uh to my mind let me say what a flourishing adult or a flourishing child has not just the absence of misery but it's a real thing it's the presence of five things so the first is positive emotion Joy Comfort happiness um I want to make sure you don't mistake positive psychology for the smiley face so one of the five elements of positive psychology is smiling and being cheerful and being Merry and being happy but it's very important that you know that um cheerfulness is normally distributed in the human population and that means that there are
three billion people in the world right now who don't feel happy or merry or cheerful and the second thing to know cheerfulness is strongly uh genetically based it's about 50% heritable and what that means to those of us who work on I'm I'm by the way in the lower half of positive affectivity and uh uh by the way I take my own medicine generally so each of the exercises that I'll be telling you about are things that are first if it works on me I try it then I give it to my wife and seven
children if works on them I give it to my graduate students if it works on them we start to do clinical trials on it um so uh uh what I think we have with the p the smiley face is about 15% leverage and that means if you're uh a uh low positive effective prone to depression and pessimism there's about 10 to 15 I I know tricks to get you to live in the upper part of a set range uh and it's uh the genetics and the distribution of positive emotion that uh tells me that positive
psychology is not a happyology it's about engagement as as well the the question of when time stops for you when you're one with the music uh when you're in flow and um we know something about that now Mike chent Mi high is a leader in this field flow occurs learning occurs in the classroom and elsewhere when your highest strengths are just matched the highest challenges that come your way and that notion says we need to know what children's highest strengths are and I'll tell you something about that uh as well as teachers highest strengths in
about 15 minutes the third element of positive psychology is good relationships and uh there some of you are blessed with knowing how to bring off good relations but good relations are a skill and it turns out there have been discoveries in the last decade about that skill discoveries that tell us we can teach good relationships to our children the fourth element is meaning belonging to and serving something you think is bigger than the self the self is an impoverished site for meaning but human beings I believe ineluctably search for meaning I believe human beings have
not only been individually selected Dawkins but also group selected and that human beings are live creatures just like termites and wasps and bees and I'll say more about that later uh the final element of flourishing for a child or an adult is achievement accomplishment Mastery and competence so that's so what I want to do now is take you in about 12 minutes through Perma and I think what I'm going to do here is tell you one thing about the science of positive psychology that uh your grandmother didn't know some people uh you might think that
your minister and your grandmother knew all this stuff before but there are actually about 20 things that I didn't know 15 years ago that have been discovered and then I want to tell you one thing we know about how to reliably build uh each of the five elements so starting with Perma positive emotion um uh let me talk about about smiling okay I'm a photographer smile on smile okay uh uh about there are two kinds of smiles there is a duchen smile which is a genuine smile and you can tell it by the muscles underneath
the eyes you can't tell it by the lips uh and there is a stewardess smile uh these are people who SM smile for a living it's called a non duen smile and in about 5 minutes I could teach any of you how to go through pictures in a uh in the newspaper and and uh identify whether or not the person was engaged in a genuine smile or a uh a non duen smile in 1970 the entire freshman class at Mills College was asked by the photographer to smile and they did and the yearbook was published
and half of them were displaying a duen smile and half of them were displaying an artificial smile uh 30 years later researchers from Berkeley called them up and asked them how many divorces have you had and it turned out that uh uh statistically the women who were engaged in an artificial smile had more divorces less marital satisfaction and less life satisfaction it's just one of the snapshots of uh the relationship of a snapshot of positive emotion to what goes on in life um I spend a lot of time predicting how long people are going to
live uh there's a a great interest in uh under what conditions do people die prematurely and what is the psychological relationship of this and people in uh Utah live longer than people in Nevada that is a typical finding in this literature uh well people in Nevada uh drink all night they have drug addiction they have sexual sexual diseases uh they don't believe in God people in Utah uh get up at dawn and go to sleep at Sunset they don't drink they believe in God um I have a t-shirt that says uh uh eat drink and
be married for tomorrow you may be in Utah um so it's no surprise that people in Utah live longer than people in Nevada uh so in order to do serious work on uh who lives long you need a homogeneous group of people who don't stay up partying all night who don't get sexually transmitted diseases who believe the same thing who have good medical care and so there's an exemplary study of nuns and uh uh one aspect of this great study of nuns has to do uh with the essay they wrote In the late 1930s about
140 nuns the bishop asked them to write an essay about why they were entering the convent and about half the nuns used one positive emotion word like I'm eager to serve Jesus and the other half uh completely dead pen about it um more than 60 years later the researchers came back and asked who was alive and who was dead at I don't have the data with me but this approximately right at age 85 90% of the nuns who used one positive emotion word were alive versus 52% of the nuns who used none and at age
