SUCCESS Magazine, Shawn Achor December 2014 The brilliant Amy Wrzesniewski from Yale University researches how people perceive their jobs. She found that the way a person sees his or her occupation—as a “calling,” as opposed to a “job”—doesn’t depend on the job title or position, but on the meaning he or she perceives in the…
October 15, 2014 Imagine how happy you would be if all your interactions with others were positive and pleasant. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s actually quite easy to establish. In 2009, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, split 100 participants into groups of four and filmed them working together to solve…
As a leader, influence your team toward a positive reality by enlisting help from within. Being a leader, you need to understand how to influence your people. As I describe in my book Before Happiness, one of the most powerful ways to share a positive message is to recruit other people to spread it. A colleague,…
Do you feel like life comes at you too quickly to respond in the way you want? Your ability to respond to an ever-changing world is predicted by how big a paddle you think you have. Let me explain. Pong, one of the oldest video games, is a primitive game of virtual pingpong—you control a…
Optimize Your Brain for Success: Reducing Excess and Negative Noise Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead. Contributor: Shawn Achor, expert…
Why redefining happiness is the key to sustaining it If you want to live happy, you first need to define happiness. Over the past few years, we have traveled to more than 50 countries researching and speaking on positive psychology, and after spending time with farmers who lost their lands in Zimbabwe, Swiss bankers in the middle of a banking crisis, owners of…
Improve Productivity and Success with Five “Positivity” Habits Nano Tools for Leaders® are fast, effective leadership tools that you can learn and start using in less than 15 minutes — with the potential to significantly impact your success as a leader and the engagement and productivity of the people you lead. Contributor: Shawn Achor, expert on the…
I thought it was simple: Vacations are fun, Americans are stressed, and happiness raises productivity and sales. Therefore, people should take more vacations, right? But research doesn’t hold that line of thinking up. Not every vacation is equal. According to a 2013 report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the U.S. is the only developed…
Click here to watch the TEDTalk that inspired this post. A few years back, while crunching stats for my dissertation, I spent many nights in the student computer lab in the basement of the psychology department at Yale. On one particularly “dark” night, Bret Logan, head of IT in the psychology department who had come in…
The X-Spot: Finish strong! Reach any goal faster with this science-based brain trick. Shawn Achor There are few better ways to witness the sheer power of human potential than to watch a runner cross the finish line of a marathon. It’s incredible to see months and years of training, determination and self-discipline culminating in one moment…