Martin Seligman, of Positive Psychology fame sees well-being as a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment. His own positive psychology movement, which I find a particularly persuasive world-view to challenge the deficit paradigms of our time, has inspired many efforts to survey people's state of mind. One example being David Cameron's moves to measure GWB as well as GDP.
Seligman is now concerned however that surveys exploring well being use questions which tend to concentrate on "life satisfaction", which might include the above elements of well-being, but he says that the answers to these questions are largely, i.e. 70%+, determined by how respondents are feeling at the point of the survey and not how they evaluate their lives overall. For this he believes better questions search out notions of "flourishing", ask people about their moods, i.e. the present, then go on to explore their relationships with others and how far they have a sense of accomplishing something worthwhile or meaningful. This offers a more comprehensive assessment than joy and happiness of previous survey methods.
For the record, a recent study in 23 countries found that the citizens of Denmark and Switzerland topped the table for having flourishing lives with more than 25%, and citizens of France, Hungary, Portugal and Russia reporting fewer than 10% of citizens as flourishing.
Motivation. Many will have enjoyed listening to motivational speakers from business, sport and leadership. Interesting, inspirational even, yet beyond the intrinsic value of the speech the longer term value back in the office can sometimes be difficult to realise. In a Guardian article over the weekend, there was an interesting exploration of how innate talent is seen as having a strong influence on excellent performance, but it's not the only determinant. In fact, research shows that high-flyers learn no faster than those who reach lower levels of attainment, but the critical feature of their success is that "high achievers practice for more hours." Strengths theory speaks often about talents being part of us and not learned, and that talents only become true strengths when combined with activities that bring the talents into full and frequent use, i.e. 'practice make perfect.'
In addition, it appears that mindset, in this case fixed or growth focused shaped very different responses to challenges and apparent 'failure.' For instance, fixed mindset groups, i.e. those who see talent as fixed and incapable of development, rapidly shift into a blame mode when things go badly, whereas 'growth' mindset groups seek new approaches, are flexible in their thinking, don't recognise 'failure' as such and teach themselves new strategies for addressing apparently intractable problems. Perseverance it seems opens the door to the potential for personal transformation and access to higher performance. Or, as the great golfer Gary Player once said, "it's funny, when winning major tournaments, I'm often called lucky, yet the more I practice, the luckier I seem to get!"
And finally, one sentence I couldn't resist replaying from today's press:
"A Conservative Council,with a history of cleansing the poor from its housing, is currently attempting to criminalise the good souls who distribute soup to the destitute." LB Westminster draft bye-law refers. What price the Big Society, in Westminster at least?
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