I have, for a year or two now, been teaching happiness (or more accurately, Positive Psychology) at UTS Business School.
From next year (2009) I’ll be teaching happiness (and positive psychology coaching) at RMIT in a new Wellness degree.

Tal Ben-Shahar has, for quite some time, been teaching happiness at Harvard. In Tal Ben-Shahar’s positive psychology class, students learn that happiness isn’t just an accident, it’s a science.

An entire industry has been built up around the pursuit of happiness. A stroll past any bookstore window demonstrates the explosive popularity of the feel-good, self-help movements of recent years. And whether these products are genuine paths to ultimate happiness or just pleasure-peddling scams, the trend seems likely to hold.

Now, even the Ivy League is getting in on the act, layering serious academic research onto the pop-psychology phenomenon to develop a “science of happiness.” Known as “positive psychology,” the field was pioneered at the University of Pennsylvania and came to Harvard a decade ago when an elective course on the topic was first taught.

To read more of this Business Week article on teaching happiness and positive psychology - click here

“Happiness does not heal, but happiness protects against falling ill,” says Ruut Veenhoven of Rotterdam’s Erasmus University in a study to be published next month.

After reviewing 30 studies carried out worldwide over periods ranging from one to 60 years, the Dutch professor said the effects of happiness on longevity were “comparable to that of smoking or not”.

Is happiness the key to living a longer and better life? To read more - click here

Do you want more happiness?
Even if you’re already happy, would you like more happiness in your life?

Well why wouldn’t you!

But if you want something more than you currently have you’ll probably need to change in some way.
Because the only time things will change for you is when you change.

So if you’d like your happiness levels to change then you need to change…your attitude, your goals, the way you live your life and maybe even the people with whom you spend time!

A recent article in the Financial Times begins…

Freedom, not high income, is the key to happiness
By Roberto Foa

Published: August 19 2008

In recent years, a small army of happiness gurus has lined up to proclaim the ills of modern society and its failure to make us feel better. We have more money, say some, but family life has eroded. Some have even blamed affluence itself, arguing that the dizzying range of lifestyle options that we now confront frustrates the pursuit of happiness.

Yet, contrary to the assertions of pessimists, newly released data, recently published in an article with colleagues from Jacobs University Bremen and the University of Michigan, shows that today’s world is a happier one. From 1981 to now, more than 350,000 people from 90 countries were asked about their happiness and satisfaction with life. Among the 52 countries for which at least a decade of data is available, well-being rose in 40 cases and fell in only 12. The average percentage of people who said they were “very happy” increased by almost seven points.

How is it that the world is getting happier? In the words of Thucydides, the secret of happiness is freedom. In each survey respondents were also asked to rate their sense of free choice in life. In all but three countries where perceived freedom rose, subjective well-being rose also. A chart, produced by the authors, shows how these increases in free choice and subjective well-being are strikingly related.

…this is, as many of you would well be aware, entirely consistent with The Happiness Institute’s “CHOOSE Philosophy” which you can access in our free resources section.

But if you’d like to read the rest of The Financial Times’ happiness story - click here

Being happy and staying happy isn’t up to your genetic makeup or your life circumstances alone, says happiness researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California, Riverside, who told an audience at the American Psychological Association on Friday that people can add to their capacity for happiness through techniques that can be learned to boost their joy.

Lyubomirsky, a psychologist and author of the 2007 book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, offered some of her happiness insights to a crowded room of psychologists who deal with unhappy people all the time.

To find out more about how you can benefit from these sorts of powerful, positive psychology coaching interventions - contact us at The Happiness Institute via info@thehappinessinstitute.com or www.thehappinessinstitute.com

To read the rest of the happiness article started above - click here

For quite some time now I’ve taken what’s called an ideographic approach to understanding people and, in my career as a therapist and coach, to helping them. In simple terms, this approach is based on the premise that we’re all different and contrasts with other approaches in psychology and psychiatry in which it’s assumed that we all fit into certain groups with commonalities.

