FLIP in Ella’s Kitchen
There's no rest for the wicked and as we near the end of the year organisations are still busy planning everything from Brexit to budgets.
As Bob Dylan once said, the times they are a-changin' and we all need to keep an open mind, be prepared and help others be resilient.
Ella's Kitchen, which regularly tops best companies to work for lists - has decided to be pro-active about the uncertain year ahead and is prepping teams early.
The company is training champions to chat to people and help them look forward with a growth mindset.
Our Laughology train-the-trainer programme is great for this and we have partnered with Ella's Kitchen to give them FLIP coaching and growth mindset development tools.
Our train-the-trainer team delivered two days of workshops at the company and investigated action learning sets, talking groups and drop-in sessions. The team helped Ella's champions understand how to have conversations using FLIP, which is a useful tool to help people look at situations in a different light and be ‘solution-focussed’.
Being solution-focussed is about helping people focus on the solution, rather than dwelling on an issue or the cause of a problem. For example, rather than focussing on what can't be done, solution-focussed people will focus on what can be done.
FLIP can be used as a trigger word in chats, to help people break out of their ‘thinking rut’.
FLIP stands for:
Focus.
When a situation happens, we tend to focus on how it feels and what went wrong, rather than how it could feel and what can be done. Reframing, through focusing on the possibilities is a powerful tool that helps people get what they want from a situation. We know that helping people understand where their focus needs to be can encourage them to think and behave in ways that are more productive.
Language.
Language decides how we contextualise a situation. The use of positive or negative language can change the way people feel about things. Using language in a wise way determines how people react to situations and move forward from them.
Imagination.
Our imagination can change the way we think about a situation. We can be creative and solve problems, or negatively focus on the issues. Our ability to generate ideas in work and life is essential for success, improving innovation, solution-focused thinking and happiness.
Pattern breaking.
We all form patterns in the way we think and view the world. These manifest themselves in our behaviours. Recognising what you are doing to sustain a behaviour, through the way you think or the language you use, is an important part of forming new, more positive behaviours.
As we absorb information from our environment, we create our own perception of that information. We connect an emotional feeling to our created perception (e.g. happy, sad, disappointed, confident, etc). These feelings affect the way we speak, communicate and act, which in turn influence reactions towards us.
Our perceptions can be distorted by previous experiences. We interpret situations negatively or positively, depending on factors such as other people’s involvement, personal history and environment.
FLIP allows us to influence how people perceive a problem they’re facing. By using FLIP, we can move away from negative emotions that may be stopping us from thinking about an issue constructively.
FLIP it thinking is unique to Laughology and used in organisation such as O2, Ella’s Kitchen and Vodaphone as a coaching tool to help with change and transformations.
