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Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life (Paperback)
by Martin E. Seligman
| Category:
Personal improvement, Psychology, Motivation |
| Market price: ¥ 158.00
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¥ 148.00
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| MSL Pointer Review:
Healing, encouraging, and life-changing, this book is an excellent treatise on how thinking patterns affect how we perform and feel. |
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Author: Martin E. Seligman
Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition
Pub. in: January, 2006
ISBN: 1400078393
Pages: 336
Measurements: 8.1 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00626
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-1400078394
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- Awards & Credential -
National Bestseller in North America, ranking #1,221 in books out of millions on Amazon.com as of January 15, 2007. |
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- MSL Picks -
Non-negative thinking, not positive thinking, is the key to success, according to Martin Seligman author of Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind And Your Life.
Seligman writes: "The optimistic individual makes the most of his talent... The optimistic individual perseveres."
As a graduate student, Seligman made a significant discovery - dogs can learn their actions are futile and can learn to become helpless. According to Seligman, people, too, can learn to become helpless. And, such negative thinking can lead to depression.
So, what separates optimistic people from more pessimistic people? Seligman says it's the way we explain events and outcomes to ourselves. If something good happens to us, how do we explain it? Was it luck? Or was it the result of our talent?
If something bad happens to us, how do we explain that? Is it that conditions just weren't right? Or did the bad event happen because we're somehow horribly flawed as individuals? Will this flaw eternally damn us in all other endeavors?
After extensive research, Seligman concludes that optimists and pessimists attribute the reasons for success and failure differently. Pessimists tend to attribute failure and bad events to permanent, personal, and pervasive factors. Optimists tend to attribute bad events to non-personal, non-permanent, and non-pervasive factors. Conversely, for good events.
By "permanent," Seligman means factors that will be with you throughout life. By "personal," Seligman means factors that relate to us as individuals. By "pervasive," Seligman means factors that affect our efficacy in other parts of our life.
Seligman writes: "Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope... Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair."
Learned Optimism includes a test to determine your own attributional style. And, to improve optimism, Seligman offers a solution called ABCDE. Seligman writes: "When we encounter adversity, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into beliefs. These beliefs .... have consequences."
D is for disputation, where we find evidence against the negative beliefs, alternatives to our negative reasoning, and limit the implication of the beliefs. Seligman writes: "Much of the skill of dealing with setbacks... consists of learning how to dispute your own first thoughts in reaction to a setback." E is for energization, which we feel after we've disputed our false, negative beliefs.
Seligman points out that optimism is essential to success in many careers and that a lack of optimism limits one's life. For example, salespeople who explain failure in personal terms often don't want to make more sales calls. And, that leads to lower performance. In hiring for certain positions, Seligman says optimism is a key criterion. Seligman worked with Met Life and showed that optimism is a crucial success factor for hiring insurance salespeople.
Organizations, too, such as a hockey team, can develop optimistic or pessimistic ways of explaining poor performance. For anyone interested in handicapping sporting events, CAVE techniques discussed in "Learned Optimism" might be helpful for separating the teams that crumble under pressure from the teams that don't.
Seligman's book shows that most elections tend to be won by the more optimistic candidate. Seligman successfully predicted several races in the 1988 elections, including the presidential primaries, the presidential election, and 25 of 29 senate races.
Seligman writes: "Among Republicans, there was also a clear winner: George Bush, far and away the most optimistic... Dole would fade fast by our predictions." [This was before Viagra].
It would be interesting to see if more current political races have been predicted with that much success. Did they continue their predictions?
The book also has an excellent discussion of the role of optimism and how it affects health. In particular, pessimism weakens the immune system. For example, in one test, rats were given cancer and three groups studied. The amount of cancer injected corresponded to a 50% chance of the rat developing cancer. One group of rats were given conditions where they could control their environment and prevent shocks. One group were given conditions where nothing they did mattered to prevent shocks. And, the control group had nothing special about their conditions and no shocks.
Seligman writes: "... 50 percent of the rats not shocked had died, and the other 50% of the no-shock rats had rejected the tumor; this was the normal ratio. As for the rats that mastered shock by pressing a bar to turn it off, 70 percent rejected the tumor. But only 27 percent of the helpless rats, the rats that had experienced uncontrollable shock, rejected the tumor."
Seligman also discusses the beginnings of treatment of patients using psychological therapy for treating physical illness. Because this was started in the 1990's, it would be interesting to know what the results have been.
However, optimism isn't always best. Seligman says a pilot, for example, shouldn't be "optimistic" the wings of his plane won't ice up and fail to de-ice them before a flight. And, Seligman points out that depressed people actually have a more accurate perception of reality than optimistic people (That sort of [stinks]if you think about it.). Pessimism is useful because it forces us to confront situations where we really have no effectiveness and change course. (Relentlessly optimistic people seem to be somewhat blinded to reality.)
