Hello and welcome to the psychology podcast with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman where we give you insights into the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.

Each episode will feature a new guest who will stimulate your mind and give you a greater understanding of yourself, others, and the world we live in.

Hopefully we'll also provide a glimpse into human possibility.

Thanks for listening and enjoy the podcast. Next. But right now we're really excited to be speaking with our guest Diana Brecher.

Dr. Brecher is a cognitive behavioral therapist and educator who is a particular interest in working with clients who are experiencing anxiety and depression.

In addition to teaching at Ryerson University in downtown Toronto,

she has most recently been jointly responsible for establishing a university-wide

Thrive-R-U program at Ryerson, based on her work in positive psychology and flourishing.

Thanks for being on the show today.

Thank you. I'm delighted to be here.

Yeah, me too.

You have lots of mutual interests and you are doing lots of really important and interesting work to help students with their well-being and anxiety and lots of things.

So the big question is where to dive in, right?

Let me ask you this, when did you first discover positive psychology?

Like how did that contact happen?

Okay, so that's interesting because I think I discovered it in some ways years ago

without realizing that it was part of positive psychology.

So I wrote a book review of Martin Seligman's book, Authentic Happiness, about eight years ago.

And I became very interested. authentic happiness about eight years ago.

And I became very interested in his work and I followed him even from before that and the

learned optimism.

I was very interested in how that formed my clinical practice. I ran workshops on flow and optimal performance.

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