis J. Alloro, M.Ed., MAPP (2008)

References

Baumeister, R.F., Gaillot, M., DeWall, C.N., & Oaten, M. (2006). Self-regulation and
Personality: How interventions increase regulatory success, and how depletion moderates the effects of traits on behavior. Journal of Personality, 74(6), 1773-1801.
Brown, K.W., & Ryan, R.M. (2004). Fostering healthy self-regulation from within and without:
A self-determination theory perspective. In Linley, P.A. & Joseph, S. (Eds.), In Positive
Psychology in Practice (pp. 105-124). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Compton, W. C. (2005). Positive psychology interventions. In An Introduction to Positive
Psychology (pp. 182-195). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Fredrickson, B. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 300-319.

James, W. (1899/1983). The Gospel of Relaxation. In Talks to Teachers (pp. 117-119).

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Locke, E. A. (1996). Motivation through conscious goal setting, Applied & Preventive
Psychology, (5) 117-124.
Lopez, S. J., Snyder, C. R., Magyar-Moe, J. L., Edwards, L., Pedrotti, J. T., Janowki, K.,
Turner, J. L., & Pressgrove, C. (2004). Strategies for accentuating hope. In Linley, P. A., & Joseph, S. (Eds.), Positive Psychology in Practice (pp. 388-404). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.