2008
It was 1976. I was in the fifth grade. The fifty-yard dash record for Lake Bluff Elementary School in Shorewood, Wisconsin was set in the mid 1950s. I had a chance to break it. I walked past my classmates and stepped up to the starting line. I looked at my gym teacher, Mr. (Buddy) Wolf. He blew his whistle and I took off running. I pumped my legs and arms as fast as I could. 6.5 seconds later I leaned into the finish line and I heard the click of Mr. Wolf’s stop watch. I turned around just as fast as I could to hear Mr. Wolf say: “You just broke the school record!”
2008
“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
A birthday is a special day for many of us. We all make wishes on our birthdays. Yet it seems that this is more of a ritual as most […]
2008
By Dave Shearon
One of the great things about blogging or having a personal web site is that I can look back and find things I wrote years ago and still agree with. (The opposite is also true, though not as frequent for me, but that’s a subject for another post!)
One such post is this one […]
2008
Social contagion is a term for moods spreading from person to person. We are physically constructed to make this possible. Daniel Goleman in Social Intelligence (2007) writes about mirror neurons that fire in response to observing behavior or emotions in others. “For instance, when volunteers lay in an fMRI watching a video showing someone […]
Topics: All, Business, Positive Emotions (Positive Affect), Resilience
7
2008
“How do you propose we share positive psychology with strangers?”, a participant at one of my recent seminars asked. The question took me by surprise but in a flash, I answered intuitively “Be nice”. That succinctly covered all the ways I could think of in 2 seconds. Two weeks have passed and I think of the myriad of […]
2008
“The praise that comes from love does not make us vain, but more humble.”
J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan (1860 - 1937)
“Appreciation is a wonderful thing: It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”
Voltaire (1694 - 1778)
Today is my graduation ceremony for my Master degree, a big and significant […]
2008
I’ve been a bit of a grump today. Not a bad, grump. Just some tacky, negative comments. I said as I started out this morning that I was feeling that way, and I know I was a bit terse with my staff a time or two during the day. When I got home this evening, I was still […]
2008
If you’ve never seen a wrestling match, you’ve never seen one of the grittiest athletic spectacles known to man, and one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to watch as a nervous mother (through laced fingers over my eyes, to be honest). And if you haven’t heard about Dustin Carter, you’re about to learn […]
2008
Last summer, the journal Insulin published What people with diabetes want their caregivers to know: Development of the TCOYD patient concensus statement” based on the results of a workshop I ran at the 2004 Raleigh Taking Control of Your Diabetes conference. I’m going to look at three items from the patient consensus statement and show […]
2008
Positive Psychology Detractor Exorcised by Big Leap
In his new book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholia, Eric G. Wilson blends his experience as a sufferer of chronic sadness and as a scholar of the Romantic period and comes up with “proof” that negative emotions and experience lead to creativity. That is quite a leap!! This […]