Sara Lewis, the Managing Director of Appreciating Change, a psychological change consultancy focused on helping leaders and managers achieve positive change in their organizations was a past podcast guest. Details can be found: Transcription and Podcast: Mastering Positive Change
An excerpt from our discussion:
Joe: It really is a deeper dive from Appreciative Inquiry.
Sarah: Yes, absolutely. Appreciative Inquiry, one of the main principles that it’s built on is this principle of positivity, which essentially says “change takes energy.” And energy that comes from positive emotions is much more sustainable as a support for change than the energy that comes from what you might call negative emotions. Particularly fear is often used in organizations to try to promote change. Fear, anger those sorts of emotions are important. They produce a short burst of energy to change something. Whereas things like hope, optimism, passion, excitement, joy, or interest, these emotions, these positive emotions, create a much more sustainable movement forward for change.
So Appreciative Inquiry has always recognized this importance of positive emotions to help organizations, and as part of organizational life, particularly around change. And the more research that is done into positive emotions through the positive psychology field, the more apparent it becomes what an asset that are, both to us in our own lives, and to organizations.
The huge difference it makes. You may have come across Shawn Achor’s work. He’s done some fantastic broadcasts on TED and so on, who’s really coined it. And said, “You know what we’re realizing now? Is that happiness causes success. Not success causes happiness. That when we’re able to develop more positive emotional states for ourselves as individuals and in our organizations, then we do better.” That is very exciting I think.
Transcription and Podcast: Mastering Positive Change
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