How Well do you Generate Positive Emotions in Others?

Jo Bishop Reviews Challenge 2 and Launches Challenge 3

Reviewing Challenge 2: link evidence of efficacy and efficiency to pride in achievements (#prideinachievements):

This pushed me to really look for the specifics of how other people made a difference to me. I found it harder with the fam and friends. It made me question how many people I may take for granted.

Two examples of this I shared; My husband’s joyous orderliness that helps me to find things. Our super-efficient dog sitter who responds instantly to desperate eleventh hour canine crises. The doing of this, the sharing of this information has had a positive impact on both sides, and for me was well worth the effort.

Launching Challenge 3: telling stories in an authentic and inspiring way

Challenge 3: We ask you to tell stories in an inspiring and authentic way

Tweet @iOpenerIPP with your experiences and don’t forget to #inspiringstories 

How is this different from Challenge 2? 

This challenge is different again, the first two are about noticing and sharing. Actually, this is also about noticing and sharing. It’s just that the delivery is different, and what you notice might not be shared directly.

When we work with leaders on this topic we usually begin by exploring what inspires them. What they say backs up what we know, we want to know that the other person is real, human, like us. Authenticity and similarity play a huge part in engaging storytelling.

The best stories inspire elevation*. Jess Pryce Jones, iOpener Chair, says elevation is best described as the emotions we feel when other people do good, skillful, or admirable things which we emotionally resonate with. That resonance inspires us to think we can do better ourselves. It’s also important to connect. We don’t want to be so removed from anyone we can’t think we share anything in common.

Feeling that we share a similar identity is key to engagement and inspiration…

Why stories:

Stories can inspire in a way that a spreadsheet can’t because they:

• connect on a human level
• capture and hold attention by using this ancient art which has not changed in thousands of years!
• travel in a social network
• change the hearts and minds of those around us

Perhaps one of the most famous business stories of recent times was delivered by Steve Jobs at Princeton University. How to live before you die. If you are one of the few who hasn’t seen it, check it out here.

How to begin with telling stories:

Watch as many as you can from TED and The Moth to give you a flavour of what type of stories move and resonate with you.

Look out for others that do this well. And then think about:

• what big message do you need to share in your organisation?
• what small things have you noticed other people do that illustrates these messages working well?
• how can you share something of yourself in the story? Some vulnerability that others might relate to?
• make sure the story has a beginning, middle and end, and pay attention to the small stuff. The sights, sounds and smells encountered in this story.

“If I want to say she’s annoyed with me, I’m not going to say she’s annoyed with me. I’m going to say she tapped her foot” Writer of the TV show ‘The Streets’ Let me know how you get on!

*Elevation was first really identified by Jonathan Haidt and written about only in 2000 (Haidt, J. (2000). The positive emotion of elevation. Prevention and Treatment, 3, most recently Vianello, M., Galliani, E. M., & Haidt, J. (2010). Elevation at work: The organizational effects of leaders’ moral excellence. Journal of Positive Psychology, 5, 390-411.

**http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/07/13/1008662107.full.pdf+html