Positive Psychology Revisited Wed, Aug 30, 2017

I recently picked up a night class at the junior college to work my way toward an AA Psychology. I’m taking Social Psychology at the moment (the study of how people act, think, and feel in the context of society). I was excited last night when I saw the phrase “positive psychology” written on the board of topics to cover that evening. “What luck!” I thought to myself, “he might even mention Shawn Achor and I can share about how we implement these practices at my work.”

But to my shock, when the topic came up, my professor immediately started bashing the concept. He introduced it as a “new psychology method that is honestly for all of the tree huggers out there that just think to feeeeel better and that will fix everything. It’s a bunch of BS.” 

He completely disregarded and brushed past the entire topic. The reason that we here at SlideBelts recommend the Happiness Advantage book is not just because it’s a “feel good fix it” book. That book is full of hard evidence and study after study containing results that are hard to disregard.

I gathered 2 points from this experience:

1: I’m glad that here, one of our seven keys is “open minded policy.” Even if something is new and “sounds like BS” at first, it’s important that we listen and give it a chance before making brash assumptions. Unfortunately my professor didn’t seem very open minded at all in that moment.

2: Once I was aware of his stance on positive psychology, I began to pick up a little more on the overall negativity that was sprinkled throughout his speech and actions. He would often end sentiments with a negative or pessimistic spin on them, instead of a positive one.

Now of course I was looking for the negativity at that point so it was more easily found, and obviously my professor overall is a very intelligent guy that I’ll end up learning a lot from, but it was just interesting coming from work in a very positive and uplifting environment and going straight to one that was almost an opposite environment. It made me grateful that I get to spend the majority of my time here where we actively try to be CEANN...who knows, maybe I’ll lend him the Happiness Advantage.