Well-being at work

Social networks have become so prevalent in modern life that people have started to speculate about whether they will soon make face-to-face interactions obsolete. Here is the word from science on this assertion: hogwash. Humans thrive on being together and a great deal of research indicates that we communicate best when we are with each other, face-to-face or side-to-side or simply over a nice cuppa coffee.  (Jonah Leher reviews a bit of this research.)

It’s interesting to note that people made the same outlandish claims when telephones first became popular. A bunch of Chicken Little’s were running around back then claiming that, with the phone, no one would ever need or want to meet in person. We all know those concerns were overstated. Sure, the phone can be used to avoid interactions with people and it can be used for down-right nefarious purposes. But the phone can also be life-enriching, such as when it lets us speak with loved ones who live far away.

This does not mean that Facebook has no value, nor should it be misconstrued as suggesting Facebook is totally benign. Facebook, like the phone, has its light and dark sides. When used prudently, it can be useful and even life-enriching.

We also know that face-to-face interactions have their light and dark sides. When we are with someone we can care for them, support them, encourage them, create with them, play with them, pray with them, and much more.There are lots of great things we can do face-to-face. But we can also be horrid to each other in face-to-face interactions (read here about recent research on the corrosive effects of bad co-workers).

There are a few insights to take from all of this research. (1) We need to be with people. Caring for, loving, supporting, playing and many more of life’s richest activities happen in the presence of other people. (2) We communicate best face-to-face, a good reminder that being together is a precious moment. (3) All forms of communication can be used for good or evil: it’s all in how we chose to use them.

We hope you are flourishing in ministry

Matt Bloom and the FiM team

When my sons were in their formative years, I often worried about their sense of self-esteem. I wanted them to see themselves as people of value and worth. I wanted them to think well of themselves. Part of my concern grew out of parental love and my desire to see my sons thrive. Part of it also grew out of my understanding of research on self-esteem. I thought that studies had shown that, in general, high self-esteem was related to a variety of positive outcomes such as higher academic performance, greater ability to withstand negative peer pressure, and high levels of well-being.

At the same time, I did not want my sons to have such high self-esteem that they tipped into arrogance or narcissism. That is, while I wanted them to think well of themselves,  I also wanted them to think well of others. I thought that research suggested that self-esteem has a “Goldilocks” point and that the best kind of self-esteem was not too much and not too little.

I was right, but only partly so. To be sure, there is such a thing as too little or too much self-esteem. A good-sized portion is a very good thing indeed. It is equally good to see others as persons of worth and value. However, there is such a thing as too much. A super-sized portion of self-esteem can cause us to ignore  wise admonitions, engage in risky & detrimental behavior, and to undervalue other people.

In addition, the pursuit of self-esteem can often, as Jennifer Crocker and Lora Park emphasize, be very costly. Pursuing a sense of self-validation in the eyes of others is a natural human tendency, but too often we spend too much in that pursuit. Professors Crocker and Park note that:

When people have the goal of validating their worth, they may feel particularly challenged to succeed, yet react to threats or potential threats in ways that are destructive or self-destructive. They interpret events and feedback in terms of what they mean about the self; they view learning as a means to performance outcomes, instead of viewing success and failure as a means to learning; they challenge negative information about the self; they are preoccupied with themselves at the expense of others; and when success is uncertain, they feel anxious and do things that decrease the probability of success but create excuses for failure, such as self-handicapping or procrastination.The pursuit of self-esteem, when it is successful, has emotional and motivational benefits, but it also has both short- and long-term costs, diverting people from fulfilling their fundamental human needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy, and leading to poor self-regulation and poor mental and physical health…We argue that in the pursuit of self-esteem, people often create the opposite of what they need to thrive and that this pursuit has high costs to others as well. People pursue self-esteem through different avenues, and some of these have higher costs than others, but we argue that even “healthier” ways of pursuing self-esteem have costs, and it is possible to achieve their benefits through other sources of motivation.

