Posts Tagged ‘positive psychology’

The Psychology of Hobbits

Sunday, January 6th, 2013

The tale of Bilbo Baggins, central character of The Hobbit, is the tale of how a conservative, comfortable, respectable and timid suburban dweller sets out on adventure and finds himself braver and wiser as a result.

The Hobbit is a morality tale of self-discovery and self-knowledge. Despite his comfort, satisfaction, creature comforts and smugness, Bilbo Baggins in his middle age, finds himself uncharacteristically rising to the romance, lure and challenge of the unknown, and begins his journey of self-discovery doing what few hobbits before him have ever done: having an adventure.

Tolkien’s The Hobbit, now recently brought to the screen by New Zealand’s Peter Jackson, was written in the 1930’s in the context of an English audience, who would have easily seen themselves gently parodied in the suburban mildness of the timid hobbits (just as New Zealanders are probably now doing with the release of the movie), and is often interpreted as Tolkien’s warning against the menacing gathering “darkness” of World War II.

Whether the looming war influenced Tolkien’s thinking and writing, or not, The Hobbit taps into quite deep human psychological themes and archetypes. The hobbits, with their meek and comfort-loving spirit, represent the ordinary, suburban dwellers in most of us, who, by choosing safety and comfort above all else, sacrifice adventure, challenge and wisdom. The Trolls represent thick-headed stupidity, the Goblins evil and depravity, the Dwarves stoic solidity and doggedness, and the Elves the higher, lighter, more shining spiritual and philosophical side of ourselves.

By tapping into these deep psychological archetypes that appear in his writing as well as in the mythology and legends of most human cultures, Tolkien was able to weave a spell of simply and engagingly told adventure, while at the same time teaching us much about ourselves.

And Bilbo Baggins is the Everyman character in this particular morality tale. He is the character most of us can empathise and associate ourselves with, and we will do well to do so.

Bilbo left his comfortable life for an adventure full of risk, danger, but much reward, and the adventure changed him permanently. Along the way, he found himself. Bilbo lost his innocence, naivety and softness, but he gained wisdom, confidence and bravery. Bilbo learnt to face his fears. He learnt that for higher wisdom, self-knowledge and bravery, there was a price to pay, but that the price was well worth it. Bilbo Baggins became a hero, and his adventure became legend in Middle Earth.

With the recent release of The Hobbit in time for the 2013 New Year, and with our own modern psyche so closely tied up with the sweeping challenges of financial uncertainty across the world in recent years, it’s a perfect time to take stock of ourselves and the lessons The Hobbit has to teach us. We can look beyond the confines of Middle Earth.

In business and in life do we want to be hobbits – comfortable and safe, but scared and timid, closed in, small-minded and vulnerable, frightened of development, change and adventure? Or do we want to be open minded, open hearted, spirited and up for challenge in the wider world?

We can all learn from Bilbo Baggins.

We can hide in our safe suburban and small worlds where we are protected behind our round hobbit doors, or we can go out into the wider world and find adventure and new horizons and the courage to face up to challenges. We have choice, and if we choose adventure, we choose knowledge, wisdom and great reward, as Bilbo did.

View Trailer: The Hobbit – An Unexpected Journey

 

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

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The Currency of Relationships

Friday, August 24th, 2012

Our Managing Director and Chief Psychologist, Stephen Kohl, believes that since the Global Financial Crisis, people have been demanding more genuine engagement and service in business.

In the boom climate prior to late 2009, companies and organisations were prepared to spend much more on out-sourced services like recruitment, training, conferences and “extras”. Following the GFC, things have been leaner and meaner, as organisations have learnt to cut costs by bringing many things we had previously paid others to provide, in-house. And even though the Australian economy has improved, we seem to have got used to this, just like Australian householders have got used to building savings.

At the same time this has been going on, there has been a burgeoning of social media and internet networking, to the extent that these have been increasingly integrated into most companies’ marketing and business strategies.

