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This week’s podcast is about the context of our psychology and choices framed from through science. Based on a paper that I wrote for a class I was recently taking in the Master’s of Applied Positive Psychology program at the University of Pennsylvania, Katie and I expand on a model that has been used by her and others in describing the context in which we approach the situations in our lives. This model is a binary model that basically describes that we can either be defending ourselves and closed or that we can be open and interested in learning. The key point to this model is that we can use it to describe the current context in which we may be acting from and also importantly, that we have a choice. This model supports us in first, identifying where we are with our consciousness and secondarily, that we can make a choice if we want to stay closed or open. Powerful right? We also talk about the initial beliefs in psychology and how the discoveries about humans over the years have changed much of our understanding about what is possible.

The basic premise is that we can shift our focus through many of the practices now being identified in positive psychology through building our resilience, using an optimistic explanatory style as lenses to look through the events of our lives and also, other components like focusing more on our strengths than our weaknesses. These are all things that we have focused on throughout the show and this week, we bring it all into focus. We hope you dig the model and that you share your comments with us below. And, if you want to read a great book that tells you even more, check this one out here.