Putting your strengths to work by Jeremy McCarthy for Positive Psychology News Daily OK, so you_ã_ve taken the VIA Survey to determine your character strengths. And after reading one (or several) of Tom Rath_ã_s books on strengths and leadership, you_ã_ve taken the Strengthsfinder 2.0 test to...
The discipline of positive psychology is advancing at an incredible rate and the good thing is that it means we're rapidly understanding more about what happiness is and how we can have more happiness in our lives! We're also understanding more and more that happiness...
by Joe Robinson for the Huffington Post Fifty percent of your happiness is genetic. Sorry, you can't do much about that. Another 10 percent comes from your circumstances (geography, family, health). So that leaves you with 40 percent of your potential happiness that you can actually...
Within the positive psychology community many have a love-hate relationship with happiness. By that, I mean that there are some positive psychologists who're concerned that the word happiness is too vague and means too many things to too many different people. Some of these academics...
I've writtem much about happiness at work before but mostly (for obvious reasons) my focus has been on psychological and interpersonal variables. That is, I typically look at happiness at work from the perspective of the individual, the team or sometimes the organisation...
A brief, semi random collection of reasons to feel better. from the New York mag _㢠Fifty-eight percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 say immigrants strengthen the country. _㢠Last year, Standard & Poor_ã_s downgraded nearly four times as many companies as it upgraded. This year, it_ã_s...
Just pause and think for a minute on the heading and sub-heading of this blog posting...
by Mary J Loftus for the Huffington Post One of the things that most irritated me about Sunday school -- and there were many, including the fact that I had to wear tights, keep quiet and not ask why God wasn't a girl -- is that...
Another interesting article from Positive Psychology News Daily Would you knowingly engage in behaviors that you know would lead to a cascade of negative health events? After her husband died, Shirley regularly declined invitations to go places with friends by saying, _ã–Oh, my husband really wouldn_ã_t...
Now here's a really interesting article from Forbes...
According to a recent survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM_ã_s Institute for Business Value, CEOs identify _ã–creativity_ã as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future. The link may initially not be intuitive, but spawning creativity in the workforce comes back to corporate social responsibility. While corporate responsibility is often used in reference to the organization_ã_s interaction with outside communities, it also touches upon how members of the organization are actually treated and valued. How they are treated determines both self-perception and performance within the workplace and is correlated with life happiness in general.
Writers, business leaders and psychologists have long hypothesized about the link between work environments and creativity, and the challenges in harnessing natural human creativity to optimize performance. One scientist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, explains the optimal state of mind, when creativity is at its highest, as _ã–flow._ã Flow is when our minds and bodies are stretched to their limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something worthwhile and difficult.
The link between happiness and creative _ã–flow_ã is explained in a Scientific American article that chronicles the results of a study published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The study found that _ã–With positive mood, you actually get more access to things you would normally ignore_ã_ Instead of looking through a porthole, you have a landscape or panoramic view of the world._ã In other words, the results suggest that happiness makes people more receptive to information of all kinds, and therefore results in greater creative thought processes. (Note: it can also lead to greater distraction, so read the article).
