At last, psychology gets serious about glee, fun, and happiness. Martin Seligman has given us a gift-a practical map for the perennial quest for a flourishing life.
Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it.
Evolutionary theory holds that our ability to sense when we should be suspicious has been every bit as essential for human survival as our capacity for trust and cooperation.
Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.
Empathic, emotionally intelligent work environments have a good track record of increasing creativity, improving problem solving and raising productivity.
Companies in the East put a lot more emphasis on human relationships, while those from the West focus on the product, the bottom line. Westerners appear to have more of a need for achievement, while in the East there’s more need for affiliation.
Our emotional mind will harness the rational mind to its purposes, for our feelings and reactions – rationalizations – justifying them in terms of the present moment, without realizing the influence of our emotional memory.
We’re exposed and carry in our bodies multiple chemicals, and we have to understand how they interact. Both how they individually interact and the thousands of effects they can produce when they interact with the receptors that run our bodies.
But the rational mind usually doesn’t decide what emotions we “should” have !
We need to re-create boundaries. When you carry a digital gadget that creates a virtual link to the office, you need to create a virtual boundary that didn’t exist before.
Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.
Some children naturally have more cognitive control than others, and in all kids this essential skill is being compromised by the usual suspects: smartphones, TV, etc. But there are many ways that adults can help kids learn better cognitive control.
Every morning, I go off to a small studio behind my house to write. I try to ignore all email and phone calls until lunchtime. Then I launch into the sometimes frantic busy-ness of a tightly scheduled day.
Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival.
For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when emotions hold sway.
The industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company’s bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy.
The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response.
Motivation aside, if people get better at these life skills, everyone benefits: The brain doesn’t distinguish between being a more empathic manager and a more empathic father.
Once shoppers become empowered, we will facilitate industries thinking in completely new terms; for example, making products that are totally biodegradable.
Happy, calm children learn best.