About

John “Sean” Doyle is poet, consulting psychologist, and lawyer with a long record of helping individuals and groups meet their objectives and find more meaning and purpose in life.

Sean has held executive leadership positions in a broad range of organizations, and served as a trusted advisor to army generals, legislative leaders, and other senior executives for over 30 years. During that period, Sean also resolved over 10,000 disputes.  Sitting side-by-side with others during moments of conflict, you learn a few things about people and how they relate to one another: how individuals respond under stress or when things are falling apart around them. You see the surprising things they do when they think they are getting what they want, and how easily they get distracted from what is in their best interest.

Of course, conflicts and hardships do happen.  Individuals can be horribly cruel or cold to one another other.  And yet every day, people do reach genuine agreement – even when it involves fundamental differences in value.  Over 10,000 times, Sean has seen regular people quietly overcome challenges and hardships and accomplish extraordinary things.  And just beneath notice, friends, lovers and strangers constantly extend gestures of kindness to one another – in unexpected moments – and in both large and small acts.

Sean taught psychology at North Carolina State University for close to a decade, and has worked with army drill sergeants, Buddhist monks, foreign governments, recovering addicts, and others, on matters of hope, meaning and resilience.  We can be effective and find meaning and contentment in life, no matter what obstacles come our way.

Called “the poetic voice of positive psychology,” Sean writes the Luminous Things column for Psychology Today. His book Mud and Dreams is an argument for the goodness of people, the beauty all around us and our reasons for hope. It calls us to embrace all the noise and confusion of our lives, and to find the meaning, gratefulness and cause for celebration. Ultimately, Mud and Dreams is about falling more deeply in love with life.

A husband and father of three, Sean studied philosophy at Rutgers, received his juris doctorate from Loyola-New Orleans, and his Masters in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Some of past interviews and other media links are here.

Thank you!

Sean
Connecting with others around what makes life worth living.