Since I am taking a short vacation, I will not be posting again in 2 weeks (my usual interval between posts) but in 4 weeks. To compensate for it, here is an extra-long post. Enjoy!

I am going to contrast and compare two different books: Dan Ariely’s latest, The Upside of Irrationality; and Daniel Pink’s  Drive.

Both books are terrific. They read very well. They are very engaging. The authors make an extra effort to illustrate their concepts in the simplest and most understandable way. They both use metaphors that are clear and effective in their power to explain. Not only these two books are a pleasure to read – they are also very informative.

Ariely’s book is sort of a sequel to his hugely successful Predictably Irrational: the Hidden Forces that Shape our Behavior. However in The Upside of Irrationality Dan Ariely’s takes a more compassionate stance towards the bias that make us irrational decision makers, a.k.a. humans. In keeping with this softer perspective, the book shines with many personal stories that are going to touch the reader. And it is no accident that the focus of this book is not “the consumers’” behavior but how people behave at work and in their own personal life. So we have 5 chapters about “how we defy logic at work”, and another 5 about “how we defy logic at home”.

Dan Pink’ s Drive feeds on the work of Ariely and many others on the science of motivation. Pink is a master in making the insights gained by recent research  understandable and readily usable by managers and businessmen. Drive is a call for a general and comprehensive rethinking of the ways in which we organize what we do.  Pink’s metaphor of assumptions that societies have about human behavior as being their operating system is brilliant and enlightening in and of itself! Moreover, the second part of the book is a treasure trove of practical advice - simple strategies to implement the ideas illustrated in Drive.
Continue reading…

Tags: book review, brief coaching, coaching, Dan Ariely, Daniel Pink, Drive, epistemology, marketing, motivation, psychological bias, science, The Upside of Irrationality, training

HOW PLEASURE WORKS

Yale psychologist Paul Bloom gave us a book about pleasure that is a pleasure to read.
Though it is basically a pop-psych book, it reads almost like a collection of short stories – each one with the aim of illustrating from different angles what the nature of pleasure is, each one solidly grounded in psychology or neuroscience.

In the author’s view, human pleasures are universal and are not culturally determined: “we start off with a fixed list of pleasures and we cannot add to the list.” When we derive pleasure from new technologies or cultural habits, it is because they connect to pleasures that humans already possess.

However, most of these hardwired pleasures are not adaptations, but rather are by-products of mental systems evolved for other purposes.

For example, we can get a kick out of coffee, but this is not because “coffee lovers of the past had more offspring than coffee hater” – it is because we like to be stimulated, and coffee is a stimulant.

This is just the starting point for Paul Bloom – the book itself is a journey through the pleasures of food, of sex and love, of collecting objects, of art, of imagination, of sport, of science, of religion. In each entertaining chapter the author argues for his main claim: that “the pleasure we get from many things and activities is based in part on what we see as their essences”.

In other words pleasure is grounded in our BELIEFS about the deeper nature of a given thing – even our sensations are always colored by our beliefs.

That is why an original Picasso is worth a lot of money, but a perfectly executed replica is not. That is why sexual pleasure is not merely a matter of sensations, but it is also rooted in beliefs about who someone really is and what someone really is – as illustrated by the use of bedtricks in plays and fiction, and by our preference for partners that are faithful, smart and kind. That is why how we think about food and drink affects how we judge it – orange juice tastes better if it is bright orange, yogurt and ice cream are more flavorful if described as “full fat”, and experts rate highly the same Bordeaux if it is described as “grand cru classe” but not if it is labeled “vin du table”.

I found particularly interesting the chapter dedicated to imagination, where the author develops a very tight explanation of how imagination arose in evolution and why now we take so much pleasure in it – from daydreaming to playing videogames.

I was also intrigued by philosopher Tamar Gendler’s notion of alief, introduced by the author in that very same chapter regarding imagination.

