Who are you now, and who are you capable of becoming?
We are all at times overwhelmed by life and lacking in what is needed to take on something new. But according to new research in the field of positive psychology, building psychological capital can help.
PsyCap, as it’s typically shortened to, can help you manage who you are now and who you want to be.
And unlike other forms of capital investment, it has no financial risk and is almost always guaranteed to pay great dividends.
What is PsyCap?
PsyCap is about building the mental resources required for doing what you want and realizing your potential. After all, according to research, when your…
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Focusing attention on the relationship
There was a time when almost all coaching and therapy took place in person. Yet, with the challenges we’ve all faced over the last year and remote working becoming the norm, this has changed.
It had to.
Advanced e-coaching and e-therapy tools have enabled coaches and therapists to take sessions online and–perhaps surprisingly–improve contact with clients while getting to know how they are doing between sessions.
After all, it is outside of dedicated meetings when most learnings and growth occur. …
Finding the path to growth
So often in life, we busy ourselves with everyday tasks and forget to take stock of who we are, what we are good at, and what is important to us.
Reflection can help.
Capturing key events of the day on paper–in a journal, diary, or a phone–is incredibly valuable.
The act of writing down what has happened and reviewing it later can be insightful and help you recognize positive and negative patterns in your behavior. But more than that, it builds hope.
Ask yourself at the end of each day:
What was the best part of the day? What would…
If you can’t recognize your strengths, you may not be using them
Love, I hadn’t expected that. Why not bravery, leadership, or perseverance?
My character strengths test results were in, and I felt slightly cheated by my top three – love, curiosity, and love of learning.
Two and three were not a surprise. After all, I’ve always enjoyed learning, and I’m drawn to interesting things like a magpie to shiny objects.
Thankfully my writing allows me to explore my passions. I’m in my element when I’m online, looking through new research or flicking through a heavy-weight textbook, with a coffee and my dog snoozing beside me.
I don’t know why the love…
20 statements to help you see things differently
Unless you’ve been off the planet for the past five years, you’re probably aware of the importance of adopting a “growth mindset” — or at least you’ve heard the term. Researcher Carol Dweck’s influential TED Talk and her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success emphasize the importance of the growth mindset. But simply adopting this way of seeing the world is easier said than done. Integral to a growth mindset is an acceptance of neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to make new connections and reorganize synaptic connections.
A growth mindset is about adopting an outlook that says “I can…
Writing comes first, then it takes time to recognize who you’ve become
It took a year of writing full time before I dared call myself a writer. After all, it’s not a proper job. It’s something other people do. Isn’t it?
Yet, like many others, when my job finished early in the pandemic, I had to find another way to pay the bills. So I made the jump. I took it as an opportunity to do what I had always wanted — write full time.
I fell on my feet, finding a freelance role with a company that needed plenty of well-researched, evidence-based psychology articles. It was a dream. …
Psychology has a new digital friend
We may think of chatbots as new technology, but they’ve been around since the 1960s.
When MIT’s Joseph Weizenbaum created conversational software known as ELIZA in 1966, it resulted in a relatively crude, yet surprisingly effective, imitation of a psychotherapist.
While it did little more than rewording patient’s phrases, it hinted at what was possible and took the next step on the path to Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Jump forward to this century, and AI is being used to assess patients.
Not only can it confirm their identity, but it uses smell to recognize intoxication, vocal analysis to detect subtle changes…
