Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott
Speaker 1: Barry Kaufman, where we give you insights into the mind, brain,
Speaker 1: behavior and creativity. Each episode will feature a new guest
Speaker 1: who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater
Speaker 1: understanding of yourself, others, and the world we live in.
Speaker 1: Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening and enjoy the podcast. But right now we're
Speaker 1: really excited to be speaking with our guest, Diana Breecher.
Speaker 1: Doctor Breecher is a cognitive behavioral therapist and educator who
Speaker 1: is a particular interest in working with clients who are
Speaker 1: experiencing anxiety and depression. In addition to teaching at Ryerson
Speaker 1: University in downtown Toronto, she has most recently been jointly
Speaker 1: responsible for establishing a university wide Thrive RU program at
Speaker 1: Ryer based in her work in positive psychology and flourishing.
Speaker 1: Thanks for being on the show today. Thank you. I'm
Speaker 1: delighted to be here. Yeah, me too. You have lots
Speaker 1: of mutual interests, and you are doing lots of really
Speaker 1: important and interesting work to help students with their well
Speaker 1: being and anxiety, and lots of things so the big
Speaker 1: question is where to dive in. Right, let me ask
Speaker 1: you this, when did you first discover positive psychology, Like,
Speaker 1: how did that contact happen? Okay, So that's interesting because
Speaker 1: I think I discovered it in some ways years ago
Speaker 1: without realizing that it was part of positive psychology. So
Speaker 1: I wrote a book review of Martin Seligman's book Authentic
Speaker 1: Happiness about eight years ago, and I became very interested
Speaker 1: in his work and followed him even from before that
Speaker 1: and the learned optimism. I was very interested in how
Speaker 1: that formed my clinical practice. I ran workshops on flow
Speaker 1: and optimal performance. So I was very interested in Chick
Speaker 1: sent me High's work. So I think I was interested
Speaker 1: in positive psychology before I knew it was all under
Speaker 1: that big tent of that name positive psychology. And then
Speaker 1: as time has gone on, I registered for a six
Speaker 1: month certificate course in positive psychology last May, which I
Speaker 1: completed in October, and that really introduced me to a
Speaker 1: much broader range of research and work being done in
Speaker 1: the field. That's great, So you encountered all this work
Speaker 1: and you immediately saw its applicability to the work you've
Speaker 1: already been doing with students. I mean you've been working
Speaker 1: with students for how many years? Well, I've been at
Speaker 1: Ryerson University in Toronto for just over twenty five years,
Speaker 1: and before that I did some training and other university
Speaker 1: counseling services, and as of July first, I left the
Speaker 1: counseling center for a year and started to just devote
Speaker 1: all of my time to the Thrive ar U project.
Speaker 1: Oh great, So well, if you're doving all your time
Speaker 1: to that, I think we ought to talk about it. Okay, great,
Speaker 1: are you now? You started it? You coined that name
Speaker 1: as well. Well. With a couple of colleagues, we were
Speaker 1: talking about resilience program that I developed for students who
Speaker 1: actually had been waiting on the waitlist and the counseling center,
Speaker 1: and it was a skill based program to build resilience,
Speaker 1: and several of my colleagues outside the counseling center were
Speaker 1: very interested in it. We started to talk about how
Speaker 1: we could export it from the counseling center and into
Speaker 1: kind of the mainstream of the university. And in fact,
Speaker 1: I was really inspired by Martin Seligman's work in Australia
Speaker 1: with the Geelong School. I don't know if I'm pronouncing
Speaker 1: that correctly. Yeah, Yeah, they're great, They're great. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I loved what he did. It was so inspiring to
Speaker 1: think about actually going in and changing a culture from
Speaker 1: really from the ground up and also top down, And
Speaker 1: so that became the vision for the Thrive RU project
Speaker 1: is how do we work with faculty, staff and students
Speaker 1: at different levels getting them thinking about positive psychologies. She
Speaker 1: how to increase a sense of well being in the
Speaker 1: students and educate them on those type of strategies so
Speaker 1: by the time they graduate, they actually really have two
Speaker 1: completely separate but integrated sets of skills, whatever their focus
Speaker 1: of their academic program is, and then the focus of
Speaker 1: their sense of wellbeing and resilience and capacity to flourish
Speaker 1: in the world of work and in their other dreams
Speaker 1: in their lives. So it's a very lofty kind of idea,
Speaker 1: and we've started quite modestly and have been building out slowly.
