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.