Martin E P Seligman Quotes

"I WAS THE CATCHER for the Lake Luzerne Dodgers, a catcher with meager talent, a catcher in awe of Danny and Teddy. Danny was the first baseman and Teddy, the coach's son, was the left fielder. They were natural athletes: they could hit fastballs (a small miracle of hand-eye coordination that I never mastered), and they glided around the base paths with the grace of gazelles. They were, to a ten-year-old who was batting .111, the embodiment of beauty and summer and health. As I drifted to sleep at night, it was often with the image of Danny, horizontal and three feet off the ground, spearing a line drive, or of Teddy stretching a single into a double by slipping under the tag. In the early hours of a chilly, August, upstate New York morning, my father woke me. "Danny's got polio," he said. A week later Teddy got it too. My parents kept me indoors, away from other kids. Little League was suspended, the season unfinished. The next time I saw Danny, his throwing arm was withered and he couldn't move his right leg. I never saw Teddy again. He died in the early fall. But the next summer, the summer of 1954, there was the Salk vaccine. All the kids got shots. Little League resumed. The Lake Luzerne Dodgers lost the opening game to the Hadley Giants. The fear that kept us housebound melted away and the community resumed its social life. The epidemic was over. No one else I knew ever got polio."

The optimists believe defeat is just a temporary setback.

Si bien es posible que la psicología haya desatendido la virtud, no cabe duda de que la religión y la filosofía no lo han hecho y existe una convergencia sorprendente sobre la virtud y la fortaleza a lo largo de los milenios y entre culturas. Confucio, Aristóteles, santo Tomás de Aquino, el código Bushido de los samuráis, el Bhagavad-Gita y otras tradiciones venerables discrepan en cuanto a los detalles, pero estos seis códigos incluyen seis virtudes clave: — Sabiduría y conocimiento. — Valor. — Amor y humanidad. — Justicia. — Templanza. — Espiritualidad y trascendencia.

But clinical psychologists also began to find something disconcerting emerging from therapy: even on that rare occasion when therapy goes superbly and unusually well, and you help the client rid herself of depression, anxiety, and anger, happiness is not guaranteed. Emptiness is not an uncommon result.

Try to reframe the provocation: Maybe he’s having a rough day. There’s no need to take it personally. Don’t act like a jerk just because he is. He couldn’t help it. This could be a testy situation, but easy does it.

Pessimistic prophecies are self-fulfilling.

He formado parte del cisma en la psicología que se conoce como psicología positiva, un movimiento científico y profesional. En 1998, como presidente de la American Psychological Association (APA), apremié a la psicología a complementar su venerable meta con un nuevo objetivo: explorar lo que hace que la vida valga la pena y crear las condiciones habilitadoras de una vida digna de ser vivida. La meta de entender el bienestar y crear condiciones habilitadoras para la vida no es de ningún modo idéntica a la meta de entender el sufrimiento y deshacer las condiciones incapacitantes de la vida. En este momento, varios miles de personas en todo el mundo trabajan en este campo y se esfuerzan por promover estas metas.2 Este libro narra su historia, o por lo menos el lado público de esta historia.

Raising children, I realized, is more than just fixing what is wrong with them. It is about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live these positive traits to the fullest.

Optimists recover from their momentary helplessness immediately. Very soon after failing, they pick themselves up, shrug, and start trying again.

Happy people remember more good events than actually happened, and they forget more of the bad events. Depressed people, in contrast, are accurate about both.

There is a third premise of the recovery movement that I do endorse enthusiastically: The patterns of problems in childhood that recur into adulthood are significant. They can be found by exploring your past, by looking into the corners of your childhood. Coming to grips with your childhood will not yield insight into how you became the adult you are: The causal links between childhood events and what you have now become are simply too weak. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make your adult problems go away: Working through the past does not seem to be any sort of cure for troubles. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make you feel any better for long, nor will it raise your self-esteem.

Coming to grips with childhood is a different and special voyage. The sages urged us to know ourselves, and Plato warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Knowledge acquired on this voyage is about patterns, about the tapestry that we have woven. It is not knowledge about causes. Are there consistent mistakes we have made and still make? In the flush of victory, do I forget my friends — in the Little League and when I got that last big raise? (People have always told me I'm a good loser but a bad winner.) Do I usually succeed in one domain but fail in another? (I wish I could get along with the people I really love as well as I do with my employers.) Does a surprising emotion arise again and again? (I always pick fights with people I love right before they have to go away.) Does my body often betray me? (I get a lot of colds when big projects are due.)

You probably want to know why you are a bad winner, why you get colds when others expect a lot of you, and why you react to abandonment with anger. You will not find out. As important and magnetic as the “why” questions are, they are questions that psychology cannot now answer. One of the two clearest findings of one hundred years of therapy is that satisfactory answers to the great “

Now we introduce a three-step model, “Putting It in Perspective,” for disputing catastrophic thinking: worst case, best case, most likely case.

After the most likely outcome is identified, they develop a plan for coping with the situation, and then practice this skill with both professional examples (a soldier has not returned from a land navigation drill; you received a negative review from a superior) and personal examples (your child is doing poorly at school, and you are not home to help; your spouse is having a hard time managing the finances while you are deployed).