Speaker 1: That's great. Tell me a little bit about which work
Speaker 1: has inspired you the most, which aspects of positive psychology
Speaker 1: or positive education. I read somewhere that you were particularly
Speaker 1: inspired in addition to mar So, I mean also by
Speaker 1: Sonya Lubermerski's work. Is that right? Absolutely? I read her book,
Speaker 1: The How of Happiness, and like it's a fabulous piece
Speaker 1: of work. I mean, she has collected great interventions and
Speaker 1: really research validated interventions for people to increase what she
Speaker 1: refers to as that forty percent solution, so that forty
Speaker 1: percent of our life satisfaction that's under our control. And
Speaker 1: so one of the things that I created was I
Speaker 1: kind of selected twenty six of the exercises to follow
Speaker 1: the rhythm of the academic year and created a workbook
Speaker 1: calendar where each week of the semester, for both the
Speaker 1: fall and the winter semesters, students are given a particular
Speaker 1: exercise that I feel would be really helpful given what's
Speaker 1: going on in the semester, and then some suggestions onto
Speaker 1: how to use this exercise to increase your sense of
Speaker 1: well being and resilience. And we're just putting it out
Speaker 1: to press in January, and I've been writing about it
Speaker 1: in my blog. But I'm hoping that this is something
Speaker 1: that's going to be available to all of our students
Speaker 1: just as a download from our website. Oh that is
Speaker 1: so useful. That's so useful. I actually have a friend
Speaker 1: named Dan Werner who's doing a lot of work on
Speaker 1: hes Positi psychology at NYU, and he's doing some trying
Speaker 1: to create some curriculum to help college students were thriving
Speaker 1: as well. I feel like I want to leak you
Speaker 1: guys up at some point. Oh yeah, for sure. What
Speaker 1: was his name again, Daniel Werner? Okay, So this is
Speaker 1: clearly an extremely important in this time in which students
Speaker 1: all across those country, you know, suicide rates are just
Speaker 1: they're always unacceptably high, but yes they are pretty you know,
Speaker 1: it's not like the numbers are becoming reduced and that's problematic,
Speaker 1: and students are just more depressed than ever. And what
Speaker 1: do you think is going on? You know, I get
Speaker 1: asked that question a lot. What is going on? And
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not really sure. I have some ideas.
Speaker 1: So one possibility is that stigma has been reduced with
Speaker 1: respect to talking about mental health or mental illness, and
Speaker 1: so people are more willing to disclose how they're feeling.
Speaker 1: So maybe we're hearing about it more because we're in
Speaker 1: the conversation. So that's one possibility. Another one is, you know,
Speaker 1: a colleague of mine is writing a book on burnout
Speaker 1: with millennials, and so his idea is that there's something
Speaker 1: about the pressures of being in this age group, you know, seventeen,
Speaker 1: eighteen to twenty five, that is just too much. That
Speaker 1: these young people aren't quite prepared for the demands of university,
Speaker 1: of being a young adult, the financial expectations, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And it just gets too much. They just don't have
Speaker 1: the capacity to figure it out, and that feeling of
Speaker 1: being overwhelmed leads them to a place where they think
Speaker 1: there's no other solution. So in my work as a
Speaker 1: clinical psychologist, I've worked with, you know, quite a number
Speaker 1: of students who have felt that way, and our work
Speaker 1: together is to instill hope and to find ways to
Speaker 1: cope better and to maybe advocate for them around finances
Speaker 1: or you know, academic responsibilities, et cetera. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: ways to really help clear the deck of it so
Speaker 1: the person is better able to cope with their challenges.
