Many of you are parents. We think this article, from invited author David Pollay, will be of particular interest. Let us know what you think by leaving a comment at the end of the blog post.
Invited Author David Pollay
Here are the highlights from last night’s dinner with my family. When I arrived home from the office, Dawn and the girls were in the kitchen. The first thing I did was hug and kiss Dawn. Then I found Eliana and Ariela – they had gone into hiding when they heard the front door – and I hugged and kissed them too (after a little joyful tickling). I then grabbed my daughters and bounced them in my arms as I sang our special song. (It’s a simple song: I’m so happy to see you! I’m so happy to see you! I’mmmm soooo happy!). Next, we sat down together for dinner. We held hands and said our prayers, and we ended our blessings with a loud, and in unison, “Aaaamen!” We ate the food on our plates – vegetables included – and then we enjoyed a little dessert. And along the way, we talked about the fun and important things that happened that day for each of us. (Real or imaginary, four and five year-olds are fun to talk to!).
Why do we do these things? Why do we perform these rituals every night? Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychologist and author of “Stumbling on Happiness”, wrote, “Just as we pass along our genes in an effort to create people whose faces look like ours, so too do we pass along our beliefs in an effort to create people whose minds think like ours.” We want our children to share our values and beliefs and to demonstrate them in their behaviors.
“Almost anytime we tell anyone anything,” Gilbert says, “we are attempting to change the way their brains operate – attempting to change the way they see the world so that their view of it closely resembles our own.” I would add that any time we do anything in front of someone, we are transmitting a belief.
I kiss and hug Dawn in front of the girls because I want them to believe their mother is loved, respected and appreciated. I hug, kiss and sing to my girls because I want them to believe that they are loved and that they bring joy to my life. I make sure we hold hands and have fun saying “Amen” when we pray, so that the girls enjoy saying thanks for everything that is good in their lives.
But what did checking my e-mail 20 minutes after dinner say? What belief was I communicating? My diving right into e-mail said that my work was more important than family time. It also said that when my girls get older, it will be OK for them to run off after dinner and plunge into e-mail, Facebook or MySpace. And when I thought about this before I went to bed, I said to myself, “I don’t want my girls to hold these beliefs. E-mail can wait. Family time is more important. From now on, no more e-mail during family time.” I want my girls to see that I value my time with them and Dawn. And I want them to believe that family time is meaningful, interesting and fun.
How about you? What beliefs do you want your children to have? What beliefs do you believe will help make them happier, kinder and more successful? What are you saying and doing to transmit these good and powerful beliefs? Whatever good things that you are doing, keep doing them. Your children need to hear and see them. And what are you doing that undercuts the beliefs that you want your children to have? Make sure that you start removing your contradictory language and behavior from your daily routine.
Our children are sponges. Let’s give them something positive to absorb.
(Originally published elsewhere. Reprinted with permission of the author.)
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
In recognition of our new exercise, Use Your Strengths, we invited coach and author David Pollay to write strengths, and why positive psychology focuses on what works, and what we do well.
As a user of happier.com, you may have already taken the VIA Strengths Survey. The assessment helps you discover the things at which you’re best, as indicated by your strengths. Thousands of people like the strengths assessment but wanted something more. An exercise to teach you how to best put your strengths into use.
Use Your Strengths helps you discover how to put your top strengths into practice, at work, and at home. Let us know what you think about the exercise by leaving comments for fellow users and our team to review.
“Your Strengths Are Your Best Material” by invited author David Pollay
The other day one of you wrote to me, “David, why should we focus on our strengths? We can do some more work on what we’re already good at, but why not just get right to our weaknesses?” Let me tell you about an experience I had with one of my daughters.
Last year, Eliana, who was four at the time, came into the kitchen with a big smile and a “rattling” box in her hands. She walked past me, climbed up on a stool and dropped the box on the breakfast counter. I had barely enough time to read the box cover, “Jewelry Making Kit,” when Eliana said, “Papi, let’s make a bracelet.”
Eliana and I delicately strung beads on a bracelet wire. We used beads of all colors, beads with numbers, and we even spelled Eliana’s name. One hour later and our bracelet was complete.
There was just one problem. The bracelet did not fit Eliana’s wrist! I couldn’t believe it. After all that effort, it was too small.
I wouldn’t accept it. I had invested too much time to give up, and I didn’t want to disappoint Eliana. So I tried everything to make it work. I took off beads. I made the knots on the ends smaller. I tried to stretch the wire. And then finally, somehow I found a way to hook the bracelet, but just barely.
I was relieved until I heard a yell from the play room five minutes later. I ran in to find Eliana, and Ariela, my then-three year old, looking at the floor. Not only had the bracelet popped off, all the beads were now buried in our carpet!
The bottom line was simple: The bracelet just didn’t fit. It didn’t matter what we did, there was not enough material to work with. We did not have enough bracelet wire.
The same is true when we try to do great things in our lives by spending our energy focusing on our weaknesses: We get coached, we get trained, we get motivated, we get inspired, but there’s only so much we can do. Why? There’s just not enough material to work with – that’s why they’re weaknesses.
