Enhancing Psychological Capacities: A Focused Intervention in 60 Minutes or Less.
Resource link: Workbook: Enhancing Capacities: Session 2
A word on capacities and capacity development.
Capacities are states, meaning they don’t stay the same over time.
The defining characteristic of sentient beings is their goal-directed behavior.
Coaching as an engagement is facilitated in the context of a client goal pursuit, the typical components of which comprise goal design, pathway generation, identifying obstacles and overcomings, and triumphing over obstacles in active goal pursuit.
There are a hundred methodologies for individuals, small groups, and large groups; they are well-established, practiced, and documented in the literature on facilitation, scenario planning, and future search. The capacity development intervention presented is an intuitive process you implicitly and daily engage in a dozen times.
Developing Hope Through Focused Intervention.
With Snyder’s Hope theory, today, we use a group intervention to develop hope. The group session presented here can easily be applied to individual coaching sessions.
Goals.
Identify a personally valuable goal and write it down.
There is an ideal design for such goals, a structure to empower goal pursuit.
Make sure your goal has a concrete endpoint by which we can measure goal attainment and success.
Frame it in positive terms as an approach goal so that you work toward goal accomplishment. Such a pull goal pulls you forward or up through desire, inducing positive emotions, thoughts, and expectations.
In contrast, non-positive or negative goal formulation results in an avoidance goal where you work to move away from or against something to accomplish the goal. An avoidance or push goal pushes you forward or up through aversion, inducing negative emotions and thoughts.
Identify milestones, steps, and sub-goals to attain as you progress toward goal accomplishment. Make them celebration points; plan for celebrating these wins.
Pathways.
Generate multiple pathways to your personal goal. Brainstorm alternatives, regardless of the practicality of implementation.
In the group setting, let us hear your goal and let the other group members voice their ideas of pathways to your goal. We will take turns for each group member and contribute to their pathway alternatives.
Now, each member has many potential pathways generated. Make an inventory of routes to your goal. Consider the resources required to pursue each course. Discard unrealistic paths and identify a smaller number of realistic ones.
Obstacles.
In this step, you build goal-setting processes and anticipatory abilities. Anticipate obstacles, plan for blocks, and prepare to triumph over obstacles.
What can stop you from accomplishing your goal? Take a few minutes for self-reflection.
Returning to the group setting, let us hear alternative perspectives on potential obstacles and strategies to overcome them. State your goal, potential pathways, your perspective on obstacles and strategies to overcome these, and invite alternative perspectives from others.
Now that you have identified obstacles, you can choose an alternate pathway to avoid pathway blockage.
Agency.
Throughout this process, you have utilized your judgment and decision-making capabilities; you are the owner of the whole process and the outcome, and you are the agent. You have defined a personally valuable, meaningful goal; you are prepared for obstacles and ready to implement multiple pathways as contingency plans. You also have experienced goal setting, pathways generation, and identifying and overcoming obstacles, a complete process you can use in your workplace and your life.
Developing Optimism Through Focused Intervention.
The intervention for developing hope, the goals, pathways, and obstacles exercise benefits participants’ expectations and explanatory style, increasing optimism. Participants engage in forecasting bad events by anticipating potential obstacles and then creating alternative pathways to minimize their impact. A reasonably expected effect is a decrease in negative self-talk and an increase in positive self-talk, contributing to a more positive attributional explanatory style and positive outcome expectations. Preparing for obstacles, anticipating worst-case scenarios, and putting in proactive measures to monitor, evaluate, and take appropriate action, all these intervention aspects develop optimistic expectations.
Developing Self-efficacy Through Focused Intervention.
Bringing the four sources of efficacy into the goals exercise has a combined effect by integrating the powers of developing hope, efficacy, and optimism.
As an initiating factor, positive emotion is the ground on which capacities, and by extension, the person, flourish and thrive by broadening and building our ideation and action repertoires.
Bringing our past successes into the present exercise is a booster to task mastery, making our real success a solid ground to stand on, take notice of, feel the good we already created, and crystalize the memory of our available powers.
In the same framework, group sharing, brainstorming, voicing alternatives and perspectives on obstacles and overcoming obstacles are a variant of modeling or vicarious learning, social persuasion, and positive feedback. The overall process evokes physiological arousal and psychological empowerment, positively feeding the broaden and build cycle.
In addition to the described aspect, when you identify goals, generate pathways, inventory resources required for goal accomplishment, and identify sub-goals as milestones or mini-goals to goal accomplishment, you have created an imaginal, successful experience. This is precisely the purpose of your human brain, to let you live in your fantasies as if they are your reality. You can visualize accomplishing each step toward your goal and gain an imaginal task mastery experience. Further, the group process enhances efficacy as each participant models success which becomes a vicarious learning experience for all others.
Developing Resilience Through Focused Intervention.
With Masten, resilience is viewed as an effect of asset factors, risk factors, and influence processes all along the dimensions of the subjective, personal, interpersonal, social, and environmental.
Furthermore, it is assumed that resilience factors can be managed, developed, and accelerated in later stages of adult life, even though they are typically acquired early at a young age and predominantly stable over the life course.
Effective development strategies are based on enhancing assets, proactively avoiding risky, potentially adverse events, and reframing the individual’s perception of their power of influence on life events through cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes.
The reframing influence process is primarily in the subjective domain.
Here we go; identify a recent personal setback within your work domain, whether major or minor. Then, write your immediate reactions to the identified setback.
With a calm, centered, and open stance to the actuals of the setback situation, how else could one frame the happenings in a workable way?
Asses the real impact of your setback individually and in the group: what is in your control, what is out of your control, and what are the options for taking action?
The subjective, cognitive process of reframing setbacks regarding impact, control, and options is worth practicing. This affects your perception of influence; practice these on personally relevant setbacks at work and in life to reinforce the cognitive process you have learned. Practice anticipating and addressing setbacks associated with the personal goals set in the hope-building exercise. Practice with other events inside or outside of work. Practice, and you will become better at accurately framing personal setbacks regarding actual impact, control, and options. You will become more apt to bounce back quickly from a setback. You may even bounce forward to new performance levels and attain levels above where you started.