One of my great references in leadership and emotional intelligence issues is undoubtedly Professor Richard Boyatzis. I was lucky enough to be his student and also to have had dinner with him and talk about leadership when he visited my city to give a lecture at the ESADE Alumni Lleida Annual Conference (it was a truly unforgettable experience).
Richard’s classes are great. He transmits really complex concepts like no one else and knows how to motivate his students.
I perfectly remember an exercise that he made us do at the beginning of one of his classes. He asked us to remember a very special time in our lives when we had a very good experience with a leader. With inspiring leaders or as Boyatzis says, with resonant leaders. People who have known how to get the best out of us, people who have marked us in some way, people who have been decisive in our lives. Many of the students remembered our father or mother, our grandparents, a friend, our partner … or even a teacher, a boss, or coworker. And many of these moments have had, as a common characteristic, that these people opened new possibilities in our minds. They identified some exciting and truly motivating possibilities. According to Boyatzis studies at Case Western Reserve University, between 80% and 100% of the stories have to do with your “ideal self”, with your aspirations, or with your personal vision. People who trusted you and made you believe in yourself.
And this combination of making you see that you can achieve your dreams or achieve your personal vision with the confidence in your personal strengths to achieve it, is what Boyatzis calls the activation of positive emotional attractors (PEA). And when these positive emotional attractors are activated, our levels of creativity, imagination, curiosity … skyrocket. AND THESE HIGH LEVELS OF MOTIVATION, CONFIDENCE, CREATIVITY … ARE VERY NECESSARY TO SUCCESSFULLY FACE ANY CHANGE PROCESS.
Unfortunately, in our society, most leaders focus more on negative emotional attractors (NEA). Many of the managers, teachers, fathers, and mothers … focus their attention on those aspects that are not going well. They focus on our mistakes, on our weaknesses, thus activating negative emotional attractors. And when these are activated, we have a clear tendency to defense and self-protection. OUR LEVELS OF MOTIVATION, CREATIVITY, AND CONFIDENCE… FALL RADICALLY, MAKING ANY PROCESS OF CHANGE OR IMPROVEMENT SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFICULT.
As human beings, we need both positive and negative emotional attractors.
The negatives help us to activate a certain level of stress and to guarantee our survival. Also, negative emotions are stronger than positive ones and we remember much longer. For this reason, we must reinforce positive emotions. Furthermore, in our society and culture, we have always focused more on the negative than the positive. But if we really want to improve, aspire to new heights in any field, we must bet on positive emotional attractors.
As a father or mother, teacher, manager … I recommend you think about the great value of activating positive emotional attractors if you want your daughter or son, students, workers … to change and improve. FOCUS ON THE POSITIVE WHEN POSSIBLE. And you will quickly see how positive emotional attractors are activated and thereby increase confidence and motivation to achieve change.
Because as Richard Boyatzis himself states: “You need the negative focus to survive, but a positive one to thrive.”
