Repression is not the way to virtue. Or, How to create the narrative of Self-Actualization: book reviews of Maslow, Csikszentmihalyi, Seligman and Dweck.

After receiving a text from a close friend a couple months ago that said, "There's a name for my delusion: I'm an optimist!", I haven't been able to get that thought out of my head. For over a year now I have been trying to understand my own perspective and my own engagement with the world. There was a vague sense that I am a negative person but I always saw that as a strength of viewing the world rationally, logically, and skeptically. In addition to seeing it as a strength, I viewed it as a strategy: I built my successful business with this mindset, so it must work. So, why would anyone choose to be delusional? Why would anyone choose to see the world through rose-colored glasses for the sake of seeing the world through rose-colored glasses? And, most importantly to me the-business-owner-and-environmental-guy, wouldn't that perspective skew and disrupt how I engage with the very real and very scary stresses facing small business owners and the environmental situation at-large?

Like most answers to my questions, I turned to books. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flourish by Martin Seligman, and Mindset by Carol Dweck were what I turned to. I came to them from finding their names repeated over and over in the following books I encountered over the past four months: How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric, How Children Succeed by Paul Tough, and Give and Take by Adam Grant. But it turns out that this same friend has been trying to get me to think about what all of these authors call Positive Psychology for a while. What has sold me is that through these works, all of them share that successful people are proven to be more optimistic. And here optimism doesn't mean ignoring the scary realities but rather embracing them and not overly worrying about them. In fact, many of the anecdotes I found are of people who have had the exact same stresses and worries as business owners and environmentalists as myself but still chose to be optimistic. The statistics are pretty great: happy and successful relationships are those where the partners view their significant other as having 5 positive qualities to every negative quality whether that is objectively true or not, more money, etc.

I like to think of these books sequentially, leading up to a whole narrative. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs lays the groundwork for the ability to self actualize or “flow” and flow allows us to “flourish” and choose to see the world in a “growth-mindset” way.

First Book: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs prioritizes the important aspects of life and focuses health prior to intimacy and intimacy prior to objective engagement with reality for example. There are five stages of the Hierarchy of Needs:

1. Physiological
   
2. Safety
   
3. Love/Belonging
   
4. Esteem
   
5. Self-Actualization
   

Second Book: Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow:  Developing Flow is the most successful strategy to deny entropy and Flow is a ‘game’: a system of symbolic order that includes the following steps:

1. Flow activities have rules that require the learning of skills
   
2. Setting up goals
   
3. Providing feedback
   
4. Making control of self possible
   
5. Facilitating concentration and involvement by making the activity as distinct as possible from everyday existence. 
   

To understand the most appropriate response to achieve Flow easily: if you are bored, you have to increase your challenges; if you are anxious, you have to increase your skills. To live in a state of Flow, one needs to develop a Life Theme: goal-directed actions that provide shape and meaning to an individual’s life. In a life theme, whatever happens is either a step toward or away from that goal. The clear feedback will keep them involved with their actions. Even if one loses all their money or experiences a trauma, that person’s thoughts and actions will see that as worthwhile.

Third Book: Flourish by Martin Seligman is similar to Flow and a further exploration of Self-Actualization. More than that it (and this whole discussion) is Positive Psychology. To Flourish means having high positive emotion (admiration, joy, pride and gratitude) plus being high on any three of the following: 

• self-esteem 
  
• optimism 
  
• resilience 
  
• vitality
  
• self-determination 
  
• positive relationships
  
• achievement
  

Beyond that, Seligman goes on to explain spirituality (self-awareness, sense of agency, self-regulation, self-motivation, and social awareness), depression and 'icebergs' (Icebergs are deeply held beliefs that often lead to an out-of-kilter emotional reaction), and the social ramifications of when individual’s flourish (health, productivity and peace follow)

Fourth Book: Mindset by Carol Dweck. is a book that encapsulates the ideas of the previous three books. It focuses on the positive psychology research done by the others along with many more.  It basically takes the entire 200 pages of the book to explain how we can make decisions that are growth-oriented rather than fixed. The definitions are best described in the list below but the graphic does a decent job of explaining the difference as well.

Parents, teachers and coaches: to create a growth mindset in students, children this involves:

• Presenting skills as learnable
  
• Conveying that the organization values learning and perseverance, not just ready-made genius or talent
  
• Giving feedback in a way that promotes learning and future success
  
• Presenting managers as resources for learning