Applied Positive Psychology Credential
2024
This digitally badged Credential Course is led by internationally-renowned speaker, educator and best-selling author, Caroline Adams Miller, MAPP. It’s a 46-hour deep-dive program that will teach you evidence-based, applied positive psychology strategies to help your clients find motivation, set effective goals, improve relationships, and flourish.
Module 1: How Our Motivation, Competence & Self-Efficacy Impact Wellbeing
This first module provides an overview of the course and introduces the concepts of positive psychology and flourishing as seen through the lens of the PERMA model. Fundamental notions, such as the theories undergirding wellbeing, the Broaden and Build framework, and the centrality of purpose and meaning, are identified. Lecturer and author Caroline Adams Miller, MAPP, also outlines the importance of positive interventions, ways of using character strengths to achieve optimal development, and the importance of self-efficacy and self-determination to achieving goals and realizing a flourishing life. In all of the units, recent research is used extensively, complemented by heart-warming anecdotes to illustrate the main points.
Units included in this module:
- Introduction, PERMA & Purpose
- Positive Interventions
- Character Strengths
- Self-Determination, Self-Efficacy and Self-Actualization
Module 2: Getting Things Done
This module drills down more deeply into the question of how those who would flourish can utilize emergent findings on goal-setting toward the attainment of mastery. Unit 1 briefly reviews the history of goal setting and discusses why goals are important; learning and performance goals are differentiated. Unit 2 examines the “dark side” of goal setting: the instances in which, through insufficient knowledge of how to set appropriate goals, individuals and organizations have created disaster instead of mastery. Unit 3, finally, proposes the BRIDGE Method as a useful means of pursuing learning goals for the first time. The unit explains the importance of each of its components Brainstorming, Relationships, Investment, Decisions, Good grit, and Excellence showing how each contributes to the accomplishment of the goal.
Units included in this module:
- Goal Setting Theory
- Goals Gone Wild
- The BRIDGE™ Method
Module 3: People, Places and Things
This module takes a deep dive into the positive psychology notion that “other people matter”, showing that, while they always “matter”, other people sometimes help individuals to flourish, and sometimes hinder their efforts. Unit 1 examines the research which illuminates the question, and offers interventions to reduce loneliness and to guide people towards the “right” relationships: ones which will help them to flourish. Unit 2 takes that examination into the realm of the environment: specifically, the conscious and nonconscious cues - primes - that either move us toward goal achievement or conflict with primes which do. Ways of using primes to succeed are suggested. Unit 3 delves into the inner environment – that of the individual’s willpower and self-regulation – to discover how to avoid depletion of these crucial but finite resources, and how to build them back if they do become depleted. Unit 4 is devoted to the question of why women do not support other women in their successes as well as their dark times – and how they can. Numerous notions explain this phenomenon, and solutions are suggested to help create a world in which it is the norm for women to support other women in flourishing – and thereby create a more greatly flourishing society.
Units included in this module:
- Other People Matter
- Priming
- Willpower and self-regulation
- The Downside of the “Disney Rule”
Module 4: The Muscles of Excellence: Resilience, Grit & Growth Mindset
In this fourth and final module, we drill down deeper into several of the foundational skills for a happy, flourishing life, one which engenders excellence. Specifically, Caroline Adams Miller examines resilience (Unit 1), the growth and fixed mindsets that facilitate or undermine resilience and their relationship to hope (Unit 2), and the recently-differentiated notion of grit (Unit 3). Here, Angela Duckworth’s general concept of grit is extended on, to tease out various types of it; not all of them contribute to excellence! Fittingly for a course on positive psychology, the final unit Is devoted to a look at awe: what it is, what causes us to experience it, and how we can help clients to be awesome – and awestruck – while inspiring others. The course summary at the end of the unit highlights the interconnectedness of the various positive psychology concepts presented over the 15 units.
Units included in this module:
- Resilience
- Growth and Fixed Mindsets
- Authentic Grit & Bad Grit
- The Awethentic Effect & Summary
