Category Archives: Positive Psychology

How should we  go about having more of these creative and substantive conversations? One reason that conversational life can lack depth and excitement is that we easily fall into using formulaic question to open a dialogue – How are you? 

Pessimism may support the realism we so often need. In many arenas of life, optimism is unwarranted. At times we do fail irretrievably, and seeing those times through rose coloured glasses may console us but will not change them.

Curiosity remains valued in the arts and sciences today. But it is limited by our enlightenment inheritance, which assumes that curiosity should be applied to ideas and object, rather than people. One recent study, for instance defines curiosity as an exploratory inquisitiveness about ‘ what we don’t know’, omitting any reference to Who we don’t know we should move beyond this inheritance and elevate curiosity about others into supreme virtue

As pet parents, we ought to take our dogs for a walk or a hike or a swim because at the end of the day, our love for them overrides our love for being a couch potato. And thanks to these leash pullers, we are spending more time outside, taking in the greenery and the fresh air.

There are methods in buddhist practice devoted to cultivating loving kindness and compassion. Here, the meditations try to generate all pervading sense of benevolence, a state in which love and compassion permeate the entire mind.

No amount of tweeting could help the Occupy Movement clarify their very general political view, develop their leadership capacity and strategy, or maintain the passion of their supporters over a prolonged period. All these typically require face to face meeting and the hard, time-consuming work of collective organising.

Highly emphatic people recognise that by words and pictures offer only second hand experience rather than the real thing, they deserve to be taken seriously, and not dismiss as little more than ‘ empathy lite.’ Why? because art has a long and distinguish history, going back centuries, of kicking our empathic selves into action, be it for the struggle against child labour or the anti war movement.

Paradoxically, humility promotes strength of character: the humble person makes decisions on the basis of what he believes to be right and sticks by them without concern for his own image or the opinions of others. 

Mihali Csiksgentmihalyi was struck by the fact that when the creation of a painting was going well, the artist was completely absorbed in his work and stayed with it to completion, unaware of being tired, hungry, or uncomfortable.