“When massive, seemingly soulless corporations recognize that the happiness of the workforce is a great predictor of long-term sustainable success, then you’ll see the societal tip occur.” ~Shawn Achor

Shawn Achor spent over a decade living, researching, and lecturing at Harvard University, and has been involved in one of the largest studies of happiness and potential at Harvard and others at companies like UBS and KPMG.  He brings a truly unique perspective of applying positive psychology to the business world.

In 1998 Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, set a new direction for the discipline:  Positive psychology. What has followed is an unprecedented publication of robust research and applied interventions.  In 2000, Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow:  The Psychology of Optimal Experience, published an article in the American Psychologist that anchored positive psychology as an evidence–based practice.

Since then the positive psychology movement has boomed.  Founded with the intention of building thriving individuals, families, and communities, proponents of the discipline can be found in popular and academic publications, working with an array of corporate entities, and teaching on college campuses throughout the world. There are even graduate degrees in positive psychology.

I’m thrilled to announce a new series we’ll be doing here on Psych Central. It’s all about creativity. Each month we’ll interview one person about their creative process and inspirations along with their tips for cultivating creativity.

To kick-start the series, we spoke with one of my all-time fave bloggers and e-course creators. (Seriously, I’ve taken two of her courses already and will be starting a third in January.)

In addition to creating thoughtful courses, Susannah Conway also is a photographer — and self-professed Polaroid addict — and author. Her first book, This I Know: Notes on Unraveling the Heart (Globe Pequot Press), launches in June 2012. She’s also co-authored another book, Instant Love: How to Make Magic and Memories with Polaroids (Chronicle Books), coming out in spring 2012.

I got to know Rachel Bertsche because I stumbled upon her blog, MWF Seeking BFF, which is all about the challenge of making friends as an adult. Making and keeping friends is is one of the most common, and also most significant, happiness challenges; friendship is very, very important to happiness, but as adults, we often don’t have the time and opportunities to build and strengthen those relationships.

Rachel’s book, MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend, just hit the shelves.

In it, she talks about her adventures as she tried to meet and make friends after she moved to a new city. The relationship between friendship and happiness is a constant theme in the book, so I was eager to here more about her views on hapipness.

Earlier this year, I introduced World of Psychology readers to the One Hello World project in a post about how my panic attacks sometimes grow rosy in retrospect.

One Hello World is a man, a phone number, and a few musical instruments. Here’s the premise: anyone who wants to tell a story can call (316) 247-0421 and leave an anonymous voice mail message.

“Max,” the mind behind this Postsecret-esque project, will then compose a musical soundtrack to correspond with your story. He posts the completed tracks to his website at onehelloworld.com.

If you couldn’t guess by the quotes, “Max” isn’t his real name. Why the pseudonym, you might ask?

“I just don’t plaster my name all over the thing,” Max explained, “since One Hello World isn’t really about me.”

That’s because it’s about you. And me. And you, and you, and you.

I’ve dedicated many posts to the topic of stillness … like how to do it. I’m still really confused, to be perfectly honest, HOWEVER, I have met several soul sisters along the way that are pursuing the same kind of spiritual peace. One of my stillness buddies is Anne Simpkinson, the online managing editor for Guideposts.org. Anne has co-edited two anthologies: Sacred Stories and “Nourishing the Soul,” and co-wrote Soul Work: A Field Guide for Spiritual Seekers. You can read her wonderful blog posts at “Thrive” on Guideposts.org.

1. I just wrote a piece on vacations and came across some literature that said, as much as we talk about wanting to change our environments and chill out for a week or two, most of us are incapable of doing just that, and scared to, actually, because it creates a kind of uncomfortableness of sitting with silence and tapping the desires of our heart. Can you speak to that?

Anne: We are bombarded daily with noise, information and activity. So yes, in that environment, it’s difficult to listen deeply to our innermost selves. Quiet, contemplation and silence can make people uncomfortable because they are not used to it. And yet, silence is like a deep, refreshing well that can buoy you in difficult times, ignite your creativity, deepen your faith, give more meaning to your life.

A little while ago, I was laid off from my last job, and then this book called The Intuitive Investor shows up.

Pretty good timing, I’d say.

And while the topic would not be one I would normally pick up, I was especially intrigued by the combination of intuition and investment because, well, now I am back to being poor and could use all the financial advice I could get. So I decided to interview the author, Jason Apollo Voss.

1. While I understand intellectually how one needs to invest with the right and left brain, I need to know how exactly you get the two parts of your brain to work in tandem. My two brains like flipping each other the bird. How can I make them get along?

The short answer is to increase your consciousness about how you are making decisions. This is because scientifically it has been consistently demonstrated that there is no true physical distinction between the left and right brains.

Is it possible to be a stand-up comedian and minister simultaneously?

I didn’t think so until I learned about Rev. Susan Sparks, Senior Pastor of Madison Avenue Baptist Church. Her book, Laugh Your Way to Grace: Reclaiming the Spiritual Power of Humor, is a fantastic read and will put you in a good mood before you’ve even turned a page. I was so intrigued with her journey that I wanted to interrogate her a little more, and she accepted the invitation.