The result is that people expect much more from their business relationships. We expect real relationships. The GFC forced us to conserve and maximize our spending, and we’ve grown used to only paying for excellent quality, service and value. Post GFC we expect more. And through social media and other traditional advertising and networking, there is no shortage of individual consultants and companies vying for our attention and business connection.

So how do we differentiate? What can we do to stand out from the crowd, and forge real relationships with our clients, potential clients, connections and associates?

The answer is clear: be genuine and provide real and friendly, authentic service. Make genuine human connection.

In his article, It’s More Important to be Kind than Clever in Harvard Business Review this week, Fast Company magazine co-founder Bill Taylor, writes that small acts of genuine human kindness and engagement are the most powerful form of connection, and can be accidentally the most powerful marketing tool we have. Why? Because we are all people, and we all respond to genuine interaction. It makes us feel good, feel trust and it stands out in a world that can seem to be dominated by cynical self-serving and arrogance. All of us want to do business with people we can trust.

To illustrate his point, Taylor recounts the story of an American food franchise, which received huge publicity as a result of a simple and genuine act of kindness by the management and staff of one of their outlets. Though they only produced their clam chowder on Fridays, when a dying grandmother craved the soup on a different day, they made it just for her. This small act of kindness was repaid by thousands of “likes” on Facebook, where the grandmother’s daughter and grandson posted their gratitude.

It’s word-of-mouth advertising on a grand scale, and anyone in business knows that word-of-mouth recommendation is our most powerful tool. But to be powerful, it has to be genuine.  You really have to mean it. To be good at what you do is to want to share your knowledge and service with other people, and everyone responds to honest enthusiasm and care. In her most recent post, Penelope Trunk says, Networking means making real friends.

Acts of kindness make us feel better about ourselves and the world, and this is enough reward. But if we are in business for the long-term, relationships are far more important than quick deals. Good service and kindness should be the basis of everything we provide, because the real currency of business is people.

 

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on heading to leave a comment. More posts below.

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl and his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) & Why it Helps to Be Human

Saturday, August 18th, 2012

Here’s the good news:

Every organisation or individual can achieve a high rating on Google and the other search engines.

Here’s the other news:

You’ve got to be a good writer and like people, language and communication. You’ve got to work intelligently and consistently.

If the second point sounds like bad news to you, here’s why it is this way:

Whether on the Internet, in magazines and newspapers, in advertising, in literature, and for TV and movies, writing is about communication. Communication is about human beings sharing information with each other in order to understand and share experience. And you can’t understand if you don’t get what’s being communicated.

Though, like Coca-Cola’s and KFC’s secret recipes, Google’s algorithms are a bit mysterious, the secret to writing for the Internet is essentially no secret at all. Just write to communicate.

You would think that this would be advice that everyone would intuitively understand, but we all know that many businesses struggle with the simple concept. Very many organisational and business sites look impressive and slick, yet their copy and information feels cynical, wooden, trite, empty or ingenuine. That means that their audience will read a sentence, or a paragraph if they’re lucky, and leave the site.

Recently, an article in Harvard Business Review, by Kyle Wiens, explains why an understanding of language and good grammar is important for writing computer programming. Wiens says, “…programming should be easily understood by real human beings – not just computers”. Clearly, if an understanding of language matters for computer programming, it matters even more for writing for the Internet.

Human beings require that writing is engaging, authentic, sounds and feels honest, flows well and rings true. While there are different styles of writing and different contexts that call for different approaches, formats and tone, essentially, we read because we want to find out things. If we have to work too hard, we’ll stop and find something else. Good writing starts with engagement, whether its advertising copy, high literature, academic or scientific writing, or your Sunday magazine.

Search engines pick up key words and phrases, but they also pick up organic style. This means that if you work too hard to fit in key words or phrases, at the expense of real communication, you’ll lose both your human and your computer audience. Language and writing is about being and sounding genuine and authentic. Just as we can spot a con-man in real life, we’ll instantly stop reading copy that sounds contrived, cynical and self-serving.

