Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment

What progress there is been in the prevention of mental illness comes from recognizing and nurturing a set of strengths, competencies, and virtues in young people—such as future-mindedness, hope, interpersonal skills, courage, the capacity for flow, faith, and work ethic.

the good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.

Building strength and virtue is not about learning, training, or conditioning, but about discovery, creation, and ownership.

Wisdom and knowledge Courage Love and humanity Justice Temperance Spirituality and transcendence

By transcendence, I mean emotional strengths that reach outside and beyond you to connect you to something larger and more permanent: to other people, to the future, to evolution, to the divine, or to the universe.

now turn to the routes—the strengths of character—by which we achieve the virtues.

During the next five adverse events you face in your daily life, listen closely for your beliefs, observe the consequences, and dispute your beliefs vigorously. Then observe the energy that occurs as you succeed in dealing with the negative beliefs.

a person gives up for—with permanent explanations for bad events producing long-lasting helplessness, and temporary explanations producing resilience. The pervasiveness dimension determines whether helplessness cuts across many situations or is limited to the original arena.

you can move your emotions in a positive direction by changing how you feel about your past, how you think about the future, and how you experience the present.