Martin Seligman 'Flourishing - a new understanding of wellbeing' at Happiness & Its Causes 2012

[Music] let us bring our first speaker to the podium it is a man who is just up from Adelaide he's been there for a month as a fabulous uh Under The Fabulous title thinker in Residence he will be explaining what that means it's DrMartin Seligman world-renowned founder of positive psychology director of the center for positive psychology University of Pennsylvania bestselling author authentic happiness and flourishing a Visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being so would you please welcome DrMartin Seligman what can we most hope for in life what what can we most hope for for our children as you know Freud and schopenhauer told us the best we could ever do in life was not to be miserable not to suffer that the best we could ever do in life was approach zero but when you lie in bed at night you are not thinking about how to go from - 8 to -5 you are for the most part thinking about how to go from plus two to plus 6 so what I want to talk about today is the possibility that there is life above zero and that human flourishing well being is what we can hope for for our future I believe the thesis that the best we can do in life is to relieve misery is empirically false it's morally Insidious and it's politically a dead end so I'm going to talk about the opposite today here's what we'll do in a half an hour um I've just said what we can most hope for in life I'm going to uh argue and show you some data that wellbe being itself is a plausible individual and a national goal and that it's something well over and above the absence of misery uh then the question is can it be defined reasonably well and what is it we would want to build I don't know if there will be a positive human future but I don't think there's going to be one unless we can Define in what it might consist and investigate how those building blocks can happen uh I'm going to suggest to you that Perma positive emotion engagement relationships meaning and accomplishment are the constituents the elements of well-being and I'll show you some data uh new data from Europe in which 23 of the European Union nations are compared on Perma uh then having said it's a plausible thing to measure I'm going to ask the question well can you build it or is well-being like your waste line you probably know dieting is a $50 billion scam uh any of you can lose 5% of your body weight in about 3 weeks by following any diet on the best seller list um I did the watermelon diet I lost about 20 lbs in 3 weeks I had diarrhea for 3 weeks uh and the reason dieting is a scam is 80 to 95% of people regain all that weight or more over the next 3 years so the issue is can Perma can well-being be lastingly increased or does it just flop back to your old caginally state in time and I'm going to suggest to you that um we know something about how to build it that it's not like dieting and indeed is not like uh Psychotherapy for what's wrong so I'll tell you a little bit about the science of P positive emotion the science of e engagement and what I'm going to do as I do this is try to tell you something that your grandmother and your minister did not know things I didn't know 20 years ago that have been discovered in the science I'm going to talk about relationships and a major new technique that has been discovered that builds relationships talk about meaning uh and about accomplishment in particularly self-discipline then we'll be about 20 minutes through the lecture at that point and what I'll have said is that we know something about how to build these things at an individual level on a onetoone basis there is good reason uh to believe they can increase can this happen in schools in large organizations uh that's the stepping stone to the possibility that the planet could flourish and so I'm going to talk about um this having been done in a huge organization the United States's second largest employer the United States Army which decided three years ago to teach resilience and positive psychology to all 1. 1 million soldiers and measure the outcome so I'll argue that it's a plausible goal for large units and finally I'm going to talk about the politics of all of this this is political it's not political in the sense of left versus right left versus right to my mind is the question of given that we agree on goals like wealth or military uh adventurism Who carries them out are They carried out by individual or by state means this is not about who does it this is about a different set of political ends so that's what we'll do in the next 25 minutes and let me start with Perma so this is my theory of um positive emotion um one one of these things is the uh ah here it is this so for me uh well-being consists of five elements an element contributes to well-being an element is pursued for its own sake not merely to get one of the other elements so for example uh we have no interest in IQ in itself we're interested in IQ because we think it leads to intelligent decision making so an element is pursued for its own sake and the element can be measured independently of the other elements and I believe there are five elements that free people choose in life the first is positive emotion uh the smiley face happyology hedonics uh part of the name of this conference but positive psychology does not stop with positive emotion and part of the reason is um how much positive emotion you feel is about 50% heritable and it's only increasable by 10 to 15% so we know techniques for having you live in the upper part of your set range for happiness for positive emotion but positive psychology is also concerned with engagement when when when time stops for you when you're one with the music so looking looking at you um about 70% of you right now are completely engaged in what I'm saying uh the other 30% of you are having sexual fantasies by the way CU our um so we're interested in uh when people go into flow we're interested in relationships with other and that's crucial because if you think about when you're in your highest positive States it's almost never solitary think about the happiest you've ever been I have no idea what it'll be but it's almost always going to be with other people very interesting we've evolved to be Hive creatures that he system is built around other people meaning and purpose belonging to and serving something bigger than the self the self is completely impoverished uh soil for well-being and finally human beings pursue accomplishment achievement Mastery so I'll talk about each one of those in turn um importantly if I had suggested 30 years ago that well-being as defined by kma were a plausible political goal National goal for a nation it would have been a silly suggestion because it wasn't measurable