When is the last time when you genuinely smiled until the ends of your mouth would reach your ears? It seems that smiling people get the most out of life, especially if you are a woman. If you have never heard of the Duchenne smile...google it. Research has shown that women who have this type of smile are happily married and have an overall state of well being. This is one of the details which Martin Seligman reveals to us in his book Authentic Happiness, Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment.
At my first reading of this book I admit that I wasn’t overly stoked or surprised by its topic. At the second reading I started to get to the gist of it all and I liked it. I guess this book challenged a lot of my misconceptions and as you probably know...it is not pleasant to let go of the old beliefs.
PART 1 of my book review
I lived an entire life thinking that getting a better education is a tool to improve my overall happiness. I was taken aback when Seligman introduced in this book an essential list of things that are proven by research to actually make you happy. Getting more education and stuffing your house with pretentious diplomas from prestigious universities is not one of them. If you don’t touch the entire book this part that I am about to tell you about is the only thing that you must retain if you have at least a bit of misery in your life and you are willing to make something in order to dust it off and bring the sunny happiness in your existence.
“ If you want to lastingly raise your level of happiness by changing the external circumstances of your life , you should do the following:
- Live in a wealthy democracy, not in an impoverished dictatorship (a strong effect)
- Get married (a robust effect, but perhaps not causal)
- Avoide negative events and negative emotion (only a moderate effect)
- Acquire a rich social network ( a robust effect, but perhaps not causal)
- Get religion ( a moderate effect)”
little effect on happiness (you needn’t bother to do the following:)
“6. make more money (more materialistic people are less happy)
- stay healthy (subjective health, not objective health, matters)
- get as much education as possible (no effect)
- change your race or move to a sunnier climate (no effect)”
PART 2 of my book review
So making more money or getting that extremely wanted top promotion at your job will not last. These kind of achievements are transient and leave us empty. We have all been there. It takes a maximum of several days until the novelty of any material possession acquired wears off. Do you remember the vacations where you went alone in fabulous places and yet something/someone was missing? You would have wished to have a loved one with you, isn’t it? The biggest surprise to me was the marriage factor. If you end up being happily married and succeed nothing more...you will have more happiness than those who parade their wealth in front of others while miserably suffering the lack of a loving spouse. As Seligman points out "marriage is a more potent happiness factor than satisfaction with job, or finances or community”. I put the emphasis on being happily married because research has shown that “among those in ‘not very happy’ marriages, their level of happiness is lower than the unmarried or divorced”
Martin Seligman introduces the concept of the good life as being a goal that we should strive to achieve. What is a good life though? According to the author, “herein is my formulation of the good life: using your signature strenghts everyday in the main realms of your life to bring abundant gratification and authentic happiness” . So you increase your chances to be happy if you use your natural talents while keeping in mind the fact that it is about gratification and not about pleasure:“pleasure marks the achievement of biological satiation, whereas gratification marks the achievement of psychological growth”. Martin recommends us to take the VIA Survey of Character Strengths available at the https://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/testcenter . I did the test and it is very good. It will reveal to you what are you the best at and guide you through possible career paths while considering your natural abilities.
In order to be happy at your job you need to use your signature strenghts. As Seligman wisely points out, “a calling must engage your signature strenghts” and “the key is not finding the right job, it is finding a job you can make right through recrafting”. I admit that I was reluctant after reading this as I often believed it is all about finding the right job where someone could then become happy. But if you sit long enough with Seligman’s idea you start to realize that the notion of a perfect job to make you happy doesn’t exist and that the focus should be on using your natural skills in a job that you can make right. Interesting shift of perspective, right?
A valuable part of this book is related to education and what we can do in order to raise happy children in our schools and in our homes as parents. I will mention a couple of valuable insights shared by Martin Seligman and I invite you to reflect on them as they will me key tools in changing the way we treat children and their happiness levels:
“Teaching 10 years old children the skills of optimistic thinking and action cuts their rate of depression in half when they go through puberty” and also teach children skills like: “future-mindedness, hope, interpersonal skills, courage, the capacity for flow, faith, work ethic” to act like “buffers “ against “the tribulations that put people at risk for mental illness”
“inducing positive emotion to children helps the learning process”
“So my first piece of advice about building strenghts in kids is to reward all displays of any of the strenghts” , “ My second and final piece of advice is go out of your way to allow your child to display these burgeoning signatures strenghts in the course of your normal family activities. When they are displayed, acknowledge them with a name”
“adults and children who are put into a good mood select higher goals, perform better , and persist longer on a variety of laboratory tasks, such as solving anagrams”
The book is in fact a big hefty tool to discover that the key to lasting happiness is inside of you and that it is in your power to use it to do something bigger than yourself. Finding out what you would like to do for humanity from your natural gifts is something that Seligman describes as “the meaningful life”:“The meaningful life has one additional feature: using your signature strenghts into the service of something larger than you are”. I have found this key distinction made by Seligman to be inovative: how about focusing on having a meaningful life rather than having a happy life as this type of approach will bring you a long lasting good effect?
I believe that we need to focus more on the less palpable things that promise happiness and to look inward to the elements that are easier to work on even if they are not physical: love, optimism, faith, personal mission, resilience, hope, courage.