"Learned Optimism: How to Change Your
Mind and Your Life"
by
Martin E. Seligman
Life Changing Book
- Evidence That Changed Me From a Pessimist To An Optimist. I have always
been very skeptical of all "self help" books, believing they were mainly
fluff and a waste of time. On a whim I thought I would buy this book since
it was written by a psychologist and clinical researcher, and claimed to
have evidence that optimists actually do succeed more and accomplish more.
As stated earlier, the author is a psychologist and clinical researcher who
has spent the majority of his life studying learned helplessness and optimism.
After many clinical trials, he has been hired in many "real world" situations
(including Met Life Insurance and sports teams) to improve results and test
optimism and success. The results are astounding. The book describes the
results using these real-life projects. As evidenced by these studies, optimism
helps persons succeed in business, sports, politics, health, school, and
literally all walks of life.
The book demonstrated over and over again how I was handicapping myself by
being negative and a pessimist. I am a very logical person and it took a
book like this, written factually instead of emotionally, to open my eyes
to pessimism. Since reading this book, I have dedicated myself to being an
optimist, and I must say I have already noticed major differences in my life.
I am succeeding at things I never would have even attempted before, and I
have become very resilient in non-favorable situations. I have surprised
myself over and over again.
Not too many "life changing" books come along, but this book was definitely
one for me. If you are a pessimist, this book can transform your life. If
you are average or only slightly positive, this book can improve your life
greatly. Do yourself a favor and read this book! ~E.N.C.
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
Book Description
Known as the father of the new science of positive psychology, Martin E.P.
Seligman draws on more than twenty years of clinical research to demonstrate
how optimism enchances the quality of life, and how anyone can learn to practice
it. Offering many simple techniques, Dr. Seligman explains how to break an
“I—give-up” habit, develop a more constructive explanatory
style for interpreting your behavior, and experience the benefits of a more
positive interior dialogue. These skills can help break up depression, boost
your immune system, better develop your potential, and make you happier..
With generous additional advice on how to encourage optimistic behavior at
school, at work and in children, Learned Optimism is both profound
and practical–and valuable for every phase of life.
READER'S COMMENTS ON
Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
An intelligent self-help work that is
both very readable and extremely compelling. I am a psychologist myself,
and ever since i first began studying psychology, I have been fascinated
by the work of Dr. Seligman. Once I started working as a therapist, I purchased
and this book to facilitate my work with clients. Dr. Seligman is a talented,
amusing, and engaging writer who presents an extremely pursuasive review
of his research into the effects of learned optimism on mood, performance,
health, etc. Because his research includes areas as diverse as including
health (showing greater breast cancer survival rates for those who are more
optimistic), sales success (proving that optimistic salesman are more
successful), and sports/politics (providing evidence that both sports teams
and political candidates are more likely to win when optimism is increased),
his methods are beleivable to even the most die-hard psychological skeptic.
Dr. Seligman explains your attribution style--that is, how you explain your
successes/failures--can have a major impact on mood as well as all of the
other dimensions mentioned above. He provides the reader with a concrete,
easily understandible model to asses their own thinking style, emphasizing
that being able to monitor your thoughts is the first step towards changing
them. Finally, he presents a simple plan for changing though patterns which
involves easy to implement steps. This book will definitely help you to better
understand how your thought patterns affect your mood and how to go about
making changes in order to live a happier, healthier life; highly
recommended.~Beth
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
A Breakthrough Book. This book remains
a breakthrough book. It shows how important our overall viewpoint and perspective
influence our lives and our success in them. Instead of focusing on dysfunction
and pathology, the author explores how he was led to understanding what makes
people successful. Get ready to have your notions of the mind as drummed
into students in psychology class challenged.
Unfortunately, the author only devotes about 20 percent of the book on how
people themselves can cleanse themselves, their family members, and their
co-workers from undue pessimism and negative thought and toward an optimistic,
productive and successful future. ~Kelly
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
Best of Seligman's
books. I really respect Seligman's work and, as a person with major depression,
his books have been some of the most useful to help me understand my situation
and how to feel better. I have read "Authentic Happiness", "The Optimistic
Child" and this book, and I'd say that if you want to buy only one, get this
book. It contains all the key points of "Authentic Happiness" and parts 2
and 3 have all the key points from "The Optimistic Child".
