Book Discussion – Positive Psychology Coaching

May 10th, 2012 -- Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Positive Psychology Coaching – Putting the Science of Happiness to Work for Your Clients by Robert Biswas-Diener & Ben Dean

A Review in Progress by Linda Lawless LMHC LMFT
www.ProfessionalPracticeInstitute.com

Many of us have already been using Positive Psychology in our therapy and coaching work. I believe this new book will help you put things in a clear context of what to use and why.

I am finding this new book very easy to read and well organized. The first chapter is really an overview of what the book is about and why they wrote it. Here is an overview

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Positive Psychology And Weight Loss Coaching

May 10th, 2012 -- Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Weight loss coaching is usually a combination of coaching, consulting and counseling. I’m a big believer in blending our expertise with our coaching skills. In this way, every coach is a weight loss coach — this issue is going to be raised by many coaching clients, because people are often successful in every area of their lives except weight loss. It’s frequently a symptom of people who are overachieving, taking care of everyone else . . . of our overresponsible, overdone lives.

Weight loss is about your whole life. If we only ate when we were hungry and stopped when

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Positive Psychology in Education

May 10th, 2012 -- Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

What happens when positive psychology principles are truly applied in an educational setting? Answering this question invites at least two tactics: 1st, identifying which principles are in question; and 2nd, considering schools which may not identify with the label “positive psychology”.

Let’s consider that the underlying principle of positive psychology as applied to education is simply focusing on what’s right with individual students while recognizing their learning difficulties and challenges. A school that successfully applies that method is Landmark School (http://www.landmarkschool.org), a school for elementary, middle- and high-school students with verbal learning disabilities. Practically speaking, this means that students

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Positive psychology and managing serious diseases

May 10th, 2012 -- Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

As you may know I am struggling through a difficult period with an
autoimmune illness, Wegener’s disease. I dislike being a “patient” in every sense of the word but I have had to learn new adaptive skills to weather the storm.

Managing this illness has been life changing to say the least, and my
training in positive psychology has never been more useful. I am no stranger to stress caused by serious disease processes. I’ve been managing much too much stress, especially during the past two years due to my husband’s recurrence of cancer.

I also have many mothering demands

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Book review: a mind of its own

May 10th, 2012 -- Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

a mind of its own: How Your Brain Distorts And Deceives
Author: Cordeia Fine

Highly recommended by reviewer: Carole Rein

Well-researched, this book presents information supported by hundreds of studies by hundreds of researchers including Dan Wegner, Roy Baumeister, and Antonio Damasio. What sets this book apart from others is its lightheartedness in listing serious shortcomings of our brains, that is, the brains that are not learning-disabled, but considered ‘normal’. Research has shown that our brains distort facts repeatedly in order to see ourselves personally in a better light. This is a million examples of positive psychology in action, on

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Chapter 3 Choosing Happiness: Goals, Relationships, and Positive Thinking

May 10th, 2012 -- Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Having just spent a day with Dan Siegel (The Mindful Brain) and hearing about neural plasticity, I was put off by the introduction to Chapter 3 and their belief in “biological determinism.” Realizing the authors and I come from different places, but are looking to the same outcomes, helping clients increase the happiness in their lives, I read on.

The three areas of focus are mentioned in the title of this chapter. I thought I knew a lot about goal setting and discovered a lot lot more. The power of relationships and thinking styles and habits are also thoughtfully explored.

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Positive Psychology Coaching – Book Review

May 10th, 2012 -- Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Positive Psychology Coaching – Putting the Science of Happiness to Work for Your Clients by Robert Biswas-Diener & Ben Dean

A Review in Progress by Linda Lawless LMHC LMFT
www.ProfessionalPracticeInstitute.com

Many of us have already been using Positive Psychology in our therapy and coaching work. I believe this new book will help you put things in a clear context of what to use and why.

I am finding this new book very easy to read and organized well. The first chapter is really an overview of what and why the book is about. I’m eager to move on to the

[...] Continue Reading…

What’s Right With You?

May 10th, 2012 -- Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

If you’d like a simple, useful book to recommend as an introduction to the concepts of positive psychology for your clients, I’d highly recommend “What’s Right with You?” by Barry Duncan, PsyD.  You may recognize Barry Duncan as one of the authors of “The Heroic Client”.   In this straight-forward book, Duncan describes his frustration as a young psychologist to find out that the mental health field was only interested in what was wrong with people…their pathology.    It characterized people as damaged goods, hopeless victims of past trauma or their own biochemistry. Duncan reports that this “view” did not fit with

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