Last week, fellow MAPP graduates, Marie-Josee Shaar and Kathryn Britton published their new book: Smarts and Stamina: The Busy Person’s Guide to Optimal Health and Performance. I was honored to have been asked to write the foreword for their book. This week on Psychology of Wellbeing, I share with you the foreword I wrote for them. […]
To be successful as the CEO of a large company, you have to have skills that few other people have. You have to simultaneously be a disciplined organizer and a creative innovator. You have to drive the economics of your business while motivating and engaging the people in your workforce. You have to drive a […]
Today’s article is also published on Positive Psychology News Daily. With the release of his new book, “Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being,” Martin Seligman presents his new model for wellbeing under the codename PERMA. PERMA is an acronym for the five pillars of wellbeing that Seligman has identified through decades of research […]
The Psychology of Wellbeing blog is now one year old! I launched the blog just a few days before my son was born in May of last year (the second article on the blog was about his birth: “Why is Childbirth So Freakin’ Painful?”) I knew that if I didn’t get the blog going before […]
The tendency in holistic or “mind-body” wellbeing is to focus on the importance of mental wellbeing for physical health. Reducing stress, practicing mindfulness, and experiencing positive emotions all have an impact on our physical health. But the mind-body connection works in the other direction too. Using our bodies and developing physical fitness is also good […]
Have you ever read a book (and religious texts don’t count—that’s too easy) that you can honestly say has changed your life? For me, the one book that has changed my life more than any other is “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (say that three times fast–hint: it’s pronounced “cheek sent […]
If you have ever been on safari in Africa, then you have had an opportunity to see the incredible diversity of life that inhabits our planet. In a lush ecosystem like the Serengeti, there are many different species of animals, all incredibly different from one another, and yet all have adapted specific mechanisms or strengths […]
“Encantado” is the common greeting to someone you’ve just met in Mexico. In France, it’s “enchanté”. These words are awkward for a native English speaker to use, (as I can tell you as an American who has been studying both languages.) We just aren’t as easily “enchanted” as our more passionate international counterparts. In English, […]
It was the first week of the Master of Applied Positive Psychology graduate school program at University of Pennsylvania when I met George Vaillant, who would be one of our guest lecturers. I was excited to meet him because, working in the spa industry, I was a big fan of his book “Aging Well,” a […]
I just finished reading “What the Dog Saw” by Malcolm Gladwell. The book is typical of Gladwell’s fascinating storytelling style but unlike his other books (“Outliers,” which is about the factors leading to phenomenal success, “Blink,” which is about how ideas are formed in our subconscious, and “The Tipping Point,” which is about how ideas […]
