Learning Center

According to the Department of Labor, 61.1% of married-couple families in 2016 had both parents working. In my counseling work, and in my role as husband to a working wife, I bear witness daily to the power spouses have to support or undermine their partners. As I enter my 50th year of marriage, still working and still married to a ...

If someone foolishly launched into a litany of excuses and rationalizations around my former colleague Nancy, she loved to proclaim: “If wishes were dishes, the whole world would be a kitchen.” Invariably, she would follow up with an emphatic and melodic: “Woulda! Coulda! Shoulda!”. I was thinking about Nancy when I was assembling this short list of resolutions worth keeping ...

If you take the pleasure of getting things done at work and multiply that by the pleasure of getting better at what you do, the result is improved job satisfaction, higher motivation and diminished levels of stress. It’s a simple formula: we come to work to get something done and when we do our level of well-being and engagement increase. ...

There is nothing better than an impending disaster to clarify the distinction between the essential and the trivial. When total annihilation is on the horizon no one is wasting any time worrying about whether it’s going to rain this weekend. The standard formula for disaster movies builds upon the stark choices offered by the threat of total calamity. In response ...

Last October, I had an opportunity to ask 25,000 strangers five questions concerning their attitudes and feelings about work. Today’s post reviews some of the responses I received to one of those questions: “What are your strategies for balancing the demands of work with those of your personal life?” As you might expect, there is great variability in how people ...

Ethel Weiss is the primary (and sole) investigator for the longest running research project in the country on the subject of happiness and job satisfaction. When I tell you that the study is being conducted in Massachusetts you might reasonably suspect that the Harvard Business School or M.I.T. have something to do with it, but they don’t. Ethel’s extraordinary research ...

What a joy it is to recycle stuff that has been gathering dust. It’s not just the space it opens up, although that’s pretty satisfying. The best part of repurposing things is that you also silence their nagging challenge: “I have value. Why aren’t you using me?” So it was with pleasure that I cleaned out the area below my ...

Before color tv and before personal computing and long before the internet, my portal to the outside world was a glossy magazine called TV Guide. Our copy came in the mail every week and I studied it carefully. I couldn’t read yet but I remember being captivated by the cover photos of television celebrities: every week a different entertainer was ...

In a couple of weeks I will celebrate my 44th wedding anniversary. I’m not bragging. Honestly, I feel lucky that I didn’t screw it up when I think how very young and immature and needy I was at the outset. Like all marriages, mine dodged a few bullets along the way and should be considered a work in progress, but ...