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“Happiness does not depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions. It isn’t what you have, who you are, where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it.”
Dale Carnegie (1888–1955), How to Win Friends and Influence People, American writer, speaker, and developer of self-improvement courses

In 1996, Martin Seligman was elected president of the American Psychological Association by a landslide. This set him casting about for a central theme for his time in this key leadership role. A few weeks later — still puzzling over a theme — he was weeding in his garden. His five-year-old daughter, Nikki, was throwing weeds in the air and singing. This distraction caused Seligman to yell at her to stop. A few minutes later she came and said, “Daddy, I want to talk to you.”

“Yes, Nikki?”

“Daddy, do you remember before my fifth birthday? From when I was three until I was five, I was a whiner. I whined every day. On my fifth birthday, I decided I wasn’t going to whine anymore. That was the hardest thing I have ever done. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.”

From the mouths of babes!

Seligman describes this encounter in his outstanding book, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. His encounter with Nikki is described in an early chapter entitled “How Psychology Lost its Way and I Found Mine.”

Seligman writes of his conversation with Nikki, “This was an epiphany for me….I’d spent fifty years enduring mostly wet weather in my soul and the last ten years as a walking nimbus cloud in a household radiant with sunshine …in that moment I resolved to change…raising children, I know now…was far more than just fixing what was wrong with them. It was about identifying and amplifying their strengths and virtues, and helping them find the niche where they can live those positive traits to the fullest.”

Seligman, who elsewhere in that book described himself as a natural pessimist studying optimism, has authored 20 books and 170 articles on motivation and personality. This turning point with Nikki led him to found the Positive Psychology movement. Here’s an excerpt from the Positive Psychology Center spawned by Seligman’s pioneering leadership of this rapidly growing movement:

“Positive Psychology has three central concerns: positive emotions, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. Understanding positive emotions entails the study of contentment with the past, happiness in the present, and hope for the future. Understanding positive individual traits
consists of the study of the strengths and virtues, such as the capacity for love and work, courage, compassion, resilience, creativity, curiosity, integrity, self-knowledge, moderation, self-control, and wisdom. Understanding positive institutions entails the study of the strengths that foster better communities, such as justice, responsibility, civility, parenting, nurturance, work ethic, leadership, teamwork, purpose, and
tolerance.”

This new approach has been at the forefront of explosive levels of research on happiness and leveraging strengths. In Authentic Happiness, Seligman provides this useful formula to help us determine “what you can change and what you can’t” (the title of one of his earlier books):

H = S + C + V

Our enduring level of Happiness is a result of our Set Range plus our Circumstances and Voluntary Control. We can’t do much about our Set Range. It’s how we showed up on this earth. Circumstance is a grayer area. Some circumstances — such as our childhood, country of birth, ethnicity, and key people in our lives — we inherited. Our Circumstances factor gets fuzzier when we look at how today’s situation is also in large part based on past decisions we’ve made. The most hopeful aspect of this whole formula — and the core of framing our life in leader mode — is Voluntary Control. Regardless of what’s come before or where we are now, we can change our present reality by what we focus upon. And that will bring us a different future.

Seligman’s web site, www.authentichappiness.com, has a series of free assessment tools and plenty of practical ideas to help you climb the leadership stairway.

Luckily, I caught Richard Wiseman in a radio interview late one night on my way home from the airport. When I got home, I immediately looked him up on the Internet and ordered his book. Wiseman is Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of
Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. He’s been extensively studying luck over a number of years by interviewing and running experiments with very lucky people who seem to lead charmed lives and very unlucky people who seem to have their own black cloud following them around.
His findings are further proof that we make choices to wallow in and create our own bad luck, or lead ourselves toward attracting “lucky” breaks in our lives.

In his book The Luck Factor: Change Your Luck and Change Your Life, Wiseman outlines four principles he has found define lucky people. Through his “luck school,” he’s retrained up to 80 percent of the unlucky to reverse their fortunes and attract good luck. His four principles involve key elements of leading: engage others in conversations and social interaction; listen to your intuition and trust hunches; develop positive expectations about the future; and strengthen resilience and persistence to eventually turn bad luck into good.

These few excerpts of his luck research further illustrate the magnetic power of the energy force fields we choose in framing, explaining, and acting on the good and bad events in our lives:

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