Last week I attended the Harvard Kennedy School Leadership and Happiness Symposium - an event focused on helping design wellness and happiness into curriculum design.
I’ll probably sprinkle in some of my learnings over time, although the first action I took was enrolling into a free class that I’ll be doing over the next 6-10 weeks. It’s go at your own pace and it’s “The Science of Well Being” - available on coursera -
https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being
But what is the course?
Laurie Santos, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Yale. She also currently runs a podcast called The Happiness Lab.
She had a hypothesis that she could put together a class on living the ‘good life’. She did just that, and it has become the most attended class at Yale, with over 1 in 4 students taking the class. The class itself expects you to engage in several topics related to happiness, challenge certain misconceptions about happiness, build new habits, and rewire your brain.
In 2018, the class format was digitized onto Coursera. I wish I had known about it earlier. I’ve personally completed 2 of the 10 ‘weeks’ of material since last Thursday.
There’s also an abridged “6 week” version for Teens… (13-18) https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being-for-teens
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In the first week portion of the curriculum, you’re able to measure your happiness using two different detection techniques. the PERMA Profiler and the Authentic Happiness Inventory, which you can do these assessments for free without enrolling - PERMA Profiler and Authentic Happiness Inventory.
The point of doing this in week 1 is to then measure it again in the future (at the end of the course, for one)… and I imagine that I may start doing this yearly when I complete my Wheel of Life goal setting activity.
Let me know if you intend to take the course, as I’d love to share notes over this summer while I engage in the content…