Tag Archives: Wellbeing

Arts, Psychology, Science

Wellbeing theory: accomplishment and achievement

 POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

Martin Seligman’s most recent theory of wellbeing contains the new component of “accomplishment”. It’s a broad category, covering everything from achievement, competence and success to progress towards goals and mastery at the highest possible level. These concepts have been studied individually in psychology for decades – but collecting them together under the heading “accomplishment” within positive psychology is new.

Positive psychologists don’t always agree on definitions of happiness and wellbeing, nor what should be included in wellbeing theory and what should be left out. Seligman’s original model of “authentic happiness” consisted of three components: positive emotions, engagement and meaning. In the intervening years, scientific research and debate inspired him to revise this by adding two further components to wellbeing theory, relationships and accomplishment.

Accomplishment is included as one of the facets of wellbeing because like the other components, it is something that humans pursue for its own sake. Even though we all know people who are high achievers for extrinsic reasons, such as increased power, status or pay, accomplishment per se is intrinsically motivating. Nurturing accomplishment on its own or together with any of the other four facets, says Seligman, will lead to higher wellbeing.

There are various techniques in psychology that can be used to increase your sense of accomplishment. One of these is known as the “accomplishment anchor”. With this, you can use your past successes to give you confidence, spur you on to greater achievements and give you a boost of positive emotion when you need a little psychological pick-me-up. This is an idea adapted from positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson.

How to increase your level of goal achievement

According to Seligman’s theory, achievement can be summarised as follows:

Achievement = skill x effort

He suggests that the skill and effort elements have certain characteristics which are needed for higher achievement:

. Speed of thought. According to wellbeing theory, if you have already acquired a lot of relevant skills or knowledge about a particular task, you won’t have to waste brain power on the basics. This leaves you more able to think quickly, and with time left over to devote to planning, checking and being creative. These, of course, are the hallmarks of performance excellence.

. Rate of learning. Clearly the faster you learn, the more information and knowledge you can acquire per hour spent on the task. In terms of achievement and accomplishment, this will also put you ahead of the game.

Becoming an expert

In terms of effort, research by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues suggests that it takes a minimum of 10 years (or roughly 10,000 hours) of deliberate practice in any subject to become an expert. By “deliberate practice”, Ericsson doesn’t mean practising those things which you already know how to do, he means putting sustained effort into the things you can’t do very well, or even at all. In other words, in order to become an expert, you must put yourself outside of your traditional comfort zone, which requires substantial self-motivation and self-discipline.

Since very little is currently known about how to increase our speed of thought and rate of learning, the one thing we can all do to improve our rate of accomplishment is to spend more time on deliberate practice.

Becoming an expert in a particular field, Ericsson and colleagues recommend two tips:

. Find a coach or mentor who can provide the level of challenge and critical feedback necessary to keep improving your skills.

. Spend time observing a “master” at work, then utilise or use similar techniques that were used.   

The role of competence

Competence is one of the psychological facets which increases self-motivation, goal achievement, and wellbeing. When it’s accompanied by perseverance, competence makes a good recipe for accomplishment at any level, big or small. When psychologists speak of competence, it implies being confident and effective in what we do.

There are several strategies you can adopt to increase your competence in a particular field. One way is to get regular constructive feedback about how you are performing. The feedback might be inherent in the activity: you can tell straight away whether or not you’re playing the piano or playing a game of squash well, for example. Or you may have to wait for results or seek feedback from someone else.

Another way to increase your competence in relation to your goal is to find ways to improve your skill-set. You could do this by gradually making the goal more challenging, so that you have to strive a bit harder every time you do it. People naturally shy away from stepping outside their comfort zone, but remember, this really is the only way to learn new skills. When feeling uncomfortable, remind yourself that this is a sign that you have the opportunity to learn something new.

A third method is to undertake specific skills training. You might do this in your own spare time or through an organisation. As Ericsson suggests, you could find a role-model to emulate.

Those are some of the ways that will help to improve your competence, and increase the probability that you will tread the accomplishment pathway to wellbeing. Effort and persistence are so essential for goal achievement.

