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The A in PERMA: Accomplishment (The Gift That Keeps on Giving)

8/8/2011

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This discussion series, inspired by Martin Seligman’s work, did not aim to simply duplicate content, but rather to explore a wider context for PERMA with more practical application.  Today we look at the last component of PERMA – Accomplishment – and how it can aid to making our lives happier, more joyful.   

Here are several ways that Accomplishment contributes to well-being:

The Gift that Keeps on Giving

What struck me most about Accomplishment is that it is quite literally the gift that you can give to yourself that keeps on giving.   Often we find ourselves at the end of the day or the week and we know that time has passed, but we have little notion where most of it went, which is sad indeed, because this represents pieces of our precious life that went missing without record or recognition.  If however we devoted our time to a specific task or goal, the time is easier to recall, to remember and to re-play in your mind.  You can enjoy and savor the rewards of achieving a goal over and over again.  The first time the gift of accomplishment makes you feel is good because you achieve a goal you set out to do, and thereafter, your recollection or memory of that happy moment can be replayed and enjoyed for the rest of your life. It is like having a cookie jar filled with good feelings next to you: just dip in, pull out a memory of an accomplishment, and hey presto!  You will feel good without having done a thing, based purely on invoking a memory of past accomplishment.

This is because the words “accomplishment” and “achievement” are often retrospective, as people look back at their lives or the immediate past at something already completed.

Gratitude

One of the easiest ways to achieve your life goals is to look to the people who have already helped you.  Thank each one personally and privately.  Expand beyond the basic thank you by telling them why they are important to you and how their help in the past helped you to succeed at something.  Keep these people in your corner by showing your gratitude and they will likely help you again.  University of Michigan psychologist Christopher Peterson wrote in his book, A Primer in Positive Psychology, “In our experience with many dozens of gratitude letters…they ‘work’ 100% of the time in the sense that the recipient is moved, often to tears, and the sender is gratified as well.”

In a sense gratitude is a gift too – also giving more than once. Gratitude researcher Robert Emmons recently reviewed the growing evidence that feelings of gratitude improve the quality of our lives.  By being grateful, we feel good, possibly even happy, and the person we are thanking also experiences positive emotion.  Double value!  Emmons found that people who “wrote up to five things for which they were grateful or thankful” on a weekly basis “exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week.”  Seligman and his colleagues also discovered that when people took a few minutes each evening to write down “three good things” that happened to them during the day, their happiness increased and their depressive symptoms decreased.  So gratitude it seems, helps with positive rumination – this ‘how to’ hint for ditching depression is a keeper!

Emmons found in another study that people who feel gratitude are more likely to help others.  He wrote, “Gratitude leads not only to feeling good, but also to doing good.” It seems therefore as if gratitude transcends depression and self focus and allows us to move beyond preoccupation with ourselves and our problems. It allows us to reach out to help others.

Savoring Accomplishments Leads to Strengths Identification

Positive Psychologist David Pollay observes that when you reflect on the most significant accomplishments in your life, it is easy to spot which of your top strengths helped you achieve those successes. This makes it possible for you to see a pattern in your life: you will discover that many of your greatest achievements were made possible by engaging your top strengths.  Accomplishment helps you to spot the underlying patterns of your personal strengths and how they have contributed to your successes in life. This is dynamite insight about yourself and your abilities - yours to freely use for the next challenge and goal to be accomplished.

Appreciate Your Own Accomplishments so Others can Too

Strengths expert Kathryn Britton points out that we sometimes make our accomplishments look easy. This may be because for us they are easy - by virtue of leveraging our signature strengths.  Or maybe we are just being modest. Point is, others - such as our partners, peers, bosses and spouses won’t readily recognize our accomplishments if we don’t.  If the way we work makes it look easy it does not always lead to appreciation.  If you appreciate your own contribution and recognize how it is different from those made by others you will develop a habit of appreciating and savoring your own accomplishments leading to some great joy-in-the-present equity. When someone else is acknowledged as a hero for solving a difficult problem, perhaps you can think of times when you prevented problems from occurring by planning ahead. Take notes. Keep track of satisfied customers. Write about it in your journal. Take photographs to savor later. Collect evidence of ways you have influenced important outcomes. It is always easier to illustrate your value with specific instances that show how you have made things  work than to show how your actions prevented problems from occuring.

Projected Appreciation as a Tool for Goal Achievement

Projected Accomplishment is an excellent energy source for achieving future goals.  Yeager writes that people who scrapbook their future goals with illustrations, photos, articles, give themselves a little bit of 'Achievement-savoring-in-advance'.  This may help to energize the person to go ahead and better achieve their goals.  Similarly, people who scrapbook about past accomplishments give themselves permission to explore and examine their remembered pleasures in their journey.

