Last month, I participated in the International Positive Psychology Association conference, which was held over four days in Vancouver Canada. This is the third time I’ve attended this wonderful event, which happens every other year in a different location. In 2017, the year after I finished my master’s program, I went to Montreal, and, though I wasn’t able to make it to Melbourne, Australia in 2019, in 2021 I attended the zoom conference that IPPA had put together, since large in-person events weren’t feasible and many borders were closed that year.
I was thrilled to be able to go this year and it did not disappoint. When I discovered the field of positive psychology in 2013 and then went to grad school in 2015 and 2016, I also found my people, and continue to feel such a profound sense of belonging and resonance with the PP community, something I am truly grateful for. There were around 1100 people from around the world at this year’s conference, representing every continent, and it was replete with learning and connections.
Several people have asked me what the highlights were, but by the end of the conference my head was swimming from so much input and it was hard for me to pinpoint specifics. I’ll try to do that now that I’ve had a little time to both decompress and reflect.
This year’s theme was Happy Together. This was centered both on the importance of relationships to our well-being, which is a well-established principle of positive psychology, and also a larger, more global view of what both happiness and together mean, something that resonates strongly for me given my growing focus on the profound importance of interconnectedness and collective well-being to human flourishing. I believe that flourishing must be a collective as well as an individual endeavor, and they each support one another. In the words of the late progressive politician and visionary Paul Wellstone, “we all do better when we all do better.” Our future as a species on this planet very much depends on integrating a realization of this truth into how we construct our societies going forward.
A recent Greater Good Science Center article outlines three new big ideas that were highlighted at the conference: The concept of psychological richness, the need to include and explore more non-western ideas about happiness and well-being, and the well-being benefits of being involved and connected with our own culture. I’ll be doing a post on each of these and how they connect with my own thinking and work in upcoming weeks.
In the meantime, I’m still basking in the glow of having been at the conference, the feelings of inspiration and optimism I left with, and the gratitude I feel for having been able to spend time in the vibrant, beautiful city of Vancouver and, once the conference was over, see more of British Columbia, which, as shown in these photos I took from the Canadian Sunshine Coast, is breathtakingly gorgeous part of the world.
