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“The notion of a positive psychology movement began at a moment in time a few months after I had been elected president of the American Psychological Association. It took place in my garden while I was weeding with my 5-year-old daughter, Nikki. I have to confess that even though I write books about children, I’m really not all that good with them. I am goal-oriented and time-urgent, and when I am weeding in the garden, I am actually trying to get the weeding done. Nikki, however, was throwing weeds into the air and dancing around. I yelled at her. She walked away, came back, and said, “Daddy, I want to talk to you.” “Yes, Nikki?” “Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From the time I was three to the time I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. When I turned five, I decided not to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.” This was for me an epiphany, nothing less. I learned something about Nikki, something about raising kids, something about myself, and a great deal about my profession. First, I realized that raising Nikki was not about correcting whining. Nikki did that herself. Rather, I realized that raising Nikki was about taking this marvelous skill—I call it “seeing into the soul”—and amplifying it, nurturing it, helping her to lead her life around it to buffer against her weaknesses and the storms of life. Raising children, I realized, is more than fixing what is wrong with them. It is about identifying and nurturing their strongest qualities, what they own and are best at, and helping them find niches in which they can best live out these positive qualities. As for my own life, Nikki hit the nail right on the head. I was a grouch. I had spent 50 years mostly enduring wet weather in my soul, and the last 10 years being a nimbus cloud in a household of sunshine. Any good fortune I had was probably not due to my grouchiness but in spite of it. In that moment, I resolved to change.”
Positive psychology is the scientific study of positive human functioning, happiness, well-being and success through the exploration of personal strengths and virtues, as well as community and global paths to well-being on many levels including biology, personality, relationships, institutions, and cultures, to ask what is in a life which is thriving and flourishing. As it turns out, essential to all lives which are flourishing is positive emotion defined as cultivating joy, mindfulness, optimism, gratitude and awe. Another aspect is that people who have amazing lives engage fully with their life, world, and communities through activities and sharing of their own experiences and inner strengths. Such people maintain and foster quality and life-filling relationships with others who are both like and not like themselves, and they find a sense of purpose and meaning in every part of their lives leading to the feeling of accomplishment because they are motivated to achieve their goals and ambitions. The above diagram shows how these pathways to human flourishing are interconnected, and lead to a positive and gratitude filled life.
Written by: Monique Vanden'Aklie
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