Accomplishment is also about keeping something in store for the times when in-the-moment positivity is difficult to find.  One cannot help wondering how many times folks like Nelson Mandela or Viktor Frankl would have had to dip into either past or future savoring to help them get through difficult times or to keep their hopes alive for the future.  It is indeed a broadening experience – to borrow the term form Barbara Frederickson – to be able to Accomplish and later to reflect on that Accomplishment again in order to be able to fuel goal achievement or to  broaden one's resilience against adversity even more. 

Accomplishment and reflecting on Accomplishmnet builds positivity, it strengthens resilience and it gives us an idea of what we are good at.  If we reflect on past or future accomplishments we can easily experience gratitude which  spins off a whole cycle of positivity for ourselves and others.  Achievement lasts forever and it cannot be taken away – not even by death.  It is worth celebrating daily, for our own wellbeing as well as for those around us.

References:

1.       Seligman, M. E. P. (2004), Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Free Press.

2.       Gratitude and Giving Will Lead to Your Success. David J. Pollay. Positive Psychology News.

3.       Positive Core and Strengths at Work.  Kathryn Britton. Positive Psychology News.

4.       Make Your Goals Come Alive through Imagery. J M Yeager. Positive Psychology News.

5.       Peterson, C., (2006). A Primer in Positive Psychology New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

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The Meaning of Life - the M in PERMA

5/28/2011

 
Martin Seligman defines the meaningful life as knowing what your highest strengths are and “using your signature strengths and virtues in the service of something much larger than you are.” He comments that authentic happiness is meant “as a preface to the meaningful life and that while it is possible take drugs to generate the effects of positive emotion and pleasure through pharmacology, it is not possible to synthesize the positive effects of being in the flow or of experiencing meaning.”1) 

A happy life is made up of three different kinds of lives: the first is the pleasant life, which consists of having as many of the positive emotions as you can, and learning the skills that amplify them. Fortunately positive emotion (hedonics) as we often see it portrayed in the Hollywood context is not where it ends.  Pleasure in itself seems empty and philosophers from Aristotle through Seneca through Wittgenstein considered the notion of pleasure as vulgar.  

The good life is the second kind of life, and at it's root  is knowing what you are good at – your signature strengths – and then re-crafting your life to use more of these strengths in all aspects of your life, which leads to Flow.  When you deploy your strengths in various parts of your life, such as work, home, romance, you end up spending a lot of time in Flow. Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle talked about "eudaemonia", the good life,  as the pursuit of happiness2).  They didn’t mean smiling and giggling, they were talking about about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. It is the place where time stops, where you feel completely at home, where negative emotions like self-consciousness is blocked and where you're one with what you are doing.   

To review so far, there is the pleasant or life — having as many of the pleasures as you can and the learning the skills to expand them — and the good life — knowing what your highest strengths are and re-crafting everything you do to use them as much as possible as often as possible. And then there's a third form of happiness that we humans pursue, the pursuit of meaning.  There is one thing we know about meaning: that meaning consists in attachment to something bigger than you are. The self is not a very good site for attaching meaning, and the larger the thing that you can credibly attach yourself to, the more meaning you find.

Meaning is knowing what your highest strengths are - and deploying those in the service of something you believe is larger than you are. There's no shortcut to that. That's what life is about. There will likely be a pharmacology of pleasure, and there may be a pharmacology of positive emotion generally, but it's unlikely there'll be an interesting pharmacology of flow. And as Seligman said, it's impossible that there'll be a pharmacology of meaning.

Although people tend to think of meaning as having a singular source, Emmons (1997) states, “Empirically, however, people’s lives usually draw meaning from multiple sources, including family and love, work, religion, and various personal projects.”

Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs (2005, p. 610) associate the quest for meaning in life with the following needs: 3)

1. Purpose: Present events draw meaning from their connection to future outcomes — objective goals and subjective fulfilment.
2. Values, which can justify certain courses of action.
3. Efficacy, the belief that one can make a difference.
4. Self-worth and reasons for believing that one is a good and worthy person apparently are what results from emersion in our natural talents or what we excel at. 

