Doing good deeds helps socially anxious people relax - Being busy with acts of kindness can help people who suffer from social anxiety to mingle more easily. Sufferers from social anxiety are more than just a little shy. Dealings with others might make them feel so threatened or anxious that they often actively avoid socializing. Although this protects them from angst and possible embarrassment, they lose out on the support and intimacy gained from having relationships with others. They have fewer friends, feel insecure when interacting with others, and often do not experience emotional intimacy even in close relationships. Performing acts of kindness to the benefit of others is known to increase happiness and may lead to positive interactions and perceptions of the world at large. Jennifer Trew of Simon Fraser University and Lynn Alden of the University of British Columbia. Motivation and Emotion

Success Breakthroughs - Research shows that truly new, paradigm-busting ideas with long-term potential need profound knowledge in a narrow domain. Organizations that ignore that in favour of recombining what's already known will miss out on the greatest potential breakthroughs. Recombining existing knowledge "is only one piece of the puzzle," says Sarah Kaplan, a Rotman professor of strategic management who has co-written a study paper on the subject with Keyvan Vakili, an assistant professor at the London Business School, who is a graduate of the Rotman PhD program. "Managers are going to have to design organizations for both deep-dive research and recombination," says Prof. Kaplan. University of Toronto Rotman School of Management. Strategic Management Journal 

Mentors and Success - The success of online networking sites such as LinkedIn illustrates the popularity of building a wide-ranging contact list. Yet when it comes to raising one's profile within the workplace, female employees stand much to gain from formal, face-to-face mentoring programs. University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business Social Forces

Your pain reliever may also be diminishing your joy - Researchers studying a commonly used pain reliever found it has a previously unknown side effect: It blunts positive emotions. Participants who took the pain reliever reported less strong emotions when they saw both very pleasant and very disturbing photos, when compared to those who took placebos. At this point, the researchers don't know if other pain relievers such as ibuprofen and aspirin have the same effect, although they plan on studying that question. Ohio State University. Psychological Science

The Brain - New pathways discovered. Scientists have made a major new discovery detailing how areas of the brain responsible for vision could potentially adapt to injury or trauma and ultimately prevent blindness. The study sheds new light on the relationship between vision loss and brain plasticity - the extraordinary ability of the brain to modify its own structure and function as a result of change or damage. Monash University. Current Biology

Imagination beats practice - Practice may not make perfect, but visualization might. New research shows that people who imagined a visual target before having to pick it out of a group of distracting items were faster at finding the target than those who did an actual practice run beforehand. Imagery, or visualization, is commonly used as a technique to improve performance in various sports. "The idea that we can train our brains to work better is all the rage across society, but our research suggests that the human brain may benefit as much, or even more, from imagining performing a task, than the brain does from practicing a task over and over," says psychological scientist Geoffrey Woodman of Vanderbilt University.

The research team brought participants to the lab and had them look at a computer screen while their brain activity was recorded via EEG. The increased efficiency brought on by imagination was also supported by the EEG data, which showed a link between imagination and a pattern of brain activity thought to be specialized for shifting visual attention. "This study indicates that some of the success of imagery for learning in sports, music, and clinical settings is due to how well our sensory systems process inputs. So using imagery can change information processing in the brain at the earliest levels," Woodman concludes. Psychological Science

Learning entrepreneurship - Entrepreneurship is an acquired skill. The capacity to think and act in entrepreneurial terms is present in many people - unbeknown to most of them. Action-oriented entrepreneurship training sessions can unlock dormant potential and awaken entrepreneurial spirit. Leuphana University of Lüneburg, the University of Singapore, Universities in Uganda and Tanzania. Academy of Management Learning & Education

Sports and Game intelligence - Game intelligence is not necessarily something you are born with but something you can learn. Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg. PLOS ONE

Goals and rewards - Whether it's being outbid at the last second in an online auction or missing the winning lottery number by one digit, we often come so close to something we can "almost taste it" only to lose out in the end. These "near wins" may actually boost our motivation to achieve other wins, leading us to pursue totally unrelated rewards. "Our research suggests that at least in some cases, losing has positive power. While we often think of motivation as being targeted to a specific reward or goal, these findings support the notion that motivation is like energy and reward is like direction -- once this motivational energy is activated, it leads an individual to seek out a broad range of goals and rewards," says Monica Wadhwa of INSEAD. While it may seem like losing might put a damper on motivation, Wadhwa and co-author JeeHye Christine Kim hypothesized that losing out by only a narrow margin might have the opposite effect. A near win, they speculated, intensifies but doesn't satisfy our motivational state, and so the drive to win is extended to the next task or goal we encounter. Interestingly, the findings indicate that a near win may actually provide a stronger motivational boost than an actual win. Psychological Science

