Be a Hero! Psychological Capital and Happiness!

Hi, I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your positive psychology expert, and this week’s video is all about something called psychological capital. Psychological capital is kind of parallel to economic capital, which most of us understand. Economic capital is simply the assets we own that we can use to grow stronger in our business, to get more of what we want. So, examples of economic capital would be like the truck that you buy if you want to open a landscaping business. That truck is an asset that helps you build the business, similarly to a building or some technology. These assets are what we build our businesses with, and they’re called capital. Capital, sometimes seen as money, it’s a tool, a resource that we can use to build the businesses we want.

Well, psychological capital is very similar. It’s the mental and emotional resources that we can use by which we build a more successful life, whether we’re talking about our workplaces, our personal lives, or our relationships. All of these areas of our lives benefit from greater psychological capital. We can look at things like we get greater job satisfaction when we have psychological capital, and that’s highly associated with life satisfaction. We have better health, personal health, we have better relationships when we have high psychological capital. So, this video is going to be all about how to get more psychological capital and a little bit about what it really is, what the fundamentals of it are. If you like this kind of content, want more positive psychology tips and more success in your life, please subscribe to my channel. You get a new video every Sunday morning.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Okay, so what is this concept of psychological capital? It just fundamentally is this idea that we have resources, mental and emotional resources, from which we can build a more successful, happier life. The research basically shows that there’s four fundamental pillars known by this acronym HERO. HERO just means H is for hope, E is for efficacy, this sense of self-efficacy, R is for resilience, and O is for optimism.

Let’s start with the first one, hope. Hope is this wonderful feeling. It’s one of the most positive emotions we can have. It’s highly motivating, and it kind of also not only has the motivational component with it, but it has this kind of way forward, this idea that I’ve got a plan or a mechanism by which I can accomplish that which I’m motivated to do. When we have that motivation and that way forward, we get this positive emotion. The emotion is what we call hope, and it’s wonderful. It fuels so much about what humans accomplish on this planet. One of the tips I can give for you, which maybe is already implicit in what I’ve said, is that goal setting, simple goal setting, takes us a long way to getting more hope. It doesn’t have to be big and grand about the whole of your life, it can be about my goal for the next hour, my goal for this week, my goal for this particular relationship. It can be task-oriented, or it can be broad, but whichever way we look at it, I highly recommend to all my coaching clients that they use that SMART acronym. SMART standing for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant to the goal, and Timely, that there’s some way I can say whether I accomplished it or not. SMART goals are fantastic. So, hope is one of the pillars of psychological capital.

The second pillar I wanted to talk about is efficacy, self-efficacy. This idea that I have a belief in myself to accomplish what it is I want to accomplish, and that belief in ourselves, in and of itself, is motivating and helps us get stuff done. So, this idea that we believe in our ability to produce results, and one of the best tips I can give you for building efficacy, is to focus and consider your past successes. What are the things that you’ve done well in your life, or that you accomplished while at work, or in relationships, and you look at how that came about, and what you’ll be finding is some of your own personal strengths. As you look at those successes and say I had these strengths that helped me accomplish these things, then you can start applying some of those same strengths and same belief systems to the thing that you want to accomplish in the future, to build your self-efficacy. So, that’s the second pillar.

The third pillar I want to talk about is resilience. Resilience is this capacity to bounce back from adversity. The more resilience we have, obviously, the better we can deal with the issues in our lives. We’ve all got issues, we’ve all got problems, that’s the human condition. The degree to which I have resiliency means I can get through those things and move on to the successes that I want to get to. One of the tips for building resiliency is to innovate, is to look to creative solutions, think way outside the box. Often when we’re in a problem, what makes the problem troublesome emotionally is this sense of stuckness that we don’t know how we’re going to get our way through it. Yet, when we get very creative, we might actually redefine the problem or recognize that there’s mechanisms by which we can overcome the problem that we hadn’t looked at in the past. Really getting creative and improvising is a wonderful way to build resiliency.

The fourth pillar for psychological capital is optimism. This is the belief that good things will happen in the future. One of the best ways to build more optimism, ironically, contrary it seems, is to accept our past. In order to be happier and more optimistic about the future, we need people to look at the past and simply accept it. Forgive ourselves for our mistakes, recognize that what was, was, and that is gone now. Our past is a fantasy that exists somewhere only in our mind. It’s not here in the here and now anymore. It’s not a reality for you right now. The more we can accept our past, feel like we’ve gotten through it, the more optimistic we can be about our future.

Now, all of these things, these four pillars, hope, efficacy, resilience, and optimism, are ways to grow greater strength, to get whatever you want out of your life. Whether it’s your personal life, your social life, or your work life, you can get more of what you want when you have high levels of psychological capital. One of the real clear indicators is simply being aware of your psychological capital, in and of itself, builds psychological capital. So, I hope this video has got you thinking a little bit about your own ability to lean on hope, lean on your belief in yourself to get things done, be resilient, bouncing back from adversity, and being optimistic about what’s going to happen in the future. All of those bits of awareness build your psychological capital.

All the time that I’m coaching clients one-on-one, we’re having discussions about these four pillars of psychological capital. Whether the client knows it or not, that’s essentially what we’re doing, is building the mental and emotional resources for people to get what they want. So, you can do that for yourself too. Consider hope, and invest in your own capital. I hope you like this content. If you do, like the video with a click, the little like button, share it with your friends and family, and subscribe to my channel. You get a new video every Sunday morning. Thanks so much for watching. Until next time, bye for now.