1. How did you become an ex-lawyer, turned standup comedian and minister?

Rev. Sparks: After ten years as a trial lawyer, I left the practice to pursue a career in ministry and standup comedy — a job that frankly, didn’t exist. I had felt a call to the ministry for some time, but was unsure how a comedian would ever fit into organized religion. I decided to travel around the world hoping to find some — any kindred spirits.

I traveled for two years doing everything from working for Mother Teresa and climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to driving my Jeep Wrangler from NYC to Alaska. Everywhere I went, whether it was the laughter of Buddhist monks or the Sacred Clowns of the Navajo, I found examples of how comedy — joy and laughter — was an integral part of the Holy. Consequently, I returned and entered Union Theological Seminary, graduating with an honor’s thesis on humor and the sacred and eventually became the senior pastor of the historic Madison Avenue Baptist Church in New York City (and the first women in its 160 history).

In order to confront the pervasive stereotypes about youth and what it means to get older, professor and author Wendy Lustbader draws on her decades as a social worker with elders and their families to present a message contrary to the one blasted over every media outlet: life gets better with age!

In her book, Life Gets Better: the Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older, Lustbader defies all conventional logic and discusses the process of getting older as an adventure in personal discovery and increasing vivaciousness.

Here is an interview about her new book.

1. What are some of the specific ways in which life gets better as we get older?

Wendy: First, our self knowledge becomes more extensive, and from this we become more adept at asserting our opinions and preferences. Then we start bungling our relationships less often because we gain a further understanding of our own and others’ motives, needs, and feelings. The benefits of clear communication also become increasingly apparent.

Gradually, we come to make better decisions, using the hard-earned benefits of hindsight. We look back at our earlier mistakes and misadventures, weighing our choices on the basis of experience rather than conjecture. We gain a much greater grasp of the mixture of luck and diligence required to live a good life. We know so much more about what contentment looks like and how to seize it when we can. Often, a wonderful kind of freedom and courage emerge from this consciousness.

In a recent survey of the U.S. population, researchers Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris assessed common beliefs about memory.  They found that common beliefs are often incongruent with scientific findings.  Recently I had an opportunity to ask Simons about some of the implications of the survey.

What motivated this survey on understanding memory?

Our goal in conducting the study was to supplement the research we had done for our book, The Invisible Gorilla. The book focuses on everyday illusions, cases in which people’s intuitive beliefs about how the mind works are faulty. In writing the book, we realized that nobody had ever conducted a national survey to measure how pervasive those beliefs are. Our PLoS One paper reports the results from a subset of the items in the survey, those most related to memory. We chose our items by drawing from a number of smaller-scale surveys that asked about the same sorts of principles, so we had good reason to suspect that these items would reveal a sizable discrepancy between public beliefs and the established science.

Eleanor Concepcion “Connie” Mariano has quite an impressive resume — even for a doctor. Not only was Dr. Mariano — or, Dr. Connie, as she’s more intimately known by a few — the first Filipino-American to become a Rear Admiral in the United States Navy, but she was also the first American woman to be appointed the Director of the White House Medical Unit.

In June 2010, Dr. Mariano released The White House Doctor: My Patients Were Presidents: A Memoir (Thomas Dune Books, 2010).

I was able to speak with her recently about the psychology behind spending nine years caring for three Presidents of the United States through everything from surprisingly panic-inducing blisters to that sex scandal heard ’round the world.

Since birth, Susanne Veder Berger was taught to hide herself, to cover the six-inch “port-wine stain” that dominated nearly the entire left side of her face. (Doctors call the condition “naevus flammeus,” a vascular birthmark resulting from deep dilated capillaries below the surface of the skin.)

When Susanne was only four years old, she was taught how to apply a mask of thick makeup to her face each day in an effort to avoid teasing and humiliation. Susanne did this literally every day of her life for more than 50 years as she attended Seneca College in Toronto, got married, moved to the New York City suburbs and raised two children.

Conditioned to believe that if the mask ever slipped — from careless application of her makeup or perhaps by shedding a tear — the world would see what she really looked like, and the result was too painful for Susanne to even imagine. At the age of 30, Susanne underwent a laser surgery — a series of dozens of “pulsed dye” laser treatment sessions — that changed her life. I was curious to know if 30 years of living with this skin condition had taught her any life lessons, so I interview her here.

This is part 2 of an interview with Stephen Haggerty (read part 1 here), a Critical Thinking Teacher of the Year award winner at Eastern Kentucky University.

Does one need to be highly intelligent to be a good critical thinker?

Highly intelligent…what does that mean?  Does that term imply book intelligence? Street smarts?  I would argue anyone could engage in higher-level thinking if they are trained in the terminology and how to apply it.

It takes a lot of practice to be a critical and creative thinker who communicates effectively, but I do believe if one is dedicated to being more successful in life, then they can learn to apply the principles of critical and creative thinking through effective communication.