Customer Reviews

Authentic Happiness

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Some of ideas near the beginning of the book are effective at making me happy and not too hard to follow. This is surprising enough to make it a pretty good book.
But much of the book has little value. The lengthy questionnaires mostly just told me what I already knew about myself.
He mostly ignores any questions that might be raised about whether the happiness he's helping people to find is authentic (which isn't surprising if you assume he's following his own advice). I have a strong suspicion that becoming happy from following his advice and changing one's perception about how well things are going isn't as genuinely satisfying as it would be to create the kind of successes that happiness has evolved as a reward for.
Some of his claims about parental influences on children appear to have been discredited by Judith Rich Harris. His advice for parents may still be right, but his apparent carelessness has made me suspicious.

I have long been a fan of Martin Seligman's work. Among his books, I have often cited his classic 1990 book, Learned Optimism in my own writing (Growing the Distance: Timeless Principles for Personal, Career, and Family Success, The Leader's Digest: Timeless Principles for Team and Organization Success, and Growing @ the Speed of Change: Your Inspir-actional How-To Guide For Leading Yourself and Others through Constant Change and presentations. As Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and as Past President of the American Psychological Association, Martin has lead groundbreaking research on the emerging field of "positive psychology." This approach is "shifting the profession away from its narrow-minded focus on pathology, victimology, and mental illness to positive emotion, virtue, and strength."

In this book, Martin provides the Signature Strengths Survey along with a number of brief quizzes and tests that are helpful tools for assessing how much positive emotion we experience and how to determine our greatest strengths. His research shows that there is a direct relationship between the positive emotions, or happiness, we experience in our lives and our core, or signature, strengths.

"I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather; I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths." Martin prescribes; "Weigh up your life once a year. If you find you are getting short weight, change your life. You will usually find that the solution lies in your own hands." His self-assessment tools and the Signature Strengths Survey are ideal for some of that vital self-oxygenation and personal reflection and renewal.

His formula for authentic happiness recognizes that our life is a balance of things we can control and things we can't (one of his earlier books is entitled, What You Can Change and What You Can't). Martin's formula for lasting happiness is "H = S + C + V. Where H is your enduring level of happiness, S is your set range, C is the circumstances of your life, and V represents factors under your voluntary control."

Authentic Happiness is a very well researched book that's also quite readable and very practical. I have purchased copies for our kids and they have found the book lays the foundation for a lifetime of real happiness and fulfillment.