This type of engagement brings personal joy and imbues meaning to one’s life.  It even makes it possible for us to work towards the greater good, to transcend our personal limitations and to get enmeshed in creating resilience for our communities and those close to us.   There is a classification of six universal virtues which break down in to 24 strengths:  first, a wisdom and knowledge cluster; second, a courage cluster; third, virtues like love and humanity; fourth, a justice cluster; fifth a temperance, moderation cluster; and sixth a spirituality, transcendence cluster.  These virtues and their subordinate strengths represent the best in us.  We all have different strengths, and if we engage ourselves in our personal areas of strength, we create meaning – both in our own lives and also beyond.  It becomes virtually impossible to be engaged in one’s area of personal strengths without creating meaningful output - both for personal and wider consumption. Finding out what we are good at is not only our birthright, but will in most instances result in greater life satisfaction – if we then focus on spending more time on the areas where we are best at, doing what makes us feel good.  Knowing what our personal strengths are allows us to find our niche in this world, the place where we can be recognised for our strengths, where we have enough talent not only to use for our own good, but even plenty to spare and to share with others.

People who live a life of paucity or scarcity have most likely not discovered their personal strengths, or know what these are, but choose not to live their lives by practicing them.  The following list of strengths is provided to provide in broad strokes a context for these strengths that makes each of us as individuals great at what we do.

Strengths of Wisdom and Knowledge:

·         Creativity (originality, Ingenuity)

·         Curiosity (interest, novelty-seeking, openness to experience)

·         Open-Mindedness (judgement, critical thinking)

·         Love of learning

·          Perspective (wisdom)

Strengths of Courage:

·         Bravery

·         Persistence (perseverance, industriousness)

·         Integrity (authenticity, honesty)

·         Vitality (zest, enthusiasm, vigour, energy)

Strengths of Humanity

·         Love

·         Kindness (generosity, nurturance, care, compassion, altruistic love, ‘niceness’)

·         Social intelligence (emotional intelligence, personal intelligence)

Strengths of Justice

·         Citizenship (social responsibility, loyalty, teamwork)

·         Fairness

·         Leadership

Strengths of Temperance

·         Forgiveness and mercy

·         Humility and modesty

·         Prudence

·         Self-regulation (self-control)

Strengths of Transcendence

·         Appreciation of beauty and excellence (awe, wonder, elevation)

·         Gratitude

·         Hope (optimism, future-mindedness, future orientation)

·         Humour (playfulness)

·         Spirituality (religiousness, faith, purpose) 4)

Also see
http://uat.viacharacter.org/VIACHARACTERPROFILE/GetYourProfile/tabid/62/language/en-US/Default.aspx.  Note: readers are urged to take the free test at the above site to identify their personal strengths.  Please contact us if you want to find out more about how to use your strengths to your best advantage in work, relationships and day to day living.

The  emphasis in the VIA Character Strengths and Virtues above is on the strengths of individuals.  There is not the traditional ‘weaknesses’ which have to be ‘improved’ on or the euphemistic ’areas of development’ we have had to listen to through gritted teeth in our performance reviews.  The logic is simply that if you spend most of your time doing what you are good at then you will probably be more successful than if you spent most of your time trying to get better at things for which you clearly have little natural ability or talent.  And no more need to feel bad about what you are not good at, or to feel compelled to improve in an area that would take you years to barely equal average.   And if you are doing what you are good at, you will be happy at what you are doing, you can expectto receive a good wage for doing it and you may well find that it feels less like work and more like play.  You will be fast at what you do because it comes naturally – so you will be able to finish tasks on or ahead of schedule, thus giving you a little extra margin of free time if you want to get away from work to have more quality time with your family, or if you want to give some of your time and talent to a charity or some other form of the greater good. 

 And there are other bonuses to being involved or ‘in Flow’ – that place where you are so immersed in what you are doing that you hardly hear the radio, or the telephone ringing, where you are creative, focussed on the task, living in the moment, experiencing no negativity and being extremely productive:  You do not have to combat some of the most serious ills of our time – the ruminations or negative self talk that we can so easily fall victim to when living a life without purpose or meaning:  boredom, restlessness, feelings of inadequacy. Swaby remarks that we are all addicts: watching TV, the computer, technology, the internet, food, coffee and even chocolate have become objects of our addiction.

“It is hard to find something that we can enjoy without the risk of becoming addicted. One might even wonder if we are all destined to become addicts? The National  Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University polled 1,987 teenagers and 504 parents. It found that teen substance abuse has three predictors: high stress, too much spending money, and frequent boredom. Bored teenagers, it found, are 50% more likely to smoke, drink and use illegal drugs. The studies  highlight that at the core of addiction is a search for significant experiences, an escape from boredom and a longing for the rush that comes from consuming the substance of choice. Addiction, it seems, is a pseudo-search for meaning. It is a replacement for having little or no compelling purpose for your life. One either finds personal meaning, or they will find themselves swept into a compulsive search for meaning-in-a-bottle. Indeed, are we all not addicted to meaning?”

