Goals

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.

Based both on my PhD research and on my personal experiences publishing a book with Margaret Greenberg, here are my research-based suggestions for taking incremental steps to reach important goals.

What are the mindsets and preconditions that are present before we can make a choice to be happy? Shawn Achor’s new book outlines the 5 hidden keys that we can all embrace and enact. In every section, Achor provides a helpful list of ways to make this exercise very practical.

“What can we as a country do to significantly improve the life chances of millions of poor children?” This is the question that reporter Paul Tough asks us to tackle with him in How Children Succeed. This book is passionately written and soundly researched. If Paul Tough is right, and I hope that he is, …

If we perceive our best selves in terms of ideal and ought standards, our sense of emotional well-being will be contingent upon our success in upholding those standards. A more adaptive approach is to distinguish our best selves from how we would ideally like to be and how we feel we ought to be.

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.

In Kim Cameron’s Deviance Continuum, designed for use in businesses and other organizations, normality or healthy performance is a mid-point between positively deviant and negatively deviant performance. Negative and positive deviance are aberrations from normal functioning, problematic at one end and virtuous at the other.

Some months ago, a colleague introduced me to the book ‘Building Happiness, Resilience and Motivation in Adolescents: A Positive Psychology Curriculum for Well-being’ by Ruth MacConville and Tina Rae, which focuses on applying the VIA strengths to adolescents rather than younger, primary age children.

As my plane landed at the Toronto Pearson International Airport on Thursday, I looked out the window and saw large letters spelling “HAPPY” on the main terminal wall. The sign struck me as a foreshadowing of the days ahead.

The APA’s research suggests that less than half of adults who recognize a needed change in lifestyle are able to maintain the change. The #1 barrier to change cited in the survey was a lack of willpower. This is good news, since scientists such as Roy Baumeister have shown that willpower can be developed with …

I sympathize if you’re one of the estimated 35% of people who have already fallen off the wagon and given up on your New Year’s Resolutions, but help is at hand. Positive psychology coaching offers some useful insights into setting goals and sticking with them that might help just help you see them through.

Goals for parents can take the shape of child-centered goals (I want my child to sleep through the night) or parent-centered personal goals that do not involve the child (I want to speak Spanish). Perhaps the greatest opportunity for flourishing, as parents, is to ensure that there is a healthy balance between the two.

James McNulty and Frank Fincham challenge a key assumption of positive psychology, that certain psychological traits and processes are inherently beneficial for well-being. They say that context, so often ignored in positive psychology research, is paramount. They suggest that well-being is determined jointly by the interplay between those characteristics and qualities of a person’s social …

Can going to the movies make you a better person? It depends on the type of positive emotions the film elicits. At last week’s IPPA World Congress, I was captivated with Lindsay Doran’s presentation on “Hollywood and Happiness.” After thirty years in the industry, she thought she knew everything there was to know about movies. …

What is passion? Is it always beneficial? Are there different kinds of passion? What actions can we take to nurture beneficial passion in ourselves, our colleagues, and our children?

As I pondered the topic for this article, I intended to focus on the purely euphoric experience of surfing, and the myriad ways in which it fulfilled a Positive Psychology purpose for me: flow, positive affect, flourishing through physical activity, and more. Just as positive psychology seeks not to reject the notion that life has …

The 23rd Annual American Psychological Science convention took place May 25-29th in Washington, DC. The theme was Convergence: Connecting Levels of Analysis in Psychological Science. This second of two reports covers presentations by psychologists Eddie Harmon, Shana Cole, and Gary Latham as well as a Wikipedia call-to-action by APS president, Mahzarin Banaji.

New research by psychologist Iris Mauss and colleagues suggests that valuing happiness itself could be self-defeating and actually lead to disappointment. They conducted two studies, one a correlational study and another that manipulated how much people valued happiness.

Drive; The Surprising Truth about What Motives Us by Daniel Pink is an intriguing and informative read for anyone interested in human motivation. I found the toolkit to be extremely rich with great ideas for rethinking motivation in the workplace. Pink helps us to understand when incentives work and when they don’t. He challenges the …