Happiness can be fleeting under the best of circumstances. Even people who are basically happy have periods when they’re not, and for those who are prone to depression, it’s always a struggle. The core issue with depression (or one of them) is that it hijacks your urge to want to fix things, which obviously creates a vicious cycle.

Shutterstock Pilots use a checklist to make sure that everything that’s supposed to happen before a flight does happen. You need a checklist too, to make sure that you’ve covered all the bases before you accept a job offer.

We get a lot of mail from readers. Sometimes they write to say “You say the job market is good, Liz. Where is it good? It isn’t good in my city!” You may be wasting your time in the wrong job market. If your job search revolves around applying for posted job openings, and if you are applying for those job openings by filling out forms in an automated recruiting portal, you are definitely in the wrong job market! That job market is slow and bureaucratic. It is inefficient.

In my executive coaching work with high potential leaders, I get to learn first hand what truly makes a difference between the leaders who meet the goals they set for our coaching work, and those who miss out on the opportunity. On the surface these leaders have a lot in common. They are all senior leaders in Fortune 500 companies. They are smart, ambitious, and committed to their careers. Their companies want to invest in their growth. The coaching process we work through is similar.

Dear Liz, I transferred into my job from a different location and I honestly would never have made the move if I had known how badly this office is managed. I’ve  been here seven months and I’m debating trying to get my old job back, even though I’d  have to get a new apartment and move again. I’m not sure I can get out of my apartment lease. It’s a mess! My old office was friendly and professional. We took pride in serving our customers very well.

Dear Liz, I respect your wisdom and I could use your advice. One of the most important  lessons I’ve learned by reading your columns is that any job these days is a just a stopover. It isn’t healthy to think about any job as a long-term gig, because that kind of thinking dulls your senses and you start to focus more on pleasing your boss than growing your flame. That’s exactly the situation I am in now.

One of the key topics I’m asked about these days is unconscious bias training. More and more studies come in every day that show diverse and inclusive teams (more on what that means later) consistently outperform teams made up of people who are very similar to each other. So it’s time to bust unconscious biases in business. And that’s the tricky part.

(Shutterstock)  How would you feel if you lost your job today? Turns out, more than half of American employees believe they’d land on their feet within six months. Fifty-four percent of employed workers said they were confident that if they became suddenly unemployed, they’d find a new position that matched their experience and current compensation within half a year, according to the career site Glassdoor.   That optimism has been on the rise.

Working smarter, rather than simply investing more, is the key to gaining value from Big Data and analytics in business, according to a new report.

When people discuss the workplace of the future, they frequently focus on the collaboration technologies and the layout of these new workspaces. We discuss the “intolerance” of millennials and how work tools must change to support the digital native. While the selection of tools is important,  this dialogue lacks a discussion of the type of jobs employees will perform and how they’ll be trained to do these jobs.