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"Equity and social justice are key, argue Jaye Sablan and Bill Mahoney ..."

by Miriam Plotinsky

“Ultimate wellbeing has nothing to do with what's outside us,” says Daniel Goleman. What would happen if we could fully take charge of our own wellbeing... and what's the neuroscience that will help make it so?

Worrying about deadlines, work flow or employee issues is natural for people working in the business world. Stress happens. You have options, though, on how you deal with stress.

Sometimes, taking a moment to recenter yourself is all you need to do: By putting things into perspective, you can find the grit to keep going. That’s not always the best course of action, though. If you find that a particular task or job regularly leaves you feeling overwhelmed, drained or quietly angry, you may want to rethink how you approach the work or even consider whether you’d be better suited for a different sort of job or different company.

The field of positive psychology was born when researchers noticed that psychology was awfully negative—focusing on illness and suffering but mute on the topic of how to thrive and flourish.

Two decades later, you could say that positive psychology is moving past this dichotomy of positive and negative, toward a more nuanced perspective on the good life. At least, that was one of the themes at the International Positive Psychology Association’s 5th World Congress, a four-day conference held earlier this month that brought together more than 1,300 researchers, practitioners, students, and journalists in Montreal, Canada.

Researchers shared the complexities and complications they were uncovering about the elements of well-being, from gratitude and mindfulness to passion and grit. Here are some of their insights.

In this interactive feature, you will learn how the choices we make can help children and the community as a whole become more resilient in the face of serious challenges

The parenting video lesson of the week is on the importance of sleep in elementary-aged children.

We create social emotional learning videos for kids. We hope you love our social emotional learning videos.

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Supporting Kids to Thrive: Are Kids Thriving Equally?
Six Seconds gathered this data by having kids age 7 to 18, all over the world, take the youth version of the SEI, the world’s leading emotional intelligence assessment. The good news is that youth wellbeing is on the rise: from 2015 to 2017, we saw a 4% increase in youth wellbeing scores. The bad news is that, on average, wellbeing scores seem to drop as kids enter their teenage years. Check out this graph of youth wellbeing scores, broken up into 3 age groups. 
 
The particular challenges for teenagers are something that many of our Six Seconds team members have noticed in schools and in their own homes. Freedman says that “the level of anxiety and stress for teenagers is a pandemic, all over the world.”  
Why would teenagers be struggling more?

We undertook a national survey to understand the reality of how mental health is experienced at work.  The survey results tell us that progress is being made but there is a need for greater organisational awareness of the support required for better mental health at work. Significant and potentially damaging disconnects exist that demand an urgent response from business.

Employers need to recognise the scale of poor mental health in the workplace and take significant steps to reduce the risk of their workplace being a contributor.  Employers have a duty of care to their employees to respond to mental ill health just as they
would to a physical illness.  Organisations should equip their managers with the tools, support and organisational culture they need to do their job well, which must include managing employees with mental health issues. It makes good business sense to foster a culture of openness that supports employees with a mental health issue to work and stay in work.

The Benefit Mindset has made its way into its first academic book!

The books forward is by David Cooperrider and the Benefit Mindset is explored in the Chapter ‘Why We Need Positive Education 2.0’. The chapter was co-authored with Mathew A. White PhD, Director of Wellbeing at St Peter’s College.

Access the book here >

Abstract: What’s next in well-being? We argue it’s Positive Education 2.0. The American psychologist Corey Keyes explains, “It is often said that our youth is this nation’s future. If true, then there is too much mental illness to look forward to in the future”. Never before have schools received the call to educate a new generation to lead global challenges of such complexity. Notwithstanding Keyes observations, this is a global challenge and it requires a global approach. We need Positive Education 2.0, which is informed by entrepreneurship, innovation and hands-on discovery for young people. We believe in doing this; positive education should now move toward programs that teach innovation through project-based learning teams, in which students will focus on solving real-life challenges.