How to Stop Negative Emotions from Derailing Your Success Success Magazine, Shawn Achor September 23, 2016 Sometimes we come across obstacles in our lives that lower our overall level of happiness and disrupt our path to success—I call these mental map hijackers. A common hijacker is a negative boss who tries to drive productivity through intimidation. There are two…
How to Trick Your Mind Into Doing Things You Hate to Do Success Magazine, Shawn Achor August 26, 2016 Believe it or not, adversity and challenge at work don’t have to be the enemies of engagement and motivation; they can actually be the glue. Why? The answer lies in Leon Festinger’s famous work on a psychological phenomenon called…
Face Down Any Challenge with These 3 Key Pieces of Advice Live Happy, Shawn Achor & Michelle Gielan August 2016 When we address difficulties head-on, we can truly flourish and thrive. On one of our first dates, we sat across the table from each other at a sushi restaurant in Chicago and shared stories of growing…
Resilience is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure Harvard Business Review, Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan June 24, 2016 As constant travelers and parents of a 2-year-old, we sometimes fantasize about how much work we can do when one of us gets on a plane, undistracted by phones, friends, and Finding Nemo. We race to…
Optimists Are Better at Finding New Jobs Harvard Business Review, Michelle Gielan April 15, 2016 Given that I’m a happiness researcher, you might think I’d strive to help people eliminate unhappiness in their careers. But unhappiness actually serves a crucial function, signaling the need for change, prompting us to switch companies or fields, or even just motivating us to…
Why You Should Map Your Mental World Success Magazine, Shawn Achor March 10, 2016 While working as a teaching fellow for one of my psychology professors at Harvard University, I often conducted an insightful experiment called mental mapping in which students created a map of the world around them. The experiment was simple—students had three…
Don’t Sprint the Marathon Success Magazine, Shawn Achor December 2015 I once worked with a company vice president who wanted to run a marathon. Although she wasn’t in great shape and her workload limited her preparation for a marathon, she thought that if she could lead a team across three continents, then she could run…
Why You Need to Stop Worrying About Failing Success Magazine, Shawn Achor October 2015 Do you know what “icing the kicker” means? In football, when a kicker is preparing to make a potential game-winning field goal, the opposing coach will often call a timeout right before the ball is snapped. The thinking behind this strategy…
What You Think You Become Success Magazine, Shawn Achor July 2, 2015 “Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” Napoleon Hill once said. “The mind is everything. What you think, you become,” Buddha taught. You’ve heard high-minded quotes like these all your life. Now science has caught up. We can finally quantify and…
SUCCESS Magazine, Shawn Achor April 2015 We often think that if we had more choices, it would be easier to change our lives. In fact, we dohave plenty of choices, but we don’t change. What we really need in our lives to make a positive change are fewer choices. In The Happiness Advantage, I wrote…