Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter.
Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.
In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.
Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage.
The aim of Positive Psychology is to catalyze a change in psychology from a preoccupation only with repairing the worst things in life to also building the best qualities in life.
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.
You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.
When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.
Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
Well-being cannot exist just in your own head. Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.
Curing the negatives does not produce the positives.