Simplified Wellness – Workshop 4 (Positive Psychology)
The Appleton Greene Corporate Training Program (CTP) for Simplified Wellness is provided by Mrs. Sciortino Certified Learning Provider (CLP). Program Specifications: Monthly cost USD$2,500.00; Monthly Workshops 6 hours; Monthly Support 4 hours; Program Duration 12 months; Program orders subject to ongoing availability.
If you would like to view the Client Information Hub (CIH) for this program, please Click Here
Learning Provider Profile
Mrs Sciortino is a Certified Learning Provider (CLP) with Appleton Greene. An internationally renowned author, Simplicity Expert and Professional Speaker, she spent almost two decades as a high-functioning, award-winning executive before she experienced a life-changing event that forced her to stop and ask the question: ‘What if there’s a better way to live?’.
Embarking on a journey to answer this question, Mrs Sciortino uncovered a simple system to challenge the status quo and use the power of questions to purposefully direct life.
A highly accomplished businesswoman, Mrs Sciortino is an official member of the Forbes Coaches Council, has received nominations for the Top Female Author awards, was awarded a prestigious silver Stevie International Business Women Award, named as the recipient of a 2022 CREA Global Award and has also been awarded over 20 international awards for the uniqueness of the tools and resources she offers.
Sought globally for expert comment by media, she’s been featured in podcasts, Facebook Live, YouTube, blog articles, print media and in live TV and Radio.
Mrs Sciortino works globally with corporate programs, conference platforms, retreats, professional mentoring and in the online environment to teach people how easy it is to live life in a very different way.
When not working, she can be found in nature, on the yoga mat, lost in a great book, meditating, hanging out with her husband and her house panthers or creating magic in her kitchen.
MOST Analysis
Mission Statement
‘Positive Psychology’ has become something of a buzz word in the past decade. The term is thrown around a lot, but most people don’t really know what it is, what it does or why they would want to have it in their lives. This module focuses on understanding positive psychology, its role in life and why you do – and don’t – want to have it. With a thorough exploration of themes such as optimism, gratitude, savoring, happiness, curiosity, courage, altruism and the meaning of life, this module is aimed at creating the perfect mix of positivity for your life.
Objectives
01. Positive Psychology – look at what it is and why it is important for us to practice.
02. History of Positive Psychology – understand where the practice of positive psychology came from and the way it has shaped everyday life.
03. Assumptions of Positive Psychology – dive into the assumptions that are made about the practice of positive psychology.
04. Examples of Positive Psychology – look at the themes that run through the practice of positive psychology.
05. Positive Psychology Pillars – understand the key pillars that support the positive psychology movement.
06. The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology – look at the different ways that we can engage with the principles of positive psychology to change the way we experience our life.
07. Issues with Positive Psychology – understand the issues and concerns that arise when over-doing positive psychology.
08. Happiness – deep dive into the concept of happiness and the control we have over deliberately bringing joy into our everyday activities.
09. Humanist Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and Positive Psychology – explore the differences between these three forms of psychology to better understand the unique role that positive psychology brings.
10. Subjective Wellbeing – look at the ways that people experience and evaluate their lives and the specific activities they participate in.
11. Positive Psychology in Organizations – look at the role that positive psychology plays within an organization and the effect it has on the individuals within it.
12. Positive Psychology’s Influence on the Self – understand the significant influence that positive psychology can have on every individual.
Strategies
01. Engage and elicit expectations for the program.
02. Understand the importance of strategic wellness planning and complete exercises that assist in embedding this knowledge.
03. Set aside time to study the information, tools and resources in the workshop.
04. Set aside time to meet with their team to discuss the elements of the workshop.
05. Identify, and make a list of, the key personnel needed to participate in health & wellness discussions.
06. Participants to complete the exercises as directed in each course manual.
07. Allocate time to consider the current effectiveness of any health & wellness program in place.
08. Without conducting any in-depth research, identify where strategy can play a role in adding depth and breadth to the existing health & wellness programs.
09. Identify elements where strategy can boost areas that are working well from existing health & wellness programs.
10. Identify the convincing rationale for creating a bespoke health & wellness program.
11. Create a clear narrative regarding the need to incorporate strategic elements in creating the framework for a health & wellness program.
12. Set aside time to identify, and write down, any additional commitment required to create a strategic plan for the health & wellness journey.
Tasks
01. Set aside time to read through course manuals and make notes.
02. Allocate time to read the workshop’s preliminary analysis.
03. Identify the key personnel needed to create an effective health & wellness program.
04. Ensure relationships are built with key personnel through regular meetings, discussion and gathering ideas.
05. Schedule a meeting within the next 30 days for participants to meet and discuss workshop.
06. Participate in small groups during the workshop to share observations and reflections.
07. Determine and schedule the time needed to dedicate each workshop.
08. Demonstrate preparedness, commitment and personal presence at each workshop.
09. Prepare questions, seek feedback and create a plan for personal growth.
10. Each exercise in the workshop must be fully completed by the participants, and they must share the process and outcomes with the group.
11. Participants should identify and put into practise the adjustments presented throughout the workshop in order to finish their project.
12. Participants are asked to go over resources for ideas and choose at least one new tool from the list to use.
Introduction
The fourth workshop in the Simplified Wellness Program – Positive Psychology – focuses on understanding the significant influence that positive psychology can have at the individual and the organizational level.
Although positive psychology has been defined in many ways and with many different words, the following is the generally accepted definition of the discipline:
‘Positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes life most worth living.’ (Peterson, 2008).
To expand on this succinct description, positive psychology is a scientific approach to studying human thoughts, feelings and behavior that:
• places an emphasis on strengths rather than weaknesses,
• builds on life’s positive aspects rather than repairs its negative ones, and
• takes average people’s lives and makes them “great” rather than just concentrating on getting those who are struggling to ‘normal’.
Wikipedia defines positive psychology as:
‘ … the scientific study of what makes life most worth living, focusing on both individual and societal well-being. It studies ‘positive subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions…it aims to improve quality of life.’
It is a field of study that has been growing steadily throughout the years as individuals and researchers look for common ground on better wellbeing.
History
The field of psychology known as positive psychology, which is focused on the scientific study of happiness and the “good life”, first arose in the latter half of the 20th Century.
In order to challenge the dominance of psychopathology at the time and create a science of human flourishing, the field of psychology began to shift towards the study of optimal human functioning.
It is the area of psychology that places the most emphasis on the abilities, qualities and attributes that support effective functioning, and promotes the wellbeing of both individuals and communities.
Happiness, resiliency, wellbeing and states of flow and engagement are among the major issues. Martin Seligman, a former leader of the American Psychological Association, was its driving force.
Current Position
A number of assessments of the area of positive psychology have made an effort to look at the research associated with it and determine empirically to what extent the worries about the field are valid. Reviews of recent literature show that there is a complicated narrative.
A thorough review of positive psychology literature that has been published since the movement’s foundation up until 2013 has produced some interesting results. An extensive examination and theme analysis showed that there are two main methods that characterize positive psychology research as it exists today.
One strategy is centered on the creation and evaluation of structures that foster virtues and enhance life quality. This strategy closely reflects the way the field’s creators conceived positive psychology and the goals they established for the research that would create positive psychology.
The second strategy employs the use of constructive concepts to facilitate overcoming hardship. Despite the fact that this was not what the early scholars emphasized, a sizable portion of current positive psychology research takes this tack.
According to an analysis of the global landscape of positive psychology research, 46% of studies use the first approach (which we refer to as the “positive” approach), 29% use the second approach (which we refer to as the “deficit” approach), and 25% combine the two approaches in the same study.
The evaluation of the metrics employed in positive psychology research articles starts to tell a similar tale. Nearly as frequently as ‘positive’ measures like those measuring character strengths, gratitude and resilience, pathology-focused scales measuring stress, anxiety and depression are cited and used.
More research has been done on the intricate relationship between coping with adversity and general wellbeing that affects and influences people, groups, communities and organizations.
When considered collectively, the reviews indicate that the field has responded to the criticisms and that research in positive psychology has grown more balanced, taking into account both the pleasant and unpleasant facts of human life.
On the other hand, social justice is not given much consideration in the field. With a focus on gender, race and ethnicity, reviews have sought to evaluate the extent to which positive psychology research addresses issues pertinent to underrepresented populations.
Future Outlook
The goal of the area of positive psychology is to promote organized, methodical research and practice in developing, maintaining and upgrading a meaningful existence.
Its methodology has evolved over time to take a more holistic approach, contrasting and integrating both life-improving and life-depleting facets of human existence to foster greater knowledge and actual flourishing.
Like all psychology fields, there is still much work to be done in terms of contrasting and integrating various voices and needs, particularly those of those who are marginalized.
The second wave of positive psychology is expected to be better able to forward this objective.
Executive Summary
The fourth workshop in the Simplified Wellness Program – Positive Psychology – focuses on understanding the significant influence that positive psychology can have at the individual and the organizational level.
Positive psychology is subject to certain widespread misconceptions, both about what it is and also what it is not.
The most crucial thing to realize about positive psychology is that it is, in fact, a branch of psychology and, despite occasional derision as a “soft science” or “pseudo-science”, it is nevertheless founded on the scientific approach of assessing hypotheses in light of available data.
A focus on strengths rather than weaknesses, creating the good in life rather than fixing the bad, and elevating the lives of average people to “great” rather than just concentrating on getting those who are struggling up to “normal” are all aspects of the scientific field of positive psychology, which studies human thoughts, feelings and behavior.
This workshop has 12 focus areas. Here’s what they cover:
Chapter 1: Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is a well-known movement that got its start in the late 1990s.
It is the area of psychology that places the most emphasis on the abilities, qualities and attributes that support effective functioning and promotes the wellbeing of both individuals and communities.
Happiness, resiliency, wellbeing and states of flow and engagement are among the major issues. Martin Seligman, a former leader of the American Psychological Association, was its driving force.
In this focus area you will look at what positive psychology is and why it is important for us to practice it every day.
Chapter 2: History of Positive Psychology
Although positive psychology as a formal field has only been around since 2000, the ideas that underpin it have been the focus of empirical research since at least the 1980s and have been discussed in religious and philosophical discourse for thousands of years.
Both psychodynamic and humanistic therapeutic philosophies have had an impact on it. Researchers in the field of psychology had been concentrating on subjects that would now be covered under this new designation before the word “positive psychology” was used.
In this focus area you will look at the origins of positive psychology and the way that it has been modernised to assist us in our everyday lives.
Chapter 3: Assumptions of Positive Psychology
Positive psychology’s core tenet is that people frequently focus more on the future than the past. It also implies that a nice, happy life can result from any amalgamation of pleasurable events or emotions, past or present.
We may see something in another way if we look at it from a different perspective.
The two key assumptions of positive psychology are that as human beings we have free will and that there is an authenticity of goodness and excellence in every situation.
In this focus area you will dive into the assumptions that are made about the practice of positive psychology and learn about how they impact the way that positive psychology is applied.
Chapter 4: Examples of Positive Psychology
Positive psychology is adaptable to a wide range of contexts, vocations, and surroundings.
It can be applied to improve interpersonal connections at home, work, and school. It may increase one’s enjoyment of personal pursuits and broaden their selection of leisure activities. Supervisors, administrators and other leaders can employ positive psychology to make their workplaces happier.
In this focus area you will look at the key themes that run through the practice of positive psychology.
Chapter 5: Positive Psychology Pillars
Positive psychology, in contrast to traditional psychology, changed the emphasis from “what goes wrong” or “what’s broken” to “what works” and “what can work better”.
In doing so, there are three main pillars of positive psychology that have emerged:
– contentment with the past
– happiness in the present
– optimism for the future.
Additionally, positive psychology leads you through the landscape of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the heights of lifelong fulfilment: meaning and purpose.
In this focus area you’ll explore the key pillars that support the positive psychology movement.
Chapter 6: The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology
Thanks to thousands of psychologists from around the globe practicing positive psychology for decades, a fresh theoretical angle on positive emotions has arisen within the discipline of positive psychology.
As a part of this new focus within positive psychology, the idea of ‘broaden-and-build’ has come through. According to the broaden-and-build idea, positive emotional experiences extend people’s fleeting thought-action repertoires, which in turn helps to develop their long-term personal resources, affecting everything from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources.
The broaden-and-build theory effectiveness is in the early stages of being evaluated, however early findings suggest that the capacity to experience positive emotions may be a fundamental human strength central to the study of human flourishing.
In this focus area you’ll look at the role that positive emotions play within the positive psychology model.
Chapter 7: Issues with Positive Psychology
As with all movements that arise, criticism abounds about the parts that don’t work perfectly.
The positive psychology movement is no different and has drawn critics from multiple perspectives over time.
Criticisms range from the movement not being new, to happiness being an elusive state that has no real definition that is adopted by everyone, to the movement seeming to neglect the negative experiences of life.
In this focus area you’ll learn about the issues and concerns that arise when over-doing positive psychology.
Chapter 8: Happiness
When referring to mental or emotional states, happiness is any positive or pleasurable feeling, from contentment to ecstatic delight.
Other kinds include eudaimonia, thriving, subjective wellbeing, life satisfaction and wellbeing.
Since the 1960s, a wide range of scientific fields – such as gerontology, social psychology, positive psychology, clinical and medical research, and happiness economics – have conducted research on happiness, because it is widely held as being the only thing we truly want for its own sake.
In this focus area you’ll deep dive into the concept of happiness and the control we have over deliberately bringing joy into our everyday activities.
Chapter 9: Humanist Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and Positive Psychology
There are numerous paradigms of psychology that relate to one another, including humanist psychology, cognitive psychology and positive psychology.
All three of these forms concentrate on related issues, but they differ in approach and epistemology.
However, many of the perceived distinctions between these three forms of psychology have been based on generalizations that are not always true – most notably that positive psychology does contain some qualitative approaches, while humanistic psychology has a strong tradition of quantitative research.
In this focus area you’ll explore the differences between these three forms of psychology to better understand the unique role that positive psychology brings.
Chapter 10: Subjective Wellbeing
Subjective wellbeing (SWB) is the term used to describe how individuals perceive and assess their lives as well as particular spheres and activities within them.
Researchers, politicians, national statistical offices, media, and public interest in SWB (also known as “self-reported wellbeing”) data has significantly increased in recent decades.
The importance of this data comes from its potential to monitor population economic, social and health problems as well as from its potential to advise policy choices in these areas.
In this focus area you’ll look at the ways that people experience and evaluate their lives and the specific activities they participate in.
Chapter 11: Positive Psychology in Organizations
The scientific study of positive subjective experiences and characteristics in the workplace and in positive organizations (as a subset of positive institutions) is known as positive organizational psychology, and it is used to enhance the productivity and general wellbeing of organizations.
Positive leadership, positive organizational development and transformation, and good individual employee qualities are significant subjects explored in the research on positive organizational psychology.
In particular, research on positive psychology in the workplace has been steadily produced, particularly focusing on workplace predictors of employee health, wellbeing, relationships and performance.
In this focus area you’ll look at the role that positive psychology plays within an organization and the effect it has on the individuals within it.
Chapter 12: Positive Psychology’s Influence on the Self
We seek to learn more about human behavior every year. In order to prevent and treat all diseases, medicine is evolving at the speed of light.
It’s important to remember that a person’s mental health is just as important to them as their physical health. Relationships with ourselves are crucial.
No one can perform well in a way that would totally satisfy them if they are not feeling good, and if their self-esteem is poor or, even worse, virtually non-existent.
In this way, positive psychology can assist us in taking care of ourselves.
In this focus area you’ll understand the significant influence that positive psychology can have on every individual.
Curriculum
Simplified Wellness – Workshop 4 – Positive Psychology
- Positive Psychology
- History of Positive Psychology
- Assumptions of Positive Psychology
- Examples of Positive Psychology
- Positive Psychology Pillars
- The role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology
- Issues with Positive Psychology
- Happiness
- Humanist Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and Positive Psychology
- Subjective Wellbeing
- Positive Psychology in Organizations
- Positive Psychology’s Influence on the Self
Distance Learning
Introduction
Welcome to Appleton Greene and thank you for enrolling in the Simplified Wellness corporate training program.
You will be learning using our special distance learning facilitation approach, which will allow you to put everything you learn in school into practice. The techniques and resources used in your program have been created and developed to guarantee that you get the maximum benefits and enjoyment possible.
We hope you enjoy the curriculum and find it both thought provoking and enjoyable. But if you’ve never studied remotely before, you could be feeling apprehensive about the task at hand. In order to get you started, we will provide you with some fundamental knowledge and instructions on how to use the modules effectively, how to handle the materials, and what to do as you go through them. This manual is intended to put you in the correct path and assist you in developing your skills as a successful distance learner. Before you begin studying seriously, spend a few hours reading this guide and your guide to tutorial support for students and taking notes.
Study Environment
To study, it’s often best to choose a space that is both private and peaceful. Preferably, this should be a room where you have easy access to isolation from outside distractions. Make sure the space is well-lit and has a relaxed, inviting atmosphere. Doing this will give you the opportunity to create the right frame of mind when you do spend time to studying.
A lovely fire, the option to play calming background music, mild but effective lighting, perhaps a nice view if it’s possible, and a good-sized desk with a comfy chair are a few examples of ways to make your study space more inviting.
Make sure your family is aware of your study schedule and is familiar with your study guidelines. Your learning environment is crucial. If at all feasible, having a separate study area that you can dedicate to yourself is great. If this is not possible, you will need to devote much more time to creating and maintaining your study plan because it will have an impact on both you and other people. The more attuned to learning you space is, the more easily you will be able to study.
Study Tools and Rules
Make an effort to ensure that your study materials are adequate and in good operating condition. You will require access to a computer, scanner, and printer as well as internet connectivity. You will require a good filing system in addition to a comfortable chair that supports your lower back.
Spending valuable study time trying to remedy unreliable or improperly designed study tools can be highly irritating. Make sure your study aids are current. You should also take a few study guidelines into account. You will be subject to some of these guidelines, which are meant to help you be more organised about when and how you study.
After reading this guide to distance learning, spend some time creating your study rules. You will also need to come to an agreement with your family, friends, or anyone living with you over some study guidelines. To be able to help you as you study, they too will need to practice discipline. It’s crucial to include your family and friends as active participants in your study group. Their encouragement and support may prove to be a vital factor in your ability to successfully complete the program.
Successful Distance Learning
Since individuals can learn in their own way, at their own pace, and for their own purposes, distance learners are not required to attend regular classes or seminars.
But with a distant learning program, unlike traditional internal training courses, it is the student’s job to make sure they manage their own study contribution.
Strong self-discipline, self-motivation, and a strong will to achieve are required for this. Students who prefer working alone, are adept at managing others, and are accustomed to controlling themselves are more likely to succeed as distance learners.
It’s crucial to understand your primary motivations for studying as well as the primary outcomes you hope to obtain as a result. When you need to encourage yourself, you will need to keep these goals in mind.
Keep both your short-term and long-term objectives in mind at all times.
You will need to find ways to motivate and appreciate yourself while you are studying because no one is here to spoil, take care of, or spoon-feed you information. Make sure to keep track of your academic progress so that you can be confident in your accomplishments and periodically review your goals and objectives.
Self-Assessment
All of the Appleton Greene training programs are post-graduate degrees. Consequently, you ought to be a seasoned learner with a degree in a business-related field.
As a result, you ought to be aware of your academic talents and shortcomings. What time of day, for instance, are you most productive? Are you an owl or a lark? Which research techniques do you find most effective? Are you a diligent student? How do you maintain self-control? How can you make sure you have fun while studying?
If you want to apply yourself effectively, it’s crucial to understand who you are as a student. To do this, you’ll need to do some self-evaluation early on.
Make a SWOT analysis of your academic career. Describe your internal and external opportunities and threats, as well as your strengths and shortcomings as a student.
Later on, when you are making a study plan, this will be useful. Then, you can include elements in your study schedule to make sure you are playing to your strengths and making up for your inadequacies. Additionally, you can make sure that you take full use of your possibilities while avoiding any dangers to your success.
Accepting Responsibility as a Student
Training programs almost always entail a sizable investment, both in terms of money and the amount of time you must devote to studying, and the student bears the entire burden of responsibility for their effective completion.
This is never more obvious than when a student is taking a course remotely.
A crucial step in ensuring that you can successfully complete your training program is accepting responsibility as a student. When anything goes wrong, it is simple to point the finger at other people or situations. However, the reality is that if a failure is your fault, you have the power to correct it; the decision rests totally with you.
You are helpless to change the situation if it is always someone else’s fault. Due to the fact that each student is an individual and that what works for one student may not necessarily work for another, every student studies in a completely different manner.
You must take personal responsibility for figuring out how to create, carry out, and maintain a personalised study plan if you want to succeed. You are the only one to blame if you don’t succeed.
Planning
The sense of not being in control is by far the most important factor contributing to stress. Without planning, we have a tendency to be reactive and can stumble from one obstacle to another, hoping that all will work out in the end. Almost always, they don’t!
We must be certain of the steps we want to take and when we want to take them in order to be in charge. Additionally, we must take into account as many potential outcomes as we can so that we are ready for them when they occur.
Compared to emergent change, prescriptive change is much simpler to govern and control.
This also applies to distance learning. If you believe that you are in charge and that everything is going according to plan, it is much simpler and more fun.
Even if something does go wrong, you are ready for it and can respond to it without being overly stressed. It is crucial that you do take the time to carefully plan your academic schedule.
Management
It is equally crucial to make sure you oversee its implementation once you have created a clear study plan.
The majority of us often enjoy planning, but implementation is usually when things go wrong. We don’t know why goals aren’t being met.
At times, we are unsure even if our goals have been reached. We cannot simply draw the conclusion that the study strategy was unsuccessful. If it isn’t working, you’ll need to know what to do to fix it.
Similarly, even if your study strategy is working, you still need to know why so that you can keep getting results.
Therefore, you need to have self-assessment criteria so that you can consistently increase performance throughout the program. Your performance should continue to advance throughout the program if you handle things properly.
Study Objectives and Tasks
Creating your program objectives is where you should start first. These should feature your priorities and reasons for enrolling in the training program.
To avoid confusion, keep them brief and to the point. Don’t just jot down the first ideas that occur to mind because they probably overlap too much.
List potential department names like “customer service,” “e-business,” “finance,” “globalisation,” “human resources,” “technology,” “legal,” “management,” “marketing,” and “production.” List as many goals under each heading as possible to generate ideas, and then rearrange these goals according to importance.
Finally, identify the most important item under each department heading to serve as your program’s goals.
Try to limit yourself to five, as doing so will help you concentrate. If the main goals are all accomplished, it is likely that the other items you stated will be as well. Simply go through the procedure once more if this is not the case.
Study Forecast
Depending on your availability and ongoing obligations, the Appleton Greene Simplified Wellness corporate training program should be finished in 12 to 18 months.
Whilst the program is designed to be completed in a 12 month period, every student is an individual with varying commitments and production levels, which accounts for the wide variation in time estimations.
The fact that this is a distance learning program that integrates the practical integration of academic theory as an as a part of the training program then magnifies these distinctions. Because every project study is based on actual data, crucial choices and trade-offs must be made. To guarantee that everything goes according to plan, you’ll need to be patient with your expectations. We would always advise you to use caution when making your own task and time estimates, but you must still create them and have a good understanding of what are reasonable expectations in your particular situation.
Regarding your time planning, think about how much time you can realistically devote to studying with the program each week. Then, using the guidelines provided here, estimate how long it should take you to complete the program. Finally, divide the program into logical modules and allot an appropriate amount of time to each one; these will be your milestones. You can make a time plan using a computer spreadsheet or a personal organiser like Mimio.
Refer to your list of tasks that must be completed in order to meet your program’s objectives when planning your tasks; Calculate each task’s implementation date in relation to your time plan, keeping in mind that you are not estimating when your objectives will be met but rather when you will need to concentrate on implementing the corresponding tasks.
You also need to make sure that each task is carried out in conjunction with the relevant training modules that are associated with it. the next step is to divide each activity into a list of particular to-dos, say 10 for each task, and add these to your study plan; Once more, you might create your study plan using MS Outlook to include your time and task management.
You could also use a project management tool like MS Project. Now that you know when you can anticipate being able to take action to complete the tasks necessary to fulfil your program objectives, you should have a clear and realistic prediction.
Performance Management
Creating a study forecast is one thing, but tracking your progress is quite another.
In the end, it matters less if you meet your initial research forecast than how frequently you revise it to keep it reasonable and in line with your performance.
You will have a better understanding of your own performance and productivity levels as a distance learner as you progress through the program. You should reevaluate your study forecast after finishing your first study module so that it accurately reflects the amount of achievement you really accomplished.
You must first time yourself while practicing by utilising an alarm clock in order to achieve this. Set the alarm for hourly intervals, and then record your progress throughout the course of each hour. After that, you can record your actual performance on your study plan and compare it to your forecast.
Then, whether they were good or bad, think about the factors that led to your performance level and thoughtfully change your future forecasts as a result. With time, you ought to begin routinely hitting your forecasts.
Time yourself while you are studying and record the actual time taken in your study plan. Think about your time-efficiency successes and the reasons for each success when reviewing future time planning. Think about your time-efficiency failures and the reasons for each failure when reviewing future time planning. Re-evaluate your study strategy.
You must consistently manage your time otherwise you will never finish your academics. This will either happen because you are not dedicating enough time to your studies or because you are using your study time less effectively. Keep in mind that if you let your studies go out of control, they can end up adding to your stress.
Consider your successes with task-efficiency and the reasons for the success in each case; take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning. Consider your failures with task-efficiency and the reasons for the failures in each case; take this into consideration when reviewing future task planning. Time yourself while you are studying and make a note of the actual tasks that you have undertaken in your study plan. If you don’t manage your tasks consistently, you won’t be able to tell if your program objectives are being met or not.
Keeping in Touch
You will have access to qualified professors and tutors who are competent and experienced and who are in charge of giving tutorial help for your specific training program. Therefore, don’t be afraid to let them know how you’re doing. We save electronic copies of all emails sent in support of tutorials so that instructors and tutors can examine earlier exchanges before deciding how to react to a specific request.
Additionally, it means that all correspondence between you and your instructors and tutors is documented, preventing any needless repetition, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation. Send them an email if you are experiencing any issues with the program.
Since they are more than likely to have dealt with a situation similar to yours before, they can frequently offer valuable advice and point you in the correct way. Please refer to the Tutorial Support section of this student information guide for more information on when and how to use tutorial support. This will enable you to make the most of the tutorial support that is offered to you and will eventually help you succeed in and enjoy your training program.
Work Colleagues and Family
It is important to share your program study progress with your family, friends, and coworkers.
The training courses offered by Appleton Greene are highly useful. It’s part of the program to seek out information from others, collaborate with others to plan, develop, and implement processes, and get feedback from them on the processes’ feasibility and productivity. As a result, you’ll have lots of chances to put your theories to the test and get feedback from others.
Don’t keep your feelings within; people are often understanding of distance learners. Get outside and spread the word! Your family, coworkers, and friends are probably going to gain from your efforts with the program, therefore they are probably more interested in getting engaged than you might imagine. Don’t be afraid to assign tasks to others who could gain from them. This is a fantastic method to get buy-in and understanding from those that you may later depend on for process implementation. Talk about your experiences with your loved ones.
Making It Relevant
Making information relevant to your own unique situation is the key to learning effectively. You should constantly be attempting to draw connections between the program’s content and your personal situation. Remember that this is the most crucial and satisfying step in turning your studies into genuine self-improvement, whether you accomplish it alone or in conversation with your family, clients, or colleagues.
Be specific about how you hope to benefit from the program. This entails establishing precise study goals related to the course’s material in terms of comprehension, concepts, completing research or review exercises, and connecting the material to your own situation. As you progress through the program, it is understandable for your goals to change. In this situation, you should update your study plan with the new goals, so you always know what you are aiming for, when, and why.
Distance Learning Checklist
• Prepare your workspace, materials, and norms for studying.
• Detailed self-evaluation of your capacity for learning should be done.
• Make a structure for your study schedule.
• Take into account your study goals and assignments.
• Make a forecast for the study.
• Analyze your academic performance.
• Review the prediction from your study.
• When organising your study schedule, be consistent.
• For tutorial assistance, contact an Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP).
• Be sure to stay in touch with those in your vicinity.
Tutorial Support
Programs
Appleton Greene uses standard and bespoke corporate training programs as vessels to transfer business process improvement knowledge into the heart of our clients’ organizations. Each individual program focuses upon the implementation of a specific business process, which enables clients to easily quantify their return on investment. There are hundreds of established Appleton Greene corporate training products now available to clients within customer services, e-business, finance, globalization, human resources, information technology, legal, management, marketing and production. It does not matter whether a client’s employees are located within one office, or an unlimited number of international offices, we can still bring them together to learn and implement specific business processes collectively. Our approach to global localization enables us to provide clients with a truly international service with that all important personal touch. Appleton Greene corporate training programs can be provided virtually or locally and they are all unique in that they individually focus upon a specific business function. They are implemented over a sustainable period of time and professional support is consistently provided by qualified learning providers and specialist consultants.
Support available
You will have a designated Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and an Accredited Consultant and we encourage you to communicate with them as much as possible. In all cases tutorial support is provided online because we can then keep a record of all communications to ensure that tutorial support remains consistent. You would also be forwarding your work to the tutorial support unit for evaluation and assessment. You will receive individual feedback on all of the work that you undertake on a one-to-one basis, together with specific recommendations for anything that may need to be changed in order to achieve a pass with merit or a pass with distinction and you then have as many opportunities as you may need to re-submit project studies until they meet with the required standard. Consequently the only reason that you should really fail (CLP) is if you do not do the work. It makes no difference to us whether a student takes 12 months or 18 months to complete the program, what matters is that in all cases the same quality standard will have been achieved.