Indeed, research in psychology suggests that regardless of innate talent, considerable effort is required to become an expert. Continual practise is a key ingredient.

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Mental Health, Psychology, Science

Schools of Thought: Humanistic Psychology

HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

THE move towards cognitive psychology came about through frustrations with what were seen as the limitations of psychoanalysis and behavioural psychology. In the 1950s, another movement within psychology also began to gain ground – one that rejected all the main strands of psychology: psychoanalysis, behavioural psychology, and the emerging cognitive psychology approach. This fourth approach has become known as humanistic psychology.

Rather than seeing the human psyche as a minefield of conflicting parts of the self, driven by primitive urges (as the psychoanalytic approach was characterised), or viewing the self as the result of myriad stimulus-response exchanges that make us who we are (as behaviourists do), or seeing the reasons for our beliefs and actions as residing in our perception and cognition of what’s around us (as the cognitive psychologists are doing), humanist psychologists view the individual as a whole person with their own free will, desires, responsibilities, passions, aims, and aspirations. In short, all the kinds of things that make us human. For the humanists, the concept of mental health for far too long had been obsessed with reducing negative states such as anxiety or depression. The humanists wanted mental health to be all about striving for something better, like happiness or fulfilment.

What do you really want from life?

Two key thinkers are the pioneers of the humanist psychologist movement. One is Abraham Maslow, best known for his 1954 concept of the “hierarchy of needs,” which dates from 1943, and which presents an image of what people really want from life – and the idea for striving for something for its own sake. Having established lower-order needs – such as food, shelter, belonging, self-esteem – we seek knowledge, meaning, and, ultimately, the realisation of our full potential.

The second, Carl Rogers, shared Maslow’s view that humankind seeks this higher state of self-actualisation, making the most of our talents or education or skills. And along with that, we seek positive regard, which can be love, or simply respect, from others. In his 1961 book On Becoming a Person, he discussed some of the conditions necessary to achieve this state – a discussion that was to form the basis of a client-centred therapy (later renamed “person-centred” therapy). At its heart is the concept of unconditional positive regard – the kind of parental love that children can enjoy no matter what they might do, and which gives them a freedom to take risks and discover what they like doing. In cases where children receive only conditional positive regard, parental love may only be won through good behaviour or excellent performance, with the risks of the child becoming a perfectionist or neurotic later in life. Client-centred therapy could redress this by the therapist providing the unconditional positive regard, and allowing the client to start finding their own way toward their self-actualising goals.

The “I” and the “me”

For Rogers, an important theoretical aspect was the self concept. There are two parts to it: the “I” that does stuff, and the “me” that the “I” sometimes thinks about, such as when we say “I am ashamed of myself.” The self concept develops as we grow up, and we are happiest, Rogers believed, when we have congruence between the “I” and the “me” – that is, minimal conflict between the perceived self and the kind of behaviours we actually find ourselves doing.

Rogers developed his “Q Sort” test – a kind of personality test using a deck of flash cards – to measure levels of this congruence, which allowed for some degree of quantitative testing to demonstrate correlation between congruence of the self concept, and other measures of well-being or social adjustment.

Nonetheless, humanistic psychology is often characterised as being more of a qualitative than quantitative strand of psychology. By contrast, positive psychology is a related branch that also has as its goal not simply a reduction of psychological pain, but more positively, the advancement of well-being – looking, for example, at the science of happiness, or how creativity is stimulated: in many respects, another route to the summit of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

. See also Positive Psychology

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Arts, Health, Life, Psychology

Understanding well-being

WELLBEING

Podcast: This entry is available on audio

THE phrase, “state of well-being” is often loosely bandied about, but what does this phrase actually mean? It is a rather nebulous phrase, which many interpret as synonymous with welfare or level of happiness, state of physical or mental health or degree of satisfaction with life.

Perhaps all these factors do form part of what we mean by this term, but not necessarily so. For example, let us speculate upon Andrea Bocelli, the renowned Italian tenor who became blind at the age of twelve. Must his level of positive well-being be significantly compromised because of his physical infirmity? There is every possibility that Bocelli might enjoy an extremely high level of positive well-being despite his lack of sight, since estimation of one’s well being is a highly subjective phenomenon.