Seligman recommends developing a healthy and flexible optimism. Doing so should allow a person to live a fuller and richer life.
This great book does a good job helping us understand the role of optimism in our success.
(From quoting Peter Hupalo, USA)
Target readers:
General readers, but we highly recommend this inspiring book to die-hard pessimists, nay-sayers, skeptics, people who have no confidence in the future or themselves, and followers.
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Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D., is the Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, the director of the Positive Psychology Network, and former president of the American Psychological Association. Among his twenty books are Learned Optimism, Authentic Happiness and The Optimistic Child.
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From Publisher
Known as the father of the new science of positive psychology, Martin E.P. Seligman draws on more than twenty years of clinical research to demonstrate how optimism enchances the quality of life, and how anyone can learn to practice it. Offering many simple techniques, Dr. Seligman explains how to break an “I - give - up” habit, develop a more constructive explanatory style for interpreting your behavior, and experience the benefits of a more positive interior dialogue. These skills can help break up depression, boost your immune system, better develop your potential, and make you happier..
With generous additional advice on how to encourage optimistic behavior at school, at work and in children, Learned Optimism is both profound and practical - and valuable for every phase of life.
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Two Ways of Looking at Life
THE FATHER is looking down into the crib at his sleeping newborn daughter, just home from the hospital. His heart is overflowing with awe and gratitude for the beauty of her, the perfection.
The baby opens her eyes and stares straight up.
The father calls her name, expecting that she will turn her head and look at him. Her eyes don't move.
He picks up a furry little toy attached to the rail of the bassinet and shakes it, ringing the bell it contains. The baby's eyes don't move.
His heart has begun to beat rapidly. He finds his wife in their bedroom and tells her what just happened. "She doesn't seem to respond to noise at all," he says. "It's as if she can't hear."
"I'm sure she's all right," the wife says, pulling her dressing gown around her. Together they go into the nursery.
She calls the baby's name, jingles the bell, claps her hands. Then she picks up the baby, who immediately perks up, wiggling and cooing.
"My God," the father says. "She's deaf."
"No she's not," the mother says. "I mean, it's too soon to say a thing like that. Look, she's brand-new. Her eyes don't even focus yet."
"But there wasn't the slightest movement, even when you clapped as hard as you could."
The mother takes a book from the shelf. "Let's read what's in the baby book," she says. She looks up "hearing" and reads out loud: " 'Don't be alarmed if your newborn fails to startle at loud noises or fails to orient toward sound. The startle reflex and attention to sound often take some time to develop. Your pediatrician can test your child's hearing neurologically.'
"There," the mother says. Doesn't that make you feel better?"
Not much," the father says. "It doesn't even mention the other possibility, that the baby is deaf. And all I know is that my baby doesn't hear a thing. I've got the worst feeling about this. Maybe it's because my grandfather was deaf. If that beautiful baby is deaf and it's my fault, I'll never forgive myself."
'Hey, wait a minute," says the wife. 'You're going off the deep end. We'll call the pediatrician first thing Monday. In the meantime, cheer up. Here, hold the baby while I fix her blanket. It's all pulled out."
The father takes the baby but gives her back to his wife as soon as he can. All weekend he finds himself unable to open his briefcase and prepare for next week's work. He follows his wife around the house, ruminating about the baby's hearing and about the way deafness would ruin her life. He imagines only the worst: no hearing, no development of language, his beautiful child cut off from the social world, locked in soundless isolation. By Sunday night he has sunk into despair.
The mother leaves a message with the pediatrician's answering service asking for an early appointment Monday. She spends the weekend doing her exercises, reading, and trying to calm her husband.
The pediatrician's tests are reassuring, but the father's spirits remain low. Not until a week later, when the baby shows her first startle, to the backfire of a passing truck, does he begin to recover and enjoy his new daughter again.
THIS FATHER and mother have two different ways of looking at the world. Whenever something bad happens to him - a tax audit, a marital squabble, even a frown from his employer - he imagines the worst: bankruptcy and jail, divorce, dismissal. He is prone to depression; he has long bouts of listlessness; his health suffers. She, on the other hand, sees bad events in their least threatening light. To her, they are temporary and surmountable, challenges to be overcome. After a reversal, she comes back quickly, soon regaining her energy. Her health is excellent.
The optimists and the pessimists: I have been studying them for the past twenty-five years. The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe 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 defeat is just a temporary setback, that its causes are confined to this one case. The optimists believe defeat is not their fault: Circumstances, bad luck, or other people brought it about. Such people are unfazed by defeat. Confronted by a bad situation, they perceive it as a challenge and try harder.
