Change

Yesterday I sketched the 3 main topics highlighted in the Appreciative Education conference in early January. Today I want to talk the ways appreciative education relates to positive psychology, appreciative mindsets, and ways appreciative education can contribute to my own goals around creating positive universities and university experiences.

Master communicators can garner early attention to new science and simplify messaging in ways that appeal to larger non-expert audiences. I credit Arianna Huffington for helping positive psychology principles into mainstream conversation and popularizing many research findings.

No baby learned to walk by receiving a beating for its tumbles or taunts about the perfect stride. I have also learned that the best version of me is not one that is perfect, but one that is human, hopeful, fallible, energetic, and emotional.

From Paul Dolan’s talk about his new book, Happiness by Design, I gained 3 important insights to shape my thinking about happiness in the new year.

This article tries to answer some of the most burning questions about positive education with the strongest evidence currently available to support our proposition. These are the questions we tend to experience when discussing positive education with an interested but skeptical audience.

In The 3 Promises, David Pollay illustrates a beautiful way of living and sets out a simple formula to help us get there.

We intuitively know that when we sleep poorly, we are drawn to snacking and overeating. We also know that nothing gets rid of a crappy mood faster than a good sweat and that lower stress levels contribute to a better night’s sleep. So why are so many programs treating sleep, food, mood, and exercise as if they were separate topics?

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.

Earlier I described my growing awareness of fear of failure, how it became a familiar part of myself at home in my psyche. So, how do I deal with this unhelpful little shadow, my fear of being valueless?

“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!

Don’t sit there too long waiting for happiness to appear, or wondering whether now is the right time to do something. Why not take a different approach? Why not act now and reflect afterwards on whether it worked? If it wasn’t quite right, you can change it, and in the meantime you will have learned something about yourself. This way, you can act your way into a new way of being happy.

As a managing director, leadership coach, and parent, I’m always open to advice that can better inform my approach, attitude and style. After all, what might start out as helpful nuggets could easily become the guiding principles in all areas of life. Here are four gems that have made a significant difference to me as a leader over the years.

Welcome to PPND TV!  This 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…

Wonder by R.J. Palacio is about the highs and lows of a boy with a severe facial disfigurement as he attends middle school for the first time. It’s a brilliant book, very thought provoking on the nature of resilience and friendship and courage and kindness. It has led me to think about kindness, from random acts such as the challenge to NekNominations from South Africa to all the non-randomly kind people who are thoughtful, and helpful to others simply because that’s who they are.

Many sources in the wellness industry erroneously treat the concepts of disease prevention and health promotion as if they were one and the same. That’s a big mistake, and not recognizing the inherent distinction between the two undoubtedly reduces our ability to implement our health intentions. Here’s why, and how to use each.

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.

For years, the thought of joining Twitter filled me with dread. I was convinced it would upset the balance of life. My privacy would go out the window, and, worse still, I’d probably be judged, abused or ridiculed for saying the wrong thing.

I was wrong.

It turns out that Twitter is so much more than I realized. I had a pleasant surprise in store. It fuels, nay turbocharges, one of my greatest passions: learning.

The Flourishing Center, in partnership with the New York Open Center, is granting a Certification in Applied Positive Psychology (CAPP) through a 6-month program that has been approved by the New York Board of Education. The program covers all the topics that make positive psychology so fascinating, including gratitude, resilience, positive emotions, mindset, flow, strengths, and self-regulation. It also covers topics that are becoming mainstream in positive psychology, such as mindfulness, altruism, spirituality, neuroscience, and physical vitality.

What is the purpose of this book? It is about how to scale up excellence. Essentially, this isn’t about scaling up in a strictly economic sense, but rather in a psychological sense. How do we take something that’s really good, and share it to make a larger something that’s truly excellent?

The desire to fit in is a powerful shaper of behavior. In some cases, social pressures serve us well. In other cases, social pressures are lagging behind their times. Here’s how to use social pressure to extinguish four unhealthy social norms.