7 Quotes on Well-Being and Happiness to Inspire Positivity, Altruism and Kindness in Social Interactions

7 Quotes on Well-Being and Happiness to Inspire Positivity, Altruism and Kindness in Social Interactions

The quotes in this post are all by Martin Seligman, from the lecture “Ideas at the House: Martin Seligman – Well-Being and Happiness,” which can be viewed at the bottom of this post.   1) Traditional Psychotherapy Doesn’t Deal with Achieving Happiness, but with Reducing Suffering Freud and Schopenhauer told us the best we could ever do in life was not to be miserable; that the object of human progress, the object of psychotherapy was to reduce suffering to zero. I’m going to argue today that that’s empirically false, it’s morally insidious, and it’s politically a dead end; that there’s much more to life than zero.   2) 30 Years Ago There Was No Way to Measure Happiness. Today There Is 30 years ago, the word “happiness” was a tremendously vague word. It meant very many different things to different people, and it could not be measured. But now, we have good measures of the elements of well-being.   3) There Is Higher Chance of Making Less Happy People Happier, then Already Happy People Even Happier Technically, we call these states “positive affectivity” and they are bell shaped. That means, right now, 50% of the people in the world are not cheerful and merry. They are not smiling. It is highly genetic. It is about 50% heritable and most importantly, the best we can to with smiling, being merry, being cheerful, is to raise it by about 5-15%. In fact, I spent most of my life working on misery and people would ask me: why didn’t I work on happiness? The reason I didn’t, there was a very influential...
What Is Flow Experience? Can We Help Each Other Experience Flow More Often Than What Is Described Here?

What Is Flow Experience? Can We Help Each Other Experience Flow More Often Than What Is Described Here?

When you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, you do not have enough attention left over to monitor how your body feels, or your problems at home. You cannot feel even that you’re hungry or tired. Your body disappears, your identity disappears from your consciousness, because you don’t have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration, and at the same time to feel that you exist. So existence is temporarily suspended. This automatic, spontaneous process that is being described can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you cannot be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field. Whether it is mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it is better than what was there before. Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out. This is the flow experience, and it happens in different realms. –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the TED Talk “Flow, The Secret to Happiness.” All quotes in this post are from this TED talk, which can be viewed also at the bottom of this post.   Flow Experience for a Poet For instance, a poet describes it in this form. This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous...
12 Ways Positive Social Connections in the Workplace Increases Business Success

12 Ways Positive Social Connections in the Workplace Increases Business Success

1) More Positive Emotions = More Productivity & Creativity Whether we looked at entrepreneurial startups or large, established enterprises, the same holds true: People are more productive and creative when they have more positive emotions. –Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, 2011.   2) Negative Emotions Have the Opposite Effect We find that human happiness has large and positive causal effects on productivity. Positive emotions appear to invigorate human beings, while negative emotions have the opposite effect. –Economist Team led by Andrew Oswald, Warwick Business School, July 2010, in “A New Happiness Equation: Worker + Happiness = Improved Productivity.”   3) Positive Workplace Interactions = Improved Employee Health Positive social interactions at work have been shown to boost employee health, e.g. by lowering heart rate and blood pressure, and by strengthening the immune system. Happy employees also make for a more congenial workplace and improved customer service. Employees in positive moods are more willing to help peers and to provide customer service on their own accord. What’s more, compassionate, friendly, and supportive co-workers tend to build higher-quality relationships with others at work. In doing so, they boost co-workers’ productivity levels and increase coworkers’ feeling of social connection, as well as their commitment to the workplace and their levels of engagement with their job. –Emma Seppala, “Why Compassion in Business Makes Sense,” Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, April 2013.   4) Business Success Depends on Empathetic Leaders Business success depends on empathetic leaders who are able to adapt, build on the strengths around them, and...