Their research suggests that we need to be very careful about whose opinions matter and also very careful about when, where and how we seek self-validation. We should value the opinions of those who love and care about us. These people act out of beneficence, seeking to help us grow, develop, and become better, more capable people. However, our tendency is to seek validation from too many people and we can become something like weathervanes, pushed by the winds of social pressures.

I also found it interesting that, in addition to strength, self-esteem has another dimension: stability. The right kind of self-esteem seems to be moderately strong and moderately stable. We need enough strength to see ourselves and others as precious and valuable. We need enough stability to be able to push forward in the face of  “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,”  but not so much that we cannot change and grow into better people.

Interestingly, it appears that narcissists may have high, but fragile self-esteem (see research by Kernis, Lakey, and Heppner). Narcissists think highly of themselves, but they must have those self-views regularly validated. They seem to need a constant source of external validation that their self-views are correct. As such, they spend a great deal of time trying to get others to tell them that they are right — “you are great!” This makes me feel a bit more sympathetic to their plight: it must be exhausting work. Of course, I wouldn’t know from personal experience…

Wishing you Goldilocks self-esteem and much  flourishing in life

~matt

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Jennifer Crocker and Lora E. Park. 2004. The Costly Pursuit of Self-Esteem. Psychological Bulletin, 130: 392–414

Kernis, M H., Lakey, C. E., & Heppner, W. L. 2008. Secure Versus Fragile High Self-Esteem as a Predictor of Verbal Defensiveness: Converging Findings Across Three Different Markers. Journal of Personality 76: 477-512

When students talk about finding a great job they often use the adage of “finding their bliss.” The basic idea, which is very appealing, goes back to an older adage attributed to Confucius that if you find work you love you will never work a day in your life. The trouble with these adages is that they are only half true. To really be able to perform a job, you need the right knowledge, skills, and abilities. It’s hard to hold a job you love if you can’t perform it well.

Here is an example. I love baseball. I know, some of you hate it, but rest assured that hard science has proven that baseball is wonderful. (OK, that part about science is balderdash).  I would love to play professional baseball — that would be at least one bliss for me. Trouble is, I have no talent for baseball. I can’t hit well, throwing across the infield with accuracy is a distant dream, and I run the bases like a whirling dervish: arms and legs flailing but going nowhere fast. My deep and profound affinity for baseball simply cannot overcome the total lack of talent.

So, what’s love got to do with it? (There’s the link to Tina Turner). Well, some things we can do well we don’t particularly enjoy. For example, I have a talent for math, and with a lot of graduate courses in math, I honed it into a skill. But I don’t like math very much, so while I can do it well, it is certainly not my bliss. My youngest son has both a talent for and love of math. Talent + bliss is a potent combination.

I think that some, maybe many, people take a job that  uses their bliss-less talents. They are likely to perform their bliss-less job well, but they are very unlikely to find the job intrinsically rewarding. Instead, they will probably wonder why they don’t love something they can perform so well and this may lead to further frustrations that they will never find their bliss.

So, love has something to do with finding the right job, but so does natural ability (as long as that ability is honed and developed into a useful skill.) For my youngest son, his love of math has a lot to do with finding the right job. For me, math is a wonderful skill to have, it is one I use often as a researcher, but I am much better off studying human well-being than abstract mathematics.

The challenge  is to gently lead people to consider whether they have the talent to pursue their bliss. When we love something so much, we can easily deceive ourselves that we really do have the right knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform well.

The lesson: At least part of the recipe for finding the right job is one that you love and one that you can perform well.

We hope you find a talent-filled bliss

~matt

Because of my research on human happiness I am often asked what I think about the book The Secret. The short answer is that I think it is potentially dangerous. The book wraps a lot of misinformation and distortion around a few kernels of truth. Like most propaganda, it plays on peoples’ hopes and fears to draw them into its web of deceit. I want to take on some of these distortions and, at the same time, try to highlight and recast the small bits of truth.

