Mathew’s Blog
Insights from Positive Psychology
Do You Need Help When Making A Challenging Decision?
We often do need the help of someone else when we’re facing challenging decisions., and that what kind of help we ask for can take our character and our relationships in different directions. We need to consider if we want the helping person to support our responsibility – our autonomy and competence – or if we want this person to take the responsibility from us.
Is Your Kindness an Exchange or an Act of Character?
There is a difference between treating a person a certain way because of how they are behaving at that moment, and treating that person a certain way because of who we are.
Are we kind because that person seems to deserve our kindness at this moment? Or are we kind because we are a kind person?
A Respectful Approach To Interpersonal Conflict
What gives the situation the most opportunity for reconciliation is when both people can work together – perhaps with the help of a professional – to form a shared story that shows respect for each person’s feelings and underlying needs, and then explains each other’s behavior in a way they can both accept as accurate.
You Can Have A Better Relationship With Failure
The strong emotional response to failure (or success) is a secondary experience, something tacked on to it by other psychological and social influences. The problem is not the fact of failure, but the response to it.
Your Opportunity To Choose A Better Story
It can be said that the quality of your story determines the quality of your life. The story you accept not only makes sense of what you just experienced, it also is highly influential on shaping how you experience the next situation like it – and your subsequent experiences begin to reinforce the strength of this story for better or worse. But if you can change your story, you can change your experience.
When Vulnerability Is Voluntary vs. Imposed Upon You
It is not the single act that creates high trust, but your consistent experience of vulnerable sharing that is met with respectful handling by the other. The more positive interactions of vulnerability you have in the bank of experience, the more likely that relationship can handle an occasional rupture-and-repair of trust.
Summary of Mathew’s Masters Thesis
Thesis: Introduction Part 2
Objectives This paper is a discussion of a connection I found between a psychological theory underpinning the work of a helping professional and a physiological marker of well-being that is relevant to desirable coaching outcomes. More specifically, this paper aims to...
Thesis: Introduction Part 1
While most kinds of coaching share the same objective of helping people make positive moves forward in life, there are a myriad of ways in which clients need help doing that. Not only might they respond differently to different coaching methods, they may also respond...
Thesis: Preface To My Summary
For the sake of my friends, colleagues, and clients who have asked me to share my thesis I am publishing a series of articles as a summary, written in a more reader-friendly way, and will include content I was grieved to not have been able to fit in given the word...