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Authentic Happiness: Using Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential ^{Top Rated}
Over a decade ago, Martin Seligman charted a new approach to living with "flexible optimism." Now, in his most stimulating and persuasive book to date, the bestselling author of Learned Optimism introduces the revolutionary, scientifically based idea of "Positive Psychology." Positive Psychology focuses on strengths rather than weaknesses, asserting that happiness is not the result of good genes or luck. Seligman teaches readers that happiness can be cultivated by identifying and using many of the strengths and traits that they already possess - including kindness, originality, humor, optimism, and generosity. By frequently calling upon their "signature strengths" in all the crucial realms of life, readers will not only develop natural buffers against misfortune and the experience of negative emotion, they will move their lives up to a new, more positive plane. Drawing on groundbreaking psychological research, Seligman shows how Positive Psychology is shifting the profession's paradigm away from its narrow-minded focus on pathology, victimology, and mental illness to positive emotion, virtue and strength, and positive institutions. Our signature strengths can be nurtured throughout our lives, with benefits to our health, relationships, and careers. Seligman provides the Signature Strengths Survey along with a variety of brief tests that can be used to measure how much positive emotion readers experience, in order to help determine what their highest strengths are. The life-changing lesson of Authentic Happiness is that by identifying the very best in ourselves, we can improve the world around us and achieve new and sustainable levels of authentic contentment, gratification, and meaning.
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Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life ^{Top Rated}
Martin Seligman, a renowned psychologist and clinical researcher, has been studying optimists and pessimists for 25 years. Pessimists believe that bad events are their fault, will last a long time, and undermine everything. They feel helpless and may sink into depression, which is epidemic today, especially among youths. Optimists, on the other hand, believe that defeat is a temporary setback or a challenge--it doesn't knock them down. "Pessimism is escapable," asserts Seligman, by learning a new set of cognitive skills that will enable you to take charge, resist depression, and make yourself feel better and accomplish more.

About two-thirds of this book is a psychological discussion of pessimism, optimism, learned helplessness (giving up because you feel unable to change things), explanatory style (how you habitually explain to yourself why events happen), and depression, and how these affect success, health, and quality of life. Seligman supports his points with animal research and human cases. He includes tests for you and your child--whose achievement may be related more to his or her level of optimism/pessimism than ability. The final chapters teach the skills of changing from pessimism to optimism, with worksheet pages to guide you and your child.
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Think It Out
Spirituality, peace, happiness and life balance guidance. Developing self awareness articles and books.
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What You Can Change... and What You Can't: The Guide to Self-improvement
The subtitle of this psychological self-help adviser seems to promise impossibly more than could be delivered. But Seligman is so much more sensible and lucid than most self-help gurus that he encourages thinking that, yes, this is all we can say--and do--right now about changing undesirable behaviors. "Two worlds views are in collision," Seligman says, over the prospects of behavioral change. Those products of the Western concept of free will--psychotherapy and self-improvement--maintain that behavior is malleable through a variety of conscious techniques. Biological psychiatry asserts that mental illness is physically caused, personality is genetically fixed, and brain chemistry determines emotions; change is possible only by physical interventions, primarily pharmaceutical but also surgical. Seligman comes down between those two extremes in recommending what to do about anxiety, phobias, depression, sexual problems, weight, alcohol use, etc. He advocates techniques that have demonstrably achieved lasting change or--what is far more likely--reduction in the frequency of undesired behavior. He bases his advice in sound research and highly educated inference, which means that his book constantly rewards anyone interested in individual psychology. In the last two chapters, Seligman offers first a devastating critique of the notion that childhood traumas shape adult behavior, particularly as that belief is exploited by the recovery movement, and then his own theory of behavioral change, in which change is possible according to the depth of the behavior--e.g., sexual orientation is very deeply entrenched, hence very difficult to alter, but panic attacks are very shallow and fairly easily eradicated.
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