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.

Parental involvement is widely recognized as important to the creation of great schools. This past week I was working with a group of school superintendents and one shared this story about ABC’s and parental involvement.
“ABC” stands for “Adversity-Belief-Consequences.” It is a key construct of cognitive behavioral therapy and, from a positive psychology stance, of explanatory […]

The design for the opera house was the result of a world-wide competition in 1955-56. Jørn Utzon, a Danish architect submitted the winning design, but it did not meet the criteria of the competition and had drawings described as “simple to the point of being diagrammatic.” One of the judges did a crayon sketch to use in presenting the winning design to the Permier and public. The design was so far different from the prevailing state of architecture (though not entirely without precedent), that one widely reported story about the selection process relates that Utzon’s design was discarded in the initial pass and only reconsidered when a late-arriving judge demanded to see the discarded entries, recognized its genius, and brought it back into consideration.

I have recently read Susan Segerstrom’s Breaking Murphy’s Law and was surprised to learn that much of her research has been with law students. I wasn’t the only one; I checked with one major researcher in the field and he wasn’t familiar with that aspect of her work either. Dr. Segerstrom focuses on the relationship between optimism and immune system functioning…

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 how a terrific leader or group response to a challenge improved morale? Let’s hear your story!
Christopher Peterson, a faculty member […]

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 […]

Psychological Capital (Oxford University Press, 2007), by Fred Luthans, Carolyn M. Youssef, and Bruce J. Avolio, introduces both a significant stream of research and an important framework for the application of positive psychology to organizations. The stream of research involves a construct they call “PsyCap” — a composite construct made up of self-efficacy, hope, optimism, […]

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.  The song features a young man reflecting on a night out with a wild and crazy young woman and […]

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 […]

Over the last year, I have started to develop my stories. At first, they simply came out as part of speaking to audiences of lawyers about positive psychology. Eventually, I realized that I was just doing what many of those I admire do also. Marty Seligman has the “Nicky story” and Karen […]