PNTV: Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman (#8)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes TV episode number nine. Today we're going to do a great book, another great book, Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman. As always, we have the book, six page PDF Philosopher's Notes, where I've got some of my favorite big ideas. Really excited about this book. This is actually the second book we've done on Martin Seligman. The other one we did was Authentic Happiness and we did a note on that and a TV episode a few episodes back, so you can check that out. But Martin Seligman is one of the leading researchers in the field of positive psychology. And he's in a lot of ways, kind of the father of the positive psychology movement. He and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote a great book called Flow that we're actually gonna do tomorrow. It's essentially kicked off the positive psychology movement in the year 2000 when Martin Seligman, this guy who wrote Learned Optimism, was the head of the, I think it's the American Psychological association or something like that, the professional organization for psychologists. So Learned Optimism, it's amazing. Really big idea. As you know, if you looked at the video overview of my philosophy, optimism is the number one principle that to living an extraordinary life. If we can't get in control of our consciousness and our minds, it doesn't matter how passionate we are and compassionate we are, how connected we want to be to source. If we can't control that little monkey running around up there, then none of the other stuff really matters. So we want to learn how to shape our minds. And this book is all about that. So first, in order to understand learned optimism, we need to understand its opposite, learned helplessness. And also, I want to give a little bit of context this idea. The lead quote that I have here in this note, I kick off everyone with a quote is this. Seligman says one of the most significant findings in psychology in the last 20 years is that individuals can choose the way they think. Now, why that's significant is that it wasn't that long ago when we thought that everything that we did was a result of our conditioning. A guy named B.F. skinner was a behaviorist. And everyone at the time essentially believed that what we had been conditioned to be is who we were. There was no other variable at play. Genetics, nature plus nurture, conditioning. Boom, there you are. And what Seligman did was he came out and said, no, no, no, no. We can actually shape the way we show up. And that was blasphemy. When he first Came out with this in 1965, which I find remarkable. And he talks about that in the book. So back to learned helplessness. Seligman was actually studying learned helplessness before he got into learned optimism. And really quickly. Helplessness is one of the highest correlates to depression. If you feel helpless, if you feel like you can't do anything constructively to create a wonderful life, that's a pretty good indicator that you're trending toward or you might be depressed. So it's really important that we move from helplessness to empowerment. And. And that's, again, what this book is all about. It's what so many of these great books are all about. If you think about Esther and Jerry Hicks, if you're into the work of Abraham, they have their emotional guidance system. Right at the top is freedom and empowerment and knowing we can create our ideal lives and joy and love and appreciation. At the bottom is depression and helplessness and then rage and all the frustrated energy that goes with that. So we want to be able to move up this spectrum toward learned optimism really quickly about helplessness and what he was studying, what he learned. Here's a really fascinating study. Imagine that you bring in a couple of dogs right? Now. I'm an animal lover, but we'll go with this experiment for the moment. So we have two dogs are separated and they're given mild shocks, right? One dog is able to move in a certain way or do certain things that basically removes that shock. They're in control of the shock experience, and they wind up being okay. This dog over here doesn't have the same ability to control the shocks that this dog has. In fact, whether the shocks go on or off is dictated by this dog, right? So this one is essentially out of control, doesn't feel it has control to control the shocks. Now, what's interesting is that you have these two dogs, right? One that can control the shocks, one that couldn't. The then you pick them up and you put them into a different part of the experiment. In this experiment, both dogs can control whether or not they can get away from the shocks. The dog that felt that it had power before, no problem. It quickly learns what to do, and it's fine. The dog that now has the ability to get out of the shocks, but was conditioned before to think that it couldn't get away from the shocks, now crawls up into a ball in the corner and just continues to suffer the shocks. It's learned helplessness. So that's the idea of learned helplessness that we want to juxtapose with learned optimism. So halfway done. Learned optimism. It's more than positive thinking, right? It's more than whistling platitudes to ourselves and affirmations. As Martin Seligman says, it's all about changing the fundamental way we communicate with ourselves. And one of the key ideas we want to take away from this is the idea of explanatory styles. If you haven't noticed, we're always talking to ourselves in our heads, right? Well, he calls those explanatory styles. And you can differentiate between an optimistic and a pessimistic explanatory style. Really quickly, there are three P's to our explanatory style. Whether we think something is permanent, whether we think it is pervasive, and whether we think it's personal. So really quickly, let's think about it this way. Let's say something good happens to us. The optimist thinks that that good is probably going to be permanent. They think it will happen again and again in the future. It's pervasive, meaning it's not just this one event. I got a promotion at work or I had a great date or whatever it is. They think it's pervasive. It goes across multiple domains in their life, and they think it's personal. They think it has something to do with them. Isn't that great? Now, the pessimist, when they experience a positive event, for example, let's say they get a promotion at work, the pessimist thinks it's not permanent, it's not going to last. They think it's not pervasive. They got lucky in this one aspect of their life, and they don't take it personally. They think that the boss just must have been in a good mood kind of thing. So that's the positive event, and that's how optimists and pessimists respond. Now, on the negative event, they do the opposite. If a negative event happens to an optimist, let's say they have a setback at work on a relationship. The optimist says this isn't permanent. This is just right now. And it's not pervasive. It's not going to happen to every aspect of my life, and I'm going to kind of deflect a little bit of the personal stuff and say it was probably something outside of me right now. The pessimist, when something negative happens, does the opposite. They say it's permanent. I'm always going to be screwed. It's pervasive. This isn't just my job. This is every aspect of my life, and it's personal. I'm totally at blame. There's nothing outside of me that could have contributed. So those are the differences between pessimists and optimists with explanatory styles. And we want to learn to look at our three P's. So my suggestion for you in this discussion is how are you perceiving things in your world? If something's going right, how are you looking at it as an optimist or as a pessimist? If something's going wrong, how. How are you looking at it as an optimist or a pessimist? And the exciting thing is we can learn to change how we approach these things. I go into a lot more detail about it in the note. So if you have the notes, check it out. If you don't have them yet, as I always say, what are you waiting for? Sign up. Guarantee it's the best 47 bucks you will ever invest in yourself. What else do we want to cover? We have a couple more minutes. He talks about some other really cool studies where we can look at the power of optimism and why we want to be optimistic, ranging from MetLife, an insurance company, to Olympic athletes. Right? So the insurance company, MetLife, hired Martin Seligman and they brought him in. And what he proposed was that they should hire people based on their level of optimism, not just their aptitude and their motivation, but their optimism. Because how they respond to a challenging situation, like someone telling them no again and again and again, is one of the highest. And they found one of the highest predictors of that individual's success as a salesperson in the organization. So he says, one, build your optimism. To be more successful in any endeavor and hire people who are optimistic, it's one of the most underrated, yet valuable attributes we can look for in people. He also talks about Matt Biondi, the old school Olympic swimmer, and apparently he placed second in one of his events and bounced back. And Seligman knew he would because optimists tend to bounce back positively after a setback and he had studied beyond you. Really cool stuff. So there's a bunch more stuff in the note, but that is the really quick look at a great book, Learned Optimism. I think you'll like the note and I think you'll like the book, Martin Seligman's awesome. Check out Authentic Happiness as well. And I really hope you enjoyed. So I'm having fun with this and looking forward to sharing more with you. Soon we're going to continue our Positive Psychology Push. We've done a bunch of positive psychology titles already. We're going to do several more over the next week and a half, and I'm excited to share more. Thanks for all your support. Talk to you soon. Bye.