Resilience

On April 16, my dear friend, Linda Frank, died in a traffic accident. I’ve gone through a wide range of emotions over the last month — numbness, sadness, humor, confusion, emptiness, … But beyond my own grief, I’ve worried about her family. What do they need? How can I best be there for them? I’ve also looked around and seen many people who want to do something.

Would you send your child to a school whose schedule encouraged them to become socially inept, inattentive, overweight, depressed underachievers? Probably not. But these may be unintended side effects of…

While employers would like to think that people leave their problems at home, the reality is that most people find it challenging to turn off stressors from their personal life when they get to work. Rather than ignore the home-life/work-performance connection, we argue that employers who encourage and support healthy home lives in their employees see a better return on their salary investment.

FROM YESTERDAY: The Psychologically Healthy Workplace Conference held in Washington, DC last weekend gave everyone concrete and reliable evidence to make the topic a priority. The conference showed that creating…

The stories we tell weave moments, days, and years into a meaningful sense of life. Researchers have found that the way we tell those stories about our own lives is…

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.

Are there positive ways to combat employee negativity? Are you interested in improving personal and organizational performance and at the same time personal and organizational well-being? Over the long Christmas…

In my workshops, I find that Chinese executives are receptive to positive interventions but something about Chinese culture gets in the way of their pursuit of happiness, and until these…

A leader who wants to incorporate the findings of positive psychology into his or her enterprise must “fly high cover” for that process to give it time to happen. Last…

How would you react if an unexpected traumatic event happened at your company, university, religious group, or other organization? How would everyone around you react? How strong is the organizational…

“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…

Dear Readers, We have been racing the clock to get the first book in the Positive Psychology News Series out in time for the holiday season. It is now available…

It’s all by matter of connection. Empathetic relationships are what predict successful lives. George Vailliant has shown this in the Harvard Men’s Study of Adult Development and in his PPND…

In the paper, Communicating and Philosophizing about Authenticity and Inauthenticity in a Fast-Paced World, Becky DeGreeff, Ann Burnett and Dennis Cooley at North Dakota State University suggest that living life…

The Army News Service formally announced last week that the U. S. Army has a new approach it hopes can prevent the psychological effects of warfare from turning into post…

Detecting Icebergs Recently, I was teaching “Detecting Icebergs”, one of the resilience skills described in The Resilience Factor.  The participants had practiced the skills themselves, and we were talking about…

Outcomes of Workplace Bullying I was a victim of workplace bullying, along with 70% of the American workforce according to Schat and colleagues. After five years of abuse I’d lost…

When we chose the theme of relationships as a topic for PPND this month, I asked myself, what is true love? I would describe myself as a (covert/genuine/tentative-but-rational … Heathcliff!!)…

The new school year brings renewed hopes and aspirations for both students and teachers. It is an opportune time for teachers to appeal to the strengths of their students to…