Speaker 1: But I don't know if anyone really knows why suicide
Speaker 1: is up. We just know that it is, And certainly
Speaker 1: at my university at Ryerson, there's a very strong awareness
Speaker 1: throughout the administration and generally that we have to really
Speaker 1: support our students and their well being, and so part
Speaker 1: of This initiative that I'm involved in is to try
Speaker 1: to see how do we change the culture, right, like,
Speaker 1: how do we I think of it as like almost
Speaker 1: like how do we affect the hive? How do we
Speaker 1: get principles of positive psychology into the classroom, into the curriculum,
Speaker 1: into the residences or the dorms. How do we do
Speaker 1: it around student programming generally with athletes, et cetera. And
Speaker 1: so part of my work is to bring training to
Speaker 1: people at all these different levels. I just finished doing
Speaker 1: a four week training session with our journalism department with
Speaker 1: the professors there, and we've been talking about how do
Speaker 1: we bring these principles of resilience into the classroom? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean these are Resiliency is a big key. I
Speaker 1: was going to say it to a lot of what
Speaker 1: you're saying, and what are the different components resiliency that
Speaker 1: you see? Okay, So I've kind of conceptualized it like
Speaker 1: pieces of a puzzle that fit together. So think at
Speaker 1: the heart of the puzzle is mindfulness, which is really
Speaker 1: about the capacity to be present in this moment, not
Speaker 1: time traveling, you know, to the worrying about the future
Speaker 1: and ruminating about the past. It's really about being pressed here,
Speaker 1: then if you think clockwise going around the circle, I've
Speaker 1: put in a work of gratitude and the kind of
Speaker 1: notion that you can start noticing the good things that
Speaker 1: are happening in your life and noticing possibilities. And as
Speaker 1: you begin to do that, you begin to feel more
Speaker 1: resilient because you're not just accepting the good stuff but
Speaker 1: not taking it in, it's really taking it to heart.
Speaker 1: The next part of the puzzle is optimism and how
Speaker 1: one needs to learn how to become optimistic, and so
Speaker 1: I run a workshop on that specifically on actually each
Speaker 1: of these components. Then I look at self compassion Kristin
Speaker 1: Nef's work on that in particular, but also some of
Speaker 1: the mindfulness traditions like the loving kindness meditation and the
Speaker 1: notion of forgiving yourself for being stuck in a bad
Speaker 1: place is equal to bouncing back afterwards. And then finally
Speaker 1: I've been looking at two ways of thinking about perseverance
Speaker 1: and grit, so I borrow from Angela Duckworth's research on
Speaker 1: perseverance more around the academic achievement, but also Christine Pedeski,
Speaker 1: who's a clinical psychologist in one of the many workshops
Speaker 1: I've attended that she's given in Toronto. She talked about
Speaker 1: something called developing a personal model of resilience. So that's
Speaker 1: something that I teach everyone who goes through the training,
Speaker 1: is how do you tap into your amazingly resilient strengths
Speaker 1: and attitudes that you have very well developed from a
Speaker 1: when you're doing something you love to do that you
Speaker 1: manage obstacles because of the love of it, and then
Speaker 1: transport those same strategies and attitudes and metaphors into a
Speaker 1: different context where you're really struggling. And so it's over
Speaker 1: a four week period. Usually I do four sessions with
Speaker 1: mindfulness integrated into each of the other four and people
Speaker 1: come away with some strategies and new kind of insights
Speaker 1: about integrating gratitude, optimism, self compassion, and perseverance. Oh, I
Speaker 1: really like it. I predict that if I asked you, like,
Speaker 1: where does creativity come into it, you would say in
Speaker 1: each of them, yes, absolutely, yeah, yes, because you have
Speaker 1: to really be you know, adaptability and being flexible so
Speaker 1: crucial for resilience. And this the whole thing is a
Speaker 1: model of resiliency, right, it could also be a model
Speaker 1: of creativity. Oh, that's interesting. Imagine it can't because creativity
Speaker 1: does really require that we approach things in new ways
Speaker 1: without these preconceived notions and the kind of rigid thinking
Speaker 1: that's the opposite of creativity. And I'm inviting anyone who
Speaker 1: works through this model is to really start approaching their
Speaker 1: life with much more flexibility and a sense of empowerment
Speaker 1: that they have that capacity to determine at least forty
Speaker 1: percent of their happiness set point. And this is in
Speaker 1: service of that. Yes, that's right, that's the Liver and
Speaker 1: Mersky work. That's right. So you know, it's interesting you
Speaker 1: described mindfulness, you know, actually the absence of mindfulness as
Speaker 1: a form of time travel. Yes, can you ever how
Speaker 1: that is? Sure? So I think that when someone is
Speaker 1: spending all of their kind of emotional and psychic energy
Speaker 1: worried about the future. And so someone who, let's say,
Speaker 1: when I was working as a clinician, would come in
Speaker 1: with generalized anxiety and so everything is all a worry
Speaker 1: and they can't appreciate the present moment because they're imagining
Speaker 1: the worst case scenario of everything that's going to happen
Speaker 1: in the future. So they're not really being present. They're
Speaker 1: living in the future, but they're living in an imagined
Speaker 1: future that hasn't come to me and may never come
Speaker 1: to me, but they're acting as if it's already happening.
