Reaction to Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking, Oliver Burkeman

This video clarified for me the topic of Polarity Management or at least the overarching principle of Polarity Management. In WFED 572 we read a bit about polarity management and watched a couple of videos on it. In one video, and in the article we were assigned, polarity management was described as breathing. You can only inhale for so long before you go from thinking “how great was that breath?” To wanting to exhale because to hold your breath becomes more and more difficult the longer you do it. So then you exhale and at the begging, you feel a great sense of relief and think about how great it is to exhale when the next thing you know, you don’t want to exhale any further, and the thought of exhaling further becomes uncomfortable as your lungs screen to be filled with new breath. 

I read the explanation, I acted out the explanation and I kind of understood – you can’t take a breath without the process of inhaling and exhaling. And one end of the spectrum is no better than the other end, in fact, to linger at either end for too long causes great discomfort and in extreme cases death.

So, what does all of this have to do with Oliver Burkeman’s video? It explained to me the importance of understanding the entire range of the spectrum. It became clear to me the importance of polarities when he shared the story of the airline pilot who was questioned about his tweezers after 9/11. The security guard said that they posed a threat to the safe arrival of the plane to its destination – in other words, the tweezers could be used as a deadly weapon while onboard the flight. The pilot replied, “Why are you worried about my tweezers when I could just crash the plane to the ground?” 

The pilot was arrested and jailed for a night, and spent six months fighting in court to be able to fly again. What started as a safety check morphed into extremes – suddenly tweezers were deadly weapons, then we realized that the safety of flight is squarely in the hand’s of the pilots, and although they are looking for deadly weapons, no one thought that the weapon could be the pilot (although that’s what happened to cause this whole tweezers as weapon thing). So, the only other thing that could be done to keep air travel safe is to ground all planes.

There are extremes – life/death- inhale/exhale – fly/grounded. Optimism/ Pessimism – you can’t have one without the other. If you take these dualities away, you’re stuck in one extreme – like when you’re the only one who wants to play on the seesaw, sitting at the bottom waiting for the counterweight to take you up again. (They now actually build seesaws that cushion the landing and provide a counterbalance for when one kid decides to jump off and leave the other one to crash, very softly and safely to the ground). (side note, in the US seesaws, are being eliminated – In 2000, 55 percent of playgrounds around the nation had a seesaw, according to the National Program for Playground Safety, which makes estimates based on visits to about 3,000 parks. By 2004, that number was 11 percent. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/11/nyregion/the-downward-slide-of-the-seesaw.html) – but this may be a post for another day.)

As we’ve progressed in this course, I’ve been thinking about how great AI is – to NOT have to talk about the negative and focus only on the positive is in my wheelhouse – but this video reminded me that the positive is positive through context. When I lived in the Caribbean, we rarely talked about the weather – it was hot and sunny, or a bit hotter and a bit sunnier. Now I live in Boston where every conversation mentions the weather – “why is it so hot in Feb.? Did you see the snow in Oct.? Yesterday it was raining sideways, today it’s sunny and clear” We need the varying weather patterns to give us something to talk about, to be in awe with. Sunny every day is borning. Happy all the time doesn’t feel right.

Positivity is all in the eye of the beholder, and what is positive for one person may not be positive for another. 

I was talking to a friend the other day about the day his mother died. He told me that he was crushed, that he felt a sudden void, but his sister? She felt relief. 

“She, either the mother or the sister, must be an awful person” is what went through my head. But then Mark told me that their mother had suffered from Alzheimer’s for a number of years and had lost all of her short term memory. She could remember all sorts of things from when she was young, but nothing of recent years. A year before her death, she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Due to the effects of Alzheimer’s, for the last year of her life, she discovered each and every day that she had pancreatic cancer. “It was Groundhog Day every day,” Mark said.

Was her death a blessing? 

I appreciated this video very much and all of the ways in which I saw parallels between what we’re learning in AI, and my other course.

References:

Polarity Management, Lynnea Brinkerhoff

Polarity Management a Summary Introduction, Barry Johnson Ph.D., 1998

Happiness for people who can’t stand positive thinking, Oliver Burkeman

Trevor Albert and Harold Ramis (Producers) Harold Ramis (Director). (1983)  Groundhog Day United States of America, Columbia Pictures

I’ve been asked to lead our next team retreat in December. A few weeks preceding the retreat, we’ll participate in the Clifton Strengths and have a strengths coach come in and discuss our results. This, I hope, will provide us with a foundation of terms that we can use to reference as we begin to share during our AI retreat.

This will be the first time that I’ll facilitate a retreat… of any kind. I’m excited and nervous. I’ve been thinking a lot about it over the past week and have been concerned as to how I will move the conversation from the discover and dream phase all the way through to the design and destiny phase. As I think through what could happen, I keep getting stuck on the great stories we’ll have to share about past successes, the way in which our team will grow closer as we let down our guard and allow ourselves to be open and vulnerable to our dreams and aspirations. But, I keep coming back to a few fears – the first is how will I know when the time is right, to make the transition from discovery to design? And then if I can successfully do that, how the heck am I suppose to get us to embark on the destiny phase?

