P. Alex Linley & Carol Kauffman

Positive psychology and coaching psychology are often recognised as complementary bedfellows, but to date there have not been many systematic attempts to explore how each can inform the other. This special issue of the International Coaching Psychology Review was conceptualised as a way of beginning this integrative process, and seeks to provide coaching psychologists with some perspectives from empirical and theoretical work at the intersection of these areas. Additionally the special issue includes interviews from leading positive psychologists, and four positive psychology book reviews, the intention of which are to introduce some of the breadth and excitement of this field to the coaching psychologist who may not be familiar with it.

So, to begin, what is positive psychology, and how did it come about? The advent of ‘positive psychology’ as we know it today can be traced back to Martin E.P. Seligman’s 1998 Presidential Address to the American Psychological Association (Seligman, 1999). Seligman realised that psychology had largely neglected the latter two of its three pre-World War II missions: curing mental illness, helping all people to lead more productive and fulfilling lives, and identifying and nurturing high talent. The advent of the Veterans Administration (in 1946) and the National Institute of Mental Health (in 1947) had largely rendered psychology a healing discipline based upon a disease model and illness ideology (see also Maddux, 2002; Maddux, Snyder & Lopez, 2004). With this realisation, Seligman resolved to use his APA Presidency to initiate a shift in psychology’s focus toward a more positive psychology (Seligman, 1999).

However, it is also eminently clear from a cursory examination of the research literature that positive psychology did not ‘begin’ in 1997, or 1998, or 1999, or 2000 (see also McCullough & Snyder, 2000). More than 50 years ago, Abraham Maslow - who also called for a ‘positive psychology,’ but one that would study the extreme positive ends of the distribution - also lamented psychology’s preoccupation with disorder and dysfunction:
‘The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side. It has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illness, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his full psychological height. It is as if psychology has voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction, and that, the darker, meaner half’ (Maslow, 1954, p.354).

We would argue that positive psychology has always been with us. We are equally sure that many coaching psychologists reading this special issue will proclaim, if only to themselves - ‘but this is what I have believed - and practiced - all along.’ This is a common refrain that we hear often. Yet we also suggest that it is only with the advent of the positive psychology movement as we know it today that we have developed a shared language and acknowledged heritage that allows us to lift up and celebrate what we do know about what makes life worth living, as well as carefully delineating the areas where we need to do more. If nothing else, positive psychology has served to give a voice and identity to the things that many of us always did, but that often went unrecognised (see Linley & Joseph, 2004).

How might one define positive psychology? A simple definition that is often used is ‘the scientific study of optimal human functioning,’ but here are some other ways of understanding this approach:
‘The field of positive psychology at the subjective level is about valued subjective experiences: well-being, contentment, and satisfaction (in the past); hope and optimism (for the future); and flow and happiness (in the present). At the individual level, it is about positive individual traits: the capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future mindedness, spirituality, high talent, and wisdom. At the group level, it is about the civic virtues and the institutions that move individuals toward better citizenship: responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work ethic.’ (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, p.5).
‘What is positive psychology? It is nothing more than the scientific study of ordinary human strengths and virtues. Positive psychology revisits ‘the average person,’ with an interest in finding out what works, what is right, and what is improving…positive psychology is simply psychology.’ (Sheldon & King, 2001, p.216).
‘Positive psychology is the study of the conditions and processes that contribute to the flourishing or optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions.’ (Gable & Haidt, 2005, p.104).

There is much in these definitions that resonates with what we do - and what we believe - as coaching psychologists. Writing about perspectives on the integration of positive psychology and coaching psychology, Linley and Harrington (2005) identified three primary reasons as to why positive psychology and coaching psychology ‘fit.’ First, they are both concerned with the enhancement of performance and wellbeing. Second, they focus on the plus side of human nature, and thus to an extent at least, have challenged practitioners to think about their fundamental assumptions about human nature. And third, they both attend to people’s strengths and what they do well (see also Linley & Harrington, 2006).

