E089: Psychological Capital

I'm James, hi. This is

James. Just before we start, I wanted to remind you that you can read our articles, explore more podcasts, and learn about our online personal and management development programs and workshops by visiting our website, www, dot, World of work.io. All right, onto the podcast. Hello. This is James, and this is Jane, and here we are again with another episode of The World of Work podcast.

Yeah, we're right here, as always, coming to you from the wonderful world of Edinburgh and James, what are we talking about this week?

Well, today we're actually speaking about psychological capital, or sometimes positive psychological capital, and it's an interesting construct of capacities that individuals have.

And I actually wasn't here for this conversation, so I'm really looking forward to listening to it. We've got

two great guests. We've got Patricia and Katina from worker being so let's get into the episode. Okay, so here we are in the main body of this podcast, and today we're going to be speaking about psychological capital, which is going to be really exciting topic for us. And we're going to be speaking to Patricia and Katina, two people we know from worker being, and they've got a lot of interesting background to bring to this. So before we get into the subject itself, why don't I hand over to them and them and see if they're happy to introduce themselves to the audience. So over to you guys.

Thank you. So I'm Patricia gribarek and I'm a co founder of worker being so we're really excited to be here. So happy to talk about psychological capital. It's a topic that we love and are very passionate about. So Katina and I are both organizational psychologists, so we actually met in graduate school and started worker being to focus on workplace wellness. So we really have a passion for getting workplace wellness research out to the masses. There's a lot of great research out there, and it's not super accessible, and that's the impetus of worker being, and I'll pass it to Katina to introduce herself too.

Yeah. Hi. I'm Katina, and I guess Patricia and I, as she mentioned, founded this company with the idea of getting workplace wellness research and science based practices out to people that need them. I am an academic in my full time role at George Washington University in the business school, and a lot of my research surrounds issues that impact employee wellness. And it was getting kind of frustrating to me that a lot of the work that we do, really good scientific work, sits behind a paywall, and so only people who have access to university libraries or want to pay like, $40 for an article, which, by the way, academics never get that money. Those are the only folks that have access to the articles. And so I was talking with Patricia about my frustration around spending so much time doing this cool research, but then feeling like not a lot of people were having access to it, and she was spending a lot of time with clients in her full time role as a consultant who were asking for solutions to fairly basic wellness related problems. So we both realized that there was just like a dearth of basic knowledge in this area, and worker being was created to sort of create that bridge between the scientific information that we know is out there and is really helpful, but is not getting to people in the way that it might,

you know, that's so cool. And a lot of our drive and the stuff that we do here is really similar, and we talk about kind of a democratization of this information. And, you know, my background is, I worked in a really large organization that had the ability to bring in consultants like you guys, and to bring in research and to pay and to provide and to train and to educate and to do all this stuff. And Jane's background is that she worked in a very small organization in the charitable sector, so they never had this access. And you know, when we were speaking about it, it seems so kind of unfair and unhelpful to the well being of individuals, but people in smaller organizations couldn't get it. So I think that's that's really cool, sort of alignment of stuff we're doing, and as a little side thing, actually, our last podcast that we recorded last week was with an academic called Kevin Teo, who's focuses on healthy workplaces and workplace well being as well, which is just kind of cool that it feeds in with this. Yeah, it's pretty cool. So today, though, we're going to really focus on psychological capital. So as a real basic starting point, right? I mean, I think people know what economic capital is. It's the sort of resource and the money that you build up. When we speak about psychological capital. What exactly is that? So psychological

