Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment

I have been using positive psychology for many years, and am a member of the International Positive Psychology Association. However, I'd never read this book till now. Martin writes beautiful, easy to read prose, and, like all great writers, lets you into his own life. He becomes a real person in these pages. His analyses and recommendations are all based on scientific research, and are in accord with accepted best practice. This makes the book an excellent introduction for psychotherapists who are as yet unfamiliar with positive psychology. At the same time, the book is actually designed as a self-help tool for lay people. As such, perhaps it is a little too academic. Any intelligent, educated person will get immense benefits from applying its recommendations, but it may be a struggle for someone who barely completed high school -- and they deserve a good life too. Like many American writers in the field, going back to Abraham Maslow, Martin is enthocentric without realizing it. The very title assumes that, of course, happiness is the goal of life. This is actually untrue for most of the human occupants of this planet. As Viktor Frankl showed, meaning and purpose are far more important, and can lead to contentment in situations that preclude happiness. My only other complaint is about the way notes are organized. References, and frequent interesting comments, are in a separate endnotes section. While reading the first one-third of the book, I kept turning to this section at the end of each page, but it was rather onerous and distracting to do so. All in all, this is a book that will uplift your spirit. If you implement its recommendations, it will change your life for the better. It is a classic of the psychological literature. Dr Bob Rich [...]

I don’t consider myself a pessimist, but I am definitely not an optimist. So what does that make me? Probably makes me a pessimist in denial. During my teenage years I had a mild anger streak. Luckily with a little self-discipline I was able to overcome that. During college, I had a minor episode with depression. Luckily with friendly support and modern medicine, I was able to overcome that. In the last five years or so, I have experienced some extremely difficult moments that I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I think it is a miracle that I was able bounce back from these difficult times. I can attribute my resilience to a myriad of things: great wife, religion, self-awareness, etc. It was a combination of all these things. Over the years, I have read a lot about positive psychology. At first it sounded like cheap psychology but as I dug deeper into I started to see its true value. Instead of focusing on the problems and fixing them, positive psychology focuses on baseline and building on top of it. It was nice to see myself as a muscle to strengthen and not a problem to be solved. If you want clear picture of positive psychology, how it works, how you can use it, then this book will guide you through it perfectly. While reading the book I immediately started rethinking how I approach my wife and my children. It has helped me be a better husband and father. I already bought another book by Seligman that specifically addresses raising children with positive psychology.

As a psychologist myself and a big fan of Seligman's previous self-help work, Learned Optimism, I was eager to read this book. Authentic Happiness is based on the Positive Psychology movement, or the idea that psychologists should be helping people feel more happy rather than simply less unhappy. Well-respected psychologist Seligman has a gift for taking years of psychology research and breaking it down into readable yet still compelling evidence to support his theories. He begins with reviewing the components that can affect happiness and how we can work to change these factors with respect to our past, present, and future. The meat of the book, however, lies in Seligman's notion of Signature Strengths, which he views as keys to more lasting fulfillment. Seligman focuses in particular on how to enhance your signature strengths in the areas of love, work, and raising your children (based on many examples from his own child-rearing experiences). He concludes the book by shifting into a slightly more spiritual perspective to discuss attaining a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Seligman is practical in addition to being philosophical, and thus the book contains many self-tests (all of which can also be found on his web site) as well as plenty of practical advice. Overall, however, this book didn't quite resonate with me in the same way that Learned Happiness did, and although I've frequently recommended Learned Happiness to my clients, I see this newer work as being appropriate for a more limited audience. Still, for anyone who chooses to read this book, Seligman's engaging writing style is sure to make it worth your while, and those who are truly motivated to pursue happiness in their lives are likely to benefit enormously.

