# Meet Jan Raeder, the Evidence Translator Making Positive Psychology Easier to Understand Published: 2026-09-04 Category: Business Category URL: https://entrepreneurtribune.com/category/business/ URL: https://entrepreneurtribune.com/meet-jan-raeder-the-evidence-translator-making-positive-psychology-easier-to-understand/ ![Jan Raeder](https://prod.superblogcdn.com/site_cuid_cm5qsqu1j002vwirgtlcwq54p/images/jan-raeder-1788533527753-compressed.jpg) Jan Raeder spent years reading the same research anyone else could find, then asked the question most people skip. How do you actually get someone to use it? The answer became her calling card, and now she has a name for the work itself. “Seligman’s framework is P.E.R.M.A., positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment,” Raeder says. “That’s hard to remember. So I asked, how can we change this?” Raeder developed M.O.R.E. as her own simplified framework, drawing on concepts associated with positive psychology and adapting them for a broader audience. Raeder calls herself an Evidence Translator, a title that describes exactly what she does for a living. Raeder is the SelfCare Sensei, a wellbeing educator, speaker and author with more than 30 years in martial arts and a master's degree in wellbeing education. She built M.O.R.E. after watching Martin Seligman's original acronym lose people before it ever had the chance to help them. PERMA, she noticed, sounded like permafrost. It was easy to forget and easy to skim past. Worse, the accomplishment pillar tended to get overlooked entirely, especially with business audiences who assumed it meant something they already had covered. So she rebuilt it piece by piece. In Raeder’s framework, positive emotions are represented through optimism, which she presents as something people can intentionally cultivate. “It’s not something that happens to you,” she says. “It's something you choose, on purpose, daily.” Relationships stayed largely intact, anchored in what is now called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. It began in 1938 as the Harvard Grant Study and, 88 years later, has grown to include the children of its original subjects. The Harvard Study of Adult Development has consistently highlighted the importance of close relationships to long-term health and wellbeing, finding that stronger social connections are associated with healthier and more fulfilling lives. What changed most was the packaging. M.O.R.E. is memorable in a way P.E.R.M.A. never was, and memorable is what makes a framework usable outside a classroom or a journal. Being an Evidence Translator is not the same as being a researcher, and Raeder is careful about the distinction. She does not run studies. She reads them, tests them against a process she built herself, and decides what is solid enough to hand to someone who has never opened a peer reviewed journal in their life. Her process starts with the abstract, the study’s core question. From there she checks the method, how many participants started, how many finished, who they were, whether the researchers disclosed any bias. Funding comes next, because money changes what gets studied and how it gets reported. “A yogurt study funded by Dannon is going to find something nice to say about yogurt,” she says. Only after that does she weigh the findings against the quality of the work behind them, then look for other studies that found the same result. If something cannot be replicated, she is not interested in repeating it as fact. That rigor is the point. Raeder gives readers her sources so they can check her work themselves, something she says most wellness content never bothers to offer. "I want people to see where I'm pulling this from," she says. It is not about telling people what to think. It is about giving them enough of the real material to think it through for themselves, then trusting them to do it. The discipline behind that process is not new to her. Three decades on the mat taught Raeder that a technique means nothing until it has been tested, repeated and checked against something real. She applies the same standard to a study as she once applied to a sparring combination, testing it before she ever hands it to someone else. That standard matters more now than ever, she says, in a wellness industry crowded with advice that sounds good but was never checked against anything. Burned out professionals and skeptical readers do not need another quick fix. They need to know the tool in front of them actually holds up. Raeder has not finished building M.O.R.E. She deliberately left accomplishment out of the framework after watching people's eyes glaze over whenever she asked what they had achieved that day. She suspects that gap is where the framework goes next, though she has not decided how yet. "Maybe that's my next way to go," she says. "I haven't figured it out yet." The framework lives inside her book, Strive for M.O.R.E., 139 pages by design so a high school senior and a PhD can both use it without feeling talked down to or over their heads. That accessibility already found an audience. According to Raeder, nearly 400 copies had reached readers before the book’s formal launch. For now, M.O.R.E. is the tool Raeder hands to burned out professionals, tired parents and anyone standing at a crossroad wondering what comes next. The science behind it is decades old. The translation, and the discipline of checking it before she passes it on, is hers. The goal was never to hand people a finished answer, she says. It was to spark enough curiosity that they go looking for the rest of it themselves, one honest question at a time. _More information about Jan Raeder and the M.O.R.E. framework is available at selfcaresensei.com._ --- This blog is powered by Superblog. Visit https://superblog.ai to know more. ---