This video on generativity has come at precisely the right time! Don’t get me wrong. I had to read the transcript twice and I viewed the video three times before I could get a grasp on what generativity means. I did three Google searches on the word and still came up unclear. It wasn’t until I went back to the transcript again and saw in the opening paragraphs what Ron Fry said that made me understand a bit more clearly. He said, “no one really comes to those interventions, or to those sessions, or to that process coming in the room saying, I can’t wait to get more work. I can’t wait to get on a new task force.” 

This sentence flew over my head again and again, and yet, it is one of the main reasons I’m fearful that my first AI practice will be a failure…. Because people do. Not. Have. Time. To. Implement. New. Things. When they’re already busy.

And yet, that is exactly what I hope happens after the retreat. It is exactly what will make it effective. It is what makes the destiny phase happen. I hope is that at least one great idea percolates to the top of the rest. An idea that each of us can grab onto and use as a driver to take us to the next stop. An idea with which each person can bring his or her own perspective, curiosity, hope, and ideas for action can be implemented as a team. It’s an idea that we will be able to run with as it propels us towards our goal.

So, what does this video say? It tells me that I will know if the AI retreat has been successful if people are ready to take on additional work. If there is excitement and activity driven by the idea, I will know that it has been successful. If I see that people (myself included) are excited to add another item in their list of things to do, then the day will have been a success It tells us the key to a successful Appreciative Inquiry. The key is that success comes from finding that idea that will emerge and become our driver.

Yes, I want people to have fun. Yes, I want our team to get to know each other better. Yes, I want our team to appreciate each other and the strengths that we bring as individuals to the team. But the success of the inquiry will be determined by what we accomplish as a team after the inquiry. Success will be measured by how well we were able to stay motivated and focussed on driving towards our new goal, how well we implemented the new idea. The success will be determined by what we do when we return to our desks and our place of habit. How will the idea transform our workload? How will the idea make its way into our habits? How will we balance our other priorities with the priorities of the idea? 

Success will be measured in three months, six months, and a year when we can look back on our December 2019 retreat and say this is what happened, this is how we changed, this is the impact we had and it all came about from this idea….

Ron Fry and Gervase Bushe video (watch from minute 12:12 to 32:25)

After the video, I googled Treetop Academy to see if it’s still around and if they’re still practicing positive learning – they are. Then I looked to see what the academic calendar is like and if it would make sense to send my daughter there. I love their mission, and I thoroughly enjoyed watching the students make their way through the year. I was sad when Kathy Ann left, although I could see how much she was struggling. She mentioned race when she left, and I wondered what would have happened if she was not the only aboriginal student there- would it have made a difference? 

I was surprised by the quality and depth of conversations the teachers had with the students and how incredibly honest they were. When the kids were being jerks, they didn’t just say “cut it out” and move on, they stopped, said “cut it out, do you know why….” and turned it into a teaching moment. When they had the morning discussions about how people were being more positive, the 

What struck me the most was the marathon and that everyone, staff or student, was expected to run it at the end of the year. It’s far! They ran each day and did so much hiking, that although I’m sure they were physically fit enough to do it, it also takes mental toughness and preparation to do it. The route they ran was also challenging, from trail running to dirt roads- there’s a lot of physical agility that is required. What touched me when they were running was the number of shots of students holding hands while running- going down a hill, splashing through a puddle – not just at the end as they crossed the line, but throughout. Without being there, I wonder what triggered it- was it the need to show support to their friends? Was it the bond that had grown over the course of the year? I just can’t imagine holding hands with someone and running, and yet the image seemed to come across often.

Of course, as they were finishing the race I felt the largest smile cross my face. Their finish was symbolic of not just finishing the race, but of the hurdles, they faced and overcame through the year. I was especially touched at the way they cheered for each other as they crossed the line. From cheers to sweaty hugs – there was true excitement for their peers. How wonderful that they had the chance to bask in their great feat with the friends at their sides – their friends who had also just gone through what they went through.

But more than anything else the marathon was the epitome of resilience because although they had their friends out there on the course with them there are many mental hurdles one goes through when running for 3 or 4 or 5 plus hours. The mental battles that can ensue when you feel like you’re just not getting any closer to the finish, or that the blisters are about to bite off your feet- whatever it is – it’s that small nagging voice that likes to pop up and tell you that it’s ok to quit.

I would love to know what happened to the students they followed to see how they did in school the following years, how the relationships with their parents changed, what kind of life choices they made. I’d also like to see what happened to Kathy Ann when she returned to her family and if anything changed for her…. Did she ever become the nurse she wanted to be so badly when her story at Treetop Academy began?

Reference

Accentuate the Positive: Using Positive Psychology in the Classroom video