Resilience

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…

In a special lecture preceding this year’s first International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) World Congress in Philadelphia, Martin Seligman laid out his vision of a new field called positive education.…

I am on the move again for the fifth time in my adult life. As I am a New Yorker, my moves have always had a certain “Woody Allen-esque” quality…

The U.S. Army today issued a press release about the development of a master resilience training program in cooperation with the University of Pennsylvania Resilience program. A Fortune column reports…

Parents, if you have been waiting for a positive psychology book that is results-oriented but easy to digest, Dr. Timothy J. Sharp’s new book, 100 Ways to Happy Children: A…

If your teen is in the bottom 80% of the class, you may have been told – or thought– that she is “an underachiever” (a polite way of saying lazy or dumb). Underachiever compared to what? Compared to the narrowly-defined measures of school performance or compared to the abilities that will help her to thrive in life?

In my opinion, your child is not under-achieving. I think your child is under-appreciated.

The strength of Endurance belongs with the virtue Courage. With Endurance, people respond patiently and with acceptance to things they cannot change.

At last month’s IPPA Congress, I was inspired by Lord Richard Layard’s comment, “The highest thing in life is to uplift the spirit.” Unfortunately, not everyone we work with uplifts our spirits. Harvard Business Review recently featured a short article, “How toxic colleagues corrode performance.” What can be done about toxic colleagues?

Cruised any politics related web sites recently? Seen any angry, sarcastic, personal attacks wrapped in "humor"? I suspect that for many participants, there are very real consequences. What to do? I have two suggestions, one from my political experience and one from that great political philosopher, Walt Disney.

Chronic stress has been linked to many health disorders, including depression, heart disease, cancers, and Alzheimer’s disease. But the stress response engages a number of adaptive, complementary systems fine-tuned to find a balance between stress and solace. Take pleasure seriously, and sow it generously.

My colleague John Buckley used to think of resilience as a suit of armour. Within the armour you feel invincible, safe in the knowledge that nothing can penetrate your defense system. It may be that resilience isn’t an extraordinary quality at all — that we all have the capacity to bounce back.

Based on various research and studies, I summarize here the various research and studies into a 7-mechanism model of resilience that offers a comprehensive picture of a state of resilience that leads to optimal performance with manageable stress.

We tend to think of resilience as an individual quality — I or you, he or she. However if you are surrounded by happy, hopeful, optimistic, resilient individuals, you are also likely to manifest those qualities. In Joker One by Donovan Campbell, a Marine lieutenant led a platoon of 40 men in Ramadi, the site of some of the heaviest sustained fighting in Iraq.

I was at Weaver Street Market, waiting for a friend who was a little bit late for lunch, and caught sight of an older gentleman sitting at an outdoor table with his white-tipped cane under his seat. Around his neck, he wore a sign that said, “I like company. How about a 5-minute conversation?”

I’ve recently become aware of a question that’s important to many of my coaching clients: “What are the skills for resilience I can use throughout my life?” I’ve been thinking about this…

I watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart religiously. Instead of CNN, Fox or MSNBC, my news source of choice is Comedy Central. Why, you may ask? Don’t I want to be a well-informed citizen? Shouldn’t I be reading the New York Times and taking things seriously. Maybe. But in today’s environment, I desperately need a laugh.

What is a good amount of eustress in a flourishing person? Eustress helps us increase our skills and confidence and gives us the frisson of adrenalin as we set ourselves goals that we feel mildly terrified by. But there’s a fine line between eustress and distress. In fact, physiologically the body knows no difference between the two, but psychologically there is a world of difference.

It was not an easy decision for his parents to let Blake leave high school and it continues to be a hard choice. They are attacked by critics —most of whom they’ve never met. If the Peebles had taken the expected path and insisted that their son stay in school, no one would be giving them flack – even if their son was bored, depressed or learning less. Many would tell them they were doing the right thing.