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Ruth Ostrow | February 29, 2008

IN the elegant foyer of The Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney, 350 business leaders have gathered. Chief executives and managers from all the major corporations are there.

They have come as members of the Australian Institute of Management to hear advice on how to be more effective in business, but not from a sales guru. They're here to listen to one of the great thought leaders of our time; father of the positive psychology movement; Mr Happiness himself, author of the best-seller, Learned Optimism, Dr Martin Seligman PhD.

Seligman is selling the happiness message to our top corporations and he intends to return to Australia next year with a team to run in-house programs. "I teach the new prosperity," he tells me later.

"Not how to get rich, but how to stay prosperous in all aspects of life: work, home and body. We need to look at a gross wellbeing indicator, not Gross Domestic Product so we can get ahead without illness, depression, anxiety and fear stopping us in this new, positive paradigm."

Indeed, there has been a paradigm shift in corporate thinking since I last worked as a finance journalist in the "greed is good" 1980s and 90s.

Cairns says this is the new frontier - business with a spiritual edge. "I don't use the word spiritual. It is about transformation. To get the most out of your business and people, you have to work on yourself first. Buddhism has given me a profound sense of meaning and purpose."

Akehurst says: "I was an anxious over-achiever driven by anxiety, wanting targets to be met, and fear of failure. The change is that I have become mindful of the moment, I am only motivated by the positive, and have learned the value of authenticity and integrity. When you tell the truth to the people you work with, you save so much valuable time and money."

Rennie from McKinsey, a promoter and fan of both Seligman and Rinpoche, says: "When I tried to sell this type of thinking into the corporate market 10 years ago I was considered a heretic. Now it's mainstream."

Meanwhile, David White, a director of Port Jackson Partners who is organising the meditation event, says what's really being taught is "the science of the mind" and how to transform thinking to achieve quantifiable results.

International Business Week summed it up thus: "It may sound flaky but a growing number of companies are setting off on spiritual journeys ... in search of a soul as a way to foster creativity and motivate leaders." The list includes US corporate giants such as AT&T, Boeing and Xerox, not to mention the World Bank, where leaders sit in a semicircle once a week and "connect".

The crux of the new prosperity movement is happiness, not a superficial happiness but a deep, resounding contentment born of having abundance in all areas of life: work family and play.

As Seligman says, happiness doesn't come from pleasures alone, such as making money or having sex, but from adding a deep sense of meaning - what the Buddhists and yogis call bliss.

Property developer Bruno Grollo, of Rialto fame, understands this. "You work so you can gain security and material wealth, but money never made me happy. I made money but I never felt the way I did when I was 18 or 21, so I realised that money didn't matter. Transcendental meditation is the closest thing to the euphoria of youth I have discovered," he once confided to me.

With an international Happiness conference being held in Sydney in May, the medical statistics bear out the premise. Happy people live eight to 10 years longer and fight off illness at double the rate of others.

The Reserve Bank's Akehurst, admired for his leadership qualities, shuns the notion that working with concepts such as happiness and authenticity is the "soft and fuzzy" option. "This is hard-nosed business practice. It creates tough but fair leaders."

He says: "Authenticity is a beautiful, time-saving process. When you cover up, people know it's not true and trust is damaged. If you say something isn't working, everyone says that's bad, and gets on with fixing it. Otherwise it takes ages to get things sorted." Personal growth leads to efficiency.

It's two decades since I wrote my book The New Boy Network on the excesses of the 1980s. In some circles people joked that to be interviewed by me was the kiss of death, as those I had revered for their enthusiasm and determination seemed to go down like tenpins: Larry Adler, father of Rodney; textile king Abe Goldberg; Alan Bond; Christopher Skase; Adsteam's John Spalvins; Robert Holmes a Court and Coles Myer's Brian Quinn.

Many Asian visitors went with them, such as Thai confectionery mogul Jack Chia and Malaysia's Lee Ming Tee.

Why? I have thought a lot about it the past decades, myself having moved to Byron Bay to embrace wellness. I have observed that what drives you can drive you over the edge. My own journey echoed theirs. A workaholic, a believer that somehow external success would take away that nagging sense of fragility and unworthiness that so many of us feel, I soon discovered external success was like water to sand and resulted in burnout and bad decision-making. At the height of my own career, burnt out and suffering depression, I walked away.

Years later, having sat at the feet of people involved in personal growth: Buddhists, yoga teachers, wellness and longevity masters, I have unravelled the greatest mystery of all.

The answer to happiness is the ability to live now, comfortable in your own skin whatever the circumstance.

