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 who we are becoming).”  Salit has coined this The Becoming Principle.

There are five key fundamental elements of performance she covered.

1)  Choose to Grow.

(This is where we groaned.)  You have to make a choice to grow, because growing is hard work.

2)  Build Ensembles Everywhere

Their work is also based on Lev Vygotsky who coined the phrase ‘zone of proximal development’.  Basically, how we allow children to perform a head taller than they are.  We grow in groups, not alone.  This has been a criticism of positive psychology, that we are only focusing research on the individual.

Her practice, “Say ‘we’ when you would normally say ‘I’.”

3) Listen!:  The Revolutionary Way to Have a Conversation

Apparently, most people only listen 20% of the time.  This is the fundamental point of improvisation (the methodology of POAL’s work).  While we didn’t have time to do the ‘yes, and’ exercise I recommend you looking it up.  If we all really listened, how amazing would our conversations be?  A great Ted talk in this regards is Ken Robinson’s.

The practice?  Perform being curious.  Even if you’re not.

4) Create with Crap

“Option A is not available.  So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.”  Sheryl Sandberg

This is my favorite section and comes out of the listening for ‘offers’.  In improv, an ‘offer’ isn’t always something you want.  How do you create with something you don’t want?  Cathy gave a good example of empathy when you get the crying person in your office after a performance review.

The practice?  She encouraged participants to make a poem from their ‘crap’.  Send your “Create with Crap” poem to stories@performanceofalifetime.com.

5)  Improvise Your Life

1. Say “Yes, and” (and mean it!)

Yes means you accept what your partner gives you, ‘and’ means you add to it.

2. Make the other person look good

If you don’t do this in improv the scene dies.  Same is true for making your boss look good.

3. Celebrate mistakes and failures

We learn by failing.  As Beckett said, “Fail fast.  Fail better.”

4. Follow the follower

If you are following each other then you can really build rather than try to dominate a ‘scene’ (or a meeting).

5. Delight in curveballs

Take what you weren’t expecting and run with it.  I wasn’t expecting tech glitches in the webinar but we rolled with them!

Wrap up:

Performance is all around us.  We don’t wake up in the morning with a script.  So take a risk.  Even if it is a small one in your workplace.  And write us back to tell us what you decided to do!  See below for more ways to stay in touch with Cathy.

And you can follow @CathySalit on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  

We’ll be posting some of her questions to webinar participants in another blog post.

 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 the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program sought to collide the frontier of positive psychology—or the scientific study of human flourishing—with the science of creativity. The mash-up was an interdisciplinary take on two emergent fields that are garnering increased popularity in the corporate world.   The team learned that at the intersection of positive psychology and creativity emerged some interesting insights that are both actionable and accessible.

For example, consider  Adam Grant’s (2013) research in the best-selling book,  Give and Take.  Grant’s research displays a strong link between collaboration and creative character. A recent study conducted by Baer (2012) found more of the same, suggesting that creativity and implementation are regulated by people’s ability to network and the number of strong relationships they hold. Lucky for the team, collaboration – or rather, relationships at large – is shown to be one of the most important contributors to one’s overall happiness. Here we begin to see a picture emerge where positive psychology and creativity can, indeed, tango together. And this is just the beginning – many more insights continued to unfold, illuminating the commonality between these seemingly disparate fields.

In fact, another example near and dear to a positive psychologists heart is positive emotional states. Fredrickson’s (1998) ground-breaking broaden and build theory posits that positive emotions contribute to an upward spiral of more positive emotions, open-mindedness, increased scope of attention, out-of-the-box thinking, and increased problem solving.  And yet, the plot actually thickens when creativity is examined  further. Negative emotions also have the power to boost creativity. One study of 161 employees found that creativity increased when both positive and negative emotions were running high (George & Zhou, 2007). In short, they appeared to be using the drama in the workplace positively. It turns out that finding ways to turn negative moods from creativity foes to allies can be a deceptively simple strategy: don’t resist the resistance. There is no need to turn that frown upside down after all.

As we stumbled across findings such as these we went right to the creativity core. We coupled the time-tested definition of creativity—the generation of novel and useful ideas (Amabile, 1988; Oldham & Cummings, 1996)—with Einstein’s famous quip that we cannot solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Putting the two together, and making sure to stay true to the big “A” in MAPP (application),  a sixty- minute webinar was designed, “Hacking Creativity,” that explores the intersection of these fields in an intriguing, insightful, and all together imaginative way.

Baer, M. (2012). Putting creativity to work: the implementation of creative ideas in organizations. Academy of Management Journal, 55(5), 1102-1119.

Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions?Review of General Psychology, 2, 300-319.

Grant, M. (2013). Give and take: A revolutionary approach to success. New York: Viking Press.

George, J. M., & Zhou, J. (2007). Dual tuning in a supportive context: Joint contributions of positive mood, negative mood, and supervisory behaviors to employee creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 50(3), 605-622.

Oldham, G. R., & Cummings, A. (1996). Employee creativity: Personal and contextual factors at work. Academy of management journal, 39(3), 607-634.

If you are interested in learning what the team discovered, and howto leverage it against creativity-starved challenge, come join us on September 24^th at noon EST.  We look forward to sharing the result of our efforts to concoct a distinctive creativity and happiness tonic.  Go here to register:  https://www4.gotomeeting.com/register/119275815.

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 your anxiety and increase your influence whether you have a formal presentation or are just running a meeting.  I’ll look at the external aspects of presence, the internal aspects of presence, managing anxiety and accessing flow.

What is your objective?

When you get up in front of a room…what do you want?  Many people who are presenting have one goal – to get off as fast as possible.  But our intention has a big impact on our presence and on our audience.