Support Process
Please forward all of your future emails to the designated (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit email address that has been provided and please do not duplicate or copy your emails to other AGC email accounts as this will just cause unnecessary administration. Please note that emails are always answered as quickly as possible but you will need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general tutorial support emails during busy periods, because emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. You will also need to allow a period of up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Please therefore kindly allow for this within your time planning. All communications are managed online via email because it enables tutorial service support managers to review other communications which have been received before responding and it ensures that there is a copy of all communications retained on file for future reference. All communications will be stored within your personal (CLP) study file here at Appleton Greene throughout your designated study period. If you need any assistance or clarification at any time, please do not hesitate to contact us by forwarding an email and remember that we are here to help. If you have any questions, please list and number your questions succinctly and you can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each and every query.
Time Management
It takes approximately 1 Year to complete the Simplified Wellness corporate training program, incorporating 12 x 6-hour monthly workshops. Each student will also need to contribute approximately 4 hours per week over 1 Year of their personal time. Students can study from home or work at their own pace and are responsible for managing their own study plan. There are no formal examinations and students are evaluated and assessed based upon their project study submissions, together with the quality of their internal analysis and supporting documents. They can contribute more time towards study when they have the time to do so and can contribute less time when they are busy. All students tend to be in full time employment while studying and the Simplified Wellness program is purposely designed to accommodate this, so there is plenty of flexibility in terms of time management. It makes no difference to us at Appleton Greene, whether individuals take 12-18 months to complete this program. What matters is that in all cases the same standard of quality will have been achieved with the standard and bespoke programs that have been developed.
Distance Learning Guide
The distance learning guide should be your first port of call when starting your training program. It will help you when you are planning how and when to study, how to create the right environment and how to establish the right frame of mind. If you can lay the foundations properly during the planning stage, then it will contribute to your enjoyment and productivity while training later. The guide helps to change your lifestyle in order to accommodate time for study and to cultivate good study habits. It helps you to chart your progress so that you can measure your performance and achieve your goals. It explains the tools that you will need for study and how to make them work. It also explains how to translate academic theory into practical reality. Spend some time now working through your distance learning guide and make sure that you have firm foundations in place so that you can make the most of your distance learning program. There is no requirement for you to attend training workshops or classes at Appleton Greene offices. The entire program is undertaken online, program course manuals and project studies are administered via the Appleton Greene web site and via email, so you are able to study at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office as long as you have a computer and access to the internet.
How To Study
The how to study guide provides students with a clear understanding of the Appleton Greene facilitation via distance learning training methods and enables students to obtain a clear overview of the training program content. It enables students to understand the step-by-step training methods used by Appleton Greene and how course manuals are integrated with project studies. It explains the research and development that is required and the need to provide evidence and references to support your statements. It also enables students to understand precisely what will be required of them in order to achieve a pass with merit and a pass with distinction for individual project studies and provides useful guidance on how to be innovative and creative when developing your Unique Program Proposition (UPP).
Tutorial Support
Tutorial support for the Appleton Greene Simplified Wellness corporate training program is provided online either through the Appleton Greene Client Support Portal (CSP), or via email. All tutorial support requests are facilitated by a designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). They are responsible for deciding which professor or tutor is the most appropriate option relating to the support required and then the tutorial support request is forwarded onto them. Once the professor or tutor has completed the tutorial support request and answered any questions that have been asked, this communication is then returned to the student via email by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM). This enables all tutorial support, between students, professors and tutors, to be facilitated by the designated Program Administration Manager (PAM) efficiently and securely through the email account. You will therefore need to allow a period of up to 20 business days for responses to general support queries and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because all tutorial support requests are answered strictly within the order in which they are received. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Consequently you need to put some thought into the management of your tutorial support procedure in order to ensure that your study plan is feasible and to obtain the maximum possible benefit from tutorial support during your period of study. Please retain copies of your tutorial support emails for future reference. Please ensure that ALL of your tutorial support emails are set out using the format as suggested within your guide to tutorial support. Your tutorial support emails need to be referenced clearly to the specific part of the course manual or project study which you are working on at any given time. You also need to list and number any questions that you would like to ask, up to a maximum of five questions within each tutorial support email. Remember the more specific you can be with your questions the more specific your answers will be too and this will help you to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding, misinterpretation, or duplication. The guide to tutorial support is intended to help you to understand how and when to use support in order to ensure that you get the most out of your training program. Appleton Greene training programs are designed to enable you to do things for yourself. They provide you with a structure or a framework and we use tutorial support to facilitate students while they practically implement what they learn. In other words, we are enabling students to do things for themselves. The benefits of distance learning via facilitation are considerable and are much more sustainable in the long-term than traditional short-term knowledge sharing programs. Consequently you should learn how and when to use tutorial support so that you can maximize the benefits from your learning experience with Appleton Greene. This guide describes the purpose of each training function and how to use them and how to use tutorial support in relation to each aspect of the training program. It also provides useful tips and guidance with regard to best practice.
Tutorial Support Tips
Students are often unsure about how and when to use tutorial support with Appleton Greene. This Tip List will help you to understand more about how to achieve the most from using tutorial support. Refer to it regularly to ensure that you are continuing to use the service properly. Tutorial support is critical to the success of your training experience, but it is important to understand when and how to use it in order to maximize the benefit that you receive. It is no coincidence that those students who succeed are those that learn how to be positive, proactive and productive when using tutorial support.
Be positive and friendly with your tutorial support emails
Remember that if you forward an email to the tutorial support unit, you are dealing with real people. “Do unto others as you would expect others to do unto you”. If you are positive, complimentary and generally friendly in your emails, you will generate a similar response in return. This will be more enjoyable, productive and rewarding for you in the long-term.
Think about the impression that you want to create
Every time that you communicate, you create an impression, which can be either positive or negative, so put some thought into the impression that you want to create. Remember that copies of all tutorial support emails are stored electronically and tutors will always refer to prior correspondence before responding to any current emails. Over a period of time, a general opinion will be arrived at in relation to your character, attitude and ability. Try to manage your own frustrations, mood swings and temperament professionally, without involving the tutorial support team. Demonstrating frustration or a lack of patience is a weakness and will be interpreted as such. The good thing about communicating in writing, is that you will have the time to consider your content carefully, you can review it and proof-read it before sending your email to Appleton Greene and this should help you to communicate more professionally, consistently and to avoid any unnecessary knee-jerk reactions to individual situations as and when they may arise. Please also remember that the CLP Tutorial Support Unit will not just be responsible for evaluating and assessing the quality of your work, they will also be responsible for providing recommendations to other learning providers and to client contacts within the Appleton Greene global client network, so do be in control of your own emotions and try to create a good impression.
Remember that quality is preferred to quantity
Please remember that when you send an email to the tutorial support team, you are not using Twitter or Text Messaging. Try not to forward an email every time that you have a thought. This will not prove to be productive either for you or for the tutorial support team. Take time to prepare your communications properly, as if you were writing a professional letter to a business colleague and make a list of queries that you are likely to have and then incorporate them within one email, say once every month, so that the tutorial support team can understand more about context, application and your methodology for study. Get yourself into a consistent routine with your tutorial support requests and use the tutorial support template provided with ALL of your emails. The (CLP) Tutorial Support Unit will not spoon-feed you with information. They need to be able to evaluate and assess your tutorial support requests carefully and professionally.
Be specific about your questions in order to receive specific answers
Try not to write essays by thinking as you are writing tutorial support emails. The tutorial support unit can be unclear about what in fact you are asking, or what you are looking to achieve. Be specific about asking questions that you want answers to. Number your questions. You will then receive specific answers to each and every question. This is the main purpose of tutorial support via email.
Keep a record of your tutorial support emails
It is important that you keep a record of all tutorial support emails that are forwarded to you. You can then refer to them when necessary and it avoids any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Individual training workshops or telephone support
Please be advised that Appleton Greene does not provide separate or individual tutorial support meetings, workshops, or provide telephone support for individual students. Appleton Greene is an equal opportunities learning and service provider and we are therefore understandably bound to treat all students equally. We cannot therefore broker special financial or study arrangements with individual students regardless of the circumstances. All tutorial support is provided online and this enables Appleton Greene to keep a record of all communications between students, professors and tutors on file for future reference, in accordance with our quality management procedure and your terms and conditions of enrolment. All tutorial support is provided online via email because it enables us to have time to consider support content carefully, it ensures that you receive a considered and detailed response to your queries. You can number questions that you would like to ask, which relate to things that you do not understand or where clarification may be required. You can then be sure of receiving specific answers to each individual query. You will also then have a record of these communications and of all tutorial support, which has been provided to you. This makes tutorial support administration more productive by avoiding any unnecessary duplication, misunderstanding, or misinterpretation.
Tutorial Support Email Format
You should use this tutorial support format if you need to request clarification or assistance while studying with your training program. Please note that ALL of your tutorial support request emails should use the same format. You should therefore set up a standard email template, which you can then use as and when you need to. Emails that are forwarded to Appleton Greene, which do not use the following format, may be rejected and returned to you by the (CLP) Program Administration Manager. A detailed response will then be forwarded to you via email usually within 20 business days of receipt for general support queries and 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies. This does not include weekends or public holidays. Your tutorial support request, together with the corresponding TSU reply, will then be saved and stored within your electronic TSU file at Appleton Greene for future reference.
Subject line of your email
Please insert: Appleton Greene (CLP) Tutorial Support Request: (Your Full Name) (Date), within the subject line of your email.
Main body of your email
Please insert:
1. Appleton Greene Certified Learning Provider (CLP) Tutorial Support Request
2. Your Full Name
3. Date of TS request
4. Preferred email address
5. Backup email address
6. Course manual page name or number (reference)
7. Project study page name or number (reference)
Subject of enquiry
Please insert a maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Briefly outline the subject matter of your inquiry, or what your questions relate to.
Question 1
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 3
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 4
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Question 5
Maximum of 50 words (please be succinct)
Please note that a maximum of 5 questions is permitted with each individual tutorial support request email.
Procedure
* List the questions that you want to ask first, then re-arrange them in order of priority. Make sure that you reference them, where necessary, to the course manuals or project studies.
* Make sure that you are specific about your questions and number them. Try to plan the content within your emails to make sure that it is relevant.
* Make sure that your tutorial support emails are set out correctly, using the Tutorial Support Email Format provided here.
* Save a copy of your email and incorporate the date sent after the subject title. Keep your tutorial support emails within the same file and in date order for easy reference.
* Allow up to 20 business days for a response to general tutorial support emails and up to 30 business days for the evaluation and assessment of project studies, because detailed individual responses will be made in all cases and tutorial support emails are answered strictly within the order in which they are received.
* Emails can and do get lost. So if you have not received a reply within the appropriate time, forward another copy or a reminder to the tutorial support unit to be sure that it has been received but do not forward reminders unless the appropriate time has elapsed.
* When you receive a reply, save it immediately featuring the date of receipt after the subject heading for easy reference. In most cases the tutorial support unit replies to your questions individually, so you will have a record of the questions that you asked as well as the answers offered. With project studies however, separate emails are usually forwarded by the tutorial support unit, so do keep a record of your own original emails as well.
* Remember to be positive and friendly in your emails. You are dealing with real people who will respond to the same things that you respond to.
* Try not to repeat questions that have already been asked in previous emails. If this happens the tutorial support unit will probably just refer you to the appropriate answers that have already been provided within previous emails.
* If you lose your tutorial support email records you can write to Appleton Greene to receive a copy of your tutorial support file, but a separate administration charge may be levied for this service.
How To Study
Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can help you to plan a task list for getting started so that you can be clear about your direction and your priorities in relation to your training program. It is also a good way to introduce yourself to the tutorial support team.
Planning your study environment
Your study conditions are of great importance and will have a direct effect on how much you enjoy your training program. Consider how much space you will have, whether it is comfortable and private and whether you are likely to be disturbed. The study tools and facilities at your disposal are also important to the success of your distance-learning experience. Your tutorial support unit can help with useful tips and guidance, regardless of your starting position. It is important to get this right before you start working on your training program.
Planning your program objectives
It is important that you have a clear list of study objectives, in order of priority, before you start working on your training program. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance here to ensure that your study objectives have been afforded due consideration and priority.
Planning how and when to study
Distance-learners are freed from the necessity of attending regular classes, since they can study in their own way, at their own pace and for their own purposes. This approach is designed to let you study efficiently away from the traditional classroom environment. It is important however, that you plan how and when to study, so that you are making the most of your natural attributes, strengths and opportunities. Your tutorial support unit can offer assistance and useful tips to ensure that you are playing to your strengths.
Planning your study tasks
You should have a clear understanding of the study tasks that you should be undertaking and the priority associated with each task. These tasks should also be integrated with your program objectives. The distance learning guide and the guide to tutorial support for students should help you here, but if you need any clarification or assistance, please contact your tutorial support unit.
Planning your time
You will need to allocate specific times during your calendar when you intend to study if you are to have a realistic chance of completing your program on time. You are responsible for planning and managing your own study time, so it is important that you are successful with this. Your tutorial support unit can help you with this if your time plan is not working.
Keeping in touch
Consistency is the key here. If you communicate too frequently in short bursts, or too infrequently with no pattern, then your management ability with your studies will be questioned, both by you and by your tutorial support unit. It is obvious when a student is in control and when one is not and this will depend how able you are at sticking with your study plan. Inconsistency invariably leads to in-completion.
Charting your progress
Your tutorial support team can help you to chart your own study progress. Refer to your distance learning guide for further details.
Making it work
To succeed, all that you will need to do is apply yourself to undertaking your training program and interpreting it correctly. Success or failure lies in your hands and your hands alone, so be sure that you have a strategy for making it work. Your Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and Accredited Consultant can guide you through the process of program planning, development and implementation.
Reading methods
Interpretation is often unique to the individual but it can be improved and even quantified by implementing consistent interpretation methods. Interpretation can be affected by outside interference such as family members, TV, or the Internet, or simply by other thoughts which are demanding priority in our minds. One thing that can improve our productivity is using recognized reading methods. This helps us to focus and to be more structured when reading information for reasons of importance, rather than relaxation.
Speed reading
When reading through course manuals for the first time, subconsciously set your reading speed to be just fast enough that you cannot dwell on individual words or tables. With practice, you should be able to read an A4 sheet of paper in one minute. You will not achieve much in the way of a detailed understanding, but your brain will retain a useful overview. This overview will be important later on and will enable you to keep individual issues in perspective with a more generic picture because speed reading appeals to the memory part of the brain. Do not worry about what you do or do not remember at this stage.
Content reading
Once you have speed read everything, you can then start work in earnest. You now need to read a particular section of your course manual thoroughly, by making detailed notes while you read. This process is called Content Reading and it will help to consolidate your understanding and interpretation of the information that has been provided.
Making structured notes on the course manuals
When you are content reading, you should be making detailed notes, which are both structured and informative. Make these notes in a MS Word document on your computer, because you can then amend and update these as and when you deem it to be necessary. List your notes under three headings: 1. Interpretation – 2. Questions – 3. Tasks. The purpose of the 1st section is to clarify your interpretation by writing it down. The purpose of the 2nd section is to list any questions that the issue raises for you. The purpose of the 3rd section is to list any tasks that you should undertake as a result. Anyone who has graduated with a business-related degree should already be familiar with this process.
Organizing structured notes separately
You should then transfer your notes to a separate study notebook, preferably one that enables easy referencing, such as a MS Word Document, a MS Excel Spreadsheet, a MS Access Database, or a personal organizer on your cell phone. Transferring your notes allows you to have the opportunity of cross-checking and verifying them, which assists considerably with understanding and interpretation. You will also find that the better you are at doing this, the more chance you will have of ensuring that you achieve your study objectives.
Question your understanding
Do challenge your understanding. Explain things to yourself in your own words by writing things down.
Clarifying your understanding
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your understanding.
Question your interpretation
Do challenge your interpretation. Qualify your interpretation by writing it down.
Clarifying your interpretation
If you are at all unsure, forward an email to your tutorial support unit and they will help to clarify your interpretation.
Qualification Requirements
The student will need to successfully complete the project study and all of the exercises relating to the Simplified Wellness corporate training program, achieving a pass with merit or distinction in each case, in order to qualify as an Accredited Simplified Wellness Specialist (ASWS). All monthly workshops need to be tried and tested within your company. These project studies can be completed in your own time and at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office. There are no formal examinations, assessment is based upon the successful completion of the project studies. They are called project studies because, unlike case studies, these projects are not theoretical, they incorporate real program processes that need to be properly researched and developed. The project studies assist us in measuring your understanding and interpretation of the training program and enable us to assess qualification merits. All of the project studies are based entirely upon the content within the training program and they enable you to integrate what you have learnt into your corporate training practice.
Simplified Wellness – Grading Contribution
Project Study – Grading Contribution
Customer Service – 10%
E-business – 05%
Finance – 10%
Globalization – 10%
Human Resources – 10%
Information Technology – 10%
Legal – 05%
Management – 10%
Marketing – 10%
Production – 10%
Education – 05%
Logistics – 05%
TOTAL GRADING – 100%
Qualification grades
A mark of 90% = Pass with Distinction.
A mark of 75% = Pass with Merit.
A mark of less than 75% = Fail.
If you fail to achieve a mark of 75% with a project study, you will receive detailed feedback from the Certified Learning Provider (CLP) and/or Accredited Consultant, together with a list of tasks which you will need to complete, in order to ensure that your project study meets with the minimum quality standard that is required by Appleton Greene. You can then re-submit your project study for further evaluation and assessment. Indeed you can re-submit as many drafts of your project studies as you need to, until such a time as they eventually meet with the required standard by Appleton Greene, so you need not worry about this, it is all part of the learning process.
When marking project studies, Appleton Greene is looking for sufficient evidence of the following:
Pass with merit
A satisfactory level of program understanding
A satisfactory level of program interpretation
A satisfactory level of project study content presentation
A satisfactory level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
A satisfactory level of the practical integration of academic theory
Pass with distinction
An exceptional level of program understanding
An exceptional level of program interpretation
An exceptional level of project study content presentation
An exceptional level of Unique Program Proposition (UPP) quality
An exceptional level of the practical integration of academic theory
Preliminary Analysis
Positive psychology: theory and practice
https://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/history-of-happiness/martin-seligman-psychology/
Positive and negative emotions – do we need both?
https://positivepsychology.com/positive-negative-emotions/
Positive psychology fact sheet:
https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Positive-psychology-fact-sheet.pdf
Positive psychology: The science of happiness by Professor Tal BenShahar from WGBH Forum:
The happiness advantage: Linking positive brains to performance TED Talk from TEDx Talks:
View the entirety of ‘The Last Lecture’ by watching this YouTube video:
Positive Psychology Pillars: 4 habits of ALL successful relationships:
Course Manuals 1-12
Course Manual 1: Positive Psychology
Introduction
The field of positive psychology gained popularity in the late 1990s. It is the area of psychology that places the most emphasis on the abilities, qualities and attributes that support effective functioning and promotes the wellbeing of both individuals and communities. Happiness, resiliency, wellbeing and states of flow and engagement are among the major issues. Martin Seligman, a former leader of the American Psychological Association, was its driving force.
The focus of positive psychology is on life’s constructive experiences and influences, such as:
• Positive feelings (such as pleasure, happiness, inspiration and love).
• Positive emotions and characteristics (such as compassion, resiliency and thankfulness).
• Institutions that uphold positive values across their whole structures and organizations.
Positive psychology as a discipline spends a lot of time considering issues like character traits, optimism, life satisfaction, happiness, wellbeing, gratitude, compassion (including self-compassion), self-esteem and self-confidence, hope and elevation.
These issues are investigated on an ongoing basis in order to learn how to support people in thriving and leading their best lives.
Martin Seligman is a well-known researcher with a wide range of experience in the psychology field.
Often, if people aren’t aware of the positive psychology movement, they’ve come across his name at some point. Seligman’s studies in the 1960s and 1970s formed the basis of the well-known psychological concept of ‘learned helplessness’.
Seligman’s hypothesis, which is supported by decades of research, explains how both people and animals can grow to feel powerless and deprived of control over their circumstances.
Seligman made a connection between this behavior and depression, noting that many depressed persons also experience a sense of helplessness. His research on the subject inspired, generated and supported numerous treatments for depressive symptoms as well as preventative measures for depression.
Although this is impressive enough on its own, Seligman was aware that he had more to contribute to the field of psychology and the wider world, specifically with more of a focus on the states of being positive, uplifted and inspired.
Following his success with learned helplessness, he focused on other qualities, traits and viewpoints that could be learned.
In resilience and learned optimism, he discovered what he was looking for. These discoveries laid the foundation for his widely used resilience programs for kids and the military, among other groups.
As an avid researcher, Seligman became irritated by psychology’s excessively limited emphasis on the negative; he believed that a disproportionate amount of attention was given to suffering, mental illness, abnormal psychology, trauma and pain, while comparatively little focus was placed on wellbeing, exceptionalism, strengths and flourishing.
He seized the chance to steer the field in a different direction from such a powerful position when he was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1998. Upon stepping into this new role, Seligman suggested a brand-new branch of psychology with an emphasis on what enhances rather than diminishes life. Together with ‘founding father’ of flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Seligman presented the original research article for this brand-new discipline of positive psychology in 2000.
Since then, thousands of researchers have responded to Seligman’s call for a greater emphasis on the positive aspects of life, sparking tens of thousands of studies on positive phenomena and creating a foundation for the application of positive principles to coaching, teaching, relationships, the workplace and every other area of life.
There are ten important findings from positive psychology research:
1. Most people are generally happy.
2. Contentment is a cause of positive events in life rather than merely their effect. Good things happen because people are happy.
3. In politics, conservatives are happier than liberals.
4. The majority of individuals are tough. They overcome both major and minor setbacks.
5. Happiness, character strengths and strong social ties operate as protective barriers against the negative effects of disappointments and failures.
6. Religious belief is significant. Compared to non-believers, people who find religion to be significant are happier and handle stress better.
7. While money’s significance to happiness is ever-declining, pleasure can be purchased by spending money on others.
8. Eudaimonia (i.e., a life of purpose) triumphs over hedonism (i.e., a life of pleasure) as a path to a fulfilling life.
9. Having a sense of independence, competence and community are characteristics of good days.
10. One can learn to live a nice life.
The role that positive psychology plays
‘How can one be truly happy?’ is one of the biggest questions of our age. Positive psychology and its associated study seek to provide an answer to this question.
The never-ending search for happiness and the never-ending effort to live a life that is meaningful have given rise to a whole industry devoted to prioritizing our health by offering many programs, guides, treatments and advice on how to lead a positive and optimistic existence.
Many of us are in a condition of sadness and despair as a result of recent world events, such as the coronavirus epidemic and watching the deaths of unarmed people of colour at the hands of police. Having been affected by these tragedies, we find ourselves trying to concentrate on how we can promote positivity in our neighborhoods and in ourselves, emphasizing the very things that give life greater meaning. It is here that the positive psychology movement hopes to be able to benefit your mental health.
In his TED Talk, Martin Seligman asserted that psychology ought to be equally concerned with human power and weakness. He said: ‘It should also be equally engaged in creating the finest things in life as in fixing the worst, and equally concerned with making ordinary people’s lives fulfilling, and with cultivating high talent as with curing pathology.’ These objectives serve as the cornerstone of positive psychology.
Positive psychology, according to another well-known psychologist named Christopher Peterson, is simply the study of what makes life most worthwhile. By focusing on strengths rather than flaws, enhancing the positive aspects of life while addressing the negative ones, and making people’s lives fantastic rather than sufficient, it takes a scientific approach to understanding human thoughts, feelings and behavior.
Although the main focus of positive psychology is on factors like optimism, hope, happiness and joy, it also addresses other factors. This area of psychology also focuses on character strengths, self-esteem and wellbeing, how they can be used in our daily lives, careers and interpersonal interactions, and how they all interact to help us live meaningful lives.
It is largely accepted that there are three levels within positive psychology. They include:
• Subjective level: this level focuses on sensations of joy, contentment, optimism and other comparable emotions or sensations as they pertain to your day-to-day experience.
• Individual level: this level combines the subjective level emotions of wellbeing with the traits or virtues that make you a complete person, such as courage, love and forgiveness.
• Group level: this level is concerned with how well you connect with your neighbors, and includes characteristics that make social ties stronger, such as altruism and social responsibility.
The value of positive psychology
The basic goal of positive psychology is to motivate people to focus on developing their character strengths rather than trying to fix their flaws. In order to increase quality of life, positive psychology emphasizes the need for people to change their pessimistic perspective to one that is more upbeat.
Positive psychology theories contend that one of life’s primary energies is positivity. Each of us frequently experiences both good and bad outcomes, but it often seems more comfortable to concentrate on the bad results and ignore the ways in which we could use the good things to make the bad things better.
For all of its history, psychology science has been primarily concerned with the diagnoses that explain bad behaviors and patterns of behavior, the psychological flaws and anomalies that distinguish certain people from others. These illnesses cover the mental health issues that many of us face, such as depression and anxiety.
However, scientific justifications for constructive thoughts and behaviors are given more attention in positive psychology research. Positive psychology emphasizes that people’s talents and virtues should be given equal weight, even while it does not discount the existence of flaws and foibles in our ideas and behavior.
Positive psychology is crucial, because understanding what makes people live more fulfilling lives can help us develop more effective management techniques for dealing with mental illness, stopping bad behaviors, and boosting happiness and productivity.
For instance, a positive psychologist would investigate the resilience of persons who have successfully recovered from drug addiction and encourage such resilience in upcoming patients, rather than examining the underlying characteristics connected with drug addiction.
Benefits of positive psychology
The benefits of positive psychology are many and varied. Therapists often use positive psychology as a method of showing their patients a way to identify their strengths and more easily find happiness in everyday life.
Some of the most common benefits include:
• Positive feelings – This phase entails more than just remembering to be optimistic. The goal is to increase your good feelings towards the various life stages. You might cherish the pleasant memories of the past, delight in the pleasures of the present, and have a positive outlook on the future.
• Engagement – When you are enthusiastic and involved in a task that is appropriate for your skill set, you are said to be in this state. “Flow” is the feeling of enjoyment you have when your task and your skills are in harmony. Your hobbies, your job, or anything else that fits with your skills can help you find your flow. It’s also referred to as time standing still or losing one’s sense of self.
• Relationships – People are social animals who depend on interpersonal connections. Family and friends are significant and can significantly improve your quality of life. Additionally, they can provide you with the much-needed support you need when you’re down. Your relationships can give your life direction and significance.
• Meaning – Whatever a higher good means to you, it might be linked to a sense of meaning or purpose. For some people, it may refer to their religion, politics, sense of community, level of job satisfaction, or commitment to social and environmental problems.
• Accomplishment – To be successful might mean different things to different people. This fundamental principle denotes the pursuit of success for its own sake or for the pure joy of receiving the result.
• Power of Positive Thinking – Optimism and positive thinking may lead to advantages like:
– more fulfilling connections
– improved general health
– getting better sleep
– decreased risk of heart attack
– more restraint
– improvement at work
As is always the case, every individual is a unique human being so the benefits one person will experience will differ from another.
Positive thinking and optimism have their limitations. If their health condition doesn’t improve, some people who think using positive psychology will help them get over their ailments may experience emotional discomfort or blame themselves.
What happens if you don’t have positive psychology?
Is your glass half full or half empty? Your response to this venerable question on positive thinking could reveal your outlook on life, how you feel about yourself, whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic, and even how your health is affected.
According to certain studies, personality qualities like optimism and pessimism can have an impact on a variety of aspects of your health and wellbeing. Effective stress management relies heavily on the optimistic mindset that it typically entails.
Additionally, effective stress management has a number of positive effects on health. You can develop positive thinking abilities even if you have a tendency to be gloomy.
Knowing how to think positively and have positive conversations with yourself is important.
Positive thinking does not imply ignoring less than ideal circumstances in life. Simply said, positive thinking entails taking an upbeat and constructive approach to bad situations. You anticipate the greatest, not the worst, happening.
Self-talk is frequently the first step in positive thinking. Self-talk is the never-ending stream of inner dialogue that occurs. Positive or negative thoughts may come to mind automatically. Your self-talk contains some elements of logic and reason. Other self-talk might result from assumptions you make as a result of incomplete knowledge or anticipations brought on by preconceived notions of what might occur.
Your attitude towards life is more likely to be negative if the majority of your thoughts are negative. You probably consider yourself an optimist, or someone who engages in positive thinking, if your ideas are generally positive.
The advantages of optimistic thinking for health
The impact of optimism and optimistic thinking on health is still a topic of research. However, what research to date has shown is that positive thinking may have a variety of health advantages, including:
• increased longevity
• decreased depression rates
• greater resistance to infections and lower levels of anxiety and discomfort
• improved physical and psychological health
• lower risk of death from heart disease and stroke and improved cardiovascular health
• decreased likelihood of dying from cancer
• decreased chance of dying from respiratory diseases
• reduced danger of infection-related mortality
• improved coping mechanisms for difficulties and stressful situations
Why positive thinkers enjoy these health advantages is not entirely apparent. According to one idea, having a positive outlook makes it easier for you to handle stressful situations, which lessens the negative consequences of stress on your body’s health.
Additionally, it’s believed that upbeat and optimistic people lead healthier lifestyles – they engage in more exercise, consume a healthier diet, and don’t smoke or overindulge in alcohol.
Case Study: Positive Psychology on the Battlefield
Martin Seligman was taken aback when the US Army called.
The Army required warriors who were mentally prepared in addition to being physically fit. They sought to make sure their troops could endure combat while also preventing future cases of depression, divorce, addiction and suicide for their veterans.
The Army had seen decades of combat-weary, stressed-out soldiers with poor performance and strained domestic relationships.
