The Mood Elevator: Take Charge of Your Feelings, Become a Better You

We all ride the Mood Elevator up and down every day. How well we do it impacts our relationship, our personal effectiveness, our career and our experience of life. Most people take that ride for granted and don't think it can be influenced. But what if we knew the right buttons to push to move to the top of the Mood Elevator. Wouldn't it be useful if there were proven ways to make visits to the lower floors less frequent and less intense?

In this very practical guide, Larry Senn provides an operating manual to keep you out of the emotional basement. He shows how to recognize when you've become
so accustomed to being stuck on a lower floor—depressed, stressed, anxious, judgmental—you don't even realize it and what to do to interrupt those negative thought patterns and start going up again. He urges us to cultivate mental attitudes like curiosity and gratitude that will keep us on the higher floors and explains how to quiet the mind and nurture positive thoughts without succumbing to Pollyannaish denial. And as someone who took up triathalons at the age of seventy, he speaks from experience when he emphasizes the inseparable connection between physical health and mental health.

Through Senn's decades of work as a consultant, the Mood Elevator has been enthusiastically embraced by hundreds of thousands of people around the world.
It symbolizes our moment-to-moment experience of life, encompassing a wide range of feelings. Together, these emotions play a major role in defining the quality of our lives and relationships and our effectiveness on the job. By sharing his work with a wider audience, Senn hopes to help all of us live life at our best.

About the Author

Dr. Larry Senn is a pioneer in the field of corporate culture. He founded Senn Delaney (originally called Senn-Delaney Leadership Consulting Group) as a culture-shaping firm in 1978. It was a spinoff of Senn Delaney Management Consultants, a business process consulting firm. The challenge of implementing change in organizations led to Larry's interest in the power of the personality or habits of organizations to support or defeat initiatives. His vision from the beginning was to create a transformational process to assist CEOs and their own change leaders in creating healthy, high-performing cultures. Today, Senn Delaney is the oldest, most experienced organizational culture-shaping firm in the world.

Larry's 1970 doctoral dissertation, Organizational Character as a Tool in the Analysis of Business Organizations, played a key role in Larry's journey. It was the first field study of corporate culture in America. Based on his principal finding that “organizations become shadows of their leaders,” Larry created Senn Delaney - the culture-shaping firm - to work with CEO teams and organizations from top to bottom to create the behaviors needed to support strategies and enhance business results.

Larry's vision and leadership for more than 30 years has helped Senn Delaney become an international firm that is widely recognized as the leading authority and practitioner in the field of culture shaping. Based on his early work, Larry was recently named “The father of corporate culture” by CEO Forum magazine.

In addition to his role as chairman, Larry actively works with clients on culture-shaping initiatives. He also guides Senn Delaney's product development team to continually improve offerings and services to enhance all aspects of the Senn Delaney culture-shaping methodology.

Larry has led culture-shaping engagements for the leaders of numerous organizations, including dozens of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, state governors, members of two U.S. president's cabinets, deans of business schools and the presidents of major universities. He has extensive experience working with top leaders in a wide range of industries, including telecommunications, retailing, insurance, financial services, consumer products, energy and health care. Larry is an accomplished consultant, business advisor, group facilitator, author and CEO coach.

Prior to founding Senn Delaney, Larry ran his own retail business in college, was a senior engineer in the aerospace industry and a faculty member at University of Southern California and University of California Los Angeles where he taught leadership. He was also an assistant coach of UCLA's championship gymnastics team.

Larry was a finalist for Entrepreneur of the Year in Southern California. He and his wife Bernadette are active joggers and fitness enthusiasts and Larry is a triathlete. They have five children, three grown, one in the business school at USC and one still at home. Born and raised in the midwest, he now resides in Sunset Beach, California.