At a superficial level, the view has often been expressed that positive psychology can provide the research backbone for the practice of coaching psychology. We see this relationship as much more symbiotic than this view may suggest. There are undoubtedly instances, and probably many instances, where positive psychology research findings can inform the practice of coaching psychology. But we do not need to claim, or even suggest in any way, that positive psychology has the monopoly on the research underpinning coaching psychology. Indeed, a stark differentiator between coaching and coaching psychology is the psychological base from which coaching psychology explicitly draws its principles. That said, there are of course areas where positive psychology has a lot that it might offer the practicing coaching psychologist. One example could be the positive interventions work reported by Seligman, Steen, Park and Peterson (2005) who demonstrated that having people use their strengths in new and different ways each day, and writing down three good things that had happened to them each day, both produced significant increases in happiness at a six-month followup. This research, rigorously conducted, lends itself easily to applications within the coaching psychology engagement. But the information-flow needs to go both ways: academic researchers are often quite detached from the practical applications of their work, and as practicing coaching psychologists we should ensure that part of our agenda should be about influencing the nature and direction of academic research to make it more applied and relevant to real world, everyday issues. One of the most powerful ways of doing so is at the grassroots level through collaboration between academic researchers and applied practitioners tackling questions of mutual interest together. The academic brings a wealth of background knowledge and theory, while the practitioner has a handle on what can really be used in practice. Any readers looking for a template of how to understand the different drivers of academic research and applied research are recommended to consider the pragmatic-pedantic-populistpuerile matrix provided by Anderson, Herriot and Hodgkinson (2001). While this was developed in relation to organisational psychology, it is readily applicable to any other researcher-practitioner interface.

Our aim for this special issue of the International Coaching Psychology Review was to collate a series of contributions that speak to the positive psychology - coaching psychology interface, and thereby to provide coaching psychologists with a first foray into the different ways in which positive psychology can be applied in coaching psychology practice. In the first article, Sulynn Choong and Kathryn Britton explore how the MBTI and the VIA Inventory of Strengths relate to each other. Many coaching psychologists will be familiar with the MBTI, but perhaps less so with the VIA Inventory of Strengths, and this article shows how using them both can add real value to understanding the preferences and strengths of your clients. Suzy Green, Anthony Grant and Jo Rynsaardt then explore the use of evidence-based life coaching for senior high school students as a means to build hardiness and hope. High school can be a time of transition and turmoil for many students, so building their psychological resources to deal with this through coaching is a valuable activity. Karen Wesson and Ilona Boniwell explore the implications of flow theory for coaching psychology, and demonstrate how flow as a positive psychological concept can be both created and harnessed through the coaching psychology engagement. Building on this theme of peak performance, Cristina Rolo and Daniel Gould report on an intervention study that was designed to enhance hope in student athletes. Clearly, enhancing athletic performance is an area where coaches (in the traditional sense of the word) and psychologists have been very active, and their article shows how work is now beginning to apply some core positive psychology tenets and theories to real world settings. Daniel Burke and Alex Linley continue this theme of application of theory to coaching, with a study that examines the effects of coaching on self-concordance. They show that even short coaching interventions can increase goal self-concordance, which in other work has also been related to goal attainment and well-being (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999: Sheldon & Houser-Marko, 2001). As such, this linkage may be one through which coaching has its positive effects. Taking a variant on the question of ‘what works for whom?’ Jordan Silberman examines if people can accurately self-select the interventions that may be most appropriate for them. His data indicate ‘no,’ which suggests an important role for the informed expert coaching psychologist, who can make recommendations based on the state of the empirical literature. Moving the perspective slightly wider, the last empirical article is from Dana Arakawa and Margaret Greenberg who explored the role of optimism and positivity in managers and the implications for performance. They found that optimistic managers who operated from a strengths focus achieved better results, and examine the implications of this work for coaching psychologists who are working with executives and within organisations. The special issue then includes a series of short interviews with leading positive psychology figures (Ilona Boniwell, Chris Peterson, Shane Lopez, Robert Biswas-Diener, Stephen Joseph), exploring their perspectives on the further integration of positive psychology and coaching psychology. Our concluding article then reviews the contributions to this special issue and in the spirit of researcherpractitioner integration, draws out some of the pragmatic applications of the studies that have been presented. The special issue closes with three positive psychology book reviews that are designed to further introduce the reader to positive psychology, and especially the applications of positive psychology to coaching psychology. We hope that the special issue inspires you with the possibilities that positive psychology research and practice offers for coaching psychology, as well as enthusing you as coaching psychologists to engage with academics in positive psychology and more broadly to shape the research agenda so that the research being conducted is more aligned with, and supportive of the directions for our practice, both now and into the future.

P. Alex Linley
Centre for Applied Positive Psychology,
Barclays Venture Centre,
University of Warwick Science Park,
Coventry CV4 7EZ, UK.

E-mail: [email protected]
www.cappeu.org

Carol Kauffman
Coaching Psychology Institute:
Positive Psychology in Action.

Harvard Medical School,
22 Mill Street, Suite 405,
Arlington, Massachusetts, 02476, USA.

E-mail:
[email protected]
www.positivepsychologycoaches.com

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