Obviously, both approaches have some validity (you can always find differences just as you can always find similarities) but when it comes to the creation of happiness and a good life, I’m much more in the former camp. And I’m pleased to note that I’m not alone here but rather, in some good company. Aristotle, for one, noted that “different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means and so make for themselves different modes of life…”

Why am I writing about this? Because I think that too often we try to follow others but then expect a different outcome; too often we expect if we do what others do we’ll achieve the same outcome. It is, quite clearly, not that simple and so this week’s column is about finding your own way and finding a way to happiness that works for you…a way that might be quite different!

To help with this I thought I’d introduce you to some of the interesting work coming out of the innovation domain, an area in which different and individual approaches have received more respect than in some other contexts. And this in itself is an approach I’d encourage you to consider; what can you learn from one part of your life that might help you in other areas of your life? What, for example, do you do at work that might be useful at home (and vice versa)?

As much as I believe that there are general principles from which we can all benefit when it comes to enhancing our happiness (including, of course, the CHOOSE model we’ve used with such effect in The Happiness Institute), I’m also quite sure that there’s not one perfect approach that we can prescribe for everyone – so the following tips are provided to help you work through the mine field of possibilities and ideally, generate a recipe that will help you live a life filled with more positivity and success.

- Open a book (maybe an encyclopaedia or dictionary) at a random page and reflect upon a word or phrase
- Contemplate your typical approach to happiness and then imagine the complete opposite
- Gather together a group of friends or colleagues and without inhibition or restriction discuss happiness and life
- Imagine your life as a court-jester or a clown and meditate upon how you might approach life differently

During or after all of these little exercises ask yourself – what can I actually do right now that might impact positively on my happiness?

Please enjoy this interesting article from my friend, Lionel Ketchian’s Be Happy Zone eNewsletter.

HIERARCHY OF HAPPINESS
Attending a lecture this past Thursday by Mark Setton, Ph.D., held at our New Haven Happiness Club, I realized that the characteristics of the self-actualized person are the same ones for a happy person.

Self-actualization and The Hierarchy of Needs is represented in a triangle developed by Abraham Maslow who was born on April 1, 1908 in Brooklyn, New York and died on June 8, 1970 in California. Maslow was an American psychologist and was known for his conceptualization of a “hierarchy of human needs,” and is considered the father of humanistic psychology.

Their are five levels to the pyramid of The Hierarchy of Needs. The first is Physiological, the second is Safety, the third is Love/Belonging, the fourth is Esteem, the fifth and final one is Self-actualization. After the basic needs that we share with animals, come the more subtle needs that are more truly human. The third level, which is the need for love and belonging, includes the need for friends and companions, a supportive family, identification with a group, and an intimate relationship.

The fourth level is about meeting our esteem needs. This group requires recognition from other people that results in feelings of prestige, acceptance, status, and also self-esteem. This generates feelings of adequacy, competence, and confidence. Lack of satisfaction of the esteem needs, can result in discouragement and feelings of inferiority.

Finally, self-actualization is at the top of the pyramid. This is shared by humans and includes: Morality, Creativity, Spontaneity, Problem Solving, Lack of Prejudice and Acceptance of Facts. Here is how Maslow’s five aspects relate to happy people.

Morality: Being happy produces a person who is not as driven by accumulation for oneself. Maslow said: “They have a system of morality that is fully internalized and independent of external authority.” A happy person will include thinking about the welfare of others because they have developed a feeling of oneness for humanity. Happiness produces a feeling of virtue because happy people are friendly and love to share themselves with others. Oscar Wilde accurately described this aspect in happy people when he wrote: “When we are happy we are always good, but when we are good we are not always happy.”

Creativity: Creativity is a natural part of all of us. Happy people can and do express their creativity. Happy people seem to reach this inner state, because they are more relaxed and connected to themselves, others and to this state. The creativity they encounter is largely due to the control they experience over their thoughts and emotions.

