Martin Seligman
Martin Seligman
Martin E. P. "Marty" Seligmanis an American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. Since the late 90's, Seligman has been an avid promoter within the scientific community for the field of positive psychology. His theory of learned helplessness is popular among scientific and clinical psychologists. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Seligman as the 31st most cited psychologist of the 20th century...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPsychologist
Date of Birth12 August 1942
CountryUnited States of America
People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.
Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals choose the way they think.
We deprive our children, our charges, of persistence. What I am trying to say is that we need to fail, children need to fail, we need to feel sad, anxious and anguished. If we impulsively protect ourselves and our children, as the feel-good movement suggests, we deprive them of learning-persistence skills.
You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.
Well-being cannot exist just in your own head. Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.
When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.
When we take time to notice the things that go right - it means we're getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.
Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.
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.
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.
The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.
Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage