Florentino is in his mid-forties, and has worked for a fortune 500 company for the last ten years. For the first six, he worked hard and stayed late. However after several small events that caused him to question his role in the organization, he was passed over for a promotion. No one acknowledged his work, or talked with him about his progress. While he continued to do the minimum necessary for his job, by all measures, Florentino was disengaged and unhappy. How did he change that?

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 Biswas-Diener’s …

This semester I taught positive psychology at North Carolina State University.  After our studies of, and exercises on, “savoring” one student lost 20 pounds by changing her relationship with food. Another, who reported she …

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living.
To which philosopher Iris Murdoch replied, “Lighten up, Socrates!” Well, I am paraphrasing a little. What Murdock really said was that people can lead moral lives …

Wishes touch on so many aspects of positive psychology. That is because wishes tell us something about what it means to be human. They frame for us our vision of what is important – both those things that are “big I” Important that give us meaning and purpose, as well as the little pleasures and comforts that ease and aide us in our enjoyment of life. Wishes help us define a vision of what is possible and show us what life could be.

How can our children develop these sort of empathic bonds with others if their interactions are with a screen rather than real-life, flesh-and-blood people? Photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand had an idea. While stranded in Mali in the 1980’s, Arthus-Bertrand spent an evening listening to another man’s life story. [...]

Sometimes I feel like I have this life-thing all figured out. The roof leaks: no problem. The dog pees on the Christmas presents: primo-fodder for our holiday letter! But then there are other days … I catch a glimpse of cockroaches scurrying away as I crack open the cabinet doors, and it DOES bother me. I stress about them all day.

When, at 39, I was trying to decide whether to pursue training in positive psychology , I made for myself all the “practical” objections. I was already a successful lawyer, had a wife, kids, …

I have always been drawn to the quote by Friedrich Nietzsche that “Freedom is to struggle with no hope for reward.” There a great deal of courage in that line. There is comfort in the …

A poet and lawyer, Sean Doyle, MAPP ‘07, JD, offers strengths-based consulting for organizations. He also acts as an adviser and confidant to people about their personal sources of joy, how they want …