About four years ago I wrote an 85 page story about my life titled "A Roadmap for Happiness, When Traveling from Age 70 to age 90". Each year since then I have been adding a new chapter. One of my main references for this story was a book by Dennis Prager, titled "Happiness is a Serious Business". Between April of 2010 and March of 2011 I worked at job that fully utilized my technical skills (electronics engineer) and teaching abilities. Since this job ended I have been busily readjusting my roadmap. Part of this activity has been to read more books about happiness and to modify my goals. "Authentic Happiness" includes a thorough analysis about techniques for "realizing your full potential for lasting fulfillment". One of my favorite parts is the description of work as a "job, career, or calling". The author says that a key part of being happy is to understand your own "signature strengths" and to use them to help other people. Another key to happiness is being grateful and expressing that to others (especially your spouse) on a regular basis. A book titled "Aspire" (by Kevin Hall) describes eleven attributes of people that we can admire. He recommends that we let them know what observe about them. There are many other books about happiness and numerous people who comment about them on Amazon.com. I am proud to be one of them.

I don’t know when it happened, but somewhere along the line virtue became a dirty word. You can’t say it without getting weird looks. You can’t even think it without feeling like a hypocrite. Virtue? Isn’t that something Victorians believed in? Look where that got us: a world so full of oppression that the sun never sets on it. I used to be in that camp. Virtue was a guilty pleasure of mine. I believed in it (sort of). But I always felt like either a faker or a cultural imperialist for doing so. Whenever the word popped into my mind, I gave myself one good mental flogging as penance. The field of psychology seems to have been beset by similar demons. Much of the research agenda has been dedicated to identifying pathology (things gone very wrong), and mitigating it where possible. That is, until now (or, to be more accurate, until about ten years ago). Martin Seligman is one of the founders of the field of Positive Psychology, a new branch of research that tries to identify what can go very right. His findings are compiled in Authentic Happiness. The book has vindicated virtue, at least in my mind. Seligman has spent the last decade plus trying to identify the sources of human flourishing. He has found a combination of six such sources appearing in literature from the Indus Valley to the Japanese Archipelago to the Mediterranean Sea (how about South America, Africa, or the annals of the Iroquois Nation? I’m not sure. I bet you’d find these traits in abundance there, too, if you looked). The six (drumroll please) more-or-less ubiquitous human virtues as uncovered by Seligman’s team of graduate students are…. Ha! As if I’m going to just tell you. Go read the book! Sike. I’ll tell you. 1) Wisdom and Knowledge 2) Courage 3) Love and Humanity 4) Justice 5) Temperance 6) Spirituality and Transcendence (defined as moving beyond narrow self-interest) Quibble as you will, this seems like a good place to start. The first step to becoming a better person is believing that it is possible. For a long time I didn’t. I thought that the best I could do was keep to myself; I cowered in fear of offending anyone’s sensibilities with my notions of good and bad, or of taking on a model I couldn’t live up to. I’m done with that. I may go down, but at least I’ll go down swinging.

