Tag Archives: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Creating Productive Thought Patterns

Albert Ellis

Leaders’ actions actions are influenced by unspoken self-talk.
Sometimes, these thoughts are self-critical and provoke anxiety.

Aaron Beck

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), developed by University of Pennsylvania’s Aaron Beck, provides a systematic way to notice and restructure “irrational self-talk.“
Similar approaches were developed by Albert Ellis in Rational-Emotive Therapy (RET), and David Burns in his synthesis of CBT and RET.

David Burns

Arizona State University’s Charles Manz and Chris Neck translated these self-management processes to managerial development.
They outlined a Thought Self-Leadership Procedure as a five-step circular process:

Charles Manz

1. Observe and record thoughts,

2. Analyze thoughts for potential errors in reasoning (jumping to conclusions, exaggeration),

3. Substitute alternate positive, realistic, plausible, acceptable thoughts,

4. Monitor personal reactions to these thoughts,

5. If more negative thoughts appear, continue to substitute the more productive thoughts.

John Crimmins

Other recommendations to manage thoughts about stressful situations were distilled by John Crimmins of Behaviour Institute in coaching people at work.

He suggested asking the following questions:

How do I know if this thought is true?
What evidence do I have to support this thought or belief?
How can I test my assumptions/beliefs to find out if they’re accurate?
What would a trusted friend say about these thoughts?
How is this thought helpful now?
What other ways that I can think about this situation?
What would a friend say when I blame myself in this situation?
What would I say to a friend who was in this situation?
What would a friend say to me when I take this situation personally?
How can I consider this situation on a continuum rather than in either-or terms?

-*What practices do you use to develop and apply productive thought patterns?

©Kathryn Welds

Restructuring Cognitive Errors at Work

Extract More Value from Meetings with Effective Questions

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Shane Snow

Shane Snow, co-founder of Contently.com advocates asking incisive questions to extract more value from meetings, mentors’ guidance, and chance encounters with thought leaders and influencers.

He notes that expert journalists, researchers, innovators, and therapists are trained to ask effective questions, and their common “best practices” include:

Listening more than talking
Asking open-ended questions to avoid suggesting responses: “Who?”, “What?”, “When?”, “Where?”, “How?”, “Why?”
They use closed-ended questions sparingly: “Is?”, “Would?” and “Do?”
Posing one concise question at a time.
They avoid multiple choice questions
Waiting for an answer without interjecting more questions or comments.
They rarely interrupt themselves or others
Tolerating the other person’s silence for several seconds before talking
Directly, repeatedly probing for insightful, revealing replies
Nodding only when the response is intelligible, logical, and understandable
Interjecting questions or rephrasing the original question to redirect tangential responses
Cross-checking information and following up possible inconsistencies with more probing questions

Sakichi Toyoda

Nearly a century earlier, Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota Industries introduced an iterative problem-solving approach based on posing “Five Whys” to uncover the root cause of an issue.

This technique is now-widely applied in Lean Manufacturing, and is advocated by Eric Reis in The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses .

‘”Five Whys” were reduced to “Three Whys” to uncover customer objections in sales situations, and was modified Judith Beck in cognitive therapy to identify underlying Core Beliefs that lead to negative automatic thoughts.

Judith Beck

Beck softens the “Five Whys” by repeatedly asking “If that were true, what would it mean?”
Her model that suggest connections among:

Early experience->Core beliefs (schemas) ->Underlying assumptions (if/then – conditional) ->Automatic thoughts-> Physical Experiences->Self-Limiting Behaviors

Lois Frankel

Therapist and writer Lois Frankel illustrated the similarity of effective questions in psychotherapy sessions with those used to spur inquiry and innovative breakthroughs.
She advises interviewers and consultants to:

Use questions to define your purpose:
What do you want to gain from this conversation?
- Help
- Advice
- Information
- Commitment
- New ideas
- Clarification of opinions or attitudes
- Decision
- What is the “real” problem? Engineers and business people answer this question using a “Root Cause Analysis”
  - What are the options?
  - What are the likely consequences?
  - What results will justify the invested time, effort or money?
  - Ask specific questions:
    - What could we do differently?
    - Why is this important?
    - How can we best meet our objective?
    - What do you want to happen?
      - What don’t you want to happen?
      - What is the best thing that could happen?
      - What is the worst thing that could happen?
      - How will you react if you don’t follow this course of action?

