One of my favorite activities is writing. I love to share stories and articles that can help others. My blog and online articles are the place where I share my insights, ideas, and lessons learned from my work and study.
In addition to online articles, I’m also a contributing author to several books. My books are the place where I can dive deeper and provide a more detailed discussion of topics on design and well-being (positive psychology).
My colleagues and I at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) wrote this book to share our story of innovation – to show that it’s possible for organizations big and small to create meaningful culture change. Through our journey, we created a new innovation framework that blends the practical applications of engineering with innovative concepts and techniques.
To illustrate our approach, we utilize case studies from our organization. These help readers to understand how they can bring these concepts and techniques to their own organizations in a real and tangible way.
What are the elements of good character? The Values in Action (VIA) project identified 24 qualities such as creative, authentic, loving, forgiving, kind, persistent, prudent, and brave, calling them character strengths. Character strengths are elements of good character valued across time and around the world.
In Character Strengths Matter: How to Live a Full Life, my co-authors and I bring the 24 character strengths to life with stories involving children, teenagers, adults, and elders and occurring in family life and business settings, in the present and in the distant past, in locations from China to the United States to the Middle East.
In this book, we include many ideas for using your character strengths in new ways. Based on the unusual premise that a key way to build strength is to act ‘as if’ you have that strength already, we include short passages to read aloud to try on particular character strengths.
In Positive Health: Flourishing Lives, Well-Being in Doctors, Dr. Marsha Snyder tackles the massive challenge of improving the well-being of practicing doctors. She puts forward a compelling solution, detailing research-based interventions and practices from positive psychology that can dramatically improve physician well-being. My role as a contributing author was to articulate the premise of the book in the introduction, and to show how our understanding of Positive Emotions research can help improve well-being.