Seligman acknowledged that the Army needed to alter its strategy to put more emphasis on embracing resilience and growth in the face of hardship than on treating chronic illness.
Seligman agreed to implement the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program in response, which includes psychological assessments, self-improvement training, and a pilot resilience study that will soon be expanded to 1 million soldiers.
The outcome was a program that assisted soldiers in identifying and utilizing their strengths and in building more resilience. It was also well-liked; the soldiers gave it an incredible 4.9 out of 5 stars.
It was incredibly successful.
In 2011, a comprehensive evaluation was completed to measure the impact of this training program.
In this evaluation, eight Brigade Combat Teams were randomly selected to be evaluated.
The Army discovered that the trained soldiers “improved in emotional fitness, active coping, and optimism and catastrophized less” before and after deployment in combat zones.
Everyone saw its usefulness in preparation and on the battlefield, but the biggest change was felt at home.
According to Seligman, one soldier recalled telling him that he had just finished a phone call with his kid, who was eager to share the news that he had hit a home run in Little League. The young child asked his father, “Dad, is this really you?” when the call ended.
Exercise 4.1: Consciously creating positive emotion moments
1. Write down the things in everyday life that bring you joy. These can be big or small things – it doesn’t matter their size, write them down if they make you smile, bring you pleasure or enjoyment.
2. Take a moment to reflect on the past 7 days. Write down as many positive emotions that you can remember experiencing in this week.
3. From this list, identify which three of these emotions you experienced the most often.
4. What activities were you doing when you experienced these three emotions?
5. Where/how else do you think you could easily experience these emotions?
6. What is one thing you will do to increase your experience of these emotions?
Course Manual 2: History of Positive Psychology
Introduction
Although positive psychology as a formal field has only been around since 2000, the ideas that underpin it have been the focus of empirical research since at least the 1980s and have been discussed in religious and philosophical discourse for thousands of years.
Both psychodynamic and humanistic therapeutic philosophies have had an impact on it. Researchers in the field of psychology had been concentrating on subjects that would now be covered under this new designation before the word “positive psychology” was used.
Psychology’s roots are in the study of how the brain, nervous system, cognition and behavior work, as well as how psychopathology and mental illness are caused and mitigated. This is often referred to as the ‘disease’ model.
The treatment of traumatic psychological injuries suffered by military soldiers after the First and Second World Wars was the origin of many twentieth-century psychological interventions for mental health issues. However, some psychologists were troubled by these therapeutic approaches because they called for the therapist to take on the role of an aloof expert, rather than showing empathy and compassion for their patient.
In response to what the pioneers of humanistic psychology saw as the reductionist, positivist view of the mind as a complex mechanism akin to a machine – a stimulus-response mechanism in behaviorism or an economy of sexual and aggressive drives in psychoanalysis – humanistic psychology emerged in the 1950s and 1960s.
Humanistic psychology promoted a comprehensive examination of people as bio-psycho-social beings. The phrase ‘positive psychology’ was originally used by Abraham Maslow in his 1954 book Motivation and Personality. According to Maslow, psychology’s focus on dysfunction and disorder lacked a proper comprehension of human potential.
Martin Seligman promoted the positive psychology subfield in 1998 while serving as the American Psychological Society’s President. In order to combat psychopathology’s domination and create a science of human flourishing, the positive psychology proposal was specifically intended to further research human potential.
The Psychology Waves
Like actual ocean waves, several of these psychological waves began to form practically simultaneously and eventually combined to form larger, broader tendencies that gave rise to what is now known as positive psychology.
Introspection
Wilhelm Wundt founded the first experimental psychology laboratory in Germany in 1879, which marked the beginning of psychology’s development as a separate field concerned with the science of mind and behavior. A psychology lab had already been built by William James at Harvard University a few years previously, although he used it more for instruction than for research.
James is connected to functionalism, whereas Wundt is connected to structuralism, the first school of psychological thought. Structuralism was interested in examining how the mind works by focusing on the minute details of perception. James, however, favored a more comprehensive viewpoint and emphasized the role that environment plays in influencing behavior.
Psychoanalysis
The development of psychoanalysis was pioneered by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud in the 1890s while he was treating female patients who had ‘hysteria’-like psychosomatic symptoms.
He developed the free association techniques and dream interpretation methods, which he referred to as the ‘royal road to the unconscious’, through a series of experimental interventions.
The repressed sexual and aggressive urges that Freud later referred to as “drives” were stored in the unconscious, according to his explanation. Psychoanalysis sought to successfully sublimate these urges and turn hysterical agony into commonplace sorrow.
Numerous students, including Carl Jung, Albert Adler, Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, who later founded their own schools of psychoanalytic thought, embraced and advanced psychoanalysis and its distinctive account of human development and psychopathology.
Behaviorism
In the meantime, a development that was closely related to it concentrated on human behavior rather than the inner world. John Watson suggested in the early 1900s that studying interior mental processes was unnecessary since we could understand the human mind as a conditioned stimulus response system.
He argued that behavior could be unlearned and that it was learned. John Watson founded behaviorism in 1924, and B.F. Skinner adopted it in 1953, before it developed into the variety of behavioral therapies that are still used today.
Despite their many differences, psychoanalysis and behaviorism both concentrated almost solely on the causes of psychopathology and the therapeutic management of a variety of psychological disorders.
The founders of humanistic psychology criticized both for portraying the psychologist or psychotherapist as an aloof authority on the patient’s difficulties.
Positive Psychology
The next big wave in psychology developed from three key developments that were motivated by criticisms of the reductionist approach to the study of the human mind and behavior embraced by behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Conceptually, think of it like multiple waves merging into one bigger wave as they roll to the shore.
• Holism – Gestalt psychology, developed in Germany in the 1930s by Max Wertheimer, suggested a macroscopic, comprehensive knowledge of human psychology. From the 1950s onward, Abraham Maslow’s work, whose work is discussed below, was heavily influenced by his work.
• Person-centric – Maslow established the Esalen Institute for the Study of Human Potential alongside Gestalt therapist Fritz Perls to carry out research outside of the traditional university framework. The Esalen Institute contributed to the development of a new person-centered approach to psychology, counselling and psychotherapy.
• Understanding – A focus on meaning-making as the psychological underpinning of mental health was also growing in the existential psychology of Rollo May and Viktor Frankl during the 1950s and 1960s.
What Maslow referred to as ‘the third force’ of psychology – after psychoanalysis and behaviorism – combined holistic, person-centered, and meaning-making.
Through the development of his person-centered approach to counselling and psychotherapy, Carl Rogers became a well-known pioneer in the field. Some of the most important ideas that make up positive psychology were developed by Rogers, including what he called the ‘three core conditions’ for successful counselling and psychotherapy:
• Empathy (which indicates emotional receptivity)
• Congruence (which conveys sincerity)
• Unconditional Positive Regard (which conveys acceptance)
Transpersonal components were also adopted by humanistic psychology in order to advance a comprehensive knowledge of the human mind and behavior. An early proponent of psychosynthesis according to Roberto Assagioli, every individual is a special synthesis of personal and transpersonal aspects that needs to be integrated.
Transpersonal aspects foster a sense of belonging to something more than oneself, whether that something bigger is the world, our ecological imprint, our community, our contribution to something meaningful, or our interconnectedness with everything.
The human potential movement, which has grown quickly, has redirected psychology’s attention from psychopathology to a comprehensive study of ideal human functioning. But at the turn of the century, positive psychology began to champion the study of human flourishing.
Intentional Psychology
The scientific study of human flourishing and positive psychology are both usually acknowledged as having been co-founded by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The conceptual history of positive psychology is outlined in the following section, along with a brief summary of each of the five founding fathers’ contributions.
Maslow’s first edition of Motivation and Personality, which included a concluding chapter headed ‘Towards a Positive Psychology,’ was published in 1954. That year marked the beginning of the phrase ‘positive psychology’.
He deleted that chapter from the second version, which was released in 1970, noting in the prologue that ‘a positive psychology is at least available today, though not very widely’.
There are signs that since the 1950s, psychologists have become more concerned with promoting mental wellness than only treating mental disorder. Since its inception, psychology has approached the human experience using the ‘Disease Model’, focusing on researching and identifying an individual’s dysfunction.
When Martin Seligman decided to make positive psychology the focus of his term as President of the American Psychological Association in 1998, it became a significant area of research within the discipline of psychology. ‘For the last half century psychology has been consumed with a single topic only – mental illness,’ Seligman wrote in the first line of his book Authentic Happiness, building on Maslow’s remarks. He exhorted psychologists to carry on psychology’s original aims of developing talent and enhancing daily living.
Development
In 1999, the first summit on positive psychology was held. In 2002, there was the first-ever international conference on positive psychology. The general public paid more attention in 2006 when, utilizing the same framework, a course at Harvard University gained a lot of popularity. The University of Pennsylvania hosted the First World Congress on Positive Psychology in June 2009.
Modern positive psychology is largely developed in Western Europe and the United States. The concepts, theories, research and motivation to study the positive side of human behavior are as old as mankind itself, despite the fact that positive psychology presents a novel method to the study of positive emotions and behavior.
Influences
Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Erich Fromm, among other humanistic psychologists, created theories and methods related to human pleasure and flourishing. The humanistic notions of flourishing have recently received empirical support from positive psychologists. Additionally, positive psychology has advanced in a number of fresh ways.
The tripartite model of subjective wellbeing, proposed by Diener in 1984, states that there are ‘three distinct but frequently related components of wellbeing: frequent positive affect, infrequent negative affect, and cognitive evaluations such as life satisfaction’.
According to this concept, subjective wellbeing is influenced by cognitive, emotional and environmental aspects. The concept of subjective wellbeing is based on the notion that each person’s thoughts and feelings about their lives matter.
The Six-factor Model of Psychological Wellbeing by Carol Ryff was first published in 1989, and updated research on its components was released in 1995. Ryff’s model claims that the following six components are essential for wellbeing:
• self-acceptance
• personal growth
• life purpose
• environmental mastery
• autonomy
• good relationships with others.
Eudaimonic wellbeing, also known as psychological and social wellbeing, is concerned with skills, talents and optimal functioning. Hedonic wellbeing, on the other hand, focuses on the emotional components of wellbeing. This three-part concept of mental health has received a lot of empirical support from many cultural perspectives.
A beginning of positive psychological influence
The concepts that constitute the foundation of this area have been discussed in religious and philosophical debate for thousands of years, even though the formal term ‘positive psychology’ has only been in widespread usage since roughly 2000. Researchers in the field of psychology who worked before the phrase ‘positive psychology’ was coined generally examined issues that are now included by the word.
Some see positive psychology as the synthesis of Western psychodynamic theories and Eastern thought, such as Buddhism. The ideas of Aristotle, whose Nicomachean Ethics advocate cultivating moral virtue as a method of achieving happiness and wellbeing, and which he referred to as eudaimonia, are the historical foundations of positive psychology.
The 5 Founding Fathers of Positive Psychology
It is generally agreed that there are five founding fathers of the positive psychology movement.
1. William James
William James was a psychologist, physician, philosopher, and the first teacher in the United States to provide a psychology course.
He wondered why some people were able to thrive and get through hardships while others experienced mental health issues. He maintained that the study of ideal human functioning depends on an understanding of subjective experience.
In order to connect mind and body, and look into the concrete, observable aspects of inner experience, he blended pragmatic and functionalist viewpoints. Because of his focus in whole person functioning and the whole range of subjective experience outside the bounds of psychopathology, James is widely regarded as America’s first positive psychologist.
2. Abraham Maslow
The ‘third force’ of humanistic psychology was important in supplying the fundamental ideas of positive psychology, although Abraham Maslow had the biggest impact.
In reality, Maslow originally used the phrase ‘positive psychology’ in his book Motivation and Personality. Maslow disagreed with psychology’s focus on dysfunction and disorder, contending that it did not adequately account for human potential.
Maslow stated that although psychoanalysis and behaviorism, two previous psychological approaches, showed a lot about human failings and mental health issues, they did not go into human virtues and ambitions.
3. Martin Seligman
American psychologist, educator and researcher, Martin Seligman is also an author.
When he decided to concentrate on the central idea of positive psychology, Seligman was elected President of the American Psychological Association in 1998.
His central thesis, which established a new period of research into the causes of human happiness and fulfilment, was that mental health extended beyond the absence of disease.
His early interest in taught optimism was sparked by his work into learned helplessness and pessimistic views. Due to this, he collaborated with Christopher Peterson (listed below) to develop a useful alternative to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) classification of psychopathology.
They looked at several historical cultures, from the ancient Greeks to the present, during their research to compile a list of virtues that are highly regarded. The following six categories were part of the classification system that served as the framework for their 2004 book Character Strengths and Virtues by Seligman and Peterson:
• wisdom/knowledge
• courage
• transcendence
• justice
• humanity
• temperance
As the acknowledged creator of the field of positive psychology, Professor Seligman was appointed director of the Positive Psychology Centre at the University of Pennsylvania in 2004. He has published more than 30 books and over 350 research articles on the subject to date. In the below video Martin Seligman explains where his ideas and efforts came from:
4. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was born in Hungary in 1934, during a time when the Second World War had a significant impact on his family and many others.
When Hungary became communist in 1949, his father, who had been appointed as the Hungarian Ambassador to Rome, resigned from his position and opened a restaurant. The teenage Mihaly dropped out of school to work in the family business after the regime retaliated by depriving the family of their Hungarian citizenship.
After these traumatic events, Csikszentmihalyi became interested in psychology after hearing Carl Jung speak in Switzerland on the traumatized psyches of post-World War II Europe. He moved to the USA to study psychology as a result of his passion. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1965, and in 1969 he was appointed as a professor there.
Painting was a passion of Csikszentmihalyi’s, and he noted that sometimes the process of creation was more significant than the final product. His preoccupation with what he dubbed the flow state resulted from this. He dedicated his life to researching the various approaches to reaching flow as an expression of the ideal human experience.
The research of Csikszentmihalyi attracted a lot of public attention and has been extensively used to examine creativity, output and pleasure at both the individual and organizational levels.
Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman worked together to develop positive psychology as pioneering researchers. Today, Csikszentmihalyi is regarded as one of the field’s founding fathers.
5. Chris Peterson
Christopher Peterson is the former Department of Clinical Psychology Chair and University of Michigan Professor of Psychology.
He is renowned for his work in the study of strengths, virtues, optimism, hope, character, and welfare. He co-authored Character Strengths and Virtues with Martin Seligman.
In addition to the five founding fathers, there are also an additional six psychologists who are widely revered for their significant contributions to the positive psychology field.
Albert Bandura
From his social-cognitive theory, Albert Bandura derived his self-efficacy theory. It deals with how a person believes they may accomplish their goals by carrying out the necessary tasks.
Positive psychology has placed a lot of significance on comprehending self-efficacy.
Donald Clifton
When he created strengths-based psychology, Clifton took a similar route as Seligman. Clifton researched successful people to learn how they attained top performance at work.
His research has given workers advice on how to identify a rewarding career that plays to their own abilities. He was given a Presidential Commendation by the American Psychological Association in 2002 in recognition of his contributions to strengths-based psychology.
Ryan and Deci
Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan created the self-determination theory in the 1980s. Ryan was a clinical psychologist and professor at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney, Australia, while Deci was a professor in the Department of Clinical and Social Sciences at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York.
Their ground-breaking research on self-determination modified Abraham Maslow’s initial hierarchy of needs. According to their research, three factors – autonomy, competence and relatedness – are what motivate people. The field of positive psychology can use this widely.
Ed Diener
Leading researcher Ed Diener, aka “Dr. Happiness,” invented the phrase “subjective wellbeing” to describe a dimension of happiness that can be measured objectively. His findings that happiness has a major genetic component have inspired numerous investigations of the internal and environmental factors necessary for its development.
Additionally, Diener has conducted research on the effects of culture and income on wellbeing. He is a senior scientist for Gallup and has collaborated with Martin Seligman.
Carol Dweck
Research was done by Carol Dweck comparing the growth mindset to the fixed mindset. Studies of parenting, teamwork, and corporate leaders have all used her findings. It is a positive psychology tool that is frequently applied in workplace and academic contexts.
Barbara Fredrickson
With her ‘widen and build’ hypothesis, which holds that pleasant emotions broaden people’s brains and aid in the development of the resources necessary for resilience during difficult times, Barbara Fredrickson made her first contribution to positive psychology.
Case Study: The impact of a ‘last lecture’
A fantastic example of an inspirational speech that challenges the audience to re-examine their beliefs about life, death, and interpersonal relationships is Randolph Pausch’s ‘The Last Lecture’. Additionally, it exhorts them to maintain optimism in the face of numerous challenges. This speech shows how one may remain brave and determined to live even in the most terrible circumstances.
A fantastic example of an inspirational speech that challenges the audience to re-examine their beliefs about life, death, and interpersonal relationships is Randolph Pausch’s ‘The Last Lecture’. Additionally, it exhorts them to maintain optimism in the face of numerous challenges. This speech shows how one may remain brave and determined to live even in the most terrible circumstances.
The Last Lecture was delivered by Randolph Pausch on the Oprah Winfrey Show. This event was attended by about 100 people; however, one must keep in mind that it was ultimately viewed by millions of people through television and the Internet. Overall, viewers of the speech have shown that the words are applicable to individuals from various sexes, ethnic backgrounds, age ranges or social classes.
The speaker does not state at the outset who his remarks are intended for; rather, he merely states towards the conclusion that while this speech was initially directed for his children, it may also be applicable to other audiences. Therefore, it is possible to argue that Pausch engages with auditors or listeners who are not directly addressed.
The Last Lecture might be considered an extemporaneous and technology-assisted lecture from the perspective of delivery, meaning that the speaker carefully planned his talk in advance and used computer software to support his thoughts with visual pictures. However, overall, he was able to have a strong emotional impact on the audience thanks to this delivery’s effectiveness.
His speech’s start included an attention-getter that piqued the audience’s curiosity in what he had to say. There was no real structure to the speech, instead Pausch decided to expand on his main point in the speech’s later sections. However, because the speaker was able to persuade the audience, the lack of proper structure was not a weakness.
Pausch employed the ethos (appeal to credibility) and pathos (appeal to emotions) modes of appeal. He used instances from his own life to try to persuade the listeners. He described how one should behave in various situations and the justification for doing so. However, because the audience was aware that the speaker had a terminal illness, this motivational speech also touched people’s hearts.
Randolph Pausch may not have intended for his statement to evoke an emotional response, but it undoubtedly had pathos in it. Therefore, pathos and ethos, two components of the rhetorical triangle, are present in the Last Lecture and drive the audience to believe his words, not because he offers strong proof to back up his claims, but because the emotion evoked in the speech drives them to do so.
This speech can be seen as including components of positive psychology that promotes a particular outlook on life, other people, and potential challenges that one might encounter. When we talk about this speech, the speech pattern that is chosen is also crucial. Pausch utilizes a chronological argument, in part because he recounts his life’s journey from childhood to adulthood.
However, topical organization is more crucial in this address. The problem is that he puts a lot of emphasis on concepts like creativity, relationships with family and friends, humility and optimism. His speech had a clear ending and a really well-thought-out organizational structure.
Overall, this speech serves as an example of how to captivate an audience and keep them interested. Randolph Pausch was able to persuade his audience that having a positive outlook on life will help one get through even the most trying circumstances because of his determination and commitment to remain optimistic.
Exercise 4.2: An exercise in Compassion
– The first chair represents a voice of self-criticism.
– The second chair represents the emotionality or sensation of feeling judged.
– The last chair takes the perspective of a supportive friend or wise counsellor.
1. Think of something that has recently caused you to criticize yourself.
• Sit in the first chair – the chair of self-criticism:
– Express out loud in words or sound how you think about the issue you have been dwelling on. (For example, your issue might be that you’ve been criticizing yourself for not getting something done and in this chair you might say ‘I hate that I am so lazy and can’t seem to get anything done’.
– Notice the tone of voice you use – how would you describe it?
– What emotions do your words evoke?
– Notice your posture and your general demeanor.
• Move to the second chair – the chair that represents emotionality or sensation of feeling judged.
– Express out loud in words how it feels to encounter criticism (explain the emotions you feel when hearing the criticism)
• Engage with yourself in dialogue between the last two perspectives (critical voice and emotion).
– Try to understand how each perspective feels.
– Share your thoughts on this understanding with the participants in your group.
– Notice your tone, emotions and posture – have they changed?
• Move to the chair that represents the friend or wise counsellor.
– Drawing on a sincere sense of compassion, like you would if you were counselling a friend, communicate with the critical voice and the emotion of the criticism.
– What do you say to them?
– What advice do you give to your ‘friend’ about the situation?
– How do you see and relate to the situation from a more detached point of view?
– Notice your tone, emotions, posture and demeanor – have they changed?
2. What did you notice about yourself as you moved through the different chairs?
– How can you use this information to help you approach things a little differently when you catch yourself being self-critical in the future?
Course Manual 3: Assumptions of Positive Psychology
Introduction
Positive psychology moves the scientific psychological perspective from an exclusive focus on distress, disorder and dysfunction to a focus on wellbeing, health and optimal functioning. It provides a different lens through which to view the human experience.
Positive psychology provides a different perspective that places the study of positive states, strengths and virtues in relation to one another and connects them to significant life outcomes of an individual.
Research into positive psychology suggests that rather than using the standard diagnostic categories of mental disease, difficulties in psychological functioning may be more profitably treated as the lack, excess or inverse of these qualities.
The main tenet of positive psychology is that studying happiness, health and fulfilment is just as important as studying disease, dysfunction and pain. Both the academic community and the general public have responded favorably to this.
There are a number of assumptions that underpin the positive psychology movement.
The basic premise is that humans frequently place more importance on the future than the past. It also implies that a nice, happy life can result from any amalgamation of pleasurable events or emotions, past or present.
This supposes that we may see something in another way if we look at it from a different perspective.
Assumptions of positive psychology
The two most common assumptions of positive psychology include:
Acknowledgement of free will
The majority of other psychological methods have a determinist perspective, saying that external forces govern our actions.
This ‘disease’ based concept absolves people of accountability. While acknowledging their potential influence on behavior, positive psychology emphasizes the importance of free will.
Positive psychology holds that people are free to decide how they respond to circumstances and what they do in the future. It implies that people have the choice to shape their special talents and exert control over their own wellbeing.
As long as we have power over our life and the ability to make decisions, everyone has access to happiness.
There is proof that having a strong sense of personal agency and free will is linked to better subjective wellbeing. This can be observed psychologically in the use of quality of life and mindfulness therapies, which teach people to become more conscious of their own moods and emotions. They have the ability to employ their free will to strengthen their present awareness, which they can then use to feel happier.
According to Seligman, happiness has three components:
1. The enjoyable life: activities that emphasize pleasant feelings and make us feel good, such as eating a favorite meal or listening to a favorite song.
2. The happy life: partaking in things that engross us and enable us to experience flow. This entails concentrating on our distinctive abilities, fostering meaningful relationships with others, and making progress towards our objectives.
3. The meaningful life: the feeling of fulfilment we get when we apply our character traits to a more significant goal. For instance, we might make use of our advantages to support a cause we care deeply about, like the environment.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s main positive approach idea of ‘flow’ can be used as an illustration of the ‘good life’. This refers to achieving a state of total engagement in an activity. For some people, different activities induce a flow state. The degree of difficulty the activity brings and the abilities we possess to handle it need to be balanced.
Authenticity of goodness and excellence
According to the positive psychology perspective, psychology has grown overly preoccupied with personality flaws like stress and sadness. Other methods place more emphasis on correcting people’s flaws than on highlighting and praising their virtues. This is an uneven perspective, because what people are good at is considerably more prevalent in reality.
Therefore, it is equally important to conduct research and provide support for people who are ‘OK’ and want to improve their own sense of wellbeing. We can have a much more positive perspective on human behavior by emphasizing our positive attributes and striving for personal progress.
Another fundamental tenet of this strategy is that goodness and greatness are equally deserving of our attention.
The theory of trademark strengths, developed by Seligman in 2002, reflects this emphasis on goodness and excellence. According to this, there are 24 character traits that represent the signature of positivity. Examples of these traits include things such as curiosity, fairness and honesty.
Seligman believes that each person possesses all of these qualities, and it is important to encourage them to cultivate and enhance them in order to enhance their wellbeing.
In 2004, Peterson and Seligman compiled them into the VIA Classification of Character Strengths and Virtues, which was later converted into an online self-report questionnaire.
Humans are social animals with a built-in need to establish, nurture and maintain relationships. In 2008, Christopher Peterson summed up positive psychology with the term ‘other people matter’ to underpin the fact that fostering relationships with others helps us to be happier.
Positive relationships with others are a component of the ‘good life’. Our subjective wellbeing can be increased, and the ‘good life’ can be attained, through establishing healthy relationships with other people. Participating in activities that captivate and engross us, assisting us in achieving a state of flow, is another aspect of the ideal life. This could include things like sports that we play with friends.
We frequently get the most out of pleasant experiences in our lives when we are around other people, such as when we share good news or personal accomplishments.
In 2002, Diener and Seligman conducted a poll of 222 undergraduates. The ‘less happy’ groups were less sociable and had weaker romantic and other social ties than the ‘very happy’ groups.
Children who had larger social networks and participated in more social activities as adults, such as sports, were happier. These social ties were a greater indicator of happiness than other elements, such as academic success.
The constructive method acknowledges that incorporating respect for free will into how relationships are created plays a part in how we behave.
It has been estimated that intentional behavior accounts for 40% of the variation in happiness. Intentional action can refer to a variety of ordinary activities that people choose to partake in, especially when exercising their free will.
Nurturing social connections is one deliberate action that might enhance happiness – for instance, by making the decision to reconnect with someone you haven’t heard from in a while or by devoting time to strengthening current friendships.
We use our free will to motivate us to sustain and develop our relationships, which ultimately improves our wellbeing.
Five Key Concepts of Positive Psychology
1. The 3 forms of happiness
Perhaps the idea of happiness is seen as the epitome of positive psychology and the representation of happy feelings. According to Seligman, there are three ways to be happy. They are not all equal, however, which is the twist.
The first form of happiness is known as ‘the pleasant life’. Each of us has some things that make us happy in the moment, such as a wonderful piece of cake, a lazy morning spent avoiding work, or a few (maybe too many) beers with friends. However, while these give us pleasure in the short term, the happiness we experience in ‘the pleasant life’ is not always happiness over the long term.
A pleasant life in which you frequently and consistently engage in activities that make you happy is one level of happiness. Imagine spending most of your time doing activities like eating your favorite meal, watching a movie, shopping, going on a run, or playing video games just to feel joyful. It can make for a happy life.
Although it’s fantastic to indulge in things that make us feel good, even your own experience may demonstrate that there are frequently deeper levels of satisfaction to be achieved.
This gets us to the second form of happiness, which is known as ‘the engaged life’. By being active in our work, we pursue happiness in this way. When we regularly employ our talents and qualities in daily life, we become connected to what we are doing and lead an engaged life. Engaged behavior could take the form of developing new interests or being enthusiastic about your job.
Seligman refers to an engaged life as being one step up from a pleasant existence. A life that is actively lived is one in which your strengths and virtues are developed.
This kind of enjoyment, which is based on your strengths, is more likely to result in a state of ‘flow’, which is a fundamental idea in the PERMA model’s Engagement stage (see more about PERMA below). In particular, you have the ability to become totally absorbed in your work to the point of being “in the zone”.
Seligman and his colleague Christopher Peterson named six virtues (such as Wisdom and knowledge, Transcendence) that give rise to 24 strengths. These 24 strengths assist you in pursuing things that result in an engaged life. You are more likely to enter a state of flow if you engage in activities that draw on these talents and qualities.
For instance, one of the qualities under the virtue of Wisdom and knowledge is a love of learning. Spending hours learning everything you can about a subject, or developing a new talent, can be examples of activities that go under the category of living an engaged life for you if this is one of your character strengths.
The third form of happiness is called ‘the meaningful life’, and has been shown to be the surest way to happiness. When we put our talents and character qualities to use for a cause or goal that is greater than ourselves, we can have a ‘meaningful life’. Since no one cause will be significant to everyone, we must consider what matters most to us in order to give our lives meaning.
How can we strive to live meaningful lives? First, take time to consider your virtues and strengths – your best qualities. What do you excel at? What inherent talents do you possess? What qualities have you intentionally developed in yourself, such as wisdom or courage?
Can you now identify a cause greater than yourself that is actually worthwhile serving? Does it have political ties? Or a plan for social justice?
Ironically, you can only find lasting happiness and life satisfaction when you prioritize this purpose above all else, including your personal happiness. A life with meaning is achieved through honing your abilities, talents, and capabilities and putting them to use in the ways that matter most to you in the service of improving the world.
You can see that not all forms of happiness are created equal. While some contribute to fleeting moments of pleasure, others result in a deeper, more enduring sense of enjoyment and fulfilment. So, in your pursuit for happiness this leaves you with the question: Which one will you concentrate your efforts on?
2. PERMA
The five Seligman-identified building blocks of resilience and wellness include:
• Positive emotions,
• Engagement,
• Relationships,
• Meaning, and
• Accomplishment.
These building blocks are commonly referred to as ‘PERMA’ and are another key concept in positive psychology.
Resilience and wellness depend on experiencing positive feelings. By choosing to do things we enjoy, we can improve our feelings of happiness right now. A fantastic approach to feel better about the past and future is to practice gratitude.
When we are totally involved in an activity that calls on our talents, abilities, and attention, we experience engagement.
Making a conscious effort to invest in healthy relationships offers us meaning and creates a defense mechanism against our own problems.
Working for a goal greater than ourselves can help us all live meaningful lives.
When we accomplish key goals, we feel a sense of accomplishment.