Speaker 1: And similarly, some people who I've worked with kind of
Speaker 1: get stuck in their past and they can't let go
Speaker 1: of a relationship or they can't let go of a disappointment,
Speaker 1: and so they spend a lot of time kind of
Speaker 1: covering the same ground and being very self recriminating and difficult.
Speaker 1: And so the time travel is in the sense that
Speaker 1: they're not actually in the present moment, which may in
Speaker 1: fact be much better than either the past or the future,
Speaker 1: and they're not able to see the good that is
Speaker 1: happening in this moment. And a lot of my work
Speaker 1: as a clinician was to try to get these individuals
Speaker 1: to spend more time noticing what is working in their
Speaker 1: life but they have some control over so, you know,
Speaker 1: the notion of the Zoro circle that Sean Akor talks about,
Speaker 1: like taking charge of one small piece of your life
Speaker 1: and then developing some mastery over it and then taking
Speaker 1: charge of the next piece. So I'm a really strong
Speaker 1: believer in empowerment as it relates to living in the
Speaker 1: present moment. You can't be in the present moment if
Speaker 1: your attention is elsewhere, and so mindfulness is about training
Speaker 1: your mind to be in this present moment. Do you
Speaker 1: think mindfulness and imagination are necessarily at odds with each other? Oh? Again,
Speaker 1: really interesting question. I think that mindfulness can work in
Speaker 1: service of imagination. So I think that sometimes when we daydream,
Speaker 1: we're definitely not really present in the moment, and daydreams
Speaker 1: can lead to these amazing leaps of imagination and creative.
Speaker 1: But I also think that mindfulness is really important in
Speaker 1: order to be able to be creative, because you have
Speaker 1: to actually be very present in your life, even though
Speaker 1: you may not be attending to your immediate surroundings. Sure
Speaker 1: so kind of you know, like the ultimate is to
Speaker 1: be able to have a rich imagination and be mindful
Speaker 1: of it at the same time. It seems to be
Speaker 1: kind of yeah, I mean, given that you don't have
Speaker 1: to like drive a car or pay attention to a lecture,
Speaker 1: but no operating having machinery while trying to be too creative, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, because then you're divided attention and that can
Speaker 1: be dangerous. Yeah. Sure, so I like that A lot,
Speaker 1: and I think there is this emerging understanding that mind
Speaker 1: wandering is not the opposite of mindfulness. They're not opposites.
Speaker 1: They're kind of on two different dimensions, and they can
Speaker 1: be combined in lots of interesting ways or mostly two ways.
Speaker 1: But so which two ways? I'm curious. Well, you can
Speaker 1: have mindless mind wandering and mindful mind wandering. Course, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes sense. Cool, Okay, So I like this model.
