Learned Optimism : How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

Rating:
Summary: Okay...But not great
Review: This book does offer some useful advice, thus the two stars but it is not a great book.

I would recommend Patterns Of Depression or any good NLP book by Bandler and Grinder. Anthony Robbins Awaken the Giant also offers some useful strategies to offset depression that work faster and better than what is in this book.

I recommend that you borrow this from your library and save the money for a better book.

Rating:
Summary: Optimist or Pessimist?
Review: Most of us know how to be pessimists. Fortunately, I was reered in a home with my parents were usually happy and positive and actually condoned on negatove thoughts. Rarely did a negative thought come across.

On the other hand, I have met other people, friends when I was growing up and families of some other people that I went to school with who were not all that positive so it was easy for me to see why their offspring mimmicked their negativity.

In Learned Optimism, author Martin Selligman asks; "Are you an optimist or a pessimist?" "How do you feel if a friend says something that hurts your feelings?" "How often do you take on exciting new projects or celebrate your successes?"

Selligman, one of the world's experts on motivation, shows you how to chart a new approach to living with "flexible optimism."

In the this groundbreaking book, based on over 20 years of clinical research, Dr. Selligman outlines easy-to-follow techniques that have helped thousands of people rise above pessimism and the depression that accompanies negative thoughts.

LEARNED OPTIMISM shows you how to:

Recognize your "explanatory style" - what you say to yourself when you experience setbacks--and how it influences your life.

Boost your mood and your immune system ---with helpful thoughts

Help your children by practicing the patterns of thought that
encourage optimism at an early age and at home

Stick to your diet or resolve a difficult business deal: Break the "I give up habit" with Dr. Selligman's ABC techniques.

Change your interior dialogue and experience the astonishing positive results.

Learned Optimism offers tests that reveal your present level of optimism and pessimism, and proven techniques to transform negative thoughts and talk yourself out of defeat. When you know how to choose the power of optimism, you'll gain an essential new freedom to build a life of real rewards and lasting fulfillment.

Learned Optimism provides a wealth of information to help anyone conquer depression or even be even more optimistic. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: He's optimistic about optimism!
Review: Learned optimism

When Martin Seligman deliver his APA presidential address, I was in the back of the room. His ideas were radical -- too radical for some therapists, who began walking out. These days Seligman's ideas reach beyond the research community and we can all gain.

Here's the basic thesis. When rats receive shock after shock, and nothing they do prevents future shocks, they learn to be helpless. They just give up. Dogs exhibit the same behavior and so do people. However, not all people -- and, for that matter, not all rats -- succumb. With people, Seligman has learned, thinking style is the moderator, i.e,. the differentiator between those who give up and those who keep going.

At first I seem an unlikely person to read this book, let alone recommend it. I'm known as irreverent, cynical and "cantankerous," as one reader said. However, Seligman defines an optimistic style by the way we respond to adverse events. Optimists see them as specific rather than pervasive, transient rather than permanent, and caused by factors outside oneself. In that sense, I might qualify!

I recommend this book because it is important to understand that thinking style can outweigh other predictors of success. His stories with insurance sales representatives and athletes are persuasive. One insurance company found that an optimistic style can compensate for lower aptitude, as measured by their traditional test.

Seligman also acknowledges that an optimistic style will not always be appropriate. When facing high risk, it's better to err on the side of pessimism. Indeed, he says, some occupations tend to attract and reward those who are mildly pessimistic.

On the downside, I found I could not relate to the tests in the book. Example:
Your car runs out of gas on a dark street late at night.
Either "I didn't check to see how much gas was in the tank" or, "The gas gauge w as broken." Well, it seems that the condition of the gas gauge is an objective fact, which I'd find out sooner or later. And if I stop a crime by calling the police, it's possible that a strange noise caught my attention AND I was alert that day. Then again, I get irritated at tests in general (hmm...is that a pessimistic style?)

The next step is to explore the ways our society and institutions foster a sense of helplessness. Seligman encourages us to get a medical exam if we've experienced many losses, yet the medical profession often encourages us to feel helpless. Taking a pill, which requires getting a prescription, gives all control to the doctor. Schools, prisons and other governmental institutions teach people they're wrong - and often labels students or inmates as "C student" or "bad person."

And while Seligman says we can all learn to be optimists ,every psychological relationship has limits. In today's economy, when people get knocked down over and over again, are they learning to be pessimists? And can they learn a new style of thinking?

Finally, couldn't someone be a pessimist in some life domains and an optimist in others?

