Martin Seligman is the father of positive psychology. He developed the field over the steadily over his years of research, teaching, and therapy. It began with his work on learned helplessness which eventually resulted in his noticing the lack of study in the area of mental well-being. Seligman noted that the field of psychology, since its inception, has only focused on mental illness. The thought that previously dominated the field was “if we fix all the negative, we will be left with a healthy happy patient”. Seligman found that once you heal all the negative in your patient, you are not left with a healthy one but rather an empty one. Thus positive psychology was born. In short, positive psychology studies mental well-being. It seeks to not only reduce the negative areas in one’s life, but also to build up the positives. The main positive areas that are focused on are summed up in the acronym coined by Seligman, PERMA:
- Positive Emotion
- Engagement
- Relationship
- Meaning
- Accomplishments
I have collected various quotes from the works of Martin Seligman that highlight some of the findings from his research. They can be found below.
1. Control Your Explanations
“While you can’t control your experiences, you can control your explanations.”
― Martin Seligman, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life
4. Kindness Is Good For Your Health
“Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.”
― Martin Seligman, Flourish
5. Stop And Smell The Roses
“When we take time to notice the things that go right – it means we’re getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.”
― Martin Seligman
6. Life Is Sacred
“The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power, or goodness. A life that does this is pregnant with meaning, and if God comes at the end, such a life is sacred.”
― Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness
7. The Call To Meaning
“Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.”
― Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness
8. Misfortune Is Temporary
“The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case.”
― Martin Seligman
9. Where Does Time Stop?
“There is one aspect of happiness that’s been well studied, and it’s the notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly at home, wanting to be no place else?”
― Martin Seligman
10. Your Beliefs Matter
“It’s a matter of ABC: When we encounter ADVERSITY, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into BELIEFS. These beliefs may become so habitual we don’t even realize we have them unless we stop to focus on them. And they don’t just sit there idly; they have CONSEQUENCES.”
― Martin Seligman