Dale Carnegie taught us years ago in his famous self-help bible How to Win Friends and Influence People that to be effective communicators, we have to think about our audience and stop thinking about ourselves. So just because computer-based writing is a relatively new medium, we have no excuse.

This means don’t lecture, don’t be gratuitous or cynical and don’t think you can bully or brow beat your audience or clients into trying or buying your product or services. They are people like you are. You need to have something to say that’s worth saying, and that they want to hear. (Here’s an example of a recruitment website with simple artwork but effective, honest, straightforward writing). And don’t think it’s just luck or magic: there is a reason why some organisations or people have a high Google profile and some don’t, and it doesn’t just come down to how much money they spend.

There is not as much mystery to Search Engine Optimisation as you might think. Mostly, just learn to be a good writer. And how do you do that? Empathise with your audience, tell them what they want to know, have something worth saying and learn to be genuinely yourself.

Good writing is good writing – in any medium.

 

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on heading to leave a comment. More posts below.

Related posts:

Engagement & Empathy

Art Imitates Life, Life Imitates LinkedIn: Online Citizenship

Grass Roots Sales Tip: Body Shapers & David Jones

A Room With a View

* With thanks to Paul for inspiring this post

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl & his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

What Does Sport Teach Us?: London 2012

Saturday, August 11th, 2012

Every 4 years, the Olympic Games bring sport into sharp focus across the world, and in most ways the Games are the highest expression of human sporting prowess and endeavour that we have.

Why do we participate in and honour sport so much, and what does it teach us about the rest of life and work?

The Olympic Games are a celebration of being human. They symbolise and encapsulate competition and co-operation, tenacity, skill, mental toughness, physical excellence and sportsmanship. They are a celebration of who we think we are, what we prize most highly, and how we can strive for more.

For thousands of years, sport has been a crucial part of most good education systems, for good reason. Whether sport is played as an individual or as a team, it has important lessons to teach us which carry over into the rest of life, and which apply to business, politics, teamwork and leadership.

Sport teaches us tenacity, focus, perseverance, patience, strength, concentration, timing, courage, adaptability and skill. Sport teaches both mental and physical agility. Sport teaches us to time our run and to tolerate and overcome physical pain and limitations. Sport is about thinking and strategising, and its about mental toughness and resilience. Ultimately, sport is more about the mental challenge than the physical one.

Sport teaches us sportsmanship, which is essentially how to handle ourselves with grace, dignity and humility in victory and defeat. And whether we are participants or spectators, to be good sports there can be no complaint, tantrums, weakness or bad grace, and the only tears we are allowed to shed are tears of joy.

Since ancient times, when children in Ancient Sparta, for instance, were taught to hone their physical skills and compete in sports because the experience prepared them mentally and physically for tough adult life, sport has played an extremely important role in both preparing young people for adult life and for symbolising the human traits we hold most dear. Sport also provides safe battles between teams and nations, and in many ways negates and compensates for potential war and conflict.

Every four years the world comes together in a glorious display of competition and celebration. Though nations compete for glory and success of their individual champions and collective teams, the Olympic Games nevertheless represent human co-operation more than they represent competition, because we are universally united in our deep-seated  and common respect for the underlying principles that sport represents.

Sport embodies and develops physical and moral courage and the Olympic Games allow us to celebrate our species with joy and pride, and to paradoxically come together in our shared delight in competition.

As the Games of the XXX Olympiad, London 2012, draw to a close, we do well to learn the lessons that sport teaches us, and that the Games symbolise:

In work and the rest of life, sport reminds us to do better, last longer, be stronger and aim higher. And strive, individually and in teams.

 

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on the heading to leave a comment. More posts below.

Related Posts:

Slam Dunk

Leadership & Good Manners

Social Trends: The New Conservatism?