While beliefs are attitudes that we hold in response to how things are, alief are more primitive – they are responses to how things seem.

Psychologist Paul Rozin found that “people often refuse to drink soup from a brand-new bedpan, eat fudge shaped like feces, or put an empty gun to their head and pull the trigger. Gendler notes that the beliefs here are: the bedpan is clean, the fudge is fudge, the gun is empty. But the aliefs are stupider, screaming, “dangerous object! Stay away!” (p.169).

In Bloom’s essentialist framework, even science and religion can be seen as an obvious source of pleasure – even though they are very different, both science and religion share the basic assumption that there is a deeper reality that has significance. Science can tell us about it, religion provides tools to experience that reality.

Our essentialist nature appears in us as infants, as research carried out by the author and others has demonstrated. With science and religion we come full circle: essentialist properties are attributed to the very fabric of the Universe – and in this insight I, as a reader, took a great pleasure.

Tags: aliefs, beliefs, book review, essentialism, how pleasure work, Paul Bloom, pleasure, Psychology

Recently Katalin Hankovszky shared the following thought by Liselotte Baeijaert:

Solution Focus is not about finding THE solution for a problem, it’s about a useful interaction that leaves the client changed: with more hope, with more creative ideas, with a feeling of competence, with a clearer view on possibilities.

I think this is an important distinction that goes a long way in making clear what Solution-Focus is and what Solution-Focus is not.

Tags: InterAction, solution, Solution-Focus definition, Solution-Focus distinction

Great short video presentation by Coert Visser which shows how the 3 basic human needs for Autonomy, Competence & Relatedness are supported by Solution-Focused Coaching & Therapy.

Tags: Autonomy, Coert Visser, Competence, Human Needs, Relatedness, Solution Focus, video presentation

I have always been a great fan of the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi about the psychology of optimal performance.
His idea of flow has resonated with me ever since.

In my life I had the good luck of experiencing flow states in different occasions.
When you are “in the flow” everything disappears – including the self.
You are totally absorbed in the activity, passionately engaged in what you are doing.
Time disappears. Joy and doing are all there is.
One word follows another, one movement follows another, in an effortless flow of action and creation.
A frictionless world.

I experienced flow in writing; I experienced flow in running, sometimes with mystical over-tones; I even experienced flow while leading workshops.

But I have always wondered which form flow would take in coaching.
Not anymore.
I experienced it.

Flow in coaching is about tuning in to rhythm of the interaction rather than on the content of the conversation.

Or, as my friend Svea Van Der Hoorn put it recently during a workshop: in the discipline lies the magic.

Just like a tango dancer who is so connected with his partner and so engaged in the dance that he knows exactly when and how to lead his partner into the next step – in the same way a Solution-Focused Coach in a state of flow knows exactly when and how to lead the client into the next phase of the coaching conversation.

Flow in coaching is definitely linked with the concept of not knowing –  having no specific expertise in the clients’ field of work can be a tremendous asset.
The details of the problem the client is experiencing is noise – the signal is that little shift in the coachee’s tone of voice which tells you the client feels he or she has been heard and therefore we can move on to negotiating goals; the subtle smile which tells the coach that the coachee has found something that worked in the past and so we can start asking amplifying questions around that exception; the eyes of the coachee staring in the distance and contemplating the landscape of the Miracle – let’s leave the client there for a while; the signal is noticing the client shifting from “problem language” to “solution language”; the signal is that little key word buried there in that long sentence or that sparkling moment in that long litany of complaints.

Content changes but the process does not.

There is an opening, there is a middle and there is an end – there might be endless variations, thousands of different words and meanings, but the grammar of a Solution-Focused coaching session stays the same.

I am indebted to Coert Visser for having me reflect some more about the importance of not-knowing.

Tags: coaching, content, Flow, not-knowing, process, Solution Focused

Tags: book, Doing Something Different, Routledge, Solution Focus, Thorana Nelson