Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology, theorizes that while 60 percent of happiness is determined by our genetics and environment, the remaining 40 percent is up to us.

In his 2004 Ted Talk, Seligman describes three different kinds of happy lives: The pleasant life, in which you fill your life with as many pleasures as you can, the life of engagement, where you find a life in your work, parenting, love and leisure and the meaningful life, which "consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are."

After exploring what accounts for ultimate satisfaction, Seligman says he was surprised. The pursuit of pleasure, research determined, has hardly any contribution to a lasting fulfillment. Instead, pleasure is "the whipped cream and the cherry" that adds a certain sweetness to satisfactory lives founded by the simultaneous pursuit of meaning and engagement.

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The course shows you how the essential elements of trust, credibility, and specific confident communication behaviors bring about confident communication and enhance your influence. It highlights the advantages of communicating with confidence, explores the construction of trust and credibility, and clarifies how trust and credibility result in confident communications.

This is course number:  comm_21_a01_bs_enus

Visit the UMBC SkillSoft website (link to: www.umbc.edu/skillsoft) for a Quick Start Guide, FAQ’s, and the link to log in to SkillPort. 

For more information about the Business Exploration Series courseware, click here.

To schedule a department presentation about using SkillSoft for professional development, call ext. 5-6262 or e-mail hrtraining@umbc.edu. 

A few things—like chocolate, chick flicks, and clean sheets—are almost guaranteed to boost your mood. But when it comes to achieving true happiness, there are a ton of misconceptions.
 
Shawn Achor, author of the upcoming book Before Happiness: The 5 Hidden Keys to Achieving Success, Spreading Happiness, and Sustaining Positive Change, clears up some of the most common myths about finding bliss.

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June 8 was National Get Outdoors Day. Did you miss it? I did -- and chances are, you did, too. In 2012, out of the 313 million people in the United States, 70,000 participated. That's .0002 percent.

National Get Outdoors Day. Let's think about that.

Our nation's indoor-dwelling denizens, like you and me, have such a dearth of outside activity that a coalition of people and organizations banded together to get us to go outside. These folks tempted us with geocaching, bike clinics, fly-fishing lessons, hikes, canoeing, rock climbing and fairs in parks all over the country.

By many standards, these events were deemed a success. People went outdoors. Awareness was raised. People felt energized and happy. All good things.

But why aren't we outside anyway?

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As a clinical psychologist and sleep researcher at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, Kelly Glazer Baron frequently heard complaints from aggrieved patients about exercise. They would work out, they told her, sometimes to the point of exhaustion, but they would not sleep better that night.

Dr. Baron was surprised and perplexed. A fan of exercise for treating sleep problems, but also a scientist, she decided to examine more closely the day-to-day relationship between sweat and sleep.

What she and her colleagues found, according to a study published last week in The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, is that the influence of daily exercise on sleep habits is more convoluted than many of us might expect and that, in the short term, sleep might have more of an impact on exercise than exercise has on sleep.

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This is your life.

Do what you love and do it often.

If you don’t like something, change it.

If you don’t like your job, quit.

If you don’t have enough time, stop watching TV.

If you’re looking for the love of your life, stop; they’ll be waiting for you when you start doing things you love.

Does any of this sound familiar?

If so, you might be one of the 100 million people who’ve read and shared the Holstee Manifesto.

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