Goals

The need for seemingly endless snow removal has gotten me interested in self-regulation and willpower. It turns out that people who believe that they can’t take it anymore may be right! There’s new research that ties our self-control to our beliefs about it, questioning the model of self-control as a limited resource.

Happy New Year! How are those New Year’s Resolutions coming along? I know it has only been a handful of days, but today is ~ a good day ~ to check-in and assess how your goals are progressing or regressing and to think about ways that goal-setting theory can keep you on track.

Celebrating the new year in the past week, I have found myself engaged in (or eavesdropping on, admittedly) conversations about New Year’s Resolutions and the goals people were considering. This got me thinking about my own experiences with goal achievement and goal-setting theory.

Most people can’t imagine having an excess of free time. Yet busy people often suddenly become less busy. A semester ends, or a deadline is met, or a family member no longer needs care, or a person retires. When this happens, people aren’t necessarily happier. Life can seem suddenly empty, aimless, and without structure. How …

Research shows we are more likely to sustain positive change by changing actions and patterns than by improving external circumstances. But that assumes we do them. Stephen Schueller is the first researcher to develop a structure for recommending positive interventions based on a person’s preferences for prior interventions.

The use of imagery may be compared to a mental video/DVD library, a cataloged collection of thoughts that one has the power to create, recall, and consequently use to evoke a variety of psycho-physiological responses. We have amassed a great number of mental movies that have been stored in long-term memory. We have good movies, …

Do you ever wish you were more creative? New research has shown that adults can be primed to become more creative simply by being asked to think like children.  There are many kinds of creativity, including flexible thinking, elaboration of existing ideas, fluency of ideas, and originality. For the purposes of the study conducted at …

This academic year, I met a student who I will call James.  He is one of several high school and college student clients that were referred to me with new diagnoses of attention deficit disorder (ADD) and related organizational difficulties. Imagine struggling through school for 10 or 12 or more years, and then finding out …

On an apparently meaningless bus drive home, Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany: “I am not as happy as I could be.” She also realized that the problem might not be the conditions of her life, per se, but with how she lived and perceived it. She wondered if she could change her life without actually …

Dear Student, Don’t worry when people tell you it will be hard to find a job. What the doom-and-gloom folks don’t understand is that they have something as contagious as the H1N1 virus– anxiety. Like the flu, they are probably “carriers” without even realizing it. You can innoculate yourself.

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 positive psychology workbook series, Positive Motivation: A Six Week Course by Dr. Kennon Sheldon.   Sometimes these goals and choices are …

Although sports mean different things to different people, most theorists and enthusiasts would agree that physical activity and sport participation can be intrinsically valuable. We learn the joy of movement and the challenge of taking risks. We learn something about our limitations as well as our strengths. We learn to work cooperatively toward a common …

“The future is looking a whole lot better.” It was the reference to that classic film “Back to the Future” in the title of this new piece of research on future thinking that first caught my eye. It was the movie by Michael J. Fox that first made him a household name in the UK …

Are your employees eager to work for you each and every day? Few leaders can answer this question with a confident yes. Here’s a tip to help you be one of them. This technique enables you to adjust your practices so they support the leader you want to be and helps you reinforce the behaviors …

Carl, 14, can text with his cellphone in his pocket and keep up with friends on Facebook. However, he won’t look adults in the eye even though he insists he’s ‘a man’. … As children have become healthier and our society has become more complex, the age of puberty has fallen while the age of …

As a kid, did you love taking a bath every day? I didn’t. Fast forward 25 years later, taking a shower is so ingrained in my habits that I couldn’t possibly fathom the idea of going to work without a prior healthy dose of body wash. …When a man at least ten years older than …

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.)

“You must retain faith that you can prevail to greatness in the end, while retaining the discipline to confront the brutal facts of your current reality.” The Stockdale Paradox – Jim Collins