Staying Afloat: Boats & Analogies

Work Life Balance (And How to Preserve Olives)

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl & his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

 

Engagement & Empathy

Wednesday, July 25th, 2012

Human beings belong to a gregarious species. We live in groups, we organise ourselves in communities, we develop language, rules and technology to communicate and co-operate with each other, and usually, we work in teams.

In short, we engage with each other and with our environment. Our engagement keeps us safe and happy. By co-operating together, in every form of work and endeavour, we support each other, harness the power of multiple skills, talents and intellectual points of view, and we create outcomes that would be impossible if we lived and worked alone.

Of recent years there has been a lot of interest in the subject of engagement at work. It is recognised that people are happier, more fulfilled and are likely to be more productive if they are engaged with their jobs. In many ways, this is fairly obvious, since you only have to look to your own experience of life to know that you have a better time and feel better about yourself and other people if you feel connected – connected with an activity, connected with other people, connected with your surroundings or connected with an idea.

Underlying this ability to connect or engage is what is probably our species’ highest, most prized skill: the ability to empathise. Empathy helps us connect with the world and people outside our own skins. It makes us understand. It allows us to see and feel beyond ourselves. And by doing this, we keep the group, and the individuals within it, safer and more effective.

Empathy drives our fascination with each other and this underlies almost every form of human expression and drives culture (from reality TV to fine art and literature), commerce and research & education. In every culture and across time, religion, age, gender, and geography, humans are fascinated with each other because we are fascinated with ourselves. Other people are like a mirror. To study other human beings is to understand ourselves better, and to understand better is to increase the likelihood of our success.

Really successful human beings have a high level of empathy, which imbues them with many advantages. Empathy allows us to read signals, understand situations, foresee problems quickly and connect subtle clues. Empathy allows us to see beneath the surface and operate with a sophisticated level of interaction.

People with low empathy struggle greatly. They can’t read social or facial cues, or discern more sophisticated relationships or patterns. They have a hard time “joining the dots”, understanding what other people understand, reading non-verbal language, and picking up on higher order social rules or patterns like metaphor and tone.  How things connect is often a mystery to them. People with low empathy have many difficulties with other people and their environment because they can’t read the signals and warning signs. Sometimes people like this are stigmatised with popular culture labels like “nerd” and lack of empathy characterizes autism spectrum conditions like Asperger’s Syndrome. Without the ability to exercise empathy, human beings have a hard time in life.

Engagement is not just a Human Resources term. All managers and employers should be developing an engaged workforce and an engaging work environment. But it goes much further and deeper than that. There is not a divide between work and the rest of life, and we are ourselves whether at home or in the workplace. Being engaged is what enlivens us, and underlying engagement, is our ability to empathise.

In the world of work, as in the rest of life, higher level empathy allows you to see effectively and well, and to achieve better and more sophisticated and seamless results. Understanding other people helps you understand yourself, and makes your path in life more smooth, and gives you respect and influence because you understand how other people tick.

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on the heading to leave a comment

Related posts:

Psychopaths at Work

Building Real Relationships

Who Are You? “Know Thyself”

Work Life Balance (And How to Preserve Olives)

Murder in the Village: Teamwork & Community

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl & his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

How to Spot an Original Thinker

Saturday, September 10th, 2011

Original thinkers who drive innovation, adaptability and problem solving are highly valuable and sought-after, so if organisations were able to identify and encourage original thinkers they would have a huge advantage in the marketplace.

Can you spot an original thinker? Dr Mark Batey of Manchester University’s Manchester Business School believes you can.

In a recently produced MBS video interview, Original Thinkers, Dr Mark Batey, a world-leading psychology of creativity researcher, outlines the four dimensions he believes make up an original thinker and that organisations can look out for to identify original thinking in their current or potential employees:

Ideas generation

Original thinkers are highly fluent, which means they produce lots of ideas. Even though sometimes their ideas might not be practical, and it might be hard for other people to see how these solutions might be used, the key is the volume of ideas they are able to produce.