Speaker 1: And then you've taken kind of the best pits you
Speaker 1: know for positive psychology. And it seems like gratitude goes
Speaker 1: hand in hand with mindfulness. You know, it's very hard
Speaker 1: being appreciative of something if you don't pay attention to
Speaker 1: it exactly exactly. And there's so many people I've worked
Speaker 1: with over the years who will say, yes, this good
Speaker 1: thing happened, but it doesn't count because I'm so worried
Speaker 1: about this or I'm so depressed about that. And so
Speaker 1: it's this notion of dismissing or distorting the good stuff,
Speaker 1: And for me, mindfulness will help the individual think about Okay,
Speaker 1: this is also my truth. So I'm struggling and I'm strong.
Speaker 1: I like that's the place to be. What do you
Speaker 1: think we as parents and educators can do using the
Speaker 1: work you've done with young adults to help children manage
Speaker 1: their worries effectively and even flourish. Right, that's a great question. Well,
Speaker 1: I think, for example, gratitude for young children is really
Speaker 1: I think an antidote to entitlement. Right, So instead of
Speaker 1: assuming that life should owe you all these good things,
Speaker 1: to take a moment to sit back and say, these
Speaker 1: are good, this is really exciting. I am deserving, not
Speaker 1: that I am deserving, but I am grateful for having
Speaker 1: received this. Like for me, gratitude is like feeling blessed
Speaker 1: by whatever the good thing that happened to you, and
Speaker 1: it's this gift that came from the universe. And I
Speaker 1: think that's something that really works against the idea that
Speaker 1: the world owes you something. And grateful people are much
Speaker 1: more likely to feel happy in their lives because whatever
Speaker 1: good that happens, they're happy about it and they're not
Speaker 1: expecting more. Yeah, that sounds good. And you can certainly
Speaker 1: apply that to children and which it's a lifelong even
Speaker 1: you know, you apply it to genarians for sure. So
Speaker 1: you've applied this work to You've done a bunch of
Speaker 1: initiatives I just want to talk about some of them.
Speaker 1: One is you did a workshop for Tha's Is that right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, feedback on resiliency. Yes. So this is actually
Speaker 1: quite interesting because I don't think that these graduate students
Speaker 1: who work as teaching assistants we do a lot of time.
Speaker 1: They spend time grading exams for profits, or they'll be
Speaker 1: working in engineering labs or that kind of thing with
Speaker 1: all undergraduate students. Until this workshop, it seems that they
Speaker 1: hadn't really thought about what was the impact of their
Speaker 1: rating or their comments, either written or verbal, to these
Speaker 1: undergraduate students. They didn't seem to think about how the
Speaker 1: students who's hearing the feedback may in fact be reacting
Speaker 1: to it. Is it going to help them learn anything?
Speaker 1: Are they simply going to just shut down because they've been,
Speaker 1: in effect scolded by a bad grade? And so I
Speaker 1: got them to start thinking about character strengths, their own
Speaker 1: character strengths, and what does it mean to lead from
Speaker 1: those character strengths when they're giving feedback to whoever they're teaching,
Speaker 1: and then at the same time to consider that all
Speaker 1: of the students that they're working with, who they may
Speaker 1: never even meet, also have strengths that they can notice
Speaker 1: in their grading. So it's like that of Yin Yang idea,
Speaker 1: where are you only going to comment on the mistakes?
Speaker 1: So are you also going to acknowledge really good things
Speaker 1: that are happening in the essay or in a project
Speaker 1: that you're grading. And so it was really helping them
Speaker 1: to try to think about their resilience and the resilience
Speaker 1: of the people they're teaching are equally important. And the
Speaker 1: growth mindset is much more likely to be as a
Speaker 1: result of feedback. That's like, for example, sandwiched. So you
Speaker 1: give good feedback, then you do a critique, and then
Speaker 1: you do a summary of good feedback again, and so
Speaker 1: it gets delivered in such a way that the person
Speaker 1: can truly take it in good. How many workshops are
Speaker 1: there for tha's like that in this country. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I mean I just kind of made it up myself.
Speaker 1: I've ran it once and then they asked me to
Speaker 1: do it again because more students were interested. So I'm
Speaker 1: hoping to run it more often. And this is what
Speaker 1: I mean by the infecting the hive notion. So if
Speaker 1: I get grad students beginning to think about giving feedback differently,
Speaker 1: even if I've never spoken to the professors with whom
Speaker 1: they're working, that might actually trickle up, and at the
Speaker 1: same time the students that they're grading, it'll trickle down.
