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Building Adult Friendships: A Personal Journey
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How can we make friends as adults? Getting stuck into new activities is a great starting place, but the internet can also sometimes give us a helping hand.
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Pulling on the Christmas heartstrings?
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It’s that time of year again. Let’s talk about the John Lewis Christmas advert. Yet again music is being used as a way into feelings and connections that are hard to put into words. This year we’ve got a son who buys his dad Where Love Lives, a 1990s hit,…
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Ready to Thrive in Five?
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Today’s modern world is stressful, and record proportions of people report feeling anxious. Although we are living longer, our quality of life can be low, even for those of us lucky enough not to be living in war zones or through famines or droughts. If you’re constantly exhausted, juggling many…
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Does your job fit?
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It’s exactly a year since I left my long-term academic career, in a role I used to love. At the turn of the millennium I signed up with enthusiasm for what I thought would be a glittering career full of inspiring conversations, opportunities to make a real difference in my…
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What are we using AI for now?
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Harvard Business Review has recently published the top 100 GenAI use cases for 2025. While there is a slightly worrying finding that the top use case is personal therapy and companionship (and more on this below), it’s also interesting to see a new use case for 2025 which is ‘organise…
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How much time does it take to feel better?
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We’re all about the quick wins in today’s fast-paced dopamine-fuelled society. And while we all recognise that change takes time, we still want the quickest routes to it – Ozempic, anyone? A new study by researchers from Duke University, North Carolina, found that health care workers could improve their emotional…
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Feel better fast!
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Building on the courses I’ve been running so far and my experience teaching happiness and wellbeing over the past 15 years, for summer 2025 I’ve launched two new online offerings. The first is a free download containing five top tips for boosting your mood. These are drawn from the latest…
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Reflections
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A month ago I finished running the first pass of my online positive personal development course, which is thoroughly grounded in scientific research and inspired by both Western positive psychology and the Eastern tradition of Ikigai. I’ve been a bit busy since then with some in-person events in both France…
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International Women’s Day
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There are lots of posts out there today celebrating wonderful women who have inspired or changed the world. As I’m 50% of the way through my first online positive personal development course, Look Up, I’d like to celebrate the women who have come along on this journey with me. In…
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Anticipation
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I’ve been really enjoying putting my first online course together over the past few weeks and looking forward to how it’s going to go down amongst my first cohort starting on Monday. It’s often challenging to present something to a new type of audience, but the course is all about…