As well as the number of ideas they produce, original thinkers tend to produce different or unusual ideas.

In their approach to thinking, original thinkers often like to incubate, or let their thoughts percolate for while. This period will often be followed by a “eureka” experience, what Dr. Batey calls “Illuminative Moments”.

Personality traits

Original thinkers are inclined to be very curious. They ask lots of questions, and want to know how things work the way they do, and why.

The other personality trait that stands out in original thinkers is that they are comfortable with a high level of ambiguity and uncertainty. Original thinkers tend not to see things in black and white, and are quite happy with contradiction, competing evidence and shades of grey.

Motivation

Original thinkers tend to be motivated intrinsically. This means that they have a strong drive that comes from within them. They will be very self-motivated.

In addition, Dr. Batey believes these people are quite competitive, and they will quite likely want to “beat” other people with their ideas.  Although they may work well in a collaborative team environment and be willing to share their ideas with colleagues, they will want the team to do better than it’s competitors.

Confidence

Original thinkers tend to be very confident about their ideas. This applies to having ideas, believing in the quality of their ideas, sharing them, and being able to confidently implement them.

 

In September 2009, Olivier Serrat wrote in a paper for the Asian Development Bank, “Creativity plays a critical role in the innovation process, and innovation that markets value is a creator and sustainer of change. In organisations, stimulants and obstacles to creativity drive or impede enterprise.”

The ability to identify original thinkers would clearly provide huge advantages to organisations faced with the fast changing pace of a developing national and world economy.

As Mark Batey says, “It’s not just being an original thinker, it’s being an original applier as well”.

Watch Video: Original Thinkers: Dr. Mark Batey

Lynette Jensen

Lynette Jensen is a director and co-founder of Genesys Australia and is committed to helping people achieve work-life balance through good job fit. In addition to contributing to this blog, she also writes regularly for HR Daily Community and Dynamic Business Magazine. Her articles have been re-published in India & the United Kingdom.

Please click on heading to leave a comment. More posts below.

Related Posts:

The Creativity Imperative

King of the Manning River: Creativity & Problem Solving in the Workplace

NB: We are an independent workplace psychology practice. All views expressed here are our own and are the opinions of Stephen Kohl & his associates, which do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher and developer of GeneSys assessments, Psytech International.

Creativity: The Essence of Being Australian

Sunday, May 29th, 2011

Creativity is at the core of all human endeavour. It’s what makes us keep searching for new ideas and innovations, and is what got us standing up and leaving our cave dwelling existence in the first place.

Creativity in the workplace is essential. At a macro level creativity drives innovation, and it’s innovation that drives expansion and development of industry and economy. At a micro level, every individual in the workplace can be more productive, happy and effective if they apply creativity to problem solving, team dynamics and management, and their general work and work/life balance.

There has been a tendency in Australia to marginalise the word “creativity”. As a society, we have been guilty, I think, of using it almost as a pejorative term, and to see it as something outside the mainstream. We have tended to think of it as being associated only with the arts, or with advertising, or with people who wear “funny clothes” and are generally not quite “like us”. But this is to trivialise creativity, and not understand what it really is, and to miss the point as a growing and dynamic society, to our detriment.

Australians are probably known for loving sport and straight-talking, and for being suspicious of the more “airy fairy” which we’ve historically associated with a perceived pretention in arts, culture and intellectualism. We pride ourselves on a straightforward and egalitarian approach. And we are proud we’ll “have a go” with a minimum of fuss (No worries, Mate!).

“Having a go” is at the heart of what creativity is. Creativity allows you to make something from nothing, to look at something in a different way, to make the most of limited resources, to try something new and to solve problems. I would have thought that Australians, with our “No worries, Mate” attitude, unconsciously apply creativity very well, and fundamentally.

