Coaching Positive Attitudes (summit)

When coaching for a positive attitude, it's important to remember that reprimanding someone with a negative attitude doesn't automatically make them positive. Positive attitudes require practice and self-awareness. To encourage a positive attitude, ask self-actualized questions with a success imperative, framing the mind in a positive direction. Additionally, tie the coaching to a learning project that focuses on positive interactions with teammates. Fuel their mind positively by recognizing and praising their good actions, and provide supplemental coaching materials like books. Changing a negative attitude takes time and effort, so focus on praising their efforts and helping them feel good about improving. Now when coaching a positive attitude, keep one major thing in mind. Reprimanding a negative attitude, telling someone to cut it out, or to identify someone with a negative attitude, does not necessarily translate itself or transfer itself into a positive attitude. A positive attitude takes practice. Most people are not going to knock on your door and say, boss, I've got to tell you something, my attitude is terrible, you've got to help me. And it really is at the core of self-awareness. Now deep down, people who are naysayers, the people who say yeah but and interrupt and always put a downer on things, I think deep down those people really know they do it. So what we have to do is two fundamental things. One, ask self-actualized questions. What questions plus a success imperative, such as what are you going to do to successfully engage with your teammates? What are you going to do to successfully influence your teammates with positive feedback? So it's a what question plus a success imperative. What that does is it uses a technique psychologists call framing. And what it does is it gets their minds to move in the right direction. Because remember, their triggers are to immediately be negative. And it really creates two sides of the brain. We talk about the right brain and the left brain. Say I think you have a positive brain and a negative brain. You typically don't have a neutral brain. Nobody goes home and says honey, I had a neutral day. I didn't have a feeling all day long. We typically have good days or quote unquote bad days. The second thing that you can do is tie it to a learning project. Again, a learning project is something that is done between coaching sessions, such as the following example. Tom, next week I want you to come in with two examples of where you really conscientiously and positively invested in your teammates with a set of actions that were designed to engage thoughtfully and professionally. Now, you're not asking them to read books. You're asking them to do something. You're putting a spin, for lack of a better description, on something they're already doing, which is interacting with their teammates. Asking self-actualized questions and then having a learning project that keeps the conversations going around positivity will be absolutely critical. Now, the third component and something that we encourage you to do is to fuel their mind positively. We as coaches have to recognize the good things that they do, to call them into the office for the good things when we observe those things honestly and authentically. The second thing you can do beyond that to fuel their mind is something called supplemental coaching. Get them a book. Get them the Chicken Soup books by Mark Victor Hansen. Have them fuel their own mind positively. And what that does is it creates a teeter-totter. So when coaching positive attitudes, what we're initially doing is giving them the choice and then prompting them to take actions. People with negative attitudes will take longer than people who just have neutral attitudes, who are just, you know, they're not really negative. They're just not overly positive. So keep in mind, if you have someone who's really negative, what you're doing is you're having them develop triggers and conditions in which they react positively, which goes against the grain of what they're used to. This will take time. Remember, people change in three directions, effort, progress, and results. When you first start coaching and they're making an effort and they're doing their learning projects, praise them. Stay away from constructive feedback. Help them feel good about getting better.