Flourish

A visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being

By Martin E. P. Seligman

 

TOPICS

Positive Psychology • Well-Being • Resilience

 

The Big Idea

To flourish is to build five core elements: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

From the back cover: “Traditionally, the goal of psychology has been to relieve human suffering, but the goal of the Positive Psychology movement [is] different—it’s about actually raising the bar for the human condition. Flourish builds on Dr. Seligman’s game-changing work on optimism, motivation, and character to show how to get the most out of life, unveiling an electrifying new theory of what makes a good life—for individuals, for communities, and for nations.”

 

Key Definitions

Well-being theory goes beyond happiness and increasing life satisfaction to measure positive emotion, engagement, meaning, positive relationships, and accomplishment with the goal to increase flourishing.

  • Positive emotion. In short, the pleasant life.

  • Engagement. Assessed subjectively by asking, “Did time stop for you? Were you completely absorbed by the task? Did you lose self-consciousness?” Seligman reminds us to “keep in mind, however, that thought and feeling are usually absent during the flow state, and only in retrospect do we say, ‘That was fun’.”

  • Positive Relationships. “Other people are the best antidote to the downs of life and the single most reliable up.”

  • Meaning. Belonging to and serving something that you believe is bigger than the self. Not solely a subjective state.

  • Accomplishment. Pursuing success, accomplishment, and mastery for its own sake, even when it brings no positive emotion, no meaning, and nothing in the way of positive relationship on its own.

 

What’s the Significance?

Well-being is buildable

Well-being is not something you have or you don’t.

Design, like traditional psychology, has failed in its core premise that by simply solving the right problems, better conditions will emerge. Seligman turns that on its head: eliminating problems only creates an empty container.

Instead, he encourages us to focus our efforts on actions and creating the conditions that will result in a reinforcing cycle of positive change and well-being.

Resilience is learnable

Building the elements of well-being creates resilience for when life throws inevitable curveballs.

“We think too much about what goes wrong and not enough about what goes right in our lives. Of course, sometimes it makes sense to analyze bad events so that we can learn from them and avoid them in the future. However, people tend to spend more time thinking about what is bad in life than is helpful. Worse, this focus on negative events sets us up for anxiety and depression. One way to keep this from happening is to get better at thinking about and savoring what went well (emphasis mine).

Growth after trauma is possible

“If all a soldier knows is about PTSD, and not about resilience and growth, it creates a self-fulfilling downward spiral […] that catastrophizing and believing you have PTSD engenders.”

This book demonstrates that focusing on emphasizing strengths (instead eliminating weakness) and building an optimistic outlook results in growth, especially after a traumatic experience.

“A substantial number of people also show intense depression and anxiety after extreme adversity, often to the level of PTSD, but then they grow. In the long run, they arrive at a higher level of psychological functioning than before.”

 

Practical Application

Purpose of Business: Wealth as a means to engender flourishing. This concept is at the core of the social enterprise movement: to make businesses that create a better world for employees, customers, the environment, AND shareholders.

“But what is wealth for, anyway? The goal of wealth, in my view, is not just to produce more wealth but to engender flourishing. We can now ask of public policy, ‘How much will building this new school rather than this park increase flourishing?’”

Impact Measurement: The differences between a construct and a directly measurable thing. “Well-being is a construct, and happiness is a thing. A ‘real thing’ is a directly measurable entity. Such an entity can be ‘operationalized’—which means that a highly specific set of measures defines it. For instance, the windchill factor in meteorology is defined by the combination of temperature and wind at which water freezes (and frostbite occurs).”

Instead of considering positive psychology as a directly measurable thing, Seligman defines it as a construct. This is not just semantics.

Measuring impact and business health requires us to examine what concepts are a construct versus things we can measure directly. A “healthy business” or “social impact” are both constructs, not not measured directly. But employee turnover, operational costs, voter turnout, and constituent engagement are all things that can be measured directly and will result in the desired state, which in itself is not tangible.

 

Exercises & Tools

What-Went-Well

Also referred to as the “Three Blessings” exercise. At the end of the day, write down three things that went well and why they went well. This can be used as a personal reflection, but also works great with a team to identify things to reinforce and celebrate—especially when it seems that everything is working against you.

Active, Constructive Responding

The Active-Constructive Response technique focuses our attention on responding to others win ways that connects with what is important to them, lifting them up, and inviting them to share more. It can be helpful to think about it in a matrix, like below:

Losada Ratio

The Losada Ratio is named after the researcher, Marcel Losada, who discovered that a ratio of at least 3:1 positive to negative statements indicates health in relationships or organizations. First observe how often you respond either negatively or positively to others. Then begin to increase the number of positive and affirming statements you use throughout the day, particularly if you find yourself often overly focusing on the negative.

Assertive Communication

  1. Identify and work to understand the situation.

  2. Describe the situation objectively and accurately.

  3. Express concerns.

  4. Ask the other person for his/her perspective and work toward an acceptable change.

  5. List the benefits that will follow when the change is implemented.

 

Conclusions

Flourish invites us to design more human-sensitive engagements. Particularly when creating events or doing research, I focus on these two aspects:

  • Basic Rest and Activity Cycle (BRAC), a characteristic of humans and other day-dwellers where on average, we are most alert in late morning and midevening and at our lowest energy midafternoon and the wee morning hours. Planning an event around people in multiple timezones can be challenging, but I try to work in breaks for activity and to plan for the most critical moments to happen when we are most likely to be at our best.

  • Post-traumatic growth: I remind clients and loved ones that growth is possible even after terrible things happen, and then point them to trusted resources for additional support when needed, since I am not a trained psychologist.

Flourishing enables us to harness more effective change efforts. “A theory that counts increases in engagement and meaning along with increases in positive emotion is morally liberating as well as more democratic for public policy.”

 

This book pairs well with …

Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Grit by Angela Duckworth

Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg—especially the section on assertive communication.

 

Who should read this book?

  • Organizational leaders looking to bolster their company culture

  • Individuals wanting to make the most of their own life

  • Parents

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