The science of Positive Psychology focuses instead on how we can use our most natural strengths to achieve our greatest and most gratifying successes in life. Most people focus their life on simply building skills to meet their job responsibilities. The best leaders know that this approach is incomplete. They focus instead on bringing out their top strengths, developing them and maximizing their use in support of the outcomes they are determined to achieve. Then these leaders turn to skill building to complement their natural power. They start with strength, and then add skill.
Your chances of success as a leader increase greatly when you follow my ADAPT Strengths Model of Leadership Development. Leaders do best when they become aware of their strengths, develop them, apply them to their work and life,partner with others to amplify their strengths and find ways to work around their lesser strengths. They then implement this same approach with the teams they lead.
The most important thing you can do in your life is to use your most abundant strengths and passion to live your best life possible. Don’t make bracelets that won’t fit.
The best place to look for greatness is inside our strengths. Go where you have the best material.
(Originally published elsewhere. Reprinted with permission of the author.)
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
By invited author, David J. Pollay
Since the beginning of time, man has been concerned with how to achieve happiness. Philosophers, theologians and, later, psychologists have all tried to provide the answers.
In the Fourth Century B.C., the Greek philosopher Aristippus told us that the key to happiness was to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. He called his approach to happiness “Hedonism,” the Greek word for pleasure. Decades later, Epicurus went even further and said it was man’s moral obligation to maximize his experience of pleasure.
Socrates took a different tact. He believed happiness is achieved through the pursuit of virtue and knowledge (aretē and epistemē in Greek). Continuing in this vein, Aristotle wrote that man can only be happy when he identifies his virtues, cultivates them and lives in accordance with them. The idea is that we should develop what is best within us, and then apply our talents and skills to the betterment of others and our world. Socrates and Aristotle’s approach to happiness is known as “Eudaimonia,” loosely translated from Greek to mean happiness.
Socrates and Aristotle
On the other side of the world, Confucius taught us that all men have the power to transform their lives: A good life is possible for everyone, not just the privileged in society. And then like Aristotle, Mencius believed that true joy in our lives is possible when we nurture “our sprouts of virtue.” Zhangzi then shifted the focus to the importance of intuition, and away from the mind. He taught the power of the Dao, and how happiness comes from living in harmony with nature. Buddha then introduced “the way of the eightfold path.” Buddha taught that the key to a good life was found in controlling your mind – that peace and happiness could be attained through a meditative life.
Many more have spoken and written about happiness through the centuries. Marcus Aurelius said, “Remember this, that very little is needed to make a happy life.” The renaissance philosophers Erasmus and Thomas Moore believed that it was God’s desire that man be happy, as long as the means taken to achieve happiness were not superficial. Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Happiness depends more on the inward disposition of the mind than on the outward circumstances.” German philosopher Immanuel Kant said, “Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
William James, the father of modern-day psychology believed, “How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.” Psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote that we must satisfy our hierarchy of human needs before true happiness – self-actualization – is achieved. And psychologist Viktor Frankl emphasized man’s search for meaning: Our happiness is reliant on our ability to live a life full of meaning and purpose.
Throughout recorded history it is clear that man has contemplated and pursued happiness. And the great philosophers, theologians and psychologists have helped us realize that happiness is achievable for all of us.
Whenever I needed to meet a challenge or pursue a goal when I was growing up, my grandfather used to tell me to say, “I can. I will.” His guidance is relevant to all of us.
We can be happy. We will be happy. History says it’s up to us.
(Originally published elsewhere. Reprinted with permission of the author.)
happier.com is a personal trainer for your happiness. With more than a dozen tools and tests to help you measure, track and improve your happiness, you can trust the happier.com experts to help you reach your goals. Exclusive videos and a popular blog mean there’s something new to learn every day. Download the free iPhone application or find what you’re looking for with the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. happier.com is on Facebook, LinkedIn, and twitter and has meetup groups in Washington, Philadelphia, and Portland, with more planned. Click here for a social media press release from our launch.
Screen Shot from happier.com: Letting Go of Grudges
A note from the team at happier.com: David is a friend of ours who really “gets” positive psychology. We’ve asked him to share his insights on the impact of revenge. At
happier.com, we’ve built
Letting Go of Grudges to help you tackle grudges and desires for revenge.
David J. Pollay
David J. Pollay, MAPP, is the creator of The Law of the Garbage Truck™. Mr. Pollay writes the Monday Morning Momentum Blog each week. He is a founding associate executive director of the International Positive Psychology Association, a syndicated columnist with the North Star Writers Group, and president of the The Momentum Project.
Many people spend their lives trying to get back at people. They feel abused, challenged or violated, so their mission is to hit back someday. They often think about what they “could have said” or “should have done.” And they fantasize about revenge.
They become movie directors: They imagine a scene where they get to talk like the hero of big action movie: “You just messed with the wrong guy. I just became your worst nightmare!” And then, in their dream scene they stick it to the person that hurt them. And even better, they watch it all in slow motion to extend the joy of evening the score. And their scene ends with their walking triumphantly into the distance with victory music playing in the background. Why? They just carried out justice.
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