Marcos Salazar - Personal & Career Development for Young Professionals

An Invitation to FiveDailyGratitudes.com - A New Positive Psychology Tool to Increase Your Happiness

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I am writing this blog post to formally invite you to participate in a new positive psychology website I have created that extends the spirit of Thanksgiving and helps people take advantage of integrating the power of gratitude into their life. The site is called FiveDailyGratitudes.com and is an Online Community Gratitude Journal that provides a quick and easy way to list five things you are thankful for and helps you consistently take advantage of this powerful positive psychology technique by providing a subscription service that sends you a morning email reminder so you can stick to your commitment of increasing your happiness through writing Five Daily Gratitudes.

Five Daily Gratitudes is backed up by an overwhelming amount of psychological research showing that integrating the power of gratitude significantly increases your optimism, health, and self-esteem as well as improves your sleep, motivation, relationships, and even your career.

Why I started FiveDailyGratitudes.com
People usually write daily gratitudes in a journal but I wanted a method that I could do from anywhere in the world. I didn’t want to forget to write them down on paper or forget my journal somewhere. So I decided to start this website to list my Five Daily Gratitudes each day.

However, I quickly realized this was something that could benefit many other people, especially during today's anxious economic times where it is easy to focus on all the current negativity. So I decided to do a little psychological experiment: I opened up Five Daily Gratitudes so that anyone can share the things they are thankful for. More importantly, I want to see how many people I can get to start consciously appreciating the good things in their lives through this free service.

So why not spend a few minutes each morning to focus your mind on the positive things in your life and join this positive psychology movement of bringing happiness and gratitude to as many people as possible by listing your own Five Daily Gratitudes! Start cultivating the power of thankfulness today, subscribe to get a daily morning reminder, and share the site with all your friends!

To learn more about how you can get started using Five Daily Gratitudes, visit our Getting Started section.

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Making Good Decisions: Part 4 - Bringing Emotional Intelligence to Your Decisions

This is the third in a series of posts about the psychology of making good decisions in the contexts of life in our twenties and thirties. In the first post we talked about the good and bad things of having much more freedom after college. In the second post  we talked about the cost associated with an abundance of opportunities. In the third post we discussed how with every opportunity there is a cost and the more choices we explore, the worse we can feel about our decisions. In this post we will talk about how you can begin using emotional intelligence to make better decisions.

During my first week in college, I met Steve. He was valedictorian of his high school and a math wiz who was just a few points shy of get­ting a perfect SAT score. Steve was one of the most intelligent people I had ever met and yet, at the end of the first semester, he was on probation for nearly flunking two of his classes.

The reason Steve had done so poorly in school was because he had spent most of his semester hanging out with friends, drinking, getting high, and sleep­ing until one or two in the afternoon. At the end of the year, he had to leave our school for a year and take classes at a community college before coming back. I still don’t know if he ever graduated.

Whenever I thought about Steve, I always used to ask myself how someone with such a high IQ could act so dumb. Why did he have so much trouble making good decisions? I soon found the answer in Daniel Goleman’s groundbreaking book Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ.

What Goleman has found during his years of intelligence research is that things like IQ, the ability to get a high SAT score, or good grades are not always the best ways to predict who will succeed in life. This is not to say that there isn’t a relationship between IQ, SATs, grades, and future success. There certainly can be. However, more and more research continues to show that they aren’t the only factors involved, says Karen Arnold, professor of education at Boston University who tracks valedictorians. “To know that a person is a valedictorian is to only know that he or she is exceedingly good at achievement as mea­sured by grades. It tells you nothing about how they react to the vicissitudes of life.”

Making Good Decisions Part 3 - Four Essential Tips on Managing the Tyranny of Choice

This is the third in a series of posts about the psychology of making good decisions in the contexts of life in our twenties and thirties. In the first post we talked about the good and bad things of having much more freedom after college. In the second post  we talked about the cost associated with an abundance of opportunities. In this post we will discuss how with every opportunity there is a cost and the more choices we explore, the worse we can feel about our decisions.