The first part describes his work on learned helplessness, from his own
background to all the people who influenced his work and the animal studies
he did. It also includes a couple quizzes to find how you react to events
and how depressed you are, to see what kind of help would most help you.
The second part has stories about the effect of pessimism in different realms
of life, and also includes the quizzes from the first part rewritten for
kids to take. As I don't have kids, I found this whole section to be quite
repetitive and not that useful, except for page 132 where he descibes the
CAVE technique - a way to quantify how pessimistic other people are without
them taking a quiz.
The third part teaches you the techniques you can use to become more optimistic
and how you can teach those skills to children and workers. At the end, it
addresses the rising tide of depression, and Seligman philosophizes on why
he thinks depression is becoming more prevalent in our society. I found this
section to be the most useful for me.~Earthnut
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Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
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If You Want
To Be Happy For The Rest Of Your Life. Pessimism is a disability. It's a
legitimate handicap. Maybe you won't get a handicapped parking sticker for
your car, but there's no doubt that negative thinking will limit you in many
ways, including your happiness level. Dr. Seligman champions the benefits
of optimism. He knows. He's done the research. He is the father of the field
of "positive psychology" which is transforming psychology in general and
psychotherapy in particular. This book delivers. "Learned optimism" will
change your mind and your life. If your glass is half empty, or even if it's
half full, you'll benefit from this book.~Alan G.
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
A Book With "Staying Power". Over ten years ago, a professional colleague
told me about this little book. It was in context of explaining how a unit
of people at work had acquired a dysfunctional style.
She was mildly apologetic in recommending it, since she was a professional
in organizational development and this book had not been much used in that
context. However, once I read it, I was really hooked. I found myself (and
still find myself) using its concepts both personally and professionally
in a variety of ways.
I highly recommend it as accessible, simple and very, very powerful. Simplicity
is not the same as incompetent. In fact, some times just the opposite is
true...~John B.
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
Fascinating. Not only did I like the advice about changing my own outlook,
I found the research fascinating! Definitely worth a read.~Moondazed
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
A truly excellent
book. In Learned Optimism, the author does an excellent job of explaining
the different ways optimists and pessimists view their circumstances and
events. One learns that optimists are less acccurate in evaluating their
circumstances. They are cheerful, persist and succeed more often because
of their expectation of success (even when the expectation lacks substance).
When the consequences of failure are far reaching, optimism can be dangerous.
One also learns that pessimists are more accurate in their evaluations. I
believe this is an essential book for those who seek understanding about
how we view the world. I would also strongly recommend Optimal Thinking:
How To Be Your Best Self, a practical how-to book that shows the reader how
to be an optimal realist (making the most of situations at hand).~Hal
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
Pivotal book makes optimism achievable. Despite equal talent and drive, it
turns out that optimists will succeed where pessimists fear to tread. The
good news is that you can learn optimism and lean on it to respond to adversity
and inculcate greater resilience. Through descriptions of dozens of studies
performed since the '70s, author Martin Seligman conveys the history and
landscape that define "positive psychology," the science he helped to found.
He offers cognitive techniques designed to tweak your natural disposition
and give you the advantage of optimism. We recommend this book as a seminal
work of positive psychology.~Rolf
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
I received this book several years ago
and can say it literally changed my life. It gives great advice on how to
deal with habitual pessimism and the free-floating anxiety that often accompanies
it. I use the techniques in the book and they really do work. My copy is
dog-eared and tattered from lots of use!! Thank you Martin
Seligman!!!!!!!!~Sparkygal
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
Learned Optimism. I received this book
about a year ago and I think it is the best self help book on the market.
It has been fantastic and has helped me so much by giving me scientifically
proven techniques to change the way I look at events or situations.