Spontaneity: Happy people are not afraid to be spontaneous. Happiness assists them in overcoming the barrier to giving of themselves to others. They feel connected and they share this feeling with other people. I will quote Maslow here: “Self-actualizing people are relatively spontaneous in their behavior, and far more spontaneous than that in their inner life, thoughts and impulses. Self-actualizing persons are not hampered by convention, but they do not flout it. They are not conformists, but neither are they non-conformist for the sake of being so. They might act conventionally, but they seldom allow convention to keep them from doing anything they consider important or basic. They are not externally motivated or even goal-directed; rather, their motivation is the internal one of growth and development, the actualization of themselves and their potentialities.”

Problem Solving: Realizing the choices happy people have available to them, as a result of being happy, is one reason that happy people know how to deal with their problems as well as the problems that other people may face. Again I quote Maslow: “Self-actualizing people have a problem-solving orientation towards life instead of an orientation centered on self. They are interested in solving problems; this often includes the problems of others. Solving these problems are often a key focus in their lives. They commonly have a mission in life, a problem outside themselves that enlists much of their energies. In general, this mission is unselfish and is involved with the philosophical and the ethical.”

Lack of Prejudice: As we become happy, we become less attached to our own limited beliefs about other people. Happy people are less judgmental, more forgiving, less blaming and controlling of others and have a sense of connection to all people.

Acceptance of Facts: Happy people accept the way things are and the way they are for now. Happy people are free from wanting things to be different that can’t be changed. Happy people understand that the situation has already happened and there is nothing they can do about it. They act on the choices they have available to them. Happy people accept things because they know they don’t want to fight themselves. They concentrate on changing their state of mind to create the best possible outcomes. They know better than to start the downhill spiral of unhappiness, hopelessness and helplessness. By accepting a fact, happy people eliminate the feeling of turning the situation into making them feel like a victim.

Abraham Maslow also proposed that people who have reached the state of self-actualization will sometimes experience a state he referred to as “transcendence,” in which actualized people become aware of their own fullest potential, as well as the fullest potential of human beings at large.

Mark Setton, Ph.D. is a Professor at the University of Bridgeport. To learn more about Maslow, take a look at Mark’s website: www.pursuit-of-happiness.org.

BE HAPPY ZONE by Lionel Ketchian

ENDANGERED ice caps and polar bears notwithstanding, the thing that most annoys me about global warming is that the climate wars have turned its prophets into priests of a new campaign against the modern world.

It’s a few years since Australian author and former think tank boss Clive Hamilton started telling us that the failures of freedom are a “profound challenge to liberalism”. It is “more pressing every day, to question the value of the economic, political and personal liberties that have been won”. Now he has dedicated a book - The Freedom Paradox - to it and the metaphysics of godless repentance.

The answer to the malaise is to surrender your “individual self” to the “universal self” to achieve “metaphysical empathy”. Why do you need to repent? Because everywhere he looks, the world is falling apart. But he hasn’t looked very hard or far.

I’ve not read Hamilton’s new book, which clearly touches on happiness, but I’m familiar with his earlier works and although I don’t agree with everything he says his writings certainly make for interesting reading.

To read more of the article titled “The Global Pursuit of Happiness” - click here

Research over the last few decades has increasingly pointed to the fact that happiness is associated with longer life.

Click here to read more.

But I would say that’s only part of the picture. Happiness may well be linked to living more years but it’s also undeniably associated to living better for years. Longevity is one thing but happiness is also associated with better health, success, better quality relationships and much, much more.

Life’s too short not to be happy…at least that’s our motto here at The Happiness Institute.

So much for the grumpy old man/woman image! It seems that we may well become happier, not grumpier and more irritable, as we age.

If the Rolling Stones couldn’t get no satisfaction in their youth, new research suggests they might have a better shot now that they qualify for the seniors’ discount.

A study published in the latest edition of the Journal of Positive Psychology investigates the origins of life satisfaction across adulthood and finds the secret to happiness evolves as we age, while the things that dissatisfy us most remain constant.

To read more from canada.com about variations of happiness across life time - click here