The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Psychology

Inside your head

  • Book review: Learned optimism

    Of course I’ve been reading while I was on holidays, and it fit very well that I was reading about optimism. Martin Seligman has long researched optimism and positive psychology, and Learned Optimism is the popular summary of his work.

    But why be optimistic? Shouldn’t you just be a realist? Well, here are a few good reasons for being an optimist:
    * Optimists lead better lives
    * Optimists live longer
    * Optimists are healthier
    * Optimists do better at work and in school
    * Optimists have fewer depressions
    * Optimists have more friends and better social lives

    And did you know that:
    * The most optimistic candidate has won nine out of ten american presidential elections from 1948 to 1984
    * The most optimistic sports teams outperform the pessimistic ones
    * An insurance company that started hiring based on optimism rather than skill got much better salesmen out of it
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  • Book review: Man’s search for meaning

    This is a very unusual book, spanning topics rarely encountered in one and the same volume. The author, Viktor E. Frankl, was a pshychologist and he spent most of world war 2 in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. And these two backgrounds have gone into this book which is both an account of his experiences in the concentration camps, a psychological analysis of how people react under such extreme conditions and a short introduction to his psychological school called Logotherapy.

    The basic underlying theme here is meaning (logos in greek). Frankl argues, that what made some people endure the trials of the concentration camps, while many others gave up, was their ability to see meaning in their suffering. And in general, Frankl sees the drive to discover meaning as our most basic need, and he believes that many psychological problems (from neuroses to alcoholism) stem from a lack of meaning in peoples lives.
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  • Book review: The inner game of work

    I discovered Inner Skiing about 15 years ago, and enjoyed it immensely. That book describes how the inner game principles pioneered by Timothy Gallwey can be used to create better learning conditions for skiers. Gallwey originally used it for teaching tennis, and the method basically consists of teaching not by telling people what to do, but simply by helping them direct their attention to different aspects of what they want to learn.

    In this book, subtitled Overcoming mental obstacles for maximum performance, Timothy Gallwey applies the same principles to work. How can we create the best learning conditions at work and what advantages would this give us?
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  • Book review: Crossings

    This book by Richard A. Heckler, subtitled “A New Psychology of the Unexpected”, is about change in a big way. It’s about those events that have the powert to totally transform your life. The events can be big or small, trivial or life-threatening, mystical or practical, but they fundamentally alter the people to whom they happen.

    The strongest feature of the book is quite simply actual stories of this happening. Told partially in the words of the people involved and partially by the author, these stories are downright gripping. From Karl, a former drug dealer turned minister, to Rebecca who discovers her strengths and leadership abilities on board a small boat close to sinking in a ferocious storm.
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  • Quote

    The decisive question for man is: Is he related to the infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interests upon futilities and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.
    – Carl Jung

  • Want to understand others? Imitate them!

    According to this article, there is a very concrete, neurological link between empathy (the ability to identify with other peoples emotions), and the tendency to imitate others.

    A team at the University of California has conducted an experiment that used Magnetic Resonanced Imaging (MRI) to measure brain activity in subjects who were either observing other peoples facial expressions or imitating them. The areas of the brain stimulated by these two activities were found to be similar, but when the subjects were mimicking the expressions, there was an increased activity in the parts of the brain responsible for regulating emotions.

    From the article: Even if someone has suppressed most of their ability to empathize, Iacoboni says, anyone can become more empathetic. “If you want to become more empathetic, you have to try to look at how people act and move their body and their face. Try to mimic it a little bit, and you will feel internally what other people feel.”

    This seems to validate one central tool of NLP, which is to create a rapport between the practitioner and the subject, by mirroring the subject.

  • Positive psychology

    In 1998 Martin E.P. Seligman decided to teach an undergraduate seminar in positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. This was based on his idea “that psychology should turn toward understanding and building the human strengths to complement our emphasis on healing damage”.

    Simply put, the seminar focused on what gives people positive experiences. Themes included kindness, play, life as art, flow and more.

    His experience is described here, and apparently it was extremely positive. One student put it like this: “Positive psychology was a course that seemed to grab all of the young burgeoning psychologists in the room by their throats and say ‘Hey! The world should be smiling a lot more than it is! What are you going to do about it?’”

  • Book review: Inner skiing

    “Inner Skiing” is an excellent account of how learning occurs, but this time it’s not at work, it’s out on the ski slopes.

    As every skier knows, skiing can be a wonderful experience, when you’re in flow, your skis obey your every command and you zoom down the mountainside. And every skier knows the flip side: When your skis won’t do anything you ask them to, every other skier on the mountain seems to deliberately get in your way, and you spend more time falling than skiing.

    What determines the experience you will get? How do you you move from one to the other?
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  • Book review: Playful approaches to serious problems

    So, why on earth am I reading a book about child therapy? First of all, therapy is all about change. You have a problem, you need to change, therapy is one potential tool, and therapy contains many potentially useful methods for promoting change. And one of the biggest challenges facing organizations today is the need for constant change. It’s almost a clich? to say it, but it remains true.

    Secondly, I discovered the concept of narrative therapy on the net, while netresearching therapy, and it seemed really interesting for a number of reasons.
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  • Psychological test

    Here’s a riddle for you:
    It is a story about a girl. While at the funeral of her own mother,she met this guy whom she did not know. She thought this guy was amazing, he was her dream guy, and she fell in love with him there but never asked for his number and could not find him.

    A few days later the girl killed her own sister.

    Question: What is her motive in killing her sister?

    Give this some thought for a while before you click more to see the answer.
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