Swaby argues that when we have a compelling purpose we become filled with meaning, energy, persistence and zeal for life.  And when we lack this type of purpose, we feel empty, we suffer from depression, anxiety, lack of focus and distractibility. Addicts describe feeling drawn to the excitement of the high. We are all drawn to the 'high' that we receive from a fulfilling life purpose. Boredom, restlessness and anxious feelings can drive any of us to an addiction of busy-ness. 5)

Steven Winn, who writes for the San Francisco Chronicle says, "We are all terrified of boredom." "Boredom," he writes, "arrives with a spectrum of feelings shading from guilt and distress to bafflement and pleasure. It poses fundamental questions about our own identities and the connections we make, or don't, with the world around us." Each of us must choose: a compelling purpose, or a compulsive practice.

Tara Miller says that if life is a question of contentment, then the answer will be defined by what we do - our life's meaning.  Our contentment to find passion in our work, our family, our love, can falter if we are constantly engaged in tasks that don’t bring out the best in us.

Being content with life is difficult, especially when you feel that life, love, work, and relationships are treating you unfairly. Having personal meaning, and finding worth in one's life and activities will lead to contentment. Personal meaning brings the individual from responding with greed, anger, or resentment, and allows for contentment and joy in the task at hand.  Contentment is not hard to attain, yet if one's own personal meaning does not drive one's life, one is robbed of true contentment. 

If one can find joy in the task for the tasks’ sake, if it is possible to enjoy the journey as much as the destination, then meaning and  purpose cannot be far way. When one can transcend the execution of the task and enjoy it for it’s own sake, or deliver one’s own talents and gifts in the service of something greater, then we approach serving in a vocation – a calling.  This elevated state of living one’s highest worth is possible and potentially in the grasp of everyone who reads this blog entry.  It starts with finding your strengths and claiming your purpose.

References:
1.        Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic happiness. New York: Free PressSeligman, M. (2004).
2.       
Eudaomonia, The good life. Edge conversation with Martin Seligman about meaning in life.
3.        Baumeister, R. (1991). Meanings of life. New York: Guilford Press.
4.        Christopher Petersen and Martin E.P. Seligman.   Character Strengths and Virtues – A handbook and Classification. New York. Oxford University Press. (2004)
5.        Addicted to Meaning  Sean M. Swaby Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 
http://www.ibolt.com
6.     Where has my Contentment Gone?Tara D. Miller Edmonton, Alberta,  Canada  http://www.meaning.ca/living/MOL_articles.htm

 

 

 



 

Engagement / Being in Flow / In the Zone

3/11/2011

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Today we are looking at the second pathway to a happy life - Engagement, also known as 'being in the Zone,' or 'experiencing Flow'. Even if it all sounds a bit strange, I am sure you have been there.

Discovering the enjoyment of life ‘In The Zone’ – immersion in activities that bring total focus, creativity and personal fulfillment is one of the greatest contributors to authentic happiness. When one is in The Zone, time passes without our notice, we have almost no sense of what is happening around us, we don't hear the phone ringing, we are so busy having fun that we don't want it to stop... You know it - we have all been there at some time, and probably not often enough. When people are immersed in doing something they love doing, benefits such as good health, longevity and fulfilling personal relationships become much more readily attainable.

People in the Zone are normally busy doing something that they are really good at. So if you ever wanted a clue about what you are best at, think back of the times you have found yourself in the Zone and try to remember what you were busy doing at the time.

When one is so totally immersed in an activity there is not much room for feeling anything. Which can be a good thing. It is a good way to banish the blues or bad thoughts and events out of your mind. People in the Zone exhibit extraordinary creativity and problem solving abilities, as well as focus far beyond their normal levels.

And another thing about being in the Zone is that when you eventually come out of it, you may feel tired or drained, but you will be happy. The act of reflecting back on the intense immersion is a joy-promoting activity of itself.

But being engaged offers another dimension of happiness too – it is the dimension of being in the present. It is not possible to feel sad or negative when your entire awareness is focused on the present. The bad thing about focusing on the past is that that is the place where some of the bad things happened which could influence our current thoughts. So hanging around in the past isn’t a clever thing to do.

But neither is hanging around in the future. Because then you are in dreamer mode – where you think about what must be, but you are not making it happen.  But in the present, you ARE MAKING IT HAPPEN. It is the most powerful place to be and the only part of your life that is almost completely under your control.  It is difficult to justify spending much time in any dimension other than the one where you are in charge. And it is a conscious choice to live in the present.  It is a way in which you can take responsibility for your thoughts.

