Martin Seligman's Authentic Happiness

Martin Seligman, one of America's top academic psychologists and its leading happiness guru, is visiting Australian on a lecture tour sponsored by, of all outfits, the Australian Institute of Management. His thesis - for which he admits he doesn't yet have scientific proof - is that happier managers and workers lead to higher productivity and profits.
Find that hard to believe? The bottom line would be fatter if only workers spent more time swapping jokes around the water cooler? It's not as implausible as it sounds.
Part of the problem is that word "happiness". It's a great word for headlines, but it makes what Seligman prefers to call "positive psychology" sound frivolous, fleeting, self-centred and unworthy.
He counters with another yet-to-be-substantiated
thesis, that happiness comes in three kinds. At the most basic level is "the pleasant life", where people have as many positive emotions and as few negative emotions as possible.
Then comes "the good life", which consists of using your greatest character strengths as frequently as possible in "the three great arenas of life" - work, love and parenting - to obtain abundant gratification.
Finally comes "the meaningful life", which has one additional feature: the use of your character strengths in the service of some cause larger than you are.
You might imagine that, at its most basic level, happiness as the pursuit of pleasant emotions wouldn't have much relevance to the business world. But that's not quite right.
As Seligman explains in his book Authentic Happiness, published by Random House Australia, our emotions can concern the present, the past and the future. And the emotions we feel about the future are heavily influenced by whether we're optimists or pessimists.
Now this is a topic on which there's solid psychological evidence, much of it gathered by Seligman. Psychologists have tests that determine whether you're an optimist or a pessimist, according to your feelings about the setbacks and victories in your life.
The optimist regards setbacks as temporary and able to be changed, whereas the pessimist regards them as permanent. The optimist regards setbacks as having been caused by peculiar circumstances, whereas the pessimist regards them as pervasive. Optimists see the cause of the setback as outside themselves, whereas pessimists tend to blame themselves. With victories, of course, it's the other way
round.
Why make so much fuss over minor differences in attitude? Because their effects aren't minor. Pessimists are up to eight times more likely to become depressed when bad things happen. They do worse than their talents would lead you to expect in education, sport and most jobs. They have worse physical health, shorter lives and rockier interpersonal relations.
So it seems pretty obvious that most businesses are better off employing optimists. And, indeed, business people - including those who start businesses - are noted for their towering optimism.
The fortunate thing is that, as Seligman made his name by demonstrating, optimism can be learned. And he has other techniques people can use to lift their experience of positive emotion into "the upper part of their set range".
You may think people are happy at least partly because they're successful in their lives. It's true. But there's evidence that it also works the other way: people are successful because they're happy.
If we're looking at things from a boss's perspective, however, it's likely to be the second level of happiness - living the good life - that's most relevant.
Seligman says there's a better route to high productivity than monetary incentives, which is to maximise work satisfaction. "Corporations that promote this state for their employees will overtake corporations that rely only on monetary reward," he says.
Psychologists have distinguished three kinds of work: a job, a career and a calling. You do a job for nothing other than the pay cheque at the end of the week.
A career involves a deeper personal investment in work. You mark your achievements through money, but also through advancement. Each promotion brings you higher prestige and more power, as well as a raise.
A calling or vocation, on the other hand, is a passionate commitment to work for its own sake. The work is fulfilling in its own right, without regard for money or advancement.
"Individuals with a calling see their work as contributing to the greater good, to something larger than they are, and hence the religious connotation is entirely appropriate," he says.
When your work is a calling you more frequently experience a psychological state known as "flow". Flow occurs when the challenges you face mesh perfectly with your abilities to meet them. You're so totally absorbed in what you're doing that you lose sense of time and self.
Leisure activities can involve flow, but it's more common at work. What emotion do you feel when you're in flow? You don't feel anything - not till it's over. Seligman classes flow not as pleasure, but something deeper: gratification.
So how do you find a calling that involves lots of flow? The guru says the key is not finding the right job, but finding a job you can make right by recrafting it to fit your "signature strengths".
Seligman is obsessed by the need for people to know and exploit their greatest character strengths or traits (which aren't the same as their talents). He says don't devote much time to correcting your weaknesses, just use and build your signature strengths.