Greek poet C.P. Cavafy talks about not being so outcome-driven, not so eager to get to Ithaka, mythical home of Odysseus. Rather, he says, to be able to enjoy the journey itself on the high seas will teach us to appreciate the riches of Ithaka when we arrive. Seligman calls it being in the flow of life. The Buddhists call it absorption in the moment.

Others simply describe it as the pleasure of stroking your child's face or playing with the family dog. Whatever it is, those able to connect from the heart, rather than through ego alone, seem more able to achieve enduring success.

Indeed, coming back to Sydney to put into practice what I've learned, I have found a different corporate landscape. While some - such as the recent spate of overgeared entrepreneurs - are still suffering for their sins of hubris and being too driven, it's a rapidly changing world.

Funds management icon Brian Sherman is fighting for animal rights, our Prime Minister is fighting for home care for his son, and former Microsoft mogul Daniel Petre is taking time off to be with his wife and kids - all for the sake of joyfulness and meaning.

According to Gordon Cairns, words such as empower have replaced command and control, while abundance and prosperity have replaced wealth.

My new column, Business Life, is about the things that matter: business and life, work and play, passions and health, heart and soul - in balance. In a world in which happiness is the hottest new corporate commodity and health and success depend on it, it's no longer a dream to have it all. It's a necessity.

Labels: abundance, business, Dr Martin Seligman PhD, happiness, learned optimism, meaning, Ruth Ostrow, spirituality

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Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Teaching happiness: the classes in wellbeing that are helping our children

From Times Online
February 18, 2008

Binge drinking, mental health issues, adolescent suicide: how can we solve the problems that beset so many children? The answer may lie with the new science of positive psychology

In a classroom in South Tyneside, a small group of 11-year-olds is considering the finer points of Stoic philosophy. The teacher, Mrs Carrahar, points helpfully at the blackboard. “Come on now, kids, remember your ABC: Adversity, Belief, Consequence. Sometimes how we feel about things depends on ... what? It begins with P ... Yes, Darren?” “Perspective, miss!” says a small child. “Very good, Darren!”

The class is the latest experiment in a new movement called “positive psychology”, which is slowly but surely revolutionising the way that education is approached in the English-speaking world. It is the brainchild of Martin Seligman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. If there is one figure responsible for the deluge of books, articles and TV programmes on happiness with which we have been inundated over the last five years, it is Seligman. So, when I meet him in a hotel suite in London, it is a relief to discover that he is not some moronically upbeat figure, like the self-help guru played by Patrick Swayze in Donnie Darko.

In fact, he tells me, “I was a slightly depressive grump for the first 40 years of my life”. After considering a career as a professional bridge player, then turning down a Fulbright scholarship in analytical philosophy at Oxford, he eventually became a psychologist and forged a distinguished name for himself studying “learned helplessness”, or how animals (and people) learn to give up in apparently hopeless situations.

While researching the phenomenon, Seligman was struck by something: some people, and even some animals, didn't give up even in highly adverse circumstances. He began to be interested in the opposite phenomenon, “learned optimism” - why some people possess unusual powers of resilience and self-control, and whether those powers can be taught or cultivated in others.

When, in 1998, he was elected president of the American Psychological Association, the largest body of psychologists in the world, he decided that he wanted to use his presidency to shift the discipline from its histor-ical focus on mental illness to a new focus on mental health and wellbeing.

He began to gather together his own and other people's research from cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), as well as from neuropsychology, the social sciences and even economics, to try to find the secret to living well. His team discovered that about 50 per cent of our average happiness level is genetically conditioned. But the rest is conditioned by things under our control: both external factors, such as our job or social life, and inner factors, such as how we think and what values we have.

His team undertook a huge amount of life satisfaction surveys, to look at what really made people happy. They discovered that some external conditions were not as important as people commonly believed: changes in income, for example, played a marginal role in life satisfaction. Other external conditions played a much bigger role, such as having a rich social network or being married.

The team also identified the inner work that can improve your wellbeing. They incorporated many techniques from CBT that have been proved to help to overcome depression and anxiety disorders. They also tried out cognitive and pedagogic techniques from ancient philosophy and spirituality, such as the idea of character strengths from Aristotle, mindfulness from Buddhism and learning to challenge one's irrational beliefs from Stoicism, then tested these insights empirically, to see if they really worked. As Seligman says: “We took some ideas from ancient philosophy and married them to the new scientific study of happiness. Aristotle never had the benefit of the seven-point scale [used to measure life satisfaction].”

So, while positive psychology is in some ways a “new science”, and a new way of approaching education, in other ways it is a return to the norm for Western education, which for centuries, through the Roman Empire and beyond, taught young people philosophic techniques to manage their thoughts and emotions. Indeed, he may not know it, but the ABC model of emotions that Darren is learning on Tyneside comes directly from a Stoic philosopher called Epictetus, who suggested that “it is not events, but our beliefs about them, that cause us suffering”.