capital is a set of four resources. And I like your example of economic capital. We always use the example of human capital, or human resources, right? So it's a similar concept, where it's a set of resources that a person can use to help improve their performance and their wellness and their success in the role. And these four resources work together to help you be resilient in the workplace, to help you actually achieve your goals. Yeah, so let me explain what the four resources are great. So it's, it's self efficacy, optimism, hope and resilience. So there's a lot of definition to happen around both of those, all four of those concepts to help kind of everyone understand, but basically all them together helps you drive towards your goals. So self efficacy, that's the first one, and that's your confidence in your ability to control your outcomes and to overcome challenges. So in other words, it's you believing that you can do it right. You have control over what's going to happen. You have control of what how your day is going to go, how your tasks are going to go, how you're going to accomplish your work. So that confidence piece is really important, so you don't shy away from challenges and you're not discouraged by failures. Optimism, that is your expectations of a positive outcome. So if you're high in optimism, you're somebody that thinks things are going to go well, overall, you know, I'm motivated to get my work done because I know that generally things will end up okay. Things will go well. Even as they go get hard, you still feel like they're going to go well in the end, hope is the funny one. That's the one that is not what you would think it is, because we use hope very differently in our normal day to day language. But hope is made up of two parts when it comes to the research, it's agency and pathways. So agency is basically your motivation to succeed in a specific goal or task, and your Pathways is how you do that. So if you're high in hope, you are going to put more effort towards your goals, and you're going to come up with lots of different ways to meet those goals. So if the first try doesn't work, you're going to figure out a different way to do it. You're going to adjust if you need to, to get towards towards your goals. And then the last one is resilience. That one is probably the most obvious in terms of what it means, and that's your ability to bounce back from challenges, from failures, from any roadblocks that you might come across, so you're able to change and adapt to stressful situations. So as you can see, all four of those resources together kind of combine to make you this super goal oriented person that's able to overcome challenges. Find different ways to reach your goals, be confident that you can get there and be positive, that there will be a positive outcome at the end of all this.

Right, that's cool. And thanks for explaining the piece about hope. Because, you know, just in its own the phrase hope does, does feel like it means something else When, when, I guess, you look at assessing these, I guess these capabilities in in the real world, and when you're you know when you're doing research, do you find that they tend to coordinate? Do you find that people have, I guess, even levels of these capabilities, or do you find that people are unevenly distributed? And what happens if individuals are maybe strong at or have high levels of self efficacy, resilience and optimism, but low levels of hope? How does that sort of play out?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So the four factors do have a common kind of underlying link that makes them correlated when you measure them in individuals. So they do hang together and more of one tends to correlate with more of another. However, nothing is like, as you know, like a one to one correlation. So these things do can be studied on their own. They're not so highly correlated that they're the same construct, but they hang together in a way that it makes sense to study them together at times. But there has been some research done on individual levels of each of these things. So they do slightly different things on their own, and are related to slightly different things on their own, but they share a common underlying feature of sort of this resource capacity for positivity, almost that that creates an impetus to study them or to think about growing them all at Once, and that they have similar outcomes relatedly, but just because you're high on one doesn't automatically mean you're high on the other. So they can be distributed unequally within any given individual. Yeah,

okay, and in terms of a reason that they're combined by this, and I guess some of the history around this has it come about because they're maybe correlated, or they've got that common underlying factor, or where have I come about for a different reason? What's your thoughts on that?

Yeah, so they are. They are a core construct that has been studied by researchers as one kind of, like, basically, underlying theory around why they sit together. And the main researchers in this area are like this person, Fred luthens And this other person, Bruce of folio. They have studied this quite a bit, and the reason that they sort of put them together is because they feel like and the research shows, or the data shows, that. These capacity, this capacity for being able to approach problems in a particular way that has to do with just sort of how. What is your general outlook when you reach a challenge, or you're trying to overcome something, or you're trying to get a goal, people have differential capacities for doing that in a productive fashion. And these are each things that have to do with creating a way of approaching a problem that's more positive than negative. So it's almost like your capacity for positive problem solving technique. And if you have all four of these things, you're super high in being able to approach problems in a positive fashion. So it's almost like, if you think about if you think about it as this is, this is what helps me to solve problems and get my goals. And it's sort of like a pack of things that all relate to that same general outcome, but without any one of those given pieces, your capacity for that goes down. So they're all They're all correlated, they're all related, but each individual one has its own impact on the outcome, and if you remove one of those pieces, you're not going to be as good at positively approaching problems than if you had all four. So they're kind of all all in there, but you need to think about them each independently in order to fully address your capacity.

Yeah, cool. That makes sense. And like, like you said, they all bring something slightly different to this problem solving approach, the way that we interact and try and undertake tasks when, when we think about these, when we think about the people that have these and demonstrate them in high levels of presence, what are the benefits? What range of benefits are there for the individual or for organizations of having these capabilities?