94 50% of the nuns who used one positive emotion word were alive versus 12% who use none and that is I'm not pulling these findings out at random there is a growing literature which I'm very interested in on the relationship of uh Perma to uh living longer lower morbidity lower Health Care expenditure um so that's those are a couple of things you wouldn't have known before and let me just tell you something about the question can you raise your positive emotion uh so uh I said in the spirit of uh the research I do the
ultimate res I've spent a lot of my life working on drugs and Psychotherapy and what works and there's a gold standard methodology for that it's the random assignment Placebo control test and when I started to work on happiness I asked uh could you apply random assignment Placebo control testing to the 200 uh stories from the Buddha to pop psychology that have been told about can you be happier and uh so when I I'm about to tell you an exercise when I tell you an exercise that works it means it's been through random assignment Placebo controlled
testing so it actually works so here's one um every night for the next week here's this is your assignment uh write down three things that went well today and why they went well uh turns out 6 months later if you start to do that you're statistically have less depression less anxiety and higher life satisfaction and importantly it's addicting that people like doing positive psychology exercises um uh unlike Psychotherapy in Psychotherapy how many of you are psychotherapists uh one of the the dirty little secrets of Psych I'm been psychotherapist most of my life one of the
dirty little secrets is that when we teach a patient something its Effectiveness is measured by how long it stays before it melts to zero so for the most part what we teach in Psychotherapy and and our pharmacology goes away in time uh positive psychology exercises are self-reinforcing so that's um the first one p um engagement being one with the music being in flow using your signature strengths so in order to uh begin to ask the question how can you have more flow in life we had to uh devise reliable instruments to measure in children and
adults what their highest strengths are and by the way these are available for free at authentica happiness.org part of my job has been to give this stuff away and so you can go to this website with your class with your children or yourself take the signature strengths test and identify compared to roughly 2 million people uh what your signature strengths are uh and how they rank let me just tell you these signature strengths are moral strengths they're not talents these are things that are valued in their own right like gratitude kindness sense of humor uh
and the like and uh let me just give you an example of uh what's been found out about using signature strengths as a builder of well-being so um if we're if this was an overnight Workshop here is what I do tonight you would go to the website and you'd find out what your highest strength is might be something Stephen like social intelligence uh and then your job and I'll do I'll do the exercise now close your eyes think of something you don't like doing at work that you pretty much have to do at least once
a week okay open your eyes having found out what your signature strength is what you're asked to do is to do that task using your highest strength and so for example one of my students was a uh beggar at jardi do you have people who put uh at supermarkets who put the things in your bags okay well that's what that's what she did she didn't like doing it she was working her way through school uh and her highest strength was social intelligence so her job was to recraft bagging using her highest strength so she decided
that she would make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer's day now importantly she failed at that uh with a lot of the customers but she put what was best inside of her on offer all the time and begging became a lot easier after that and in fact when people do this when they take something they don't like doing and find a way next week of doing it using their highest strength it's addicting uh you don't you don't need if kindness is your highest strength and you start using it in the office
uh you people like you more you get along better and it it's self-reinforcing and 6 months later statistically you're less depressed less anxious and higher life satisfaction um now while while we're on signature strengths I want to say something about uh teaching and character I'm very interested both in the character of students and I'll tell you more about that later but I'm fascinated by the character of teachers and of good teachers how many of you are teachers okay well this is especially for you uh the wandering starts with the question of what is it we're
really trying to teach our kids and I don't believe it's spelling and geometry I believe these are the media through which we're trying to teach three much more basic elements uh the first is social navigation how to get an adult to like you how to get along with peers and I think uh when we teach teach that's a gloss Underneath It All the second is rhetoric it's an old old word but a real thing rhetoric is how to tell a good story how to write a good story how to ask the right questions how to
put uh the people you're talking to in touch with what's best inside of them I think rhetoric is the second thing we're trying to teach and the third and most important is I believe we are trying to teach good character and I'll say more about that uh in a bit uh I mentioned the Via signature strengths and the children strengths and uh I'll take you back to character and children in a moment but I want to tell you something about uh great teachers on the right hand side of a report card on Route so um
my uh David Levan is the uh president of 120 Kip schools in the United States these are charter schools for the poorest black kids in America and they've been having terrific success with this it's a positive education School set of schools and they give the usual left-hand side of the report card grades but what they also do now is they've identified eight characteristics character strengths of uh kindergarten through seventh grade children that they want to build zest grit self-discipline uh interpersonal self-discipline optimism gratitude social intelligence and curiosity so each child every semester is rated on
