0:15
In my last lecture, I talked about how I had spent 35 years of my life
working on the alleviation of misery and suffering-
depression, suicide, panic, drug addiction, schizophrenia, and the like.
It occurred to me that there was more to psychology than just
the alleviation of misery, there was well-being.
0:54
I found myself in 1997 elected to the Presidency of
the American Psychological Association, 160,000 squabbling psychologists,
and it's the job of presidents, if they're doing their job,
to ask the question of the future of the field.
1:36
my five-year-old daughter, Nikki, Nicole,
and I'm a serious gardener and when I weed, I'm weeding.
Those of you who do weeding, know it's no fun at all,
you can't even get a routine going for weeding.
And so I'm sitting there weeding and Nikki is having a wonderful time,
she's throwing weeds in the air and dancing and singing,
and I shouted at her, I said “Nikki get to work!”
She looked up at me and she looked puzzled, walked away and
came back and said, “Daddy, can I talk to you?”
I said, “sure Nikki.”
So Nikki said to me,
“do you remember that since my fifth birthday I haven't whined once?
On my fifth birthday, Daddy, I decided that I wasn't going to whine anymore.
And that was the hardest thing I've ever done.
And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.”
2:41
First, that indeed Nikki hit the nail on the head, that I was a grouch.
That I, indeed, was a nimbus cloud whose main strength was critical intelligence.
I could see everything that was wrong with everything,
and somehow I had attributed my success in the world,
whatever I had, to my ability to say no.
But it occurred to me, really for the first time,
that it might have had something to do with what I could say yes to.
3:23
Secondly, Nikki told me that my theory of child development,
I have seven children, was wrong.
The view that psychology had of child development,
in which you want to find all the things they're doing wrong and correct them
and somehow,
magically, if you get rid of everything that's wrong, you get an exemplary child,
well, that actually makes no sense at all.
Nikki had just shown not the absence of a negative, but the presence of a positive,
that is the ability to talk to an adult, to make sense of an adult.
4:02
So it occurred to me that child-rearing should be not about eliminating
the negatives, but identifying and building what's best,
the strengths in children.
And the third thing I realized was that my profession, psychology, was half-baked-
that the part that had been baked and
the part that I was proud of was the alleviation of suffering,
but the part that was unbaked, the part that was missing,
was a psychology of well-being.
4:40
Well, if 30 years before, as Abe Maslow tried to do in the 1960s,
I had stood up and said, let's have a psychology of well-being,
let there be a psychology of happiness,
there were three huge barriers to that, all scientific.
First, there was no theory of well-being.
All the theories that psychology had were about ill-being, about what was wrong.
Second, there was no way to measure well-being, and
thirdly there were no interventions to increase well-being.
All the interventions we had, psychological and pharmacological,
were about alleviating suffering,
and so what was needed for a psychology of well-being
was a theory, measures, and interventions.
That is the meat of today's lecture.
5:36
So first, the question of theory:
What does well being consist in?
What is it that free people who are not suffering choose?
Let me suggest to you, my best attempt:
the acronym PERMA,
that there are five things that free non-oppressed people choose to do.
P is positive emotion.
6:07
E is engagement.
R is good relationships.
M is meaning and purpose.
And A is achievement and accomplishment.
So what I want to do is go through each of those and
tell you what these mean, how to measure it, and what we know about building them.
6:56
If you think about the dashboard of an airplane,
is there one number that tells you how an airplane is doing?
Well, it turns out there isn't.
There are a whole bunch of gauges, and depending on the mission of the airplane,
you pay more attention to one gauge than another.
So if you're trying to fly from Chicago to New York
as quickly as possible, then the speedometer is what matters.
If you're trying to get there as comfortably as possible,
then the radar is what matters.
If you're trying to get there as economically as possible,
then it's the gas gauge that matters.
No one number describes how an airplane is doing, it depends on the mission.
Human well-being is even more complicated than that.
So if you value positive emotion
more than relationships, more than achievements,
then positive emotion is the gauge you're going to pay attention to,
but if what Ben values is good relationships,
then that's going to be the gauge he pays attention to.
So it's very important to understand, as a therapist, as a parent,
as a friend, that you're not there to change people's values,
you're there to find out what they value and to help them maximize what they value.
Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D.Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology & Director, Positive Psychology Center