Oh my gosh, there are so many benefits. Psychological capital is linked to performance. So if you're an employer, if you're a leader, that, in and of itself, is a motivator to try to help build these resources in your teams, because those with high psychological capital, they tend to outperform other employees. They they also tend to be, you know, the more productive, and I would assume, very easy to be around in the sense that they're more positive. So having that positive culture, having supervisor support, can actually lead to better psychological capital and higher psychological capital. So from an organizational perspective, if you want your team members to have these four resources and to be performing well, the culture and your support of those employees is really important. But for us, the thing that we are most excited about when it comes to psychological capital is well being. So we find that employees that maybe have some work life balance issues, they're less likely to burn out if they have psychological capital so they can recover and be more resilient in the face of something like a work life balance problem, we see that overall, people with psychological capital are higher in well being over time, we even see that if somebody's unemployed and they have high psychological capital, they tend to do better in terms of their wellness, because you can imagine that means that they're more positive. They're working towards those goals of getting a job or whatever it is that they're looking for in a positive way, instead of kind of getting into that, that downward spiral that some people can get into if they are facing unemployment,

yeah, and so I know there are lots of benefits to, I guess, positive psychology generally, or certainly, there are lots of evidential statements about the benefits individuals of positive psychology in terms of longevity and well being and All those types of things. How does, how does this separate out the sort of work related aspects from the purely positive psychological aspects for individuals? Do you get a sense of how the sort of task related element of this contributes to people, or does it increase the benefits of positive psychology? Yeah,

I think that so generally, you could use this approach in your life outside of the workplace to try to achieve goals. I think the reason that it's particularly relevant to the workplace is because that's a domain of life where you're most likely to have very clear goals, but you could have goals outside of the workplace, like, you know, I want to run a marathon, or I want to be a better partner or spouse, or I want to create a better learning environment for my children in the household, or whatever the case may be, right? All those sorts of things can also be set up as goals. So really, any domain where you have goals, psychological capital is relevant. But because goals are so ubiquitous within workplace life that this is an area that's been particularly studied with regard to work, but it does relate more broadly and with regard to other psychological or positive psychological capacities. There are lots of different variables in the positive psychological literature, and they have differential impacts on the way. That you know your work life might unfold, like, for example, gratitude, people study quite a bit in the workplace. That's one example. Like morality, integrity, spirituality, like those are other sorts of things that create capacities for the way that you view and think about the world or other people around you. But the reason that these four are sort of pinned together is because they frequently correlate and sort of relate to that goal aspect. So I think answering the question of how they relate to other positive psychological concepts or constructs, these are more goal oriented in nature and and affect how you view your goals. So they have a common underpinning, but they've also been studied more in the workplace, because goals are so important there.

Yeah, that makes sense. And and from a work related perspective, I mean, if you have a team of people, and you've got people with, I guess, really high technical skills, but low levels of psychological capital, and then people with high levels of psychological capital, but maybe low levels of technical skills, who do you think skills. Who do you think is going to perform better? Or what's the relationship between that technical set of capabilities and psychological capital in the workplace?

So you obviously need some sort of minimum level of knowledge, right? If you're thrown into developing software and you don't know how to code at all, that's going to be a problem. But that being said, if you have those minimum requirements for the role, if you have psychological capital, you're more likely to get through challenges. So if all, if the job was easy, if there were no challenges thrown at you, no roadblocks, no difficult people that you're dealing with, then, in theory, the technical person might win out, but that's not realistic, right? In the workplace, you're going to be dealing with lots of Roblox challenges, stress coming in from multiple areas, whether that's from your personal life or from work. So those that are high in psychological capital are going to outperform because they can move past those challenges more easily. They have thought of alternative ways to get to their goals. They are able to bounce back when those challenges come their way. If you don't believe you can bounce back, if you don't believe you have the skill set, you don't feel confident in your skills. If you haven't thought about those different pathways on how to get to your goal, you are going to get stuck when something blocks you, and when you face a challenge, you're going to be less likely to move past it effectively, and that'll slow down your ability to get the job done or to succeed as effectively as somebody that has the four components we talked about. So psychological capital can really help, because we live in the real world where there's always going to be challenges coming our way.

And when you were speaking there, it got me thinking a little bit, how does psychological capital relate to the ability or propensity of an individual to learn in changing work environments? Do you see people with higher levels of psychological capital being more focused and more able to learn than others, or what do you have to know? That's an interesting

