Positivity Podcast with Make School Positivity Podcast with Make School

“The solution isn’t to do away with dreaming ... Rather, it’s making the most of our fantasies by brushing them up against the very thing most of us are taught to ignore or diminish: the obstacles that stand in our way.” - Gabriele Oettingen

Professor Gabriele Oettingen tears through traditional notions of motivation and success. Her 20 years of research focus on the perils of positive thinking, and the science of how focusing on obstacles has been proven to help people achieve their goals. Gabriele is the author of more than 100 articles and book chapters on thinking about the future and the control of cognition, emotion, and behavior. She is now a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg.

In this episode we cover:
- Her WOOP framework for engineering motivation, clarity, followthrough
- Why dreaming makes you less motivated
- Why dreamers are prone to depression
- Identifying the correct obstacles in your way

You can check out her book Rethinking Positive Thinking as well as her website mywooplife.org

This episode focuses on tools of emotional resilience.

I’ve met few people like Marc - he is so open and honest about his emotions that it is refreshing. It’s easy to see why. Marc Brackett, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor at Yale University. His research is on the role of emotions and emotional intelligence in learning, decision making, creativity, relationships, health, and both academic and workplace performance.

Marc is the lead developer of RULER, a Pre-K to high school evidence-based, whole-school approach to social and emotional learning that has been adopted by over 2,000 schools. He has published 125 scholarly articles and consults regularly with corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google on integrating emotional intelligence principles into employee training and product design and is co-founder of Oji Life Lab, a digital emotional intelligence learning system for businesses.

You can check out his app Mood Meter App (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mood-meter-building-your-emotional/id825930113) to log and respond to your own emotional changes throughout the day.

Having more choices is good right? Barry Schwartz thinks otherwise.

"In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice , tackles one of the great mysteries of modern life: Why is it that societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before — are now witnessing a near-epidemic of depression? Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today's western world is actually making us miserable. "

In this episode we explore making choices on:
- dating
- prioritization
- career
- eliminating choice
- decision making

By the end I had a practical framework for making choices in my life and tools to think less about low priorities.

What motivates us? How can we motivate ourselves? Our guest today is a legend in the psychology world, Dan Pink. He’s often credited for paving the paved the path for authors of other character trait oriented books, including many of the authors who have been on this podcast. And he’s so well regarded that at this point if I see an amazing education organization I just assume he’s on the board. In his groundbreaking book, "Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us", Dan uses 50 years of behavioral science to overturn the conventional wisdom about human motivation and offer a more effective path to high performance.

This episode is incredibly practical and I’ve since used it as my go-to-guide for when I feel like I’m in a slump. Dan talks on how to design your habits, routines, commitments, self-talk, and projects to increase your drive.

So you want to be more motivated, this episode is for you. And, of you are a manager you may want to jump to minute (31) where Dan shares his top 5 tips for what organizations can do to increase their employee motivation.

It’s incredibly practical and will leave you with new techniques to be inspired.

Were you ever in a classroom that felt too crowded? Maybe 35 students, 50, 100? One man teaches a lot more students than that - he teaches over 320,000 students. What a headache! But not for one person.

Who is he? Rob Percival. He’s one of the best selling online instructors of all time. His uDemy iOS course has reached hundreds of thousands of students. We discuss why Rob believes his courses caught on, his teaching philosophy, the story of his career and how he hopes to change the world. This episode helped me rethink my teaching career, and how to cope with unexpected dramatic success and impact. In this episode, I’m joined with Make School student Unathi Choco.

How can you cultivate a generous attitude?

In this episode, we have Matthieu Richard, a Buddhist monk in Nepal with TedTalks on happiness and altruism that have over 8 million views. In this episode, we deconstruct how to cultivate this urge in our own hearts to be altruistic. We also talk about Matthieu's journey from the intellectual elites in France to a monastery in Nepal, meditation, self-love, how to evaluate the effectiveness of an altruistic act, habits to achieve a meditative mindset throughout the day, and why some reporters call Matthieu “the happiest man in the world” but he disagrees.

Our talk helped me think about how to push the boundaries of my own giving, how to better delight people in my life. We also talk about how giving can make me happier. Matthieu's new meditation app (https://www.imagineclarity.com/) may also be the tool you need to find peace.

Alright, here’s Matthieu.