Category Archives: Shannon Polly

Performing Your Way to Growth – Webinar with Cathy Salit

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  We had a great time with Cathy Salit today, CEO of Performance of a Lifetime.  A powerful company with a  funny name.  As you can see from the photos, she engaged a whole class of psychology students by asking them to perform (and groan and stretch).  Their teacher wrote: Hi Cathy,     My students and I enjoyed your Webinar. ​They groaned with you, and wrote what they learned afterwards. Play and performance is so radical, when people get it, it’s life transforming. Great job. Rafael​   Cathy spoke about her book, Performance Breakthrough:  A Radical Approach to Success at Work.  Based in a field called Performative Psychology founded by Lois Holzman, Fred Newman and Ken & Mary Gergen from the Taos Institute.  As Dr. Holzman said:  ”We collectively create our lives through performance (simultaneously who we are and… …

Teamwork Levels the Status Playing Field

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 *This article first appeared on www.positivepsychologynews.com   It was dark in the theater. The crowd was hushed waiting for the big reveal. The musical was Sweeney Todd, and my college audience had heard from their friends about what happens when the first victim gets the ax (or in this case, the razor). The seat and foot on the trick chair drop, and the actor falls through the roof of the second floor set to the crash pad below. I had the good fortune to play Mrs. Lovett, and I had also sourced the barber’s chair for this production. At the time, I was backstage waiting for an entrance. I heard the moment in the music, and then I heard screams. Just like we rehearsed. But these weren’t the screams of an actor playing a character who was just killed. These were real… …

The Power of Positive Listening

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Listening is like driving.  Everyone thinks they are good at it.  But probably less than half of people really are.  That’s why I was interested by the research of Kate Muir. Research into how emotions change over time has revealed that negative emotions tend to fade to a greater extent over time compared to positive emotions, an effect known as the fading affect bias. Talking to others is an important way in which this process can be enhanced: frequent social disclosure of past emotional events can help dissipate negative emotions and maintain positive emotions.  The question is, how and why does talking help? Kate described experimental research which demonstrates that the degree of responsiveness of the listener during social disclosure is pivotal in how the speaker feels afterwards. Further, merely responding to the speaker is not enough.  This research provides… …

Hacking Creativity by Jessica Amortegui

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 Join our Hacking Creativity Webinar on September 24 at noon EST.  Register here. I believe everyone has the potential to be creative when given the time, freedom, and autonomy. And, combined witha subtle dose of inspiration,  that creativity may turn into full-blown innovation. In business, creativity used to be reserved for the designers, marketers, and artistic talent that represented the antidote to buttoned-up organizational cultures. In today’s  increasingly ubiquitous “VUCA” environments, where volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity have seeped across industry verticals, creativity is no longer reserved solely for the hip folk clad in skinny jeans.  The ability to innovate across the corporate value chain – from strategy formulation to go-to-market execution – is a pre-requisite for market competitiveness. Those who do it best relish an ascent up the corporate ladder with increased reputational capital: they are the leadership game-changers. Armed with this insight, a group of six students from… …

Does Corporate Training Have a Lasting Impact?

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A Look at Well-Being Measures to Evaluate As a corporate communications trainer I work with many people on a short term basis.  Over a two day session I can see an enormous impact on their personal and professional growth.  Invariably I am always asked, “Does this training really work?”  Aside from the pile of positive evaluations I have received I do not have a scientific answer for them.  Implementing well-being measures can bring scientific rigor to my field and can fine tune the work we do to serve the client in the most effective way possible. I. Corporate Training The company we work with has a policy requiring their high performing women, after a selection process, to take part in our training.  It is this training program that I will be evaluating.  We work with high performing women in cohorts… …

entheos Interview: What Appreciative Inquiry Has Taught Me

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An Interview with Shannon Polly, MAPP and Kathryn Britton, editor of Positive Psychology News Daily en*theos International Day of Happiness Virtual Conference Kathryn: Getting back to the personal of this, what’s the most interesting thing that you learned about yourself in the course of doing AI summits? Shannon: Oh that’s a great question. A number of things, I think one of the things I learned is that even though I’ve had all of this training in positive psychology I still too have a negativity bias and I have not been cured of that. I was doing an AI summit leading into strategic plan for an organization recently and the AI summit was great because the positivity principle is built in and really started to design the strategic plan and I started to slip into “well the lease is up in 2017 and what if we lose it” and then I had to jolt myself out of it and… …