In more recent years, a sixth component of wellbeing has been included in this paradigm, so we have seen ‘PERMA’ become ‘PERMAH’ with the addition of physical health.
Physical health in relation to positive psychology can be divided into three main categories:
• Movement: According to multiple studies, those who frequently exercise are less likely to experience mental health conditions including sadness and anxiety. Exercise has also been shown to help lower stress, improve mood, and increase self-esteem.
• Nutritious diet: Our diet has an impact on how we feel both physically and mentally. A balanced diet can lessen the risk of chronic disease and enhance mood and cognitive performance. According to various population studies, eating fruits and vegetables consistently are strong predictors of lower mental health issues.
• Sleep: Going about daily life while feeling exhausted is difficult, never mind trying to strive to get ahead. Lack of sleep can make us irritable and make it difficult to focus. On the other side, getting enough sleep is linked to feeling well and having a purpose, both of which we already know are essential for living a meaningful life.
3. Strength and character
A large part of the assumptions set in positive psychology relies on harnessing your strengths to lead an interesting and fulfilling life, but it can be difficult to reflect internally and identify your own strengths. To overcome this, Seligman and Peterson created the Values in Action (VIA) Character Strengths Survey, which contains 24 character strengths grouped under six overarching virtues:
• wisdom and knowledge,
• courage,
• humanity,
• justice,
• temperance, and
• transcendence.
The VIA offers a framework to experimentally analyze and categorize positive qualities, much like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) does (which is used for categorization and diagnosis in traditional psychology).
The VIA Strengths survey can be used to pinpoint certain strengths for an individual, and then by regularly using and developing these identified talents, allows them to thrive.
The more we practice using our abilities, the more probable it is that they will become ingrained in our routines and provide our lives more purpose and satisfaction.
4. Grit
Grit is characterized as a strong desire for, and commitment to, long-term objectives. In the face of difficulties, it is what fuels us. According to research, grit predicts achievement more accurately than other factors like IQ and conscientiousness. Grittier people not only succeed more, but they also have greater resilience and can recover more quickly from adversity.
We can influence our grit levels through deliberate practice, unlike IQ, which is relatively steady throughout adulthood. In order to change our thinking and become ‘grittier’, we must examine the ideas that limit us, cause us to give up when we’re upset, or prevent us from taking on a challenge out of fear.
Developing grit includes striking a balance between persevering with effort and remaining engaged. Grit can be developed through adopting a different perspective, viewing obstacles and failures as teaching moments, and moving forwards gradually.
5. Gratitude
Gratitude is a lifestyle, not merely the newest trend sweeping the wellness industry. A fundamental premise of positive psychology is that feeling appreciative is a terrific way to magnify the effects of what is ‘good’ in our lives. Actually, the very act of expressing or receiving appreciation causes the brain’s ‘happy’ neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin, to be released. We can access those happy feelings and feel well thanks to these chemicals, which we know are crucial for wellbeing.
Making gratitude a habit is essential for enhancing these brain networks. Anchoring the practice of appreciation to routine activities will boost the likelihood of success. For instance, you may:
• make a thankfulness list while riding the train to work.
• close out each day by listing three positive things that occurred, for instance through journaling.
• send a friend a thank-you note after spending time with them.
Case Study: The Case for Gratitude
An engineering firm held a three-day, off-site strategic planning and development meeting with key members of their team. Towards the end of the intensive three days, the energy in the team was understandably low.
The team still had an important session to complete, but collectively they were tired and lacked the energy to complete the last few critical tasks.
The group facilitating the retreat could have pushed through and taken the team through the final section of the off-site, but they knew that if they did that, the quality of the session (and what came out of it) would be compromised and that the strategy that was put in place to move forwards would be potentially flawed.
Instead, the facilitation group addressed the energy they were viewing in the room with the team members, who admitted they were exhausted and were already turning their thoughts to the long commute they had at the end of the day to get home. The team members had already switched off and just wanted things to be wrapped up. They had reached a point where they didn’t care whether the results of the retreat were sub-par; they just wanted to get home.
The facilitation group decided to shake up the agenda and inserted a gratitude session instead. The session went something like this:
• Each participant was asked to use one word to name how they were feeling in the moment. Words like drained, irritated, exhausted and ‘brain dead’ were used.
• The participants were then asked if they were willing to participate in an experiment that would help change the energy in the room and within themselves. Everyone agreed, because the agenda had changed and their curiosity had been piqued.
• Each person was asked to say one thing they appreciated about their teammates, and to name one thing they were grateful for. There were no boundaries put on gratitude; it could be about anything they felt gratitude for.
• The facilitation group captured all the gratitude statements and by the time the last person had their turn, there were 25 gratitude statements on pieces of paper around the walls.
• As each person had their turn, the facilitation group watched the energy in the room change.
• Sitting and looking at those statements, the team members had the opportunity to see what they had accomplished, how they had impacted their teammates along the way and all the things that people were grateful for.
This exercise gave the team members a chance to shift their perspective and personally step into taking control of their mood. They were elevated by the process of giving and receiving gratitude.
The facilitation group took the opportunity to ask each team member to once again use one word to name how they were feeling. This time the words used were things like awake, prepared, changed, energized, content and fulfilled.
Using this exercise allowed the facilitation group to help the team members transform their energy levels and re-focus for the remaining session.
Not only did the remaining session go ahead, but because the participants were supercharged from the gratitude session, the output of the session was stellar and the retreat ended on a high note.
Exercise 4.3: Gratitude Practice
1. Each participant is to use one word to describe how they are feeling in the moment.
2. One member of the group is to write down each of these words.
3. All participants are to stand up and swap chairs with another participant.
4. Once each participant is sitting in a new chair, one at a time, each participant is to name one thing they appreciate about each of the other participants in their group and then state why they are grateful for this characteristic.
5. One group member is to record all of the appreciation and gratitude statements on one sheet of paper.
6. As a group, go through all of the appreciation and gratitude statements.
7. Each participant is to use one word to describe how they feel after seeing and hearing the appreciation and gratitude statements for their group.
8. One member is to record all of these words.
Course Manual 4: Examples of Positive Psychology
Introduction
The positive psychology movement spends a lot of time considering issues like character traits, optimism, life satisfaction, happiness, wellbeing, gratitude, compassion (including self-compassion), self-esteem and self-confidence, hope and elevation.
It does this in order to learn how to support people in thriving and leading their best lives.
Positive psychology is adaptable to a wide range of contexts, vocations and surroundings. It can be applied to improve interpersonal connections at home, work and school. It may increase one’s enjoyment of personal pursuits and broaden their selection of leisure activities. Supervisors, administrators and other leaders can employ positive psychology to make their workplaces happier.
Examples of positive psychology
There is lots of information about positive psychology, but it’s also useful to see the ways that it can be used in everyday life situations.
Here are some examples of how applying positive psychology can make a significant difference in outcomes for different situations.
Focusing on your strengths
We are more prone to suffer pain when we become negatively self-focused, including those times when we get stuck dwelling on our deficiencies and weaknesses.
On the other hand, knowing what our strengths are and regularly using them has been linked to having a more positive frame of mind.
Researchers have also discovered that recognizing our greatest skills and actively utilizing them might improve our happiness. There are various methods for doing this.
The best place to start is to better understand your strengths. You might consult your friends and relatives, go through a character qualities list, or respond to a formal strengths questionnaire.
Once you know your strengths, you can decide to employ one of your best qualities in various ways throughout the week after highlighting a few of your standout qualities.
For instance, if creativity is one of your primary skills, you can choose to create a picture, work on a short narrative, or prepare a dish you enjoy in a novel way. This ‘strengths experiment’ will have a greater impact if you track any improvements in your mood as a result of your efforts.
You can play with different types of creativity to determine which creative activity was most satisfying by rating your happiness before and after each one.
Taking note of your experiences
Writing about and reflecting on pleasant experiences is a typical positive psychology technique used to improve wellbeing.
The ‘Three Good Things’ or ‘Three Blessings’ exercise, created by Dr. Martin Seligman, is one variation of this technique. The task requires you to list three positive events from your day and consider how they came about.
Various studies have shown that increases in happiness and a reduction in depression symptoms have been linked to participating in this activity for at least a week and that those benefits persisted six months later.
You can also broaden the experience of this process by looking at what those positive things signify about yourself, your relationships, and your future. There is evidence to suggest that the impact grows the more frequently one intentionally encounters this form of happiness.
Cultivating gratitude
An increasing amount of research shows that cultivating gratitude is linked to wellbeing and has favorable benefits on life satisfaction, happiness, sleep, and relationships. The great thing about a gratitude practice is that you can participate in the way that best suits you. For some people, this means openly sharing the things they’re grateful for while others may opt not to share their thoughts and sentiments of gratitude and participate through a fully self-contained gratitude practice.
Anything – person, place or thing – can be the subject of gratitude, whether it be one’s own life, relationships, the larger world, or something transcendent.
In this sense, gratitude journaling in particular can be a private experience with research indicating that people much prefer to express their gratitude in writing as opposed to verbally. Studies show that journaling for 10 minutes a day for four weeks about the people you are grateful for can boost your life happiness, inspire you to make changes, and make you feel more connected to others.
Other researchers discovered a correlation between reduced levels of depression with writing about feelings of appreciation more generally, rather than only for others. In neither study did the participants express their thankfulness.
Thanking people
Sharing one’s thanks with one’s benefactors might be as rewarding as having private gratitude experiences. As part of his ongoing research, Seligman researched ‘gratitude visits’ in which participants wrote letters of thanks and gave them to compassionate people in person.
Participants said they felt happier and less depressed once the visit was over, and that these feelings lasted for up to a month.
The expression of appreciation has been linked to neurobiological alterations. According to studies, listening to someone express gratitude caused the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain involved in processing happy emotions, to become more active.
Increasing positivity
While some people may benefit from positive psychotherapy and wellbeing treatment, others may gain more from a psychoeducation-based strategy.
An example of a group multi-component positive psychology intervention that does not entail individual cognitive restructuring or problem-focused therapy is PCOM’s A ‘Happier You’ Program. This program focuses on developing participants’ skills in the areas of gratitude, self-awareness, humor/lightness, activities, compassion and love. Participants also learn to enhance their good experiences and incorporate new practices in these areas.
Optimism
In 2011, Seligman concluded that ‘optimism is robustly associated with cardiovascular health, and pessimism with cardiovascular risk.’
The assertion that happy feelings are directly related to physical health is bold, yet it is supported by research.
We are aware that optimists frequently act and lead healthier lives. They take their acts seriously and are more likely to follow medical advice. But other positive psychology-related elements also come into play. According to Seligman (2011), social support, or the caliber of our relationships, is also related to happiness and physical health.
What concrete proof do we currently have that interventions promoting flourishing and life satisfaction can strengthen our cardiovascular system?
A lot, it seems.
Cardiovascular patients felt better after receiving positive psychology interventions (focusing on happy emotions, utilizing personal strengths, and meaningful living). More importantly, their cardiovascular indicators significantly improved as a direct result of their physiological response.
Positive psychological traits are also connected to healthier habits like better diets and more physical activity, both of which have a major impact on cardiac health.
Patients with heart failure were more likely to follow instructions for healthy living in a 2018 pilot trial when they conducted positive psychology tasks (such as writing letters of thanks and utilizing personal strengths).
Utilize your advantages
Not all stressful events occur during conflict. Stressful, high-pressure work conditions are common among employees. Long-term, uncontrollable stress can cause mental, emotional, and physical tiredness in workers as well as burnout.
Workplace stress management, building resilience, and experiencing growth and flourishing have all been made easier with the support of positive psychology.
One excellent example of how psychology can help a business succeed and enhance the lives of its people is Southwest Airlines. The airline experienced difficulties in the early 2000s as a result of high operational expenses and ferocious competition from other carriers.
Gary Kelly, the CEO, used a strengths-based strategy to alter the company and its employees in response, turning to positive psychology.
They started by figuring out each employee’s particular strengths using the Clifton StrengthsTM assessment tool. Then, they taught employees how to recognize their skills and apply them to further both their own and Southwest Airlines’ performance. Employee engagement and motivation increased as a result, and the business made better use of their skills.
Second, they matched employee strengths with the company’s vision and objectives, especially in terms of customer service and giving customers a pleasant flying experience. By doing this, the business developed a culture of excellent customer service that set it apart from its rivals.
Thirdly, they tapped into staff talents to encourage creativity and productivity. For instance, Southwest Airlines encouraged its inventive and creative staff to discuss their ideas and put them into practice, which helped the business save time and money while enhancing the customer experience.
Success was achieved. They succeeded in transforming a failing airline into one of the best-known and most successful brands in the aviation sector. Importantly, it demonstrated the potential for a set of interventions based on positive psychology to assist a business in achieving better results for both its customers and employees.
Positive psychology interventions
Positive psychological interventions (PPIs) are suggestions, activities, and recommendations that are theoretically supported and empirically proven in order to improve wellbeing. PPIs also place an emphasis on harnessing one’s strengths and positive emotions to reach or improve wellbeing.
Savoring, Mindfulness and Positive Psychology
‘What we do with our attention determines the difference between misery and happiness,’ is a famous saying coined by Shari Salzberg.
Most of us would have heard about the power of practicing mindfulness so that we might foster more joyful feelings.
In his work, Seligman encourages us to create a specific action plan in addition to developing mindfulness practices such as meditation.
For example, you create an action plan that allows you to experience a ‘beautiful day’, filled with delightful activities for yourself. Then, whilst enjoying the activities of the day, you take the time to stop and appreciate each and every event you experience during the day.
Doing so allows you to combine the creative and planning process of deliberately setting out to create joy with the mindfulness process of deliberately stopping to appreciate the experiences.
Relationship-Building Activities in Positive Psychology
According to psychiatrist Robert Waldinger, ‘Good relationships keep us happier and healthier’.
Waldinger also stresses the value of long-lasting happiness. He outlines the process that will help you build relationships while also using the principle of positive psychology known as recognizing and maximizing your abilities. To complete this exercise, a couple chooses their top strengths and plans an evening that makes use of them all.
Another exercise Waldinger recommends for emphasizing the value of connections is to engage in both enjoyable and charitable activities, then compare the results. While you will enjoy the enjoyable activity, according to Waldinger, the sense of fulfilment that comes from engaging in charitable work and improving the lives of others will stay with you for a longer period of time.
Journaling for Positive Psychology
Self-reflection is frequently encouraged by positive psychologists as a technique to assess one’s current state of wellbeing. Finding one’s strengths and happy spots both directly improves wellbeing and points out areas that need work.
Journaling may be a useful tool for keeping track of changes over time, reflecting on areas that need development, and recording your results.
Case Study: The Power of Strengths-Based Leadership
A well-known example of a business that has effectively implemented strength-based change and strength-focused leadership is Southwest Airlines. Since its founding in 1967, the airline has grown to become one of the best-known and most admired in its field.
The airline business is renowned for its fierce competition and difficult operating conditions, with numerous carriers fighting to stay viable. Southwest Airlines, on the other hand, has constantly maintained its profitability and has a solid reputation for providing excellent customer service and happy employees.
Southwest Airlines’ dedication to strength-based change and strength-focused leadership is one of the main reasons for its success. The airline’s management is committed to creating a culture that values and makes the most of its employees’ abilities and talents because they understand that they are the company’s greatest asset.
The strength-based employment procedure at Southwest Airlines is the first step in their strength-focused strategy. The organization seeks applicants that are upbeat, team participants, and passionate about providing excellent customer service. Additionally, they search for applicants who have a track record of success in their past positions and who have an eagerness to learn and develop.
Using this method of hiring, Southwest Airlines can be certain that new hires have the mindset and attitude necessary to succeed in their positions. Southwest Airlines is able to create a team of engaged and motivated workers that are dedicated to the company’s success by focusing on strengths and positive traits during the employment process.
Strength-Based Development and Training:
Southwest Airlines makes significant investments in the education and growth of its personnel after they are hired. To ensure that staff have the abilities and information necessary to thrive in their positions, the organization offers rigorous training upon commencement with the organization. The development process doesn’t end there, though.
In order to support staff members’ skill development and growth, Southwest Airlines also offers possibilities for ongoing training. The organization provides a range of training options, including cross-functional training, mentorship programs, and leadership development possibilities.
Southwest Airlines is able to construct a team of highly competent and knowledgeable personnel who are better able to handle obstacles and contribute to the success of the firm by making an investment in their professional development.
Leadership Based on Strengths:
Southwest Airlines’ dedication to transformation that is founded on strengths is also seen in their leadership style. The company’s leadership is focused on creating a culture that values and makes the most of its employees’ abilities and talents because they understand that they are the company’s greatest asset.
Gary Kelly, the CEO of the organization, is a fervent supporter of strength-focused leadership. He thinks that leaders may foster an environment of positivity, engagement, and success by emphasizing their strengths and positive traits.
Southwest Airlines’ ‘Celebrating Heroes’ initiative is one illustration of their strength-based leadership style. Employees that go above and above to provide great customer service are recognized through the program. The program affirms the business’ priority to respecting and utilizing its employees’ strengths in addition to rewarding them for their commitment and hard work.
The Effects of Strength-Based Change and Leadership That Is Strength-Focused:
The dedication of Southwest Airlines to strength-based change and strength-focused leadership has greatly contributed to the company’s success. In surveys on employee involvement and consumer happiness, the airline consistently receives top marks.
Southwest Airlines has also continuously turned a profit, despite challenging times for the business. The airline’s strength-focused strategy has aided in developing a positive, engaged, and innovative culture that has allowed the business to thrive and compete in a difficult sector.
The company’s dedication to leadership, training, and growth that is built on strengths has greatly contributed to its success. Southwest Airlines is well known for its outstanding customer service, high levels of employee engagement and steady profitability.
The success of Southwest Airlines exemplifies the value of concentrating on strengths and admirable qualities when it comes to organizational development and leadership. Southwest has developed a positive, collaborative culture as a result of emphasizing a strength-based strategy, which has led to tremendous success and growth.
Southwest’s dedication to hiring for attitude and cultural fit rather than just abilities and experience is one of the primary factors in the company’s success. Herb Kelleher, the founder of the airline, held the opinion that “you can teach skills, but you can’t teach attitude.” Southwest places a strong emphasis on hiring employees who are enthusiastic about innovation, cooperation, and customer service.
Additionally, Southwest emphasizes empowerment and workforce participation. The airline has received recognition for its strong staff retention and satisfaction rates, which is largely attributable to its emphasis on fostering a happy work environment. Employees are given a significant lot of autonomy and are urged to take responsibility for their job and make a positive impact on the success of the business.
Southwest’s unique and imaginative approach to business is another important factor in the company’s success. The airline has been at the forefront of many industry advances, including the introduction of low-cost flights, the use of point-to-point routes rather than the conventional hub-and-spoke models, and the adoption of technology to improve operations and customer service.
The ability of Southwest to keep its attention on its advantages and positive outlook in the face of difficulty is maybe what matters most. For instance, the airline encountered substantial financial difficulties following the September 11 attacks and was forced to make painful choices on route and hiring cuts. However, throughout the process, Southwest leadership remained dedicated to sustaining a positive culture and treating staff members with respect and decency.
In conclusion, Southwest’s success serves as a potent illustration of the significance of emphasizing strengths and positive traits in organizational development and leadership. Southwest has been able to achieve outstanding performance and growth in the very competitive airline business by prioritizing employee empowerment and engagement and establishing an environment that is positive and innovative.
Exercise 4.4: Identifying and Using Strengths
1. Write down the top 5 characteristics that you believe are strengths of yours.
2. Write down which areas of your life you believe you use these strengths:
– Work
– Personal
– Social
– Networking
3. When applied across all the areas of your life, how useful you believe your top strengths are.
– Why do you think this?
4. Which of your strengths do you think you could use more?
– In what ways?
– In which areas of your life?
5. Which strengths leave you little, or no room for expansion in the areas of your life?
– What makes you believe this?
6. What is one thing you could do immediately to start using your strengths in a new way?
Course Manual 5: Positive Psychology Pillars
Introduction
Since the dawn of time, people have been striving to find happiness.
Yet it’s frequently challenging to precisely describe what ‘happiness’ is. And that’s because ‘happiness’ means something different to each and every one of us.
Happiness makes phrases such as thriving, self-actualization, joy and purpose come to mind, but each of these also means something different to each of us.
With the chaos that we experience in everyday life, these phrases also leave us with the question of whether it is feasible to have any of these in the midst of chaos and unfavorable conditions. Can we develop ourselves or find the abilities that lead to this “good life”?
Martin Seligman explored these questions whilst building the positive psychology model and created the PERMA model to help individuals create the unique version of the ‘pleasant life’ that perfectly matches their unique needs.
What is the PERMA Model?
One of the first psychologists to define ‘wellbeing’ in terms of the traits of a self-actualized individual was Abraham Maslow in 1962. Self-actualization is described as a precursor to the PERMA model (which specifies the traits of a flourishing person) and to Wellbeing Theory (WBT).
When Seligman became the head of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 1998, his inaugural speech shifted the emphasis away from investigating mental illness and pathology and towards studying what is good and positive in life.
Since that time, theories and research in psychology have focused on wellbeing definition, measurement and creation, as well as positive psychology therapies that help make life worthwhile.
In 2012, Seligman chose five factors for his theory to focus on, since they are both intrinsically motivating and promote wellbeing in people.
Seligman set these factors up so that they are defined and assessed independently of one another and are pursued for their own purpose.
Wellbeing Theory differs from other theories of wellbeing in that the five components include both eudaimonic and hedonic components.
Following are the five factors identified by Seligman identified:
• Positive emotion
• Engagement
• Relationships
• Meaning
• Accomplishments
Wellbeing Theory is made up of the PERMA model, where each dimension interacts with the others to produce a higher order construct that forecasts the success of communities, organizations, groups and countries.
According to research studies, each of the PERMA components significantly positively correlates with physical health, vitality, job satisfaction, life satisfaction and commitment inside organizations.
Additionally, PERMA predicts psychological distress more accurately than other reports of distress have in the past. The results of these studies have shown that aggressively addressing the elements of PERMA will both improve wellbeing and lessen psychological suffering.
Unpacking the five factors
P – Positive Emotion
Positive emotion goes well beyond simple ‘happiness’. Hope, interest, joy, love, compassion, pride, amusement and thankfulness are examples of positive emotions.
Positive emotions can be developed or learnt, and they are a key predictor of wellbeing.
Positive emotions can be experienced, savored and integrated into daily life (as well as future life visualizations), which enhances habitual thinking and action. Resilience can be boosted by positive emotions, which can counteract the negative impacts of negative emotions.
In order to develop the physical, intellectual, psychological and social resources that support this resilience and general wellness, people need to experience more pleasant emotions.
Some strategies for fostering positive emotions include:
• Getting together with the people you cherish.
• Engaging in interests-driven hobbies and creative endeavors.
• Playing music that makes you feel good or is inspirational.
• Considering your blessings and the positive aspects of your life.
E – Engagement
Engagement, in the words of Seligman, is ‘being one with the music’. This adheres to Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of ‘flow’.
The absence of self-consciousness and the total immersion in a task are also characteristics of flow. In other words, it involves being fully present and concentrating on the current task at hand.
When the ideal balance of difficulty and ability or strength is discovered, flow – or this concept of engagement – happens.
When people apply their top character qualities, flow is more likely to occur. In a research study conducted in 2005, Seligman, Steen, Park and Peterson discovered that people who tried using their abilities in novel ways every day for a week were happier than those people who don’t engage in this behavior – and they were still happier some six months later.
The idea of involvement is much more than just a desire to be happy; it involves taking action and deliberately setting out to create happiness through action. Being happy is just one of the numerous benefits of actively engaging in the pursuit of happiness.
How to boost engagement:
• Engage in things you truly enjoy, where you frequently lose track of time.
• Practice being present, even when performing routine or everyday duties.
• Spend time in the outdoors while keeping an eye on your surroundings and listening to what is going on.
• Discover your character strengths, practice what you are good at, and identify your character weaknesses.
R – Positive Relationships
Relationships cover all the many relationships people have with their spouses, friends, family, co-workers, bosses/mentors/supervisors, and the rest of their community.
In the PERMA paradigm, relationships are defined as experiencing others’ support, love and value. On the basis of the notion that humans are intrinsically social beings, relationships are taken into account in the model (Seligman, 2012). There is evidence for this all around us, but as we become older social relationships become even more crucial.
Strong social networks have been linked to better physical health in older persons, and the social environment has been proven to be crucial in preventing cognitive decline (Siedlecki et al., 2014).
A common objective is to strengthen bonds with those who matter most to them. According to research, communicating achievement or good news strengthens links and improves relationships (Siedlecki et al., 2014). Additionally, giving others a warm response, especially in close or intimate relationships, fosters connection and promotes happiness and contentment.
Some ways to start establishing connections:
• Find a class or group that interests you and join in.
• Learn more about people you don’t know, so that you can get to know them better.
• Turn acquaintances into friendships.
• Make contact with people you haven’t seen or spoken to in a long time.
M – Meaning
The urge to find purpose and a sense of value and worth is another fundamental human attribute. In 2012, Seligman discussed meaning in terms of belonging to or serving a higher good. In the face of a severe difficulty or adversity, having a purpose in life aids people in maintaining their attention on what is truly essential.
Each person’s definition of meaning and purpose in life is unique. Finding meaning can be done through a career, a social or political cause, a creative project, or a spiritual or religious conviction. A career, extracurricular, volunteer, or community activities are all common places that people focus on to further enhance the meaning of their life.
According to studies, persons who report having a purpose in life live longer, are more satisfied with their lives, and experience fewer health issues. A sense of meaning is also significantly influenced by personal values.
Ways to help you cultivate more meaning in your life:
• Participate in a group or cause that is of interest to you.
• To work out what is of interest to you, give yourself permission to try out some novel and creative activities.
• Consider how you can use your interests to benefit others.
• Spend time with the individuals you value.
A – Accomplishments / Achievements
Achievement, mastery, and competence are other terms for accomplishment in PERMA.
A sense of success comes from working towards and achieving goals, succeeding in a task, and having the drive to complete the task at hand. Because people may look back on their lives with pride, this promotes wellbeing (Seligman, 2012).
Success incorporates the ideas of tenacity and desire for achieving objectives. However, success is linked to internal drive or working towards something merely for the sake of the chase and progress when flourishing and wellbeing are desired (Quinn, 2018).
In comparison to pursuing external goals like fame or money, achieving internal goals (such growth and connection) yields greater improvements in wellbeing (Seligman, 2013).
How to increase accomplishment:
• The easiest way to achieve your goals is to create them in a SMART way. That is, make them: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound.
• Consider your prior victories and reflect on what worked well for you before.
• Find original ways to recognize and celebrate your accomplishments.
How PERMA became PERMAH and then PERMA+
Over time, as the PERMA model was put to use, it became obvious that there are more factors that can contribute to happiness than just these five.
Initially, the absence of physical health was questioned, and it was agreed that this was a significant contributor to positive emotion and happiness. As a consequence PERMA was expanded to become PERMAH, in recognition of the important role that physical health plays.
Then, people started questioning why things such as optimism, good nutrition and sleep weren’t included in the model. After all, these are equally crucial to maintaining mental health. So PERMAH was once again expanded and it became the PERMA+ model.
Optimism
An important good emotion for fostering wellbeing and resilience is optimism. Optimism is the outlook that more positive events will occur in life than negative ones. Optimistic people are more likely to be able to handle stressful life circumstances.
According to research studies conducted in 2010, positive people tend to live longer, recover more quickly from surgery, have lower depression levels and do better in college.
A more upbeat attitude on life would be established if youth were encouraged to become more resilient. The result of this research was the establishment of the resilience movement and the push for people to undertake exercises and activities regularly that would see their resilience levels grow.
Physical exercise
In many different ways, and over a long period of time, physical activity and wellbeing have been linked as being interrelated.
Over the years, countless studies have shown that people who experience mental illness are more likely to be physically inactive, and negative emotions are linked to an increased risk of physical disease and unhealthy lifestyle choices.
Being more active has obvious physical advantages, but it also helps people feel less depressed, anxious or lonely and increases their ability to concentrate and think clearly.
Nutrition
While there is much evidence linking diet and mental health, poor nutrition is linked to physical health issues like obesity, diabetes, heart disease and even cancer.
Eating a well-balanced diet low in processed or sugary foods and high in veggies and nutrients has been linked to wellbeing. People who consumed more fruits and vegetables reported feeling extremely well. A less nutritious diet (high levels of saturated fat, refined carbs, and processed foods) was found to be associated with worse mental health in a review of data on children and adolescents.
Sleep
Good sleep hygiene builds mental and emotional resilience, while sleep deficit results in negative thinking and emotional fragility, according to research in neuroimaging and neurochemistry.
Additionally, those who have psychiatric disorders are more likely to experience sleep issues, which could raise their chance of acquiring mental illness.
In particular, insomnia raises the possibility of depression.
It is advised to get seven to nine hours of good sleep at the same times each night. Sleep quality can be improved by making lifestyle adjustments – such giving up (or at least reducing) caffeine, alcohol and nicotine; engaging in physical activity; cutting back on screen time; and just using the bedroom for sleeping and having sex.
Improved sleep and general wellbeing can be achieved through the use of relaxation techniques and cognitive behavioral strategies for stress and anxiety reduction.
Case Study: Positive Psychology and Submariners
One of the most difficult and psychologically taxing settings for sailors is the one in which submariners operate.
A variety of possible stressors are present for the men and women working on the submarines. Unfavorable weather or mechanical problems are examples of external stresses that could make it more difficult for a boat to safely surface.
Living in a pressure-sensitive air environment, the possibility of being exposed to poisonous gases, high humidity, and a lack of restroom facilities for personal hygiene are all biological stresses.