well what's happened in the last 30 years is each of these elements is now respectively measurable that probably as well measured as things like GDP and indeed that's one of the reasons that the Prime Minister of England David Cameron has decided to measure the well-being of the entire British population and most importantly to hold himself accountable for the success or failure of public policy By changes in well-being and most importantly uh they're not like the dieting scam each of these things is teachable you can actually have more of each of Perma uh in your life and I'll just talk a little bit about the research on this uh so let me start with the measurement question is this uh in order to be a plausible National or planetary goal it has to be measurable so here's what Timothy so and Felicia hupper did last year they um uh went to 23 European Union Nations and asked Perma questions of 2,000 adults in each of those Nations and they asked what percentage of adults are flourishing by Perma criteria and uh Denmark as usual leads the pack with almost 40% flourishing um the UK and Germany are in the middle um France and the former Soviet Union are at the bottom with under 15% uh no one's done this for Australia or for the United States for that matter so we don't know where Australia and the United States sit uh we will indeed soon that was part of what I was doing in South Australia and uh tomorrow I'll talk about what I was up to in South Australia for the last month but anyway with this this slide shows it's measurable and there are very large country to Country differences and most importantly there's very large room for improvement it's commonly said that uh the our children will not have as much money as we do I'm not an economist I don't know if that's true but there is plenty of room for our children to be happier to flourish to have more well-being than we do and that is indeed the theme of what this is about so let me now go through P MN a for individuals just telling you a little bit of the science that I didn't know 20 years ago and a little bit of how these things are built so let's take positive emotion happiness um it turns out that if you go to companies and you look at how they're doing economically uh and you count every word that's said in business meetings there is something called a losada ratio and it distinguishes economically flourishing from stagnant from about to go bankrupt companies so the ratio of positive words to negative words in business meetings for flourishing companies is above 2. 9 to1 uh between 1 and 2.

9 to1 the companies are stagnating and Below one the companies are going under now don't take this home to your married life uh 2. 9 to1 leads to divorce and the reason we know that is uh John and Julie gotman take couples and they lock them into an apartment for a weekend and they record everything that's said and they compute the losada ratio and if the ratio is under 5 to1 it predicts divorce now what what's going on here well I think it is that we in we often have to criticize and say bad things to our spouses to to our children to the people that work for us and the question is against what background of positivity will they hear us will they not think we're their enemy and indeed this was brought home to me uh by my teenage daughter Nikki Nikki you last heard about when she was 5 years old and called me a grouch and founded positive psychology because she was right on the money uh well about four years ago she was a a junior in high school uh measor majoring in entitlement and um I came home one evening and I was all excited about the losada ratio and I told the family about it and then I went to work on the computer it was a Thursday night and about 11:00 Nikki came downstairs and said Daddy will you drive me to a party and I shouted at her 11 o'clock Nikki get to work it's a Thursday night and she looked at me and she said Daddy you've got a terrible losada ratio uh and the question is to raise children what ratio of positive to negative things do we need and the answer is no one knows um that's a little bit about the P engagement uh I asked the question before when do you go into flow when does time stop for you and the answer is we go into flow when our highest strengths are just matched to the challenges that come our way that that's when we go into flow and uh so we're very interested in increasing the amount of flow we have in life and um to do that you have to identify people's highest strengths uh this is all free by the way part of my job has been to in positive psychology has been to give this away so there's a website authentica happiness. org that two and a half million people have gone to and taken the test it has a signature strengths test on it which tells you what your five highest strengths are now here's the kind of exercise that we do against random assignment Placebo controlled and by the way when I say an exercise works it doesn't mean I kind of think it's a good idea it means I have actually run large scale random assignment Placebo control tests of it in the same way when I worked on drugs and Psychotherapy I would take Prozac and a sugar pill and run them against each other so uh here's an exercise that works um I'll do half of it with you now uh close your eyes think of something you don't like to do at work that you have to do pretty much once a week okay open your eyes okay your assignment is go take this test this will tell you what your five highest strengths are it might be social intelligence it might be humor and playfulness and then your assignment is to do that task next week using your highest strength so for example one of my uh students was a waitress and she hated waitressing working her way through graduate school heavy trays being patronized by customers she took the signature strength test her highest strength was social intelligence so she res so her job was to recraft waitressing to use social intelligence much more so she resolved to make the encounter with her the highlight of every customer's evening now notice that wouldn't always succeed but notice she was putting what was very best inside of her on offer all the time and waitressing became more fun the tips became larger and in controlled studies uh if you do this uh six months later statistically less depression less anxiety more life satisfaction um oh just one little bit of science more uh I'm very interested in trauma and post-traumatic growth I've spent my life working on depression helplessness and Trauma and we recently asked the question who comes through who grows through trauma who of whom is it true what n said uh if it doesn't kill me it makes me stronger and we did a study of 17700 people who had been through uh one two or three awful events uh we listed the 15 worst things that