The Positive Side of Pain?
No life is free from challenges, stress or hardship such as losing a loved one, home or job. And when such events hit, they have the potential to change the course of someone’s future forever. But not necessarily always for the worse. Adversity can be a positive, it can recalibrate a person’s perspective for the […]
Bouncing Back
When life throws you unexpected difficulties, how do you respond? Do you wallow and let things keep you down, or do you get up and continue on with your life? Resilience is thought of as our ability to bounce back from disappointment, defeat, failure or constant change. Masten and Reed (2002) suggest that resilience can […]
The Key to Achieving Your Goals
Unlike my last post on how to set goals for 2020, this one is going to focus on motivation, which may already be dwindling for you one month into the new year, yet is crucial in helping you achieve your goals. Motivation can be a powerful force in shaping who we are and how we […]
20/20 Vision
How clear is your vision for 2020? And have you already set out your goals for the year ahead? My final post for 2018 spoke about setting goals rather than committing to resolutions as each new year approaches, and my last post for 2019 will follow a similar theme. But first, I’d like you to […]
A Smile A Day
Forget the apple. What we should be doing instead is forging a smile a day to keep the doctor away. Why? Research has found that people who smile often have increased wellbeing and experience a range of other benefits too. In one longitudinal study, researchers LeeAnne Harker and Dacher Keltner (2001) analysed the 1965 college […]
Are Your Responses Undermining Your Relationships?
Have you ever wondered what distinguishes good relationships from poor ones? It may come as a surprise to you that it often has little to do with how couples deal with problems or distress, but rather how good news is celebrated in each other’s lives. In fact, how you respond to another’s good news can […]
Where’s Your Psychological Safety At?
Are you able to be yourself at work, make mistakes, take risks, ask questions, raise problems or disagree? If your answer is yes, then psychological safety may be high within your team or workplace. Unfortunately for a lot of people, their work environment is ruled by fear; they are constantly in impression management mode so […]
It’s All About The Data
I have just spent two days looking at statistics and research methods at uni. And yes I was pretty surprised to learn that stats are an important topic of an Applied Positive Psychology degree. In psychology, there is an enormous amount of data that needs to be understood. And stats allow psychologists to measure the […]
Are you addicted to your work?
Do you feel like you never truly switch off from work? Does it feel like there is always someone to call or an email to read or reply to? Does your work feel like an addiction that you constantly need to feed? If the answer is yes to these questions, you could be suffering from […]
A Fish in Water
Did you know that a sense of belonging was part of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs? I must have forgotten this but there ‘love and belonging’ is quite clearly staring back at me as one of our five basic needs as humans, right after ‘safety’ has been obtained. For some reason I had never thought much […]