Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being Paperback – February 7, 2012

Dr. Seligman starts off reviewing why he has moved on from authentic happiness to well-being. While not giving up on authentic happiness, he argues that while happiness is an important concept, the notion of well-being involves a number of factors in addition to happiness.
The book is comprehensive in nature, covering everything from happiness to sex in space to a denial that he ever helped the U.S. military develop torture techniques. That comprehensiveness, is however, the book's weakness as well as its strength. The book does start with ways to achieve well-being at a personal level, including some exercises to do so. Just as it began to get interesting on that topic, the author switches to introducing well-being into the education system and just as that becomes interesting he switches to well-being in the military and so on. He also has a tendency to go off on tangents throughout the book, further diminishing the book's focus. Because of this it was hard to discern the target audience of the book, with some parts being suitable to the lay-person while others were best suited to psychologists or similar professionals.
Having said all that, I did enjoy the book and found the occasional gem of wisdom. However as stated in a previous critique, this is not a self-help book and those wishing to learn how to flourish will be disappointed. I would recommend his prior book Authentic Happiness for those wanting to learn self-improvement. For those wanting an overview of positive psychology and the various settings it could be used in, the book does provide a basic overall introduction to the subject area. However it does not contain much information that would be useful to the lay-person or to clinicians and their clients.

I just finished Flourish, a book about positive psychology by Martin Seligman, and although I really liked it, I thought it could have been organized a little better, perhaps less an account of the recent history and fields in which the field of positive psychology is venturing into (fields like education, the military, health/medicine, etc.) and more an account of what positive psychology is. There are pieces of what positive psychology is along the way but these pieces are not the book's organizing principle. I'll attempt here to tell you what positive psychology is and demonstrate how it is supposed to work.

The field of positive psychology's main idea is that the focus of mental health has been for so long the elimination of psychological disorders and not much on the cultivation of living a richer life through a person's expression of her strengths and virtues. Positive psychology, then, is supposed to complement the traditional understanding of treating disorders with the additional goal of cultivating virtues and helping a person live a more flourishing life.

The theory of human nature that underlies positive psychology holds that people are forward- or goal-seeking individuals capable of dealing with stressors and disasters in life and concerned with increasing their well-being. And people are able to increase their well-being through positive emotion, engagement with the activities they do, positive relationships they have, and the achievements that result from the activities people engage in. These four components Seligman labels with the acronym PERMA. I'll break down PERMA to explain what each component is and how Seligman thinks you can better nourish these aspects of a life well lived.

1. Positive emotion. Positive emotion is just the set of happy feelings you have in any given day. And as we all know, these happy feelings can be produced by almost anything: eating a good meal, watching a good movie, having a good conversation with a friend, making love, and so on. For the record, though, the best research shows that nobody can much change their predisposition to conceive of events positively; it can only change by about 20 per cent, and this is because the predisposition is largely heritable. Suggestions. Seligman does make suggestions for increasing positive emotion, though, if only a little. And they are several. One is keeping a journal and writing in at night before you go to bed three good things you did that day and why you feel like they were good things. They can be the simplest things too. Another thing you can do is practice the A, B, C, D, E method with your negative thinking. How you do this is by writing down an action (A) that bothered you that day, the negative beliefs (B) you had about the situation, the feelings you have/had as a consequence (C), a demonstration, (D) of alternative ways to conceive of the event, and then an evaluation (E) of your thoughts and feelings afterward. The list goes on in terms of how you can improve your positive emotion, and you can read the book for the others.

2. Engagement. Engagement is the degree to which the activities you engage in are flowing, when time seems to pass and you're completely unaware, because you're so enthralled in the work you're doing. You can increase this sense of engagement by using your signature strengths during the things that you do. (If you're at all curious, what strengths you have, you can go to authentichappiness.org, sign up, and take the VIA test.)

3. Relationships. A basic way of improving relationships, Seligman reccommends, is by positively and constructively communicating with someone. If someone tells you something they did positive, for example, you can compliment that person and then ask more specific questions to find out about what it is they did. Something as simple as this increases relationships.

4. Achievement. What Seligman has to say about achievement is this. What a person really needs to do to perform well is the gumption to get up and do it and push away adversity. Seligman, somewhat commically, writes that if you want to be good at something, do it about 60 hours every week for 10 years.

All that I wrote here is just scanning the surface. There are a lot of good ideas in here.

Ouch. The first sentence, the cover and the packaging fooled me. I really thought I was buying a book that would show me ways of improving my relationships.

Instead, I bought something that had an excellent intro chapter or two, but which then morphs into a something akin to a diary - what Marty did here and what Marty did there in establishing positive psychology at the university level and lots of hints about the programs Marty can put together for your organization, be it a school or army, and why that would be a good thing to do.

If you are a school principal or the Head of Department for Psychology at a tertiary education institution, this book may be a wonderful source for your presentation on why you want to get Positive Psychology going at your organisation. If you're just a person looking to improve your relationships, other books will be more helpful.

The best thing about the book is the generous references to the OTHER teachers at the monumentally expensive executive program Seligman put together - there I found a reference to an author who DOES talk exactly about what I wanted to hear. That book I bought also, and am very impressed with it.

It's a pity the book is put forward as a personal level, self-help book. After the first few chapters, it really becomes a mix of memoir and exec programme brochure.

However, it does point the buyer towards some other authors who focus on improving relationships in their books.

Seligman is obviously brilliant and accomplished. This book, however, suffers the bane of too many other successful authors. It's in serious need of enthusiastic editing. As a former scientist and current doctor, I understand the need for identifying sources, but reading this book is like wading through mud. Were I "the Queen" I would have had him write two books, one for the academics, and one, Seth Godin-esque to clearly and cleanly spell out his new hypothesis which is, by the way, glorious. I got so fed up reading with the hope of him finally elaborating on that hypothesis, instead of name dropping, that I quit. Great idea, poorly executed.