Photo courtesy of Candie_N Flickr
In the paper “What Good are Positive Emotions?”, Barbara Fredrickson wrote that positive emotions are designed to “broaden and build” our repertoire of thoughts and actions.
When we feel joy, we want to play. When we play, we don’t follow guidelines on how to play. Instead, like children, we explore, imagine and we end up broadening the kinds of things that we are doing. We become willing to fool around and invent new ways of doing things. Through play and feeling joyful, we end up building resources and skills.
The positive emotion of interest expands what we want to investigate. When, we’re interested, we want to get involved, to learn new things and to tackle new experiences. We become more open to new ideas.
Yet, often many workplace trainers treat training like a battle. I’ve seen many induction materials filled with negative language that not only tells new starters that they can’t do this, and they are not allowed to do that, but almost blames the new employee like they have already done the wrong thing.
Avoiding the Learning Sulks
Often, without realising it, negative training materials (and trainers) put trainees off training and they can end up having the learning sulks (where they close up and ignore the training being presented). By incorporating training materials with positive language, trainers can ensure that people are ready to learn.
What can you do to bring more positive emotion into your workplace training, so that people are open to learning?
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This is really intriguing. I’m picturing all the safety trainings that attempt to scare people with horrific pictures of injuries. The negative emotions I feel when I see these photos make me turn off. It would be interesting to see research looking specifically at safety trainings that focus on potential injuries vs safety trainings that focus on safe work practices to see which people remember more.
Thanks for this…!
That’s a really good point and in fact, I was going to write a blog article on that. Using horrific pictures can often backfire. It also produce a similiar result when you punish workers for wrong behaviour (eg:if you don’t hand in your timesheet on time you won’t get paid). According to Chip and Dan Health, in the excellent book Switch there are two basic models of decision making – consequences and identity. Seeing horrific injuries falls under consequences and this can sometimes work, but when it fails, it really fails. With identity, this is getting people to think about a decision in terms of how it effects them through their personal identity. So iit’s getting people to make decisions about about the sort of person they aspire to be and how that person would make the decision. So rather than show negative, awful pictures, it’s best to show positive pictures of what people want to be (ie:safe and happy families).
That is awesome! I happened into Chip and Dan’s strategy accidentally, because I don’t like looking for, or at, gross pictures!
A recent Eye Safety and PPE training started with a few pictures of what people do when they get home… Get in their nice truck and drive home, Sit down and watch some football, play catch with their grandkids. I mentioned that these are all things that are impossible to do after a severe eye injury… and I had everyone’s attention. It’s a strategy I definitely want to keep using, especially if it makes my training more effective.