Positive Presenting: How to Command a Room

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Do you know how to manage your energy in order to command a room?  Does the idea of doing a presentation make you want to run and hide?  What does research say about the ability to increase our presence?  I’ve spent almost 20 years of my life thinking about this very topic.  First, I worked as a Yale trained actor and producer in New York City and then as a leadership development consultant and coach.  What I have noticed is that there are a number of myths associated with presence. The first myth is that you either have it or you don’t.  If this were true there wouldn’t be any drama schools, no need for weeks of rehearsals before opening night and nor cottage industry for selling classes to actors.  There are tangible techniques that you can use to control… …

entheos Interview: The “Four D” Process of Appreciative Inquiry

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An Interview with Shannon Polly, MAPP and Kathryn Britton, editor of Positive Psychology News Daily. en*theos International Day of Happiness Virtual Conference Kathryn: Tell us a little bit more about the process; you said the process is very organized so that makes it kind of keep things on track. So maybe you could lead us through what happened with the Cincinnati Summit. Shannon: Sure. So first you know there is a maybe 25 minutes of what is this principle, what’s the process of Appreciate Inquiry, what are we taking people through just to orient them, you don’t want to have more than about 30 minutes of it because then peoples energy tends to wane. What you want to do is immediately get them into one-on-one interviews. So you have people in tables of eight usually and you have them find a partner and you asked them they have a program guide in front of them and generally they are asking… …

entheos Interview: Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry

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An Interview with Shannon Polly, MAPP and Kathryn Britton, editor of Positive Psychology News Daily en*theos International Day of Happiness Virtual Conference Kathryn: Good morning Shannon, thank you for joining me here we are in celebration of world happiness day. Before we jump into your topic, Appreciative Inquiry, could you tell us a bit about yourself? Martin Seligman with Shannon Polly Shannon: Sure, thanks for having me Catherine. I am a positive psychology practitioner, I’m a coach, a facilitator, trainer, speaker and I live in Washington DC. I have my own consulting company call Shannon Polly and Associates and I also found an organization called Positive Business DC and our mission is to increase the tonnage of happiness starting in the nation’s Capitol, but not limited to the nation’s Capitol, so my passion is around helping individuals and organizations learn how to flourish by using training and positive psychology practices. Kathryn: Alright thank you, so tell us a little bit about… …

14 Things to Make You Happier and More Productive in 2014

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We wanted to give you something that would help make your life a little better next year.   Keep these things in mind when you are crafting your New Year’s Resolutions.   Give something away.  It makes you happier than buying something for yourself.  College students were given money to either give away or spend on themselves.  Guess which group was happier.  When we buy stuff, we always think it will make us happier, for a longer period of time, than it actually does.  Think – what did you give for the holidays versus what did you get? Give an experience.  If you are going to give something away, research shows that giving someone an experience versus a thing you can hold, makes people happier.  It also makes people happier to be with others (even if you are an introvert).  For example I gave… …

Improve for The Business Stage Changes the Way People “Listen”

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Thank you to Kat Koppett, who led Improv for The Business Stage earlier today. It was Positive Business DC’s first Webinar and has me thinking about approaching transformation and company culture a bit differently. You can read about my personal epiphany in Modern DC Business. What we’ll cover here takes a completely different flavor—the difference between “yes” and “but.” Linguists will tell you that “but” has strong negative connotations. Someone says “but” and we hear “no.” The word, “and,” however, is inclusive and without limits. Or is it? When discussing improvisational tools used within the context of business, Kat and Shannon (Polly) discussed how the Yes/And exercise becomes misapplied. The rule: You need to see, hear, and receive everything that’s happening and then use an offer—anything your partner says or does—including emotional context and gestures. You accept all that has… …

Bouncing Back: Myths and Characteristics of Resilience

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I have taught resilience to business execs and Army sergeants.  And the same myths come up every time when I ask about their definition of resilience. Resilient people are almost always positive & upbeat. Resilient people know how to go it alone. Resilient people almost never give up. Resilient people tend to be perfectionists.   The reality is that resilient people experience most of the problems that non-resilient people experience. The major difference between a resilient and a non-resilient person is how quickly resilient people recover from failures and setbacks in their life. If physical fitness is the speed with which you can recover from physical stress, resilience is the speed with which you can bounce back from psychological stress. Resilient and truly happy people understand the meaning of “good enough”. They know when to stop and enjoy what they… …

Virtuous Business Practices – an interview with Dr. Kim Cameron

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  Dr. Kim Cameron is the William Russell Professor of Management & Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and the co-founder of a field called Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS).  POS was separate in its origins from Positive Psychology (and pre-dates positive psychology).  I had the honor of having him as my advisor for my MAPP capstone at the University of Pennsylvania.  Louisa Jewell and I couldn’t ask for a fairer or tougher advisor.  I decided to interview him to see what he’s been working on. What subjects are businesses are most attracted to? Bottom line is the driver, of course.  All business executives say “If I don’t achieve profit, return to share, then I’m not doing my job and I will not last and nor will the organization.”  Their interest is:  ‘Is there any pay… …

Anticipatory Savoring: The IPPA World Congress

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I’m flying to Los Angeles tomorrow.  I’m leaving my 2 1/2 year old and my 7 month old (whom I’m still nursing, if that isn’t TMI) and I’m leaving them for four days with my mother-in-law.  And I’m spending a lot of money to go to the 3rd International Positive Psychology Association conference.  (Conferences are expensive!  This one is $740. Not to mention the added lectures and workshops that you can go to before and after the event.) But it will be worth it.  I’ve been to the first two and each time I’m learned as much as going to a graduate level course and made good connections (and gotten jobs) from/with the people I’ve met. The IPPA website as such press worthy quotes as:  ”Presentations, workshops, and poster sessions will feature leading-edge research, as well as applications of positive… …