How do you navigate your quest to live a full life?  

How do you prioritize work versus family, stretch yourself while maintaining your wellness? 

Acclaimed civil rights activist Noël Gordon Jr has a unique perspective. He’s not trying to optimize for career or happiness. He points somewhere else.

What's most surprising: Noël is incredibly accomplished, and he says his focus on other priorities has driven his success.

At 24, Noël won the employee of the year award while serving as Senior Program Specialist at the Human Rights Campaign, America's leading LGBTQ civil rights organization. Noël has advised the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator and U.S. Delegation to the United Nations on issues affecting LGBTQ people, and his work has been mentioned or quoted in more than 300 publications nationwide, including USA Today and Teen Vogue.

This episode changed my life. I hope it changes yours too.

Prioritizing What Matters - Noël Gordon on Rethinking how Work and Life Intertwine

Want to develop more willpower and empathy? Positivity Podcast gives you exercises to develop your character traits. 

In this series, Positivity Dan will help you think about character development the way you think about professional development--with strategies, advice, best practices, and tools to help you grow. The series covers essential topics like Empathy (#2), Talent (#7), Honesty (#9), Meditation (#6), and Forgiveness (#5), from experts that range from academics to best-selling authors--all of whom have actionable tips to help you become a better, happier, more effective version of yourself. Think of this series as your character development consultant, aimed at helping you succeed in life. Chances are, you’ll be helping your professional career, too. 
- Produced with love by Make School and Positivity Dan. Join thousands of the world's brightest computer science students at Make School (www.makeschool.com).

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“The solution isn’t to do away with dreaming ... Rather, it’s making the most of our fantasies by brushing them up against the very thing most of us are taught to ignore or diminish: the obstacles that stand in our way.” - Gabriele Oettingen 

Professor Gabriele Oettingen tears through traditional notions of motivation and success. Her 20 years of research focus on the perils of positive thinking, and the science of how focusing on obstacles has been proven to help people achieve their goals. Gabriele is the author of more than 100 articles and book chapters on thinking about the future and the control of cognition, emotion, and behavior. She is now a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg.

In this episode we cover:
- Her WOOP framework for engineering motivation, clarity, followthrough
- Why dreaming makes you less motivated
- Why dreamers are prone to depression
- Identifying the correct obstacles in your way

You can check out her book Rethinking Positive Thinking as well as her website mywooplife.org

Rethinking Positivity - Inside the New Science of Motivation with Gabriele Oettingen

This episode focuses on tools of emotional resilience.

I’ve met few people like Marc - he is so open and honest about his emotions that it is refreshing. It’s easy to see why. Marc Brackett, Ph.D., is the founding director of the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence and a professor at Yale University. His research is on the role of emotions and emotional intelligence in learning, decision making, creativity, relationships, health, and both academic and workplace performance. 

Marc is the lead developer of RULER, a Pre-K to high school evidence-based, whole-school approach to social and emotional learning that has been adopted by over 2,000 schools. He has published 125 scholarly articles and consults regularly with corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Google on integrating emotional intelligence principles into employee training and product design and is co-founder of Oji Life Lab, a digital emotional intelligence learning system for businesses.

You can check out his app Mood Meter App (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mood-meter-building-your-emotional/id825930113) to log and respond to your own emotional changes throughout the day.

Permission to Feel: Marc Brackett on findings from The Yale Center for Social Emotional Intelligence

Having more choices is good right? Barry Schwartz thinks otherwise.

"In his 2004 book The Paradox of Choice , tackles one of the great mysteries of modern life: Why is it that societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before — are now witnessing a near-epidemic of depression? Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today's western world is actually making us miserable. "

In this episode we explore making choices on:
- dating
- prioritization
- career
- eliminating choice
- decision making

By the end I had a practical framework for making choices in my life and tools to think less about low priorities.

Prioritizing What Matters - Noël Gordon on Rethinking how Work and Life Intertwine

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