We’re Naming Our Choice for the Poster Person of Positive Psychology, and We’re Pushing Her Hard! Care to Name Your Choice?

Skylar Diggins is very likely the best basketball player in women’s college basketball. Maybe the best ever. She plays for Notre Dame.

Diggins was an All-American High School player. So was LeBron James. Diggins was a high school phenom, just like James. James is now a multi-millionaire. Diggins will get to play for the WNBA. The top salary in the WNBA is $105,000 a year.

How do you become a star player – or a star anything? You have to arrange to have parents who eliminate the word “can’t” from the family vocabulary. In fact, Diggins admits in a New York Times Magazine interview that her mother permanently banned her from using the word “can’t.” In other words, Diggins’ mother may be an advocate for Positive Psychology.

So, anyone care to name someone to compete with Diggins (with or without her mother) as the personification of Positive Psychology? We don’t think anyone comes close, but we are willing to consider your choice. We’ll share it with others, too.

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"Your Calling is Calling"

One of the most popular employment websites is Monster. For individuals looking for a job, Monster is frequently the go-to choice to submit one’s resume and search for available jobs. In addition to making resumes available for employers across the country and listing available jobs, the site provides specific advice to the job seeker in terms of how to prepare for the search from resume writing to interview skills.

Recently, when you visited Monster, there was a slogan beneath the site header that read: “Your calling is calling.” In fact, Monster seemed to be so attached to this slogan that the site had it trademarked. Now, however, the slogan is gone from the site without explanation. One possible reason for taking the slogan down is that few people understood what it meant.

Amy Wrzesniewski, an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management also uses the term “calling” in her work. Wrzesniewski developed the concept that all employment falls into one of three categories from the worker’s perspective:

1. Job: the individual is primarily concerned with the financial rewards of work.
2. Career: the individual is focused on advancing within the occupational structure.
3. Calling: the individual works not for financial gain or career advancement but for the sense of fulfillment that work brings.

Wrzesniewski summarized her reseach:

My work addresses the possibility of finding positive meaning in work through a variety of paths: the work itself, its perceived contribution to the greater good, interactions and relationships with others on the job, and the ability to challenge oneself, to name a few.

The term “calling,” as it was used by Wrzesniewski and Monster, relates to the highest form of satisfaction derived from one’s work. To read more on Wrzesnieski’s work, as well as that of a researcher also focusing on an individual’s relation to work, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, see our feature article in CEC’s Fall 2011 New Worker.

Our opinion: Most people in this country work only for the financial rewards. Most people in this country don’t consider their work as anything but a “job.”

Your opinion: Please share your thoughts in the comments.