One of the main aspects of positive capacities is the possibility of actualizing, enhancing, developing, and utilizing them. Capacities are malleable states, which are the building blocks of life improvement powers, amenable to development and intervention.
In coaching for positive growth, we use resilience techniques to help clients with:
Developing healthier coping mechanisms when faced with stressful situations;
Holding a positive image of themselves and their abilities;
Improving their internal locus of control and emotional management;
Bouncing back after experiencing hard times;
Navigating stressful events with improved self-control.
We use tools to create resilience in practical everyday ways and become mentally tough in the face of adversity, helping you realize the strength to cope, adapt, and even thrive during challenging times and beyond.
Hardships impact the emotional wellbeing of every person, and every person has the potential to recover from hardship and adversity. However, suffering is real, as well as the strength and capacity to cope.
The four critical elements of developing resilience or any other capacity are attention, thoughts, action, and motivation.
Attention: How you direct your attention to positive and negative life events impacts your resilience.
Thoughts: practical interventions to constructively direct thoughts such as benefit finding, appraisal theory, and explanatory style.
Action: promoting effective coping styles; coping effectively with negative and positive life events.
Motivation: creating a valuable starting point for developing more adaptive coping styles.
Grow your positive capacities to accelerate your mental growth
Individual outcomes of enhancing positive capacities:
Grow in joy, achievement, resilience, wellbeing, life satisfaction, health behavior, job satisfaction, and organizational commitment.
Dyadic and group outcomes of enhancing positive capacities:
Pro-social behavior, cooperation, collaboration, better communications, better conversations, caring community, positive relationships, relational satisfaction, belonging, social status, pride, group resilience, and positive citizenship behavior.
Organizational outcomes of enhancing positive capacities:
Effectiveness, efficiency, business results, better leadership, better organizing, and better business.
Wellbeing Pathways to Take
Take a wellbeing measure, draw some insights, anchor it as a reference, decide on a goal, and pick a factor or dimension for practice based on the measure. Then do an exercise, observe, reflect, experiment, practice, observe; note development or not, what are you learning, and what is different now?
What would benefit you most to learn, to know about, focus on, move forward, and deepen as a skill?
Possible scenarios:
Low on positive emotion? >> the broaden and build theory of Fredrickson.
Low on pleasure? >> savoring, else.
Low on feeling achievement? >>set meaningful and high-quality goals, and pursue them.
Low on self-efficacy? >>mine all the strengths from personal history, narrative, and stories of “best self,” use strengths assessments
Social learning: mimic, imitate, follow a model, praise and glory: find a community where you are valued, cohort-group, peer coaching, learning buddy.
To broaden and deepen, e.g., self-efficacy, what do you need to:
Know: know about, know how?
Do: learning cycle, social learning, practice ethical leadership.
Be: EI, identity, self-reg, values, strengths, virtues, practice authentic leadership.
Maxim: Develop habits that support your goals.
Practice being authentic, genuine, and present.
Keep an eye on your motivation, extrinsic-intrinsic axis; what can we do to move it one notch toward intrinsic?
Principle:
congruent, self-concordant goal setting,
commitment,
focus on performance and learning.
Develop social capital, how we relate, through the political and power perspectives.
Develop human capital through leader development and the HR perspective.
Develop cultural capital through symbolic leadership.
Develop organization capital through structural leadership.
Develop psychological capital through the human capability perspective.
Notes on the Classification of Human Psychological Capability
needs –> wants –> goals
goal pursuit –> resources, use of resources, capacities in service of goal pursuit
What is capacity?
The maximum extent to which an individual is able
(a) to receive and retain information such as in mental or intellectual capacity, or
(b) to perform and withstand tasks such as in physical capacity
The potential to accomplish a particular physical, intellectual, or creative task
Synonym: throughput
ability to hold, receive, absorb; the measure of such ability: volume; the maximum amount that can be held; capability, the ability to perform some task; the maximum that can be produced; mental ability, the power to learn; a faculty, the potential for growth and development; a role, the position in which one functions; legal authority; electrical capacitance; operations, the maximum that can be produced on a machine or in a facility or group
ability
level of aptitude one is either born with or is trained to perform
aptitude
natural capacity to acquire competence or skill through training
– specific aptitude refers to potential in a particular area, e.g., artistic or mathematical aptitude
– general aptitude refers to potential in several fields
– a person with an aptitude for mathematics is able to learn mathematical skills with relative ease
potential
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- ability to cultivate or come into existence
- technical definition in physics
capability
the sum total of both ability and capacity in a human being
– a person possesses qualities such as ability and talent as well as the skill
– a child with musical capability has the ability to learn music and the capacity to utilize this knowledge in a skillful playing of instruments
– combining skill and knowledge, a capability is a characteristic that is of functional and constructive use
strength
the quality or degree of being strong; the intensity of a force or power; potency; the strongest part of something on which confidence or reliance is based; a positive attribute.
Synonyms: fortitude, power, ability, capability, potency, expertise, capacity
Dimensions of Personhood
character strengths, virtues
values
talents
self-image, self-concept –> identity
Resources: self, interpersonal, social, environmental
self: subjective self, personal self, social self
subjective self: temperamental, affective-motivational, cognitive –> cognitive style?
personal self: skills: cognitive, motor; talents; capabilities; capacities
the social self: charisma, attractiveness, status, name, nobility, professional self, contribution, authority, modeling of desirables, competence