Speaker 1: And so I'm working at all levels of the university
Speaker 1: kind of simultaneously and hoping that we're going to reach
Speaker 1: some kind of critical mass where people are going to
Speaker 1: start talking about developing curriculum in some way that is
Speaker 1: going to be supporting growth mindset, that's going to be
Speaker 1: supporting positive characteristics, learning good habits, all kinds of things
Speaker 1: from positive psyche that I can see applying to higher education. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can as well. And you've also done a workshop
Speaker 1: for grad students on culturing optimism. Is that right? That's right.
Speaker 1: So I've taken Martin Seldman's work I'm Unlearned Optimism, and
Speaker 1: I've kind of created this a series of six questions
Speaker 1: that are kind of designed to help an individual flip
Speaker 1: from a pessimistic to an optimistic frame, be in a
Speaker 1: positive situation or a good situation or a bad situation.
Speaker 1: Because we know that you can be an optimist when
Speaker 1: something good happens, and you can be an optimist when
Speaker 1: something bad happens. Similarly with pessimism, and so they then
Speaker 1: practice these questions and it helps shift the mindset. In fact,
Speaker 1: down the hall the other day at the university and
Speaker 1: someone who took a workshop of mine came up to
Speaker 1: me and said, you know, this resilience model really seems
Speaker 1: to make a difference for me. And when I asked why,
Speaker 1: she told me that she wrote a letter to someone,
Speaker 1: a gratitude letter to who she was feeling grateful towards
Speaker 1: but had never expressed it, and had a transformative experience
Speaker 1: with this individual, who was actually her father, and it
Speaker 1: changed their relationship and he passed on fairly shortly afterwards,
Speaker 1: a few weeks later, and she told me that she
Speaker 1: was so grateful that she had done that letter because
Speaker 1: she now feels that she can carry her father in
Speaker 1: a totally different way in her memory because of what
Speaker 1: they were able to talk about as a result of
Speaker 1: writing this letter of gratitude. And then she talked about
Speaker 1: how the optimism piece of the trainee helped her through
Speaker 1: the funeral and the family dynamics and everything else that
Speaker 1: has happened because she was able to shift out of
Speaker 1: a kind of a default pessimistic frame of reference and
Speaker 1: move into an optimistic one. How do you define optimism, Well,
Speaker 1: it's really defined by others, particularly Martin Seligman, as the
Speaker 1: capacity to explain what things happen to you from a
Speaker 1: particular frame of reference. And the frame of reference if
Speaker 1: an optimist would say, when something good happens is that
Speaker 1: I played a role in making that good thing happen,
Speaker 1: and this is going to be permanent and pervasive. And
Speaker 1: when something bad happens, but you see it more as
Speaker 1: something like bad luck, not so personally attributed, and also
Speaker 1: something that's going to be very situation specific and temporary.
Speaker 1: And so the way you explain those events in your
Speaker 1: life is integral to resilience because it helps you have
Speaker 1: enough energy to say, Okay, how am I going to
Speaker 1: transform this experience into something else? How am I going
Speaker 1: to make this bad thing temporary? How am I going
Speaker 1: to make this bad thing situation specific? Who else is
Speaker 1: responsible for what this bad thing is? Not just me?
Speaker 1: And then if you factor in self compassion, which is
Speaker 1: forgiving yourself being in the messy situation in the first place,
Speaker 1: you're moving much closer towards resilience. So do you think
Speaker 1: that definition can ever lead to people not taking full
Speaker 1: responsibility for their actions. No, that's true. But my experience
Speaker 1: has told me that people who think from a pessimistic
Speaker 1: explanatory style, they tend to be so good at blaming
Speaker 1: themselves that alleviating some of that burden is a good idea.