I use to read a few self help books to stay positive and ended up giving
them up as I found they never gave me any help and where filled with 'take
care of your self, your precious' and `say these nice things to yourself
and you will have a better life'. I suppose that is all well and good but
at the end of the day it never really helped me or changed anything. They
could never snap me out of a downward spiral however the techniques in this
book can. This book gave me concrete ways to help myself in situations where
I get emotional or upset and it is something that will always need to be
worked on but if you do it then it gets easier and you are in more control
and you are a more rational and effective person.
The book is easily understood even though alot of it is scientific and best
of all the principals are backed up by studies so the book has validation.
All of the principals are pretty basic and leave you feeling `well of course'
however they really do help and like most books it brings your attention
to things you may already know, but may not apply. If you enjoy going to
psychologists and raking up all the bad events of your life and leave with
no way to help yourself in these emotional times when you are alone, then
you may not appreciate this book. While it is great to get help, it is important
to get the right help and understand why something may not be helping you.
Cognitive therapy seems to put the responsibility back on the individual,
while you may not have chosen the way you choose to perceive your life (usually
from parents) it is your responsibility to change this and to make the long
term commitment to change.
I have also read 2 other books by Martin Seligman and I also found these
great. It is not essential to read all of these books but I found Learned
Optimism so interesting, and that I got so much out of reading it and using
the techniques that I wanted to see what was included in the other two books.
The other books hold similar material however go into greater detail in other
ways like talking about the angry person and why they are like that etc...
I would recommend any of these books to everyone as there is something there
for all, it would probably be best though to start with Learned Optimism.
~Josie
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
Helped me to change the way I saw myself and my Life! I found the research
done for the book the be stepping stones in learning why I had lost all enjoyment
in life. Several Items mentioned did not register as affecting my outlook.
Several days after reading them and thinking back over the comments I realized
how they fit into the distorted picture I had of my life. This book caused
me to look back over my life and see events for what they were, as opposed
to personal attacks by some evil score keeper in the great beyond.~A
Reader
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
Surprising
and Convincing. The thing that consistently surprised me about this book
was the way that the author was able to provide extensive scientific verification
for his claims. Most "self-help" books have anecdotal evidence at best to
support their hypotheses. This book solidly supports its conclusions by means
of numerous formal studies. Moreover, some of the material is very
counter-intuitive. Attitudes one would have assumed were optimistic turn
out to be pessimistic, and vice-versa.
Seligman shows repeatedly where actual, testable predictions have been made
based on his notions of optimism/pessimism, and the predictions have turned
out to be well-founded. This requires careful, systematic definitions of
terms, which he provides.
Equally interesting was Seligman's analysis of the consequenses of optimism
and pessimism, and his demonstration that optimism can be learned, with
beneficial results that extend well beyond "feeling good." ~Daniel D.
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Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
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Optimism Wins. This is a book packed with science yet written in a style
that is interesting and easy to understand. Reports of experiment after
experiment systematically convince the reader.
Seligman's book describes how the mental attitude of helplessness can be
learned and unlearned, how helplessness both results from and exacerbates
a pessimistic personality style, and how helplessness/pessimism ends in
depression. A test is included so you can find if you are an optimist or
a pessimist. A second test reveals if you are suffering from depression.
But if you are a pessimist/depressed don't despair. Just as helplessness
can be unlearned optimism can be learned and this book tells you how.
Next we learn how optimistic people succeed better at work, school, sports,
health, politics, religion and culture.
If I have one criticism of this book it is that Seligman strangely does not
provide scientific evidence that his cognitive therapy methods for learning
optimism work. Instead he simply writes: "The National Institute of Mental
Health has spent millions of dollars testing whether the ... [cognitive]
... therapy works on depression. It does." (p.75). A report of at least one
study would have been useful at this critical point.
I have suffered from depression and I found this book provided me with an
invaluable technique that work for me. This is one of the very few books
that I can say has changed my life. ~Raymond M.