Surely it was this attitude, and it’s underlying basis in creativity, that recently got us through the Global Financial Crisis so well, that allowed us to stage such an inspiring, beautiful and deeply touching Sydney Olympic Games, that underlies our worship and reverence of the physical poetry of Don Bradman’s game, and that’s enabled us to have created (against all odds!) a dynamic, culturally diverse and sophisticated society from a convict settlement in just over 200 years.

Surely, creativity is at the heart of what it means to be Australian? To be prepared to “have a go” is to be creative.

In Australia, visitors tell us this all the time. While they expect the geographical, physical beauty of Australia, they don’t expect our joy, our sophisticated society, our straight-forwardness, and they are surprised that we’ve made something so complex yet unpretentious from very little and in such a short time. Isn’t this why Oprah Winfrey was so shocked and so over-come recently by the surprise and wonder of Australia? And isn’t this why we can say, “We created this – we made it with our own hands and our own thoughts”?

So if Australians, and the Australian culture generally, harness the essence of creativity without even knowing it, how much more could be achieved, individually and as a society, if we started to recognise it properly, and to apply it intentionally?

What a society we could be, and what an economy we could create!

Lynette Jensen

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Happiness: Is an Interesting Life More Important than a Happy Life?

Sunday, May 1st, 2011

I’ve been reading Penelope Trunk’s blog, and it fills me with so much food for thought that I don’t know quite what to think or where to start or how to proceed.

I like this a lot in life. I like to have so much to think about that it makes me feel as though the future is endless with possibilities. It gives me hope, and hope is one of the main things that keep us alive. And thoughts are like friends. When I was at university, I missed a lot of lectures, even though I was there in the room, because they were so interesting that they got me thinking!* Like a lot of my favourite bloggers, Sean Carmody, Penelope Trunk and Greg Savage for instance, I think I must be a fairly “promiscuous” thinker, since so many things seem so interesting and seem to have such relevance to the way we work and live our lives.

So, having got so much food for thought, I thought I’d just write about happiness (as if people haven’t been trying to define and understand the nature of happiness since writing and presumably conversation began!).

This is because of a number of reasons: I’ve been thinking about happiness and the role it plays in creativity, I’ve joined an optimism-based LinkedIn Group this week, which has got me thinking from a philosophical point of view, where one draws the line between an unrealistic, silly and superficial desire for un-relentless wishful thinking and positive thought and actual happiness and what it means (and whether I’m a negative thinker for thinking that wishful thinking might be silly – so vexed and such fun!), and, because since I majored in philosophy at university, I’m always trying to be a part of a philosophical tradition of understanding and attaining happiness anyway, especially the Platonic idea of seeking The Good.

I’ve just this minute read on an old post from Penelope’s blog that “New Yorkers think an interesting life is more important than a happy life”. More to think about like: Is there a difference between interesting and happy? Can you have a happy life without interest? Are contentment and serenity the same as happiness? Is happiness possible?

Philosophers have been studying happiness for thousands of years, and there is a whole branch of the more modern discipline of psychology which deals with the psychology of happiness, which indicates that the desire for happiness is at the core of human existence and drives.

In the workplace, much store has been placed lately on the engagement we feel with our jobs, and I suspect that engagement may well be central to happiness generally, not just in the workplace. Certainly, to be a part of something, the moment, a group, society, nature, a team, an intellectual position, or a family, is essential for me to be happy.

Writing a blog and thinking makes me happy. It makes me feel part of something larger, and less alone. It makes me feel engaged with other people and the world of work and ideas. And it makes me feel grateful that so many other people want to share their lives and experiences to help me shape mine.

* I defy you, for instance, to even read the chapter titles from my old teacher Professor Raoul Mortley’s publication From Word to Silence without getting totally lost in the possibilities before you even read anything!

Lynette Jensen

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* This is a personal view and does not necessarily represent the opinion, belief or policy of the company. More posts below.