Thoughts in Time

From steve…

Totally off topic but if you’re interested in framework comparisons or know of anyone who is then point them to my video presentation I made at the NYPHP.org group in May …

http://www.stephendrobinson.com/talks/

Image via Wikipedia One of the great things about the start of the UPENN MAPP program has been having conversations with my classmates and with the founder of the positive psychology movement, Martin Seligman. One of the core things I’ve gotten from speaking to Marty and appreciating how he thinks is that he has uncovered a basic opportunity across many different domans. That opportunity I’ve stared to think of as “looking at the plus side”.

I’ll give you the example that relates to his launching the positive psychology movement. Marty realized that traditional psychology, or “psychology as usual” examined what is wrong with us. It was interested in pathology, disease, mental illness, and basically how to fix those of us who have something wrong. What Marty realized was that there were very few people studying the other side. If people with mental illness were say -5, and people who were depressed were -3, the goal of traditional psychology was to understand this so that we could get you back to 0. What about helping normal people go from 0 to +5? That’s what is now termed positive psychology. It’s the scientific (and let me underscore SCIENTIFIC) study of 0+ in the psychology domain.

The neat thing is that one can apply this thinking to other domains. Think about Physical health. Medicine primarly is concerned with fixing people with illnesses. There is work done on the plus side, but not nearly as much.

Think about business management. We tend towards thinking about cutting costs, fixing processes, etc. The study of the plus side isn’t done nearly as often. After all, we tend to think - if it’s aint broke, don’t fix it! This lack of research and attention (outside of books like good to great) presents an interesting opportunity.

I’m sure that there are other areas where Plus Side Thinking(tm )… may open up many new research and applied avenues. I look forward to discovering them!

This week, I started the Masters in Applied Positive Psychology program at UPENN. The program caught my interest for a number of reasons and so far I have certainly not been disappointed. To some up quickly, and I’ll write more in the future, the idea of Positive Psychology is that while traditional psychology has studied what’s wrong with us, and how to intervene to fix us, there has been a lack of study of what makes us great, happy, etc. We’ve approached the world with an idea that happiness is the absence of unhappiness. Intuitively, we know that’s not the case. So positive psychology is the study of the plus side of things. Whether that’s performance in business, parenting, pysical well being, or other domains, there are so many areas where we have studied what goes wrong, but not enough about what goes right and why. An important basis of positive psych is the emphasis of empirical, scientific research. This is not a “let’s be happy all the time” self help guru training program .

The program will unfold over 40 days on campus (mostly those are Friday -> Sunday to avoid missing the work week), and then there’s lots of distance work. It’s going to be a fun challenge as we continue to build Pikum at the same time!