question. I haven't seen any research specifically on capacity to learn, but I will say that when people feel more self efficacious, for example, they're more likely to approach new challenges and to the extent to which you learn from approaching things that you haven't approached in the past, or feeling efficacious to take on new challenges. I think we could probably make the case that people who take on new and interesting things, or don't shy away from challenges, probably learn more in the process than people who are who are not willing to take on those challenges. So I think the self efficacious piece probably helps quite a bit in training programs, people who are more likely to approach the training positively and with the expectation that they're going to get something out of it tend to learn more. So if optimism might influence the way that you approach whether or not you think positively about what the outcome of something will be. So if I'm going to enter into a training and I'm feeling like, you know, nothing ever works out, this is going to be stupid, I'm not going to learn anything, right? Then you might approach the training differently. And with regard to hope and resilience, I think you know, being able to figure out what's on the other side of something, and to plan and think through what your goals are probably do have an impact on the extent to which you're actually reflecting on and thinking about how to move forward when you're facing a challenge, which could create some learnings that you might not otherwise have if you were just gonna, like, give up or not think about how You might overcome a challenge ahead of time. So I think that there are probably are some capacities for learning that are meaningful in this space. One other thing I'll mention is that I'm actually doing a research project right now on the collective level of hope that exists in organizations. So all of these things. Except for optimism. I haven't seen but all of these things can be rolled to a collective level. So a team could have a collective level of efficacy, or a team could have a collective level of resilience, or an organization could be resilient, more resilient than another organization. But no one's ever really conceptualized the idea of collective hope, and what I'm finding is that when organizations face challenges at the collective level, they're more likely to persevere and continue to move towards their goals if they're high hoping than if they're not. And so if you just like crumble as an organization, you're never going to get the opportunity to learn through what might be a challenge. So I think that the learnings that come out of continuing to push through in challenging times, and what you do as a reaction to that moving forward to stabilize yourself from further risks of losing hope represent a kind of learning. So anyway, I haven't seen research on it, but there may be some to come, and it would make logical sense to me that it might be related. Yeah,

and that piece around, around the the org, levels of these, these capacities, is really interesting. I'd like to come back to that before, before we move on to something else, that popped into my mind is that I think a lot of people who listen probably have a sense or an understanding of work described as growth mindset. So some of Carl D's work, which I know some people have questioned aspects of, but which is a construct that's out there. Do you see a relationship between that sort of growth mindset piece and the stuff that we're talking about in psychological capital?

I think, to catinas point, I haven't seen any research on that either, but it does seem to follow the same type of logic, where, if you are thinking through the different pathways, the alternative routes to get to your goals, if you're thinking through how to overcome roadblocks, and you're constantly thinking about different ways to get to your outcome that you're looking for, I would imagine that a growth mindset would be related to that. Since with the growth mindset, you are also looking to continually grow, right? So I think that, I think logically, there is, there should be a connection there. But again, I haven't seen anything specific in the research, but I think it aligns with the learning piece that Katina just talked about

cool. I just want to check it out and see what you felt. Let's move on then. So we've talked a little bit about what what psychological capital is and the components of it. We've talked a little bit about some of the benefits for it. I guess a question, is this something that's like, that's innate? Are you just born with a certain level of these capabilities, or is this something that you can develop in yourself or in others? What do you think? Yeah,

so the good news about this construct is that you can develop it so people do start off with a general baseline for feeling efficacious. It's also rooted in like your life experiences, which can be difficult to disentangle once you get people into the workplace to know where they're where the variability stems from, because if you've been successful at overcoming challenges before you probably will feel more efficacious about new challenges. So there's a lot that goes into whether some things like inborn or not, but people do vary in terms of their levels of these sorts of things, like an optimistic outlook, for example, there are some people who are just more likely to approach life with a positive lens than a negative lens. Another related concept is positive and negative affect. Some people are much more positively emotionally charged naturally, and other people are much more negatively emotionally charged naturally. And sometimes people can be both just a very emotional person. You can be very positively emotional, very negatively emotional optimism, sort of similar. It's considered more of like a personality trait in terms of how you approach things generally in the literature, and there are also in the hope literature, people are called high hoping individuals. So people are sort of characterized as having a trait level of hope as well as a trait level of resilience. But there are also state levels of these things. So emotions like optimism can be state like hope, either as a cognition or as an emotion, can be induced resilience. Similarly, it's a capacity that you can build and self efficacy can also be grown over time through coaching. So the good news about this is that while it may be a little more difficult, or more challenging for some to grow than others, if you're not naturally inclined this way, there are exercises that you can do to develop your psychological capital so and also to develop your organization's capacity to have higher levels of psychological capital at large. So

if we've got, say individuals listening, who say, you know, this stuff, this sounds great. I'd like to have a higher level of psychological capital. What's that journey like? Well, what can people do on their own as individuals or Undertaker to improve this? And then, what's that sort of path like, in terms of an experience? Is it rapid? Is it slow? Is it topsy turvy? How does that transpire?

