Using the new Positive Psychology

11 Amazing Thank You Notes From Famous People After a short stint in the New York theater world, comedienne Carol Burnett landed a job as a regular on The Garry Moore Show in 1959. She caught the attention of CBS executives, who offered her her own series in 1967. With her husband Joe Hamilton at the helm, Burnett broke new ground as the first female host of a TV variety show. The Carol Burnett Show ran for 11 seasons and earned a handful of Emmy Awards in the process. As Carol Burnett painfully recalled later in life, whenever she’d expressed an interest in a career in the theater as a teen, her mother would always dissuade her and recommend that she would have better luck studying to become a writer. As she was nearing graduation from UCLA, Burnett and several fellow drama students were invited to a departing professor’s house to perform at his bon voyage party. When Vicki Lawrence cut her hair in a short “pixie” cut as a high school senior, many of her classmates commented on her resemblance to Carol Burnett.

Dawn French: 'I decided I'd pretend to be someone very confident' | From the Observer | The Observer Dawn French: 'I'm a kid in the dressing-up box at heart.' Photograph: Martin Godwin for the Observer Why are you in Australia? You were supposed to have settled in Cornwall for the rest of your days. For my sins and my guilty pleasure I am a judge on Australia's Got Talent, alongside tiny little bambi Geri Halliwell. It's an honest, open kind of competition and I thought, I'll give it a go. That is an interesting honeymoon… It is extraordinary. Do you genuinely like reality talent shows? Oh yes. Did you go through anything like that process in your early days? No. What do people think of you in Australia? They love The Vicar of Dibley. Both your novels have been bestsellers. I am a kid in the dressing-up box at heart. The second novel, Oh Dear Silvia, is out now in paperback. I think you earn big laughs in something truthful if it has tragedy also. A lot of the book is written in accents, which are supposed to be so difficult to write. It's based on people I know or mixtures of people.

Happiness & Health - Chronic Disease Prevention - Harvard Public Health Magazine [ Winter 2011] Could a sunny outlook mean fewer colds and less heart disease? Do hope and curiosity somehow protect against hypertension, diabetes, and respiratory tract infections? Do happier people live longer—and, if so, why? These are the kinds of questions that researchers are asking as they explore a new—and sometimes controversial—avenue of public health: documenting and understanding the link between positive emotions and good health. A vast scientific literature has detailed how negative emotions harm the body. Jack P. Focusing on the positive “But negative emotions are only one-half of the equation,” says Laura Kubzansky, HSPH associate professor of society, human development, and health. Kubzansky is at the forefront of such research. Among dozens of published papers, Kubzansky has shown that children who are able to stay focused on a task and have a more positive outlook at age 7 report better general health and fewer illnesses 30 years later. State of mind=state of body

Decision Points Explanations > Decisions > Decision Points Description | Discussion | So what Description Across any single activity or a set of related activities, there may be points at which decisions have to be made. These are decision points. Unless there are clear decision points, people often will continue with the momentum of the current activity. In the design or management of an activity, more or less decision points may be deliberately inserted or omitted. Example A person is given five small bags of popcorn. In retail situations there are clear decision points along the way, such as to stop and look in a window, to enter the shop, to try on clothes and to buy particular things. Business decision-making is more difficult as it often requires a number of people to agree before something is purchased, particularly if it is expensive. Discussion Decisions take time, effort, energy and expense, which together is sometimes called the transaction cost. Decision is affected by desires. See also

25 Free Stock Photo Sites When I began the research for this article, I knew of only a handful of free stock photography sites. I set out to find as many good ones as I could, thinking maybe I’d find a dozen. I was quite surprised to find 25 good, solid resources out there. Note the terms of use for each site. Keep in mind that “Royalty Free” does not mean the images are free; it means that you don’t need to pay the photographer a royalty each time you use the image. Update: Check out our latest list of 18 MORE free stock photos sites. QualityStockPhotos.com is my favorite site for free stock photography. Stock.XCHNG is a great site for free stock photography. This is a huge resource, currently indexing over 3 million photos! The photos on Imagebase are free to use, and are licensed under a Creative Commons license. Morguefile is a completely free source for stock photos. Openphoto groups their completely free photos by categories, and offers a search function as well. Imageafter has 20,000 images available.

