Positive Psychology

[helenex]

I attended an event tonight run by various Scottish and Dundonian worthies, which brought " a leading proponent" of positive psychology - Tal Ben-Shahar - to Dundee to talk about Leadership and the Positive City. As someone who is trying to be positive about living in Dundee at the moment, I had to attend.

I did catch a few concepts which I will

Comments

[psychochicken]

My problem with all these phychology based things and all these leadership/mentoring things is that it's just another homogeonisation programme. They all assume that we think the same way, work the same way and are motivated in the same way, and we're not. It's changing the world to suit, rather than changing to suit the world, and that's (a) futile and (b) stupid.

People are individuals, and if that makes them harder to manage then managers need to buck up their management skills. I am sick fed up being told I'm "difficult to manage". That's like me telling my current project that it's "difficult to do" and expecting it to toddle off and somehow become easier.

[helenex]

Actually, that was pretty much part of the message. Its not rocket science that people respond better to positive reinforcement than to being told that they're "difficult" or bad at something - but it doesn't stop people doing it all the time - whether that's managers or teachers or parents. But the guy's message was that praise shouldn't be indiscriminate, whilst positive reinforcement has been found to be universally better it needs to be appropriate to what you've achieved.

[helenex]

I gathered that - actually he mostly referred to himself as a lecturer and made no claims to academic measures, his main claim was that he had the most popular class at Harvard. I refrained from pointing out to anyone that the most popular class where I went to university was so because it was well known to be an easy pass