Center for Workplace Happiness

Do you have a dog? Two? More? Are you dogless and get your dog love from friends’ dogs? Or maybe you’re someone who just doesn’t see the appeal of dogs?

If you love dogs, you’ll probably love this article. If not, read on anyway because there’s probably something here for you despite your distaste for this nearly-perfect being. (Oops…my bias is showing!)

In the early part of the 20^th century, Will Judy, the editor of Dog World Magazine, who was a WW1 veteran and an ordained minister, devoted his life to helping people understand what he saw as a spiritual bond between humans and dogs. Of dogs, Will Judy wrote, “The most loyal thing in the world is your dog. Whether you come home from Congress or from jail, whether you have lost your fortune or made a million, whether you return home dressed in fashion’s heights or in rags, whether you have been hailed as a hero or condemned as a criminal, your dog is waiting for you with a welcome...

What started as an inside joke has turned into a day of silliness that’s celebrated every year on September 19^th. Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day – avast, ye mateys, and I’ll tell the tale of the scurvy lads who created this sorry excuse for revelry!

Two friends were playing racquetball on June 6, 1995. John Bauer, AKA Cap’n Slappy, and Mark Summers, AKA Ol’ Chumbucket, played hard, resulting in an injury to one of them. In pain, he cried out “Arrrrrrrgghhhhh” and the silliness was well begun. It was an inside joke between them for a while, until they sent a letter to humorist and nationally syndicated columnist Dave Barry, who loved it and wrote about it. Boom – a holiday was born! In deference to the lives lost in the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944, the men decided to celebrate Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19^th instead of D-Day.

The day took on a life of it’s own as people learned to speak Piratese, and it tickled the...

Whenever leaders get together to talk about what’s working in their businesses, staff recognition is always high on the list. As a matter of fact, on nearly every list of the top ways to reduce turnover and increase employee engagement, recognition and/or encouragement make the list.

Happy National Day of Encouragement. If you’re a leader and aren’t already in the habit of looking for ways to praise, recognize, and encourage your team, use today as your reason to get started. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results you can achieve with a zero-dollar perk that pays great dividends. You can’t always allow flexible work schedules, grant promotions, or give raises – you can always give praise, and in all the ways that count, that’s a huge benefit to your company, your team, and your individual employees.

Encouragement boosts morale, builds relationships, and is contagious. What kind of recognition/praise/encouragement can you give to your...

When the word “leader” is bandied about, most people don’t think of recording artists. They usually think of world leaders, prominent business leaders, religious leaders – not famous musical performers.

That’s a mistake because much can be learned from them. As an illustration, let’s look at the life and leadership of Jimmy Buffett, a man who led millions of Parrotheads while building an impressive fortune. In possession of a shiny new history degree after a rocky college career, he went to New Orleans in 1969 and played music on Decatur Street while tourists dropped change in his guitar case. He moved to Nashville in 1970, and two years in Nashville saw Jimmy Buffett rejected by nearly every record company in town, many of them two and three times. Two years later, in an interview, he said, “Got depressed, got pissed off, got divorced and left. Best move I ever made.”

The move was to Key West, where he worked on an...

Are you a rule-follower or a rule-flaunter? Most of us are firmly in the “it depends” category. Most rules we follow, some of them to the letter, and some we think don’t even apply to us or shouldn’t be rules at all.  So why are there rules and why do we follow them?

A pair of researchers, Sven Steinmo and Celine Colombo, set about to understand why people follow rules, why the impulse or need to have and follow rules exists, and how well it’s working for humanity. They found that norms of trust and cooperation need to be an intrinsic part of members of society in order for that society to thrive and prosper. You don’t have to look very far to see where rules came from – religions, races, and governments have been the impetus for complex sets of rules intended to govern and control the behavior of the people in their sphere of influence.

Why do people choose to be part of something that seeks to control their behavior, even to the point...

Today, can you focus on spreading joy? Can you find ways to delight people you don’t know, probably won’t ever be friends with, and show them you see and appreciate them? 

Why, you ask? Hang on – I’ll spill the beans. First, full disclosure – one of my current dogs is a therapy dog, the third one I’ve had the privilege of living with in my 40+ years of owning dogs. There’s something quite special, calming, and joyous about a therapy dog that they’re born with. You can train behaviors – therapy dogs are born with a heart and ability to connect that’s stronger than the normal dog. 

There’s a holiday today inspired by a therapy dog. Since 2017, August 22^nd has been designated as “Never Bean Better Day,” named after Bean, a medium-sized Golden Retriever who lived and warmed hearts in Morgantown PA.  If you saw the Animal Planet show “The Haunted” Bean played Riley, the dog who could...

Today is National Relaxation Day and this week is National Aviation Week. What do those two have to do with each other and why should you care? This will tie them together, ease your stress, and give you wings, so read on. 

Wilbur and Orville Wright didn’t have pilot’s licenses, and no one needs a license to chill. 

The same year that the first states – Massachusetts and Missouri – began requiring drivers licenses of anyone who wanted to operate a car on public roads, Orville and his older brother Wilbur made the first powered flight. They didn’t even have drivers’ licenses, and certainly didn’t have pilots’ licenses because those hadn’t been invented yet. Neither brother had a high school diploma, neither attended college, and yet with their fascination for aviation, their insatiable desire for experimentation, and their commitment to manned flight in a heavier-than-air motorized vehicle, they made discoveries and...

Let’s talk about happiness today, and how difficult it is for scientists to even define it, much less quantify it for us. A focus on happiness has been in the news so much that now its shadow twin, toxic positivity, is making headlines. In this post, happiness is being discussed as one of the large range of emotions that humans feel. It’s nice to feel happy, and not mandatory nor even possible to feel happy all the time. That’s a completely unrealistic goal. What is realistic is for you to learn how to soothe yourself so you can make yourself happier when you choose.  

First, what’s the official working scientific definition of happiness? 

According to Sigmund Freud, happiness has two components: “the absence of pain and unpleasure,” and “the experience of strong feelings of pleasure.” Not much to argue with there, and yet it’s not a satisfying definition, because that definition chases its own tail....

There’s a holiday today that’s only for women. Sorry guys – you’re left out of this one, and the silver lining is that you don’t have to remember today, buy flowers, a card, or take your lady out to a fancy dinner. Today, National Girlfriends Day, is a day for women to celebrate their women-friends, so guys, if your female significant other expects flowers, gifts, and an extravagant date night from you tonight, tell them they’re barking up the wrong tree. 

Historically, women are the care-givers, community-builders, and nurturers. From the time of early civilizations, women typically left their families to be with the new man’s family. The alliances they built with the women in their new circle were often very much like those they had with their biological families, and that deep, family-style bonding continues today. While men’s friendships are more transactional in nature and can be fairly easily disrupted by shifting...

Caution: cliché alert!!!

• You can’t pour from an empty vessel.
• Almost everything will work if you unplug it for a few minutes – even you.
• We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails.

Yes, you’re right – this edition of the newsletter is about self-care. July is Self-Care month and yesterday was International Self-Care Day. And if you’re like nearly everyone else, me included, self-care isn’t at the top of your to-do list each day, and it needs to be, for both of us.

Why? Don’t make me point you back up to those cliches, ok? The reason phrases become repeated so often that they become trite and clichéd is because – drum roll please – they’re true. They resonate, and have resonated for decades, if not hundreds of years. And yet here we are, talking about how we neglect our own self-care.

How can we make our own care a priority? First, give yourself credit for the things you already do for yourself:

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