Speaker 1: It's not that they're going to take no responsibility for
Speaker 1: what I'm wrong. I'm just suggesting share the responsibility, lift
Speaker 1: the burden a little bit from your own self, and
Speaker 1: see are there circumstances outside my control that contributed to
Speaker 1: the situation? For example, that's one question you can ask yourself.
Speaker 1: Or are there other people who played a role in this?
Speaker 1: And what I also say is this is your inside voice.
Speaker 1: So this is not something that you're supposed to walk
Speaker 1: around talking to other people about, but it is what
Speaker 1: you are. It's the script that you can say to
Speaker 1: yourself when you're really stuck in the mug and things
Speaker 1: have gone wrong and you're trying to figure out what
Speaker 1: to do next. So self recrimination rarely helpful in that context, right,
Speaker 1: And there's yeah, that's right. There's certainly a difference between
Speaker 1: beating yourself up over something and taking responsibility. You can
Speaker 1: still some would argue that you know some philosophies like stoicism,
Speaker 1: perhaps would argue that, you know, it's good to have
Speaker 1: radical responsibility for all your actions, you know, for everything
Speaker 1: you do, to just to say, to recognize that you
Speaker 1: have control of the situation. Yeah, so it gets tricky,
Speaker 1: you know. Optimism is one of those things, like you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes he defines it as and I like it better
Speaker 1: when he defines it as kind of like earned optimism,
Speaker 1: like you have hope for the future because you are
Speaker 1: confident that you have successes in the past with it,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of a more self efficacy. I think
Speaker 1: I prefer that definition of it. I haven't heard that before,
Speaker 1: and I really like it. The notion of earning the optimism. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's great. But I also think that there's a difference
Speaker 1: between kind of self recrimination blaming yourself for whatever has happened,
Speaker 1: even if you had no control in the first place.
Speaker 1: That's where I've seen the biggest contributed to pessimism is
Speaker 1: to blame yourself for things that go wrong and give
Speaker 1: yourself no credit for the things that are going well
Speaker 1: right right right. Both of them leave you stranded with
Speaker 1: nothing to work with. Yeah, I think that's quite right.
Speaker 1: You also do a lot of work with using character
Speaker 1: strengths as part of resiliency. We haven't talked about that
Speaker 1: yet in the workplace, right, I mean, haven't you been
Speaker 1: helping retail management? Yes? Yes, yeah. So I went into
Speaker 1: a retail management course that's a fourth year course. The
Speaker 1: students are graduating and I guess three or four months
Speaker 1: from now, and this course is really designed to help
Speaker 1: them figure out their next step in a career. And
Speaker 1: so I came in to help them look at how
Speaker 1: do their own self knowledge about what their character strengths are?
Speaker 1: What are character strengths In the first place, I had
Speaker 1: them do the via Signature Strengths survey. I also had
Speaker 1: them do the kind of three sixty where they ask
Speaker 1: five people in their lives what they think their character
Speaker 1: strengths are. So it's a way of trying to see
Speaker 1: how is the world mirroring what you know about yourself?
Speaker 1: Are you being reflected actor really or not? And then
Speaker 1: that was before I even walked in the room. And
Speaker 1: then when we did the workshop, it was talking about
Speaker 1: how do you present yourself in the best light, for example,
Speaker 1: in a job interview or when you're going for a promotion,
Speaker 1: when you've just started out, you know, and you've been
Speaker 1: working for a year or so. Talking about being well
Speaker 1: organized or I'm a hard worker will only get you
Speaker 1: so far. And a lot of people employers are interested
Speaker 1: really in what can they count on in these new employees.
Speaker 1: So it's the idea of how do you present yourself,
Speaker 1: Like do you come in and say, you know, I'm
Speaker 1: someone who has a ton of perseverance, and I have
Speaker 1: zest for life, and humor is my greatest strength, and
Speaker 1: so was compassionate. I mean, that's a completely different kind
Speaker 1: of conversation. You know, in the right match for a job,
Speaker 1: for example, in social work, that might be a great match.
