Women's Paths to Happiness

By Yehudit Lynn Yosef, Gayle Scroggs, Neera Nijhawan Puri and Judy Touchton

What really makes a woman happy?
The answers may surprise you!

Happiness and fulfillment do not come wrapped in a box with a pink satin bow. Looking outside yourself for gratification is not the answer.

So what is?

Twelve women coaches, therapists, and consultants share valuable insights about what women can do now to feel happier and more fulfilled in a world of competing demands for time, attention, and energy. Leveraging the principles of positive psychology, these experts provide inspiring examples and concrete strategies for helping women face their daily challenges and build more optimal lives at work, home, and play.

READ THIS IF YOU ARE READY TO TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE!

Discover how to

Leave overwhelm behind and find your balance and focus
Respect and meet your own needs for love, joy, and meaning
Turn down your inner critic and turn up your authentic inner voice
Move from frustration to inspiration by naming and claiming your own personal strengths
Energize yourself by honoring your natural tendencies to value relationships and express gratitude and affection
Tap into the deep inner well of your own spiritual nature, especially in difficult times
Create your own individual path to happiness!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 14, 2009
• ISBN: 9781469123349

Yehudit Lynn Yosef

The authors are women helping professionals deeply dedicated to helping women, men, and families live their best lives. Culturally diverse, they are united in their commitment to increase awareness of positive psychology and the role women have played in its origin, development, and diffusion. Judy Touchton Gayle Scroggs Yehudit Lynn Yosef Neera Nijhawan Puri Rachel Mitchum Elahee Barbara Becker Holstein Elizabeth G. Krimstock Janet Silliman Karzmark Sarah Gillen Darcy S. F. Ing Mary M. Leonard Diane M. Sue

Book preview

Women’s Paths

to Happiness

Copyright © 2009 by Judy Touchton et al, Editors.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2009907888

ISBN:      Hardcover      978-1-4415-6093-3

                Softcover        978-1-4415-6092-6

                 Ebook             978-1-4691-2334-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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46181

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PART I

Women, Happiness, and Positive Psychology: An Introduction    

Gayle Scroggs, Ph.D., P.C.C.

What Makes Women Happy? Toward a Positive Psychology of Women    

Gayle Scroggs, Ph.D., P.C.C.

PART II

Attending to Our Inner Wisdom: The Power of Voice    

Judy Touchton, Ph.D., C.M.C.

Four Gateways to Happiness    

Barbara Becker Holstein, Ed.D.

Can We Have It All? Family, Career, and a Balanced Life    

Mary M. Leonard, Ph.D., C.M.C.

The Legacy of Black Women and the Power of Positive Psychology    

Rachel Mitchum Elahee, Psy.D., C.D.P.

PART III

The Solitary Landscape: Finding Meaning in Suffering    

The Reverend Darcy S. F. Ing, Psy.D.

Positive Parenting with Teens    

By Sarah Gillen, M.A., L.M.F.T., P.C.C.

Seven Steps to Ultimate Wealth    

By Neera Nijhawan Puri, Ph.D., P.C.C.

Is It Possible to Reach Happiness If You’ve Had a Painful Past?    

Sarah Gillen, M.A., L.M.F.T., P.C.C.

PART IV

Timeless Wisdom, Modern Women    

Yehudit Lynn Yosef, M.S.W., A.C.C

Not Perfect, But Happy    

Janet Silliman Karzmark, L.M.F.T.

Embracing Friendships and Extending Connections    

Diane M. Sue, Ph.D.

Giving Yourself the Present    

Elizabeth G. Krimstock, Psy.D.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

PREFACE

When four women across the globe can connect virtually to discuss their shared vision for a book on women and happiness, and within a matter of weeks are able to recruit a dozen more women to join them in writing it, what does it mean? It means, go for it! Start preparing the birthing room!

The fact that many of these women had never met face to face and were just beginning to know one another personally through conference calls and email, is relevant in a far different way than it might have been only a decade ago. Despite the thousands of miles between us, when we began this project in 2007, we began to form relationships in the ways that women seem especially able to do, discovering that the commonalities we discovered among us far outweighed our differences. Indeed, what we shared formed lasting bonds. Most of us did have one more thing in common, our ties to MentorCoach™, a virtual coach training program designed for helping professionals that has a unique emphasis on positive psychology. This network and focus was the unifying element.

Impetus For This Book

The book was conceived at the 2007 MentorCoach conference in Bethesda, Maryland, where participants were treated to a truly outstanding multi-media presentation on positive psychology by a very creative, effective coach. Using film clips, photographs, and brief biographical sketches of role models for positive psychology principles, the speaker wowed everyone in the room. His presentation was top notch, as a group of us noted over lunch. There was just one concern that some of us had with it—the near invisibility of women. The citations, illustrations, photos, quotations, and actors in illustrative films were about 85% male, according to our count. As women in psychology, we felt that we were facing yet again the virtual and unjustifiable absence of women in the presentation in this new intellectual framework, despite the work in research and theory by many notable women. On a more subjective level, and perhaps more significant, several of us felt intuitively that positive psychology already had a home in women’s culture and was deeply embedded in our lives and work.

