What’s the secret to happiness?
How can we stay happy when there’s too much change and uncertainty? Are there ways to bounce back and thrive if everyday life and work is getting us down? Do you want to keep growing as you get older? How can you dig into your fears about the future and become more resilient? In this website, Alan Heeks offers practical answers to all these questions and many more!
Alan’s unique approach involves understanding human nature, and learning from parallels in the natural world around us. For example, balancing our roots and fruits (resources and outputs) composting waste energy (such as stress), working with uncertainty instead of overriding it.
This website offers you a wide range of online resources, details of upcoming events with Alan Heeks, past issues and a free sign up for Alan’s e-newsletter on natural happiness and resilience, informative and entertaining blogs, and information on Alan’s books and projects.
Foresight: future flourishing through super-resilience:
The present is already so demanding that most of us don’t want to consider the future. But surely the rapid changes and rising pressures we face now are likely to continue, and increase? Alan has been researching and leading trainings in resilience for several years: the skills to grow through problems and keep thriving, not just cope and get by. Super-resilience means the new skills we may need to stay happy in spite of new and bigger challenges of the years ahead.Natural Happiness
The times we’re in are tough: it’s clear that we need new approaches and models to thrive in all this. Natural Happiness is a simple, practical approach which can help in your life and work, and for work teams and communities.
Natural Happiness will show you how to cultivate your own human nature, and tend yourself like a garden: deepen your roots, and grow fruitfully through all kinds of weather. Alan Heeks has created a unique model, the Seven Seeds of Natural Happiness to help you do just this. Organic gardening methods offer us many useful parallels for growing our own happiness, such as: If you’re overstretched, you need to nourish your roots or prune back your branches. ·
Alan’s new book: Not Fade Away- staying happy when you’re over 64
When you’re over 50, 60 or 70, you may have exciting new freedom and choices, but you may also be facing losses and uncertainty. As you reach mid-life and beyond, it’s a good time to take stock, clear away old issues, and make fresh choices that help you to enjoy the years ahead. Alan has been exploring these topics for several years, and can offer you a lot of useful resources, including his two books on the subject:- Not Fade Away: Staying Happy When You’re Over 64! Is for women and men age 60 plus, due for publication May 1, 2018.
- Out of the Woods, published 2013, is focussed on men beyond 50, but is useful for both sexes.
Upcoming events
We’d love you to join us on one of our events in the UK or abroad. We hold spaces to connect like-minded people and explore a range of different topics for personal development.Resources
In this section you’ll find a range of processes and resources I have created which can help you to grow your own natural happiness and resilience.Creative Ageing Blogs
Enjoying your elderhood
The term elder is used with various meanings: I’m using it to invite you to connect with the mature wisdom in yourself, and in our ancestors. Traditional tribal cultures, such as the Native Americans, Celts, and Bedouin, had great wisdom, including the role of the...
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Not Fade Away Staying happy when you’re over 64! By Alan Heeks
THE BABY BOOMER GUIDE TO CREATIVE AGEING The late sixties and beyond are a landmark: a good time to choose what you want from the years ahead, and take stock of the story so far. This short, practical book offers you valuable guidance, new skills, and resources to...
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Even the old are prejudiced about ageing!
Most of us have prejudices, and most of us have them around old age, whatever age we are! It’s been shocking for me, as an expert on creative ageing, to admit this is true of me.
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The Odyssey: a guide to mens’ long voyage to find themselves
I’ve been pondering mens’ life journeys for many years: not just my own, but other men I’ve witnessed in mens’ gatherings and ongoing groups. Re-reading Homer’s Odyssey, I realise how brilliantly relevant it is to all this. Words like archetypal and heroic get...
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Working with Nature in Mind
Reclaiming our mental health and well-being through systemic thinking and ecopsychology practice. Guest blog by Roger Duncan We are currently living in strange and unsettling times, where it seems that contemporary culture is sleepwalking into a spiralling series of...
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Brexit: An Uncivil War – TV docudrama
In hindsight, what could possibly go right? This 2-hour programme from Channel 4 is well worth seeing. Not only will you learn how we all got into the Brexit crisis, it will show you how the present and future game of politics is played. Let’s start with what this...
read moreResilent Futures Blogs
Right-wing chaos: control through fear
Naomi Klein’s 2018 book, No is not enough: defeating the new shock politics, is the most lucid, convincing, and alarming account I’ve seen yet of what Donald Trump is really about, and much of it is relevant to the numerous other right-wing leaders gaining power in...
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Thriving on Chaos
Still useful, 24 years on! This catchily-titled book was published in 1987, and was a management best-seller for years. Even then, new technologies, speed of change, intensifying competition were big issues. Whilst Tom Peters’ insights may not address all our current...
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Where are the benefits in even more Chaos?
We’d better find them, since it’s already happening! You might call me an anxious optimist: I worry a lot about the state of the world, but I cling to a belief that there’s an upside to the challenges, if only we can find it. That belief is hard to sustain these days,...
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