Frankel advises to

Maintain eye contact:
Focus full attention on the interviewee
Repeat and summarize important points to verify accurate understanding

Listen for:
Content (facts)
Intent (feelings)
The way these are expressed (process).
Warren Berger

Journalist Warren Berger applied refined questioning in Design Thinking processes to produce innovative solutions in Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your World .

He advocates continued exploration of meaningful “big” questions in his blog, A More Beautiful Question.

-*What effective questioning practices have you found most helpful in achieving business results?

Related Posts:

Tim Hurson recommends New Questions, “Senses” for Innovative Thinking and Problem-Solving
John Miller, Dennis Matthies, David Cooperrider suggest Effective Questions as Change and Innovation Catalyst

Twitter: @kathrynwelds
Blog: – Kathryn Welds | Curated Research and Commentary
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©Kathryn Welds

How to Change Habits

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William James, father of American psychology and brother of novelist Henry James wrote in his 1890 The Principles of Psychology, “Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor.”

Though James seemed to look favorably upon the conservative element of habit, the drawbacks of thoughtless habitual actions are clear when people consume more calories than required to complete daily activities, purchase unneeded items, react with predictable emotions in contentious situations, and keep disadvantaged groups without advantages enjoyed by powerful groups.

Charles Duhigg’s bestseller, The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, argues that habits are a significant part of most people’s daily activities – about 40% – and that even brain injured people can form habits.

He outlines the A(ntecedant) – B(ehavior) – C(onsequence) model, initiated by a cue or a trigger that signals automatic or habitual behavior.
In a novel situation, the person shifts to a problem-solving mode to develop an appropriate response — which may require creative thinking .

However, in a more typical situation, the person executes the habitual physical, mental, or emotional behavior or “routine,” which is then rewarded — often with a reduction in anxiety or discomfort.

Duhigg shows how dysfunctional habits can be analyzed for the cue, routine, and reward, then changed by modifying the antecedent, behavior or reward.

The A-B-C approach was popularized by Albert Ellis in his Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy (RET), and outlined in his more than 50 books including Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy

Duhigg provides examples from marketing campaigns for well-known consumer products in the U.S., including Pepsodent toothpaste and Febreze air freshener.

Like Duhigg’s model’s reference to earlier behavior modification approaches, Timothy Wilson of University of Virginia’s Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change, adapts principles of Aaron T. Beck’s Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to change habitual interpretations, attributions, narratives and personal stories that lead to social problems including alcohol and drug abuse, teen violence and pregnancies, and social prejudice.

Wilson extracts and renames three empirically-validated behavioral techniques:

Story editing, to craft a more optimistic, hopeful story or interpretation about a situation, often using writing exercises
Story prompting, in which another person provides alternate, more optimistic interpretations based on data or “social proof” from experiences in a similar situation
Do good, be good, by “acting as if” the new behavior is a well-established habit, often through serving others in volunteer work.

RSA talk

Another look at habitual, even unconscious thinking in daily life is featured in a related post, Pattern Recognition in Entrepreneurship.

This discussion shares Douglas Van Praet’s guidelines to capitalize on unconscious cognitive processing and automatic buying behavior in Unconscious Branding: How Neuroscience Can Empower (and Inspire) Marketing

An earlier post, Hacking Human Behavior: “Tiny Habits” Start, Maintain Changes showcased BJ Fogg’s work on “tiny habits” as hooks to behavior change.
His approach draws on many of the same behavior modification principles featured in Duhigg’s and Wilson’s recommendations to analyze habitual cues, routines, and rewards.

-*How do you analyze and modify habits?

Related Posts:

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

Tag Archives: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Creating Productive Thought Patterns

Restructuring Cognitive Errors at Work

Extract More Value from Meetings with Effective Questions

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