By Marie-Josée Salvas. A good friend of mine could be the next Martha Stewart. In fact, let’s call her Martha. Martha loves to cook and does it beautifully. She is equally talented at home design. Having studied fashion, she can also help just about any lady plan a make-over, including hair, make-up or clothing style. But it’s a real shame to see her go to the same federal office day after day so she can send emails, make photocopies, stamp paperwork, and align numbers in the right columns.

By Bridget Grenville-Cleave. "The aim of life is appreciation." - GK Chesterton. When I was a kid, summers were always long, lazy, languid. Time seemed almost to stand still. Contrast that with how I feel today: Always in a rush… The problem, as fans of the Slow Movement would have it, is that we’re all addicted to speed (the temporal eight-days-a-week variety that is, as opposed to the chemical, mind-altering kind), and that is the fault of our unremitting obsession with consumerism. The importance of the Slow Movement philosophy is its emphasis on savoring the good life and making the most of what we already have.

In the Character Strengths and Virtues Handbook, emotion regulation is included within the classification for self-regulation. Self-regulation is conceptualized as self-control, or “how a person exerts control over his or her own responses so as to pursue goals and live up to standards.

By Fiona Parashar. "I was talking about positive stress, Selye’s eustress, with a friend this weekend as she bemoaned a too easy and too comfortable life. She compared her current state to her earlier corporate role where eustress and distress were constant companions. She left because distress outweighed eustress. But here she is a few years later concerned that she’s thrown the proverbial baby out with the bath water."

But just as fireflies use an enzyme luciferase to create their glow, Zimbardo believes there may a positive flip side to the Lucifer effect. His new research is focused on the processes involved when a person does the right thing despite the situational influences. He showed video of New York subway hero Wesley Autrey and photos of the famous Tank Man of Tiananmen Square... Zimbardo calls this heroic imagination and stresses that the qualities of a hero must exist before the opportunity to express them is presented. We can all be heroes-in-waiting, ready to shine our light when the situation demands it. (On topics of IPPA - International Positive Psychology Association)

The voices in our heads can be real buzz-kills. “I’m not whatever enough.” I should be (doing) X, I should be (doing) Y, I should be (doing) Z. Some call this voice “the gremlin” or saboteur. Others look at it is as a radio station that plays recurring tunes of self-limiting beliefs embedded into our subconscious minds.

Defined as “the optimal use of your resources and capabilities,” the authors illustrate how greatness is something that everyone can achieve and experience. Their brief and engaging stories of their experiences, and those of others, reflect that greatness is everywhere – in the ordinary and the extraordinary. We just have to open our eyes to see it.

Todd Kashdan: I wanted to write about curiosity because it has been neglected, even though there are few things in our arsenal that are so consistently and highly related to every facet of well-being — to needs for belonging, for meaning, for confidence, for autonomy, for spirituality, for achievement, for creativity... Curiosity is the counter-motivation to anxiety.

By Yee-Ming Tan.  I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book Outliers: The Story of Success. Much of what Gladwell has to say about successful people is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, family, timing and luck play important roles as well. From a coach’s perspective, the point about luck, timing and opportunity has a special relevance to the pursuit of flourishing lives for Chinese people.

By Kirsten Cronlund, Positive Psychology News Daily. It seems like every time I turn around nowadays I hear another reference to mindfulness. The idea is catching on in psychotherapy, in treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), in reducing test anxiety for students, and in increasing physical health. Its positive impact is being scientifically studied, and the positive psychology community is increasingly aware of its beneficial role as a powerful intervention.