Articles in Hope
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 / …
I’ve been thinking about how to sum up the main topics of positive psychology. Many people think of Chris Peterson’s three word summary, “Other people matter.” This phrase, powerful in its brevity, …
When we chose the theme of relationships as a topic for PPND this month, I asked myself, what is true love? I would describe myself as a (covert/genuine/tentative-but-rational … Heathcliff!!) Romantic, so was a bit …
Last week I saw (from the first row, and in 3-D) Disney Pixar’s Up , an animated film about life, adventure, and friendship. The film certainly pulled on my heart strings in a very “other-people-matter” positive-psychology way. The film also speaks to this month’s theme of fun and play. [...]
Growth occurs not through the suffering itself, but through the individual’s struggle and reconstruction of shattered assumptions. Many people then make dramatic life changes and shift priorities based on this new way of seeing the world. In doing so, they can also change the world.
I’ve recently become aware an important question to many of my coaching clients: “What are the skills for resilience I can use throughout my life?” I’ve been thinking about this in the context of …
Who isn’t affected by the financial melt-down these days?
As a coach, I hear daily about the psychological, physical, emotional and relational impact of rocky financial times. Adversity is part of life, but if your …
The “Positive Psychology Pyramid” is an approach to organizing positive psychology research to help those seeking “better” to move forward. What’s your metaphor or organizing image? (For those who like an organic theme, see the end of the post.)
When did we start calling kids “self-motivated” if they responded to someone or something outside themselves? Doesn’t the word “self” mean that it comes from the individual himself? Is someone truly self-motivated if they are doing something to get a reward from someone else? Teens who are not top students may appear to be unmotivated when we look only at their school performance.
I have had the good fortune of being born into a large, Italian family, for which I am utterly and completely grateful…. Communitas is a ritual-building process that inspires and revitalizes while reaffirming relationships within a community, state University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his colleagues. According to Anthropologist Victor Turner, building communitas is an essential step to activating a community to healthy family functioning, healthy child development, and other dimensions of well-being.

