Building this skill for your own personal development and developing management skills to support others 

In all aspects of our lives, we will face difficult situations at different times.  Having the opportunity to explicitly practise and apply staying positive skills allows you to reflect upon what works best for you in times of challenge, and how this understanding can be used to support others.

Developing tactics and strategies to overcome setbacks is key for your own personal and professional development, and effectively supporting others to stay positive strengthens management skills.  Being equipped to manage emotions and remain motivated, and to motivate others, even when facing setbacks, is also one of the most important employability skills.

When faced with a problem, experiencing conflict, or beset by unexpected changes whilst working to a deadline, it is likely that we will feel negative emotions.  Our natural response to facing setbacks can be to stop working on that task, or to give up.  

How we manage emotions effectively plays a crucial role in our personal development and it’s important to build a staying positive mindset which equips us with the strategies to remain motivated.  

Identifying the opportunities in difficult situations and sharing these, where appropriate, with others can also support those around you to stay positive and is instrumental in developing effective management skills.  

How can I manage my own emotions to support others to stay positive?

The skill of Staying Positive is defined in the Skills Builder Universal Framework as the ability to use tactics and strategies to overcome setbacks and achieve goals.  

The Framework equips individuals as part of personal development to manage their emotions effectively, remain motivated, and ultimately to motivate others, even when facing setbacks.

When building your management skills, you’ll want to be able to support others to stay positive. We should start by considering the effect of our own emotional responses on others.   This builds on our understanding of how we manage our own emotional responses to setbacks, and to identify future opportunities and adapt accordingly.  

When managing your responses effectively to support others, there are key areas to consider:

• Why you might have to support others to stay positive
  
  Shifting from how you stay positive for yourself to how you model and support others to stay positive, consider the range of situations in which you might need to support others to stay positive. This could be a setback that affects your team, an individual that has received bad news or had a bad experience, or if there are wider challenges affecting people you know or care about. 

•   How emotions spread
  
  We can be affected by the emotions that other people feel.  If a person enters a room in a good mood, it might cheer people up; on the flip side, it is equally possible for an individual to introduce negative emotions like anger, sadness or fear into a group setting, simply by showing those emotions themselves.
  
  The good news is that whilst negative emotions can spread quickly, their spread can be stopped if you consciously decide to model a different emotion. Critically, that is not about suppressing emotions or denying that they exist as this can also be harmful over time if you cannot express how you feel about something.  

It’s possible to acknowledge negative emotions and the situation that has caused them without those emotions taking over. It takes a conscious effort to stop that feeling and to rationalise that something has gone wrong but, actually, there is plenty that is going well and that the setback is contained.

• How to manage negative and positive emotions: ask yourself
  – What is the effect of what has happened?
  – Does it make it any more likely that other bad things will happen?
  – Does it make it any more likely that other good things will happen?
  – What are the practical things I can do to improve the situation?
  – What is the next best alternative to our current plan? 

This sort of self-coaching can play an important role in you recognising, and then managing, your own emotions.  

Once you have rationalised your emotional response, you can also take others on that journey of acknowledging and celebrating achievements, which helps keep a balance by not allowing emotions to completely take over.  This approach can have a considerable positive impact on your own personal and professional development, as well as the development of others.

How can I support others to identify opportunities and create plans?

When you feel confident to help others to stay positive through managing your own emotional responses to events or news, you can start to think about how to help them identify opportunities and coach them to build plans around these.

You can coach and support others to identify opportunities in difficult situations for themselves.  Coaching in this context is about facilitating and supporting others to reach conclusions for themselves.  

There is good evidence that individuals who identify opportunities for themselves are more likely to be invested in making them successful.  This about them having a greater sense of ownership over the opportunities they have identified.

Critically, coaching is not about being directive, but rather about helping to structure someone to reach the answer by themselves.

You might find these reflective questions useful to help structure conversations around staying positive, whether as a line manager, colleague, friend or family member:

• What is the role of a coach?
• How can coaching support others to stay positive?
• What mindset does somebody need to be in so that they can be effectively coached?
• How can you support them to get into that mindset?

To get to this productive mindset, you should prioritise acknowledging the setback and the individual’s emotional response to that setback, helping them address ongoing sources of upset or distress before boosting motivation by focusing on what has already been achieved, and the positive side of what might come later.  

Once you have helped them to get back to a place of calm, you should ask whether they are ready to explore some of the opportunities in the situation.

In recent years, coaching has become more common in many workplaces – but there will also be times in your personal life when being able to support others to stay positive and look for opportunities will be a valuable skill to have.

How to practise this skill step

To best practise this area of your staying positive skillset, look for opportunities for real life application. You could:

• Create a set of question cards to prompt your questioning when seeking to support others: What has been disappointing /upsetting / angering about that happening? What is still going well, though? Are you ready to talk about some of the opportunities that might exist? What do you see as some of the opportunities that there are? Are there any that excite you? What are the potential gains and the risks of some of those opportunities? Which would you like to pursue further?
  ‍
• Continue to develop your listening skills – this is an essential skill if you are to support others to stay positive. Actively listen to the answers that friends, family or colleagues give to any questions you ask. Try to ask more open questions.

Remember coaching is about actively listening and helping the individual to find the answer for themselves. It is not about telling them what to do.

The Skills Builder Universal Framework also supports you to build and apply your leadership skills when supporting others through coaching to develop your management skills further.