So what to do if you are really trying hard to focus on the present but the shadows of the past are trying to pull you back all the time? Or the dreams of the future are seducing you to follow them into a place where you won’t manage to accomplish anything? The easiest answer is to engage all or as many of your senses as you can to bring you into the present.

Waking up your senses is a sure-fire way to land yourself in the present.  The act of engaging with a flower is an awesome example of getting yourself into the present. You can look at the flower and appreciate it’s colour by using your visual sense.  Enjoying the perfume of the flower and perhaps placing a drop of it’s sweet nectar on your tongue will wake up your sense of smell and taste.  You may be lucky enough to find a bee buzzing around the flower to engage your sense of hearing and if you brush your fingers over the petals or the thorns your tactile sense will come alive.  Savoring such an engaging experience is yet another way of engaging the event long after it has passed, but getting the same positive emotion benefits as if it were happening right now.

If you are a passionate nature lover, art lover, music lover, dancer, speed freak, athlete or artist of any description, then engaging your senses will be one of the ways to take you from an ordinary moment to an engaged moment.

Caring human touch is responsible for release of oxytocin – also known as the cuddle hormone, which promotes human bonding. Bonding is an activity that makes you feel good about being in the present, and it is uncommon to feel any emotion but joy in the moment of human bonding.

It has been an invigorating experience sharing the benefits of living an engaged life in the present moment with you. I reluctantly withdraw myself from the Zone I occupied while writing this post, but I am so pleased to reflect on having been able to share this really cool information with you.

Next time we will unpack the R in PERMA, Relationships. I don't know too much about research in relationships and positive emotion right now, so I have to go do some homework for our next post.

Be present, be in the Zone for as many hours per day as you can manage!

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Positive Emotion

3/11/2011

 
The Five Pathways to a Happy Life Blog:  Positive Emotion

Martin Seligman is working on a new book, Flourish: A new understanding of happiness and well-being – and how to achieve them. I was lucky enough to get a sneak preview of his soon to be published pathways to happiness from this book, which are encapsulated in the acronym PERMA: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment.

I thought it would be interesting to unpack these pathways, one a time, as blog entries to explore how these pathways can lead us to be happy.  (These entries can also be found on our FB site's Discussions page.)

So we start off by taking a look at the P of PERMA -

Positive Emotion:

The emotion that I have now is the direct result of the choices I made previously. If I am angry, I can choose to hold on to my anger or I can shrug it off and move on. If I feel sad, I can choose to focus on what or who made me sad and I can continue contemplating my sadness for the rest of the day, or I can deliberately focus on something more positive, and move on from the negative emotions. Personally I find that no matter how negative I feel, I can always focus on something good by doing one of the following:

*  listening to music I enjoy;
*  reading a good book or re-reading a poem or even an  article that made me laugh,
*  enjoying an aromatic cup of coffee - preferably with someone I like;
*  stroking the soft fur of one of my pets or letting my fingers trail over the lush feel of silk;
*  thinking back to a happy time in my life, like that amazing concert I attended or the unforgettable holiday our family had a few years ago;
*  looking at inspiring works of art or photos of art;
*  dancing, walking, swimming - doing stuff that push up my pulse rate and make my feel alive;
*  giving or receiving a hug from someone I care for;
*  ticking an item off my to do list that has been sitting there for too long;
*  talking to a friend who really needs a pep talk;
*  wearing an item of clothing in a colour that really suits me;
*  smiling at strangers and getting the odd smile back;
doing someone an unexpected favour; and so on.

It is possible, with very little effort, to redirect one's own negative thoughts and to focus on something that gives you joy. Thinking joyful thoughts is a habit that can be learned, just the same way we sometimes learn to think about negative stuff. What is so cool about thinking positive stuff is that it really allows one to take charge of one's thoughts. Now that is cool! My thoughts, my power to choose to be happy!! That must be what the clever folks mean when they say we have to take charge of our lives... I feel pretty empowered and energised just writing about it, imagine how good you will feel if you go give it a try. And then come write a post on this wall to let us know if it worked for you.

We'll be back with some chit chat about the E in PERMA - Engagement (or being in the Flow).

Be happy!
:-)

    Author: Ally

    Hi, if you are new here, you may want to subscribe to the RSS feed at the bottom of this page. Thanks for visiting!
    I do positive psychology because it makes me a happier and more fulfilled person.   And I care about creating greater awareness of the choices people have for living happy and fulfilled lives based on their personal strengths. 
    My top strength is love of learning and this blog is about sharing what I have learned. 

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