This book is of immense value simply by virtue of the fact that it opens up the conversation on what is probably the most important topic, period: What constitutes a life well-lived? What priorities are most sensible and condusive to happiness/satisfaction/reward/contentment/(whatever you want to use as the most fundamental term). But unfortunately, the connection between the two key areas of the book is not drawn very clearly, limiting its utility considerably. First, Seligman introduces the equation H = S + C + V, (other reviewers have adequately explained it, so I won't) which is quite useful. But he doesn't flesh this out as well as he could have, and doesn't return to it enough after introducing it. S, we are to understand, is the set range, which seems to be basically genetically imposed temperament, but this isn't as clear as it should be. It seems to me that many of the factors included under V are also determined by S. Part 1 of the book is essentially a taxonomy of positive experiences, divided by temporal orientation (toward past, present, and future) and intensity level. He separates purely bodily/sensate pleasures from "higher pleasures" which involve mentation to a greater degree. This is very helpful. One can quibble with this choices, but it's helpful to have a frame. He then makes a loose but important distinction between the two sets of aforementioned pleasures on the one hand and "gratifications" on the other. Although he does not reject pleasures and indeed offers helpful tips on enhancing them, his (quite reasonable) assertion is that gratifications are the most important component of authentic happiness. Unfortunately, given the importance that he ascribes to the gratifications, he barely defines them except to equate them very vaguely with "flow states." This is the crucial flaw of the book. A more thorough analysis would have been helpful here. After failing to adequately characterize the gratifications, he moves on to Part 2, which is essentially a taxonomy of "character strengths and virtues." Again, this is a helpful frame. But it hasn't been related to Part 1 very well. I guess his assertion is that character strengths, when cultivated, lead to flow states which are gratifying, and these flow states constitute the "gratifications." But this is not at all clear or very explicit. It is not at all self-evident that the exercise of character and virtue leads to flow states. In fact, it seems like the two are only tangentially related, at best. Further, if under gratifications we would include qualities other than flow states (and again this point is quite muddled), I would distinguish between gratifications which are healthy from those that aren't - the latter might include vengeance, for instance, and getting away with a crime. I would also include other gratifications which are morally ambiguous - social status, for instance. Even if social status doesn't lead to happiness inherently (although I think it can to some degree, or at least the absence of it can lead to unhappiness), it mediates ones access to some extent to a number of the circumstantial happiness factors (namely mate selection, social circle and wealth). Although some of that status does of course derive from character strengths and virtues, a considerable amount of it also derives from talents, over which (as Seligman points out) we have little control. It also seems to me that many of the character strengths and virtues lead to what Seligman calls "higher pleasures" just as often as they lead to "gratification flow state." How do genuineness and gratitude lead to flow state, for instance? Altogether, the book is an important step toward a vital conversation and has a number of really helpful aspects, but it is conceptually somewhat muddled.

'Authentic Happiness' by Martin Seligman is the most inspiring book I have read since reading Rachel Carson's book 'Silent Spring' 25 years ago. Mind you, Dr. Seligman doesn't suggest you attain happiness by living a selfish, pretentious, and delusional existence like the author of 'The Secret' (a horrifying book, but eye-opener for the critical thinking who realizes that people really fall for that bologna), but rather through acts of good will. He teaches you how to realize the greatness in your life and show gratitude, and to recognize when we are stuck in the past, and how to move on and how to forgive. He helps you find your strengths and virtues and how to bring these out more in your life. Having read most of this so far (It's taking me so long because I keep stopping to underline and savor many of the powerful points he makes), I can't wait to hold a Gratitude Day for someone special in my life, I will muster the courage to forgive someone who betrayed me, and I will try to resort my everyday life so that I can there is more positive flow through the calling fo my strengths and virtues..

I have no credentials to discredit such an intellectual as Ph. D. Seligman. I surely gain some knowledge and insights from his work, surely I learned a lot of new English words I have never seen before, but in so many passages I got lost with many metaphorical phrases and allusions that got me lost and gotten to get back to reread again in order to understand. While reading, halfway through the reading, I know if I will read the book again. I have doubts I will with this one, maybe in the future when I’ll be more sophisticated I will. Now I’m bound try his “Learn optimism” one. There is knowledge everywhere and in anyone.

Martin Seligman livre ici une bible de la psychologie positive. Il cherche à accompagner le lecteur en le faisant se découvrir mieux lui même et lui enseignant des techniques permettant d'accéder à une vie + heureuse.

Gostei quando comprei e li, mas se pedirem para relatar não lembro muita coisa, esse tipo de literatura às vezes tem esse problema, você lê, gosta, mas não fica gravado na sua mente, tenho noções de como funciona a psicologia positiva, mas não ficou fixado.

Highly recommended book, Enjoyed it throughly. Martin is truly a father of positive psychology. Learned a lot of things from this book

Scarsa qualità

Wonderful meaning of life and if in doubt you must travel through it , simple question “Are we happy” ain’t that simple but the purpose it is indeed and if not what are we doing occupying space at all, in other words live and let live but in a meaningful way they transcend your meaning and purpose. A must read not even if you think you have got it all.