Kathryn Britton

As I ponder the ways I’ve managed my own procrastination, I keep remembering something I observed in college: I have a procrastination hierarchy, and I can manipulate it to make myself get moving on a particular task.

On Sunday morning at the IPPA World Congress, I heard Barbara Fredrickson give a keynote address about a fundamental challenge of our time, helping people build healthy habits. She suggested that finding enjoyment in healthy behaviors can create an upward spiral. Liking leads to wanting. Wanting affects the spontaneous thoughts that pop up in peoples’ minds. Those thoughts lead to small choices that affect health. Imagine my amazement when I saw her positivity spiral in action in the airport food court just a few hours later.

I first encountered Fredrike Bannink when she was leading a conference. workshop on techniques for positive supervision. I was impressed by her gentleness, her realism, her practicality, and her humor. She had seen and handled all the problems that people raised. I thought, “I would love to learn from this woman. She knows how to stimulate outstanding performance.”

Now I have the chance with this wonderful resource.

Tim Kasser made the point that materialism and well-being tend to be related to each other like two riders on a seesaw. When one goes up, the other goes down. This has implications for both individuals and society.

I highly recommend this book as a source of ideas for enhancing your leadership skills, whether you lead yourself or thousands of people. The many stories of positive outcomes will help you see that you can make a difference by making small changes. Want ideas for your small change? There are more than 70 strategies and practices clearly labeled throughout the book.

“Yet!” is a one-word positive intervention. Let’s say you’ve tried something and the results are disappointing. When you say, “I can’t do it!” good friends will chime in “Yet!” to remind you that skills are not fixed and inborn. They grow with practice and effort. So what if you can’t do it yet!

Welcome to the second episode of PPND TV. This is a companion to theinterview of Kathryn Britton that appeared earlier this month. The PPND TV interview series is an experiment inspired by TED talks. We want to bring our readers the crux of positive psychology in brief video interviews of researchers and practitioners.

Today’s guest is Senia Maymin, editor of PPND, coach, and author.

On April 11, 2014, MasonLeads and the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being presented their 5th annual Leading to Well-Being Conference. The theme this year was Thriving Together. In order…

Thinking of change efforts as experiments means that even if they don’t work, they are sources of greater self-understanding that can lead to other experiments that do work. Instead of leading to guilt that undermines the will to change, experimenting leads to new ingenuity.

The United Nations declared that March 20, 2014 will be the second International Day of Happiness. In honor of this event, the graduates of the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program at Penn are offering a free mini conference about various applications of positive psychology at work, at home, and in the community. Find out more about this free event.

If recent articles on ways to use character strengths whetted your appetite for information about pragmatic ways to use your knowledge of strengths to make a positive difference in the world, then you are ripe for Ryan Niemiec’s book, Mindfulness and Character Strengths: A Practical Guide to Flourishing. This book explores ways that character strengths can be used in mindfulness practices, and it demonstrates ways that mindfulness helps us enhance and appreciate character strengths.

What do we do when truly horrible things happen in life? Most of us can dream up a long list of disasters that could happen, and sometimes they do. What can we say to clients or friends facing major difficulties in order to help them effectively manage their moods without sounding like we are downplaying the true magnitude of their sorrow?

Setting goals is only the first step. Then we need to pursue them. Caroline Miller discusses ways that we can enhance our achievements with behaviors that support goal pursuit.

It is my great pleasure to interview Caroline Adams Miller, who spends her life helping people set and pursue the goals that lead to significant accomplishment. The first part of the interview focuses on how to set goals that drive outstanding performance. Monday I will return with her comments about how to pursue lofty goals.

Time to take another look at the IPPA Third World Congress. How wide was the coverage? Then how deep did positive psychology go when it was embodied by the Chilean miners during their long ordeal? This was one of the stories I heard when I was at the conference.

The IPPA Third Wold Congress had up to 9 parallel sessions, so everybody’s experience was different. But some events were shared by most attendees, including fresh ways to think about the future and about love.

There’s a saying that only a family will plant an oak avenue because it takes so long for it to grow, one has to be able to think of one’s grandchildren enjoying it. Prudence is taking that long view. It involves creating, assessing, and harmonizing multiple goals. It may involve making hard choices.

Dr. Paul Wong opened the second day of the 7th Biennial Meaning Conference with the statement that he had worked for 10 years to bring positive psychologists to work together with existential and humanistic psychologists in order to deepen our understanding of meaning in life.

When you think of the meaning of your life, do you think of making it, searching for it, finding it, or noticing it? Do you associate meaning with times of well-being or do you believe meaning becomes apparent primarily in times of suffering?

Last Friday I started to explore Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, by looking at some of the sections I had underlined. Today I conclude with the final set of quotations. I hope you can see just how much there is to learn from this book.