This academic year, I met a student who I will call James.  He is one of several high school and college student clients that were referred to me with new diagnoses of attention deficit disorder …

When my daughter, Lauren, chose her college, she picked-up on an aspect that didn’t jump out at me. I guess I was the only one surprised at how that played-out four years later and it made me curious: how does a college foster a service culture that stands out to a high school student?

Imagine you are in the hospital following surgery. You have 70 staples holding things together, and they hurt. Your nurse sees that you are in pain and offers to take out 5 of …

On an apparently meaningless bus drive home, Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany: “I am not as happy as I could be.” She also realized that the problem might not be the conditions of her life, per se, but with how she lived and perceived it. She wondered if she could change her life without actually changing her life, and made a year-long commitment to work on improving her happiness.

How does happiness “work?” Here are three quick stories from my own life that have given me a hint about how happiness might create good things in life.

Let’s assume you were just promoted into a management job. You know that you got the promotion because you were an excellent performer on your previous assignment, but it used your technical skills. You are worried that you do not have all the skills you need to be an excellent manager. How do you go about learning them? Where’s the best place to start?

Dear Student,
Don’t worry when people tell you it will be hard to find a job. What the doom-and-gloom folks don’t understand is that they have something as contagious as the H1N1 virus– anxiety. Like the flu, they are probably “carriers” without even realizing it. You can innoculate yourself.

What do you use your strengths in service of? Linking strengths to purpose may help you refine and clarify your own sense of purpose in life. It may also expand your sense of what your strengths can be used for. It may also increase the priority you place on strengths development and strength-related goals, and thus it may increase goal-striving and achievement.

We like to think that we are in charge of our choices. But what if making a choice or decision is based on things that we don’t notice? A new article from Song and Schwarz at the University of Michigan looks at the consequences.

Are there positive ways to combat employee negativity? Are you interested in improving personal and organizational performance and at the same time personal and organizational well-being?
Over the long Christmas / New Year / …