Senior Project Blog Post 5

The main issue the Heath brothers addressed in this week's reading is the "bad is stronger than good" bias.  Previous chapters focused on finding "bright spots" in order to explore "what is working right now and why" and trying to expand on these successes, but in reality we ask this question very infrequently, as we tend to fixate on the negatives.  On a website entitled "Learn English at Home," of the first 24 words to display emotion, only six were positive.  A psychologist later analyzed 558 emotion words (every one he could find in the English language) and found 62% of them were negative.  The most simple example of this is if a child comes home to her parents with a report card with one A's, three B's and one F.  Almost every parent will fixate on this F and try to fix it by either getting her a tutor or punishing her until the grade improves.  Few parents would say, "think about what you do in the classes you get A's in.  How can we build on those strengths?" Parents don't think much about their children's grades if they are A's and B's, but once a C or F pop up, they go berserk.  Our world has a heavy negative orientation.  If every time a light switched on we were ecstatic (instead of getting irritated every time they don't) we would be a much happier people.  The ratio of time spent solving problems to the time spent scaling success is astronomical.  "We need to switch from archaeological problem solving to bright-spot evangelizing" says Heath.  This relates to my project because coaches spend lots of time looking at their team's and player's weaknesses and trying to figure out how to solve them.  In order to fix them, almost every coach has made the team practice it over and over again until it improves by punishing the team whenever it goes wrong (much like a parent to a child with a bad grade).  Instead of this repetition that often leads to the adoption of bad habits, coaches need to look at things the team does right, or one player that really gets a skill the rest of the team struggles with and try to illuminate and expand it.

Senior Project Blog Post 4

This week, the Heath's focus on Bright Spots continued with a variety of new case studies.  They talk about "solutions-focused therapy" which is a technique far removed from traditional methods.  Instead of "archaeology" and digging for clues about why people act the way they do (ie delving into one's childhood), solution's focused therapy aims only to solve the pronlem at hand.  Understanding a problem doesn't necessary solve it.  Change doesn't require a long and arduous process to reverse a habit.  There are a variety of techniques used to find such solutions.  The first of which is the Miracle Question: "Suppose that you went to bed tonnight and sleep well.  Sometime, in the middle of the night, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens and all the troubles that brought you here are resolved.  When you wake up in the morning, what's the first small sign you'd see that would make you think, 'Well, something must have happened -- the problem is gone." The therapist then prods for specifics and forces the person to identify the first hints of the miracle (not overly grand hints such as a million dollars or a new car).  For example, in a Marital session, a wife or husband might say that a first hint could be their spouse listens to them more which would be clear if the other made more eye contact and nodded in the right places, and responded without atacking or ignoring their ideas.  The specific and vivid signs lead to the Exception Question: "When was the last time you saw a little bit of the miracle, even for just a short time." By asking this question the Therapist aims to show the client that they have actually already solved it in at least some circumstances.  For example, if a Mom is having trouble controlling her children, the therapist can help her focus on the times her kids have listened to her and figure out what she was doing during those specific instances in order to replicate them again.  Like analyzing game film of a sporting event they can work through how they were behaving, whether they were smiling, their tone of voice, etc.  If it worked once it can work again.  An alcoholic is able to see that they stayed sober for a couple hours one day because they went to the library to read the newspaper, so maybe if they do it every day they can beat their addiction.  These bright spots provide direction for change and are far more efficient than trying to find the root of the problem.  This relates to my project because there are many bad coaches out there.  Probably hundreds of thousands.  Instead of going to these coaches and trying to figure out why they are bad coaches (perhaps when they were young they had a bad coach who caused them to adopt bad habits), if they adopt my website's tips and player tracking device, they can immediately improve the quality of their player's development without having to do a major overhaul of their coaching style or technique.