Thoughts in Time

This week, I started the Masters in Applied Positive Psychology program at UPENN. The program caught my interest for a number of reasons and so far I have certainly not been disappointed. To some up quickly, and I’ll write more in the future, the idea of Positive Psychology is that while traditional psychology has studied what’s wrong with us, and how to intervene to fix us, there has been a lack of study of what makes us great, happy, etc. We’ve approached the world with an idea that happiness is the absence of unhappiness. Intuitively, we know that’s not the case. So positive psychology is the study of the plus side of things. Whether that’s performance in business, parenting, pysical well being, or other domains, there are so many areas where we have studied what goes wrong, but not enough about what goes right and why. An important basis of positive psych is the emphasis of empirical, scientific research. This is not a “let’s be happy all the time” self help guru training program .

The program will unfold over 40 days on campus (mostly those are Friday -> Sunday to avoid missing the work week), and then there’s lots of distance work. It’s going to be a fun challenge as we continue to build Pikum at the same time!