these strengths and so for example for zest each child is rated on actively participates from one to five shows enthusiasm and invigorates others and discussions with the children and with the parents uh are often around the building of character and I think very importantly once you say there's a number you want and it if you don't measure the right thing you do don't do the right thing but once you start to measure something it goes up people are interested in it and character is one of those things um so that's a snapshot of what uh
quite a few schools in America are starting to do that may be useful to south Australia uh it's a wonderful conversation starter with parents by the way um now uh we're interested in this is a complicated slide but it it basically tells you two messages these are the 24 character strengths that we believe are humanly Universal and when they occur close to each other this is based on about 100,000 people so this is a very meaningful slide it means people who have fairness also tend to be modest if they occur far apart it means people
who are modest tend to be people who have low zest so this sort of tells you uh what co-occurs and the second thing that's in this slide is different professions so we looked at four different professions and we asked where are the practitioners of those professions located so it turns out teachers tend to have this grouping of gratitude love kindness and forgiveness unlike professors who don't have any of those things uh they have creativity love of learning bravery and perspective CEOs we find have zest and hope and administrators don't have that they've got Prudence honesty
fairness and modesty so that's a description of character strengths of people in different professions but notice this doesn't distinguish good teachers from Bad Teachers so we ask the question uh what distinguishes the character strengths of great teachers from everyone else and uh that very surprising to me uh the two strengths that distinguish great teachers from the rest of us are zest and humor and the reason I mention this is I'm going to talk in about 20 minutes about a vision for South Australia in which uh I talk about the teaching profession and one of the
things embodied in that is the notion that in the same way that in teacher education we teach teachers how to teach geometry we can teach teachers how to teach well-being and I think we should but more than that we should take what's known about great teachers uh humor and zest are teachable and uh we should select for and teach those things um okay so what we've gone through so far is positive emotion and engagement relationships um active constructive responding your uh spouse comes home from work uh are any of you marriage counselors okay marriage counseling
is the worst form of therapy uh people are lying to you they're lying to each other uh and it's statistics on success are abysmal uh I teach marriage counseling I've done marriage and sex counseling and really tough form of therapy um what you try to do what we teach our our marriage counselors to do is to uh teach couples not to have the same fight over and over and over again uh what you're trying to do essentially is to take insufferable marriages and make them barely tolerable um about seven years ago Shelly Gable who will
actually be speaking in Sydney uh next week made an important discovery about marriage counseling and it's about not teaching couples how about fighting but teaching couples about celebrating together and this is not only true of marriages but it's true of friendship and corporations as well so your spouse comes home from work and she's been promoted what do you say to her uh well it turns out what I used to say to my wife in these circumstances was passive constructive which is uh congratulations dear you deserve it that has no effect on anything uh I teach
drill sergeants uh We've graduated our 7,000th drill sergeant recently drill sergeants are active destructive they say you know what tax bracket your promotion's going to put us into um many of us are passive Destructor which is what's for dinner uh it turns out the only thing that works and when couples learn to do it love loyalty commitment increase the probability of divorce goes down is active constructive and that's uh darling I I read that last paper you sent to the company on the pension plan that was the single best paper I've read on fiscal matters
in my 25 years in business now would you re live what happened exactly where were you when your boss told you you had been promoted she tells you exactly what did he say uh what do you think the real reasons you've been promoted are how can you use those strengths more at church or with the kids or in our marriage uh let's go open a bottle of champagne so that's when couples learn to do that it increases the positives so that's a important Discovery uh meaning uh belong to and serving something you think is bigger
than you are now none of you probably need to be told that this is a ineluctable form of human uh desire but your children do need to be told this so your children probably think life is about things and shopping uh and the economy runs on that um and uh so we have a set of exercises that build meaning and purpose children and adults and one of them is a um when we we have people write their vision of a positive human future and then they write their obituary uh and through their grandchild's eyes about
what they did to bring about a positive human future we don't call it a life we call it a life summary when we're dealing with depressed people and that's a very good way of increasing uh uh uh meaning and purpose um finally for this part of the lecture the a accomplishment so we're very interested in predicting High accomplishment in young people in the classroom and uh in our typical experiments these are done by Angela Duckworth um we measure self-discipline and Grit grid is Extreme persistence who who rings the doorbell in every uh house in adalade
extreme grit extreme persistence and we're interested in the relationship of self-discipline and grit versus IQ in Talent to success in life and the bottom line message of this all these studies is that self-discipline is about twice as important statistically as how smart you are as IQ for measures of success and again for those of us who are teachers that's a very important message