It has also been taught for the past two years at the £9,000-a-year Wellington College in Berkshire. There, a teacher called Ian Morris, who bears a striking resemblance to David Miliband, tries to guide his wealthy young pupils to a rounded sense of the good life. He says: “Most of them really seem to value the lessons. You occasionally get some mucking around. I sent one boy out for clowning around and he complained, ?I got thrown out of happiness classes for laughing', which I thought was pretty funny.” Harry, a polite 16-year-old whom I meet at a meditation workshop at Wellington, says the wellbeing classes have a decent reputation among the pupils. “We're a very sporty school, and Mr Morris appeals to that in the classes. For example, he teaches us a basic meditation technique which he says Sir Steve Redgrave used before big rowing races.”

Britain is, at the moment, doing badly in terms of helping its young to achieve wellbeing. The UK came bottom in a recent Unicef survey of life satisfaction among children in 21 developed countries. The Institute of Psychiatry announced last year that the number of children with emotional and behavioural problems in the UK has doubled in the past 25 years. The number of adolescent suicides has quadrupled.

To try to take the teaching of wellbeing forward, Layard organised a pilot scheme to teach “resilience” in 22 state schools in South Tyneside, Hertfordshire and Manchester. Last July about 100 teachers and local council officials spent ten days at the University of Pennsylvania, where they trained with some of the most famous psychologists in the world, including Seligman himself and Aaron Beck, the inventor of CBT. They came back enthused. “The ideas we learnt were so useful, even for our own lives,” says Diane Wood, assistant to the chief executive of South Tyneside council. “In ten days, our head of child services overcame his fear of flying, while I don't think I've argued with my teenage son once since I went on the course.”

They started to teach the subject in September to 4,000 kids ranging from 11 to 16. The classes include teaching cognitive techniques to some troubled adolescents who have dropped out of schools because of bullying or other problems. I sat in on one in South Tyneside. The teacher, Melissa, started by picking out entries from a “problem box”, into which the students had put anonymously written notes about problems they were facing.

One note that Melissa read out says: “I'm not sure I can take any more. I feel so stressed and bad all the time. It all started when I went to the new school.” The pupils then discussed the problem, empathising and asking what could be done to change things, both in terms of the person's inner beliefs and his or her external circumstances. One affable 16-year-old boy with tattoos on his arms, Geoff, said: “I lost a tenner the other day. I was stressed at first, then I figured, well, it could have been more.” The boy next to him laughed, “Yeah, but it wasn't your money, was it?” “Well, that too,” Geoff conceded with a smile.

The pilot scheme is intended to last three years, during which the children will be surveyed to check the effect of the classes on their wellbeing and emotional resilience, compared with groups who haven't been to the classes. The results so far have been good; council officials in Tyneside and Hertfordshire are already eager to roll out the subject to more schools.

Seligman tells me that nowhere else in the world have his ideas been so taken up by public policy as in the UK. “There's a real buzz here about the politics of wellbeing,” he says. He compares Britain's embrace of both positive psychology and CBT to the Renaissance government of Cosimo de' Medici in Florence, which used its wealth to help to translate and reintroduce ideas from ancient philosophy.

The Government's interest in CBT and positive psychology is, in large part, thanks to Lord Layard, who wrote an influential report in 2002, pointing out that the Government spent more money on incapacity benefits for the mentally ill than it did on unemployment benefits. Mental illness, he declared, was “the major social problem facing our country today”.

Positive psychology also seems to offer a way forward for education beyond the ethical relativism of the past 30 years when, in the words of Darrin McMahon, the author of The Pursuit of Happiness, “the only people teaching values in schools seem to be sports coaches”. The science of happiness is a way in which timeless values and philosophical techniques can be reintroduced into the classroom.

Even among the leaders of the wellbeing movement, there is disagreement over what the meaning or goal of life should be: Lord Layard thinks the goal of policy should be “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”. Seligman says: “There's too much emphasis on happiness, I think. I'm interested in the meaningful or virtuous life, what the Greeks called eudaimonia.”

As concepts of wellbeing are slowly introduced into the national curriculum, this pluralism of views needs to be displayed, not hidden away. Young people need to be given guidance in tried and tested ways of thinking and living, but they also need to understand that no two people (or prophets) ever fully agree on the meaning of life, and no amount of scientific data should ever stand in the way of them making up their own minds.

Labels: Britain, education, happiness, Jules Evans, learned optimism, Martin Seligman, positive psychology