Summary of Martin E. P. Seligman's Flourish

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The real way positive psychology was developed has been a secret until now. In 1997, I was president-elect of the American Psychological Association, and I received an email from an anonymous foundation lawyers asking me to come see them in New York.
#2 I had almost forgotten about the anonymous foundation, when I got a call from the treasurer about six months later. They had met two brilliant people in Derry, the medical anthropologist Mel Konner and Dennis McCarthy, a retired British industrialist. They wanted me to gather together the leading scientists and scholars and answer the Mandela-Milosevic question.
#3 Atlantic Philanthropies was a fund that gave out large grants to different projects. I called the CEO of Atlantic to thank him for his help, and to ask him to convey my gratitude to Feeney.
#4 The first step in positive psychology is to dissolve the monism of happiness into more workable terms. Understanding happiness requires a theory, and this chapter is my new theory.

Sujets

• Applied psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 28 mars 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669367192
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Martin E. P. Seligman's Flourish
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The real way positive psychology was developed has been a secret until now. In 1997, I was president-elect of the American Psychological Association, and I received an email from an anonymous foundation lawyers asking me to come see them in New York.

#2

I had almost forgotten about the anonymous foundation, when I got a call from the treasurer about six months later. They had met two brilliant people in Derry, the medical anthropologist Mel Konner and Dennis McCarthy, a retired British industrialist. They wanted me to gather together the leading scientists and scholars and answer the Mandela-Milosevic question.

#3

Atlantic Philanthropies was a fund that gave out large grants to different projects. I called the CEO of Atlantic to thank him for his help, and to ask him to convey my gratitude to Feeney.

#4

The first step in positive psychology is to dissolve the monism of happiness into more workable terms. Understanding happiness requires a theory, and this chapter is my new theory.

#5

The word happiness has historically not been closely tied to hedonics, and it is an even further cry from my intentions for a positive psychology.

#6

The theory in Authentic Happiness is that happiness is made up of three different elements that we choose for their own sake: positive emotion, engagement, and meaning. The first is positive emotion, which is what we feel: pleasure, rapture, ecstasy, warmth, comfort, and the like. The second is engagement, which is about flow: being one with the music, time stopping, and the loss of self-consciousness during an absorbing activity.

#7

There are three inadequacies in authentic happiness theory. The first is that the dominant popular connotation of happiness is inextricably bound up with being in a cheerful mood. The second is that life satisfaction, which is the gold standard for measuring happiness, is excessively dependent on how good we feel at the moment we are asked how satisfied we are with our lives.

#8

Well-being is a construct, and happiness is a thing. Well-being is defined by life satisfaction, where people rate their satisfaction with their lives on a 1 to 10 ladder. The elements of well-being are different kinds of things that are not all self-reports of thoughts and feelings of positive emotion, engagement, and meaning in life.

#9

Well-being theory has five elements: positive emotion, engagement, meaning, positive relationships, and accomplishment. Each of the five has these three properties: they contribute to well-being, many people pursue them for their own sake, and they are measured independently of the other elements.

#10

Meaning is not solely a subjective state. The dispassionate and more objective judgment of history, logic, and coherence can contradict a subjective judgment. People often pursue success, accomplishment, and winning for their own sake, even when it doesn’t bring them any positive emotion or meaning.

#11

Well-being theory requires a fourth element: accomplishment in its momentary form, and the achieving life, a life dedicated to accomplishment for the sake of accomplishment.

#12

Other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the single most reliable up. When was the last time you laughed uproariously. When was the last time you felt indescribable joy. When was the last time you sensed profound meaning and purpose.

#13

There is an island near the Portuguese island of Madeira that is shaped like an enormous cylinder. The very top of the cylinder is a several-acre plateau on which are grown the most prized grapes that go into Madeira wine. On this plateau lives only one large animal: an ox whose job is to plow the field.

#14

The big brain is a social problem solver, and it has been selected for that function. It is constantly using its billions of connections to simulate social possibilities and then choose the optimal course of action.

#15

Positive relationships are one of the five elements of well-being. They are so important to the success of humans that evolution has bolstered them with the support of the other elements to make sure we pursue them.

#16

Well-being is a construct, and well-being, not happiness, is the topic of positive psychology. Well-being has five measurable elements: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement.

#17

Well-being is not just about happiness, and it cannot be measured only by happiness. It must include both subjective and objective measures of positive emotion, engagement, meaning, good relationships, and positive accomplishment.

#18

The goal of positive psychology in authentic happiness is to increase the amount of happiness in your life and on the planet. The goal of positive psychology in well-being theory, in contrast, is to increase the amount of flourishing in your life and on the planet.

#19

The goal of positive psychology is to measure and build human flourishing. We can ask what makes us happy, and then figure out how to get more of that in our lives. This starts by asking what makes us happy.

#20

Gratitude can make your life happier and more satisfying. When we feel gratitude, we benefit from the pleasant memory of a positive event in our life. When we express our gratitude to others, we strengthen our relationship with them.

#21

Well-being is buildable. Positive psychology aims to build well-being on the planet, and well-being can be built. We have to find ways to make people happier that last, because the world is full of scams that make people lose their money quickly.

#22

The Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania began to test what makes people happier. They did not measure all the elements of well-being, but only the emotional element.

#23

To overcome your brain’s natural tendency to focus on negative events, you must work on and practice the skill of thinking about what went well. Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before you go to sleep to write down three things that went well today and why they went well.

#24

I have taught university students, professional mental health workers, and coaches about positive psychology. I have never seen so much positive life change in my students or heard the sweetest words a teacher can hear: life changing.

#25

The client is a 36-year-old female who is under outpatient counseling for depression. She has been working with a therapist for eight weeks, and her scores on the website’s scales are much more positive than before.

#26

The client is a depressed woman who is middle-aged, morbidly obese, and working on balancing her life using the ideas of flow, meaning, and pleasantries. She takes the approaches to happiness test and is pleased to note that the three areas are in balance at about 3. 5 on the scale of 5.

#27

I have been working with Emma for about six years, with an interruption of one year. She came back two years ago following the death of one of her few friends. I have recently used a few positive psychology exercises/interventions with Emma, a severely depressed, suicidal client who has been abused in every way possible since she was a baby.

#28

Two exercises, the what-went-well exercise and the signature strengths exercise, lowered depression three months and six months later. The two exercises also substantially increased happiness through six months.

#29

The five strengths you identified as your top five are your signature strengths. Take them one at a time and ask yourself if they are a signature strength. If they are, ask yourself if you want to use them in a new way. If so, create a designated time to use them in a new way.

#30

We tested the best of these exercises on depressed people, and found that they lowered their depression markedly into the nondepressed range. They stayed nondepressed for the year that we tracked them.

#31