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
This book changed my life. Over the years, I've read a lot of self-help and
psychology books. None has made the difference like "Learned Optimism." I
was in the midst of a bad marriage, had lost my career, and wondered how
the hell I had ended up in such a lousy life. Seligman's book helped me see
(1) how incredibly pessimistic I was, which I hadn't realized, (2) how the
expectation of failure had kept me from pursing goals, and (3) how optimism
and taking reasonable risks could help. Since that time, I got out of the
awful marriage, moved to a new city, found a job I love, and have taken many
more risks, most of which have had very happy results. Largely because, from
Seligman, I learned how to put optimism to work for me.
Yes, he spends a lot of time on the history of his research. But that's what
makes his ideas convincing. If you are a skeptic, this part really makes
his case. If there's a single book that will help you get out of your pessimistic
rut, this is it. It sure did for me. I am so grateful that Dr. Seligman wrote
this book.~Coventry K.
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Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
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Excellent. This book is wonderful because it explains the strengths and weaknesses of pessimism and optimism in various contexts. There is a simple test so that you can determine where you stand. If you want to understand why optimism is less accurate than pessimism and how optimism can promote good feelings, read this great book.~Jenny
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
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Better Than Most. I found Learned Optimism
better than most self-help genre books because it hits the sweet spot between
peer-reviewed academic publication and unsubstantiated junk (i.e. John Gray
science). Learned Optimism is enjoyable to read and I learned a great deal
about the science of my anxiety and depression. The tools for fixing both
fall a bit short, but I don't know what I was expecting to get out of a
book!~J.M.
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
A great study about optimism and pessimism. Before this book was published,
people believed that optimism was almighty. This landmark book educates you
about the reasons why people are optimistic and pessimistic and when each
style of thinking is appropriate. I learned a lot about my thinking from
this book. I also suggest another wonderful book, Optimal Thinking: How To
Be Your Best Self, for practical information about how to understand and
optimize all forms of thinking, feelings, and situations. These two books
should be read in tandem, and should be part of any thinking person's
library.~Jack
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Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
What Makes Winners? "Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the
optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better. . .
the optimist bounces back from defeat . . . the pessimist gives up and falls
into depression." Why are some people optimists and others pessimists? Can
we change our own thinking style and explanation for why bad things happen?
These questions are discussed simply in Seligman's landmark book for the
lay.
Seligman's book is an excellent treatise on how thinking patterns affect
how we perform and feel. The most valuable item in this book are his two
optimism tests that help determine how optimistic a person is. Seligman explains
there are three crucial dimensions to how you explain why things happen (your
explanatory style). These three dimensions are permanence, pervasiveness
and personalization.
Not only is there a test for adults, but there is also a test for children.
(As well as a depression test.) I have used these tests to test prospective
employees as I have found that optimists are better employees in my field
of work. Although the book's last four chapters only briefly discuss how
to change your explanatory style as an adult in your personal life, at work
and to help your own children avoid the pain of depression, his subsequent
book, "What You Can Change and What You Can't" provides more self-help answers.
~Gene
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Learned
Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
Helping to change my life. This is one of the most fantastic and helpful
books I have ever read. Much of the discussion is a touch more scientific
in tone, when compared to other mainstream psychology or self-help books.
The first three quarters of the book is also dedicated to research that had
been done earlier, rather than educating the reader on how they might apply
these practices to benefit their own life. In the end though, all that research
backing serves to add a serious amount of weight, and value, to the chapters
towards the end which outline how you as the reader can focus on changing
the way you think. The book is NOT a magic pill to change your life. There
are NO magic pills like that. This will help you learn to think differently
though, and realize that many of us are hindered primarily by our own
self-defeat. Thinking positively, expressing yourself, and going after your
dreams are the keys. When you do feel down, depressed, or fearful, debate
your illogical beliefs and change the feelings you
generate!~Buzz
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Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your
Life
Cured my year-long depression literally overnight. I will be forever grateful
to Dr. Seligman and the therapist who gave this book to me. Ten years ago,
I had been suffering from depression over a failed relationship for over
a year. After a few months of therapy, my counselor recommended this book
to me. I read it ravenously, staying up overnight to finish it after starting
it in the afternoon. The realization that I had control over my feelings
was astonishing. I do not exaggerate in saying that I felt cured of my depression
the very next day. Amazing and empowering. Highly recommended for those who
are ready to hear it.~HBN
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