What drew you to study the Diploma of Positive Psychology and Wellbeing?
“So, I was really interested for my own personal development, but also the development of the organisation.”
So, look, I’d been exposed to Langley Group content before, knew of it. I knew that the company was headed down a direction of wellbeing. I knew that it would be really advantageous for my role, you know, to move forward in my role, but also that I kind of had a feeling that I would be able to implement the content within Schneider, so based upon what I’d read about the course itself.
At that time my role at Schneider was Organisational Development and Talent. My motivation was all professional based. For me the neuroscience part had always appealed to me and understanding human behaviour from a neuroscience perspective. So, I come from a background of human physiology so that was part of my degree in education. Yeah, that sort of stuff always interests me as well.
How was your experience studying this course?
“There were ‘aha’ moments all the time, so everything was immediately applicable.”
As I was going through the whole programme I look back at my notebook now, and everywhere I’d write a little ‘a’ with a circle around it being like an action, like ‘I can action this’, ‘I can implement this’, ‘I can put this into…’ Wouldn’t life be great if this was to be happening in the organisation, so yeah heaps of ‘aha’ moments all across the board. So, yeah, I couldn’t even just mention one, so every day I would see it.
I guess when I first started some of the mindfulness activities didn’t resonate with me but, for example, walking meditation just never did it for me, and still to this day didn’t, so little things, but understand that it’s a smorgasbord and not everything is gonna suit everybody and that’s fine. But in terms of, did I find it challenging, no. No, I didn’t really find anything that challenged.
Was the course what I expected? No. I don’t know what I expected, so I went in there with an open mind, but I certainly didn’t expect the level of engagement or the level of application or the level of resonance that it certainly had with me, so it resonated professionally but also resonated personally.
How are you spreading positive ripples in your world?
“And then basically for my fiftieth I got a photo of a young refugee kid on his bike, with his helmet and his lock.”
So, I guess the main thing is from an organisational perspective that I have actually implemented, you know, a lot of the concepts from the diploma into my work, you know, so we’ve been kind of instrumental in implementing the wellbeing initiatives in the Pacific Zone, you know our Flourish programme is the shining example of our flourishing employees, our flourishing managers programme. Our language has changed, strengths is embedded in the organisation totally. If you talk to our Executive, if you ask them about our culture at Schneider, they will say it’s a strength based positive leadership culture. So, the language is actually really firmly embedded into the organisation as well. So, positive leadership, wellbeing, so neuroscience, emotional intelligence, all of the key foundational pieces that we learnt during the diploma, we have welcomed with open arms in Schneider and really implementing them all over the place in lots of different ways.
So, yeah, it’s interesting! So, yes, we have run programmes, we’ve replicated our programmes and we’ve been shown as Best in Class with our programmes, so we won our internal leadership awards, an award for Leadership Transformation in 2016 in Dubai, so that was an award that we won. You know, we also were basically entered in the RE Awards last year, so we were a finalist in the Australian RE Awards. So, we’ve got some recognition, you know, externally as well, but we see things like Glassdoor changing, you know, as in terms of our EVP. We moved into Randstad’s employer top 10 employer of choice survey last year as well. So, we’re starting to see all those things and so what all that meant was that our international operational arm started to take notice of what we were doing and became interested. People like to tend to see if things are working first before they wanna take it on board. We have run the programme in Dubai and Singapore now for our East Asia crew and so, yeah, we’re getting take up in those areas now and it’s certainly been really well embraced in those spaces. So, it does translate, across cultures, but you know we also have global offers in this space as well, so it’s seeping in and it does translate.
Yeah, look a lot of it has now created its own demand, so the courses that we have implemented have been really popular and resoundingly what we get afterwards is people saying: this has not just helped me be a better manager, or a better work colleague; it’s actually helped me be a better father, mother, partner, you know, uncle, whatever. You know, so it’s actually applicable in life as well, so it’s gained that reputation and now we get people clamouring for the programme, you know. Previously on programmes it would be that, people would be told to go along to some programmes if you like, but now we go through an application process and we’re always at capacity and we always have 100% attendance rate on the programmes, except for once when someone got pregnant and basically had a baby, and so, you know, the father had to rush home.
So, the momentum actually comes from creating its own demand, and people talking internally and the reputation that it’s generated. So, there’s a lot of work that obviously needs to go on behind the scenes, so my momentum is, you know, absolutely all the work to keep the energy levels going, to build the excitement, to build the momentum, to build the experience. So, it’s actually a whole experience as opposed to a training course, is what we’re doing. Plus also then all of the implementation of it through alumni and actually the tools that we, you know, have implemented since, so it actually becomes part of the culture and part of the language, so all of the supportive mechanisms that are in place, not just from the training but from tools, alumnus, language that is being used in the organisation processes, just continually back up and reinforce the programme’s intent to change the culture.
