The Mood Elevator

Positive psychology and organizational guru Larry Senn shows readers how allowing room for your mood swings rather than suppressing them can lead you to be more successful and happy.


Mood swings are a common, almost universal experience-especially in a world as full of unpredictable, uncontrollable changes and chances as ours. People know they have good and bad moods, but most have never thought of them as an emotional elevator they ride and can have influence over. Perhaps they've even tried to suppress their moods and refuse to acknowledge the ride at all.

Larry Senn implores us to take our changing moods seriously and ride the mood elevator, which can help us all be more effective leaders and greatly impact our personal lives. At the top floors, we find ourselves to be grateful, wise, creative, resourceful, and hopeful. At the bottom, we can be depressed, angry, stressed, judgmental, and defensive. The Mood Elevator provides a framework and a series of simple pointers and illustrative stories that help us see that without taking the full ride, we can't access the top floor moods without remembering that we have to build up from the bottom.

The Mood Elevator shows us that we create our own moods through our own thinking and, in the end, have control over the direction we head. The book provides simple steps for readers to quickly change their thinking to create better emotional states based on their environments.