Dave Shearon

Suppose you were the superintendent of a large urban school system. Or the commanding general of the most powerful army in the world? What if you were me, with the…

Positive psychology is a science, and scientists count and measure. In thinking about how to improve personal well-being or the well-being of a relationship or group, it helps to ask what you can count and how counting might help. Here are some areas to consider.

“Nobody ever changes anyway.” I suspect that many of us had at least a flicker of agreement with these words. And yet we are all changing all the time. Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey present a model that shows why people have resistance to change in their book, Immunity to Change. hey also offer ways to melt the resistance in yourself and in groups.

How does happiness “work?” Here are three quick stories from my own life that have given me a hint about how happiness might create good things in life.

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…

Martial Virtues by Charles Hackney, PhD, is an obvious gift for anyone who practices the martial arts.  Anyone in a high-conflict profession can relate to it,lawyers, for example.  For all…

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…

When I speak to lawyers at continuing legal education (CLE) events, I often mention that we do not accredit topics such as resilience, optimism, energy, strengths, etc., because we want…

Chris Peterson has written that the study of positive institutions is “the acknowledged weak link of positive psychology.” Law is certainly a key institution that could use some reshaping based…

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.

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.

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.)

Love is … . From that sentence stub, poets, philosophers, and psychologists have taken flight. Now, Barbara Fredrickson gives us a new angle on love in her book Positivity. She also discusses the 10 positive emotions that her research subjects have recounted as most common. Love, while most common, is listed last — and it has to be.

I have been thinking about what it takes for folks to change, especially the kind of change positive psychology focuses on — from ok to good or good to better: from +1 or +2 in well-being to +4, +5, or +6.

Law schools are beginning to take seriously the challenge to produce lawyers both capable of good lawyering and good relationships, skilled advocacy, and without the fuel of anger, contempt, derision, scorn, and humiliation. Further, we are finding that many practicing lawyers both want to change and can change.

American public schools have been under increasing pressure since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983. That pressure has ratcheted up continuously over the last quarter century. This post is about the most effective leadership for school systems under pressure from No Child Left Behind from a positive psychology perspective.

A few weeks ago, my wife, Teresa, my younger son, Patrick, and I had the opportunity to go salmon fishing with Captain Wayne Michie on the Mickey Finn out of Horseshoe Bay, Vancouver, Canada. It was an overcast day, sprinkling rain now and then, and we didn’t get so much as a nibble. It was great fun, and I got a lesson in happiness from Wayne.

This article is about morale and organizations helping us change for the better. Have you got any stories about great morale in an organization and its effect on the members?…

Maybe it’s because I live in Nashville (that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it!), but I keep finding great expressions of positive psychology principles in country music. One recent example is Dierks Bentley’s What Was I Thinking?.