CHAPTER TWO

Your Creative Success Road Map

This book is here to guide you to creative success with a methodology that is grounded in the principles of positive psychology. To give you a sense of how positive psychology relates to your creative success, here’s one tantalizing truth revealed by research:

That’s right.

Perhaps you believe that you will only be happy when you achieve your milestone goal of getting tenure at a prestigious university, publishing a bestseller, or making a million dollars. The research shows otherwise. When you are happy and optimistic and experience positive emotions, you are able to cultivate the kind of mindset and engage in behaviors that give rise to greater success and fulfillment. In other words, success flows from happiness.1

The Advantages Of Being Happy

There are well-documented advantages to being happy and experiencing positive emotions.

Positive emotions make it possible to be more creative, thoughtful, and open to new ideas. When we feel positive, our brains are flooded with feel-good chemicals like dopamine and serotonin, which in turn help us to work more effectively, organize and retrieve information more quickly, and become more skilled at complex analysis and problem-solving.

People who experience positive emotions are less stressed and physically healthier. In the workplace, people who experience positive emotions are more productive, make more effective leaders, and enjoy higher performance ratings, higher salaries, and greater job security.

Moreover, 40 percent of your capacity to be happy is within your control and depends on your own behavior.2 TheCreative Success Now Methodology provides you with many tools and strategies that help to change your mindset and behavior and lead you to experience greater happiness—and success.

TheCreative Success Now Methodology

With these principles in mind, here is theCreative Success Now methodology in a nutshell.