Yeah. Yeah, so there's actually an intervention that we really like, and we've written about and talked about before because of how much research backs it up. It was developed back in, I think, 2006 ish, and then there were a lot of studies subsequently that supported this intervention. So the way that this intervention was designed was as a team training. But as we've kind of gone through and talked about it and thought about it, there are definitely components you could do on your own. And then if you want to bring in your team, it's pretty simple to actually go through this as a group around the first part is to develop goals. So as you're going through and you're starting to want to build your psychological capital, thinking about what goals do you want to achieve, thinking about something that's achievable in the near future, so that you're able to start building your capacity and creating those goals, setting your goals and picking one to focus on for the following exercises, there's like a lot of exercise that you can do after that to Continue to to build that capacity. So you pick your your goal, and then you start thinking about what it would be like to achieve that goal. Think about how you would get there, what obstacles there might be, you know, if you if your goal is, let's say you want to make sure you get to work early on Tuesdays before your big team meetings. That happens pretty early in the morning. Okay, so that's your goal. Then think about what can you do to get there? Maybe the night before you need to set your clothes out and pick what you're going to wear in advance, so that you're not wasting time in the morning trying to decide your outfit if you have to leave. Of course, right now we're not in that case with COVID, but if you know, maybe now it's instead you need to, you want to set your coffee timer going so that your coffee will make itself, since you're waking up earlier than normal, and you know that you'll feel better if you have that cup of coffee right away. So whatever it is, thinking about your what are the ways you can achieve that goal? And let's say your coffee machine breaks. Well, okay, great, so I don't get the coffee in the morning. What's the next thing I can do to help make that easier? To get me to wake up earlier and be more functional early in the morning, to prep for that meeting. So thinking through how you can achieve that goal, what it would be like to achieve that goal, what are the obstacles? So spending time and just asking yourself these questions actively. So basically, all the things that you would be doing if you had psychological capital, you're now triggering yourself to do in these exercises you're thinking about, what are the, you know, sub goals? What are the resources I need? If I need to wake up early, then maybe I need to get a new alarm clock, or I need to find the right ringtone on my phone's alarm clock that will actually wake me up. Maybe one thing I do for early mornings, my mom works really early. I'll make her text me so if I haven't gotten up, somebody will call me and make sure I get up right. Yes. So thinking of all the different challenges that might come up and your obstacles, and what are the sub goals, and what are the resources you need, can really help you start thinking in the way that's aligned with psychological capital. And the part that's really that team based component, is doing some group brainstorming. So having a small group of people that you can talk through your goal, your resources, what obstacles you think you may have, and others will have ideas as to how you can get there, right? What are other ways you can get to that goal that maybe you haven't thought through, and that will help open up your eyes to even more pathways and kind of build that hope piece so it's really just going through, what a really strong goal setting exercise and planning for your goals, and that will help you start thinking in that direction. So ideally, you could do this frequently to keep your mind moving in the direction of optimism, hope, resiliency and self efficacy. Yeah,

it sounds like the whole sort of intentionality around it plays a big role. Does that seem fair? Yeah,

I think that you need to definitely. A lot of it is about planning, which is why the hope concept is sometimes difficult to wrap your head around. Because usually I think in, like, in common language, we think about hope is just like, Oh, I hope it'll happen, but like, you're not actually screwing anything. Yeah, exactly. It's like, it almost feels like the way we talk about it societally is like, almost like a helpless like, I'm just Yeah, exactly, but, but in reality, that part of the equation is really about premeditating goals and how you're going to get to your goals. And all of this is about sort of approaching your goals actively, right? So I'm being aware of the emotions that I'm using when I'm approaching the goals. I'm thinking about differential pathways I'm setting myself up to premeditate. And think about ways around those roadblocks, and I'm really being conscious about ensuring that I'm not psyching myself out of taking something on just because I don't like the idea of taking on a challenge. So it is very active, and I think that that means that the planning pieces is quite important, and and also makes it something really actionable, which we like, you know, when you think about something as a trait, oh, you know, you're either born happier you're born you're born high hope or not like, that's not very motivating, but growing it is motivating.

So is it?

