I recently attended the fifth annual World Congress on Positive Psychology (WCPP) in Montreal with Aimee and Karen. It was four amazing four days of inspiration and reflection. I’m already looking forward to the next WCPP in Melbourne in 2019 (it’s a bi-annual event).

As I did after the the last congress, I’m sharing my thoughts and observations from the four day event. There were many concurrent sessions, so my notes only reflect a small slice of the event.

What is Positive Psychology?

In case you’re wondering what Positive Psychology is all about, here’s a definition from the Positive Psychology Center:

 

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of the strengths that enable individuals and communities to thrive. The field is founded on the belief that people want to lead meaningful and fulfilling lives, to cultivate what is best within themselves, and to enhance their experiences of love, work, and play.

The field is still pretty fragmented, without many standardized definitions. Many of the thought leaders have created their own models (and related books), which push the field into many different (and mostly interesting) directions. Amongst all of that diversity, here’s my takeaway on what positive psychology is all about (and why it’s so important to what we do at Temkin Group):

• People have the intrinsic ability to be happy and to flourish.
• Changes in mindset can improve physical and mental well-being.
• It makes good business sense to help customers and employees flourish.
• The world will be a better place if more of its inhabitants can flourish.

Highlights from the 2017 WCPP

The 2017 WCPP provided a wide array of content over four days of keynote speeches and breakout sessions. The keynote content was heavily focused on research that covered the connection between positive psychology and education, physical well-being, and organizational effectiveness. Here’s a very, very small portion of highlights from some of the sessions:

• Martin Seligman shares 5 career highlights. Seligman, who many consider the godfather of the positive psychology movement, shared his thoughts about the five big ideas that he’s been involved with over his career, and where he thought they might be headed in the future. What an inspirational kick off to the event! Here’s a brief glimpse into the five areas:
  • Learned Helplessness: Helplessness is a learned behavior — usually caused after experiencing an adverse situation. Clinical depression and related mental illnesses are often the result  from a perceived absence of control. The research in neuroscience may be able to “unlearn” helplessness and eliminate depression.
  • Preparedness: Human beings are prepared to learn some things and not others based on how coherent the information is to evidence already in our minds. But why are some things we learn sticky? We tend to listen/observe for 60 seconds and then a default circuit kicks in about every 60 seconds so that we can compare what we’re learning against our existing ideas.
  • Learned Optimism: Optimistic people believe that the cause of problems are temporary and causal, and this thinking can be taught through resilience training. Since pessimistic thinking is a key risk factor for cardiovascular disease, this training can be very helpful for people who have heart disease and depression.
  • Homo Prospectus: We used to think that people think and behave based on what’s happened to them in the past, when in fact people are future oriented. So treating problems with anxiety and depression must deal with how people view their future, not their past.
  • Positive Psychology: The PERMA model has defined what well-being means, and he is seeing it being brought into class rooms, families, organizations, and even nations. He believes that this movement can bring unprecedented prosperity in the world, and it can create a level of human flourishing that only comes along every 500 years.
• David Cooperrider is improving the world. Cooperrider is one of the most unassuming and amazing people that I have ever met. He’s the creator of appreciative inquiry, which he’s successfully applied to industries, religions, and the United Nations. He’s planning a world summit that is focused on radically improving early childhood education. The approach he will use (which he’s been very successful with in the past) is to bring together representatives from every aspect of the entire system (educators, administrators, politicians, parents, etc) and run appreciative inquiry sessions. This is like a large-scale, co-creation form of design thinking that he calls “Design Democracy.” He expects that this summit will be the start of a decade long effort.
• Kim Cameron shows the power of positive energy. Cameron shared some of the work being done at the Center for Positive Organizations. He discussed how positive energy is a more important element to understanding the health of an organization than is a mapping of hierarchies or influence levels. The bottom line is that people in organizations who add positive energy (Energizers) are much more more valuable to the performance of an organization than are those who subtract energy (De-Energizers).