These questions may be too much to ask of a book destined for a popular audience.
Meanwhile, it's enough to say, this is one of the best popular psych books around, by someone who really knows the score.

Rating:
Summary: Solid research and excellent read on optimism
Review: Learned Optimism provides you with the ingredients for optimism and contrasts them with those required for pessimism. I gained valuable insights from this book and recommend it highly.

Optimism serves as a catalyst for success because it encourages persistence, but it is extremely dangerous when the probability of failure and price of failure are high. If you want to make the most of your thinking, emotions and your life, I strongly recommend Optimal Thinking - How to be Your Best Self by Dr. Rosalene Glickman as well. Optimal Thinking enables you to make the most productive use of optimism and provides the realistic, optimal solution to the dangerous aspects.

Rating:
Summary: Great Book For Understanding Role of Optimism In Success
Review: Non-negative thinking, not positive thinking, is the key to success, according to Martin Seligman author of "Learned Optimism: How To Change Your Mind And Your Life."

Seligman writes: "The optimistic individual makes the most of his talent... .The optimistic individual perseveres."

As a graduate student, Seligman made a significant discovery--dogs can learn their actions are futile and can learn to become helpless. According to Seligman, people, too, can learn to become helpless. And, such negative thinking can lead to depression.

So, what separates optimistic people from more pessimistic people? Seligman says it's the way we explain events and outcomes to ourselves. If something good happens to us, how do we explain it? Was it luck? Or was it the result of our talent?

If something bad happens to us, how do we explain that? Is it that conditions just weren't right? Or did the bad event happen because we're somehow horribly flawed as individuals? Will this flaw eternally damn us in all other endeavors?

After extensive research, Seligman concludes that optimists and pessimists attribute the reasons for success and failure differently. Pessimists tend to attribute failure and bad events to permanent, personal, and pervasive factors. Optimists tend to attribute bad events to non-personal, non-permanent, and non-pervasive factors. Conversely, for good events.

By "permanent," Seligman means factors that will be with you throughout life. By "personal," Seligman means factors that relate to us as individuals. By "pervasive," Seligman means factors that affect our efficacy in other parts of our life.

Seligman writes: "Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope. ... Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair."

"Learned Optimism" includes a test to determine your own attributional style. And, to improve optimism, Seligman offers a solution called ABCDE. Seligman writes: "When we encounter adversity, we react by thinking about it. Our thoughts rapidly congeal into beliefs. These beliefs .... have consequences."

D is for disputation, where we find evidence against the negative beliefs, alternatives to our negative reasoning, and limit the implication of the beliefs. Seligman writes: "Much of the skill of dealing with setbacks ... consists of learning how to dispute your own first thoughts in reaction to a setback." E is for energization, which we feel after we've disputed our false, negative beliefs.

Seligman points out that optimism is essential to success in many careers and that a lack of optimism limits one's life. For example, salespeople who explain failure in personal terms often don't want to make more sales calls. And, that leads to lower performance. In hiring for certain positions, Seligman says optimism is a key criterion. Seligman worked with Met Life and showed that optimism is a crucial success factor for hiring insurance salespeople.

Organizations, too, such as a hockey team, can develop optimistic or pessimistic ways of explaining poor performance. For anyone interested in handicapping sporting events, CAVE techniques discussed in "Learned Optimism" might be helpful for separating the teams that crumble under pressure from the teams that don't.

Seligman's book shows that most elections tend to be won by the more optimistic candidate. Seligman successfully predicted several races in the 1988 elections, including the presidential primaries, the presidential election, and 25 of 29 senate races.

Seligman writes: "Among Republicans, there was also a clear winner: George Bush, far and away the most optimistic... Dole would fade fast by our predictions." [This was before Viagra].

It would be interesting to see if more current political races have been predicted with that much success. Did they continue their predictions?

The book also has an excellent discussion of the role of optimism and how it affects health. In particular, pessimism weakens the immune system. For example, in one test, rats were given cancer and three groups studied. The amount of cancer injected corresponded to a 50% chance of the rat developing cancer. One group of rats were given conditions where they could control their environment and prevent shocks. One group were given conditions where nothing they did mattered to prevent shocks. And, the control group had nothing special about their conditions and no shocks.

Seligman writes: "...50 percent of the rats not shocked had died, and the other 50% of the no-shock rats had rejected the tumor; this was the normal ratio. As for the rats that mastered shock by pressing a bar to turn it off, 70 percent rejected the tumor. But only 27 percent of the helpless rats, the rats that had experienced uncontrollable shock, rejected the tumor."

