Flourish Quotes

“I used to think that the topic of positive psychology was happiness, that the gold standard for measuring happiness was life satisfaction, and that the goal of positive psychology was to increase life satisfaction. I now think that the topic of positive psychology is well-being, that the gold standard for measuring well-being is flourishing, and that the goal of positive psychology is to increase flourishing. This theory, which I call well-being theory, is very different from authentic happiness theory, and the difference requires explanation.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

“It turns out, however, that how much life satisfaction people report is itself determined by how good we feel at the very moment we are asked the question. Averaged over many people, the mood you are in determines more than 70 percent of how much life satisfaction you report and how well you judge your life to be going at that moment determines less than 30 percent.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

“Being in touch with what we do well underpins the readiness to change,” David continued. “This is related to the Losada ratio. To enable us to hear criticism nondefensively and to act creatively on it, we need to feel secure.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

“Here is the exercise: find one wholly unexpected kind thing to do tomorrow and just do it. Notice what happens to your mood.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

“my original view was closest to Aristotle’s—that everything we do is done in order to make us happy—but I actually detest the word happiness, which is so overused that it has become almost meaningless. It is an unworkable term for science, or for any practical goal such as education, therapy, public policy, or just changing your personal life.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“Good science requires the interplay of analysis and synthesis. One never knows if basic research is truly basic until one knows what it is basic to. Modern physics came into its own not because of its theories—which can be enormously counterintuitive and highly controversial (muons, wavicles, superstrings, the anthropic principle, and all that)—but because physicists built the atomic bomb and modern nuclear power plants.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

“made a New Year’s resolution for 2009: to take 5 million steps, 13,700 per day on average. On December 30, 2009, I crossed the 5 million mark, and got “Wow!” and “What a role model!” from my Internet friends.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish

“Tales de Mileto pensaba que todo era agua.8 Aristóteles creía que todos los actos del ser humano tenían como fin la consecución de la felicidad.9 Nietzsche pensaba que toda acción humana tenía como propósito alcanzar el poder.10 Freud pensaba que el fin de todos los actos del ser humano era evitar la angustia.11 Todos estos gigantes del pensamiento cayeron en el enorme error del monismo,”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Florecer: La nueva psicología positiva y la búsqueda del bienestar (Para estar bien)

“Lo que pienso sobre la meta de la psicología ha cambiado desde que publiqué mi último libro (Authentic Happiness, 2002) y, aún mejor, la psicología misma está cambiando. He pasado la mayor parte de mi vida trabajando en la venerable meta de la psicología de aliviar el sufrimiento y desarraigar las condiciones incapacitantes de la vida. La verdad sea dicha, esto puede ser un fastidio. Tomarse a pecho la psicología de la desdicha, como hay que hacer cuando uno trabaja con casos de depresión, alcoholismo, esquizofrenia, trauma y todo tipo de sufrimientos que componen el material primario de la psicología convencional, puede ser un agobio para el alma. Aunque hacemos todo lo que está a nuestro alcance por aumentar el bienestar de nuestros clientes, la psicología convencional, por lo general, no hace mucho por el bienestar de sus profesionales. Si algo cambia en el profesional es su personalidad que se vuelve más depresiva.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Florecer: La nueva psicología positiva y la búsqueda del bienestar (Para estar bien)

“The work of Dr. Shelly Gable shows that when an individual responds actively and constructively (as opposed to passively and destructively) to someone sharing a positive experience, love and friendship increase. So we teach the four styles of responding: active constructive (authentic, enthusiastic support), passive constructive (understated support), passive destructive (ignoring the event), and active destructive (pointing out negative aspects of the event). We”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“After the most likely outcome is identified, they develop a plan for coping with the situation, and then practice this skill with both professional examples (a soldier has not returned from a land navigation drill; you received a negative review from a superior) and personal examples (your child is doing poorly at school, and you are not home to help; your spouse is having a hard time managing the finances while you are deployed). The”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“Now we introduce a three-step model, “Putting It in Perspective,” for disputing catastrophic thinking: worst case, best case, most likely case.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“Once the iceberg is identified, they ask themselves a series of questions to determine: (1) if the iceberg continues to be meaningful to them; (2) if the iceberg is accurate in the given situation; (3) if the iceberg is overly rigid; (4) if the iceberg is useful. The iceberg “Asking”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“Here then is well-being theory: well-being is a construct; and well-being, not happiness, is the topic of positive psychology. Well-being has five measurable elements (PERMA) that count toward it: • Positive emotion (of which happiness and life satisfaction are all aspects) • Engagement • Relationships • Meaning • Achievement No one element defines well-being, but each contributes to it. Some aspects of these five elements are measured subjectively by self-report, but other aspects are measured objectively.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way. In well-being theory, these twenty-four strengths underpin all five elements, not just engagement: deploying your highest strengths leads to more positive emotion, to more meaning, to more accomplishment, and to better relationships.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“The closer someone lived to someone who was lonely, the lonelier the second individual felt. The same was true for depression, but the blockbuster was about happiness. Happiness was even more contagious than loneliness or depression, and it worked across time. If person A’s happiness went up at time 1, person B’s—living next door—went up at time 2. And so did person C’s, two doors away, by somewhat less. Even person D, three doors away, enjoyed more happiness. This has significant implications for morale among groups of soldiers and for leadership. On the negative side, it suggests that a few sad or lonely or angry apples can spoil the morale of the entire unit. Commanders have known this forever. But the news is that positive morale is even more powerful and can boost the well-being and the performance of the entire unit. This makes the cultivation of happiness—a badly neglected side of leadership—important, perhaps crucial.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“Negative emotions warn us about a specific threat: when we feel fear, it is almost always preceded by a thought of danger. When we feel sad, there is almost always a thought of loss. When we feel angry, there is almost always a thought of trespass. This leaves us room to pause and identify what is going on when our negative emotional reaction is out of proportion to the reality of the danger, loss, or trespass out there. Then we can modulate our emotional reaction into proportion. This is the essence of cognitive therapy, but in a preventive mode.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“General Cornum invited a leading positive psychologist to head up the development of each course: Barbara Fredrickson for emotional fitness, John Cacioppo for social fitness, John and Julie Gottman for family fitness, Ken Pargament and Pat Sweeney for spiritual fitness, and Rick Tedeschi and Rich McNally for post-traumatic growth.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“the paradigm human experiment, carried out by Donald Hiroto and replicated many times since, subjects are randomly divided into three groups. This is called the “triadic design.” One group (escapable) is exposed to a noxious but nondamaging event, such as loud noise. When they push a button in front of them, the noise stops, so that their own action escapes the noise. A second group (inescapable) is yoked to the first group. The subjects receive exactly the same noise, but it goes off and on regardless of what they do. The second group is helpless by definition, since the probability of the noise going off given that they make any response is identical to the probability of the noise going off given that they do not make that response. Operationally, learned helplessness is defined by the fact that nothing you do alters the event. Importantly the escapable and inescapable groups have exactly the same objective stressor. A third group (control) receives nothing at all. That is part one of the triadic experiment.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“The takeaway lesson from positive psychology is that positive mental health is not just the absence of mental illness.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“Isaiah 6:8 comes back to me: “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”
And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“Penn Resiliency Program”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“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.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“Going slow allows executive function to take over. Executive function consists of focusing and ignoring distractions, remembering and using new information, planning action and revising the plan, and inhibiting fast, impulsive thoughts and actions.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“human beings are often, perhaps more often, drawn by the future than they are driven by the past, and so a science that measures and builds expectations, planning, and conscious choice will be more potent than a science of habits, drives, and circumstances.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing: The practical guide to using positive psychology to make you happier and healthier