We were already well aware of many women who were doing pioneering research in positive psychology, some leading research teams, others participating in them, and all publishing frequently in academic journals. Men in the forefront of the field, however, were more likely to be publishing books, many of which are cited in this volume. Some of them targeted academic psychologists, others the lay and self-help audiences. All were generous in acknowledging their female colleagues’ work, but nonetheless their books were entering the academic and mainstream markets earlier. In the two years it has taken to bring Women’s Paths to Happiness to publication, we discovered Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006). We also celebrated the arrival of two new very accessible books by leading positive psychologists Sonja Lyubomirsky (The How of Happiness, 2008) and Barbara Fredrickson (Positivity, 2009).

By the end of lunch, several of us declared our intention to take action in our own back yard to assure that future presentations would include the voices and contributions of women as well as men. As coaches who already used practical applications of positive psychology in our work, whether emanating from recent research findings or employed more intuitively from our own life experiences, we wanted to say simply, women have something to say about this, too. Moreover, we wanted to make it clear that women have been addressing the essence of what we are now calling positive psychology for centuries in their writing, speaking, and daily lives.

As we began to talk seriously in the weeks and months that followed, we imagined colleagues like ourselves across the country and globe. Who were we? We were women who were already using positive psychology in our work as helping professionals, e.g., life coaches, executive coaches, transition coaches, psychologists, social workers, family therapists. We all felt deeply connected to this new dimension of psychology that focused on people’s strengths and character, and on expanding the potential of healthy functioning people. Most of us were explicit in saying that we felt these principles had served as a foundation of our beliefs and our work all along. Coming from an educational and social context of feminism and women’s studies, we affirm and celebrate women’s achievements in public as well as private arenas. Thus, we decided to bring women’s voices in positive psychology to the table.

In the weeks that followed, we editors met virtually and developed a network of respected women colleagues to consider contributing to a small collection of essays. We asked them to submit a paragraph on a topic of their expertise, e.g., the emergence of positive psychology, the benefits of strengths-based coaching, and/or strategies that have been used successfully with women to address typical women’s issues, addressing these three questions: (1) What do you find most compelling about positive psychology? (2) How do you use positive psychology in your work with women? (3) What is the value added by using positive psychology in your coaching and work with women, compared to whatever else you did previously?

Soon we had paragraphs from more than a dozen women, all of which grew into drafts of essays. To share the growing momentum, in September 2007, all of us began meeting virtually on a telephone conference line several times a month. Each of us had stories to tell that inspired us all—stories of real women finding new hope and greater confidence, discovering and building on strengths, feeling more fulfilled and engaged, managing relationships more effectively, discovering what was really important to them, or making other significant positive changes in their lives.

We were overcome with the abundance of stories of hope, joy, love, passion, and happiness, showing the power that positive psychology can make in so many lives. These were not research studies. We could not show empirically what accounted for such positive change. We knew that a combination of factors undoubtedly contributed. But our intuitive belief was that for each of us, embracing the principles of positive psychology and sharing these insights with others, combined with who we are in relationship as people and helping professionals, facilitated change that our clients perceived as positive. As an added bonus, our authors also spoke often of feeling happier or more empowered themselves as a result of having written the essays.

Conversations over time allowed us to laser in on the direction of our project in terms of scope and style. As a group we decided to focus on a wide audience of women—to write a self-help book so that other women could benefit from the new science of well-being. We became very intentional about including not just empirically based knowledge but also insights from women’s culture that resonate highly with positive psychology. Although all of the writers are women in helping professions, as therapists, consultants, trainers, and coaches, we differ considerably from one another in the focus of our work, in the types of clients we choose to work with, and in the issues we find most important. Our clients are very diverse as well—in their life circumstances, goals, dreams, and concerns. We imagined our readers would be much like our clients—women around the globe who visit the self-help section of bookstores, libraries, or the internet searching for ways to create more optimal lives. We also hoped this volume might inspire coaches and other helping professionals to add positive psychology tools and perspectives to their practices.

Along the way, our conference calls across the continents formed new bonds of understanding and friendship among us. Gradually our book began to shape itself organically, becoming a collection of our voices: first as women, second as women professionals who embrace positive psychology, and third as women with different backgrounds of race, ethnicity, religion, culture, age, income, marital status, and geography. With unwavering unanimity, we felt ourselves to be women who had stories and wisdom to share that could benefit other women. Women’s Paths to Happiness is the outcome.

As often happens in writing projects, a process originally envisioned as taking a few months is now coming close to two years. Some of our early contributors respectfully withdrew as their lives took other directions, and others were added who provided different kinds of insights and perspectives. Also, as life circumstances for one of the original editors changed so dramatically that she was unable to continue in this role, we asked one of our other gifted authors with extensive editorial experience to take her place on the editing team. The contributions of everyone involved ebbed and flowed with the rhythms of our lives, but the result reflects the work