“Michael”, Tracy said, “You seem to take the most negative interpretation of the feedback people give you. Why don’t you just take the most positive interpretation?”. It was 1972. I was one of a group of twelve college instructors and therapists who had just completed a weekend of training in Gestalt therapy. Tracy had taken me to task in a very compassionate way and her comment and recomendation really impressed me. That was when I became interested in what is now the science of Positive Psychology.
Tracy cxhallenged me to change the way I responded to criticism. I tried to see the positives in how people responded to me and it worked. It’s not that I dismissed what I didn’t like. I simply decided to balance the negative with the positive. I realized that things are rarely black and white, but a continuum; on one end of the continuum negative, the other extreme positive. I like Victor Frankl’s idea that “the facts of our life are not as important as the meaning we give them”.
That’s the basic platform of Positive Psychology. It’s not so much that we ignore the negative; it’s more that we focus more on the positive. “Water the flowers and not the weeds. The weeds will still be there; they just won’t be as important”.
When we talk about Positive Psychology, I am referring to a science that has undergone very rigorous research over the last two decades, led by heavy hitters, such as Martin Seligman Ph.D., Barbara Frederickson Ph.D. and Christopher Peterson Ph.D. They and many other serious scholars have amassed a huge amount of evidence to support this exciting new approach to creating or restoring people’s well-being.
My own involvement in positive psychology goes back to the early seventies when I was trying out ways to emphasize what people’s inherent strengths were and how much more important these strengths were than their weaknesses in solving their problems. Since I was – and still am – somewhat insecure and can get discouraged from time to time, I made it a habit to keep a journal and write down a list of good things that were happening in my life as well as a list of what my colleague Dan Fallon used to call “cheap thrills”, simple things I could do to make myself feel better. This really has helped me a lot.
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