Seligman

Flourish Book Summary

26 Sep 2011 2 Comments

Flourish Book Summary

Martin Seligman revised his authentic happiness theory, which was based on positive emotions, engagement and meaning. New theory of flourishing is built upon positive emotions, accomplishment, positive relationship, meaning and engagement, which all constitute the foundation of positive psychology. Each element contributes to well-being, but doesn’t not define well-being.

Aristotle thought that all human action was to achieve happiness, Nietxsche – get power, Freud – avoid anxiety, Thales -everything is water, Seligman – wellbeing.

The main reasons for revision are:

  1. The dominant popular connotation of happiness is related to cheerful mood, but not all people strive to be cheerful.
  2. Life satisfaction holds too privileged a place in measurement of happiness. It turns out that life satisfaction does not take into account how much meaning we have or how engaged we are with the people we love or how engaged we are in our work. Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful mood, so it is not entitled to a central place in wellbeing theory, that aims to be more than a happiology.
  3. Positive emotion, engagement and meaning do not exhaust the elements that people choose for their own sake. What you choose must serve no other master. Senia (Seligman’s student) asserted that many people live to achieve, just for achievement sake. 

Relationship, meaning and accomplishment have both objective and subjective components: not just how you feel about your relationship, but how these people feel about you, not just your sense of meaning (you could be deluded), but the degree to which you actually serve something larger than you are, not just your pride in what you have done, but whether you actually met your goals, and where this goals stand in their impact on the people you care about and on the world.

If people cared about not only their own happiness, but happiness of others, which would be part of their objective wellbeing, we would not have greedy financial executives, who are responsible for recent  financial downturn. It comes to ethics versus your own values. Seligman says that happiness, like GDP, is inadequate in measuring wellbeing. It is a subjective target.

The most interesting things I learned from the book:

Styles of responding: from active constructive, passive constructive,  passive destructive to active destructive.  Practice writing down your own response for the next time you have to interact with others and analyze it, create an active constructive one. Then use it. You just need to make it a habit.

Losada effect: you should have 3 times more positive thoughts than negative. To achieve it, use positive psychology techniques, including Love letter, gratitude journal, etc. Find your signature strengths and set goals, or invent activities to practice them, write about your experience.

Reasons why optimists are less vulnerable to disease: Optimists take action and have healthier lifestyles. Optimists believe that their actions matter, whereas pessimist believe they are helpless and nothing they do will matter. Optimists try while pessimist lapse into passive helplessness. Optimist use more social support. Optimists have a better response to repeated stress. Become an optimist!

Variety of programs are designed and already being used to help people balance their life with flow, meaning and pleasantries. Original Penn Resiliency program is one of them. It was later modified to work for school children (The Geelong Grammar School Project). It would be great if all schools offered it. Special program was created for US Army soldiers: Comprehensive soldier training/fitness; Global Assessment tool (GAT) has four sections: Emotional fitness module, Social fitness, Family fitness, Spiritual fitness, and the main component of the program is Turning trauma into growth.

Overview of Positive Psychology Training (14 sessions): Identify your strengths and illustrate how they are used in your life. You can complete VIA questionnaire online to identify character strengths. Start a blessing journal, in which you write, every night, three good things that happened that day. Understand the role of good and bad memories in maintaining depression/unhappiness. Write about feelings of anger and bitterness and how they feed your depression. Write a forgiveness letter describing a transgression and related emotions and pledges to forgive the transgressor (only if appropriate) but don’t not deliver the letter. Write a gratitude letter to someone you never properly thanked for and deliver it in person. Understand terms satisficers and maximizers, find ways to increase satisficing and devise a personal satisficing plan. Use optimistic style – to see bad events as temporary, changeable and local. Recognize character strengths of significant others, ask  family members take VIA questionnaire online and then draw a tree that includes the character strengths of all members of the family. Learn savoring as a technique to increase the intensity and duration of positive emotion. Give the gift of time by doing something that requires a fair amount of time and calls on your character strengths. Make sure you know how to have full life integrating pleasure, engagement and meaning.

Martin Seligman went to his 50th school reunion and gave two pieces of advice to his former classmates:

  1. Be future oriented, not dwell on the past, work for your ideals.
  2. Exercise.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , ,

31 Jul 2011 1 Comment

Positive Psychology Movement

Positive psychology is new, but rapidly growing. The International Positive Psychology Association’s student division (SIPPA) and positive psychology masters programs are emerging (at least 15 around the world), and positive psychology publications and books have increased in number.

It is applied to:

- Education: teaching positive psychology and well-being in kindergarten through 12th grade, both directly in the curriculum, and indirectly throughout all curriculum;

- Positive humanities: : infusing the arts with PERMA (Positive Emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment);

-Positive journalism: journalism that uncovers what is hidden as well as praises what is worthy.

The Positive Turn: Why Positive Psychology and the Humanities Need Each Other

James Pawelski, Donald J. Moores, Lindsay Doran, Martin E.P. Seligman from University of Pennsylvania, Positive Psychology Center, Philadelphia, PA, United States

At the First World Congress on Positive Psychology in 2009, Martin Seligman issued a challenge to positive psychology. The challenge is to ensure that 51% of the world‘s population is flourishing by the year 2051. If we take this challenge seriously, there is lots of work for everyone in positive psychology to do.

There is the theoretical work of developing definitions and models of human flourishing, the empirical work of determining the best ways to help people achieve human flourishing, and the applied work of delivering positive interventions to individuals and communities. But positive psychology will not be able to meet this challenge alone. All of the social sciences will have to collaborate in the development of a mature science of well-being. Equally important will be the development of a culture of well-being.

Key here is the engagement of the humanities, the branch of learning that studies human culture. The humanities, which includes such disciplines as history, literature, law, philosophy, religious studies, art, and music, influences every aspect of our lives and comprises a large part of what is taught to children in K-12 schools and to adults in universities.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , ,

27 May 2011 No Comments

Three types of life

The idea of categorizing our lives is not new, it was done by many: from Aristotle to Dr. Martin Seligman. I find it very helpful for understanding the world and our place in it. Here are three types in short:

1.Life of pleasure/pleasant life
2.Life of practical activity/good life
3.Philosophical life/meaningful life
 
And here is more description:
1.Life of consuming and taking, when we try to get as much as possible for our own pleasure. Think of any leisurely vacation you’ve taken, eating good food or watching TV.  It it natural to pursue this kind of life mainly in the early stage of your life. Think of a baby who consumes all the time. This type is easy as it doesn’t require much effort, it is self-serving, and it has mostly short-term effect which means diminishing returns (you need more or better of what you consume to be happier next time, otherwise you’ll get disappointed).
 
2.Life of doing or producing. It could be either work or hobby, when we try to excel at something by learning, or improving our skills. Sometimes we get into flows, when we are engaged in some activity and lose track of time, because our strengths match the task or challenge. People may experience flows while they do reading, running or working on a project they like. This type is not easy, as it requires effort, but it is still self-serving, and it usually has medium effect. Of course, people are happy with their hobbies and their work accomplishments but as at some point they reevaluate results of their activities/success and get a feeling that is not enought.
 
3.Life of giving or making positive effect on others and the world around us. This type means serving others or making them higher priority than yourself. It could be volunteering, helping those in need, making product that improves quality of life, leading an organization with some high purpose or defending somebody’s rights. This requires more effort that othere two types, it is not self-serving and it has long-term effect.

 Happiness is a combination of all three, combinations differ for different people, but the most long-lasting happiness is derived from type three, so make sure you have type three activities in your life.

by polyachka in Happiness Tags: , , , , , , , , ,