Is it sort of positively self reinforcing. So if you have higher levels of psychological capital, is it almost easier for you to grow more psychological capital? How does that work? In your view? Yeah, so

the more self efficacy you have, the more optimism you have, and then things continue to go well for you. Then that's going to continue to develop, right? So if I feel confident that this is going to work out, and I have that optimism This is everything's going to end up. Well, I'm going to achieve those goals. Then once I do achieve those goals, then it basically boosts your self efficacy again. And I know Katina had mentioned that self efficacy is one that you know, over time, can grow and develop through coaching and things like that, but it also can grow through experience. As you experience that achievement, and that accomplishment of your goals, and you see that you can do it, then you're more likely to be confident in your abilities to do it. So I do think that there is it builds upon itself. So if you are higher, it is easier to develop, because you already feel that you can do it and you're confident in your abilities. And then as you continue to see those successes, obviously you're going to continue to grow in your psychological capital over time. Something many years ago,

I had some coaching, and one of the things that came up was about framing of what a goal was, and I was doing new things, and wasn't really sure about some of those new things, and working with a coach, basically, what was what I was led to do, was to reframe that future task that I hadn't done before in line with something that I had done effectively before. So instead of saying, this is a specific thing that I haven't done, I've got apprehension about it. It got reframed as, you know, I've spent my whole life doing new things that I haven't done before, and I've succeeded in those. Do you think that framing about what we look at is relevant within you?

Yeah, I think that anytime, especially with the first two components of self efficacy and optimism, which is really about the way the attitude that you have about approaching new things, I think that reminding yourself of past successes is always helpful for getting yourself motivated to do new things. And also with regard to optimism, one of the ways that you can sort of train yourself to be more optimistic is to flip your thinking so a lot of people who may approach things with a more negative lens, like, why even get started? Nothing ever works out for me, a reminder of things that have worked out for you can be helpful. So, yeah, maybe the last thing I did didn't work out, but remember this time or that time when actually things did go the way that I wanted them to. Those kinds of reminders to balance out the conversation can really be useful in terms of thinking through, you know what? What should I be facing this challenge with as an attitude, as opposed to just letting your natural inclination take over if it's more negatively skewed naturally? Yeah, that

makes sense. That's a lot of stuff that individuals can do. What role do? Say leaders of small teams have in shaping the psychological capital of their team, if they're able to do so, or what? What impact do their own behaviors as leaders have on the psychological capital of those around

Well, I think what I mentioned in terms of those exercises and developing goals, you know, it was originally framed as a training or a group session so leaders of small teams can help encourage these behaviors and these these skills and these resources by conducting these types of sessions, thinking about once a year, once a quarter, having a group meeting where everybody's creating goals for their next quarter, and working together in that group, brainstorming, thinking about, you know, what are the obstacles others might face, and helping encourage people to see How they can succeed, succeed, and where they can go in terms of alternative pathways, if obstacles come up, and helping people think through what those obstacles are. So leaders can have a big influence by providing additional insight into obstacles, resources, alternative paths, all of that in those types of conversations, and can help the whole team come together in these group exercises around goals. So there's actually, I think, a lot that a leader can do to help move the team in the right direction. And then, as Katina mentioned, is the whole team is developing these resources. Then you'll see some collective efficacy across the team that the team. Generally feels like they're going to be able to accomplish their goals, the team is higher in hope and things like that. So you can make an impact as a leader in terms of how you work with the group and get people thinking about goals strategically and the obstacles strategically. And

you talked earlier about coaching being a way to support some of this, that activity sounds like it could bring elements of coaching in it at a group level, as well as the sort of structured activity that would help people explore these different capabilities in terms of the day to day behavior of leaders out there. Is there anything that individuals could do to tweak their own behavior that would be supportive or reinforcing of these types of things on, say, a one to one level, or just general behavior in the office. Of any tips that you might think of it that might, that might reinforce or help grow these capabilities and others or capacity? Yeah,

