Key Resources & Key Partners

1. Key Resources
1. Your Interests
2. Your Abilities and Skills
3. Personality and what you have.
2. Key Partners
1. Those who support you

There are a plethora of tools out their that help us identify our interests, strengths, abilities, and personalities. At first, I thought I might link and post about a variety of them; Meyers-Briggs Type Inventory, Enneagram, Strength Deployment Inventory, coaching sessions, surveys etc.

Amusingly, in my search for useful resources to share, I ended up watching yet another TED talk, by Martin Seligman. He introduces his research into the field of Positive Psychology. I found his talk fascinating, and ended up doing further research into his work, and was amused when his website, was oriented around "happiness."

http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/newsletter.aspx?id=1554

Essentially, Positive Psychology is about using the science of Psychology to help people move forward, to build thriving and fulfilling lives, as opposed to treating deficits. It's a shift from the "disease model" to a generative model for health and well-being.

While perusing through the information around positive psychology, and looking for tools for identifying "Key Resources", I stumbled across a parallel and common theme, one I've tried to embrace for a while.

The more we understand the context of our strengths, we can understand our weaknesses as well, and knowledge of both of these, is power.

Harvard Business Review states, "In cross-training, the combination of two activities produces an improvement—an interaction effect—substantially greater than either one can produce on its own." For me, I've also applied the 80/20 rule and Pareto principle, to my own "strength training". 

In a not so surprising connection, Key Partnerships seemed to apply well within positive psychology as well. Early in the TED talk, Dr. Seligman suggests that social interaction is one of the most important indicators for health and happiness. For me, this is taken within the context, recognizing that we have many social networks. One of the first exercises around identifying Key Partnerships, is drafting a venn diagram/nested circles diagram on the people around us, and how they impact us. 

I think this exercise is particularly useful, just like doing a systems diagram. The more we understand the elements that surround a variable(ourselves), the stronger we can develop our opportunities for improving that system.

On a final note, Dr. Seligman is currently advocating for his concepts to be used in a similar fashion as Gross National Happiness. He argues that the capacity for citizens to fill fulfilled should drive governmental policy.  In an interview(likely paralleling our coursework next quarter- Means and Measures),  he says, the first step towards designing policy that aims to improve people's well being, is designing the appropriate measure, and that perhaps GDP isn't very effective.