PERMA

yeah to my mind let me say what a flourishing adult or a flourishing child has not just the absence of misery but it's a real thing it's the presence of five things so the first is positive emotion joy comfort happiness I want to make sure you don't mistake positive psychology for the smiley face so one of the five elements of positive psychology is smiling and being cheerful and being merry and being happy but it's very important that you know that cheerfulness is normally distributed in the human population and that means that there are three billion people in the world right now who don't feel happy or Mary or cheerful and the second thing to know cheerfulness is strongly up genetically based it's about 50% heritable and what that means to those of us who work on I'm by the way in the lower half of positive affectivity and by the way I take my own medicine generally so each of the exercises that I'll be telling you about our things that are first if it works on me I try it then I give it to my wife and seven children it works on them I give it to my graduate students it works on them we start to do clinical trials on it so what I think we have with the P the smiley face is about 15% leverage and that means if you're a low positive affective prone to depression and pessimism there's about 10 to 15 I I no tricks to get you to live in the upper part of a set range and it's the genetics and the distribution of positive emotion that tells me that positive psychology is not a happy ology it's about engagement as well the question of when time stops for you when you're one with the music when you're in flow and on we know something about that now my Csikszentmihalyi is leader in this field flow occurs learning occurs in the classroom and elsewhere when your highest strengths are just matched the highest challenges that come your way and that notion says we need to know what children's highest strengths are and I'll tell you something about that as well as teachers highest strengths in about 15 minutes the third element of positive psychology is good relationships and there some of you are blessed with knowing how to bring off good relations but good relations are a skill and it turns out there have been discoveries in the last decade about that skill discoveries that tell us we can teach good relationships to our children the fourth element is meaning belonging to and serving something you think is bigger than the self the self is an impoverished site for meaning but human beings I believe intellect ibly search for meaning I believe human beings have not only been individually selected Allah Dawkins but also group selected and that human beings are hive creatures just like termites and Lost's and bees and I'll say more about that later the final element of flourishing for a child or an adult is achievement accomplishment mastery and competence so that so what I want to do now is take you in about 12 minutes through perma and I think what I'm going to do here is tell you one thing about the science of positive psychology that your grandmother didn't know some people you might think that your minister and your grandmother knew all this stuff before but there are actually about 20 things that I didn't know 15 years ago that have been discovered and then I want to tell you one thing we know about how to rely we build each of the five elements so starting with perma positive emotion let me talk about smiling okay I'm a photographer smile you know smile okay about there are two kinds of smiles there is a Duchenne smile which is a genuine smile and you can tell it by the muscles underneath the eyes you can't tell it by the lips and there is a stewardess smile these are people who smile for a living it's got a non Duchenne smile and in about five minutes I could teach any of you how to go through pictures in a in the newspaper and identify whether or not the person was engaged in a genuine smile or a non Duchenne smile in nineteen seventy the entire freshman class at Mills College was asked by the photographer to smile and they did and the yearbook was published and half of them were displaying a Duchenne smile and half of them were displaying an artificial smile thirty years later researchers from Berkeley called them up and asked them how many divorces if you had and it turned out that statistically the women who were engaged in an artificial smile had more divorces less marital satisfaction and less life satisfaction it's just one of the snapshots of the relationship of a snapshot of positive emotion to what goes on in life I spend a lot of time predicting how long people are going to live there's a great interest in under what conditions two people die prematurely and what is the psychological relationship of this and people in Utah live longer than people in Nevada that is a typical finding in this literature well people in Nevada drink all night they have drug addiction they have sexual sexual diseases they don't believe in God people in Utah get up at dawn and go to sleep at sunset they don't drink they believe in God I have a t-shirt that says eat drink and be merry for tomorrow you may be in Utah so it's no surprise that people in Utah live longer than people in Nevada so in order to do serious work on who lives long you need a homogeneous group of people who don't stay up partying all night who don't get sexually transmitted diseases who believe the same thing who have good medical care and so there's an exemplary study of nuns and one aspect of this great study of nuns has to do with the essay they wrote in the late 1930s about 140 nuns the bishop asked them to write an essay about why they were entering the convent and about half the nuns used one positive emotion word like I'm eager to serve Jesus and the other half completely deadpan about it more than 60 years later the researchers came back and asked who was alive and who was dead I don't have the data with me but there's proximately right at age 85 90 % of the nuns who used one positive emotion word were alive versus 52% of the nuns who use nun and at age 94 50% of the nuns who used one positive emotion word were alive versus 12% who use nun and that is I'm not pulling these findings out at random there is a growing literature which I'm very interested in on the relationship