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

Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment | Martin Seligman | The Starting Point To Finding Happiness

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Authentic Happines...

	Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment Martin Seligman Free Press, 2004 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 79 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

In this national bestseller -- Martin Seligman's most stimulating, persuasive book to date -- the acclaimed author of Learned Optimism introduces yet another revolutionary idea. Drawing on groundbreaking scientific research, Seligman shows how Positive Psychology is shifting the profession's paradigm away from its narrow-minded focus on pathology, victimology, and mental illness to positive emotion and mental health. Happiness, studies show, is not the result of good genes or luck. It can be cultivated by identifying and nurturing traits that we already possess -- including kindness, originality, humor, optimism, and generosity.

Seligman provides the tools you need in order to ascertain your most positive traits or strengths. Then he explains how, by frequently calling upon these "signature strengths" in all the crucial realms of life -- health, relationships, career -- you will not only develop natural buffers against misfortune and negative emotion, but also achieve new and sustainable levels of authentic contentment, gratification, and meaning.

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Right at the top!

Definitely on my recommended book list. A must read for women in business.

Susan Bock
The Success Coach for Women in Business
www.SusanBockSolutions.com

The Starting Point To Finding Happiness

Dr. Seligman's book should be the first read on any list of books to help in finding happiness. Dr.Seligman is one of the recognized world experts on what contributes to happiness. He provides tests in the book and also on the authentichappiness.com website to help the reader identify her/his "signature strengths". They are those characteristics that are our truest strongpoints. He suggests trying to incorporate as many of them as possible into our daily lives and paying less attention to other characteristics that aren't our strong suit.

Naturally, the book is very helpful not only in finding happiness in everyday life, but also as an important tool to guide in career selection. I review the basics concepts of this book with my college management students each semester. Other reviews I've done provide a fuller listing of many excellent happiness and kindness self-help books, but it seems sensible to me to start with this book. It's only logical to identify what our strongest traits are upfront so we can bring them into play in relationship to the wise advice contained in his book and in others I've listed.

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Test your happiness levels and learn what can inffluence them

I had expected more scientific research supporting the book's thesis, than mere happiness surveys or quizzes about how people feel and their moods in specific situations. Soon I realized that my expectations could hardly be met, since fortunately happiness is is one of the most subjective issues and although objective factors like wealth and health have an influence on it, every individual has his personal (maybe genetic or maybe learned) patterns or attitudes towards life.

You can find all the quizzes in the book and answer them yourself to rate your levels of optimism, happiness, etc., which is interesting per se. The author also presents the results of the surveys performed with many people from different countries. This also gives interesting data about which factors have a greater influence on happiness, always showing that specific circumstances alter the results. For example, persons that have had a successful surgery in their recent past (which is a sign of illness) are happier than healthy ones (One might wonder!)

I had first skipped the section on kids, since having no children myself, I had no interest in the topic. I returned to this chapter after reading the rest of the book and I found it extremely interesting, indeed one of the best parts of the book. I would really recommend its reading to parents, although I'm lacking first-hand experience as well as any kind of authority and have never read other literature on the topic. Maybe more experienced persons can refute the author's propositions, as apparently is the case, still I find this section worth reading and worth judging by yourself.

The last chapter is related to finding a meaning in your life, but it is full of tortuous philosophical arguments for a kind of religion without God. I do not believe it will help anybody to find a meaning in life and on top, the arguments are extremely difficult to follow. Better look for meaning somewhere else.

One of the books main thesis is that you can achieve happiness by doing things that make you happy. These are things that have a meaning or ar significant or by "submerging" yourself into an activity to fall in a so called "flow" state. For people interested in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience I will not recommend Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi's book on the topic, because I cannot properly spell his name and because I have not read it yet (although I will, since his book is one of the most quoted by authors of totally different fields). Instead I will recommend First, Break All the Rules: What the World's Greatest Managers Do Differently and its sequel Now, Discover Your Strengths. These books tell you why sticking to your strengths makes you happier than insisting on doing things in which you are not good at (by achieving flow). Do not expect a scientific demonstration of this, just the results from a series of Gallup surveys that show that most of the times this is what people feel, packed in a management book format.

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Interesting!

Gives you insights into personality traits and how to authentically be happy. Interesting approach however, my favorite book, Living The Secret Everyday: My Secret Workbook with its wonderful info on the Law of Attraction otherwise known as The mSecret shows you how to be happy through their use of many exercises and a journal.

Happiness it is!

I used this book for a course I took and it was very informative. I enjoyed learning about how to evaluate one's frame of mind and look at things in a more positive light. Using our core strengths is definitely a must, in order to live to our full potential.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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