Physical stressors include small spaces, high levels of noise when on the surface of the water, claustrophobic living and working environments, and exhaustion from lack of sleep.
The stress of ever-changing stimulus, the disturbance of circadian rhythms, persistent noise, and the need for constant alertness while operating are all examples of mental stresses that submariners are subjected to constantly.
Lack of privacy, the constant pressure to keep strong interpersonal interactions with no way to leave the limited interpersonal setting, and prolonged absence from families and home are all examples of social stressors.
Submariners go through a specialized medical evaluation every year to check their health and to stop functional decline. The annual medical assessment includes a psychological component because of their high levels of (self)-referrals for counselling and their high levels of operational stress.
In the past, the goal of psychological evaluations was to determine whether psychiatric illnesses existed by basing them on the medical/illness model. The lack of a psychiatric diagnosis was then the criterion for determining a submariner’s fitness for duty.
Before going back to work or leaving the military, those who had diagnoses received treatment. Those without diagnoses were deemed ‘healthy enough’ to continue active marine service. In general, this procedure adhered to international custom. However, the way this process was conducted was found to not sufficiently account for the incapacitating effects of the stresses that every person experiences on a daily basis.
It is widely known that discrete, non-chronic stress (often referred to as ‘life issues’) has an impact on people’s capacity for coping. These stresses included issues with family life (such as marital stress), problems with kids (such as academic or adjustment issues) and divorce. Financial pressures, work-related issues including deployment problems, career-related challenges like non-promotions, and confrontation with co-workers or superiors were also included. The submariners’ wellbeing was compromised by these stressors, which also affected their capacity for optimal performance. On the other hand, it was noted that some people, in spite of having to deal with a number of significant stressors, were managing really well and were frequently thriving.
This led to the conclusion that the richness of human experience and how people process it cannot be adequately accounted for by a pathology-focused approach.
The approach that was being used to determine a submariner’s fitness to return to sea did not include an overlay of questions that looked at the significant stressors from life issues.
This led to the questioning of the pathogenic approach underlying the psychological involvement in the submariners’ annual medical assessment, and whether there was additional distress and poor coping being caused by life’s stressors rather than psychiatric disorders.
Conclusions:
The conventional method, which placed a strong emphasis on psychopathology, was unable to effectively account for the diversity of human experience. Thus, a process with a salutogenic focus was created to give the annual assessments more context.
A new annual underwater psychological assessment model, which focused on the positive parts of the person’s life and their strengths, was then launched. As part of launching this new assessment model, it was hoped that the self-awareness developed during the interview would contributes to the growth of skills for evaluating life events and problems as well as helping the respondents to develop new coping mechanisms to deal with it.
As a result, the interview was launched with a two-fold focus: to assess the mental capacity of respondents to return to sea, and to help prepare people to deal with life’s issues in a more efficient way.
The decreased rate of self-referrals following the introduction of these interviews was seen to support the idea that this advantageous effect of ‘priming’ exists. To improve the sense of coherence in the person, this process advances its own positive feedback process.
Exercise 4.5: Goal Setting
1. Identify one goal that you are currently trying to achieve.
2. Write down the name(s) of the person/people with whom:
– You can trust your deepest worries and fears
– You can be yourself
– Are generally curious about you and your life
– You can talk to when you’re feeling lonely
– You believe values you personally
– When you are stressed or under pressure you can rely on to make you feel less worried
– Will give you comfort when you need it
– You feel welcomed completely, exactly as you are
– You can trust to hear your innermost sentiments out loud and without judgement
– You can turn to for assistance with problem solving
– You can turn to for guidance on how to achieve your goals
– Might provide insightful information that can aid you deciding how to achieve your goals
– You like to hang out with
– You want to spend time with on a regular basis
– Are the fun-loving people in your life
– Have similar interests to you
– You share your interests.
3. Write down the aspects of the goal you wrote above that you feel needs attention/action for it to progress.
– Consider the aspects you have written down and then looking at the list of points in question 2 and the names you have written down, select the person who is most likely to be able to help you progress these aspects.
– Write down a brief note for how each person selected can help you to progress the aspects you’ve identified.
4. Which aspect is the most important to progress first?
– Write down what step you will take to engage the help from the person identified to help you progress that aspect.
– When and how will you take this step?
– How will you hold yourself accountable for taking the step.
• The goal you’re working on
• The aspect you’ve chosen to progress
• The person you’ve named to help you with the next step
• The step you will take
• When and how you will take that step
• How you will hold yourself accountable for taking the step.
Course`manual 6: The role of positive emotions in positive psychology
Introduction
Thanks to thousands of psychologists from around the globe practicing positive psychology for decades, a fresh theoretical angle on positive emotions has arisen within the discipline of positive psychology.
As a part of this new focus within positive psychology, the idea of ‘broaden and build’ has come through. According to the broaden-and-build idea, positive emotional experiences extend people’s fleeting thought-action repertoires, which in turn helps to develop their long-term personal resources, affecting everything from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological resources.
The broaden-and-build theory effectiveness is in the early stages of being evaluated, however early findings suggest that the capacity to experience positive emotions may be a fundamental human strength central to the study of human flourishing.
The role of positive emotions
Understanding and promoting the elements that enable people, groups, and societies to develop are the some of the primary goals of positive psychology, as noted by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi in 2000.
For positive emotions to play a strong role in achieving these goals, it is important to understand what function they serve in fulfilling this mission.
At first glance, the solution appears straightforward: positive feelings act as indicators of thriving or maximum wellbeing. Positive feelings – such as joy, interest, happiness, love and the like – are undoubtedly experienced in large dose during those times in a person’s life when negative emotions – such as anxiety, melancholy, wrath and despair – are not present. They are also powerful allies in being able to minimise the effect of, and often times completely remove, negative emotions when they do occur.
In line with this assumption, it has been demonstrated that the way people view and judge their subjective wellbeing is predicted by their overall distribution of positive and negative emotions. In other words, if you have a higher level of negative emotions than positive ones, your view of your subjective wellbeing will be lower than if you had a higher balance of positive emotions.
Further, the broaden and build theory states that positive emotions, in accordance with their impact on viewpoints will also significantly influence a person’s judgement on whether or not they are flourishing in life.
However, this is not the complete picture, because positive emotions have also been seen to lead to personal growth. They influence happiness over the long term in addition to providing immediate enjoyment in the present moment.
The key takeaway is that fostering positive emotions is worthwhile not only as a means to a goal but also as a means to long-term psychological development and enhanced wellbeing.
Views on emotions and affects
As the broaden-and-build theory is still relatively new, researchers still vary in some of their working definitions on the affects of positive emotions on positive psychology.
That being said, there is growing agreement that emotions are merely a part of the larger class of affective events. According to this viewpoint, the best way to conceptualise emotions is as multifaceted reaction tendencies that develop over very brief periods of time. An individual’s evaluation of the personal significance of an antecedent event typically marks the beginning of an emotion.
A cascade of response patterns, including subjective experience, facial expression, cognitive processing and physiological changes, are triggered by this assessment process, which may be experienced both consciously or unconsciously by different individuals.
Consciously attainable emotions are referred to by the more generic idea of affect. Aside from emotions, which contain affect (as the element of subjective experience), there are many other affective phenomena that also contain affect, such as bodily sensations, attitudes, moods, and even affective features.
Emotions therefore differ from affect in a number of ways.
First, whereas affect is frequently free-floating or objectless, emotions are typically about some personally significant condition.
In addition, whereas affect is frequently more long-lasting and may only be conspicuous at the level of subjective experience, emotions are frequently fleeting and involve the multi-component systems mentioned above.
Last but not least, emotions are frequently conceptualised as belonging to distinct emotion families, such as fear, rage, joy and interest. Contrarily, affect is frequently thought of as shifting along two axes: pleasantness and activation, or positive and negative emotional activation.
Numerous theories have claimed that positive affect promotes approach behavior (which is a form of behavior in which a person is drawn towards something).
According to this viewpoint, experiences that engender positive emotions encourage people to interact with their surroundings and engage in activities, many of which are beneficial to the person, the species they belong to, or both.
Research studies have shown that in situations where positive emotions are high, it was regularly observed that there was a propensity for people to experience mild positive affect frequently, even in neutral circumstances, which is explained by the relationship between positive affect and activity involvement.
Without such an offset, people are frequently unmotivated to interact with their surroundings. Because of the power that positive emotions bring to an individual, people tend to be more willing to approach and investigate unfamiliar objects, people, or circumstances.
Positive emotions also serve as internal cues to an individual to continue to approach or proceed since they contain a positive impact component. Nevertheless, a variety of different pleasant affective states and positive emotions all have this function. For example, sensory pleasure encourages people to approach and keep ingesting whatever stimuli is currently biologically beneficial to them. Similarly, positive emotions can encourage people to carry on with any course of action or thought they have already started. The lowest common denominator among all affective states that share a pleasant subjective feel may therefore only be captured by functional descriptions of positive emotions that emphasize inclinations to approach or continue, leaving extra functions specific to particular positive emotions unexplored.
Discrete emotion theorists frequently relate the function of particular emotions to the idea of particular action inclinations. For example, the drive to run away and hide would be correlated with an emotion like fear. Similarly, the desire to attack someone or something would be correlated with an emotion like anger, and something like an unsavoury act would be correlated with an emotion such as disgust.
However, it is important to note that whilst we can see how emotions can correlate with situations, it is not true that when experiencing certain emotions, people always act on these inclinations. Instead, it is more relevant to understand that people tend to focus on a particular set of behavioral possibilities when considering potential courses of action.
Research studies have shown that people with highly developed emotional intelligence will likely perform best in assisting others in surviving life-or-death situations are those that are thought to render an emotion evolutionarily adaptable. That is to say, that in the moment when they are facing adversity of some sort, an individual with a higher level of emotional intelligence will adapt to the situation and move flexibly through the moment more easily than someone with a lower emotional intelligence level.
Another important concept from the standpoint of emotion-specific behavior is the relationship between particular action tendencies and physiological changes. For instance, when someone feels the impulse to flee because they are afraid, their body responds by mobilising the proper autonomic support to allow for the option of running.
The action tendencies discovered for positive emotions are noticeably hazy and underspecified, despite the fact that specific action tendencies have also been used to define the function of certain positive emotions. For instance, the emotion of interest has been connected to attending, joy with aimless activation, and contentment with inactivity.
Even though they can manifest in challenging situations, happy emotions typically occur in non-life-threatening scenarios. As a result, it might not be necessary for a person to stop and deliberately employ a specific procedure that promotes immediate and decisive action in the moment.
As opposed to this, the repertoire of emotions that people have at their fingertip, and the ability to regulate their emotions appear to be expanded as a result of the positive feelings of joy, interest, contentment, pride, and love.
Evidence collected through research studies supports this assertion by the evaluations that have been conducted about a variety of positive emotions. For instance, happiness encourages play, pushing the envelope, and creativity. In addition to social and physical behavior, these drives are also visible in creative and intellectual behavior.
The need to investigate, absorb new knowledge and experiences, and expand oneself are all characteristics of interest, a phenomenologically distinct positive emotion that broadens and builds on an individual’s ability to cope no matter the situation they are faced with. By inspiring the desire to relish current circumstances and incorporate them into new perspectives of oneself and the world, contentment also serves to broaden and build the skillset of an individual. Pride, when viewed as a positive emotion, broaden and builds an individual by inspiring the desire to tell others about the success and to open the imagination to see even larger accomplishments as possibilities in the future.
The emotion of love is thought of as a collaboration of several good emotions (such as joy, interest and contentment) that are felt in the context of secure, close relationships. Love broadens by inciting recurrent wants to play with, discover, and enjoy experiences with loved ones. These different thought-action inclinations, such as playing, exploring, savouring and integrating, or visualising future success, each show how good emotions extend habitual ways of thinking or acting.
Positive emotions stimulate expanded thought-action skillsets that are advantageous in different ways, whereas negative emotions carry direct and immediate adaptive benefits in circumstances that endanger survival.
These expanded mindsets have indirect and long-term adaptation benefits because they help people develop lasting personal resources that can be used as reserves to deal with risks in the future.
It is significant to note that the personal assets accumulated when experiencing happy emotions are thought of as long-lasting. They endure longer than the fleeting emotions that motivated their acquisition. Consequently, an increase in one’s personal skill set is a common unintended consequence of feeling positive emotions, meaning you are growing and developing long-lasting happiness whether you are consciously aware of it or not. These assets act as reserves that can be used in later situations and throughout various emotional states.
In a nutshell, the broaden-and-build theory explains how pleasant emotions take the shape of expanded thought-action skillsets and how they serve to develop lasting human resources. The theory behind, and the main premise of, broaden-and-build thus offers a fresh viewpoint on the evolved adaptive relevance of positive emotions.
Positive emotions can trigger strong wants to play, explore, and other activities. Human predecessors who gave in to these urges would have therefore accumulated larger personal resources. Their larger personal resources would have translated into greater chances of survival, and, in turn, greater chances of living long enough to reproduce, when these same ancestors later confronted inevitable hazards to life and limb.
Positive emotions can negate negative emotions
Given the powerful nature of positive emotions, it stands to reason that they should operate as effective antidotes for the lingering effects of negative emotions since they extend the instantaneous thought-action repertoire while negative emotions narrow it. Or, to put it another way, happy emotions might mitigate or eliminate the consequences of negative emotions.
It has been shown in earlier research on anxiety disorders, motivation and aggression that the fundamental observation that positive emotions (or key components of them) are somehow incompatible with negative emotions is not new.
However, the exact process that finally causes this incompatibility has not been sufficiently explained.
Positive emotions’ enlarging effects could be at work. A positive feeling may weaken the grip that a negative emotion has had over a person’s mind and body by disassembling or undoing preparation for a particular action by expanding a person’s fleeting thought-activity repertoire.
Increased heart rate, which reroutes blood supply to pertinent skeletal muscles, is one indicator of the specific action inclinations linked to unpleasant emotions. Positive emotions should therefore hasten recovery from or reverse this cardiovascular reactivity in the presence of negative emotions, bringing the body back to more moderate levels of engagement. Positive emotions speed up cardiovascular recovery, which sets the physical stage for pursuing the wider range of ideas and actions sparked.
By fostering positive emotions at appropriate times to deal with unpleasant emotions, people may be able to improve their psychological wellbeing and possibly even their physical health.
Similar arguments have been made by researchers that have shown that positive affective experiences during chronic stress aid in coping.
Experiments demonstrating that positive affect enhances attention to negative, self-relevant information can also be used to support this assertion. Extrapolating from these findings is it also possible to see how positive emotions = and positive beliefs act as resources for persons when coping with adversity.
It makes sense that certain people, more than others, could have an innate understanding of and ability to benefit from positive emotions.
For example, people who have built high levels of resiliency are considered to recover swiftly and effectively from stressful situations, much like that which is seen when resilient metals flex but do not break.
According to this theoretical notion of resilience, in a situation where a number of individuals were experiencing cardiovascular issues, those with greater levels of resilience would recover from the negative emotions associated with being unwell with higher rates of cardiovascular recovery than their less resilient colleagues.
Broaden-and-build theory further contends that positive emotion experiences may be the source of this capacity to return to cardiovascular baseline.
Case Study: Emotional Rescue
In 2001, a string quartet was assembled by Juilliard to perform at the Armory, which is a massive military structure. The families of those missing from the 9/11 disaster would go to the Armory to wait for word of their loved ones.
As the members of the string quartet arrived, they were greeted with the signs for missing people all throughout the structure, which was the size of a city block.
Thousands of joyful faces were depicted on various posters that were positioned up to eight feet above the ground.
They were immediately hit with the emotion of devastation, fear and grief, and were overwhelmed to the point where it was emotionally challenging to enter the building.
The quartet sight-read quartets for hours and, when interviewed afterwards, said that they didn’t believe they would ever forget the Connecticut State Police grief counsellor who listened the entire time, or the woman who only listened to ‘Memory’ from the Broadway play ‘Cats,’ crying the entire time.
As the quartet played, they realised the importance of the music in that moment and so, over the following hours, new musicians came and replaced musicians that had been playing for a while.
One musician recounts the experience of being asked by a man in fatigues (who introduced himself as a Sergeant Major) asking if they would mind performing for his soldiers. The Sergeant Major explained that massage therapists had offered to give his guys massages, and he believed that nothing would be more relaxing than receiving a massage while also listening to violin music.
So, as the first of his men started to arrive at nine o’clock, the musician went up to the second level and performed every piece of music they were capable of playing from memory, including the Bach B Minor Partita, the violin concerto by Tchaikovsky, the Dvorak concerto, the Paganini Caprices 1 and 17, the arias ‘Winter’ and ‘Spring,’ ‘Schindler’s List,’ ‘Melodie by Tchaikovsky,’ the ‘Meditation’ from ‘Thas,’ and ‘Amazing Grace’.
The musicians recounted afterwards that they had never performed for a crowd that was more appreciative. The effort to continuously create the music meant that the musician’s intonation was shot by the end, and they had little bow control, but somehow it didn’t matter.
As they arrived for their massages, the men would ascend the stairs fully dressed, take off their helmets, turn to face me, and grin tiredly.
The division’s commander, Colonel Slack, arrived around 11:20pm and said ‘Boy, today was the hardest day yet.’
After playing a lengthy rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’, the musician asked the Colonel whether playing the national anthem would be appropriate and then watched 300 soldiers of the 69th Division salute an intangible flag as the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ was played.
The musicians shared their talents with the front-line workers who experienced the worst of the disaster first-hand. The Colonel asked to see the musician who had played whilst the members of their division were given massages.
He presented the musician with the regiment’s currency, with the message that it is ‘only given to someone who does something extraordinarily special for the 69th Division’.
As the musician rode in a taxi back to Juilliard, they reflected that playing for the soldiers had not only made them the proudest Americans they have ever been, but it also made them the most fulfilled artist and person.
Juilliard is a highly competitive place where people are fiercely competitive and highly critical of one another. After having played highly technical pieces for hours on end, the soldiers didn’t care about the number of mistakes that were made, nor that the sound wasn’t perfect.
Instead, their sheer appreciation of the effort that the musicians made to aid them in their time of need showed the musicians the power of the emotion of appreciation. In that moment, each musician was gifted with the clarity of what it means to share music with others.
Most people who were front-line responders when the towers fell will never be able to find the words to describe the pit that was created when the towers collapsed. For the musician, meeting those first responders first-hand gave them the direct knowledge that there is a wider world out there beyond the insular world we place ourselves within.
Words can only express so much, and music can only express so much more. It is emotions that control how we truly experience so much of life.
Exercise 4.6: Positive Reminiscence
1. Write down a key word to describe how you are feeling right now.
2. Now, spend some time thinking about a positive event from your past.
– Write down the emotions that come to mind when you remember your experience of this event.
3. Once you have pictured the event in your mind, take a few moments to relive particular moments from this event when the emotions you wrote down were particularly heightened.
– What were those moments?
– Who else was there to share them with you?
– What was it about those moment that you particularly remember.
– If you find yourself trying to analyse the process, allow yourself to take a deep breath and come back to remembering and savouring the moment.
4. Explain the emotions you remember feeling and why they combine to create a positive mood for you.
5. Take a moment to examine how you’re now feeling.
– Has the way you are feeling in the moment changed from the emotion you wrote down prior to this exercise?
• How has it changed?
• What do you think was the catalyst for your change in emotion?
Course Manual 7: Issues with Positive Psychology
Introduction
For everyone – individuals, organizations, communities and societies alike – our world is becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous.
There are problems caused by escalating conflict between different groups of people, the stress placed on the environment, growing anti-capitalism sentiment, and rising economic volatility, to name but a few challenges.
Increased perceptions of inequality, poverty, and unemployment follow, which ultimately harms the prosperity of the entire world. There is a need for more creative and unusual tactics to solve these difficulties, because conventional methods of doing so no longer appear to be effective.
Whilst there are numerous parties that urge a coordinated effort to solve these difficulties by concentrating on understanding the positive emotions, traits, and behaviors necessary to improve human functioning and global prosperity, to date this has been to no avail.
The collective demands of our current world places positive psychology in a special position to directly influence global change. It provides positive psychology with the impetus to branch out into new fields and domains built around the particular problems this volatile environment presents.
However, in order for the discipline to advance, it must address not just these difficulties but also the significant criticisms and critiques that have been levelled at it over the past ten years.
Although not a complete list, it is generally accepted that there are seven major themes that stand out as having been identified as issues that could create major obstacles to positive psychology.
Seven major issues with positive psychology
1. Lack of coherence
In 2018, Friedman and Brown (two well-known figures in the positive psychology movement) stated that positive psychology lacks a coherent metatheory that supports the philosophy of the field and offers a fundamental framework for thinking about, researching, and approaching positive psychological phenomena.
Metatheories have been shown to provide a set of philosophical principles necessary for the development of a discipline by:
• defining the goal of theories supporting a science,
• outlining the kinds of theories or methods required to advance its development,
• outlining broad and paradigmatic issues relating to general theory development, and
• highlighting these issues.
However, it has been argued that grand- and mid-range theories, as well as theoretical models and frameworks that explain a phenomenon, should also be included in metatheories.
Positive psychology will be limited to componential thinking in the absence of a clearly stated, unifying metatheory, which is furthered by a hyper-focus on developing particular states, traits or behaviors.
As an alternative, it can result in little to no agreement on how to define or approach the discipline’s fundamental ideas.
In 2000, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi made an effort to present a meta-theoretical paradigm perspective of positive psychology in their co-authored position paper. They described positive psychology as ‘a science of positive, subjective experience, positive individual traits, and positive institutions [aimed at] improving quality of life and to prevent the pathologies that arise when life is barren or meaningless’.
However, this definition and the strategy described in their paper did not make it clear what exactly constitutes ‘positivity’ or present a clear purpose of positive theories. Additionally, they made no mention of the kinds of ideas and methods required to improve the field of positive psychology.
The criteria for what precisely qualifies as a ‘positive theory’ are yet to be agreed, nor are the methods and processes necessary to produce knowledge in positive psychology highlighted.
Aristotle’s virtue ethics are regarded by Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi as a vital component of positive psychology, while Robbins and Friedman’s (2018) argument ignores the philosophical underpinnings of their findings.
In contrast to Aristotle, who saw virtues as dynamic and acting in unison, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi believed that psychological strengths operate independently of one another. Many components of the positive psychology field claim that that positive psychology aims to develop or find ‘goodness’ or ‘the good life’, but they draw attention to the fact that Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi provide no clear vision of what this may entail and that the fundamental tenets of positive psychology are based on untested presumptions.
Without a unifying metatheory to broaden its theoretical value proposition, positive psychology cannot compile a number of grand theories. Grand theories are abstract theoretical hypotheses that offer a way to formally organize or order knowledge about a particular notion or social phenomena. It offers a framework for the interpretation and justification of positive psychological occurrences.
Many of the major theories that support positive psychology today, according to critics (e.g., Self-Determination Theory and Existentialism) are ‘borrowed’ from other paradigms in social, behavioral and cognitive psychology.
Positive psychology’s attempts to develop original, broad theories have drawn criticism and, in some cases, even been found to be false. For instance, the broaden-and-build hypothesis of Fredrickson (2001) is predicated on the idea that only positive emotions may increase a person’s awareness, which in turn propels them towards creativity and performance.
Contrary to popular belief, ‘negative emotions’ (such as stress, annoyance, and unmet psychological needs) can actually promote development, motivation and performance. They can also inspire creativity and resilience. Negative emotion exposure has been shown to broaden attention, focus and drive. The positive emotions science and other grand theories and components of positive psychology, such as Seligman’s (2011) PERMA, and Fredrickson and Losada’s (2005) critical positivity ratio, have also come under fire.
To solve these issues it has been proposed that the positive psychology discipline clarify its fundamental principles and philosophical underpinning in order to move forwards in order to overcome these difficulties.
A metaphysical view of reality could provide everyone with a widely accepted view on:
• how positive psychology defines reality and how its principles relate to what is understood about reality.
• epistemological beliefs (e.g., what are positive psychology’s core values, and how do modern ways of ‘knowing’ like its scientific methods help address problems associated with values;
• what values do positive psychological researchers hold regarding maintaining scientific integrity and the pursuit of unbiased truth;
• how do positive psychologists distinguish between competing theories;
• what criteria are used to determine what theories should be adopted or ignored;
• methodological beliefs (e.g., how do positive psychological researchers think about the relationship between values
• the moral and ethical considerations that go into the formulation of theories and their application in practice.
2. The ‘jingle-jangle’ fallacy
Positive psychology suffers from the ‘jingle-jangle’ fallacy due to the absence of metatheory. When various concepts or techniques within a subject are incorrectly considered to be the same because of a shared name or label, this is known as the ‘Jingle Fallacy’.
For instance, while ‘flourishing’ is a key concept in positive psychology, in 2002 Keyes came out with one approach to measure flourishing while Diener et al. came out with another one in 2010 and Seligman another one in 2011. All three of these different approaches to flourishing are readily available and frequently used in the literature.
According to Diener et al., flourishing is based on the eudaimonic tradition, where people should feel happy and perform well. In essence, it is viewed by as a gauge of social-psychological prosperity.
In contrast, Keyes described flourishing as the pinnacle of human experience, marked by high levels of social, psychological and emotional wellbeing.
And last but not least, when Seligman created his measurement, he suggested that flourishing is a subjective, emotive experience marked by high levels of positive emotions, engagement, relationships, purpose and achievement.
Although there are obvious conceptual differences between these three approaches, researchers frequently mistakenly support Diener’s theoretical assumptions with arguments from Keyes and Seligman, and vice versa.
The ‘Jangle Fallacy’, which occurs when multiple names are employed to describe the same construct or when outdated psychological constructs are repackaged in new ‘jackets’ to seem novel or new, is another criticism levelled at positive psychological constructs.
For instance, according to Schnitker et al. (2020), ‘joy’ is perceived as being similar to other elements like happiness, pleasure, pleasant mood, or the emotionality component of extraversion. However, in 2002, Luthans likened joy to four well-known theoretical notions (hope, optimism, resilience and self-efficacy).
Similarly, ‘grit’ has been compared to traits like conscientiousness or diligence, and has been moved to being regarded as one of the finest indicators of personal achievement and performance.
Given that these variables are criticized for not offering anything ‘new’, the discipline’s identity and credibility may be further damaged. Therefore, it becomes critical to create definitions so that the movement can release itself from the ‘jingle-jangle’ tag that it currently carries.
3. Validity of evaluation measures
The validity of positive psychological evaluation measures, which try to evaluate positive emotions, attitudes, and behaviors, has also come under fire.
Popular positive assessment measures have produced results that vary so widely that it can give the appearance as to produce diverse factorial structures, different levels of dependability, and use dubious markers for predictive validity in their validation processes.
In addition, the cultural fairness of positive psychological assessment measures has been questioned by a number of researchers over time. For instance, it has been demonstrated that the widely used 12-item Grit O Scale created by Duckworth et al. in 2007 may generate more than ten alternative factorial models, ranging from a unidimensional model to a bi-factor ESEM model with variable levels of internal consistency. It was also noted in a multi-national study that the Grit-O scale’s standard confirmatory factor analytic models were biased against certain cultural groups.
Because measuring is essential to the psychological sciences, researchers should take more meticulous steps when creating and validating new measures. This problem offers a chance to conduct additional research on the psychometric characteristics of current psychological tests, including their cross-cultural applicability, and to create more creative methods for measuring positive psychological states, traits and behaviors.
4. No significant changes
The case that participants’ happy feelings, attributes and behaviors do not change significantly or sustainably as a result of positive psychological therapies has also been made.
The long-term sustainability of positive psychological interventions is highly disputed, according to a number of meta-analyses and systematic literature reviews based on their effectiveness.
Most only produce modest short-term changes in wellbeing. When applied to organizational contexts, it has been discovered that the majority of interventions only produce little to insignificant short- to medium-term changes in critical individual and organizational outcomes. This may also be due to the lack of personalization of psychological interventions before being applied within an organization.
These problems present intriguing future study prospects for intervention research, as does the paucity of existing material on the long-term consequences of positive psychological therapies.
5. Reliance on ‘contextual factors’
Positive psychologists rely on ‘contextual factors’ rather than self-correcting or revising current theories for justification when hypotheses cannot be accepted, or earlier findings cannot be replicated.
For instance, some job designing intervention studies failed to detect any meaningful improvements in the outcome factors that were hypothesized in the creation of research studies.
Here, the authors of these research studies defended their conclusions by claiming that the failure of these initiatives was due to contextual factors present within these organizations (such as organizational restructuring or the implementation of a new information management system).
Additionally, these authors stated that these organizational changes typically result in high levels of stress and worry, which lower wellbeing and performance and work in opposition to positive emotion.
As a result, the authors concluded that null results suggest that the intervention genuinely protected participants’ wellbeing from the negative effects of the environment.
Because of this, detractors claim that positive psychology lacks self-correction and defends unexpected or unfavorable outcomes (which don’t match initial expectations) rather than exploring them and updating ideas.
This major problem raises the necessity for replication studies and emphasizes the importance of measuring and accounting for environmental factors in intervention research.
6. Questions about validation methods
Positive psychology is based on the conviction that empirical research and the nuanced nature of statistical analysis can offer straightforward solutions to difficult issues.
In 2018, Friedman and Brown stated that the positive psychological community is prevented from questioning or closely examining empirical findings because of its unwavering faith in the validity of the analytical method used to analyze the data.
Additionally, the novelty of a paper’s contribution typically depends on the statistical methodology used to analyze the data. Researchers mistakenly think that only strict (quantitative) procedures are necessary to assure scientific growth, which leads to an overemphasis on quantification in positive psychology.
Positive psychology can therefore overly depend on scientism and the idea that the positivist paradigm is the only valid method for analyzing psychological events.
Researchers should adopt strong qualitative and action research techniques, as well as more mixed-method approaches.