Seligman also discusses the beginnings of treatment of patients using psychological therapy for treating physical illness. Because this was started in the 1990's, it would be interesting to know what the results have been.

However, optimism isn't always best. Seligman says a pilot, for example, shouldn't be "optimistic" the wings of his plane won't ice up and fail to de-ice them before a flight. And, Seligman points out that depressed people actually have a more accurate perception of reality than optimistic people (That sort of [stinks]if you think about it.). Pessimism is useful because it forces us to confront situations where we really have no effectiveness and change course. (Relentlessly optimistic people seem to be somewhat blinded to reality.)

Seligman recommends developing a healthy and flexible optimism. Doing so should allow a person to live a fuller and richer life.

Peter Hupalo, Author of "Thinking Like An Entrepreneur"

Rating:
Summary: Amazing Book. Used by Professional Counselors
Review: This book was recommended to me by my psychology professor, who's also a very successful counselor in private practice. He uses this theory himself (it's been used professionally for at least 2 decades now). He told us that the cognitive behavioral therapy that's detailed in this book is a revolution in treating depressives. Dr. Seligman has identified that depressives have a pessimistic thought pattern that's destructive-- and that can be changed. Depressives tend to berate themselves with a mental brutality that's a hundred times worse than they would ever endure outside of their heads. This book identifies those negative thoughts and teaches you how to think more rationally and realistically.

There are no Stuart Smalley mindless "I'm good enough and smart enough" chants in here, no "confront your family & lovers and tell them just how much pain they've caused you" nausea. Instead, there's just sound and simple advice on how to recognize your own self-abusive thoughts and refocus them so you don't beat YOURSELF into a downward spiral of hopelessness.

The only negative I can say about this book is that there is a lot of Dr. Seligman's professional history and it has plenty of clinical justifications and statistics for the professionals. Take comfort in knowing that this is a well-researched and well-supported theory, and then skip just over this dry stuff.

Research has proven that in most cases of mild to moderate to depression, cognitive behavioral therapy is as effective as anti-depressant medication. All the good and none of the weight gain or loss of sex drive. I definitely say it's a better way to go!

Rating:
Summary: A Classic Part of Any Thinking Project
Review: I guess you could call it my 'personal project' -- for several years I have been investing a lot of time working on improving my thinking style and emotional attitude. I have worked my way through the classic inspirational books and the more recent psychology self-help books. And I would not call Learned Optimism 'outdated' but rather 'classic' in that literature. It seems to me that different books are best for different people (Personality Psych 101). The optimistically inclined might like Learned Optimism, the realistically inclined might prefer Optimal Thinking, the pesimistic might like The Positive Power of Negative Thinking, whereas the Zen inclined might prefer How To Change Your Entire Life By Doing Absolutely Nothing .... William James called it 'Pluralism' and popular culture calls it 'Different strokes for different folks' and personality psychology calls it 'individual differences in temperament and culture.' So I recommend Learned Optimism with the understanding that people differ in optimism, pessimism, and realism in ways that make different books necessary depending on where you are coming from. Improving thinking styles does take time and effort, but improvement can make life better. Certainly Dr. Seligman's books are a potentially useful part of such a project.

Rating:
Summary: A book that enlightens the reader
Review: This book helped me understand pessimism and optimism. Dr. Selligman explains when pessimism works and when optimism is preferable. If you are interested in thinking, this book is aworthwhile read.

Rating:
Summary: A must Read
Review: Dr. Seligman provides compelling proof in his research about learing to be an Optimist. I always thought in half-empty or half-full terms. What he teaches you is how to help let go of things that are harmful and how to "rephrase" things to assist you AND your body. After 6 months of reading this book, and listening to his tape, it has helped me take control. I recommend it to my clients, friends and family. A self-help book, with real action items and REAL studies to back it up!

Rating:
Summary: I'm trying to learn to be optimistic - at least constructive
Review: OK, so many people recommend this book that I decided to try it. Friends are always telling me I'm too negative, pessimistic, unhappy, or whatever. Maybe the second time through I'll start becoming optimistic. Or maybe it is true that some people are not meant to be optimists ... To cover that possibility, I'm re-reading side-by-side, The Positive Power of Negative Thinking by Julie Norem. Will I start to show Norem's "constructive pessimism" or Seligman's "learned optimism" I wonder? Either way, I'll continue to be feeling better, I think. The argument that there are individual differences in personality, and therefore no single ideal of psychological health fits all people, makes sense to me. So I'll keep exploring the best psychology books.