Sure, yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I’ve had endless amounts of joy with some of the things that I’ve learned from the diploma. My favourite positive ripple story I suppose from that, from a personal level, is on the programme about random acts of kindness and the reciprocity and the social capital concept that came out of that. So, a couple of years ago I had my fiftieth birthday party, and you know, I’m 50 I’ve got everything I wanted in my life, I didn’t want any presents you know. So, I had a big party in my back yard, I had a band, you know, it was a costume party and it was a big to-do in the back yard. And I said on the invitation that I didn’t want any presents at all. I don’t want anything, but what I did say to people was that my present is for you to go and do something nice for somebody else, so go and do a random act of kindness for someone else, write down what you did, put it in a card and put it in a box and that’s my birthday present. So, the next day in my drunken hungover stupor, I opened up this big box of cards and started to read all of the stories that people had done, and it was probably the most uplifting experience that I’d had in my life, 150 different stories about how these ripples, what they had done. A classic that I love to use is my friend Shelly, when she got the invitation, she had an old bike in her back shed that she was planning on putting out onto the verge for hard rubbish. So, she decided that she would get the bike actually fixed up and through a contact that she had at a refugee association, that she would give this bike to a recent refugee child. So, she went to the bike shop and she took the bike in and she was explaining to the guy at the bike shop why she was doing it, she was just telling him the story about why she was fixing the bike up, and so the guy in the bike shop said: that’s pretty awesome, I’m gonna fix your bike for free. So, he fixed the bike for free. There was a woman in the shop also who was overhearing Shelly’s story, so she went up to Shelly and said: ‘Look, excuse me, that’s pretty awesome what you’re doing, can I buy a helmet and give as a package’. And then Shelly’s mother heard what she was doing and bought a bike lock. So, basically, the ripple went out to the bike shop guy, the woman in the bike shop.
It was just awesome and now every year for my birthday since, you know, Shelly does a random act of kindness. So, you know, it just goes on. And that was one of the 150 little things that people did, so you know I keep that box really close to me and when I’m feeling a little bit low, I will go through my box and have a look at some of the stories and revisit them and yeah it’s pretty awesome. Personal positive ripple that went out.
Interestingly enough, our facilitator was running a Diploma of Positive Psychology and a couple of years later they got to that topic of random acts of kindness and somebody in the classroom said ‘I heard about this guy who had his fiftieth and he did this thing’, and she said ‘I know him!’ It’s interesting because the guy at the refugee association who received the bike to give to the child, his fiftieth was coming up and so he did exactly the same thing. So, yeah that was pretty cool.
It’s been a profound impact, it’s been really profound. So, it’s changed the direction of my life professionally. It’s changed the direction, not so changing, it’s improved my life personally, you know, I’m able to get really great things out of my life at the moment and appreciate my life so much more. So, yeah, like personally and professionally it’s been an incredible benefit, I would not change it for the world and I’m just incredibly thankful that, you know, I went on that journey and even now, now I’m actually doing some work for Langley Group as well, so it’s kind of, life is different. But if I had to choose one word: profound would be the change, yeah, because I know that, you know, it’s had an impact on me but it’s actually had an impact on lots of other people as well. I still get grumpy every now and then though.
Advice for embedding positive psychology in an organisation
“Take a risk, you know jump into some unknown territory because what you’ll find at the other end is pretty incredible.”
Leverage and strength of persistence, somehow. Keep chipping away. But I was very lucky to have a very supportive Executive Team. For us, it was a bit of I guess serendipity as well, in the fact that at the time of me doing the programme, we had a big strategy day and part of that was soliciting input from people, anyone in the organisation, and it was a shark tank style day where people would pitch ideas, and we pitched positive psychology and the implementation of it, you know, to the shark tank if you like, and we pitched it to the Executives and the response was ‘well, yeah, give it a go, let’s try this out’. So, we pitched the business case, we looked at all of the research and, you know, we got the data as well, you know, so we looked at where it was happening elsewhere in the world, we looked at the research, we looked at the technical information and, you know, it was undeniably our way to go. So, we gave it a go and we moved from strength to strength from that point forward. So, it didn’t take too long for the Executive to actually buy in wholly and solely, once they felt it and experienced it themselves. I guess that was the key turning point is that, positive psychology is not a spectator sport, you know, it’s something that people have to jump into and experience, and once they do realise that it’s a no-brainer really.
So, you know, you can certainly look at stuff that’s worked, but first of all look at your actual organisation and look to where you wanna be first of all. So, imagine the best, the best, imagine if everything was working really well in your organisation, what could it look like? And start to get your mind, you know, in that mindset to say ‘what would it look like if we were the very best in what we do? And then if I were to walk around the office, or my organisation, what would I see people doing?’, and keep that in mind. And, my advice would be then to look at some of the buzzwords like collaboration and innovation and agility and all those words that just tend to be words that we throw around now, and bring it back to the more human side of things and think about what is it that’s gonna enable collaboration? Am I talking about relationships with people? What is it that’s gonna allow innovation? So, how do I create the conditions to enable those things to happen? So, it’s not so much a focus on aiming for ‘let’s be more collaborative, let’s be more innovative’; the focus is more on let’s create the climate and the environment where that can actually just happen as being an output. And so, how can we enable people to actually want to do those things? How do we equip them with all the skills and capabilities and the environment so that they can be those things?
We have to live and breathe it as well, you know, so the advice is that if you’re gonna go down the positive leadership and implementation of positive psych in the workplaces, you’ve got to actually live it and breathe it yourself, and get your managers and leaders to actually role model those behaviours as well, because it can’t be seen as, you know, contradictory if you like, when we’re saying one thing and actually our leaders are doing something different. So, buy-in from the Executive level and the top leadership level with some figureheads is really important and, you know, to do things loudly, to support it loudly, you know, to do their own wellbeing loudly. And believe in it, so yeah absolutely. So, influencing and convincing senior leadership is key absolutely. But also, you know, creating that groundswell and the excitement within the actual population is really important as well, so you can get at it from both directions.
I’ll jump. Just do it. You’ve got nothing to lose really.