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Martin Seligman had just been elected head of the American Psychological Association and remained in search of a transformational theme for his presidency. While weeding in his garden one day with his young daughter, Seligman discovered himself irritated and sidetracked as Nikki, then 5, threw flowers into the air and giggled. Seligman yelled at her to stop, at which point Nikki took the teacher aside. She reminded him how, from ages 3 to 5, she had actually been a whiner, however on her fifth birthday, had made a conscious choice to stop. If she could alter herself with an act of will, couldn't Daddy stop being such a grouch?

Seligman had an epiphany. What if every person was encouraged to support his or her character strengths, as Nikki so precociously had, rather than scolded into fixing their shortcomings?

He assembled groups of the nation's finest psychologists to formulate a strategy to reorient the entire discipline of psychology away from primarily dealing with mental illness and toward human thriving. Then, he utilized his bully pulpit as the psychology association's president to promote it. With Seligman's 1998 inaugural APA governmental address, positive psychology was born.

Kaiser Permanente commissioned a mural on a downtown Denver developing to encourage individuals to talk about anxiety and other mental disorders.

Seligman told the crowd that psychology had lost its way. It had "moved too far from its original roots, which were to make the lives of all individuals more satisfying and productive," he stated, "and too much toward the important, however not critical, location of curing mental illness."

Seligman's own experience made this deficit extremely clear. He had become famous, as he would later on write in his autobiography, for his work on what he called "the really bad stuff-- helplessness, anxiety, panic," and that this had actually made him completely positioned to "see and name the missing piece-- the positive."

The APA leader gotten in touch with his associates to join him to effect a transformation in psychology and to produce a science that examines and nurtures the very best human qualities: a science of strengths, virtues, and happiness. What Seligman called "favorable psychology," utilizing a term created in 1954 by humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, assures personal improvement through the redemptive power of devotional practices: counting blessings, thankfulness, forgiveness, and meditation. And it is expressly designed to build ethical character by cultivating the 6 cardinal virtues of knowledge, nerve, justice, transcendence, temperance, and humankind.

Today, Seligman is the foremost advocate of the science of well-being. He had actually made his name in academic community in the 1970s and '80s for finding the phenomenon of "learned vulnerability," in which individuals become conditioned to believe that negative occasions are inescapable, even when those events are within their control. In 1991, he pertained to the general public's attention with his book about combating these kinds of procedures, Learned Optimism, which he claimed was the world's very first "evidence-based" self-help book.

But it was when Seligman moved toward the psychology of joy with the 2002 publication of Authentic Happiness, followed in 2011 with Flourish, that Seligman began to become a household name. The theory and practice of positive psychology caught fire in the general public's creativity, thanks in part to Seligman's casual prose and optimistic message. Now, Seligman's TED talk has been seen more than 5 million times online; he has satisfied heads of federal government and religious leaders, consisting of the UK's previous prime minister David Cameron and the Dalai Lama, and has actually appeared on shows such as Larry King Now.

Despite his association with the science of happiness, Seligman is by his own admission brusque, dismissive, and a grouch. He casts himself as a radical, butting heads with the academic facility, and yet he's the ultimate expert-- most likely the best-known, best-funded, and most prominent psychologist alive. As a scientist, he insists on the value-neutral purity of the research he directs, yet commands a motion that even its fans state seems to have a few of the qualities of a faith.

To a lot of its fans, the motion is a godsend, answering a need to belong to something larger than themselves and holding out the chance of better, fuller lives through genuinely reliable strategies backed by science. To its critics, that science is damaged by favorable psychology's moralizing, its mysticism, and its money-spinning commercialization. But how legitimate are these issues, and do they matter if positive psychology makes people pleased?

Positive psychology has grown at an explosive rate given that Seligman ushered it into the public conscious, surprising even Seligman himself. The field has drawn in numerous millions of dollars in research study grants. Its 2019 World Congress was gone to by 1,600 delegates from 70 countries. It motivates tens of thousands of research study documents, unlimited reams of popular books, and supports armies of mentors, coaches, and therapists.

Its institutional uptake has been no less outstanding. More than a million US soldiers have actually been trained in positive psychology's methods of durability just two years after the "Battlemind" program was launched in 2007. Ratings of K-12 schools have adopted its concepts. In 2018, Yale University announced that an amazing one-quarter of its undergraduates had actually enrolled in its course on happiness.

Because that inaugural governmental address in 1998, Seligman has actually distanced favorable psychology from its original focus. At its beginning, the field looked for to map the paths that end in genuine satisfaction. However with Flourish, Seligman changed course. Joy, he declared, is not the only goal of human existence, as he 'd formerly thought.