positive psychology

Positive psychology is a term coined by psychologist Martin Seligman, and a movement in psychology which emphasizes what is right with people rather than what is wrong with them.

Research shows that happier people are:

• Healthier
• More successful
• Harder-working
• Caring
• More socially engaged
• Make more money
• Live longer
• More tolerant of pain
• Faster thinkers
• More creative

Is this you? Would you like to be like this? Would you like people like this working in your organisation?

Overall the formula for positive psychology looks like this:

positive emotion + meaning + engagement = life / job satisfaction

Increased satisfaction leads to higher productivity.

We also look at the three areas of life to create more fulfilment:

The Pleasant Life

Hollywood's vision of happily ever after. Most people equate happiness with cheery emotion, what Seligman calls a Goldie Hawn smile, and boundless optimism. This is the Pleasant Life - having as much positive emotion as possible and learning the skills to amplify the intensity and duration of your pleasures. But this is hard to sustain. Lottery winners revert to their usual level of good cheer or grumpiness within a year after the event that changed their lives.

"There are shortcuts to the pleasant life," Seligman says, "drugs, loveless sex, television, shopping, but there are no shortcuts to the good life. Aristotle and Thomas Jefferson do not share our definition of happiness, and many thoughtful people view our have-a-nice-day mentality as empty-headed and heedless.“

The Engaged Life

Being one with the music, absorbed and immersed in your work, love, friendship and leisure. The concept of Flow (Csikszentmihalyi) Seligman says the central skill to having more engagement is to identify your signature strengths and virtues, and recraft your life to use them more often. "By deploying your highest strengths and talents, you can have more intense absorption in more areas of your life.“

For the VIA Strengths test please go to: Authentic Happiness

The Meaningful Life

This adds another element, transcending the self, to the engaged life. The central skill is to use your strengths and virtues to serve something beyond the self. Philosophers and ordinary folk have known for ages that giving provides more pleasure than receiving.

Seligman says: "Positive psychology is just not happyology, the pleasant life. We have repeatedly found that those who pursue all three lives, pleasure, engagement and meaning, have by far the most life satisfaction, with engagement and meaning far and away the biggest contributors to fulfillment."

EIW programmes are designed to offer Applied Positive Psychology techniques and tools on how increase satisfaction in the three key areas of the formula and enhance the three different aspects of your life. If you want to achieve more satisfaction in life, you cannot afford to ignore the impact positive psychology can have.

Applied PP techniques can be combined with our emotional intelligence programmes to give an all round inspirational and motivational programme designed to increase satisfaction, productivity and interpersonal relations.

Call us know to see how these interventions can work for you and your organisation.