While many times it seems like the overwhelming number of choices today makes it impossible to know if you’re making a good decision, Barry Schwartz has come up with a number of psychological techniques that you can use to help narrow down your options and increase the satisfaction of the decisions you do make.

Set Limits on Your Choices
One way you can manage an excessive number of choices is by learning to set limits on the options you look at. It’s almost auto­matic to think, “The more choices I have, the better off I will be.” However, you have seen how the more options you look at, the more likely you will be unhappy about the choices you make due to oppor­tunity costs and regret. Therefore, it can be healthy for you to set limits on the number of options you look at when trying to make a decision.

After discussing this idea with Deborah, a twenty-eight-year-old from Washington, DC, she told me that even though she didn’t consciously think about it at the time, limiting her options made her feel more satisfied about some of the major decisions she has made since leaving college. “When I was looking for teaching jobs, I applied to one in DC and one in Virginia, then chose the one I liked better.

"When I was searching for an apartment, I looked at two places then decided on the one I liked the best. I think because I spent time only looking at a few choices, I’ve been happier with my decisions because I didn’t wonder about other jobs or apartments. Instead, I’ve spent my time enjoying my current job and apartment and focusing more on the good things about the decisions I made. This is not to say that I won’t look for other jobs or a new apartment in the future. It just means I didn’t waste time worrying about all the other options out there.”

This may sound counterintuitive, but when you learn to restrict your options, you will limit the amount of extra energy you spend on looking at too many choices. By figuring out which choices really matter to you and which are less important, you can focus more time and energy on those decisions whose outcome can bring you happi­ness and fulfillment.

Making Good Decisions - Part 2: The Costs of Opportunity

"Ultimately when you’re in school, the answers to questions like, ‘What’s important to me?’ are somewhat, well, academic," says Chris, a twenty-five-year-old from New Orleans. who I spoke to "You’re in school. You’re taking classes, moving forward in a well-defined system. Then you graduate and suddenly there are a million systems, a million structures to choose from. It’s overwhelming.

"The fact is, life after college is ‘real.’ You have real decisions to make like: How important is money to me? How much time do I want to spend at work? How important is it that I have a job that I love? How can I stay healthy? Do I want a lot of challenge intellectually? Do I want a varied experience? What kind of risk do I want to take in my life career wise? Is it important for me to be busy all the time or do I need downtime? How much sleep do I need?"

Have you had trouble dealing with all the choices available to us during out twenties and thirties? Do you have trouble making decisions after looking at all those options?

This is the second in a series of posts about the psychology of making good decisions in the contexts of life in our twenties and thirties. In the first post we talked about the good and bad things of having much more freedom after college. In this post we will discuss how with every opportunity there is a cost and the more choices we explore, the worse we can feel about our decisions.

Understanding Opportunity Costs in Our Decisions
After college, you’re faced with what seems to be an endless array of choices that can often time be overwhelming They can take the form of small questions such as, “Where should I get an apartment?” “Should I buy a car?” or “Should I pay eighty dollars a month for a gym membership?” to tougher ques­tions like, “Should I move to a new city away from my friends and family for that dream job or find a job that is not so great but is near a lot of friends?” or “Should I take that job that pays well but I don’t enjoy or take a pay cut and work at a job that I love?”

In his book The Tyranny of Choice, Barry Schwartz has found that much of the negative feelings that young professionals experience while trying to make all these deci­sions stems from what are called opportunity costs. This means that the cost of any option we choose involves passing up the opportunities that a different option would have provided us.

Making Good Decisions - Part 1

When you have to make a choice and you don’t make it, that itself is a choice.

—William James

How do you know you are making the right decisions? A lot of the time you don't. Sometimes you have to just go with your gut or go with the information that is available at the present moment and hope for the best. What this means is that with any decision there is a certain level of risk. Of course, major decisions often times have more risk, so we usually spend more time contemplating those decisions. However, there is a great deal of psychological research showing that more contemplation is not always better.

This series of posts will try to get at the psychology of what makes a good decision in the contexts of life during our twenties and thirties. We will also talk about strategies you can use to make better decisions and ultimately be as happy as possible with the choices you make in your personal, social, and professional life.