7. Cultural bias
Detractors claim that positive psychology is biased against certain cultures.
Positive psychology is criticized for being essentially a Western or European endeavor where findings from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) contexts are extrapolated to the entire human population.
Although it claims to be an ‘indigenous psychology that is universally applicable and relevant’, positive psychology has disregarded the cultural, historical and sociological foundations that support the experience or development of positive feelings, traits and behaviors.
Critics contend that positive psychology is prescriptive and directive in defining the components of what a successful life should consist of, in contrast to the perspective that Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi’s shared in 2000, and is neither objective nor value-neutral.
The philosophy of positive psychology is criticized as being firmly entrenched in the North American idea that seeking happiness is a highly individualized process that downplays the significance of indigenous knowledge. In other words, positive psychology is primarily individualistic in nature and places the self at the center of the universe, where thoughts, feelings and behaviors are brought on by internal processes rather than impacted by external influences.
However, a number of cross-cultural studies have demonstrated that ideas related to mental health and wellbeing are viewed differently in collectivistic and individualistic cultures, so this criticism bears little weight.
People from collectivistic cultures, as opposed to individualistic cultures, frequently view their physical and mental health as a result of their social settings (such as their family, their society, etc.).
Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that widely used psychological assessment instruments, such as the aforementioned Grit-O scale and Mental Health Continuum-SF, are not universally applicable across cultures and that variations in item interpretation result in different factorial structures.
This is concerning because it raises the possibility of discrepancies in how each overall construct is perceived, experienced, or characterized, in addition to measurement problems for individual constructs.
Finally, popular interventions in positive psychology that are based on WEIRD principles may not be applicable to or helpful in other contexts that are not WEIRD.
For instance, it was found in South Africa that a combination of well-known self-administered intentional activities used in WEIRD contexts, such as the gratitude visits, acts of kindness, and similar activities, did not lead to changes in the associated a priori factors in a multi-cultural environment.
Therefore, it is possible that interventions and ideas with a western orientation won’t work in other situations.
More indigenous positive psychological techniques and attitudes to wellbeing are thus both needed and advantageous. Additionally, this challenge serves as a framework for additional international and cross-cultural research on positive psychology theories, methods, and concepts.
The overarching conclusion to the issues that critics have raised regarding the positive psychology movement is that it is imperative that each individual and/or organization ensure that they create strong definitions around the processes they choose to follow and then use these definitions to create the bespoke health and wellness program and processes that enable them to lead happy, health and fulfilled lives.
Case Study: Positive Education
When the positive psychology movement was first introduced, ways that it could be applied within the educational settings emerged quite quickly. These methods were referred to as positive education. Over time, different definitions of positive education have emerged and have moved the traditional focus of education from being solely on academic achievement to a paradigm shift towards positive education. Early adopters of the movement contend that turning the focus to positive education expands the strategy to create a solution that provides both wellbeing and education.
There are three types of positive education programmes in classrooms:
• Intervention programs for wellbeing that are empirically supported by science.
• Proactive, scientifically supported methods for school-wide mental health initiatives.
• Specific virtues, values, and character education teachings based on philosophy or values-based learning.
Gregory Park wrote in Wellbeing and Achievement (2013, p. 7) that ‘Educational and psychological research has found similar links between higher student self-control and better life outcomes.’
Some examples of research on the advantages of restraint and persistence include:
• Measuring self-control in individuals provided a better prediction of high school grades, absences, and at-home study practises than the rating scored in an IQ test.
• In a longitudinal study involving more than 500 middle school kids, self-control was found to be a predictor of homework completion, classroom behavior, and report card grades.
• According to Duckworth et al. (2007), an individual’s level of grit—perseverance for long-term goals—predicted a variety of academically-related achievements, including grades at prestigious US colleges, retention in top military academy classes, and placing in a national spelling bee.
• Over the course of six months, changes in a student’s self-control predicted changes in his or her academic performance.
• Self-control also indicates children’s health. Self-control was found to be a key preventive factor against gaining weight in a study of kids entering puberty.
Results like these created a strong demand for positive education programs in schools that, from a critical standpoint, might be endangering the entire area.
More than ever before there is a significant demand for wellbeing among educators and teachers at the grassroots level. Every day in the classroom, teachers witness students who are at best performing at a mediocre level rather than excelling.
For some reason, positive education won’t stick.
Despite the expansion of positive psychology, positive education, and wellbeing programs in schools around the globe, there still seems to be a disconnect. It sits somewhere between the passion for good education in particular schools and integrated policy-level transformation.
Positive psychology, positive education, and wellbeing don’t seem to cling to policy even after 15 years of evidence amassed by researchers in the movement.
There is a need to systematically address eight specifically identified challenges if proponents of positive education wish to have a significant impact on governmental policy and make positive education a permanent aspect of education:
• The belief that there aren’t the funds available to provide a line item in the budget and spend significant financial resources specifically allocated to staff wellness training.
• It’s a side issue since actual educational advancement in literacy and numeracy is perceived as being distracted by wellbeing.
• At some policy levels, it is believed that you can either address wellbeing or academic advancement, but not both at the same time.
• Unorthodox trainers who deliver dubious training on the subject and assert an impact despite scant supporting data.
• Scientism, where empiricism is viewed as the sole viable approach and ignores the philosophical issues that support the inclusion of wellbeing in educational experiences.
• Discussions on wellbeing are not the main focus of exceptional educational experiences, which is focused on creating efficient financial and commercial decision-making processes.
• The magic solution that will supposedly solve all of the problems in education.
• Culture and social economic status can serve as a justification for not expecting improvement or change in schooling.
In the traditional schooling system that has held its sway for hundreds of years, it is understandable that the topic of wellbeing fades into obscurity when the world is distracted with the global political issues arising from the increase of terrorism, unstable global finance, and rising unemployment. In the wake of these global events, it is easy to see how making decisions about including a focus on wellbeing in education can fall through the cracks.
However, there are issues with expanding the focus of education at the philosophical level as well as problems at the policy level. The conflict over wellbeing in educational systems is found somewhere in the middle of these two areas.
The majority of those responsible for implementing wellbeing initiatives in schools frequently fail to realise that a school is where wellbeing occurs, just as it does in a classroom, a theatre production, or a sports team.
Each of these groups adheres to certain ideals, rules, and behaviors. Too many wellness initiatives are implemented without careful consideration of the values already present in communities.
The expanding field of the science of wellbeing has a number of fundamental problems.
These problems need to be addressed in order to develop conceptual frameworks and a vocabulary that would allow them to bridge the gap between discussions of character and preventative approaches for wellbeing.
All of this creates a situation where there is a piecemeal approach to wellbeing. Small initiatives are introduced for a short period of time and then budget funding is channelled elsewhere and that initiative falls away. Nothing happens for a period of time and then another small initiative is introduced, and the cycle continues.
Until there wellbeing becomes outcome driven and performance is measured against the achievement of the outcomes, wellbeing can’t hold a permanent place in the educational environment and the school children and educators will have no chance to experience the rewards and outcomes that are possible when a commitment to long-term positive education is made.
Exercise 4.7: Commitment to Positive Outcomes
1. Write down a wellbeing goal that you’ve been wanting to achieve for some time.
– How many times have you attempted to achieve this goal?
– What has stopped you from achieving it?
• Have you allocated time to it and then taken the time away for other things?
• Did you allocate funding to it and then move that money to be used elsewhere?
• Did it become too hard to focus on the goal?
• Did you lose enthusiasm for the goal?
– Why?
– What changed?
2. Is this goal something you would still like to achieve?
3. What commitment do you need to make, and to whom, for you to be able to achieve this goal?
– Are you prepared to make that commitment?
4. Where does the goal sit on your ‘list of important things’?
5. What help, and from whom, do you need to achieve your goal?
6. When will you start?
– Write down three simple steps you will take
– Which of these steps will you take first?
– When will you take that step?
7. How will you hold yourself accountable for taking these steps?
8. What will you do if things get hard or things get in the way again?
– How will you hold yourself accountable to your commitment and follow through on achieving your goal?
Course Manual 8: Happiness
Introduction
There are varying definitions of happiness that can be found in many different places around the globe and it has been seen to change over time. For example, the meaning of happiness in 1960 is very different to the meaning of happiness in the 2020s.
According to Wikipedia, ‘ … Happiness, in the context of mental or emotional states, is positive or pleasant emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy.’
People have been trying to measure happiness for ages. In 1780, the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham was known to state that as happiness was the ultimate purpose of humanity, it should be assessed as a way of judging how effectively the government was working.
In the 2020s, happiness is typically measured using self-report surveys. Questionnaires are still used by happiness economists to gauge the general level of happiness among populations, because they are less bothered by philosophical and methodological difficulties that can be created through self-reporting processes.
Over time, because the definition of happiness has changed and as a way to try and find standard ways of measuring happiness within these changing definitions, several scales have been developed to measure happiness:
• Since 1999, the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), a four-item scale, has been used to measure subjective happiness worldwide. The scale requires participants to use absolute ratings to characterize themselves as happy or unhappy individuals, as well as it asks to what extent they identify themselves with descriptions of happy and unhappy individuals.
• The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) is a 20-item questionnaire, using a five-point Likert scale (1 = very slightly or not at all, 5 = extremely) to assess the relation between personality traits and positive or negative affects at ‘this moment, today, the past few days, the past week, the past few weeks, the past year, and in general’.
• The Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) is a global cognitive assessment of life satisfaction developed by Ed Diener. A seven-point Likert scale is used to agree or disagree with five statements about one’s life.
• The Cantril ladder method is utilised in the World Happiness Report. Respondents are asked to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.
• Positive Experience: In the Gallup survey, respondents are asked whether they had fun, laughed a lot, felt rested, received respect, or learned something new or interesting the day before.
Since 2012, a World Happiness Report has been issued that shares research conducted by Gallup. Happiness is evaluated, as in ‘How happy are you with your life as a whole?’, and in emotional reports, as in ‘How happy are you now?,’ and people seem able to use happiness as appropriate in these verbal contexts.
Using these measures, the report identifies the countries with the highest levels of happiness. In subjective wellbeing measures, the primary distinction is between cognitive life evaluations and emotional reports.
Academic economists and international economic organizations are arguing for and developing multi-dimensional dashboards which combine subjective and objective indicators to provide a more direct and explicit assessment of human wellbeing. There are many different contributors to adult wellbeing, that happiness judgements partly reflect the presence of salient constraints, and fairness, autonomy, community and engagement are key aspects of happiness and wellbeing throughout the life course.
Although they all contribute to happiness, not all of them have to get better at the same time in order to make a person happier.
The four levels of happiness
We all want to be happy. It is the ONLY thing we want for its own reason, according to Aristotle. Everything else we do is motivated by our desire to find happiness in some way.
But happiness is not a straightforward idea. There are four different levels of happiness according to Aristotle.
First level of happiness: Laetus
This brings us satisfaction from material possessions. At its most basic, happiness is only about receiving external, sensuous satisfaction. Although it can be strong, this happiness is transient.
People who just focus on level 1 risk experiencing a crisis where life appears meaningless and superficial. In other words, if this is the ONLY source of happiness, there is a limit to the joy you may derive from a new car, a vacation, a beautiful meal, etc. There is nothing wrong with taking the enjoyment that this first level has to offer, but the enjoyment will be limited and short-lived if you forget the other levels.
Second level of happiness: Felix
Here satisfaction comes through happiness of the ego. Being better, more admired than others, etc., brings happiness.
You experience this kind of joy when, for instance, you triumph in a sporting event or receive a promotion. Everyone enjoys being praised and winning to some extent, but how fiercely competitive a person is varies greatly. For some people, it’s everything, while for others, it’s simply a very small and fleeting pleasure.
Because no one (or a very small number of people) can consistently succeed in all areas of life, happiness derived through constant comparison with others is unstable. Focusing too much on this level may cause significant dissatisfaction and create a sense of worthlessness in the event that you fail at something.
Self-absorption, envy, cynicism, and oppression of others can result from an excessive concentration on comparison and self-promotion, which also runs the danger of alienating those close to you.
Therefore, it becomes very important that you have this level of happiness alongside the other levels of happiness to ensure that the happiness you do experience is long-lived and lasting.
Third level of happiness: Beatitudo
This is the joy that comes from helping people and improving the world.
This level of enjoyment is built on human desires for companionship, togetherness, compassion, goodness, connection, and meaning. Some others have summed it up by saying, this level is all about love.
At this level, we turn our attention away from ourselves and towards the welfare of others. In essence, our own happiness and other people’s happiness are interdependent.
Compared to levels 1 and 2, level 3 happiness lasts longer and, for the majority of people, gives a greater sense of meaning.
Human flaws can be argued to be the boundaries of level 3 bliss. Human relationships entail disappointment, jealousy, and the potential for harm since nobody is flawless. It’s a fact of life.
Again, we see here the importance of not allowing this level of happiness to stand alone in our lives.
Fourth level of happiness: Sublime Beatitudo
This the absolute, ideal happiness.
It’s the hardest level of happiness to define and it entails looking for completeness and excellence. It involves striking the ideal balance between the other levels and more.
According to psychologists, the search for utmost happiness is an appeal for transcendence or a link to the greater cosmos.
In order to uncover the answers to some of the most important questions about life, the world, and everything in it, some people choose to pursue their spirituality or religion, while others turn to philosophy, art, or scientific pursuits. There isn’t one answer that applies to everyone.
This level of happiness is the hardest to achieve because there isn’t a guidebook or a map to follow. You achieve it by following your own path and discovering your own unique vocation.
Happiness, morality and ethics
Ethics and philosophy of happiness are frequently debated together. Traditional European societies, which were passed down through the Greeks and Christianity, frequently equated happiness with morality, which was focused on playing a specific role in a particular kind of social life.
Happiness is still a tricky concept in moral philosophy. The endeavour to define morality in terms of outcomes that lead to happiness and attempts to define morality in terms that have absolutely nothing to do with happiness have alternated throughout the history of moral philosophy.
Psychology has explored the connections between happiness and morality in a number of different ways. According to empirical studies, laypeople’s assessments of another person’s happiness are partially influenced by their opinions of that person’s moral character, indicating that such assessments also apply to other people. Prosocial behavior may also boost happiness, according to a wide body of studies.
Ethics
Based on the happiness that results from a particular behavior, ethicists have proposed justifications for how people should behave, either individually or collectively. The maximum happiness principle was promoted as a moral code by utilitarians like John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. Thomas Carlyle, Ferdinand Tönnies, and other figures from the German philosophical tradition are some of the opponents of this viewpoint.
According to Aristotle, eudaimonia, or v in Greek, was the objective of human cognition and conduct.
Although ‘happiness’ is a common translation of the Greek word eudaimonia, some academics argue that ‘human flourishing’ may be a more accurate translation. In the Nicomachiean Ethics, Aristotle uses the phrase to refer to more than just a general sense of happiness.
Aristotle claimed that, in contrast to wealth, honor, good health and friendship, humans only desire happiness (along with being healthy and performing well) for its own sake (as documented in the Nicomachean Ethics, which was written in 350 BCE).
He noticed that men coveted wealth, honor or health not only for their own happiness but also for that of their families. Eudaimonia, which is translated as ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’, is an action as Aristotle defined it, as opposed to an emotion or a mood.
Aristotle maintained that the happy life is one that is characterised by outstanding rational action. He used the ‘Function Argument’ to support this assertion. Basically, if it is done well, every living thing has a purpose – what it does best. The ability to think is the only thing that makes people unique, according to Aristotle.
Also positive is doing one’s job well or excellently. Aristotle believed that a happy life consisted of outstanding rational action. According to Aristotle, the life of moral virtue is the second-best option for individuals who are incapable of outstanding rational activity.
The main question that Aristotle aimed to answer during his time was: ‘What is the ultimate goal of human existence?’
Many people are looking for happiness, health, and a solid reputation. Those do have worth, it’s true, but none of them can claim to represent the ultimate goal of humanity. It may seem like all goods are a means to obtain happiness, but Aristotle said that happiness is always an end in itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche said that ‘Man does not strive for happiness, only the Englishman does’ in response to the English utilitarians’ emphasis on achieving the greatest satisfaction. Nietzsche meant that making happiness one’s ultimate goal and the aim of one’s existence, in his words ‘makes one contemptible’.
Instead, Nietzsche aspired for a society that would have loftier, more challenging objectives than ‘mere happiness’. He introduced the hypothetical ‘last man’ as a kind of thought experiment pitting utilitarians and happiness-seekers against each other.
Nietzsche intends for his reader to find these diminutive ‘last men’ despicable because they care solely about their personal happiness and wellbeing while avoiding all risk, effort, challenge, and battle. Instead, Nietzsche wants us to think about the value of what is challenging, what can only be acquired through difficulty, pain, and struggle, and to do this, he wants us to realise the positive role that suffering and misery actually play in the development of everything that is truly valuable in life, including all the highest achievements of human culture, not least of all philosophy.
Effects of happiness
Positive
Numerous cross-sectional research on happiness and physical health have found persistent, favourable connections between the two.
Follow-up research seems to indicate that while happiness does predict lifespan in healthy groups, it does not predict longevity in communities with disease.
Low mood is linked to numerous unfavourable life outcomes, including substance misuse, poor health and a shorter life span. In turn, happiness guards against such undesirable results.
Negative
In research studies conducted around the world, on some occasions and in some circumstances, happiness has been shown to cause a person to become more sensitive, gullible, less successful, and more inclined to engage in high-risk behavior. There were also results that suggested pursuing happiness may have unfavourable outcomes, such not living up to unrealistic expectations.
These results show that the more people pursue happiness, the more likely it is that they would have unrealistic expectations and experience disappointment.
According to one study, women who value happiness more have a tendency to react less favourably to happy feelings and in another study, the results showed that it was the people who felt both positive and negative emotions who had higher psychological wellbeing.
Government society and culture
In the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson linked the ‘pursuit of happiness’ with life and liberty. Today, a lot of nations and organizations frequently evaluate population satisfaction through extensive surveys.
Happiness levels are typically higher in wealthy countries than in less fortunate ones. The relationship between wealth and contentment is nonlinear, and a similar rise in GDP will have a greater impact on contentment in poor countries than in wealthy ones.
Some political scientists contend that the social democratic paradigm, which entails a sizable social safety nett, pro-worker labour market rule, and powerful labour unions, is positively correlated with life satisfaction.Others contend that economic freedom and happiness are closely related, ideally in the framework of a western mixed economy with a free press and a democracy.
Societal norms
Cultural variables may have an impact on personal happiness. In more individualistic civilisations, hedonism and happiness seem to be more closely associated.
The more individualistic cultures of wealthier nations are associated to their higher subjective wellbeing.
In contrast to collectivistic cultures, individualistic cultures may satisfy intrinsic motivations to a greater extent. Since intrinsic motivations are thought to be related to happiness rather than extrinsic incentives, individualistic cultures may experience higher levels of happiness as a result.
Over time, cultural perspectives on happiness have evolved. For instance, Westerners have just recently begun to worry about whether childhood is a happy time. Some cultures are opposed to happiness, and not all civilisations see it as important to maximise.
Western societies have been determined to place the most value on an individual’s happiness. Different cultures may hold opposing viewpoints or have a negative attitude towards the concept of personal fulfilment. For instance, people from Eastern Asian cultures place higher emphasis on the necessity for happiness in interpersonal relationships and even consider personal happiness to be detrimental to the fulfilment of happy interpersonal relationships.
Case Study: Psychology’s Interest in Happiness
For two reasons, psychologists are drawn to the topic of happiness. First, psychologists research happiness because the general public is curious about it.
Happiness routinely ranks first on lists of the things that are most important to people around the world. People place achieving pleasure higher on their priority lists than getting rich, staying healthy, or even entering heaven. Psychologists think that by researching the variables linked to happiness, they might assist people in achieving this aim.
A person’s evaluative reactions to the outside world may reveal details about the fundamental traits of human nature, which is a second reason psychologists research pleasure.
One of the fundamental tenets of psychology theory is that both humans and animals are driven to seek out and stay away from things in the world that make them feel pain. This behavior most likely originates from adaptive processes that direct organisms in the direction of resources and away from threats. If so, the opinions of many people regarding the world ought to be instructive and insightful.
For instance, some psychologists have proposed that people have a fundamental urge to engage in powerful and encouraging social connections. They argue that a person’s social connections are dependable predictors of happiness, and they use research in the area of subjective wellbeing to back up their position. Thus, cataloging the correlates of happiness should provide important information about the features of human nature.
The findings of scientific investigations point to a number of tendencies. People who claim they are happy today also tend to say the same thing when questioned again in the future, for example, when researchers ask people to report on their level of happiness. The stability of happiness measurements lends weight to the notion that these measures actually touch this crucial dimension because people’s circumstances rarely change. Additionally, research demonstrates that people’s assessments of pleasure alter in reaction to actual life experiences.
Perhaps more significantly, these measures all tend to point to the same conclusion when psychologists attempt to quantify happiness in a variety of different ways. For instance, when people are asked to self-report their level of pleasure, they frequently concur with informant-reports of happiness, or assessments made by friends and acquaintances.
In addition, psychological tests that require participants to recall as many joyful experiences as they can in a minute may also be used to identify people who are happy without explicitly requesting such a judgement, and once more, these measurements tend to coincide with self-reports. Even the brain contains signs of happiness, according to psychologists, as particular patterns of brain activity are consistently linked to positive emotions.
The majority of people report having somewhat happy moods the majority of the time when psychologists monitor people’s degrees of happiness. In addition, the majority of respondents give psychologists ratings of overall life satisfaction that are higher than neutral.
This study’s findings are not just applicable to samples from relatively affluent populations, such as college students who are frequently invited to participate in psychological studies. Instead, it has been repeated among several populations in numerous countries all over the world. Therefore, rather than seeking for characteristics that separate the happy from the wretched when psychologists examine the correlates of happiness, they typically seek out traits that separate the extremely happy from the mildly happy.
Exercise 4.8: Chasing Happiness
1. Think about a time when you bought something you had really wanted, received a promotion, experienced a significant life event (like getting married or engaged or starting your first (or latest) company), or were given an award.
– How did you feel at the time this thing happened?
– Write down your reflections of that moment and your happiness levels during this time.
2. Write down anything that you believe significantly contributed to your achieving that thing, or that helped you get to that thing.
– What has contributed to your happiest moments?
– Is there a particular source of your happiness?
3. Are there any conclusions you can draw from the source of your happiness?
– Is there anything unique about the things that bring you happiness?
– Does your happiness come from one particular place or does it come from multiple sources?
– How often do you get to experience happiness in your life?
– Do you allocate enough time to allowing those sources to shine in your life?
Course Manual 9: Humanist Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and Positive Psychology
Introduction
The paradigms of psychology that relate to one another include humanist psychology, cognitive psychology and positive psychology. Carl Rodgers created the first theory of humanist psychology in the middle of the 20th Century (Robbins, 2008, p. 96). He provided a thorough explanation of human life using the idea of phenomenology.
However, cognitive psychology was created with the intention of analyzing how people think, since it takes into account fundamental thought processes including perception, memory, speech and other similar abilities. Because it accepts the application of scientific knowledge, and acknowledges that there are particular internal human mental processes, cognitive psychology is thought to be distinct from other psychology concepts.
Martin Seligman created positive psychology – the newest idea in psychology – to complement other branches of the discipline.
The concept’s focus on changing the paradigm of human psychology from treating mental illnesses to fostering a more satisfying life for people is what makes it special. The term ‘positive psychology’ refers to the tendency of this field of study to emphasize the good aspects of people rather than their flaws.
Positive psychology has gained popularity among philosophers and sociologists in recent years as a result of the adoption of the idea by numerous renowned psychologists over the past few years. Numerous publications on the topic (in books, journals, and the like) are proof of this trend.
This study aims to examine, analyze and comprehend the three psychological notions, while taking into account how they generally build upon one another.
The relationships between the three notions will next be analyzed, and ultimately the impact of zeitgeist on the conceptions will be examined. Which psychological school of thought will have the most influence in the future will be determined by this study’s outcome.
Historical influences of psychological theories
Positive psychology and humanistic psychology both concentrate on related issues, but they differ in approach and epistemology. Positive psychologists typically favour quantitative methods over qualitative ones, whereas humanistic psychologists typically favour the opposite.
Similar differences exist in terms of epistemology, with positive psychologists favouring logical positivism and humanistic psychologists favouring post positivism. However, many of the perceived distinctions between humanistic and positive psychology have been founded on generalisations that are not always true, most notably that positive psychology does incorporate some qualitative approaches, while humanistic psychology has a strong legacy of quantitative study.
The idea of methodological and epistemological pluralism is put out as a means of bringing these formerly interconnected but now mostly dispersed areas of psychology together. Both existentialism and the philosophy of phenomenology made a significant contribution to the growth and development of humanistic psychology. However, phenomenology had a greater impact on the movement because existentialism was viewed as being ‘overly pessimistic’.
Many psychologists contend that all people have an inbuilt propensity to pursue continual growth and development, because they find that the disease model that underpins most of psychology provides them with no motivation to make change in their lives.
They believe that positive traits – like love, bravery and happiness – should be part of psychology’s core concerns. Therefore, to create a more thorough explanation of human growth and existence, the orthodox psychology was abandoned in favour of existentialism and phenomenology.
These same psychologists who pioneered the movement away from a disease model focus disagreed with behaviorists and psychoanalysts alike, particularly with regard to the latter’s ‘mechanomorphic’ and reductionistic view of people. The view of the day was that these ideas essentially deprived humans of their essential nature.
Humanists contend that as an individual is more than the sum of their parts, they can only be fully understood as a whole. Views that clearly reflect humanism go back to the modern origins of psychology and can be found in the work of William James, John Dewey and G. Stanley Hall.
In particular, William James stated that one must take into account an individual’s subjective experience in order to completely understand optimal human functioning. James is regarded by some as ‘America’s first positive psychologist’ for this viewpoint as well as others.
James acknowledged the value of employing a positivistic technique in science, but he insisted that ‘good science’ also requires the use of phenomenologically based methodologies. This combination of positivistic and phenomenological methodology was known as ‘radical empiricism’.
Because ‘objectivity is based on intense subjectivity’, James was interested in both the objective and the subjective. William James inquired in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1906 as to why some people were able to make the most of their resources while others were unable to. He stated that two further concerns must be addressed in order to comprehend this:
• What were the limits of human energy?
• How may this energy be triggered and released in order for it to be put to optimal use?
These enquiries reveal James’ interest in the investigation of ideal human functioning and its connection to experience, which runs through the literature on positive psychology.
Humanistic psychology, often known as the ‘third force of psychology’, began formally in the 1950s in Europe and the United States.
Maslow endeavoured to experimentally research the lives and patterns of self-actualized individuals because he believed that humanistic psychology should be founded on the study of creative, healthy humans.
In the final chapter of Maslow’s book Motivation and Personality (1954), titled ‘Towards a Positive Psychology’, the phrase ‘positive psychology’ first emerged.
In this chapter, Maslow argues that psychology does not adequately set the bar for maximal achievement, and that the discipline lacks a comprehensive knowledge of human potential. He said: ‘Psychology has been far more effective on the negative side than the positive; it has taught us a great deal about man’s flaws, ailments and sins, but nothing about his potentialities, virtues, reachable goals, or complete psychological height. It is as if psychology had voluntarily restricted itself to only half its rightful jurisdiction, and that the darker, meaner half’.
Humanism and positive psychology have a lot in common. The focus of humanistic psychology is primarily on the quality of the human experience, and it is described as ‘…primarily an orientation towards the whole of psychology rather than a distinct area or school…concerned with topics having little place in existing theories and systems: e.g., love, creativity, growth, self-actualization, peak experience, courage and related topics’.
When you familiarise yourself with the work of positive psychologists, it becomes easy to see the similarities between those areas mentioned above and what Seligman referred to as signature strengths and virtues in 2002.
Throughout their illustrious careers in the positive psychology movement, Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi have argued that psychology forgot about its roots when it came to making the lives of all people more fulfilling and enhancing and identifying human excellence.
But when we examine Maslow’s work, this claim is refuted. In fact, the three pillars Seligman outlined for positive psychology are concepts that resemble those of Maslow and other humanists.
In order to attain personal progress, William James discussed the significance of good subjective experiences, which equates to Seligman’s first pillar.
In 1954, Maslow stated that a culture that promotes health must be established in order for people to flourish and achieve their potential, which aligns with Seligman’s third pillar.
Many people have refuted the claim that humanistic psychology disregards thorough research. However, it has been shown that the humanistic movement ‘…values research, although this is defined broadly to include both positivistic and qualitative or phenomenological methods.’
Core concepts of each theory
The three basic overlapping themes that make up positive psychology are the pleasant life, good life, and meaningful life.
The pleasant life looks into how people use their pleasant human emotions to live a more contented life. This examination takes into account factors like relationships, entertainment, hobbies, and the like.
Because it relates to the overall human sense people experience when doing the activities they enjoy, the idea of the good life is also strongly related to the idea of the pleasant life. The word “passion” can be used to highlight instances where people labour with a sense of fulfilment or enjoyment.
The meaningful life, which is compared to Maslow’s greatest hierarchy of wants – self-fulfillment – focuses on how people achieve a sense of wellbeing by engaging in the activities they enjoy.
Contrary to popular belief, cognitive psychology opposes the idea of introspection and is grounded in scientific notions of human psychology. In actuality, cognitive neuroscience plays a significant role in cognitive psychology. This indicates that it is opposed to earlier symbolic psychological theories, such as those put out by Freudian psychology.
The theory behind this concept is the focus on those underlying elements that lead human beings to do the things they do. This includes components like motivation, belief and desire, among others. It is crucial to note that cognitive psychology is comprehensive in the sense that it includes all aspects of human behavior (although perhaps from a biased perspective).
