Written by: Florence Dambricourt, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
If this is the first article of mine that you’re reading, thank you! My name is Florence Dambricourt. I’m an author, coach, and public speaker, focusing on helping people build clarity on who they want to be, and with it how they can have a fulfilling story, by helping them increasing their self-leadership. And I am delighted to spend a moment with you with this article.
It was a Tuesday morning – but it could have been any other mornings – and Ash* was moaning about life again and again, when something caught my ears. “It’s like spinning through vicious circles,” Ash insisted, “On and on and on, I repeat the same damn patterns.” I pause, excited. We – coaches – have a trigger for patterns, and a knack for disturbing them. “Let’s pause there, Ash. Have you taken a moment to extract some positive learnings from this situation?” Ash looked at me, in truth stared at me, “positive what? You’re kidding me, right? This situation sucks like Hell.”
It was right. And here we were, at that really interesting point.
Life sucks at time. Situations can be really tricky, unfair, painful, etc. Still, the only way to get out of them, avoiding the creation of vicious circles, is to extract some positive learnings, and at times positive intentions.
What do we call a positive learning?
When we reflect on our experiences, we are likely to make two types of learning, either a positive or a negative one.
A negative learning is something like “I don’t want to do that any longer”. It is phrased with a negative sentence, or a negative verb, and has the advantage to set boundaries and limits. However, it tells you nothing about new skills you may need to develop to ensure you can respect this boundary, and it does not provide information on new behaviours you could adopt.
A positive learning is something like “I am setting limits now”. A positive intention would be something like, “From now on, I am saying what I think.” Both are phrased with an affirmative sentence, or an affirmative verb. They are written in the present tense, and include “I” as the subject. In fact, they often start with I.
To remember their structure easily, I use the acronym API – A, affirmative – P, present tense – I, I as subject. What they are doing different? They provide information on new skills or behaviours to adopt.
What makes them so important?
To understand what makes these positives learnings so important, we need to look at how our brain operates, and helps us choosing our behaviours.
It predicts.
Through our education, our culture and our experiences, our brain builds an enormous database of possible behaviours to choose from. When we are facing a specific situation, our brain then predicts what could be our best option. This prediction is based on our previously built database. Everything we do, every moment we experience and how we react to it, is therefore based on what we have already experienced – or, at times copied from others. According to contexts, and the speed of our reactions, we may run these suggested behaviours automatically without much thinking.
What happens when we focus on negative learnings?
We focus on what we do not want to do. We maintain our database constant, reinforcing already existing information, however always playing the same behaviours and options in our head. You got it, this is where we have our vicious circles.
What happens then when we decide to focus on positive learnings instead?
We focus on what we could do or experiment next. Not only we help our brain increasing the content available within our database, by giving it another option to store, we add new possible choices. You got it again; those new choices are the ones which will break the patterns.
How does that help us exiting vicious circles?
This new information, about what we want to do instead, is seen by our brain as an added option, a new possible choice. It is the first step needed to exit vicious circles, and break existing patterns.
Great.
How do we do that then.
How do we extract these positive learnings?
Extract is the right word. It is not an automatic process – at least at the beginning – and follow 2 steps.
1. F for fail. A situation did not go as smoothly as expected and the results are not what you wanted. That’s okay; FAIL can be read as First Attempt In Learning. You acknowledge the situation and pause.
2. F for feedbacks. Using this one question, “What is important (for me) to learn from this experience?” You note every answer that comes to mind until you can phrase it as an API sentence or several sentences. If you only have negative sentences coming to mind, ask the following question, “Great. Now what do I want to do instead?”
Step 2 usually gives us both negative and positive learnings. We can therefore stop here, or we can bring it one step further by looking for some future steps, adding a 3rd F.
3. F for future steps. Using this next question, “What steps am I going to implement to follow up on the API sentences I created within step 2?” You identify actions to take or skills to develop.
Taken together, we call the sequence “the 3 F of positive learnings”.
A word of caution here. Bad experiences and negative emotions are part of life. Accepting and then processing the negative emotions we may experience is extremely important in order to develop our self-leadership. However, there are bad experiences and BAD experiences. This is not to be read lightly. In case you want to extract the positive learnings of very bad experiences, I always advise you talk to a professional. In case you are unfamiliar with self-coaching, I also advise you work with a professional to begin with.
Working with a professional, who can guide you, is a gift you give yourself. I have been using these type of tools for more than 15 years, and still on regular basis, I will work with a professional. Websites, such as EMCC or ICF, have great listings, and I am happy to help when appropriate.
Back to our positive learnings now
Somewhere, we have been educated in being really good at extracting negative learnings. I’d say this comes from this habit, in most societies and cultures, to focus on what we do not have, what we did not achieve, or what we could not do. Looking for positive learnings may feel counter-intuitive at start. Embrace the feeling – and sometimes the discomfort – and see it as learning a new skill.
Remember, each time you do it. Each time you take a moment to identify some positive learnings, you create an opportunity. You expand your choices of possible. Beautiful. Right?
There are many more tips and changes of perspectives we work on when developing our self-leadership.
When you’re ready to explore fully how you could increase your self-leadership, get my book Swim Like a Fish, an easy guide to developing your self-leadership, or reach out to get information on the next program starting date. There is always a cohort around the corner waiting for you to join that you can learn how to swim like a fish through your life.
*Funny enough, you will soon notice that all my clients have the first name, Ash (Smile).
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Florence Dambricourt, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Passionate about human and their brain. Fanatic (nearly :-)) ultra-trail runner. Florence Dambricourt is an accomplished Speaker, Self-Leadership Coach, Team Coach and Company Culture Change Enabler. Her career, in zig-zag spans over 25 years, navigating through various corporate worlds and entrepreneurship experiences. Driven by curiosity and a very strong intention to “make a difference for the better”, Florence helps her clients finding clarity, so that they can shape their future. With two books published on Self-Leadership, “Swim Like a Fish” and “Speak Like a Fish”, Florence not only champions Self-Leadership, she provides a robust methodology, and with-it tools, to develop or strengthen it. She sees Self-Leadership as a must-have competency for everyone. Her mission? "Unleashing the power of Human Innovation thanks to Self-Leadership”.