Struggling to Make the Right Decision With So Much Freedom
“I think the hardest thing for me has been all the choices I’ve had to make,” Leslie, a twenty-five-year-old from San Francisco, told me. “I went to graduate school right after college, so I hit a terrible job mar­ket with a bachelors and an advanced degree, about ninety thousand dollars worth of debt, and no real direction. I’m too young for the professor jobs I want (that I went to school for).

“I’ve been in a bind trying to figure out where to go and what to do. Which car should I buy (within the one thousand range of course) and where should I live? Should I move into the cheap place in the bad neighborhood, in with a semi-new boyfriend, or take my chances with a roommate? It has been hard to decide which jobs to take, how best to look for the jobs I want, and how to get further training.

“Mainly, I don’t know what to do with myself. I just don’t know what path is right and I don’t have a lot of room for mistakes because my expenses—medical insurance and student loans—are so high that I have to make a cer­tain amount of money. I feel that I have no room for mistakes (because of my crushing debt as well as incredible fear of failure), yet I also have no idea about and no preparation for making the right choices.”

If you took a step back and looked at the time since you were born all the way up until this point in your life, you can see that your life has been a journey in the direction of progressively more freedom—that is, a movement toward a life of higher and higher lev­els of personal choice. As you matured from infant to child, then from child to adolescent, and eventually adolescent to emerging adult, each transition created a wider range of options to choose from while at the same time decreased the number of constraints imposed on your choices.

Free­dom can certainly be beneficial to your growth and personal develop­ment because it allows you the opportunity to explore all that you want out of life. However, as Leslie explains, you can experience major difficulties in dealing with the plethora of new lib­erties and countless choices that this freedom-filled period creates.

Post-College Depression: Part 7 - Seeking Professional Help & Trying Out Therapy

This is the seventh post in a series of entries I will be writing on Post-College Depression.

In the first post of this series I talked about what post-college depression is and typical symptoms and causes. In the second post we discussed how a lack of a sense of control over one's life can result in millennials and emerging adults from Generation Y developing post-college depression. In the third we talked about how the tyranny of choice and high expectations can lead to stress, anxiety, and depression after college. In the fourth we  talked about how you can use positive psychology techniques to combat postcollege depression, anxiety, and stress. In the fifth we talked about how you can use journal writing to conquer the postcollege blues. In the sixth we took a look at how you can use exercise to improve your mood and mental health. Today we will talk about seeking professional help when dealing with the postcollege blues.

Why Should You See A Therapist
“I decided to start seeing a therapist about a year after I graduated,” says Michael, a twenty-four-year-old from Baltimore. “I was pretty darn lonely and didn’t really feel like I had a group of friends whom I trusted. I really missed my family as well as my close friends who were back east. I started seeing a psychiatrist for about six months, but I didn’t feel like I was making much progress so I really shopped around and saw about five psychotherapists before settling down with a new one whom I have been seeing since. I’m glad I went because I think it helps a lot. I have found that it’s really useful just to take an hour a week to think about yourself. I still have a lot of issues to work out and I think therapy is a great way to figure out those things.”

As Michael points out, therapy can provide an opportunity to take a step back and evaluate important issues that need to be addressed in your life. Not only will you be able to have an objective person listen to everything you are going through, but a good therapist will also help you develop the psychological skills needed to cope with many of the issues you will confront during the the years after college and beyond.

Some young people I spoke to said that one of the paths they took to deal with the struggles they were having with the post college blues was seeking out professional help. They told me that seeing a psychologist gave them an opportunity to fully express to an outside observer what they were truly feeling and it really helped them get through many of the issues they were dealing with at the time.

Letting Go of the Fear of Appearing Weak
One of the obstacles that young people can face in seeing a psychologist is that they can feel weak for having to see a professional to deal with their post college blues. The idea that it’s not normal for someone in their early twenties to seek out therapy can prevent many graduates from getting much-needed help. Many young professionals don’t have friends or know people their own age seeing a psychologist.