Therefore, the concept’s main goal is to define the stages of information processing that humans go through from input to output. The intrigues that occur during the human cognitive process are analysed during this phase.
Numerous academics have determined that behaviorism, psychoanalysis and humanism are the three perspectives through which the idea of humanist psychology may be best understood.
These elements are however meant to make people understand the conceptual origin of the concept, but the main focus of humanist psychology is to comprehend the ability of each individual in taking specific human actions.
Since human psychology contends that people are innately good but that many veer from this inclination as a result of social pressures, wants, mental health issues and other social issues, the concepts of human progress and self-actualization are central to this study.
Relationship in the past
The shortcomings of cognitive psychology led to the development of humanist psychology. Cognitive psychology was created expressly to study just one aspect of human psychology: how people think.
Humanist psychologists established the humanist movement to be more holistic and analytical of the human psychology in its entirety, since they saw cognitive psychology as a fragmented element of human psychology.
They thought that this idea – humanist psychology – represented the real image of human psychology, since people were affected by a variety of social factors including loneliness, mortality, personal development and needs for self-actualization.
Because it was created to complement both theories by emphasising the positive aspects of people rather than their flaws, positive psychology is closely related to both humanist psychology and cognitive psychology.
The proponents of this idea pointed out that conventional psychological ideas (such as cognitive psychology and humanist psychology) tended to emphasize the flaws in the human psychological process rather than its strengths.
The goal of the establishment of positive psychology was to emphasize what humanist and cognitive psychology failed to do.
Relation to zeitgeist
The zeitgeist movement of the 1960s, where there was a heavy emphasis on bureaucracy, mechanisation, dehumanisation, and other abstract features that abandoned people in favour of industrialisation and its forebears, has been linked to the origins of humanist psychology.
There was a significant drive for psychologists to bring back human characteristics like integrity, dignity, values and convictions.
According to this perspective, humanist psychology developed because there were only faint hints of human characteristics in the way society functioned. It is interesting to note, nevertheless, that attempts to connect humanist psychology and zeitgeist by historians have not been successful in presenting the idea favourably.
For this reason, there have been many requests (from all quarters) to revisit the social relationship between humanist psychology and zeitgeist. However, no one has been able to match the fact that humanist psychology emerged as a result of the social transformation occurring in the Western world.
The relationship between zeitgeist and positive psychology is also fundamentally similar, in that zeitgeist studies how the environment and current events affect positive psychology. There is a significant tendency towards rising spirituality throughout the Western world, but especially in American society.
This trend, however, manifests itself in different ways, with some areas seeing an increase in paganism and others an increase in core Christianity.
However, the connection between these factors and positive psychology is that positive psychology draws heavily from the field of positive institutions and the idea of deriving meaning from what people do. The concept of mediation is also quickly being adopted in both religion and psychotherapy. This foundation serves as a solid foundation for the idea of zeitgeist.
For instance, non-cynical people frequently hold the view that performing random acts of kindness can lead to a sense of fulfilment, which is completely in line with the idea of positive psychology.
In a study to clarify this relationship, it was found that the majority of respondents experienced a high level of fulfilment when they combined satisfying employment with charitable endeavours. This finding was consistent with positive psychology.
From this vantage point, the relationship between positive psychology and the zeitgeist can be understood in terms of the idea that positive psychology aims to respond to the majority of questions people have regarding religion, civil liberties, and the causes of the kinds of behaviors we see in society today.
The zeitgeist and cognitive psychology are closely related in that many clinical psychologists now support cognitive behavioral therapy, which is used to treat a variety of anxiety disorders, mental illnesses like depression, stress and the like.
The connection between cognitive psychology and zeitgeist stems from the fact that many individuals find it very enticing and popular to imagine seeing someone a few times before receiving the solution to a certain psychological condition.
Evidential support
Numerous academics have advocated for humanist, cognitive, and positive psychology in a number of different ways.
For instance, in previous research studies (and publications) written by the same persons, proponents of positive psychology have only partially backed their theories. Numerous of these books have enormous popularity, and many are included in university curricula around the world.
As an illustration, the Netherlands-based journal ‘the journal of happiness’ concentrates only on positive psychology as a distinct school of thought, yet the proliferation of studies on artificial intelligence that became prominent in the late 20th Century has also been a major supporter of cognitive psychology.
This school of thinking has also received strong support from research investigations focused on cognitive science, and many other studies have backed the notion of cognitive comprehension of human processes.
As shown by its recognition as a third force in human psychology and the establishment of the Association of Humanist Psychology, humanist psychology has among the three schools of psychological thought garnered the most research support.
The American Psychological Association-recognized journal of humanist psychology was also founded as a result of this distinctive school of thinking.
Case Study: Social Constructionism – A Cautionary Note
The virtues of respect and empathetic understanding become more crucial ethical standards for both the wider society and on an individual level as multicultural cultures and intercultural engagement become characteristics of a global world.
As seen by Seligman’s suggested effort for resolving ethnopolitical conflicts and more contemporary recommendations for cross cultural psychology, the American Psychology Association has been interested in the issues of multicultural society.
We are only just beginning to understand the significance of cultural context and history in the formation of human identity more and more. Positive psychology might find that its utopian search for the best social structures – like families, fulfilling employment and political institutions – does not yield universal solutions, but rather particular solutions in particular communities with particular historical and cultural identities and traditions.
This does not imply that it is not worthwhile to devote resources to researching these issues, but it does point to the necessity of ethical thinking and the expression of particular ethical values when formulating these research methodologies.
The development of multidisciplinary models of study and application, like Seligman’s effort for the investigation of ethnopolitical conflict in Northern Ireland or the expanding field of cognitive science, may be essential to the achievement of the positive psychology agenda.
The fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology are typically included in definitions of cognitive science.
A successful positive psychology movement will probably need input from other social sciences, such as anthropology, history, sociology, economics, and political science, as well as from the fields of social and personality psychology, psychology of learning and emotions, cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and developmental psychology.
Humanistic psychology has studied epistemology, methodology, and ethics during the last 50 years and can add significantly to this interdisciplinary mix.
A deep and respectful appreciation of the arts is a tradition among humanistic psychologists. The consequent access to intense emotional states through symbol or tale is a feature of human existence that Positive Psychology does not appear to have fully developed. Experience is deepened and knowledge is transformed into wisdom by knowing something in more than one sensory and metaphorical way.
Therefore, it is essential that positive psychology and humanistic psychology have a constructive conversation with one another.
The rigour and operationalizability requirements of positive psychology present a wise challenge for humanistic psychologists. The call for ‘massive research on human strength and virtue’ made by positive psychology, on the other hand, can be complemented by humanistic psychology’s familiarity with the ‘farther reaches of human nature’ and its corresponding epistemologies and methodologies.
If we are to truly build an inclusive and prosperous, multi generational and multi-cultural world, then we must move to a place where we bring together the strengths and characteristics of as many complementary movements to fully embrace and enhance the capabilities that are available in the collective.
This can be encapsulated by Seligman’s quote: ‘Treatment is about nourishing our best selves, not merely mending what is damaged.’ (Seligman, 1998).
Exercise 4.9: The Door Paradigm
1. Think about a time in your life when someone rejected you, when you missed out on something important, or when a big plan collapsed. This is referred to as a door in your life closing on you.
• Write down: what the door was that closed?
• Write down: what doors opened as a result of that door closing?
2. Reflecting on your experiences with the doors closing and opening:
• What led to the door closing?
• What helped you open the new door?
• How long did it take you to realise that the new door was open?
• Was it easy or hard for you to realise that a new door was open?
• What can you do next time to recognise the new opportunity sooner?
• What were the effects of the door closing on you?
– Did those effects last long?
• Did the experience of the door closing bring anything positive?
• What does a closed door represent to you now?
• Is there a closed door that you wish you could open again?
– Why would you like to open it?
– What benefit would opening it bring you?
– Is there another door you can open that will bring you even greater benefit than trying to open a closed door?
Course Manual 10: Subjective Wellbeing
Introduction
Subjective wellbeing (SWB) is the term used to describe how individuals perceive and assess their lives as well as particular spheres and activities within them.
When we reflect on and evaluate our lives, we evaluate how desirable we find ourselves in relation to our perceived status. This is the subjective component of cognitive evaluation.
In the same way that different objects have diverse associations with positive affect for various people, affective appraisal has a subjective component.
SWB spans a wide range of diverse notions, from brief experiences in our daily lives to far larger global judgements we make about our life as a whole. It is usually viewed as a hedonic concept, as opposed to a eudaimonic one.
SWB (also known as ‘self-reported wellbeing’) has drawn a lot of attention from academics, policymakers, national statistical offices, the media and the general public over the past ten years. The importance of this data may be seen in its capacity to monitor population economic, social and health problems, as well as informing policy choices in each of these areas.
Researchers in the fields of sociology, psychology and economics have identified a number of unique elements of SWB that coexist yet are not fully independent and that overlap each other.
These measurement constructs can be thought of as a continuum, with overall assessments of life satisfaction, purpose or suffering at one end (associated with the longest reference periods or no particular reference period) and essentially real-time assessments of experience, emotional state or sensations at the other end.
Despite these temporal overlaps, the SWB components exhibit distinctive traits, frequently correlate with different sets of variables, and reflect separate parts of the construct that are individually worthwhile monitoring for a variety of reasons.
The terminologies used to characterise SWB have frequently been applied in ways that are vague, which has complicated discussions and perhaps impeded advancement in the subject. For instance, the word ‘happiness’ has been employed to describe both moment-by-moment evaluations of affect and overall life assessments.
Understanding the intricacies that are known to coexist is impossible due to this lack of accuracy. For instance, someone who is involved in demanding or challenging activities, like pursuing an education or a job promotion, may find a great deal of meaning or satisfaction in life overall; meanwhile, someone who is generally suffering or without hope may find momentary relief in a pleasurable experience.
The proper construct to assess SWB is determined by the nature of the policy or research question being posed, and it may also propose a method for data collecting. A cross-sectional data collection carried out every two years may not be effective, for instance, if the dimension of interest is known to be sensitive on a very short time frame and responds to daily activities and occurrences but is reasonably steady over long durations.
In these circumstances, a high-frequency technique might be the most instructive (even if it uses a considerably smaller sample). Similar to the previous example, a construct may not be particularly insightful to track at national levels over time if it varies significantly from individual to individual on a given day but does not respond significantly to exogenous events (such as financial shocks, changes in employment rates, etc.) and tends to wash out at high aggregate levels.
The move to measure subjective wellbeing
Governments all over the world are starting to consistently measure the subjective wellbeing of its people. By doing so, governments gain insight into the experiences and priorities of their people which makes it easier for them to focus their attention on the areas that their people say are important to them.
In 2013, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) created the ‘Guidelines on Measuring Subjective Wellbeing’ which were intended to improve three key areas:
• the usefulness of the data collected by outlining guidelines on the proper frequency, survey vehicles and covariates when collecting subjective wellbeing data
• the quality of the subjective wellbeing measures collected by national statistical offices by providing best practise in terms of question wording and survey design
• cross-country comparability of the subjective wellbeing measures by establishing common concepts, classifications and methods that national statistics agencies could use.
A major driving force behind this research is the emerging and ongoing global initiatives to produce SWB metrics and data. The moment to provide feedback to initiatives by national statistical offices and international organizations is now, while they are still very much in the experimental stages.
Most countries recognise a growing need to offer recommendations for initiatives to develop data, surveys and research on the topic.
The need for clarification and a better understanding of the various aspects of SWB, the specific information supplied by data on measures of experienced wellbeing (ExWB), and the kinds of policy-relevant questions such data would inform are all major components of such guidance.
The majority of national statistical agencies, including those in the United States, have only had a little impact on the development of regular measures of wellbeing.
Indeed, commercial and academic organizations conduct some of the most well-known surveys evaluating SWB and contrasting the performance of various nations. The Gallup Organization’s Gallup World Poll, launched in 2005 and encompassing 160 nations, and Gallup World Values Survey are the most frequently used (and largest) datasets on SWB.
The Gallup World Poll is an annual cross-sectional survey that is repeated and includes life evaluation and ExWB questions as well as many other topics besides self-reported wellbeing. These topics include perceptions of leadership, basic access to food, shelter, and safety, as well as perceptions of work, social, financial, physical and community wellbeing.
Gallup started a daily survey of 1,000 Americans in 2008 that includes evaluative and ExWB questions. The Gallup World Values Survey, a cross-sectional study that also gathers data on life evaluation and general satisfaction, occasionally asks about more specific indicators of actual emotional state and mood.
Diener and Subjective Wellbeing Theory
One of the top SWB researchers in the world, Professor Ed Diener created the concept in his influential 1984 article ‘Subjective Wellbeing’.
Since the publishing of this article, Ed Diener continued to research on the topic from a positive psychology angle. His extensive contributions to the profession over a more than 25-year career gave him the moniker ‘Dr. Happiness’.
The majority of participants reported a favourable degree of SWB and contentment with significant life domains, according to early research by Diener in 1996. The average level of subjective wellbeing was greater than neutral in 86% of the 43 countries surveyed.
In 2002, Diener joined forces with Seligman and screened US college students for happiness in order to study variables that might affect extremely high levels of happiness, with a focus on extremely happy people.
While there doesn’t seem to be a single secret to high levels of happiness, their research showed that using a variety of instruments, including the Satisfaction With Life Scale, compared to typical people, those who are really happy spend less time alone and have richer, more fulfilling social relationships.
Three components of subjective wellbeing
It is widely accepted that subjective wellbeing has three main components. These components become the main focus of any research or evaluations that are conducted:
• Positive affect (PA)
• Negative affect (NA)
• Life satisfaction (LS)
Source: nobaproject.com
The environment in which people live has an impact on their level of happiness. It is challenging for some people to remain content when living in poverty, being ill, or having a child who has a terrible illness.
On the other hand, having a loving family and close friends, enough money to cover one’s requirements, and good health makes it simpler to be happy. However, even in this case, there are exceptions – people who enjoy wonderful circumstances but are gloomy and unhappy.
People can therefore be happy or dissatisfied depending on their personality, how they see the world, or the environment in which they live.
Because everyone has a different predisposition for happiness due to differences in their personalities and worldview, it is impossible to anticipate happiness simply by looking at someone’s living situation.
Source: nobaproject.com
The three components are considered to be completely separate and distinct from one another, however they do correlate to one another and at times also overlap each other.
They are seen as separate but related because people frequently evaluate their emotional states (e.g. ‘I’m feeling great right now’) in conjunction with their subjective opinions about their lives (e.g. ‘My life is fantastic’).
The tripartite model of SWB is made up of the three elements collectively. Usually, the two affect components are evaluated separately from the life satisfaction component using various scales.
There are various potential connections between the three SWB components. However, various frameworks with the following constituents have also been proposed:
Source: nobaproject.com
• a hierarchical construct in which the higher order element SWB has a positive correlation with PA and LS and a negative correlation with NA.
• a causal system model where PA and NA, among other things, have an impact on LS.
• a composite model where each of the three elements works together to contribute to SWB.
• a framework for configuration that sees SWB as an interconnected system comprising LS, PA, and NA, each of which is uniquely configured within various people.
Why is subjective wellbeing Important?
Subjective wellbeing matters on an individual level and to society as a whole for a variety of reasons.
Lifestyle quality
Our individual quality of life is heavily influenced by our affective experiences and general emotional health. People are more likely to be perceived as having a high quality of life if they are comfortable with their lives and frequently feel positive emotions like joy, happiness, and hope.
The quality of life for people and communities around the world can be improved by using SWB measures to guide policy decisions, academic curriculum, and social initiatives.
Human advancement
Although research indicates that it may have some influence on SWB through a variety of mechanisms, GDP alone is not a sufficient indicator of life quality at the national level.
It is generally acknowledged that by extending the notion beyond purely material concerns and taking into account individual opinions rather than outsider judgements, SWB delivers a more thorough measure of a nation’s welfare.
Mental health
SWB and mental health are interdependent. Mental health can be defined very simply as the existence of positive psychological symptoms and the lack of negative ones.
It’s vital to keep in mind that having good mental health isn’t just about not being sick or having a sickness; here is where SWB enters the definition.
We have a more comprehensive understanding of mental health when we acknowledge the importance of emotions like joy, life satisfaction, fulfilment, purpose, and contentment in daily life. We can then comprehend how to encourage its development in both individuals and populations.
In literature, the media, and elsewhere, SWB is frequently used to describe happiness. However, in more recent times, it has become more widely accepted that the latter is the primary affective element of the former.
Accordingly, SWB includes more than just happiness. We take into account both the past and the future by factoring life satisfaction into SWB measures.
Job satisfaction
In 2010, research showed that one SWB component that positively correlates with life happiness is work or job satisfaction.
The majority of research on work satisfaction and SWB is correlational, however there are a few hypotheses in the literature that explain how the two are related.
A spill over hypothesis has then arisen from this research which explores whether job experiences spill over into other spheres of life, and vice versa, suggesting that a positive relationship exists between the two variables.
Multiple research studies conducted since have revealed a bi-directional association between life happiness and job satisfaction, providing evidence in support of this idea.
The satisfaction of employees’ psychological needs may have an impact on this relationship. They were happier, more productive, and more engaged when they felt their requirements for autonomy, relatedness, and competence were met.
As a result, some potentially useful options for ways businesses might assist their employees on the subjective wellbeing scale arose:
• Employees’ desires for autonomy may be met by creating environments where they feel their behavior is purposeful and voluntary.
• It may satiate their psychological demand for competence to make them feel their behavior is successful and efficient.
• It might be possible to satisfy employees’ demand for relatedness by taking into account what makes them feel valued, understood, and linked by significant individuals.
Life satisfaction and subjective wellbeing
The definition of life satisfaction is widely accepted as being ‘…the degree to which a person evaluates the overall quality of his or her present life-as-a-whole positively’.
Dutch happiness expert, Root Veenhoven has been widely lauded for the development of his matrix that discusses four domains of subjective wellbeing:
• Instant gratification or pleasure is a fleeting, frequently sensory sensation of aspects of life. Examples include enjoying a wonderful piece of cake or listening to some fantastic music.
• Domain satisfaction or being happy with a certain area of your life—your marriage, for example, or your academic career, for example—is associated with a continued appreciation for your life as a whole.
• Top experience refers to fleeting but intense contentment with your life as a whole. This is often referred to as a moment of bliss.
• Core meaning/happiness, on the other hand, refers to enduring, all-encompassing satisfaction with life. Veenhoven claims that this is what life satisfaction truly means and dubbed this as a ‘durable.’ Quality.
These four qualities make it easier to understand how subjective wellbeing fits into everyday life. It also makes it easier to extrapolate that:
• The cognitive aspect of happiness (which is frequently referred to as life satisfaction) is persistent and affects all areas of life.
• In contrast, the positive and negative affect components of SWB can occasionally be connected to domain satisfaction and occasionally, more loosely, to all four of the aforementioned quadrants.
In essence, subjective wellbeing depends on life satisfaction.
Case Study: Variability of Subjective Wellbeing
Everyone is a unique individual, therefore how one person feels about and experiences a situation will elicit a completely different reaction from another person. Similar to how one person may view their life and feel completely pleased with it, another person may believe that their life is insufficient.
Let’s use Gemma as an example.
Gemma leads an extremely active life. She enjoys swimming, tennis, and running and is pleased with how well she does in each of them. She believes that participating in competitions and exercising regularly help her maintain her optimism, physical health, and sense of control over her life.
She maintains a blog on automobile repair in her spare time because she is passionate about the subject.
Gemma is a loving daughter, a very involved mother to her kids, and she considers her marriage to be successful. Even while she occasionally feels stressed about money or lonely when her husband is away overall, she is more likely to feel happy, in love, interested, proud, and optimistic about the future.
In this case, we can see that Gemma experiences happy emotions more frequently and strongly than negative ones. When she pauses to think, she feels content with her life as a whole. She makes an effort to engage in activities that elicit these emotions (playing sports, spending time with her parents and children, and writing her blog).
Her outlook on life is sunny and she is proactive in making sure her life is full of fun and rewarding things, people, places and activities.
Now let’s consider Vikram and his unique characteristics.
Vikram is a highly motivated expert on climate change. He resides at an Antarctic base station with a minimal staff of research colleagues.
He isn’t particularly active, has never excelled at any team or individual sports, isn’t married, and doesn’t have kids. It’s difficult to stay in touch with relatives in the Antarctic, but he maintains good relations with the other members of the research team due to shared interests.
Vikram is in awe of the beauty of his surroundings and the various things he is fortunate enough to see while working every day.
His team’s research findings inspire and enthral him regularly, and he is grateful to have worked hard and merited this opportunity. He can lose himself in his experiments and studies for hours.
When Vikram considers his life as a whole, he is pleased with his accomplishments and glad that he is contributing to the gradual solution of the problem of global climate change.
As a whole, he is very content with his life and finds great pleasure in the pursuit of his interests. He believes he is working with a greater sense of purpose and moving forwards significantly with the objectives that are important to him.
As we can see, Vikram and Gemma have quite different moral standards, lifestyles and approaches to life in general.
Despite their differences and their very different way of doing things, both Gemma and Vikram approach life in a way that allows them the opportunity to get the most out of life, be happy within their lives and to experience enjoyment and contentment with their lives.
If you asked Gemma to live Vikram’s life and vice versa they would likely struggle to find the same level of connection and contentment because they aren’t suited to that lifestyle.
Two distinct individuals with two different lives who both exhibit great subjective wellbeing.
Exercise 4.10: ‘The Guest House’ Poem
comes as an unexpected visitor.
house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honourably.
1. How would you describe the poem? What is your interpretation of its meaning?
2. What emotions did you feel while you listened to the poem being read? (or that you felt whilst reading it?)
3. If you accepted all of the emotions you felt whilst hearing/reading the poem instead of supressing them, how would it change how you’re feeling right now?
4. What advantages could there be in accepting both positive and negative emotions?
5. What lessons from The Guest House can you apply to your daily life?
Course Manual 11: Positive Psychology in Organizations
Introduction
The scientific study of positive subjective experiences and traits in the workplace and positive organizations – as a subset of positive institutions – and its application to improve the effectiveness and quality of life in organizations is known as positive organizational psychology.
Positive organizational psychology is a more focused sub-discipline that studies human flourishing and optimal functioning in the particular context of work and organizations, as opposed to the broader concept of positive psychology, which is committed to examining human flourishing and optimal functioning in general.
Positive leadership, positive organizational development and transformation, and good individual employee traits have all been extensively researched in the literature on positive organizational psychology.
In particular, research on positive, workplace predictors of employee health, wellbeing, relationships and performance has been steadily produced by positive organizational psychology.
Psychological capital (hope, self-efficacy, resilience, optimism), ‘employee strengths use’, positive leadership, and passion at work are just a few of the indicators that are frequently examined.
How these positive, professional determinants may connect to employee green behavior (EGB), however, is a topic that positive organizational psychologists have yet to fully study.
Is Positive Psychology at Work Important?
To promote the growth of individuals, groups, and organizations is one of positive psychology’s main objectives. The competitiveness of the market to attract and retain employees has only increased year on year so if you want to attract and then keep the finest staff, creating a workplace that is underpinned by positive psychology is more important than ever.
According to the ‘paradox of influence’ (which states that while individuals rise in power and make a difference in the world due to the characteristics that are the best thing about human nature, we also fall in power due to the characteristics that are the worst thing about human nature) even if developed countries are becoming more affluent, life satisfaction and mental health aren’t getting better.
This pattern is also evident in the workplace, where if a person’s basic requirements are covered, receiving more money or benefits rarely results in a rise in fulfilment, pleasure or purpose.
The world regularly and in some ways cyclically experiences many challenging difficulties facing the world today, including record inflation, pandemics, conflict, and workplace trends including record employee turnover. Positive psychology within a workplace shows that promoting elements that enable people, groups, and communities to thrive is important.
Through years of research and development, several elements have been identified that may help broaden corporate activities to increase positive psychology levels within and organization when implemented in the workplace:
• Building a culture of optimism and wellbeing will result in lower turnover rates and higher staff retention.
• Improving employee engagement and satisfaction while enhancing productivity and profitability for the company.
• Supporting managers as they develop a more positive and empowering leadership style, boosting employee performance and motivation.
• Improving communication and collaboration among team members, leading to better decision-making and problem-solving.
• Assisting leaders in building a more resilient and adaptable workforce, better able to navigate change and uncertainty.
• Reducing employee stress and burnout, which improves physical and mental health and lowers healthcare expenses.
• Assisting organizations in developing a more positive brand image and reputation that can attract top talent and increase customer loyalty.
• Increasing worker wellbeing, which elevates workplace satisfaction and engagement.
A company’s commitment to its employees’ wellbeing can be demonstrated through using positive psychology concepts at work, which can increase employee engagement and loyalty.
Positive psychology is focused on what makes individuals and communities flourish, rather than languish and is much more than a one-dimensional approach of positive thinking and happy emotions.
Contribution of other theories
Following are some important theories that have been shown to contribute to the effective implementation of positive psychology-led interventions in the workplace:
The broaden-and-build principle
Positive feelings increase staff members’ cognitive and social capacities, promoting original ideas and solutions as well as long-term success and wellbeing.
Attitudes towards happiness
There are three ways for employees to achieve happiness:
• through enjoyment
• engagement
• significance.
Psychological resources
The degree of optimism, self-efficacy, hope, and resilience exhibited by a person might influence their welfare and performance.
Theorem of sustained bliss
Employees should prioritise self-care, social interactions, and fulfilling activities if they want to stay happy.
Such positive psychology approaches have numerous advantages, and research findings have supported the following benefits for businesses, leaders, and employees:
• enhanced positive emotions
• enhanced creativity
• more effective coping mechanisms
• lessened effects of stress
• better resilience
• heightened engagement, exploration, and learning
• more goal-directed behavior.
Simply put, workers who participate in positive psychology-based initiatives and programs at work often flourish more. Organizations with a strong positive psychology platform provide an environment where employees prosper, thrive, learn, engage, self-motivate, express themselves, and experience happiness.
Workplaces that hold positive psychology as a key component to work see significant improvements in employee wellbeing and corporate performance as a result of the positive workplace initiatives they commit to providing.
Many strategies have emerged to implement and integrate positive psychology’s concepts into workplaces and organizations.
Psychological resources
The phrase ‘positive organizational behavior’ refers to the use of psychological and human resource strengths, oriented in a positive way, to stimulate and transform organizational behavior, leadership, and human resource management.
Ever notice how certain individuals always appear to be able to go forwards, no matter what is thrown their way? This is most likely a result of their substantial psychological capital (or ‘PsyCap’).
We can all build our psychological capital to assist us overcome challenges, reduce stress, and increase job happiness.
As a manager, concentrating on psychological capital has the ability to improve the performance and wellness of your team and alter the organization.
The idea for PsyCap first emerged in the 2000s as a part of the positive psychology movement. Over time, PsyCap has come to be defined as ‘an individual’s positive psychological state of development’.
PsyCap essentially refers to our mental resources and their capacity to support us in overcoming challenging circumstances. You have psychological resources at your disposal to help you get through difficult times, just as you may have financial capital to rely on when money is tight.
Each individual is unique, therefore their personal mix of PsyCap will be as unique as they are, however there are some common assets that can be seen regularly:
• Hope: your readiness to make future plans and work towards objectives.
• Efficacy is the conviction that you can do things with success.
• The capacity to “bounce back” after difficulty or failure is Resilience.
• Positivity regarding the future is what Optimism entails.
These assets collectively make up an individual’s HERO, or overall psychological capital.
According to multiple research studies, each individual has ‘psychological capital (PSYCAP), which they can develop through training, learning, and interventions. The acronym HERO stands for these four elements, which are as follows:
• Hope – Positive motivation based on goal-directed energy;
• (Self-)Efficacy – Self-belief in one’s ability to mobilise motivation, cognitive resources, and actions;
• Resilience – The ability to rebound or bounce back from adversity; and
• Optimism – A generalised positive outlook or expectancy
PsyCap that has been properly developed is said to bring advantages for both individuals and in a broader sense, for organizations.
Those with higher PsyCap often experience higher levels of commitment, job satisfaction, and general wellbeing.
Higher levels of PsyCap can also be connected to greater job performance, as well as lowered stress levels. Various PsyCap research over the years shows that participants whose test results show high PsyCap scores were more likely to come up with and try out novel ideas and strategies.
Higher psychological capital has been shown in research to benefit an organization’s bottom line. This results from a more motivated, creative, and fit workforce.
PSYCAP and its four components are seen as renewable, complementary, and synergistic even if they only make up a portion of positive psychology’s core components.
Employees can use them to satisfy job demands while maintaining high levels of competence and wellbeing by being flexible and adaptable in their use.
The significance of PSYCAP was reaffirmed by a review of 41 papers in 2019. Results revealed a range of interventions to strengthen employees’ assets and strengths that markedly enhanced workplace psychological health and productivity.
For example, although the US Army may not seem like your normal place of employment, it employs millions of people, from office workers to warriors on the front lines. The impact was astounding when in 2019, Seligman put interventions into place to boost hope in soldiers sent to the front lines.
These interventions had a significant effect on the way the soldiers behaved in active and demanding situations during training and deployment, but also played a significant role in the way their relationships fared at home as well.
In fact, a study of nearly 6,000 troops found that those who had positive psychology training were more resilient, emotionally fit, and optimistic. They also had greater coping skills.
Leadership based on strengths
In order to enhance both an individual’s wellbeing and a team’s performance, strengths-based leadership focuses on recognising and developing an individual’s or group’s capabilities. Effective leaders surround themselves with the right people and build on each other’s strengths.
When leaders use a strengths-based approach, they don’t merely address staff members’ problems but also emphasize their strong characteristics. A shift in focus like this can boost organizational performance by raising staff engagement and job satisfaction.
