Video Self-Monitoring (VSM): videos showing how individuals could perform

Positive behavior descriptions in the solution-focused approach
The solution-focused approach helps people to make progress by (1) having them produce vivid descriptions of how they would like to be able to behave (positive behaviors in the preferred future), and (2) vivid descriptions of when they have already, to some extend been able to behave like that (positive behaviors in situations of past success). In addition to this (3) perspective change techniques are used which help people describe from a third person perspective how they themselves would like to able to behave. (More about positive behavior descriptions here). I have now come across a technique which cleverly uses all of these three techniques: Video Self-Monitoring.

Question: do you know the rapid results approach to change?

Yesterday, David Creelman mentioned the Rapid Results Institute to me. As I understood from David, in the rapid results approach there are the following key steps to mobilizing a team, village or neighborhood: 1) Set a 100 day deadline to create urgency, 2) Talk about what other teams, villages or neighborhoods have accomplished in 100 days, and 3) Get people to vote on what they need to do. David will write more about that in a soon to be published article.

Did you know these things about heritability?

I came across a Huffington post article from some time ago written by Scott Barry Kaufman in which he lists 8 Surprising Facts About Parenting, Genes and What Really Makes Us Who We Are. Do the statements below indeed surprise you? Which surprised you most? How convincing do you find Kaufman's explanations?

Not every goal is good for you. Choose wisely what you wish for

"One day, I hope to be able to drive a Porsche ... that is my big dream", a former colleague of mine once told me. I don't know whether his dream has come true (we lost contact) and, if yes, whether his life has become better for it. Someone else I know told me she really hoped to become a teacher one day, which she eventually did and which she enjoys a lot. What a difference in dreams ...

Teaching adolescents a growth mindset helps to reduce their aggression

An Implicit Theories of Personality Intervention Reduces Adolescent Aggression in Response to Victimization and Exclusion

by David Scott Yeager, Kali H. Trzesniewski, and Carol S. Dweck

The hostile attribution bias is one of the most prominent constructs in the study of aggression and in the field of developmental psychology. Whereas past research has shown that hostile schemas and adverse experiences predict this bias, we propose that seemingly neutral beliefs (implicit theories about the malleability of personality traits) may also play a role in shaping it. Study 1 was a meta-analysis of eleven correlations from eight original data sets (N = 1,659), and it showed that a fixed or entity theory about personality traits predicted greater hostile attributional biases among high school students, which mediated an effect on aggressive desires. Study 2 experimentally changed adolescents’ implicit theories toward a malleable or incremental view of personality traits and showed a reduction in hostile attributions. Study 3 was a brief incremental theory intervention that reduced hostile intent attributions and aggressive desires over an eight-month period. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Real full draft article

Taming the beast

I got this interesting comment from Niklas Tiger:

I have been reading your blog for a while and I have really enjoyed it a lot. Your way of making SF understandable is brilliant! I am in the process of implementing SF skills into my organization, an IT company in northern Sweden with about 30 employees. We have been facing a problem that has been growing slowly over the years, that we have tried to address a number of times (but have never succeded in "taming the beast"). It’s an extremly complex IT-releated challenge that involves tons of different technology, processes and people. It also involves almost every aspect of our professional skills and knowledge and almost every employee in the company. We had recently come to the point where it is was so huge we didn't even think it would be possible to EVER find a solutions to this – it would take time, effort, energy, money and a project so huge we couldn’t even imagine who would want to try… Overwhelming is an understatement.

What is your best experience with the solution-focused approach, so far?

I'd like to hear some experiences of readers.

My question simply is: "What is your best experience with the solution-focused approach, so far?"

WOWW: Working on What Works

Working on What Works: working with teachers to improve classroom behaviour and relationships
by Emma Brown, Emma Powell & Adele Clark (2012)

The Working on What Works (WOWW) approach, which is based upon Solution-focused Brief Therapy, was implemented in a mainstream primary classroom over a 10-week period. The WOWW programme has three key stages: 1) observation of positive things to feedback to the pupils and class teacher(three weeks), 2) goal setting through the use of scales, 3) Regular scaling of classrom success and amplifying.

Can questions lead to change? An experiment

Can Questions Lead to Change? An Analogue Experiment
Sara Healing, Janet Beavin Bavelas, Department of Psychology, University of Victoria, Canada

It is commonly assumed that questions can affect behavior and that different sorts of questions affect behavior differently. But little research has been done which provides evidence this assumption. Healing and Bavelas did an experiment in which they tested the differential impact of two different types of questions a) their task performance on a difficult task, and b) their own attributions of their task performance (their interpretation of why they performed as they did).

Views On Work Survey

The purpose of this survey is to explore people's views on work. The survey contains three main sections: 1) What are your beliefs regarding how people achieve success at work? (16 items) 2) How do you work? (7 items) 3) How do you view your own work? (26 items)

Will you participate so that you can help? Go to the survey.

Just start - book on the test-and-learn approach to career development

There is a new book on career development: Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future. In the book it is argued that career planning often does not work in our unpredictable world. An alternative to career planning is presented which can be summarized as follows:

1. Determine your desire 
2. Take a step toward it 
3. Incorporate what you learn from taking that step 
4. Take another step 
5. Learn from that one 
6. Repeat until you have a job, your own business, or have achieved your goal

Does that somehow sound familiar? If not, have a look here, here, here, here, and here.