Pathway 2 “Engagement / Flow”

I developed a concise survey instrument to assess 6 qualities in managers from the perspective of their subordinates. Work by Steger, Rosso, and others associates these qualities with greater likelihood of employees finding their work meaningful. In a survey of 586 German employees, I found that those who found their managers high in CAARMA were more likely to experience flow, to find their work meaningful, and to

Employing tools from aviation can allow people to take charge of their lives and pilot successful futures. Embracing your life with eyes wide open allows you to design your own life story, full of appreciation, gratitude, and awe.

Mindfulness, hypnosis, and flow all involve states of deep attention, but each has a key differentiator.

Including psychological well-being in a company’s health promotion effort can take you from basic wellness to greater overall well-being. It helps us do more, and do it better.

Since a quick look at my bio reveals that I earned the first doctorate in positive psychology back in 2010, I know you are expecting a resounding yes to the question. I’d love to give that answer, but it’s not that simple. Let’s explore some questions about it.

You can easily see how a pastime like fishing can become much more than a way to relax and unwind at the end of a busy week. Sitting on the riverbank with a rod and box of bait for days at a time will eventually lead you to become fairly knowledgeable about fish and fishing, but it’s only by pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and into new realms that you’ll develop deep expertise.

Is it better to pursue an individual flow activity, such as taking on a new skill or hobby? Or is it better to find flow interacting with others? Dr. Charles Walker set out to answer these questions.

There are many good reasons why we should focus more on flow as a route to well-being. Five of the best ones are highlighted here along with several tips for making flow experiences more likely.

P is for Positive Emotion, E is for Engagement, R is for Relationships, M is for Meaning, and A is for Accomplishment. Using Martin Seligman’s alphabet of well-being, we bring you a set of ideas from our authors for flourishing during the holidays and beyond.

If you’ve ever struggled to explain positive psychology to a friend or colleague, you are ready to appreciate this short animation by Nick Standlea, a former research associate for Mike Csikszentmihalyi at the Quality of Life Research Center. It’s food for the eyes and ears.

With increasing demands in the workplace and a greater need for knowledge-based work, innovation, and creativity, organizations need to find ways to enable their employees to do and be their best. Positive psychology can show those in management roles how to use and develop human capital. It can also guide organizational policy and enable workers to make their best contributions. Positive psychology has been, and will continue to be, a boon to the workplace.

Positive psychology movies are not only the lighthearted films that inspire and elevate us, but also the movies that teach us something about the human condition, help us face suffering, and shine a light on pain and tragedy. You’ll see a mixture of both types of films in my offering of the Positive Psychology Movie Awards for 2011. This is part 1. Come back tomorrow for the awards for character strengths—and the best picture award.

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 its dark spaces, but to place more emphasis on the light spaces, I would not be telling the full story if I didn’t divulge an intense craving for what I felt out there on the water, and the truth of how I was contemplating very seriously moving to Hawaii and living out my days in a bikini.

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.

Martin Seligman presents his new model for well-being under the codename PERMA, an acronym for the five pillars of well-being that he identified after decades of research. But what about physical health? Movement, exercise, fitness, mobility, touch, and so on are all physical aspects of life that are critical to well-being, and yet they seem to be left out of the PERMA model. Did Seligman allow his psychologist experience to narrow his field of vision to only the psychological domain?