of a perma to live longer lower morbidity lower healthcare expenditure so that's those are a couple of things you wouldn't have known before and let me just tell you something about the question can you raise your positive emotion so I said in the spirit of the research I do the ultimate I've spent a lot of my life working on drugs and psychotherapy and what works and there's a gold standard methodology for that it's the random assignment placebo-controlled test and when I started to work on happiness I asked could you apply random assignment placebo-controlled testing to the 200 stories from the Buddha to pop psychology that have been told about can you be happier and so when I I'm about to tell you an exercise when I tell you an exercise that works it means it's been through random assignment placebo-controlled testing so it actually works so here's one on every night for the next week here's this is your assignment write down three things that went well today and why they went well turns out six months later if you start to do that you're statistically have less depression less anxiety and higher life satisfaction and importantly it's addicting that people like doing positive psychology exercises on unlike psychotherapy and psychotherapy how many of you are psycho therapists one of the dirty little secrets of psych I'm a psychotherapist most of my life one of the dirty little secrets is that when we teach a patient something its effectiveness is measured by how long it stays before it melts to zero so for the most part what we teach in psychotherapy and in our pharmacology goes away in time positive psychology exercises are self reinforcing so that's the first one pay engagement being one with the music being in flow using your signature strengths so in order to begin to ask the question how can you have more flow in life we had to devise reliable instruments to measure in children and adults what their highest strengths are and by the way these are available for free at authentic happiness org part of my job has been to give this stuff away and so you can go to this website with your class with your children or yourself take the signature strengths test and identify compared to roughly 2 million people what your signature strengths are and how they rank let me just tell you these signature strengths are moral strengths they're not talents these are things that are valued in their own right like gratitude kindness sense of humor and the like and let me just give you an example of what's been found out about using signature strengths as a builder of well-being so if we were if this was an overnight workshop here is what I do tonight you would go to the website and you find out what your highest strength is might be something Stevan like social intelligence and then your job and I'll do I'll do the exercise now close your eyes think of something you don't like doing at work that you pretty much have to do at least once a week ok open your eyes having found out what your signature strength is what you're asked to do is to do that task using your highest strength and so for example one of my students was a beggar at ginardi do have people who put up at supermarkets who put the things in your bags ok well that's what that's what she did she didn't like doing it working away through school on and her highest strength was social intelligence so her job was to recraft bagging using her highest strength so she decided that she would make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer's day now importantly she failed at that with a lot of the customers but she put what was best inside of her on offer all the time and begging became a lot easier after that and in fact when people do this when they take something they don't like doing and find a way next week of doing it using their highest strength it's a dick day you know you don't need it kindness is your highest strength and you start using it in the office if people like you more you get along better and it's self reinforcing and six months later statistically you're less depressed less anxious and higher life satisfaction now well while we're on signature strengths I want to say something about teaching and character I'm very interested both in the character of students and I'll tell you more about that later but I'm fascinated by the character of teachers and of good teachers how many of you are teachers okay well this is especially for you the maundering starts with a question of what is it we're really trying to teach our kids and I don't believe it's spelling and geometry I believe these are the media through which we're trying to teach three much more basic elements the first is social navigation how to get an adult to like you how to get along with peers and I think when we teach that's a gloss underneath it all the second is rhetoric it's an old old word but a real thing rhetoric is how to tell a good story how to write a good story how to ask the right question is how to put the people you're talking to in touch with what's best inside of them I think rhetoric is the second thing we're trying to teach and the third and most important is I believe we are trying to teach good character and I'll say more about that in a bit I mentioned the via signature strengths and the children's strengths and I'll take you back to character and children a moment but I want to tell you something about great teachers and the right-hand side of a report card on route so my David Levin is the president of 120 Kipp schools in the United States these are charter schools for the poorest black kids in America and they've been having terrific success with this it's a positive education school set of schools and they give the usual left-hand side of the report card grades but what they also do now is they've identified eight characteristics character strengths of kindergarten through seventh grade children that they want to build zest grit self-discipline interpersonal self-discipline optimism gratitude social intelligence and curiosity so each child every semester is rated on these strengths and so for example for zest each child is rated on actively participates from one to five shows enthusiasm and invigorates others and discussions with the children and with the parents are often around the