The Anatomy Of A Thank You Note – Krrb’s Guide To Expressing Gratitude With Style ~ Krrb Blog First off, if you can get your hands on a kid who is just learning to write and then convince said kid to write (or make a good go at writing) "Thanks" on a piece of paper that you can put into an envelope and send, you are golden. Your job is done. Who is not going to be touched by a child's early attempts at writing? Nothing says thank you like a note written by a 4 year old. You too, can produce thank you notes that would make your grandparents proud and that would bring a smile to even the most jaded of faces. I mean, if the leader of the free world has the time to write thank you notes by hand, I don't want to hear anything from the rest of us about not being able to "get around to it." Looks simple, right? The Occasion OK so here’s the first big issue to tackle: When do I need to write a thank you note? Some people say that writing a thank you note after a dinner party is overkill, but if you had a great time, we say go for it! The Stationery A Postcard A Note Card DIY Thank You’s 1.

Unstuck iPad app - How to live better every day – Unstuck Happiness 1. The meanings of ‘happiness’ 1.1 Two senses of ‘happiness’ What is happiness? Philosophers who write about “happiness” typically take their subject matter to be either of two things, each corresponding to a different sense of the term: A state of mind A life that goes well for the person leading it In the first case our concern is simply a psychological matter. Having answered that question, a further question arises: how valuable is this mental state? In the second case, our subject matter is a kind of value, namely what philosophers nowadays tend to call prudential value—or, more commonly, well-being, welfare, utility or flourishing. Importantly, to ascribe happiness in the well-being sense is to make a value judgment: namely, that the person has whatever it is that benefits a person.[1] If you and I and have different values, then we may well differ about which lives we consider happy. 1.2 Clarifying our inquiry 2. 2.1 The chief candidates 2.2 Methodology: settling on a theory 3. 4. 5.

The uses and abuses of 'happiness' The happiness 'movement' has the potential to transform society, but do its proponents know what they're doing? William Davies sets out four strands of the debate - philosophical, statistical, economical and psychological - and shows how confusion between them is hindering progress The launch of Action for Happiness last week generated yet more debate about the meaning and value of happiness. On top of the Office of National Statistics’ (ONS) ‘national debate’ on how to define and measure ‘national wellbeing’, one can scarcely open a newspaper nowadays without discovering more political, scientific or pseudo-scientific pronouncements about what does or doesn’t make us happy. In a nation as stubbornly curmudgeonly as Britain, it is no surprise to find that the cynics seem equally delighted to have discovered so much Californian chirpiness to grumble about, right here in their own backyard. There is no reason to dismiss any of this as a flash in the pan.

Money <em>can</em> buy happiness… if you spend it on other people | Not Exactly Rocket Science “This planet has – or rather had – a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.” – Douglas Adams In this pithy paragraph, the sorely missed Douglas Adams sums up a puzzling paradox of modern life – we often link happiness to money and the spending of it, even though both proverbs and psychological surveys suggest that the two are unrelated. Across and within countries, income has an incredibly weak effect on happiness once people have enough to secure basic needs and standards of living. Once people are lifted out of abject poverty and thrown into the middle class, any extra earnings do little to improve their joie de vivre. I can’t get no… satisfcation Hey big spender There is a silver lining then.

Women in STEM: four steps to a stronger Athena Swan application | Higher Education Network | Guardian Professional A change is in the air: Athena Swan, the charter recognising commitment to women's careers in STEM, has become a topic of conversation at meetings in universities up and down the country. I was at a leukaemia research meeting only the other week and spent most of my coffee break talking about the scheme. Minds have been focused by money. The National Institute for Health Research's BRC/BRU funding will require a minimum silver Athena Swan award, which can only be obtained following a submission to the Equality Challenge Unit (ECU). For this reason, most universities and departments now have their own self-assessment team preparing or planning applications, with over 90 awaiting decisions from the last round. I recently sat on an Athena Swan assessment panel. 1) Write a good letter First impressions matter. 2) Identify your organisation's direction Is the number of female staff increasing or are you becoming more male dominated? 3) Check recruitment at all levels • Thinking about training.

Positive psychology in the workplace Implementing positive psychology in the workplace means creating an environment that is relatively enjoyable and productive. This also means creating a work schedule that does not lead to emotional and physical distress. Background[edit] According to information provided by The United States Department of Labor, “In 2009 employed persons worked an average of 7.5 hours on the days they worked, which were mostly weekdays. Major theoretical approaches[edit] Martin E.P. Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers developed Humanistic Psychology that focuses on the positive potential of people and on helping people to reach their full potential.[5] Peter Warr is highly noted for his early work on work well being. Demand control model[edit] Robert A. Job demands-resources[edit] The job demands-resources model (JD-R) is an expansion of the DCM and is founded on the same principle that high job demands and high job resources produce employees with more positive work attitudes. Job characteristics model[edit]