A life of well-being, meaning and purpose.
Continue reading “Skills For Nurturing Relationships”Developing nurturing relationships can be learned and improved upon, like any other skill. Practice these skills for nurturing relationships to deepen your important ties to others.
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Continue reading “Creating A Meaningful Life”Excelerated Positivity™ embraces the concept of PERMA, Martin Seligman’s Theory of Well-Being. One of the pillars of well-being is Meaning. As you begin to bring Meaning into your life, you can use Dr. Paul Wong’s concept of PURE (Purpose, Understanding, Responsible action, and Enjoyment) as a structure for Meaning.
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Continue reading “How Using Your Signature Strengths Contributes To Well-Being”You have the power to positively influence your well-being by focusing on your character strengths. Developing and using your Signature Strengths increases happiness, improves relationships, and builds resilience – the ability to recover quickly from setbacks when things don’t go as planned. Weaknesses need to be corrected focusing on weaknesses is the hard way to grow. Focus on using our strengths contributes to well-being and flourishing.
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Continue reading “Choosing Achievement Or Accomplishment?”Achievement is inward or self-focused, while accomplishment is outward or other-focused. Accomplishment includes achievement but not all achievements are accomplishments. But it isn’t either/or. With Excelerated Accomplishment™, it’s both/and.
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We need each other. We depend on each other. We literally cannot live without each other and we cannot be our happiest, our best, and our most productive without building healthy relationships.
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“We’re all in this together.” I can’t count the number of times nor the number of people from whom I have heard this sentiment over the past months of the pandemic. I suspect you’ve had a similar experience. From doctors on TV to product advertisements to personal injury lawyers to friends on Zoom, these words have been spoken again and again. “We’re all in this together.”
Continue reading “How To Build Healthy Relationships – And Why”Flourishing is not dependent on the weather, the current political environment, or one’s wealth and status. Flourishing isn’t dependent on any external factors at all. Aiming for a ratio of 3 positive experiences to 1 negative experience is the path to flourishing and for effectively dealing with whatever comes our way.
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The Covid-19 pandemic. Unemployment. The economy in shambles. Increased violence. Injustice for many of our brothers and sisters. Leadership crises.
Some lucky souls are blessed with naturally sunny, positive dispositions. But what about the rest of us? Well, as William Arthur Ward stated, “Happiness is an inside job.” Research in the field of Positive Psychology has shown that we have a fairly large influence (about 40%) over our own level of happiness. That’s right. There are things you can do . . . today . . . that can measurably improve your feelings of contentment and gratification. Here are 5 suggestions, to get you started.
Continue reading “Five Ways To Feel Good Now”Use your Signature Strengths to improve your life, building on positives and learning from the negatives but don’t neglect your other character strengths. If fact, you can use your signature strengths to practice and build up your lesser strengths to better use all of the strengths.
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Signature Strengths are one of the foundational principles of positive psychology. Early proponents, including Martin Seligman, Chris Peterson, and others, combed through the wisdom literature of many of the world’s religions and philosophies. They identified six “virtues” that were common across all the cultures and thinking, ancient and modern, that they examined.
Then they identified 24 ways the six virtues are lived out. These they called strengths. We all embody all 24 of the strengths but we rely on and use our top 5 or 6 strengths more often and more naturally.
Continue reading “A Balanced Approach To Using Character Strengths”There are six facts about positivity — discovered through rigorous laboratory experiments — that can help you understand the importance and the pull of positive emotions. A thorough grasp of these facts starts you on an upward spiral.
We are living in dark times, some say, troubling times. But remember it isn’t the event that troubles us, makes us sad or angry or afraid; it’s our judgement of the event. For many of us, the world is a far different place than we’ve ever seen before. We could easily slip into a downward spiral of negative thoughts and emotions. Some wisdom from neuroscientist and author Dr. Alex Korb might be helpful.
Continue reading “Six Reasons To Choose Positivity”Change your perspective and the way you think about and deal with irritations and you can transform your behavior from reacting in anger and frustration to responding mindfully with love. Choose your response to irritations with care.
“God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons we could not learn in any other way. The way we learn those lessons is not to deny the feelings but to find the meanings underlying them.” ~ Stanley Lindquist
Have you ever admired an exquisite pearl necklace, each lustrous pearl perfect in shape and shimmering iridescence? Do you know how pearls are made? Natural pearls are created when an irritant, a grain of sand or bit of stone, gets inside the shell of a mollusk. The mollusk reacts to the irritant by coating it with a substance to reduce the irritation.
Over time, as layer upon layer is added, a pearl is formed. The source of a natural pearl is irritation. The mollusk responds to the irritation by creating something of beauty and value.
Continue reading “The Sand In The Oyster”The “rugged individual” is a false ideal. We are social animals who have evolved to bond with and depend on other human beings. Our attitude and actions can improve the quality of our relationships or cause them to deteriorate.
A story from India about relationships [1]:
A young woman married and went to live with her husband. Her mother-in-law also lived in the house.
It didn’t take long for the young woman to discover that it was nearly impossible to get along with her mother-in-law, a critical and mean-spirited woman, able to find something wrong with anything the young wife did. They constantly argued and bickered, even though custom dictated that the mother-in-law was to be treated with respect.
Finally, the young wife reached the breaking point. She went to see one of her father’s old friends, a dealer of herbs, wise to the ways of the world. There she poured out her sad story about the situation that had become unbearable to her. She asked if he could give her a poison that would solve her problem once and for all.
Continue reading “Why Relationships Matter”