A recent research study suggests that visualizing ourselves achieving valued goals or enjoying coveted successes may actually work against us ever obtaining those hoped-for outcomes. The researchers found that people who engaged in this positive self-imagining had less energy and devoted less effort toward those goals. Heather Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen found that positive fantasies seem to induce responses that would normally accompany achievement, responses like reducing energy and relaxing, rather than motivating the energy and persistence that are necessary for real achievement.

Setting stretch goals, on the other hand, can be very motivating. The key is to visualize why the goal really matters to you, what you need to do to achieve the goal, and how you can how you can mark progress toward it. This kind of positive visualization can have powerful motivating properties which can create lots of energy that actually help you do the work of striving toward the goal.

There are aspects of positive self-imagining that can be helpful. A group of fantastic researchers at the University of Michigan describe how a method they call the “reflected best self” can help us gain important insights about ourselves and then put those insights to good use (Roberts et al, 2005). Ken Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky support those claims with good science. It’s not magic, but used correctly, the reflected-best self can lead to significant growth and help us achieve important goals.

Kappes, H., and Oettingen, G. (2011). Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47 (4), 719-729

Roberts, L. M., Dutton, J. E., Spreitzer, G. M., Heaphy, E. D., & Quinn, R. E. 2004. Composing the reflected best-self portrait: Building pathways for becoming extraordinary in work organizations. Academy of Management Review, 4, 712-736.

Sheldon K. M.and Lyubomirsky, S. (2006) How to increase and sustain positive emotion: The effects of expressing gratitude and visualizing best possible selves. [Special Issue: Positive Emotions], The Journal of Positive Psychology , 1, 73–82

Self-forgiveness might sound like new-age hocus pocus, but research is showing that it is real, and that it matters. A recent study found that students who forgave themselves after an initial bout of procrastination were less likely to repeat their avoidant behavior. Those students who did not study for a first test, but forgave themselves, were more likely to study for the next exam.

It’s probably easy to see some of the implications of this research. Those of us who are hard on ourselves might be self-handicapping. While it is good to have high expectations for ourselves [more on the Galatea effect soon], we also need to be careful about being too hard on ourselves when we do not perform up to those expectations. Doing so might be self-defeating behavior.

Of course, there is always a middle ground here. We don’t want to accommodate or excuse negative behavior, but self-forgiveness seems to involve recognizing what we did wrong, identifying how we can do better, and then stopping ourselves from ruminating on our conduct too long. We need to get it, then get over it!

Wishing you much happiness

~matt

Research citation: Wohl, M., Pychyl, T., & Bennett, S. (2010). I forgive myself, now I can study: How self-forgiveness for procrastinating can reduce future procrastination. Personality and Individual Differences, 48 (7), 803-808

Physicians, like many people in the caring professions, regularly face people who are in the midst of pain and crisis. One of the challenges they face is how to deal effectively with this exposure. Conventional wisdom suggests that, if it affects us too much, we lose objectivity and we risk burnout. But become too calloused and we cannot be effective caregivers.

A recent study found that physicians who effectively regulated their emotional responses to patients’ pain were able to “dampen counterproductive feelings of alarm and fear [which] frees up processing capacity to be of assistance for the other.” In other words, these physicians were able to provide better care.

However, the researchers also warned that the constant need to suppress their natural emotional response was stressful for physicians. They also caution that such suppression might also strain their relationships with their patients. “Physicians face the challenge of devoting the right balance of cognitive and emotional resources to their patients’ pain experience..They must try to resonate and understand the patient without becoming emotionally over-involved in a way that can preclude effective medical management.”

Turns out there really is a razor’s edge here or what I sometimes call a Goldilock’s paradox. Care givers do need to ward off responding with emotions that are too strong, but they must also maintain vital human connections as well. This is clearly difficult to do and it is one more reason that at the Well-being at Work project we admire care professionals so much.

We hope you are thriving at work.

~matt

Study details: Decety J, Yang CY, & Cheng Y (2010). Physicians down-regulate their pain empathy response: an event-related brain potential study. NeuroImage, 50 (4), 1676-82