“Both positive and negative ways of thinking are important in the right situation, but all too often schools emphasize critical thinking and following orders rather than creative thinking and learning new stuff. The result is that children rank the appeal of going to school just slightly above going to the dentist. In the modern world, I believe we have finally arrived at an era in which more creative thinking, less rote following of orders—and yes, even more enjoyment—will succeed better.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

“15 A. de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Nueva York: Perennial Classics, 2000). En La democracia en América, Tocqueville explicó que el concepto de felicidad que tenía Jefferson se relacionaba con el dominio de uno mismo para alcanzar la realización duradera. Por lo tanto, la felicidad según Jefferson se parece mucho más al bienestar perdurable que al placer temporal. D. M. McMahon, Happiness: A History (Nueva York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2006). La mejor fuente sobre la evolución histórica del concepto de felicidad.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Florecer: La nueva psicología positiva y la búsqueda del bienestar (Para estar bien)

“Introducción a la psicología positiva” para la clase inaugural del programa de maestría en psicología positiva aplicada en 2005. Senia, de treinta y dos años, graduada con honores en matemáticas por la Universidad de Harvard, habla con soltura ruso y japonés y dirige su propio fondo de cobertura, es el ejemplo emblemático de la psicología positiva. Su sonrisa transmite calidez incluso a las aulas cavernosas de Huntsman Hall, apodado la “Estrella de la muerte” por los estudiantes de administración de la Wharton School de la Universidad de Pennsylvania que lo consideran su sede. Los estudiantes de este programa de maestría son muy especiales: treinta y cinco adultos exitosos de todas partes del mundo viajan a Filadelfia una vez al mes para participar en un festín de tres días de lo último y más novedoso en psicología positiva y cómo pueden aplicarlo a sus profesiones.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Florecer: La nueva psicología positiva y la búsqueda del bienestar (Para estar bien)

“historia. El aspecto privado también necesita mostrarse. La psicología positiva hace a la gente más feliz. Enseñar la psicología positiva, investigar la psicología positiva, usar la psicología positiva en la práctica como orientador o terapeuta, poner ejercicios de psicología positiva a niños de secundaria en un aula, educar a niños pequeños con base en la psicología positiva, enseñar a sargentos de adiestramiento a fomentar el crecimiento postraumático, reunirse con otros psicólogos positivos o simplemente leer sobre la psicología positiva hace a la gente más feliz. Quienes trabajan en el campo de la psicología positiva son las personas con mayor bienestar que he conocido en mi vida.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Florecer: La nueva psicología positiva y la búsqueda del bienestar (Para estar bien)

“He formado parte del cisma en la psicología que se conoce como psicología positiva, un movimiento científico y profesional. En 1998, como presidente de la American Psychological Association (APA), apremié a la psicología a complementar su venerable meta con un nuevo objetivo: explorar lo que hace que la vida valga la pena y crear las condiciones habilitadoras de una vida digna de ser vivida. La meta de entender el bienestar y crear condiciones habilitadoras para la vida no es de ningún modo idéntica a la meta de entender el sufrimiento y deshacer las condiciones incapacitantes de la vida. En este momento, varios miles de personas en todo el mundo trabajan en este campo y se esfuerzan por promover estas metas.2 Este libro narra su historia, o por lo menos el lado público de esta historia.”
― Martin E.P. Seligman, Florecer: La nueva psicología positiva y la búsqueda del bienestar (Para estar bien)