27. september 2007 af jesni

By Anders Lindskov (asterisk@dpu.dk)

Lars Ginnerup is a trained psychologist with his own consultancy under the auspicious name of 'The Happiness Clinic'. According to his company homepage, the clinic's offer is aimed at "organisations that want to improve the bottom line, job- and life satisfaction through Positive Psychology." Positive Psychology is the latest trend in self-development. In the 1980s, Danes went on rabbit-killing sprees to further their own development. In the 1990s, the market was dominated by personal development/optimisation, for example in the shape of NLP, Neuro-Linguistic Programming. In the new millennium, coaching is all the rage. And in recent years, Positive Psychology has emerged.

A seminar at the Happiness clinic will usually start with the attendants filling in a questionnaire about their individual psychological capital, which means their psychological strengths. Lars Ginnerup then provides individual coaching, during which he will discuss the individual's personal advantages in relation to his or her job. On his list of clients we find TDC, Rigshospitalet, and Copenhagen Business School, CBS. TDC, for instance, came to him because of widespread dissatisfaction and stress. Lars Ginnerup has his very own approach to stress:

"The traditional approach to stress has been based on a view of stress as a disease. We are too respectful towards stress, which almost feed it by itself."

The challenge for Lars Ginnerup and the Happiness clinic is therefore not the level of stress in the workplaces, but the great expectations that the clients have to him.

The biggest problem for Positive Psychology is that people's expectations have become unrealistically high - it can be difficult to keep the expectations down to a reasonable level. Many seem to think we have a panacea, but we don't claim to be able to make people happy in three hours. What we can do is to increase their psychological capital by 2% and thereby make them slightly happier and more productive," says Lars Ginnerup.

Think about something nice
Why do people have these unrealistic expectations? Maybe because, unlike most self-development philosophies, Positive Psychology has been scientifically shown to actually work. Positive Psychology emerged from academia and is based on years of psychological research. The founder of the movement is the psychologist Martin Seligman, who became the leader of the American Psychologists' Association in 1998. In his inaugural address, he asked the audience why so much research focused on mental disorders, while the question 'How do I become happy' rarely, if ever, cropped up in the research.

Seligman conducted a search through abstracts from psychological research. While there were countless articles about anger, fear and depression, there were very few about joy, happiness and life satisfaction. The ratio turned out to be 51:1 in favour of the disorders. This finding led Seligman to propose a new project for psychology: Positive Psychology. Positive Psychology deals with the personal characteristics that enable us to face and overcome bad fortune and to live meaningful lives.

One piece of advice from Positive Psychology on how to increase your experienced happiness is to write down, on a daily basis, three positive things that have occurred that day. Evidence has shown this to work through the following experiment: A group of test subjects were asked to write down something positive and what had caused it every day for a week. A control group were asked to write down their earliest memories every day for a week. Six months later, the first group was significantly more happy than the second.

The right to complain
The interest in self-development is connected to something called the subjective orientation. In the workplace, subjective orientation is displayed as a gradual change in management style. Rather than exerting an external pressure on the employees, the individual employee organises his or her own time and assignments. Thereby the employee assumes responsibility for his or her own situation at work - and this includes stress, according to Associate Professor at the DPU, Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg, who researches into self-development and work life.

"From having external causes, stress becomes an internal, individual matter. It is the condition of being stressed that must be addressed. The individual must, through various techniques, gain control over his or her stress-symptoms. In Positive Thinking and in self-development literature, workload is conspicuously absent," says Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg.

In that light, self-development becomes a mixed blessing. On the one hand, programs such as coaching, NLP and Positive Psychology provide a list of useful tools that can help the individual, both at work and in one's private life. And who can argue against positive and optimistic thinking? But at the same time all that positive rhetoric makes it difficult for the individual to complain, because complaints can be interpreted as a deviation from positive thinking and a failure to assume responsibility for one's own situation.

"Too much nagging sucks energy out of an organisation, as many managers and consultants have pointed out. But what constitutes nagging? Is every bit of criticism nagging? Is pointing out specific problems also nagging? What effect will Positive Psychology have in an organisation where the employees, based on their experience and analytical capabilities, are convinced that something is genuinely wrong?" Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg asks.

"Many people evidently think this is great, but there are also those who find that there is something wrong, somewhere, something that doesn't jibe with the way they experience the world. They find that it can be enormously difficult to address issues through positive thinking, because people veer off from anything that could lead to conflict in the workplace, because that would be a negative thing - "You really should learn to think positively and optimistically about things." Many find it humiliating and degrading that their experience and interpretation of what goes on is considered invalid," Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg explains.

Yoga and Buddha
New Age is a term Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg often uses for the countless self-development methods. Just like New Age, self-development programs are a mixture of a number of different beliefs and notions all focused on the individual's experience, and used by the individual to compose a unique metaphysics or outlook on life.

"Some of the concepts stem from Buddhism or Hinduism. That would include the notion that wisdom and self-insight can be found by looking 'inwards'. The actual practice, however, is highly Westernized. I am far from certain that Thai monks would even recognize Buddhism as it is practiced in some circles here," says Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg, and continues:

"Many of the self-development methods from New Age have been borrowed by the self-development programs, including meditation, yoga and various therapeutic practices. I have dubbed this 'psycho-religiosity', because modern psychology also plays an important role, often in the shape of humanistic psychology and Maslow's hierarchy of needs. This is a mindset focused on the future, on growth and development, development of the individual."

In Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg's view, stress in the workplace is not a question of being for or against self-development or Positive Psychology, or for or against nagging. She would much rather talk about something as old-fashioned as workload.

"I think it would be prudent to consider whether it is really necessary that people work as hard as they do. In interviews, I have heard about people who have succumbed to stress because they work around the clock. Their work has taken over their lives. Sometimes because of their own ambitions, sometimes because they suddenly have to do two people's work at once. That is reality in the workplaces," says Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg.

About Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg
Associate Professor at the DPU. Stress in public organisations is one of Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg's research interests. Her most recent work was an article titled "The human potential at a stress-time" for a Danish anthology about religion in the workplace. Visit Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg's website

Club Happiness

Kirsten Marie Bovbjerg