As the author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry perspicaciously implies in a 1943 story entitled, Le Petit Prince, it is what we think of ourselves that counts and determines our state of well-being. However, what we think of ourselves, for good or ill, can be greatly influenced by what others think of us:

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself.

Objective measures of well-being

We can attempt to measure welfare or well-being in accordance with objective measures, such as where a person may be located on various scales – be they economic, social, psychological, physical or even spiritual – but none of these actually capture the reality of well-being as experienced by the individual.

Practitioners often come into contact with many people who ostensibly have no business not to enjoy high levels of positive well-being, status, good health, loving relationships, interesting careers and so much more. And yet, such people are known to suffer from depression, anger, addictions, eating disorders and anxiety, as well as other mental health afflictions. Clearly, then, objective measures alone do not provide an accurate assessment for an individual’s state of well-being.

Positive well-being is about meeting our expectations

It is generally accepted that being adequately fed, watered, housed and exercised, along with being gainfully employed and well-educated, as well as having good physical health, are all components that facilitate positive well-being, but they are far from the whole story.

Well-being is primarily concerned with the degree to which our expectations, dreams and aspirations are met, and these are totally unique to each individual. Many of our attitudes are a direct result of our “nurturing” and this, along with our own aptitudes and personality – our “nature” – mingle together to form ideals of what success looks like for each of us.

Culture influences our sense of well-being

Depending upon our cultural heritage we might favour a collective or individualistic approach to life (or maybe a combination of the two), and this will colour our estimation of personal well-being. In a strictly collectivist society, blending into the group and not drawing attention to oneself generates feelings of acceptance, belonging and comfort. Even if the price paid is conceding to a high degree of conformity to group expectations, this will still work towards affording a sense of positive well-being for the majority who have been socialised in this manner.

We are not all equally malleable in continuing to society’s conventions

There are mavericks in every society, where the personal imperative outstrips that of the social; these highly autonomous individuals buck the trend and follow their own course of action, often at their own peril. Not to follow their own star would lead to considerable inner conflict and result in a state of negative well-being. Many of this ilk find themselves “damned if they do and damned if they don’t” in subscribing to normative behaviour.

These people, by not conforming, invite society’s disapproval or, by conceding to society’s expectations, they feel that they have not been true to themselves and experience dissonance. Dissonance is a state of mental conflict when you experience contradictory emotions and beliefs. In the not-too-distant-past, working women who wished to pursue their career after having children faced this dilemma.

Individualistic society

In fiercely individualistic societies, being indistinguishable from the pack tends to promote negative well-being, since leadership, power and talent differentiate an individual from the herd, attracting kudos and admiration. Individualistic socialisation demands that we stand out from the crowd if we are to feel good about ourselves and enjoy positive well-being. This pressure can be seen in cultures that emphasise educational attainment, and prestigious institutions can foster individualism to an even higher level.

Collectivist vs. individualistic

The powerful impact of nurturing and socialisation, resulting in the inculcation of society’s expectations, mores and values, can be seen in the contrast between collectivist and individualistic societies. Public shame has a far greater negative impact on well-being in Japan, a collectivist society, than it has in contemporary Europe, which favours a more individualistic approach. One only has to look at the number of disgraced European officials who have bounced back into public life, subsequent to their humiliation and ruination. In contrast, a number of Japanese politicians and business leaders have accepted personal responsibility for their government’s or organisation’s shortcomings in the last decade, often resigning their positions. Today, in European society, people tolerate a variety of responses. Some applaud the manifestation of honour and integrity which resignation signals, while others praise the resilience of those who insist upon remaining in post.

The important thing to keep in mind is that societal attitudes are constantly changing and evolving. Many people do get stuck in a time warp and hold on to childish perceptions about themselves and feelings, such as shame, which negatively impact their well-being. It is advisable to constantly reassess your perceptions of experiences and work out if the view you are holding is in line with your current values and beliefs. Often when you go through this process you will recognise that you are carrying parental, peer or societal attitudes that are not in tune with your own moral compass, and which therefore need to be updated.

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