People looking for jobs that bring satisfaction and happiness should concentrate on professions that focus primarily on serving other people, according to a new report from the University of Chicago, which found clergy to be the happiest and most satisfied of American workers.

“The most satisfying jobs are mostly professions, especially those involving caring for, teaching, and protecting others and creative pursuits,” said Tom W. Smith, Director of the General Social Survey (GSS) at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

Positive psychology - the study of how to improve a person’s happiness and quality of life - is a new trend that is rapidly changing traditional psychology and mental health care. The idea is developing after years of evidence-based research and a Baylor University professor is helping lead the way.Dr. Michael Frisch, a professor of psychology at Baylor, has put forth the newest and, some say, the most comprehensive approach to positive psychology in a new book, Quality of Life Therapy. Frisch will present his new book and related research findings on Oct. 7 in Washington D.C., at the International Positive Psychology Summit, the premiere group in the field that helps bring attention to emerging ideas or treatments.

If we’re lucky, every now and again, we have a decisive encounter - an event that changes the course of our lives, forever. With logic and comfort thrown to the wind, we set out on a new, more invigorated trajectory, unleashing our passion and vision upon the world. Such moments are glorious and gorgeous, mysterious and tormenting. They contort us, bend us - squeeze out every vestige of pretense, compromise, and inauthenticity. Some call this magic. Others call it synchronicity. Some may even call it madness. It has all those elements, and more. I call these moments, taken together, the Dharma life - a response to our instinct for freedom, the natural urge of the heart to know itself and seek its liberation from all obstacles, real or imagined. This revolution of the soul demands that you no longer deny your true calling. It demands that you find your higher love, which then helps you reach beyond whatever is holding you back.

Pleasure is often an unseen force that makes things happen. That it’s invisible doesn’t in any way mitigate the fact that there’s real power involved. By way of analogy, let’s talk about a couple of other unseen powers that you encounter regularly in your daily life.

Once there was a pious man whose father had just died. A geomancer instructed the man to bury his father at the mouth of a sea cave. Only once in a hundred years was the water low enough to permit access to this cave, and a family that utilized this window always experienced great good fortune. Although the son had qualms about this unorthodox advice, he threw his father’s casket into the sea at the mouth of the cave at the indicated time.

Happiness is declining in the most powerful country in the world. As Robert E. Lane, Yale professor emeritus, puts it in his book, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies: “Amidst the satisfaction people feel with their material progress, there is a spirit of unhappiness and depression haunting advanced market democracies throughout the world, a spirit that mocks the idea that markets maximize well-being and the eighteenth-century promise of a right to the pursuit of happiness under benign governments of people’s own choosing.

If you have read The Happiness Hypothesis you know all about the cortical lottery, happiness traps, and why happiness doesn’t just come from within. You know that you have to change the elephant and change your environment to change yourself. You know that happiness and meaning come from getting the right relationship between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself.

OK, so what exactly do you do now? How can you apply the ideas from the book to make yourself lastingly happier? (If you haven’t yet read the book, the activities below should still make sense.)