It would be hard to open a popular magazine or psychology journal these days without finding some reference to a new advance in positive psychology. 

The research is pouring in from all over the globe indicating that sustainable ways to shift our thinking and perception toward a more optimistic perspective of life has amazing health and well-being benefits — not the least of which include a longer, healthier, and more productive life.

Here are six questions about some of the findings that may intrigue you and test your knowledge. The good news?  You can’t fail a positive psychology quiz!  Use this as a guide to learn more about the developing field. Or, if you got them all right, you know how good it is to be kind — so get out there and help someone!

“The seed of suffering in you may be strong, but don’t wait until you have no more suffering before allowing yourself to be happy.” 
~Thich Nhat Hanh

 “You have to make the mind run the body.”
~General George S. Patton Jr.

A recently published article in the Journal of Clinical Psychology by Kearney, McDermott, Malte, Martinez, and Simpson (2012) may have broad implications for veterans suffering with symptoms of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). 

These researchers demonstrated that engagement in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) showed significant improvements after six months in reducing soldiers’ symptoms of PTSD, depression, behavioral activation (the ability to engage in activities to achieve a goal in spite of aversive symptoms), and self-acceptance. 

Last October I saw a Prezi presentation by a colleague of mine.  The material in the presentation was stellar, but it nearly took a back seat to the dazzling, engaging and, yes, spellbinding mechanics of Prezi.  It is a new zoom-style presentation platform that makes PowerPoint look like a moped up against a Ferrari.

And it is free.

Like anything worthwhile, there is a learning curve that needs to be dealt with, but it is worth the time and trouble to learn it.  Since December, every presentation I have done has been Prezi-based, and literally every person I have shared it with was eager to learn how to do his or her own.

It was developed by Adam Somlai-Fischer, a Hungarian architect, as a tool to help with visualization.  But instead he has developed one of the more interesting storytelling devices yet created.  It follows the speaker with a visual narrative of the material.  True to the developer’s mission to “make sharing ideas more interesting,” this presentation tool does just that.  What it does is give the user complete freedom to exploit the visual experience by using a zoom feature. The techies among you will recognize this as a Zooming User Interface, cloud-based SaaS, (Software as a Service) presentation delivery model.

“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.

“You have to take risks. We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen.” — Paulo Coelho

Each year is a transition.  We let go of relationships, connections to places, jobs and ways of being.  But this opens us to new people, new associations and different ways of relating.  Through death or circumstance or choice we move away from those we loved, or cared for, or knew: The unknown, the surprise, the unexpected takes their place.  This is life.

Too often the losses weigh us down with a centrifugal sadness that keeps us pinned to the passing.  Our energy is invested in the mourning, often for longer than what may be healthy or helpful.

But the loss we experience is directly proportional to the joy and love and engagement we’ve had.  We feel the pain because we knew the joy.  So the grieving must honor the connection as well.

Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man… living in the sky… Who watches every thing you do, and he has a list of ten special things that he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry for ever and ever ’til the end of time.

But he loves you. And he needs money!
~ George Carlin, from “You Are All Diseased”

Every morning I wake up and push back the anxieties and frustrations and the never-ending things-to-do list.  I awakened to the struggle of coping with these pressures for years until I found a positive psychology intervention that was, beyond a shadow of doubt, the most powerful tool in changing my thought process:  Gratitude. 

I began the day with flooding my mind with the gratitude I had for events, people, experiences and conditions in my life.  I’ve written elsewhere about how this struggle evolved.  But I never gave where I was sending my gratitude toward any thought.  I just sent it out into the ether.  Just doing this every morning changed my attitude about life and allowed me to look forward to the day (for the most part) with less angst and more hope.  Not a bad deal.  Two minutes in the morning and the day brightened up.

There was good reason for me to begin doing my morning gratitude list. 

The positive psychology movement is surely gaining momentum. In a recent discussion with two of my colleagues we joked that positive psychology’s really about a type of recovery from negative thinking.

This got me wondering if a 12-step process might be worth identifying. So guess what…? I think it is.

Here is what I propose for the 12 steps of positive psychology.

“Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.” ~ Martin Seligman

Two things happen when you feel happier in your life.  First, you catch on to the fact you have a choice in how you see the world. Second, you let go of what doesn’t work.

At least this is what I have learned.  I am a happier person now than I was a couple of years ago because I have directly cultivated and experienced more positive emotion in my life.  This happened through many positive interventions, but chief among them are: having gratitude, asking what went right in my day (and why), and daily attempts to scatter kindness.

I recently attended the immersion session for incoming students for the Master’s of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) at the University of Pennsylvania.  This program is designed to bring various individuals from around the world once a month to learn the cutting edge research, ongoing initiative, and core principles in positive psychology. 

The architect of the curriculum is Martin Seligman, former president of the American Psychological Association and now considered the father of positive psychology.  It is a rigorous and ambitious year-long program of courses, readings, lectures, group activities and projects designed to bring participants up to speed in this new, but geometrically exploding field. The five-day course I attended was peppered with stellar professors at the very pinnacle of their careers. Martin Seligman, Angela Duckworth, Ray Baumeister, Barry Schwartz, and Barbara Fredrickson — all luminaries in the field — were among those making presentations.

But it was James O. Pawelski, Ph.D., director of education and Senior Scholar in the Positive Psychology Center who was able to lead us with a series of lectures on the foundations of positive psychology.  He initiated one of his lectures with a slide of a glass filled halfway and smiled at us.

“So, what do you see?” he asked.

I was in London at Heathrow Airport when I learned that my flight back to Newark, New Jersey was canceled.  More than that, they explained that Newark and all the surrounding airports in the New York City area had been closed because of Hurricane Irene, and that there was no possibility of getting a trans-Atlantic flight for a couple of days.

Bummer.

To make matters worse, the hotels in London were filled because of an annual carnival in the city.  There were no rooms.

Double bummer.

The airport staff was stressed because, well, weary travelers were stressed, which made for some unpleasant encounters.  A woman was spewing at the counter in front of me.

Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear puts out CO2. And so, what we’re going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles.
~Bill Gates

A typographical error led Amory Lovins to coin the phrase negawatts. In a brilliant 1989 keynote address to the Green Energy Conference in Montreal he outlined what has become the blueprint for a radical business and energy concept.

Pay people to do nothing.

Twenty-plus years later the idea is deeply taking hold.

We live in a world that needs our help.
– James Pawelski, Director of Education and Senior Scholar at the Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania, just before asking for a moment of silence for the victims of the terrorist act in Norway.

From July 23rd through July 26th, the International Positive Psychology Association’s second congress took place in Philadelphia.  Two years ago, during a particularly miserable time in my life, my best friend, Professor Joel Morgovsky, suggested we go to the first congress together.

I wasn’t in the mood.

But I went, and I was sitting in talk after talk and workshop after workshop; mostly they were interesting, but please, when do we get to go home?

Then I heard Barbara Fredrickson speak.  There are a few transformative lectures I have been to in my life.  This was one of them.