《Positive Psychology 7》.doc

Positive Psychology – Lecture 7 Is finish up with the beliefs of self-fulfilling prophecy lecture and move on to the lecture on focus and how focus creates reality. Where did we end last time? We ended by talking about Rena and other things. We talked about the model, the Dan Gilbert model, the Philip Brickman model, where after a failure or a success there is a spike up, spike down, but then we recover. And we basically move along a base level of well being through out our lives, with the ups and downs, the vicissitudes. The question then became, or rather there was good news and bad news. we can take more risks, we can put ourselves on the line more. Failure usually, not all failures, but usually is just a temporary decline in our wellbeing level, self esteem level, and then every quickly we jump up again. you know, why should we put any effort into our wellbeing? And the answer to that, and the whole course essentially is an answer to that. How can we raise that base level? One of the things is coping, putting ourselves on the line. And the reason why coping, why putting ourselves on the line yields positive results in terms of the base level of wellbeing going up, meaning still the ups and downs, but ups and downs looking this way as opposed to around a straight line or a parallel line is that when we cope, we see ourselves coping, we see ourselves trying and through self perception theory, we derive certain conclusions about ourselves: oh, I must be courageous; oh, I must be a person who has high self esteem; oh, I must be a person who has a strong desire to succeed and so on and so on. And then we derive conclusions about ourselves in the same way that we derive conclusions about other people. That is self-perception theory. The second reason is that once we started failing more often, The pain that in our minds we associate with failure is far greater that the actual pain of failure when that comes. Maybe not initially when it happens, but after