yeah. I would say that you know, thinking about how you can promote these behaviors and role model them. So if you're, if you're interested in growing your own capacity for psychological capital, engaging in these exercises that Patricia talked about, and our we have a blog post that actually outlines this whole exercise. So if anyone's interested in, yeah, you can actually go and look at the specifics around it, but role modeling. So you can increase it for yourself and also increase it for others by sort of role modeling the idea that before you want to sit down and and start, you know, going after a goal and you're really serious about achieving something to write down, you know what the goal is. Unpack the goal. Think about how you're going to achieve it. Think about things that you might face as obstacles. Think about what resources you have that you can tap into, so sort of that planning process before you approach anything. Now, it's not to say that every single goal you have will require this level of complication, right? But if you have something that's particularly complex that you feel is really important, doing this process for yourself, but then also role modeling it for others in meetings. Showing how you work through this process can help other people to recognize that this is a useful thing to engage with when they're also trying to achieve the goals, or when the team gets together and needs to achieve a goal together to make it sort of a standard process that you go through in order to create this group mentality. One other thing I'll say about this is that in the study that I'm doing around collective hope, and I don't know how it relates to the other concepts, but specifically with that element, relationships seem really important. So if you're thinking about doing this in a team, the more that people relate with one another and feel comfortable and confident, sort of sharing ideas about how they might reach their goal, and the more that people are interacting and sharing stories of successes, for example, and engaging in sort of like hopeful discussion and dialog tends to raise the team's ability to be able to achieve so relationships as a foundation seem To have some important role in provoking the growth of these at the collective level cool, and

I also want to jump in around support. So I mentioned earlier that supervisor support is helpful in improving psychological capital. And I think the modeling piece is really important, but even just the encouragement so you see an employee struggling with their goals, or they're running into an obstacle. Help them see what ways around the obstacle might exist. Give them resources that might help if they're not confident in their abilities, boost them up. Let them know that you believe in them. You think they can do it. Those types of things can really help too to change people's mindset as they move towards their goals. Cool. Well, that

sounds like a really, really positive message and a fairly simple thing that people can bring up and bring into their daily practice at work. I'm afraid we are pretty much out of time. So I'm gonna wind things up there. I think we've covered some great stuff before we go though, Could you, could you say a bit more about how people could learn about your your work and your website and your own podcast as well, sure.

So if you want to find us, we are worker being, and it's spelled W, O, R, K, R, B, E, E, I N, G. So our website is worker being.com our podcast is the worker being podcast. So pretty straightforward. You can find us where most podcasts are, or through our website as well. And if you want to contact us, we're also would love to talk to you and hear your stories and and see what might be helpful for folks out there. Our email is contact at worker being.com and we're also on social media, so we're on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram at worker being so we hope to hear from some of you or see you on on our social media, that's great. Thanks. And I'll we'll share those links as

well when we share this, when we release it, so cool. All right, so it's just time for me to say thank you very much. That was a real pleasure. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Okay, so you are back in the room with us now, and that was. A Conversation with worker being Yeah, it was a really interesting conversation. I

enjoyed listening to it also because I wasn't part of the conversation at the time. So it's always really refreshing to hear a conversation for the first time. And I always amazes me, James, whenever we record these of how many similar themes crop up. So things like the idea of leadership role modeling, where, you know, it's really important for those leading organizations and teams to show what they're trying to inspire people to develop, I think is really it seems to crop up all the time, but you obviously knee deep in the conversation. So what were your reflections on it?

Yeah, like you. I thought it was great conversation. Lots of interesting stuff, a few things, a few things stuck with me. But one of the things that sort of stuck with me throughout, really, whatever's lasted, is the, I guess, the power of intentionality. So, you know, understanding the different capabilities here. So hope, efficacy, resilience, optimism, developing that understanding and then being sort of intentional in your own self management in relation to them as an ability or as a fact that contributes to your ability to grow them really struck struck me and struck a chord with me, and that whole being intentional around all of these things, being intentional and mindful and conscious of how you think about what you do, of how you approach problems, of how you aim to learn, of how you even think about things like your own efficacy, right? So as soon as you step away from unconsciously believing in your self efficacy or otherwise, and start to consciously believe that you have agency in situations, that the power of it, that that sort of step shift brings, is something that I think is really powerful. So that's a big one for me. Yeah, I

think that's really think that's really big. And it always, the challenge with that is always that it then leads me to the question of, how do you split out which bits having the biggest effect? Right? The nature of taking control of yourself and applying yourself and that and believing what's possible. But it's, it's, yeah, it's funny how often things like that crop up, isn't it? Yeah, it's cool. Well, thank you for doing that. I really enjoyed it, and hopefully you did too. Any final comments? No nothing

else for me. Just a big thank you to everyone for listening, and we'll be back again in next week with another one, I guess. So one last thing, don't forget, if you want to get in touch with worker being, you can get remote contact workerbeing.com as well, and we'll share some links when we promote the system.

Yeah, don't forget. You can always check us out on Twitter, and usually where we tweet, we tag our guests in so you can always connect there.