Speaker 1: Right in business maybe not so much. But what I
Speaker 1: wanted to do is to really help people start thinking
Speaker 1: about who they are in the world beyond what they've
Speaker 1: been graded as. So you know, they're good at this
Speaker 1: task or that task in school, but who are they
Speaker 1: in a more three dimensional way, and then see that
Speaker 1: as how to begin to how that's how they introduce
Speaker 1: themselves to people, not saying these are my characters strings,
Speaker 1: but this is who I am, this is these are
Speaker 1: my values, this is what I believe in, And that
Speaker 1: becomes a much more interesting conversation and a much more
Speaker 1: competitive one. Yeah, it comes part of their identity right
Speaker 1: and maybe helps fuel their passions as well. I like that.
Speaker 1: I like that. So lastly, I want to and I
Speaker 1: want to talk about the you know, you've really been
Speaker 1: applying this in lots of areas that have been really
Speaker 1: typically been applied. And another really interesting thing area you've
Speaker 1: applied it, I think is in the thesis supervisor supervisory relationship.
Speaker 1: I mean that's a very under developed, for what you know,
Speaker 1: area where we apply positive psychology to. Can you tell
Speaker 1: me the work you've done with that, well? Sure. So
Speaker 1: the early work was as a clinician listening to graduate
Speaker 1: students who are stuck in very dysfunctional relationships with their
Speaker 1: thesis supervisors. And of course, as you know, it's years
Speaker 1: and sometimes it could be you know, I've had students
Speaker 1: come in in profound depressions that are definitely linked to
Speaker 1: an on going struggle within a power structure that they
Speaker 1: have so little control. So I've had a lot of
Speaker 1: observations at the problem side of this and have you know,
Speaker 1: worked both address I've ad the depression of the anxiety
Speaker 1: or anything else, but also a lot of coaching around
Speaker 1: how do you negotiate things up the power lot? Right?
Speaker 1: So out of that I started to think about what
Speaker 1: I now know more about in positive psychology, how can
Speaker 1: I help both graduate students and thesis supervisors, because sometimes
Speaker 1: the relationship is dysfunctional in the opposite direction to really
Speaker 1: develop a healthy working relationship in which they're both flourishing.
Speaker 1: Because really a visas supervisor is going to want their
Speaker 1: grad students to do well. It reflects on them as
Speaker 1: part of their job, and the grad student is completely
Speaker 1: dependent on this supervisor to flourish in their career. So
Speaker 1: they both have a lot writing on it, right, And
Speaker 1: then in some professions it's like, you know, there's money
Speaker 1: connected to it, with grants and all of that. So
Speaker 1: I'm working on helping them begin to see, you know,
Speaker 1: how you give feedback and service of resilience, how you
Speaker 1: create a contract to start with. So like the notion
Speaker 1: that having shared intellectual interest on a particular topic is
Speaker 1: necessary but not sufficient to choose a thesis supervisor, you
Speaker 1: have to have something more. You have to know more
Speaker 1: about each other. I think I think you have agreements
Speaker 1: around boundaries and parameters and expectations. I think sometimes there's
Speaker 1: exploitation where visis supervisor is really using their grad student
Speaker 1: for their own purposes and not so much to cultivate
Speaker 1: the career of the student. And so then how do
Speaker 1: you assertively renegotiate those arrangements? And so I think building
Speaker 1: resilience in the graduate student can go a long way
Speaker 1: to help negotiate boundaries of that relationship so that it
Speaker 1: flourishes instead of it's being dysfunctional. I love that. I
Speaker 1: think that grad student well being is really undervalued, just
Speaker 1: proportionate to the amount of effort we put into undergraduates
Speaker 1: and their well being. I mean, grad students kind of
Speaker 1: get ignored a lot. So all, I love all the
Speaker 1: work you're doing and I just want you to know
Speaker 1: that I support it wholeheartedly and thank you for being
Speaker 1: on the show. To me, thank you so much, Scott,
Speaker 1: it was a pleasure talking with you. Thanks for listening
Speaker 1: to The Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I
Speaker 1: hope you found this episode just as thought for booking
Speaker 1: and interesting as I did. If you'd like to read
Speaker 1: the show notes for this episode or hear past episodes,
Speaker 1: you can visit the Psychology Podcast dot com.