Happy New Year! How are those New Year’s Resolutions coming along? I know it has only been a handful of days, but today is ~ a good day ~ to check-in and assess how your goals are progressing or regressing and to think about ways that goal-setting theory can keep you on track.

Celebrating the new year in the past week, I have found myself engaged in (or eavesdropping on, admittedly) conversations about New Year’s Resolutions and the goals people were considering. This got me thinking about my own experiences with goal achievement and goal-setting theory.

Most people can’t imagine having an excess of free time. Yet busy people often suddenly become less busy. A semester ends, or a deadline is met, or a family member no longer needs care, or a person retires. When this happens, people aren’t necessarily happier. Life can seem suddenly empty, aimless, and without structure. How can we turn an excess of free time into greater well-being?

Research shows we are more likely to sustain positive change by changing actions and patterns than by improving external circumstances. But that assumes we do them. Stephen Schueller is the first researcher to develop a structure for recommending positive interventions based on a person’s preferences for prior interventions.

The use of imagery may be compared to a mental video/DVD library, a cataloged collection of thoughts that one has the power to create, recall, and consequently use to evoke a variety of psycho-physiological responses. We have amassed a great number of mental movies that have been stored in long-term memory. We have good movies, bad movies, and even horror movies.

Do you ever wish you were more creative? New research has shown that adults can be primed to become more creative simply by being asked to think like children.  There are many kinds of …

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 …

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.

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.

How do we choose our goals? How do we decide how to spend our time and energy and where to direct our attention? These are the topics covered in another workbook in Robert …