Focussing on what people do well is the Core of making them FLOURISH

Dr. William E. Mayer studied 1,000 US POW in a North Korean camp, despite relatively minimal physical torture, the death rate was 38% - highest in US military history. Half of them died simply because they gave up! 

They surrendered – both physically and mentally

How did this happen? 

North Koreans‟ objective was to “deny men the emotional support that comes from interpersonal relationships”. 

They used four primary tactics: 

• Informing 
• Self-criticism 
• Breaking loyalty to leadership and country 
• Withholding all positive emotional support

Informing: They gave prisoners rewards such as cigarettes when they snitched on one another. But neither the offender nor the soldier reporting the violation was punished

• The intent was to break relationship and turn the men against each

Self-criticism: To promote self-criticism, 

the captors gathered groups of 10-12 soldiers and employed a corruption of group psychotherapy

‟Each man was required to stand up in front of the group and confess all the bad things he had done – as well as all the good things he could have done but failed to do.

•  Soldiers were not confessing to their captors, but to their own peers. This subtly eroded the caring, trust, respect and social acceptance among them
• Breaking loyalty to leadership and country 
• They slowly and relentlessly undermined a soldier's allegiance to his superiors
• A Colonel instructed a soldier not to drink water from a paddy field because it was contaminated, he shot back “Buddy, you ain't not colonel anymore; just a lousy prisoner like me. You take care of yourself, and I‟ll take care of me”. He died of dysentery a few days later .40 men stood by as three of their extremely ill fellow soldiers were thrown out of the mud hut by a comrade and left to die. No one did anything to help them, because it “wasn't their job”
• Withholding all positive emotional support perhaps the most malicious tactic of them all
• The captors withheld all letters of support and encouragement. However, all negative letters – like of a relative passing away, or one in which a wife wrote that she had given up on her husband's return and was going to remarry – were promptly delivered. Captors would even deliver overdue bills from collection agencies back home
• Soldiers had nothing to live for and lost basic belief in themselves and their loved ones

• So, what really happened?

The soldiers actually called it “give up-itis”.The doctors labeled it “mirasmus”, meaning, in Mayer's words, “a lack of resistance, passivity”. If the soldiers had been hit, spat upon, or slapped, they would have become angry. Their anger would have given them the motivation to survive. But in the absence of motivation, they simply died, even though there was no medical justification for their deaths!” 

source - https://www.slideshare.net/Managewell/mental-models-for-human-centric-leadership