The contacts made during this business venture led to an opportunity to fulfill a long-postponed dream to teach psychology at the college level.  Very quickly we found that our clinical skills translated beautifully to the classroom helping us avoid and solve many of the challenges and frustrations that seemed to plague many of our colleagues.  Eventually, we both became full time professors enamored with both the fun and joy of teaching itself but also mindful of the opportunity to provide heartfelt service to the students, college and community.

 

In consultation with local businesses Miami Dade College (MDC) developed a new course to prepare students for the rigors of college, work and life.  This course is The Psychology of Personal Effectiveness and ultimately led us and two other colleagues to publish Essential Elements of Effectiveness, a textbook of applied positive psychology.  This book is now in its seventh edition and in use for nearly twenty years.

 

Several years after the publication of this textbook, we created a series of eight workshops to train administrators, staff and faculty in the practical application of the principles of positive psychology. This became the Optimal Functioning Series and was the most favorably reviewed training program at the college. As we continued as professors, we came to believe that teaching should be more fun more often.  We believed that this could be accomplished by mapping the clinical skills of psychologists into the classroom environment. This was the genesis of the Teaching2 Series and became a central aspect of our mission as professors at MDC: teach basic clinical skills and conceptual frameworks to professors to build classrooms steeped in positive emotional states that model critical non-cognitive skills so vital to learning. Life is too short and the needs of our students and communities too great to be armed with less than the most powerful interpersonal tools.  These trainings also proved to be extremely popular with faculty members.

 

In order to address a perceived need for a different approach to leadership amongst administrators, faculty and staff, we have developed an approach to training called Leading from the Center: How Caring, Communication, and Creativity Enhance the Spirit of Collegiality.  Once again, we applied the fundamentals of clinical psychology and created a new training series. This leadership series consists of six modules, each focusing on a small number of learnable skills.  When practiced harmoniously, they form the basis for facilitating attitude and behavior change in others and in ourselves.  These include emotional regulation strategies, both cognitive and physiological, as well as emotional cultivation approaches. They also include communication skills, both assertive and empathic, appreciative inquiry, uncertainty tolerance, confusion endurance, win-win strategies, and both critical and uncritical thinking.