Coaching practices for Broaden and Build Practices

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Broaden and Build Practices, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• We keep piling new initiatives on top of old ones we’ve outgrown but never stopped, so the team is overloaded and there’s no room to start anything fresh
• My practice has gotten comfortable
• My attention defaults to what’s missing and what’s wrong, and even when I try to be grateful it’s the same rote list
• When I run the whole thing end to end, my strong parts quietly cover for my weak one, so the actual bottleneck never gets touched
• My brief is so broad — "make it better," "help everyone" — that the possibilities feel infinite and I keep landing on bland, generic answers, because the problem is too big and vague for any specific, alive solution to come into focus.

Practices that may help

1. Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical
   Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions — joy, curiosity, love, gratitude, awe — temporarily broaden thought-action repertoires (making thinking more flexible and creative) and, over time, build durable psychological resources including resilience, social connection, and cognitive flexibility. The theory is supported by experimental evidence for the broadening effect; the longer-term building effects are primarily observational.
2. Use Start-Stop-Keep reviews to drive continuous improvement
   Regularly ask what the team should start, stop, and keep doing — and act on the answers.
   The Rockefeller Habits: Scaling Up with Rhythm and Focus
3. Building Positive Emotions, Made Practical
   Positive emotions can be cultivated deliberately through practices that vary what triggers them: gratitude, savoring, meaningful engagement, kindness, and awe are the most studied routes. Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory proposes that positive emotions expand thinking and build psychological resources over time — supported by observational research, though some specific claims (like the 3:1 ratio) have not replicated. The individual practices have varying but mostly real evidence bases.
4. Train at the edge of your ability
   Work on tasks just beyond what you can reliably do, not what you already do well.
   Deliberate Practice, Not Just Practice
5. Practice gratitude as a resource builder, not a mood fix
   Gratitude builds social capital and resilience when practiced genuinely — the mechanism is not just feeling good but deepening relationships and widening perspective.
   Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical
6. Use constraint-based drills to isolate one component
   Remove degrees of freedom so attention concentrates on a single weak sub-skill.
   Growth-Edge Training: Practicing at the Edge of Your Ability
7. Narrow the scope: a smaller problem space is a richer one
   Restrict the problem to a specific user, use case, or scenario — the narrower the brief, the richer the possible solutions within it.
   Deliberate Constraints, Made Practical
8. Expand the circle deliberately, not aspirationally
   Grow your circle through deep study and feedback, not by simply believing you are competent.
   Circle of Competence
9. Use a signature strength in a new way each day for one week
   Apply one of your top character strengths to a context or relationship where you don’t normally use it.
   VIA Character Strengths, Made Practical
10. Protect play and creativity as broadening-state generators
    Play is not time away from serious work — it is the state in which the broadened thinking that solves serious problems is most available.
    Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical

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