by Steve Emery | February, 2017 | What Positive Psychology Means To Me
I think at heart I have always been a Positive Psychologist. Long before I had ever heard the title Positive Psychology I was very much a disciple of that way of thinking. I heard it said many times “You’re the most positive person around” and “Why are you always smiling?” I could never fully understand why the people around me never saw things the way I did. It felt like I was a spark of positivity in a vast ocean of negativity. I often found myself being drawn in to that world and joining in with conversations deemed to “put the world to rights”. I always felt there had to be another way. Shawn Achor put it well in his book “The Happiness Advantage” when he said the first way is to just carry on and languish in life where nothing ever changes, or you can get very anxious and let the world drag you down. Or there is a third way, a way in which you can work on improving your life and make a conscious effort to improve your overall happiness. I was always drawn to books, films and music which sent a message of happiness, but there just seemed so few of them. A few years ago, a friend introduced me to Coursera, a website offering free short courses submitted by various Universities, mostly in the USA. It was an ideal place to learn about business and I took a few short courses on Leadership, strategy, and such like. And then I started looking around at what other courses were available and got engrossed in courses...
by Sarah Monk | February, 2017 | What Positive Psychology Means To Me
For me positive psychology provides a route to be the best you can be without having to apologise for who you are. A common criticism of positive psychology is that it ignores the harsh realities in life and focuses purely on the positives. This is not how I see it at all. The first two books I read on positive psychology were “The Happiness Hypothesis” by Jonathan Haidt and “Authentic Happiness” by Martin Seligman. When you read their work, it is clear that both these authors, like me, are not winners in the genetic lottery of rose coloured spectacles. They are not happy go lucky people who want everyone to see the world as they do, but people trying to understand how to live the best life they can and help others do the same. I have struggled with depression on and off for most of my life. To use a common metaphor, to me positive psychology means not having to apologise that you naturally see the glass as half empty, but not being stuck with that either. It provides a mechanism to try to fill the glass to it’s full potential rather than trying to make it less empty, and to be armed to refill it again and again when life drains it. I came to psychology in my late teens as a depressed medical student reeling from a series of challenging life events. At that time medicine did not feel to me like it was really about helping and understanding people. I discovered psychology through a module in my second year of medicine. It was the lecture...
by Lesley Lyle | January, 2017 | What Positive Psychology Means To Me
Sitting at my computer and contemplating the question “What does positive psychology mean to you?” I am finding it hard to explain. Why? Because positive psychology had crept into my bloodstream from before it was even a concept in Martin Seligman or Christopher Peterson’s notes. As a child I was fascinated by people and their behaviour. I am a creative person, a fine artist amongst other things, and this makes me very reflective and curious. I also want to be happy. Who doesn’t? I’m a book worm and besides gorging myself on a diverse genre of books, as a young adult I also read Dickens and Orwell, so my social awareness was developed early on, and this has meant I have been determined since my school days to do good for others where I can and to live a life that makes me happy, one free of drudge and miserable obligation. I am an empathetic person and so also would like to help others find their calling and happiness in life. Psychology back when I was at university was (from what I could tell) about ‘damaged minds’ and that didn’t appeal to me. Too negative. I wanted to make things better for people and couldn’t understand why we didn’t look at the positive opportunities instead. So eventually I went into human resources, hoping that I could influence the way organisations support employees in being at their best. It gave me the opportunity to study people, understand them better and develop strategies that made the workplace an enjoyable experience and not somewhere that you have to endure until retirement. As...
by iain menzies | December, 2015 | What Positive Psychology Means To Me
Who I am today Positive psychology is the field that upended my world ten years ago, gave my life new purpose, my job new meaning, my friends more importance, and my loved ones more gratitude. In short, it rocked my existence and changed me in so many ways that I don’t know who I would be today, personally or professionally, without it. More yes, less no Once you are exposed to the research on how to live a fulfilling and flourishing life, you can’t unring that bell. You have heard it and you are now accountable to do something with it. For example, Chris Peterson was one of the major instructors during my year in the first MAPP program at the University of Pennsylvania in 2005 and 2006, and he was famous for announcing in almost every lecture, “Positive Psychology boils down to one phrase: Other people matter.” I heard repeatedly that cultivating the right relationships would bear significant fruit in life, so I changed my work schedule to include more time for friends and less time in the office. I said “yes” to things more often than I said “no.” Happiness then success I also was exposed to the research on how success in life is preceded by happiness, and that we don’t become happy because we are successful, we become successful because we are happy. That altered the fundamental way I use goal-setting in my life and coaching practice, and even resulted in my Capstone project, which became ‘Creating Your Best Life’ (Sterling), the first evidence-based book to connect the science of flourishing with the science of goal...
by Dan Collinson | September, 2015 | What Positive Psychology Means To Me
Helping others on their journey As a mental health nursing tutor, I have considered what we do and how we help individual’s on their journey. many times I have discovered it is the smile, the kind action such as making a cup of tea that gives us the entrance to be challenging towards others. We often have to help the individual to deal with their emotional responses, mostly our methods were reactive, i.e. a problem occurred and we helped the person to find a way through retrospectively. This may lead to giving the person a greater understanding for their own future. A few years ago now I read a radical theory that you can be both mentally ill and mentally healthy at the same time (Keith Tudor). This meant that I could start trusting my own patient’s to do their best (mentally healthy) to grow and at the same time understand that this would help the individual to deal with their mental illness issues. Finding meaning in life Then a little while later I was to go through a series of bereavements, including my wife (I was not yet 40). I personally went into a period of decline as I tried to find meaning to life. I was to begin understanding meaning one day when I was in my sister-in-laws house and her four year old wanted me to build Lego with her. I had nothing better to do so built, she knocked it down. She encouraged me more and she knocked it down again and started to giggle. Okay, so I built again from floor to ceiling, she...
by Lesley Lyle | July, 2015 | What Positive Psychology Means To Me
What Positive Psychology Means to Me Positive psychology is a great field to work in because I find that I’m constantly getting confronted with the upside of things; what is right and what is going well. Much like Martin Seligman confesses in his book ‘Learned Optimism’, I wasn’t always looking for what was going right in my life and trying to ameliorate (and focus on) these things. Instead my default mode was to look for what was wrong. I was essentially a fault-finder, and still can be if the situation asks for it. However, if you are involved in the field long enough, you’ll automatically start to develop a healthy positivity bias that allows you to have a realistic outlook on life, which default mode is geared towards the positive. The insights that science of positive psychology have provided me with have heavily influenced my lifestyle, interactions with other people, decision-making process and my overal well-being. What I think that contributed most to this is that I wasn’t just following some random advice from self-help books or the like, but that I got a sense of why certain interventions, or ways of doing things, repeatedly get a certain outcome. It’s like you’re learning about the mechanism that guides your everyday behaviour and slowly discovering how to master it, instead of the other way around. This, in my opinion, is invaluable. ‘We Are The Positive Psychology...
