Season 2 of the Positivity Strategist Podcast
In Season 3: Appreciative Leading I’ll be talking to guests who’ll share their experiences of leading from an appreciative mindset. I am excited to speak with business leaders and entrepreneurs, and with professionals from the legal, medical, IT and financial worlds; marketers, artists, journalists, teachers, and spiritual leaders. And, I there is an invitation for you be a patron or sponsor of my show.
To close this Season, we reflect on Appreciative Voice and how the seven literacies are impacting our thinking and relationships. We share findings from our fieldwork; and, we introduce our new thinking and learning about human capacity: four assumptions of changing beliefs about what we're all capable of and how that might reframe our realities.
Anticipating what is possible and how we fuel it is the topic of this literacy: Finding the Future. It helps if we envision a better future if we shift what's going on that isn't serving to that which is serving in any given situation. It's very powerful to dream of something new and different and develop that muscle to search for our collective appreciative voice to shape the future.
Connecting the collective is the work of hearts and minds. This literacy focuses us on living into the “we.” Connecting and belonging are the life-blood of human organizing and relationships. Starting conversations that are real and inclusive lifts up our appreciative voice.
We need one another to make sense of all that is going on around us. Finding our personal and collective wholeness contributes to our sense of belonging. In coming together, our combined intelligence, and intent for wholeness and belonging enables new wisdom and solutions to surface. In relationship with others, when we are welcomed, we taste the fullness of life.
The Literacy to strengthen our Appreciative Voice in this episode is Welcoming Wholeness – the inclusive Voice.
Paying attention to and magnifying the positive in people, communities, and networks help us flourish. Among the benefits of knowing our strengths include finding more flow and meaning in work, feeling more energized than drained, and seeing our relationships improve by coming from a place of greater ease.
In cultivating compassion, we grow empathy and positive regard for self and others. It encourages us to train our hearts and minds to stay open and offer our best to others. Growing our understanding of difference, attending to small ways to connect with others, developing our own inner resource to be of service are some of the habits of this literacy.
This literacy opens us up to our own frames (perspectives) on the world. As we widen our frames, we begin to understand and appreciate the frames of others. Having this literacy to frame and reframe enables us to shift perspective and opens us to possibilities and solutions we may never have even considered if we stayed comfortable with our blinkers on within our existing frames, which may be keeping us very small.
Inviting Inquiry is central to all the Literacies, and is central to Appreciative Voice. The principles of Appreciative Inquiry inform us that we move in the direction of our inquiries; questions we ask of ourselves and others. Inquiry stimulates curiosity. Inquiry starts movements. Inquiry questions keep us open to possibilities and enable us to engage in further dialogue. How curious are you about others and the world? What information and stories might you seek?
We set the scene in this episode for what’s to come. We talk about the origins of Appreciative Voice and how the seven literacies evolved. The intention of these literacies is to enable us to bring all voices into conversations. There are many choices to be made. They include inviting all perspectives, focusing on the collective and the relational world we are responsible for co-creating. They include our need for belonging and connection, and you will make your own connections with the content.
You are about to discover a way of celebrating your strengths, your relationships and the best in your world; and, to bring even more possibilities and positivity into your life.
