Creativity expert, Sir Ken Robinson, talks about the need for revolution in the education system.

“Very many people go through their whole lives having no real sense of what their talents may be, or if they have any to speak of. I meet all kinds of people who don’t think they’re really good at anything”, he says. This sounds very familiar to me – only today I was working with some public sector admin staff who had no idea of their strengths, or that there might be a role for them at work in which they could really flourish, rather than just survive the 9-5.  We focussed on ways to identify and apply their strengths in the workplace using the VIA-Inventory of Strengths* – and it was a real eye-opener for them.

Robinson talks about the need for an organic “agricultural model” of education, in which the conditions necessary for flourishing are created, rather than the linear, “manufacturing model”, which merely standardises everything, and squashes creativity and talent, as well as depleting our spirit and energy.

A brilliant short talk, which brings ideas such as strengths, flow, positive energy, flourishing, authenticity, meaning and spirituality to life, all without mentioning Positive Psychology once. An inspiration.

* You can do this inventory yourself for free here: it takes about 30 minutes to do, and you get an immediate report of your strengths in order. Well worth it.

Thanks to Morten Mortensen for the link.

Tal Ben-Shahar, Psychology Lecturer at Harvard University talks about how organisations can use Positive Psychology to improve motivation, creativity and loyalty, and ultimately productivity (2.37 mins).

Thanks to bigthink.com

Some of you might be wondering what the connection is between social media (aka social networking), business and positive psychology. The answer (or at least one of them) as far as I am concerned is performance. Both individiual and organisational performance depend on employee engagement and well-being, both of which can be increased through social networking.

As Will McInnes points out in this slide show (presented as part of Social Media Week), technological changes are unstoppable, so we’d be better off working out how we can use them effectively. Huge organisations like IBM have shown that it can be done – as this great blog from Casey Hibbard at the Social Media Examiner shows.

Of course there are headlines every day reporting the dark side of social networking, or about how many hours employees are wasting as they update their Facebook profiles. But technology can be used to change people’s behaviour for the better – McInnes gives the example of Toyota Prius drivers competing to better their MPG  ’score’ on the dashboard. You may remember that I touched on this subject with my posting on the so-called “Fun Theory” last year.

So if you want to engage your staff and take advantage of the social connections that people naturally make, think seriously about how social networking is being used in your organisation.

Here’s a link to my January contribution to Positive Psychology New Daily . Research just out suggests that how you spend your money affects your well-being, and that you’d be better off  (psychologically-speaking) by considering experiential purchases rather than material ones.  There are several reasons for this, for example, people tend to make unfavorable comparisons when they buy material goods, and the positive feeling you might get from buying them wears off very quickly. With experiential purchases, the feel-good factor lasts far longer.

Fortunately, if you’re a shopaholic, you may be able to fool youself into thinking about material purchases as if they were experiences, and in this way derive some longer-lasting benefit from them!

Image courtesy of Lauren Close

Here’s a link to my December contribution to Positive Psychology New Daily – given that 2010 is nearly here, it seemed appropriate to write about ‘future mental time travel’ (MTT). This particular research suggests that practising future MTT every day can increase your level of happiness if you focus on positive events.

If you can’t think of any positive future events to savour, even thinking about neutral events in the future can be beneficial, by reducing your level of anxiety. So as you start planning for 2010, why not try your own experiment, and see if future MTT works for you?

As usual your thoughts and comments are welcome here and on the PPND site!

Image: thanks to lepiaf.geo