Employees are more likely to be engaged, productive, and stay with the organization if they feel valued and recognised for their strengths.
Organizations gain from strengths-based leadership by cultivating a positive and healthy culture. Employees are more likely to feel a sense of purpose and fulfilment in their work when they feel that their abilities are acknowledged and utilised, which promotes creativity and innovation as well as better teamwork and communication.
According to numerous studies, strengths-based leadership has a favourable impact on workers’ overall wellness, psychological wellbeing, innovative behavior, and organizational performance.
Southwest Airlines are a great example of how such positive psychology initiatives can improve employee satisfaction and organizational effectiveness.
They wanted to improve employee experience by fostering a culture that values each person’s unique strengths, thus it introduced strengths-based training. And it succeeded.
Leaders in the organization have observed improved business outcomes as a result of one-on-one and group conversations with their personnel about their capabilities. Because of this, there is a decrease in employee turnover, an increase in productivity, and employees have the opportunity to do what they love in a way that makes customers feel like family.
The effectiveness of your team and your leadership can both be enhanced by a strengths-based strategy.
First off, acknowledging your need for assistance and accepting it from your team members encourages consensual or ‘laissez-faire’ leadership styles in addition to effective delegation. Asking for assistance is a sign of strength, not weakness, and it frees you up to focus on your strongest suit.
In addition to fostering innovation and creativity, responsibility sharing can provide your team members a sense of control and direction. Recognising the skills of your team members demonstrates your confidence in their ability. They’ll probably feel more inclined to speak up and provide their own opinions as a result. As they gain expertise, their motivation and sense of worth will increase.
Leadership that is focused on strengths can improve job satisfaction and team engagement. Gallup produces regular, high-quality reports around positive psychology and subjective wellbeing and their research regularly shows that employees are 40% less likely to get disengaged if their managers aggressively focus on their strengths than they are if their important abilities are neglected.
Additionally, a strengths-based strategy pushes you to hire people based on their unique skills and aptitudes rather than just because they have similar training and experience to you. As a result, there may be more cohesiveness within the team because individuals are working together rather than competing for the same ‘territory’. Additionally, it may result in a team that is more varied in terms of strengths, skill sets, attitudes, and cultural norms.
The following YouTube vide is a great example of how positive psychology assists with achieving much greater corporate outcomes: https://youtu.be/-V3TMeN1Gig
Applying Positive Psychology in the Workplace
Positive psychology is now more than just a self-help idea; it is a potent weapon that can change companies and their outcomes.
Positive psychology shifts the focus from what is clinically wrong, to the promotion of wellbeing and the creation of a satisfying life and has revolutionised workplace dynamics across the globe.
With good reason, companies increasingly view positive psychology in the workplace as a crucial component of employee hiring, retention, and achievement of organizational goals.
According to research, positive psychology can improve employee relationships and morale while also boosting performance metrics including productivity, creative problem-solving, and conflict resolution. Additionally, it facilitates employee integration and retention for a longer period of time, which is crucial in positions with widespread shortages.
An example of this trend is a Canadian brokerage firm that offers ‘happiness training’ to staff members so they can develop basic positive habits like sending ‘gratitude emails’ to co-workers. Another example is the way Southeastern Railway taught all line managers in mental health first aid and made a public ‘Mindful Employer Pledge’ in the UK.
In the words of the Black Dog Institute, ‘When our workplaces are mentally healthy, we see enormous benefits to both individual employees and the business itself.’
Understanding workplace positive psychology appears to be more important than ever for improving performance and demonstrating your leadership potential. Following the pandemic, organizations have needed to adopt a hybrid working arrangement where employees attend the workplace for some of the week and work remotely for the rest of the week. This is a prime example of just one of the ways that workplace psychology needs to be prioritised when creating strategic plans for the business.
Here are the top five ways you may start applying positive psychology right away.
Honour accomplishments
Processes that identify and value employee contributions can be developed by organizations, generating highly very important good feelings that motivate employees to get out of bed in the morning.
Managers could, for instance, consistently (yet sincerely) thank teams and specific employees for their good work. Recognising how individuals have contributed via perseverance, collaboration, or ingenuity may be done by email or in team meetings.
In addition to celebrating accomplishments, encouraging staff members to discuss their work at conferences or publish a project in a professional magazine or corporate newsletter are ways to showcase the firm favourably to outsiders.
These procedures foster productive cooperation at work and motivate individuals to use the same effective tactics in the future. Therefore, after difficult tasks, be sure to give employees a chance to celebrate and think back on how it overcome obstacles.
Focus on your advantages
Organizations are encouraged by positive psychology to build on their employees’ strengths and provide them with opportunity to develop their abilities. You can help your team in this effort by working with them through strength assessment exams. Annual reviews and goal-setting are opportunities to capitalise on strengths for both personal and business gain.
According to research, people love their jobs more if they can employ all of their skills, such as teamwork, judgement, and leadership.
Of course, it’s bad for business to ignore deficiencies, so it’s important to strike a balance between performance management, highlighting strengths, and self-awareness.
Organizations may profit and create a more engaged workforce by purposefully placing people in more circumstances where they can succeed. Employers may need to be flexible with this strategy as they find the correct balance of labour strengths.
Workplace relationships
Relationships play a key role in how we behave at work. Organizations must create safe connections among management, employees, and teams in particular.
As well as celebrating success in teams, employers could consider team-based activities, such as lunchtime exercise, mindfulness training or other activities with wellbeing benefits.
Ensuring that team members understand their own and each other’s role in a shared goal is essential. Organizational leaders need to be inclusive, recognising that everyone from the cleaner to the MD has a role to play regardless of their job in the company. By including all employees, a sense of belonging is achieved, and people feel valued.
Managers should be trained to see themselves as ‘coaches’ and be accessible to their staff – in group and individual settings – allowing staff to discuss challenges and ideas.
Conversations should be frequent and casual. Open-door policies work but need boundaries so that they’re not disruptive. Having drop-in sessions to be accessible as a manager is another option.
Encouraging people to be curious and ask questions enables issues to be raised, assurances to be given, and staff to feel that someone is listening.
Have the cultural conversation
Help people see that their work has meaning by actively talking about organizational goals, values and culture.
Suppose an organization is clear about its purpose. In that case, individuals can decide whether their values align with their employers’ – and either feel motivated to contribute or decide to move on to an opportunity that better aligns with their values.
Communicate this purpose at every opportunity: in the physical work environment, via public and internal communications, at events, and in staff meetings. Even job descriptions and employee work plans should explicitly align with broader organizational goals.
Of course, an organization needs to be clear on its objectives to share them with staff. The best approach is collaborating with the team to develop and refine this workplace culture over time, creating the maximum opportunity for individuals to own their work.
Staff can be engaged in this culture-building process via online surveys or group forums. Seeing its input in action is an excellent morale builder. Conducting a cultural audit gives insights into the current culture and areas where the focus is needed to change behavior.
It’s also a good marker to show an organization’s journey implement positive psychology in the workplace and its impact on the culture.
Invest in people
Creating opportunities for learning and accomplishment builds your workplace skill base and shows employees that the organization values them. Consider ways you can sponsor employees to grow their skills and ensure that these opportunities are visible. There are various options with varying levels of financial investment:
• Professional development
• Mentoring (share expertise ‘up, down and across’ the organization to give all staff leadership experience)
• Short-term promotions to cover senior staff on leave.
As well as building loyalty and fulfilment in your workforce, regular opportunities to learn can help people develop a growth mindset for their career journey.
We know this is vital in today’s workplace, as organizations face rapidly developing technologies and work practices. Learning and development add new skill sets to a team, so it’s a win-win for both individuals and businesses.
Case Study: Harnessing the Power of Positive Psychology at Work
Positive psychology ideas can be quite useful in the job. The foundation for improving an employee’s performance is to focus on their personal qualities, skills, and capabilities.
Recent research from throughout the world demonstrated that workgroups that received strength-based treatments experienced average increases in employee engagement of up to 15%, decreases in staff turnover of up to 721%, and reductions in safety incidents of up to 591%.
A novel positive psychology approach to team management was applied by Eleni van Delft, an accredited strengths coach and director of relationship management at AccessEAP, a top not-for-profit employee assistance programme (EAP) provider in Australia.
The outcomes have increased productivity for the company and boosted employee engagement.
Applying positive psychology helped the team play to their strengths during a time of tremendous business success.
The strategy
Within the organization, a series of significant victories had made it essential to increase the size of the organization. Increasing in size and bringing in new team members meant that the new team needed a fresh strategy.
Positive psychology, and in particular, the study of the essential components that enable individuals to thrive in life and at work was both inspiring and fascinating to Eleni. Being an accredited strengths coach had significantly influenced her management approach to provide positive reinforcement and set an example. She therefore decided early on that she wanted to aid the team’s rapprochement and establish their ideal working dynamics.
The hiring of new employees provided the team with an excellent opportunity to recognise the unique talents that each member possessed and to support one another in realising their full potential.
Eleni’s main goal therefore became to develop the freshly assembled team of varied, competent, and enthusiastic workers from a variety of industry experiences into a unified group that could value what each other has to give.
Introducing Positive Psychology
The team was shown “The Science of Character” (you can view the film here: https://youtu.be/a5PrHijwWz8), a short film that piqued their interest and presented the concept of personal strengths.
The team then completed a few psychometric tests before holding a group discussion about the findings of the tests.
In the initial psychometric tests the team completed, value statements such as ‘Being able to come up with new and different ideas is one of my strong points’ were included. The outcomes gave each team member a unique profile that highlighted their best qualities among 24 possible features.
The topic of when co-workers had used their abilities and how they appeared to be ‘in their element’ when doing so was brought up naturally in the discussion that followed.
The program had an instant impact. The energy level increased and the mood in the room improved. More camaraderie existed, and the new team’s diverse set of abilities was better understood and valued.
Additionally, each person developed a greater sense of self and developed original suggestions for better using their skills.
This initial result provided Eleni with motivation to continue using the positive psychology strategy and expand on these revelations.
Eleni then added a second questionnaire, allowing her to pinpoint 60 particular abilities that were directly related to the workplace. The more thorough results included a profile of each person’s unique strengths. The profiles were separated into 4 quadrants, each with corresponding strengths:
• Realised strengths
• Unrealised strengths
• Learned behaviors
• Weaknesses
From parenting to performance management, traditional methods of inspiring change in others place a strong emphasis on people’s flaws and potential. However, research indicates that these conventional methods often have the opposite of the desired results, which tends to be a decline in team morale, performance, and individual confidence.
When the exercise originally started, Eleni could tell that these conventional methods were at play because the majority of the team members wanted to concentrate on their flaws during the strengths debriefing.
When they started focusing on people’s strengths, there was a significant shift that happened, and it was for the better. As a way to continually celebrate the strengths of each individual in the team, personalised mugs were made for everyone as a daily reminder of what they provide to the team.
As a result of the exercise, the team has developed highly collaborative and cohesive working connections through acknowledging and recognising one another’s perceived talents. Additionally, there have been notable increases in output, individual performance, and a decline in the number of days lost to illness.
The team now has more self-assurance, is more willing to learn from and grow in their jobs, and is more motivated to produce their best work as a result of this strategy. For instance, there have been more suggestions made on how to develop procedures that are more efficient or how to carry out tasks in more creative ways. Another result was that one of the team members discovered a skill for presenting to groups that wasn’t being used in their current function, so the organization was able to create opportunities for this to happen more often.
At the workplace level as well, the advantages of using positive psychology through strengths coaching have been recognised. At AccessEAP, there is a strong focus on finding ways to better use employees’ potential by giving them opportunity to use their abilities.
After going through this process, it is evident that emphasising strengths rather than deficiencies has improved and will continue to improve our colleagues’, teams’, and even the organization’s performance.
Exercise 4.11: The Best Team
1. Imagine your team functioning at its optimal level, with all of its members performing to the best of their abilities and the team achieving all of the set goals.
– Write about your team at its best possible ‘self’.
– What skills and characteristics do they have?
– How do they feel about coming to work?
– How do they ‘show-up’ in the workplace?
– How do they behave in the workplace?
– What do they think about being a part of your team?
– What would they say to other people about coming to work as a part of your team?
2. Share your individual visualisations of your team with the group.
3. Draw two columns on the page and label them ‘Similarities’ and ‘Differences’
– Write down the similarities between each individual’s vision.
– Do the same for the differences.
4. As a group, integrate your findings to come up with a new shared vision for your ‘best team’.
– Pay particular attention to the similarities column as this reflects the group’s common aspirations.
– Work collaboratively to write down a detailed description of this new best team.
Course Manual 12: Positive Psychology’s Influence on the Self
Introduction
Positive psychology techniques have beneficial effects on people’s daily lives by lowering stress and anxiety, boosting resilience, and encouraging personal development, wellbeing, and quality of life. This occurs across various cultures, communities, situations and knowledge disciplines, comparable to the findings highlighted by recent meta-analyses.
Positive psychology holds that by being conscious of our strengths, we may enhance those aspects of ourselves rather than concentrating on our weaknesses. This creates a specific process that is designed to diagnose abilities and strengths and is intended to help us better understand who we are and our actions and reactions to the things that occur in our lives.
The goal of positive psychology is to provide an answer to the question of how a person may rely on themselves to overcome challenges and complete tasks.
The founder of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, thinks that this line of reasoning concentrates on what makes life worthwhile. We may boost our power and move our lives in the direction of happiness and wealth by learning how human strength functions. One must learn about themselves and the values that underpin them in order to be happy.
Self-esteem and positive psychology
William James was a psychologist, physician, philosopher, and the first teacher in the United States to provide a psychology course. He wondered why some people were able to thrive and get through hardships while others experienced mental health issues.
In 1890, James connected self-esteem to the level of confidence that results from the relationship between our actual accomplishments and our objectives. He used the term ‘aspiration’ to refer to forecasting potential outcomes based on our objectives, values, and ambitions.
This strategy contrasts our impression of who we are with our ideal selves. In order to develop self-esteem, we must examine all forms of criticism from places like school, peers, the workplace, and families. The way we behave in spheres of life that are important to us has a significant impact on how we feel about ourselves.
Self-esteem presupposes that a crucial element of flourishing within our lives is being happy with who we are, and some researchers have gone to the extent of creating a correlation between having a strong sense of self-worth and living an affluent existence.
In the modern society, we take care of our self-esteem by making investments in our intellectual advancement and personal growth. We regularly attend training sessions, enrol in language classes, and advance our education.
Our self-esteem is also impacted by going to the gym and watching what we eat. A major factor in the process is one’s physical health and fitness. We also spend money on cosmetic procedures because we want to look better.
By getting together with friends and discussing different viewpoints, we aim to strengthen our interpersonal relationships. We make an effort to occasionally visit the theatre or the movies or read a worthwhile book.
What we have invested in ourselves says a lot about who we are. This kind of growth and investment in high self-esteem is held in societal opinion as crucial to our ability to get ahead.
We raise the existential bar because it makes us feel good about who we are. Our self-esteem increases as we perform more tasks, work harder to accomplish our goals, and do so more frequently.
For those with high self-esteem, the sense of safety in interpersonal interactions is the most significant advantage. They experience acceptance and a sense of being ‘a part of an organism’ within the community. Through doing so, they feel that stress brought on by the worry of being rejected or alienated can be successfully lessened.
High self-esteem is held with such importance in society that research conducted in 2004 by Pyszczyski, Greenberg and Solomon led to the creation of the Terror Management Theory. This theory showed that high self-esteem was so powerful as to show the reduction in the universal and primal fear of dying. The research conducted to create this theory showed that such was the strength of high self-esteem that individuals with high self-esteem felt more powerful and metaphorically ‘immortal.’
For almost as long as psychology has existed, self-esteem has been a hot topic in psychology. Even Freud, who many people believe to be the father of psychology (even if he and his ‘children’ are somewhat estranged at this point), put self-esteem theories at the centre of his research.
Psychologists have been studying what self-esteem is, how it develops (or fails to develop), and what influences it for a very long time, and there’s no hint that we’ll ever fully understand it.
Even if there is still much to learn about self-esteem, we have at least been able to define it and distinguish it from other, related conceptions. Continue reading to find out what distinguishes self-esteem from other self-directed qualities and emotions.
Self-Concept vs. Self-Esteem
Although self-esteem may be a component of self-concept, self-esteem is not the same as self-concept. The idea we have of ourselves—our response to the enquiry “Who am I?”—is known as our self-concept. It involves being aware of one’s own tendencies, ideas, preferences, and habits, as well as one’s interests, talents, and weak points.
Simply said, our sense of who we are is the consciousness of who we are.
Self-Image vs. Self-Esteem
Self-image is a term that sounds similar to self-concept but has a different meaning; it is all about how you see yourself. But it might also be founded on erroneous and misleading ideas about who we are rather than on reality.
Our self-image may be close to or distant from truth, but it rarely matches either objective reality or how other people see us.
Self-Worth vs. Self-Esteem
Self-worth and self-esteem are related ideas, but there is a subtle but significant distinction between the two: self-worth is the more universal acknowledgement that we are valuable human beings deserving of affection, whereas self-esteem is what we think, feel, and believe about ourselves.
Self-Confidence vs. Self-Esteem
Self-confidence, as opposed to self-esteem, is the belief in one’s capacity to overcome obstacles, find solutions to issues, and interact successfully with others. As you could have inferred from this statement, self-confidence is mostly focused on outward indicators of worth and achievement rather than the internal factors that go into self-esteem.
High levels of self-confidence, particularly in a particular area or subject, are not a guarantee of a sound sense of one’s own worth or self-esteem.
Self-Efficacy vs. Self-Esteem
Self-efficacy, like self-confidence, is linked to self-esteem but is not a substitute for it. The belief in one’s capacity to be successful at particular tasks is referred to as self-efficacy. When it comes to playing basketball, you might have high self-efficacy, but when it comes to doing well in math class, you can have low self-efficacy.
Self-efficacy is centred on outward success rather than internal worth, and it is more focused and less general than self-esteem.
Self-Compassion vs. Self-Esteem
Finally, self-compassion is not the same as self-esteem. Instead of focusing on how we evaluate or view ourselves, self-compassion focuses on how we interact with ourselves.
Being self-compassionate entails treating ourselves with kindness and forgiveness and refraining from being unduly critical or harsh with ourselves. Self-compassion is not self-esteem in and of itself, but it can help us develop a positive sense of self-worth.
What high self-esteem looks like
Research has shown that it is possible to tell how high someone’s self-esteem is by specific traits that are carried.
These qualities include things like being willing to accept criticism, owning up to mistakes, enjoying getting accolades, and exhibiting harmony in one’s actions, words, and appearance.
High self-esteem individuals aren’t shy about expressing their curiosity or talking about their chances, experiences, and thoughts. Additionally, they can find humour in their life and feel at ease using assertiveness in social or personal situations.
Despite the fact that high self-esteem has received less attention than poor self-esteem, the premise and purpose behind the positive psychology movement has brought high self-esteem into the lime light and prefers to highlight high self-esteem in line with focusing on an individual’s strengths.
Because of this, we now have a better understanding of what high self-esteem looks like and how to develop it. People with high self-esteem tend to:
• Embrace their own and other people’s worth.
• Take pleasure in developing personally and discovering fulfilment and significance in their lives.
• Are able to tap into their own creativity and depth.
• Make their own choices and only comply with what others advise them to do or be when they are in agreement.
• Consider the word in practical terms, encouraging others to grow in confidence and move in a more positive path while embracing them as they are.
• Can focus easily on finding solutions to their personal concerns.
• Have relationships that are respectful and loving.
• Recognise their principles and live their life in accordance with them.
• Share their wants and needs with others, speak up and calmly and gently express their thoughts.
• Make an effort to positively impact other people’s lives (Smith & Harte, n.d.).
The research has also shown that there are several easy techniques to determine if someone has a high sense of self-worth. You are more likely to have a high sense of self-worth if you:
• Act assertively without feeling guilty and communicate with others without hesitation.
• Focus on the present and avoid thinking about the past.
• Consider yourself to be on par with everyone else, neither better nor worse.
• Reject other people’s attempts to influence you.
• Recognise and embrace a variety of emotions, both good and bad, and express them in your wholesome relationships.
• Enjoy a good mix of work, pleasure, and downtime.
• Accept challenges, take risks, and learn from your mistakes when you fail in order to advance.
• Take criticism in stride, remembering that you are developing and evolving and that your value is independent of other people’s perceptions.
• Without hesitation, share your likes, dislikes, and sentiments to people and value yourself.
• Value other people and leave them alone without attempting to alter them.
Self-esteem facts and statistics that might surprise you
Understanding self-esteem and why it is so crucial to a positive outlook on life can be challenging. Here’s a list of facts and findings that might surprise you:
• Low self-esteem is associated with violence, school dropout rates, teenage pregnancies, suicide, and poor academic performance.
• According to the Council on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, approximately 44% of high school females and 15% of boys are trying to shed weight.
• According to the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, seven out of ten females feel that they fall short in some aspect or are not good enough.
• According to the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, a girl’s self-esteem is more closely correlated with how she perceives her own body shape and weight than with how much she actually weighs.
• According to the Confidence Coalition, 90% of women wish to change at least one area of their physical appearance.
• According to the Confidence Coalition, 81% of 10-year-old girls are terrified of being overweight.
• According to the Confidence Coalition, one in four women in college have an eating disorder.
• According to the Confidence Coalition, only 2% of women reportedly believe they are attractive.
• Self-esteem is negatively impacted by absent fathers, poverty, and a poor home environment.
Given the facts about the low level of self-esteem in society and the advantages of having a high level of self-esteem, it becomes imperative that there is a focus placed on how to use positive psychology to raise the self-esteem of every individual.
Practical and effective ways to increase self-esteem
Fortunately, self-esteem levels are not something that we are born with and there are effective tips and processes that can help people to increase their self-esteem.
Establish a baseline for yourself, take a self-esteem inventory
It might be as easy as listing your top ten strengths and ten weaknesses. This will assist you in starting to form an accurate and realistic idea of who you are.
Establish reasonable goals
Setting manageable, manageable, and small goals is crucial. Setting unrealistic expectations or expecting someone else to alter their behavior, for instance, is almost certain to make you feel inadequate despite having done nothing wrong.
Give up striving for perfection
Recognise both your successes and your shortcomings. Nobody is flawless, and attempting to be one will only leave you feeling let down. The key to maintaining a positive attitude while learning from your mistakes is to acknowledge both your successes and your faults.
Examine who you are
It is crucial to understand who you are and to be at peace with who you are. It may take some trial and error, and you’ll continually discover new things about yourself, but this is a trip that you should go on with fervour and purpose.
Be willing to change how you see yourself
We all change as we get older and mature, and if we want to create and accomplish significant goals, we must adapt to our ever-changing selves.
Quit evaluating yourself against others
It’s quite simple to slip into the comparison trap, especially in the digital age of social media and the opportunity to present a polished, perfected image. You are the only one to whom you should compare yourself.
Research shows that there are also some tips you can follow to help you to raise your self-esteem:
• When your inner critic has a bit too much to say in a negative or harsh voice, actively tell your inner critic to cease and find a gentler way to talk to yourself.
• Find things that motivate you and use them to help you make choices for your life that direct you towards the things that make you feel good.
• Take regular mini-breaks (2-5 minutes) and spend some time appreciating yourself.
• In the evening, jot down three positive qualities you have about yourself.
• Do what is right, especially what is right for you.
• Let perfectionism go and allow yourself to be OK with having a go at things, no matter the outcome.
• Deal with errors and failures in a more constructive manner.
• Grow your compassion for yourself and then apply that to others as well.
• Try something new.
• Avoid using comparisons as a crutch.
• Spend more time with uplifting individuals and less time with those that are harmful.
• Consider your accomplishments. Listing all of your individual accomplishments is the most effective strategy for overcoming imposter syndrome, which is the conviction that, despite all of your victories, you are a failure and a fraud. Some of them might be able to be attributed to chance, but not all of them can.
• Increase your movement. This can take the form of anything from a brisk walk to a strenuous multi-mile run, from a quick ‘power pose’ to a two-hour yoga session; the important thing is that you enhance your health and confidence by being more in touch with your body.
• Implement the ‘five-second’ rule. This encourages you to act on your inspired ideas and positive thoughts. Within five seconds, take action to make that wonderful idea a reality.
• Develop your success visualisation skills. Spend some time using all five senses while keeping your eyes closed to see the situation in which you have achieved your goals.
• Whatever situation you are about to face, be ready for it. If you’re heading for a job interview, make sure you’ve prepared some excellent questions, are familiar with the organization, and have practised. Take the time to build your self-confidence before going on a date, dress nicely, and have a plan A, plan B, and perhaps even a plan C to ensure everything goes smoothly.
• Don’t overuse social media. Reduce the amount of time you spend staring at screens and instead prioritise seeing the environment.
• Meditate. Create a daily meditation routine to examine your ideas, pay attention to them, and detach from them. Self-esteem can be developed in a healthy way by working on your inner calm.
• Secretly pursue your objectives. While you don’t have to keep all of your goals and aspirations to yourself, it’s a good idea to keep some of them private because doing so can increase the likelihood that you’ll achieve them and make you happier when you do.
• Understand that failing actually allows you to gain confidence. When you see failure in this way, you will actively seek out failure by trying new things and taking calculated risks. Use failure as an opportunity to learn and improve.
Case Study: Changing Self-Esteem in the Workplace
Serial entrepreneur Anand Prakash recalls vividly a time early in his career when he oversaw a person who was insecure.
Peter was a front-end Android developer who had been employed as a contract employee at the time, and Anand was assisting Verizon with the construction of an incubator. Peter was very smart, but his self-esteem was very low and he had no conscious connection to his true potential.
Anand, however, believed in Peter’s abilities and felt that he would be more useful working on the back-end of the project.
When Anand suggested to Peter that he wanted him to work on the back-end development, Peter wasn’t sure he was up to the task. Even though Peter was a computer science engineer with ten years of coding experience, and he had all the fundamental building blocks, he was still unsure in his abilities. The fact that some of the work was unfamiliar to him, cause Peter to be terrified of the work he was being asked to do.
At first, Anand didn’t press Peter. Instead, he took the time to get to know him and establish a rapport. Anand went out of his way to build a relationship with Peter that let him know that he was on his side.
As time went on and Anand got to know Peter better he was able to understand that offering Peter the opportunity to learn something new was a great way to encourage Peter to step into the back-end development of the project.
Anand then assigned Peter to work on a small, very defined, and very specific part of the back-end project. He presented it as an opportunity to learn which meant that it was a small thing, rather than a big thing he was asking Peter to do.
This allowed Peter to feel at ease and also gave him the opportunity to experience a quick win with the work he was doing because he was learning, rather than delivering.
In a week, Peter finished the project with success. So Anand offered Peter with another small, very defined project that he could practice what he had learned on. Because Peter had completed the first project with ease and without any pressure, it was easy for him to say yes to the opportunity to participate in another project.
While it took Peter some time to finish the subsequent assignment, he did so more quickly than he had the previous time and because of this he was left with the feeling that he was getting better at the back-end development work.
However, when Anand handed Peter a third project things didn’t turn out as expected. Peter made a mistake in the work he was doing and the servers were hampered as a result which affected other members of the group.
The group reacted by being irritated and annoyed at Peter and he responded by withdrawing within himself and becoming dejected. Peter experienced a hit to his confidence and self-esteem because of the response of the other team members.
Anand continued to work with Peter and gradually handed him more challenging assignments with more authority.
Anand went on to become the CEO of Grail AI, a company that utilises artificial intelligence to diagnose cancer, and Peter is a successful backend developer that Anand continually turns to when he needs new back-end projects undertaken.
Exercise 4.12: Understanding the Self
1. What value do you place on your life?
– How often do you put yourself and your needs first?
– How many times a day do you stop and check-in to see what you need?
– Do you do something that is just for you every day?
2. What makes you who you are?
3. How important are you to yourself?
4. What do your answers to questions 1-3 say about you?
5. What are you like?
6. What do you deserve?
7. What is important to you?
Project Studies
Before the commencement of Workshop 5, the Head of each department is to provide a detailed report relating to the introduction of positive psychology within their department.
The report should include the following:
– Initial evaluation of the current status of positive psychology within the department.
– A SWOT analysis relating to the department’s current positive psychology status.
– Strategic process for implementing and maintaining positive psychology on an ongoing basis. The process is to include the following 12 elements:
o Positive psychology
o History of positive psychology
o Assumptions of positive psychology
o Examples of positive psychology
o Positive psychology pillars
o The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology
o Issues with Positive Psychology
o Happiness
o Humanist Psychology, Cognitive Psychology and Positive Psychology
o Subjective Wellbeing
o Positive Psychology in Organizations
o Positive Psychology’s Influence on the Self
– Detail any challenges experienced whilst implementing the process.
– Confirmation that the process has been successfully implemented and is now fully operational.
Program Benefits
Human Resources
- Improved engagement
- Improved culture
- Reduced burnout
- Increased retention
- Employee loyalty
- Performance improvement
- Empowered workforce
- Healthy organization
- Increased effectiveness
- Happier workplace
Management
- Stronger leadership
- Increased focus
- Cohesive workforce
- Greater collaboration
- Wellness mindset
- Greater potential
- Improved communication
- Consistent management
- Greater creative flow
- Positive environment
Business Operations
- Improved wellness
- Reduced costs
- Operating efficiency
- Improved quality
- Operational synergy
- Enhanced environment
- Clarified priorities
- Improved effectiveness
- Organizational resilience
- Increased productivity
Client Telephone Conference (CTC)
If you have any questions or if you would like to arrange a Client Telephone Conference (CTC) to discuss this particular Unique Consulting Service Proposition (UCSP) in more detail, please CLICK HERE.