building of character and I think very importantly once you say there's a number you want and if if you don't measure the right thing you don't do the right thing but once you start to measure something it goes up people are interested in it and character is one of those things on so that's a snapshot of what a quite a few schools in Amer erricka are starting to do that may be useful to South Australia it's a wonderful conversation starter with parents by the way now we're interested in this is a complicated slide but it basically tells you two messages these are the 24 characters strengths that we believe are humanly universal and when they occur close to each other this is based on about a hundred thousand people so this is a very meaningful slide it means people who have fairness also tend to be modest if they occur far apart it means people are modest tend to be people who have low zest so this sort of tells you what Co occurs and the second thing that's in this slide is different professions so we looked at four different professions and we asked where are the practitioners of those professions located so it turns out teachers tend to have this grouping of gratitude love kindness and forgiveness unlike professors who don't have any of those things they have creativity love of learning bravery and perspective CEOs we find have zest and hope and administrators don't have that they've got prudence honesty fairness and modesty so that's a description of character strengths of people in different professions but notice this doesn't distinguish good teachers from bad teachers so we asked the question what distinguishes the character strengths of great teachers from everyone else and that very surprising to me the two strengths that distinguish great teachers from the rest of us are zest and humor and the reason I mention this is I'm going to talk in about 20 minutes about a vision for South Australia in which I talk about the teaching profession and one of the things embodied in that is the notion that in the same way that when teacher education we teach teachers how to teach geometry we can teach teachers how to teach well-being and I think we should but more than that we should take what's known about great teachers humor and zest are teachable and we should select for and teach those things ok so what we've gone through so far is positive emotion and engagement relationships active constructive responding your spouse comes home from work are any of you marriage counselors ok a marriage counseling is the worst form of therapy people are lying to you they're lying to each other and it's statistics on success or abysmal I teach marriage counseling I've done marriage and sex counseling and a really tough form of therapy what you try to do what we teach our marriage counselors to do is to teach couples not to have the same fight over and over and over again what you're trying to do essentially is to take insufferable marriages and make them barely tolerable about seven years ago Shelley Gable who will actually be speaking in Sydney next week made an important discovery about marriage counseling and it's about not teaching couples how about fighting but teaching couples about celebrating together and this is not only true of marriages but it's true of friendship and corporations as well so your spouse comes home from work and she's been promoted what do you say to her well turns out what I used to say to my wife in these circumstances was passive constructive which is congratulations dear you deserve it that has no effect on anything I teach drill sergeants we've graduated our 7,000 drill sergeant reason the drill sergeants are active destructive they say you know what tax bracket your promotion is going to put us in - many of us are passive destructive which is what's for dinner it turns out the only thing that works and when couples learn to do it love loyalty commitment increase the probability of divorce goes down is active constructive and that's a darling I I read that last paper you sent to the company on the pension plan that was the single best paper I've read on fiscal matters in my 25 years in business now would you relive what happened exactly where were you when your boss told you you had been promoted she tells you exactly what did he say what do you think the real reasons you've been promoted are how can you use those strengths more at church or with the kids or in our marriage let's go open a bottle of champagne so that's when couples learn to do that it increases the positives so that's an important discovery meaning belonging to and serving something you think is bigger than you are now none of you probably need to be told that this is a in electable form of human desire but your children do need to be told this so your children probably think life is about things and shopping and the economy runs on that and so we have a set of exercises that build meaning and purpose in children and adults and one of them is a when we we have people write their own vision of a positive human future and then they write their obituary and through their grand child's eyes about what they did to bring about a positive human future we don't call it a life we call it a life summary when we're dealing with depressed people and that's a very good way of increasing meaning and purpose finally for this part lecture the a accomplishment so we're very interested in predicting high accomplishment in young people in the classroom and you know our typical experiments these are done by Angela Duckworth we measure self-discipline and grit grit is extreme persistence who who rings the doorbell in every house in Adelaide the extreme grit extreme persistence and we're interested in the relationship of self-discipline and grit versus IQ and talent to success in life and the bottom line message of this all these studies is that self discipline is about twice as important statistically as how smart you are as IQ for measures of success and again for those of us who are teachers that's a very important message

Channel: thinkersinresidence

Views: 116,827

Rating: 4.8052435 out of 5

Keywords: Perma, Martin Seligman, Wellbeing, Adelaide Thinkers in Residence

Id: iK6K_N2qe9Y

Length: 25min 6sec (1506 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2012