Dave Shearon

Parental involvement is widely recognized as important to the creation of great schools. This past week I was working with a group of school superintendents and one shared this story…

Do you dare to be an office Pollyanna?” It’s just a brief comment about a story in a Quebec paper I read while traveling, but I was positive about the concept. I still am, but I am also more attuned to the daring aspects of such an effort.

I’ve been a bit of a grump today.  Not a bad, grump.  Just some tacky, negative comments.  I said as I started out this morning that I was feeling that way,…

The design for the opera house was the result of a world-wide competition in 1955-56. Jørn Utzon, a Danish architect submitted the winning design, but it did not meet the criteria of the competition and had drawings described as “simple to the point of being diagrammatic.” One widely reported story about the selection process relates that Utzon’s design was discarded in the initial pass and only reconsidered when a late-arriving judge demanded to see the discarded entries, recognized its genius, and brought it back into consideration.

Psychological Capital introduces both a significant stream of research and an important framework for the application of positive psychology to organizations.

Over the last year, I have started to develop my stories. At first, they simply came out as part of speaking to audiences of lawyers about positive psychology. Eventually, I realized that I was just doing what many of those I admire do also.

I have recently read Susan Segerstrom’s Breaking Murphy’s Law and was surprised to learn that much of her research has been with law students. Dr. Segerstrom focuses on the relationship between optimism and immune system functioning…

This is not a book review; it is a book note for Educating People to Be Emotionally Intelligent.

Jon Haidt in The Happiness Hypothesis suggests the metaphor of a rider on an elephant for how we live life.  The rider is our conscious thoughts (and emotions).  The elephant…

Children give wonderful gifts. Our boys have given Teresa and I an appreciation for baseball, “stop for the fun of it”, archery, and lots of great times reading to them at night. Both of them enjoyed being read to long after they no longer needed that reassurance and ritual to go to sleep. Toward the end of our time reading to each of them, we were reading books that we all enjoyed, but they could not get read for themselves. The earliest of the Harry Potter books was such a book for my younger son. […]

My older son graduated from Emory a few weeks ago, moved to Louisville, and started his Masters in Teaching. And as we look forward with him to this change in his life, I have been thinking about what I have learned from Positive Psychology and about advice I can give to my sons. One key point is summed up in the following story my mother used to tell me. It’s called, “The Story of the Three Bears”, and it goes like this:

What are the sources of poor lawyering? Open the article to see the response from sixty participants in a CLE ppresentation I made last week. Why does this matter?

Last Tuesday, the 10th, I participated in a continuing legal education (CLE) program that was the exception to the rule that “war stories” are not good CLE. “War stories” are anecdotes about a trial or other experience in representing a client. Often, these stories, while entertaining, primarily serve to make the storyteller look good. They lack educational value.

K-12 education is under the microscope in this country, and leaders in the field feel the pressure. Next month, I’ll be joining with Bill Robertson to present a one-day seminar to school superintendents. Two PPND authors have just made points in their posts that I have discussed with Bill as we prepare for that seminar.

On the first day of the first ever Masters in Applied Positive Psychology program, Chris Peterson suggested that a key to positive psychology can be found in these three words: “Other people matter.” Here is a case in point. My comments follow.

David N. Shearon, JD, MAPP. Dave Shearon focuses on changing legal education, lawyering, and K-12 education through helping others apply positive psychology.   Dave is a frequent CLE speaker on…