These two habits of thinking about causes have consequences. Literally hundreds of studies show that pessimists give up more easily and get depressed more often. These experiments also show that optimists do much better in school and college, at work and on the playing field. They regularly exceed the predictions of aptitude tests. When optimists run for office, they are more apt to be elected than pessimists are. Their health is unusually good. They age well, much freer than most of us from the usual physical ills of middle age. Evidence suggests they may even live longer.
I have seen that, in tests of hundreds of thousands of people, a surprisingly large number will be found to be deep-dyed pessimists and another large portion will have serious, debilitating tendencies toward pessimism. I have learned that it is not always easy to know if you are a pessimist, and that far more people than realize it are living in this shadow. Tests reveal traces of pessimism in the speech of people who would never think of themselves as pessimists; they also show that these traces are sensed by others, who react negatively to the speakers.
A pessimistic attitude may seem so deeply rooted as to be permanent. I have found, however, that pessimism is escapable. Pessimists can in fact learn to be optimists, and not through mindless devices like whistling a happy tune or mouthing platitudes ("Every day, in every way, I'm getting better and better"), but by learning a new set of cognitive skills. Far from being the creations of boosters or of the popular media, these skills were discovered in the laboratories and clinics of leading psychologists and psychiatrists and then rigorously validated.
This book will help you discover your own pessimistic tendencies, if you have them, or those of people you care for. It will also introduce you to the techniques that have helped thousands of people undo lifelong habits of pessimism and its extension, depression. It will give you the choice of looking at your setbacks in a new light.
The Unclaimed Territory
AT THE CORE of the phenomenon of pessimism is another phenomenon - that of helplessness. Helplessness is the state of affairs in which nothing you choose to do affects what happens to you. For example, if I promise you one thousand dollars to turn to page 104, you will probably choose to do so, and you will succeed. If, however, I promise you one thousand dollars to contract the pupil of your eye, using only willpower, you may choose to do it, but that won't matter. You are helpless to contract your pupil. Page turning is under your voluntary control; the muscles that change your pupillary size are not.
Life begins in utter helplessness. The newborn infant cannot help himself, for he* is almost entirely a creature of reflex. When he cries, his mother comes, although this does not mean that he controls his mother's coming. His crying is a mere reflex reaction to pain and discomfort. He has no choice about whether he cries. Only one set of muscles in the newborn seems to be under even the barest voluntary control: the set involved in sucking. The last years of a normal life are sometimes ones of sinking back into helplessness. We may lose the ability to walk. Sadly, we may lose the mastery over our bowels and bladder that we won in our second year of life. We may lose our ability to find the word we want. Then we may lose speech itself, and even the ability to direct our thoughts.
The long period between infancy and our last years is a process of emerging from helplessness and gaining personal control. Personal control means the ability to change things by one's voluntary actions; it is the opposite of helplessness. In the first three or four months of an infant's life some rudimentary arm and leg motions come under voluntary control. The flailing of his arms refines into reaching. Then, to his parents' dismay, crying becomes voluntary: The infant can now bawl whenever he wants his mother. He badly overuses this new power, until it stops working. The first year ends with two miracles of voluntary control: the first steps and the first words. If all goes well, if the growing child's mental and physical needs are at least minimally met, the years that follow are ones of diminishing helplessness and of growing personal control.
Many things in life are beyond our control - our eye color, our race, the drought in the Midwest. But there is a vast, unclaimed territory of actions over which we can take control - or cede control to others or to fate. These actions involve the way we lead our lives, how we deal with other people, how we earn our living -all the aspects of existence in which we normally have some degree of choice.
The way we think about this realm of life can actually diminish or enlarge the control we have over it. Our thoughts are not merely reactions to events; they change what ensues. For example, if we think we are helpless to make a difference in what our children become, we will be paralyzed when dealing with this facet of our lives. The very thought "Nothing I do matters" prevents us from acting. And so we cede control to our children's peers and teachers, and to circumstance. When we overestimate our helplessness, other forces will take control and shape our children's future. |
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| View all 12 comments |
The New York Times Book Review (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-15 00:00>
Vaulted me out of my funk... So, fellow moderate pessimists, go buy this book.
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Dr. Robert H. Schuller (Author of Tough Times Never Last, But Tough People Do), USA
<2007-01-15 00:00>
One of the most important books of the century - an absolute must-read for all persons interested in genuinely understanding and helping our fellow human beings. |
Philadelphia Daily News (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-15 00:00>
A system for reforming the most entrenched pessimist. |
Dr. Aaron T. Beck (Author of Love is Never Enough) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-15 00:00>
Dr. Seligman makes an optimistic case for optimism: you can learn it, you can measure it, you can teach it, and you will be healthier and happier for it. |
View all 12 comments |
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