Workplace interventions - A workplace intervention designed to reduce work-family conflict gave employed parents more time with their children without reducing their work time. "These findings may encourage changes in the structure of jobs and culture of work organizations to support families," said Kelly Davis, research assistant professor of human development and family studies. The intervention included training supervisors to be more supportive of their employees' personal and family lives, changing the structure of work so that employees have more control of their work time, and changing the culture in the workplace so that colleagues are more supportive of each other. The researchers argue that a healthy and satisfied employee can benefit the workplace by improving the business bottom line through more effective and efficient work. Penn State. Work, Family and Health Network

Success via 'Serving Culture' - When managers create a culture where employees know the boss puts employees' needs over his or her own, measureable improvements in customer satisfaction, higher job performance by employees, and lower turnover are the result. Employees feel the most valued, and in return give back to the company and its customers when their bosses create a culture of trust, caring, cooperation, fairness and empathy. The study suggests this is an increasingly relevant form of leadership that offers promise to the premise that if businesses lead by caring for their people, the profits will take care of themselves. University of Illinois at Chicago. Academy of Management Journal

'Performance enhancing' drugs decrease performance - Doping is damaging the image of sport without benefitting athletes' results. "This research looked at 26 of the most controlled and some of the most popular sports, including various track and field events like 100m sprints, hurdles, high jump, long jump and shot-put, as well as some winter sports like speed skating and ski jumping. The average best life records for 'doped' top athletes did not differ significantly from those considered not to have doped. Even assuming that not all cases of doping were discovered during this time, the practice of doping did not improve sporting results as commonly believed," says Dr Aaron Hermann. "This research demonstrates that doping practices are not improving results and in fact, may be harming them - seemingly indicating that 'natural' human abilities would outperform the potentially doping 'enhanced' athletes - and that in some sports, doping may be highly prevalent," he says. "In many sports, there are perceptions that an athlete needs to dope in order to remain competitive and I hope these findings will confront those ill-informed views, and help stamp out doping in sport," said Dr Hermann. University of Adelaide School of Medical Sciences. Journal of Human Sport and Exercise

Beat procrastination - Procrastination is the thief of time that derails progress. "The simplified message that we learned in these studies is if the future doesn't feel imminent, then, even if it's important, people won't start working on their goals," said Daphna Oyserman, lead researcher and co-director of the University of Southern California Dornsife Mind and Society Center. Oyserman and co-author Neil Lewis Jr. of the University of Michigan found that study participants perceived that the future was much more imminent if they thought of their goals and deadlines in days, instead of months or years. Psychological Science

We at The Success Clinic.com have been coaching and mentoring our clients as above as a part of our mindfulness training and complementary therapies (including Clinical Hypnotherapy, Psychotherapy, Cognitive Therapy, NLP, etc.)

World Happiness Report - The SDSN report contains analysis from leading experts in the fields of economics, neuroscience, national statistics, and describes how measurements of subjective well-being can be used to assess national progress effectively. The report is edited by Professor John F. Helliwell, of the University of British Columbia and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research; Professor Richard Layard, Director of the Well-Being Programme at LSE's Centre for Economic Performance; and Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute and of SDSN. The report identifies the countries with the highest levels of happiness: 1. Switzerland 2. Iceland 3. Denmark 4. Norway 5. Canada

"As the science of happiness advances, we are getting to the heart of what factors define quality of life for citizens. We are encouraged that more and more governments around the world are listening and responding with policies that put well-being first," says Helliwell. "Countries with strong social and institutional capital not only support greater well-being, but are more resilient to social and economic crises."

7 Secrets to Getting on a Corporate Board - "As corporate boards are opening themselves up to more diverse slates of director candidates, there is a window of opportunity for those seeking to get on a board," says Susan Stautberg, CEO and co-founder of WomenCorporateDirectors (WCD) and a co-author of the new book, Women on Board: Insider Secrets to Getting on a Board and Succeeding as a Director. "CEOs are normally limited to serving on one outside board, so companies are casting a wider net," says her co-author, Nancy Calderon, Global Lead Partner at KPMG LLP and board member of KPMG's Global Delivery Center Ltd in India. 1. Meeting what the market demands 2. Highlight your global know-how 3. Build a more "board-able" CV 4. Leverage a background outside the traditional C-suite 5. Become a visible industry leader 6. Find both mentors and sponsors 7. Start small.

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