89,000 people can’t be wrong

Posted on September 9, 2014 by Shaunigan

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.

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

Follow your passion is bad advice

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Shaunigan

“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.

You can learning anything

Posted on August 20, 2014 by Shaunigan

VIA’s Love of Learning seems to overlap with Gallup’s Learner and ideation Talents.

Places to learn for free

Kahn Academy

iTunes U — list of othe providers here.

Your Library

Posted on August 18, 2014 by Shaunigan

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

Posted on August 17, 2014 by Shaunigan

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.

intense and focused concentration on the present moment
merging of action and awareness
a loss of reflective self-consciousness
a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
a distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time is altered
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

Posted on August 2, 2014 by Shaunigan

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

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Shaunigan

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

Be sure to check out their sidebar stories

Could mindfulness help teachers manage stress?

Amanda Baileyexplains how she teaches mindfulness skills in school to help staff and students manage stress and improve concentration

7 comments
How to teach … mindfulness

Resources to help introduce the concept of mindfulness to pupils, to help them be calm, focused and creative

5 comments
Meditation in schools: calming minds and beating stress

Andrew Jonesexamines the evidence for introducing meditation to students and teachers

12 comments
Teaching meditation at school

What impact can meditating have on sixth form students? An expert reveals what happened when she went back to school

2 comments
Nothing is more important than teaching compassion

Teaching schoolchildren happiness, empathy, altruism and compassion has proven beneficial results for classroom learning as a whole, says Vinciane Rycroft

arbejdsglæde vs karoshi

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Shaunigan

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Competition + Collaberation = Creativity

Posted on May 27, 2014 by Shaunigan

A lovely video wonderfully illustrations how competition when paired with a healthy dose of collaberation can bring out some real creativity.

Go to a grateful college

Posted on May 13, 2014 by Shaunigan

Gratitude:

— n
	a feeling of thankfulness or appreciation, as for gifts or favours

Much research has come out recently on the positive impact of practicing gratitude. “We’ve studied more than one thousand people, from ages eight to 80, and found that people who practice gratitude consistently report a host of benefits:

Physical
• Stronger immune systems
• Less bothered by aches and pains
• Lower blood pressure
• Exercise more and take better care of their health
• Sleep longer and feel more refreshed upon waking

Psychological
• Higher levels of positive emotions
• More alert, alive, and awake
• More joy and pleasure
• More optimism and happiness

Social
• More helpful, generous, and compassionate
• More forgiving
• More outgoing
• Feel less lonely and isolated.

Source: Greater Good Society

Greatful people like to give back. Greatful college graduates are likely to do someting for their alma mata. Certainly many alumni have strong affections for their colleges, willingly giving time and money to help the old school.

So if graduates really were greatful for the college experience, they would give back. Obviously, not everyone strikes it big and can afford to give a lot–Cal Tech tops the list when it comes to average contribution at over $56,000. But what if ever alumni gave some money–wouldn’t that indicate a high level of engagement and satisfaction? Over half the graduates at Williams donate whiel a paultry 13% gave to Columbia. So a writer over at Forbes calculated this out figuring, “The idea is that the best colleges are the ones that produce successful people who make enough money during their careers to be charitable and feel compelled to give back to the schools that contributed to their success.” He took some flack for focusing on teh monetary side and thus made adjustments to this year’s ranking to award 20% to the actual percent of alumni giving.

His list excluses schools of less than 1000 students and public universities. You can see the complete list here, but the top 50 are below. 6 of the top 10 are liveral arts colleges.

	10-Year Median Private Donations	AVERAGE ALUMNI PARTICIPATION RATE	GRATEFUL Grads Index
1 Princeton University	29,330	46%	100
2 Dartmouth College	27,464	44%	100
3 Williams College	23,346	53%	99.9
4 Claremont McKenna College	22,459	42%	99.8
5 Bowdoin College	19,598	44%	99.4
6 Amherst College	18,752	52%	99
7 Davidson College	18,044	48%	98.6
8 Wellesley College	17,958	47%	98.5
9 Brown University	21,694	29%	97.4
10 Stanford University	30,826	28%	97
11 Duke University	28,521	28%	96.8
12 Yale University	30,033	28%	96.7
13 Massachusetts Institute of Technology	36,763	25%	95.1
14 University of Notre Dame	15,319	37%	94.8
15 Bryn Mawr College	16,272	30%	94.7
16 California Institute of Technology	56,706	24%	94.5
17 Carleton College	14,876	50%	93.6
18 Haverford College	14,463	43%	92.2
19 University of Pennsylvania	16,614	24%	91.6
20 Harvard University	25,122	19%	91.4
21 University of Chicago	16,683	24%	91.4
22 Middlebury College	14,033	42%	90.6
23 Washington and Lee University	14,018	38%	90.5
24 Johns Hopkins University	22,194	16%	89.2
25 Pomona College	13,415	40%	87.7
26 Vassar College	13,813	30%	87.7
27 Rice University	14,638	24%	87.3
28 Columbia University	20,047	13%	87.2
29 Mills College	16,922	15%	86.8
30 Swarthmore College	13,139	39%	86.2
31 Washington University in St. Louis	14,376	21%	84.6
32 Northwestern University	15,200	16%	84.3
33 Trinity College	12,772	42%	84
34 Brandeis University	14,045	22%	83.8
35 Colby College	12,092	39%	79.2
36 Berea College	13,531	17%	78.7
37 University of Rochester	13,683	15%	78.3
38 University of Southern California	12,729	24%	77.9
39 Reed College	12,089	26%	74.5
40 Cornell University	12,551	19%	73.8
41 Smith College	11,555	32%	73.8
42 Hamilton College	11,426	46%	73.7
43 Kenyon College	11,206	37%	71.7
44 Colgate University	10,690	40%	66.8
45 Wake Forest University	11,403	22%	66.6
46 Wofford College	11,216	24%	66.1
47 Vanderbilt University	11,407	19%	64.8
48 Case Western Reserve University	10,552	15%	54.6
49 Wesleyan University	9,358	41%	53.6
50 University of Tulsa	10,268	18%	53.3

StrengthsMining

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