Masaru Himoto is a scientist who studied the molecular structure of water.  When subjects send distilled water positive thoughts like love, appreciation, happiness, and truth.  As a result the water turned into delicate crystalline shapes.

When water was sent a negative message like hatred and hostility, the water turned into chaotic fragmented structures.  Water makes up 60% of human body and 70% of human brain.  The energy and attention we send to ourselves and others has an enormous affect on our well being and our presence.  You must be attuned to your own true self.  If you are putting on persona or disguise an audience will know.   We know from recent psychology research that emotions are, in fact, contagious.

In the theater an actor with Stanislavsky training will choose an action verb – an infinitive – to be their ‘objective’ for the entire play.  Every action you take falls under that one verb.  The lead role in the movie Stand and Deliver might have an objective – to inspire.  Junah, the Matt Damon role in the dreadful golf movie The Legend of Baggar Vance might have an objective – to find my true swing.  Sandra Bullock’s character in The Blind Side might have an objective – to mentor.  So when you are presenting or leading your next meeting – what is your objective?  To inspire?  To entertain?  To enliven?

Managing Emotions

Much has been written in the psychological literature (from cognitive behavioral therapy to Peter Salovey’s work on EQ) about emotions.  Managing emotions is one of those aspects of external presence you can control.  One study had half of the participants place a pencil in between their teeth (inducing a smile) and the other half placed a pencil in between their eyebrows (inducing a frown).   The results showed that people who were induced with a smile were happier than the control group.  And participants who were induced with a frown were less happy than the control group.  People always ask me if you can ‘fake it til you make it’.  I think this work and Amy Cuddy’s work displays evidence that you can.

Power Poses

Amy Cuddy is a social science researcher from Harvard Business School.  Her famous YouTube on power poses has been viewed over three million times.  In it she discusses how she noticed that certain people in her classes were asking questions and certain students (usually the females and non-white males) were not speaking up.  She  also noticed that they had very different postures in class.  This led her to track the level of testosterone (power/strength hormone) and cortisol (stress hormone) of subjects who were in different poses.  When they were in poses hunched over an iPhone (which is what you might be doing before a job interview, for instance) they had high levels of cortisol, which made them perform more poorly in the interview.  When she had subjects spend just 2 minutes before their interview in one of a few ‘power poses’ (i.e. feet on a desk, hands on hips, arms out wide in a ‘Y’) their cortisol dropped and their testosterone shot up.  They performed much better in their interviews.  She doesn’t recommending striking the pose in the middle of the interview, however.

Keep Breathing

While there are any number of aspects of physical presence I get asked about on a regular basis (i.e. “What do I do with my hands?”) there is one that is the North Star.  If you can get your breathing correct it can cure a multitude of sins.

As you’re reading this, place your left hand on your chest and your right hand on your lower belly.  Take a few deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth.  (By the way, this is the most efficient way to breathe.  Nostril breathing warms and filters the air.)  Which hand moves more?  If you said your right, you win!  We ultimately want our diaphragm to move down and push our internal organs out of the way when we inhale.  This flies in the face of all the ‘sucking it in’ we’ll most likely be doing as swimsuit weather is upon us.  In addition if you breathe out for twice as long as you breathe in, it will activate the parasympathetic nervous system and lower your heart rate.  Just what you need when the nerves kick in at the beginning of a presentation or important meeting.

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

Do you remember that old joke about the person on the streets of New York who asks a local how to get to Carnegie Hall?  And the sardonic New Yorker replies:  “Practice practice practice.”  I would make one edit to that – practice aloud!  I have one client who told me that she always practices her speeches a number of times but was still having issues with anxiety and feeling successful.  It took a while before I discovered that she was practicing – in her head!  So in order to cultivate a positive presence you need to think about your intention, manage your emotions, manage your emotions, strike a power pose and find centered breathing to manage anxiety.  But you also need to practice.  That’s the only way to change a habit.

Kat Koppett

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 been offered by your partner is true and then build on it.

The misuse of this tool often stems from playing off the words alone. Subtext provides much more context so you wind up listening to the words and the meaning of everything else the person is trying to communicate. If your partner don’t share anything you immediately key into, then Koppett offers the following suggestion. “What I like about that idea is… ” I like that phrase. It can get you unstuck from pretty much any situation. I’m going to be taking that advice.

To hear how to use  the Yes/And and other exercises effectively, we invite you to listen to the webinar (Improv for the Business Stage 10-30-13 11.59 AM). You’ll get ideas that will help you go out on a limb and make your workplace more fun and productive.

The series, titled “Positive Psychology for Career Counselors and Coaches,” will offer Career Counselors and Coaches practical techniques to incorporate positive psychology into their practices and apply it to help their clients flourish.  If you haven’t met Shannon, as a friend and co-founder myself, I can tell you that Shannon is a very engaging facilitator.  That is often the takeaway from those who see her and Louisa in action.

The Webinar will include the latest techniques including how to help your clients utilize what we know from positive psychology including:

-  Increasing psychological resilience
-  Reducing stress and anxiety
-  Increasing positive energy
-  Achieving healthier thought processes
-  Improving psychological well-being and happiness

Participants will also receive a detailed workbook of exercises for use with their clients.  And, if you need them, you can get Continuing Education Credits for completion.

Here are some of the specifics:

Date: Tuesdays, April 2, 9, 16, 23, 2013
Time: 12 noon – 1:00 p.m. ET
$199 for the entire series of 4 Webinars
Week 1: Leveraging Positive Emotions in the Counselling.Coaching Session
Week 2: Fixed vs. Growth Mindset
Week 3: Curiosity and FLOW
Week 4: Five Steps to Building Resilience

Those interested in participating can register online or contact Shannon Polly at spolly(at)accentuate-consulting(dot)com.

Sign up or pass the word!

*All prices in Canadian dollars.