Says Shawn Achor- The Happy Secret to Better Work puts it in perspective
My research introduced me to the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and read his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Here’s how this book begins, “Twenty-three hundred years ago Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness”,(Csikszentmihalyi, p.1). This is the cornerstone by which Csikszentmihalyi made his mark as one of the 5 founding fathers of positive psychology. Until this time I had not really thought about it, but my experience with psychology was when it needed fixing, the pathologies, the disease model. I decided then and there, if I was going to live and breathe a particular topic for the following 3 years in pursuit of my degree, it was going to be something positive. Flow became my focus. This further piqued my interest in positive psychology.
Here’s an OK YouTube video to explain positive psychology https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qJvS8v0TTI
According to another of the founding fathers Martin Seligman, Positive Psychology has three dimensions that can be cultivated:
“The pleasant life” is realized if we learn to savor and appreciate such basic pleasures as companionship, the natural environment and our bodily needs.
We can remain pleasantly stuck at this stage or we can go on to experience “the good life,” which is achieved by discovering our unique virtues and strengths and employing them creatively to enhance our lives.
The final stage is “the meaningful life,” in which we find a deep sense of fulfillment by mobilizing our unique strengths for a purpose much greater than ourselves.
The genius of Seligman’s theory is that it reconciles two conflicting views of human happiness – the individualistic approach, which emphasizes that we should take care of ourselves and nurture our own strengths, and the altruistic approach, which tends to downplay individuality and emphasizes self-sacrifice. (“Why Happiness?,” 2016)
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2009). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper Row.
Why Happiness? (2016, September 03). Retrieved November 22, 2017, from http://www.pursuit-of-happiness.org/about/why-happiness/