Cultivating Optimism and Resilience for Success: Enhance Your Career Development Using Positive Psychology

This interactive class is designed to give you tools that will help manage the professional and personal challenges you encounter on a daily basis. You will learn how to use evidence-based strategies grounded in Positive Psychology that, with practice, will help you cultivate better relationships with others, improve work satisfaction and performance, and foster greater resilience in the face of adversity. Positive Psychology is a scientifically based branch of psychology, pioneered by Martin EP Seligman from the University of Pennsylvania. It is the science that explores how happiness and wellbeing can be improved and sustained by building on our strengths, rather than fixing our weaknesses. In other words, it differs from traditional psychology by focusing on what is right with you as a way to build on your unique strengths and abilities. Taking this course will help you foster positive outcomes, while elevating your own level of happiness, career/life satisfaction, and wellbeing. After a brief overview of Positive Psychology, you will learn how to measure where you are on the optimism-pessimism spectrum. Then you will learn to use practical strategies to help you become more optimistic and resilient. You will have the opportunity to directly apply these skills to approach the professional challenge(s) you are facing, in a new way. The class is designed to be interactive, engaging and fun in order to enhance retention and application beyond the classroom setting.

Learner Outcomes

At the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Describe the principles of Positive Psychology, and how they can be used to make interactions with colleagues more satisfying and constructive
• Measure your own optimism quotient, and learn how to improve it using evidence-based techniques such as power phrases and positive self-talk
• Identify the benefits and pitfalls of where you are on the optimism-pessimism scale
• Use tools of Positive Psychology to approach a current situation in your work/life with greater optimism and resilience
• Identify print and on-line resources for further study.

Recommendations

Who Should Attend?

This class is appropriate for professionals who want to reboot their outlook at any stage in their career, whether just starting out, at mid-career, at the peak of a career, or during a career change.