Levi Ioffe

9/14/2015
Flourish Reflection

1)

Flourishs central message revolves around how to improve your

well-being. To do so, Seligmans implements his revised authentic
happiness theory and more specifically, positive psychology. True
happiness consists of three elements: your biological set point, your
conditions of living, and your daily actions and thoughts. The first
element of that is set for each individual person, but the other two we
can change. Conditions of living make up a small part of overall
happiness, but thats what people generally focus on when trying to
improve their overall happiness. Seligman considers this a mistake.
Instead, he suggests focusing on your daily thoughts and choices in the
pursuit of happiness. This is where positive psychology comes into
play. His theory of flourishing is founded on positive emotions,
accomplishment, relationships, engagement, and meaning, all of which
constitute the core of positive psychology. These are related to a
persons well-being, but instead of defining it, these elements
contribute to it. Seligman then asserts that societal well-being is
separate of happiness. He believes that well-being is a societal
measure which comes mainly from the three elements of
accomplishment, meaning, and relationships. These are not just
subjective or objective, though. For example, it is not enough for just

you to be satisfied with a relationshipyour relationships must make

other people happy as well. On the contrary, accomplishment and
meaning need to be defined in terms dependent on you. Accomplishing
for accomplishments sake is not enough. In Flourish, Seligman
addresses these concepts, while also going through examples of
exercises that help you attain a positive psychology. He believes that if
all people looked at the world with a positive outlook and a
consideration for others well-being, the world would be a better place.
2)
The points in Flourish are valuable to our discussion in two ways.
First, they address methods of success, chiefly positive psychology. In
maintaining a positive psychology, we do not let problems get in the
way of our future success. Any problem needs to be assessed and
dealt with, but if you take a pessimistic approach to dealing with it, you
will fix nothing. Everything is about being future-oriented. Dwelling on
the past halts progress. Mistakes need to be looked at as lessons for
the future. Through optimism, we take action to fix our problems, and
to maintain optimism we should use the positive psychology
techniques Seligman outlines.
Second, considering others well-being is a valuable skill for our
success. Your relationships make your career and good relationships
make for a good career. Considering I am at the point in my career
search where I need to network, this is the point that resonated the
most with me. Seligman introduces Active Constructive Responding as
a tool to establish good relationships. This is the style of listening and

responding that shows both interest and positivity in what somebody is

saying. By responding in the positive constructive manner, you can
make someone feel worthwhile.
3) As I mentioned in my response to the second question, Flourish gives a
guideline to building good career relationships. Building good career
relationships is a key goal of our class. From the OPCD assignment to
the informational interviews, this class encourages us to take
advantage of our opportunities to build relationships within our chosen
fields.
With regards to our chosen field, Flourish establishes hard proof
in the importance of our daily actions towards overall happiness. In
Flourish, Seligman states our quality of life makes up a significantly
smaller portion of our happiness than how we achieve this quality of
life. If our goal is to be happy, we should spend more time focusing on
doing what makes us happy, and not doing things to make us happy. In
choosing a career, this exemplifies the age-old career adage: Do what
makes you happy and youll do it wellthe money will follow.