Appreciation: Savor the moments you are with the ones you love. Create mental memories of their facial expressions or sounds of excitement as they open a gift or share a story. Ask for and offer help: There is a lot to get done and plenty of people around to help out. Don’t take on all the responsibilities nor should you leave it all to someone else. It’s a family thing. Take time for you: This is your holiday season as...

My new hometown, Pittsburgh, recently was named one of the world’s most resilient cities by the Rockefeller Foundation. The “Resilient City” project being undertaken by the Foundation will name 100 large and small cities across the globe that will receive funding to develop strategies to address many of the challenges that are facing local communities. So far they have named 77 cities. The Resilient City project focuses on 4 areas of resilience including infrastructure and environment, economics and financial systems,...

In much of my work with individuals, I focus on a strengths-based approach helping people identify and acknowledge the skills that help them become successful. I find this approach much more amenable to professional growth as opposed to focusing just on weaknesses, which for many of us, is our default mode. In the same way, Appreciative Inquiry (AI) can be used to help organizations focus on positive approaches for decision-making and strategic change. Developed in the late 1980s at Case...

  © Richard Citrin, 2014]]>

Last week, I conducted a series of presentations to employees at an industrial plant as part of their ongoing education on Stress Resilience. We had a great time as the employees talked about their upcoming holiday stress and how we’ll all be dealing with our crazy Uncle Albert (or someone) who is sure to disrupt some of the festivities. Gratitude came up as a topic of discussion in most of the sessions, as a strategy to improve our own resilience...

One of our inalienable rights as Americans is to pursue happiness and certainly if we are building resilience in the face ofchallenging life events, the goal surely must be to find that elusive state. Opinions differ about exactly what makes happiness. Most research has focused on overcoming our negativities (as we discussed a few weeks ago on the Negativity Bias) which can include ideas to deal with everything from anxiety to depression. Happiness definitions vary but typically include the idea...