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

The best therapists do not merely heal damage; they help people identify and build their strengths and their virtues.

Positive emotion broadens and builds the intellectual, social, and physical resources that your children draw upon later in life. Augmenting positive emotions in your children can start an upward spiral of positive emotion. The positive traits that your child displays are just as real and authentic as his or her negative traits.

providing institutions, rituals, role models, parables, maxims, and children’s stories.

five techniques that promote savoring:

in twenty-first century America, self-esteem, good looks, assertiveness, autonomy, uniqueness, wealth, and competitiveness are highly desirable.

embraces two very distinct kinds of things: pleasures and gratifications. The pleasures are delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components, what philosophers call “raw feels”: ecstasy, thrills, orgasm, delight, mirth, exuberance, and comfort. They are evanescent, and they involve little, if any, thinking. The gratifications are ac

The display of a strength by one person does not diminish other people in the vicinity.

do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather, I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths.

So a chilly, negative mood activates a battle-stations mode of thinking: the order of the day is to focus on what is wrong and then eliminate it. A positive mood, in contrast, buoys people into a way of thinking that is creative, tolerant, constructive, generous, undefensive and lateral.