89,000 people can’t be wrong

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Just hours from now, Apple will unleash its own form of happiness in the form of a shiny new ithing. More importantly, UC Berkeley launches a Massive Online Course. join 89,000 of your new best buddies for this Mooc on the Science of Happiness. 

 

The course will include:

  • Short videos featuring the co-instructors and guest lectures from top experts on the science of happiness;
  • Articles and other readings that make the science accessible and understandable to non-academics;
  • Weekly “happiness practices”—real-world exercises that students can try on their own, all based on research linking these practices to greater happiness;
  • Tests, quizzes, polls, and a weekly “emotion check-in” that help students gauge their happiness and track their progress over time;
  • Discussion boards where students can share ideas with one another and submit questions to their instructors.

The Science of Happiness

Starts September 9, 2014 – Register Now!

An unprecedented free online course exploring the roots of a happy, meaningful life. Co-taught by the GGSC’s Dacher Keltner and Emiliana Simon-Thomas. Up to 16 CE credit hours available.

Register now!

 

It is fitting this course starts the day before World Suicide Prevention Day. 

Follow your passion is bad advice

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“The path to a passionate life is often way more complex than the simple advice ‘follow your passion’ would suggest.”
You’ve been told you should follow your passion, to do what you love and the money will follow. But how sound is this advice? Cal Newport argues that it’s astonishingly wrong.

But if you do what you do with passion, it make all the difference. 

He actually mentions Strengthsfinder as a tool, but is kind of dimissive of it. The stories he tells of people living their passions, however, he speaks of lifestyle traights they are cultivated through thir job which sounds suspiciously like people using their strengths in their work. 


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Empathy is one of Gallup’s Strengths:

Operationally, it seems connected with Social Intelligence in the VIA schema. 

Greater Good Describes it as  “a wide range of experiences. Emotion researchers generally define empathy as the ability to sense other people’s emotions, coupled with the ability to imagine what someone else might be thinking or feeling.”

How does it work?


Want to understand the science behind empathy? This quick video explains why and when we care.

 

Communicating Science Through Visual Media – Empathy from RISD FAV on Vimeo.

 

Want to Cultivate it? The Greater Good Society has outlined the Habits you need to engage in:

Habit 1: Cultivate curiosity about strangers

Habit 2: Challenge prejudices and discover commonalities

Habit 3: Try another person’s life

Habit 4: Listen hard—and open up

Habit 5: Inspire mass action and social change

Habit 6: Develop an ambitious imagination

 

 

 

Finding and building flow

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What’s your flow profile?

Don’t know the answer? Well there is a personality test to help you capture it. What is flow?

Csikszentmihalyi is credited with defining the experience as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

How often do people experience flow?

“If you ask a sample of typical Americans, “Do you ever get involved in something so deeply that nothing else seems to matter and you lose track of time?” roughly one in five will say that this happens to them as much as several times a day, whereas about 15 percent will say that this never happens to them. These frequencies seem to he quite stable and universal. For instance, in a recent survey of 6,469 Germans, the same question was answered in the following way: Often, 23 percent; Sometimes, 40 percent; Rarely, 25 percent; Never or Don’t Know, 12 percent.” (Source: Psychology Today)

Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi identify the following six factors as encompassing an experience of flow. 

  1.     intense and focused concentration on the present moment
  2.     merging of action and awareness
  3.     a loss of reflective self-consciousness
  4.     a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
  5.     a distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered
  6.     experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience
Csíkszentmihályi follows build’s on Maslow’s notion of Peak Experience: “Peak experiences are transient moments of self-actualization.”

Jamie Wheal has spent much of his adult likfe researching flow:

He explains his ideas in this compelling TED talk: Hacking the GENOME of Flow: 

His colleague goes deeper in the Rise of Superman

Strengths finder videos

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 Andrew Sokolovich has been busy creating short video descriptions–30 to 45 seconds– for the Strengthfinder Themes; 18 of the 34 are now available on Youtube with more to come. With great production values, these are wonderful snapshots for those interested in their strengths. Take Input for a wonderful example:


Take two minutes to teach mindfulness

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A growing amount of attention has been given to mindful practices in the classrom. This week, The Guardian profiled what is happening in a UK school with positive effects:

“The whole process of mindfulness has the knock-on effect of making people more receptive and open,” Woods explains. “What we are trying to do is help them become more aware of themselves in a non-judgemental way. By the time the students leave in year six, they have an emotional intelligence and a set of skills that really equip them to cope with everyday life.”

Here are five resources to help introduce mindfulness into your classroom:

• Meditation for beginners

• Mindful mind skills

• 10 mindfulness exercises for the classroom

• Mindfulness and the art of chocolate eating

• A mindfulness relaxation exercise

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arbejdsglæde vs karoshi

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Would you rather be Happy at Work or Worked to death?

Denmark, often ranked as one of happiest place on earth and one of the best countries to live on subscribe to arbejdsglæde, a Danish word meaning Happy at Work. Alexander Kjerulf explains, “ there is a word for it in Danish because Danish workplaces have a long-standing tradition of wanting to make their employees happy. To most Danes, a job isn’t just a way to get paid; we fully expect to enjoy ourselves at work.” . 


The Japanese, to contrast, have karoshi,  meaning to work oneself to death.  I first encountered karoshi during a  screening of Happy, the Movie. But the term first entered the Japanese lexicon in 1969 and gained popularity of usage in the 1980’s. The Chinese have a similiar term, guolaosi, as do the Koreans, gwarosa.


The Japan Times notes “A growing body of evidence indicates that workers in high-demand situations who have little control of their work and low social support are at increased risk of developing and dying of cardiovascular disease, including myocardial infarction and stroke. Stressful work conditions are a critical component of this phenomenon.” The International Labor Organization profiles some typical cases:

Here are some typical cases of Karoshi:

  1. Mr A worked at a major snack food processing company for as long as 110 hours a week (not a month) and died from heart attack at the age of 34. His death was approved as work-related by the Labour Standards Office.
  2. Mr B, a bus driver, whose death was also approved as work-related, worked more than 3,000 hours a year. He did not have a day off in the 15 days before he had stroke at the age of 37.
  3. Mr C worked in a large printing company in Tokyo for 4,320 hours a year including night work and died from stroke at the age of 58. His widow received a workers’ compensation 14 years after her husband’s death.
  4. Ms D, a 22 year-old nurse, died from a heart attack after 34 hours’ continuous duty five times a month.

Happily, things are changing as lawsuits are forcing companies to change their ways least they be responsible for unlawful death payments. 

So how to pursue arbejdsglæde?

Check out the arbejdsglæde website for specific examples and tips.