could happen to people and asked who was Stronger afterwards and it turned out uh that U people who had three of these awful things raped captured tortured uh were stronger than people who had two and who were stronger than people who had one who were stronger than people who had none and the character strengths that uh correlated with post-traumatic growth were those five religiousness gratitude kindness hope and bravery so that's a little bit about the science of signature strengths um relationships um what do you your spouse comes home from work and she's been promoted what do you say to her and how many of you are marriage counselors anyone a marriage Mar counselor okay well there are a couple of you you probably know that marriage counseling is the single worst form of psychotherapy uh it is has the worst statistics uh it's hard to do people are lying to you they're lying to each other um and uh what when I teach marriage counseling what you teach people to do is how to fight better that how not to have the same damn fight every single day you're trying to take insufferable marriages and make them barely tolerable uh now that's not a positive psychology form of marriage counseling so uh Shelly Gable who I think will be speaking uh at this meeting uh seven years ago did something uh tremendously interesting she said let's not look at how people fight let's look at how they celebrate together so your spouse comes home from work she's been promoted what do you say to her well uh most people say and this is what I did before I read Shelly's work uh congratulations dear well-deserved passive constructive might as well not say anything at all uh a lot of people and I work with drill sergeants now and I'll tell you about them momentarily do active destructive you know what tax bracket that's going to put us in uh that's not good um passive destructive is what's for dinner not good the one that works and what Shelly does is active constructive which is that that report you read uh wrote for the company on the pension plan that's the single best report on fiscal matters I've read in my 25 years in business now let's relive what happened today uh exactly where were you when your boss told you you were promoted and exactly what did he say and what do you think the real reasons are you've been promoted and how can you use those strengths more with me and with the kids and in church and it turns out when you do that love and commitment markedly increase it's not just a marital technique it's a friendship and work technique as well so that's a little bit on r m u meaning belonging to and serving something bigger than the self um most most of you don't need to know this but your kids sure do here's an exercise we do we have my my students are asked to do something fun next week A P thing and to do something philanthropic and then come back and Report what happens and what happens is quite remarkable when you do something fun when it's over it's over it has almost no effects afterwards but when you do something philanthropic very very different thing happens one of my students her third grade nephew called her on the phone and had to be tutored for two hours in fractions so she spent two hours on the phone doing this and she said after that the whole day went better for me I was mellow people I could listen to people people liked me more and one of my business students said uh um I'm in business because I want to make a lot of money and I want to make a lot of money because money brings happiness it brings control and it brings security but I was astonished to find out that I was happier helping another person than I was shopping and that's the regularity the one if if you're depressed right now the one single thing which will give you a temporary boost is to go out and help another person and lastly a a accomplishment achievement we're very interested Ed in self-discipline and we look at academic success we measure grit and self-discipline and IQ and we look at various forms of academic success and quantitatively we find that self-discipline in young people is roughly twice as important as IQ in predictors of academic success so that's a flavor of what goes on in the science of positive psychology and in the science of Perma and so let me now turn to uh whether or not this can be done at more than just the individual level so three years ago the chief of staff of the United States Army came to me and said post-traumatic stress disorder suicide depression Panic drug abuse sub uh divorce what does positive psychology say about that DrSeligman and what I said was people's lives are often ruined by combat divorce death of a spouse but the the phenomenon is bell-shaped and on the left hand side you've got what you just described and you should continue to spend 10 billion a year treating that but the Army is not a hospital what you're after is a healthy force that can cope with persistent Warfare in the middle of the bell-shape curve is resilience and those are people who go through a tough time but 3 months later they're back where they were psychologically and physically and on the right hand side you have post-traumatic growth people who a year later go through a very tough time at first but a year later are measurably stronger psychologically and physically than they were and so General Casey decided he would create something called comprehensive Soldier Fitness and he ordered on that very day unlike what we do he actually ordered that uh uh positive psychology and resilience would be measured and taught throughout the United States Army uh and he would allocated $145 million to do it and he created three programs that have been in process for three years now and I can show you a little bit about what they do the first is he was after creating an army that was just as psychologically fit as physically fit so it had to we had to devise a test of psychological Fitness there are plenty of tests of psychological unfitness so all 1.

1 million soldiers have taken this test and this is uh uh uh every year out of 1,200 Colonels 33 are promoted to Brigadier General so we asked the question from the test could you predict in advance who was going to make it to Brigadier General and when that tells you you can with considerable accuracy um that's part uh one of comprehensive Soldier Fitness part two is General Casey said to me well we've read your material on schools and we see you teach teachers the skills of Perma and then you measure their students and you find their students have better psychological Fitness less anxiety and depression uh three uh up to two years later well that's the Army model we've got 40,000 teachers in the Army the drill sergeants so your job DrSeligman will be to train all the drill sergeants in the army and they will train the 1.