Summary: Learned optimism: how to change your mind and your life
Learned optimism: how to change your mind and your life is a national bestseller written by
Martin E.P. Seligman, Ph.D. who is a psychology professor. In this book, the author uses
examples to make the psychology book to easily understand. For example, in the beginning of
this book, an example of a father and a mother that gives a vivid description about what is
pessimistic and what is optimistic. Learned optimism: how to change your mind and your life is
a book not only explains why people feel depression and helpless, but also teaches the
readers how to change from pessimism to optimism. This book focuses on the children
because the childhood plays a crucial role and has a great impact on people’s life. Therefore, it
is very important to teach children thinking in the optimistic way and how to release
themselves from misfortune and avoid depression. Dr. Seligman is also the author of Authentic
Happiness and The Optimistic Child. The main theme of his books is to advocate the positive
psychology and tell readers how to change the way of thinking and become an optimistic
person to increase the happiness of the life. This book is very helpful for people who want to
find hope in an unfortunate situation and have positive attitude to the life.
The book divided into three parts. The first part is ‘The Quest’ and the main topic of this section
is pessimism. Slight pessimistic emotion is a not bad thing, but emotion from our deeper sides
or the attitude to misfortune is difficult to control, especially when it becomes a habit. It means
that people always get negative feeling from misery, even it is insignificant. Helplessness is
one of characteristics of pessimist and it is barrier to solve the questions and then this emotion
goes into worse. Helplessness has negative impact on the development of human beings.
Childhood has great influence in the way we look at the world and life. In other words, if people
always have negative reflection about uncertain or bad things since they were children, this
habit probably rooted in their whole life. Depression would be the next step if the pessimism
gets worse and many depression patients’ end is suicide. The different between pessimistic
and optimistic is how to define misery. If we think it is misfortune, it will be. Our attitudes or how
we think determine we will have positive or negative emotion.
The second part of this book is ‘The Realms of Life’. Optimism is this section’s main subject.
An optimistic child has a great possible to achieve good performance in school than a
pessimistic child. For children, the growth environment, especially parents play a curial role in
children’s attitude because the negative emotion from parents will infect to children. Not only
for children, but also for adults positive emotion can help to gain success at work. Meanwhile,
the optimism can create champion in arena. Also, optimism is good for our health. Sum up,
positive emotion and optimism have numerous advantage for our work and life, even for our
health.
‘Changing: From Pessimism to Optimism’ is the last section in this book. As individuals, people
can build up our own optimistic life by ‘ABC’ method. ‘Adversity’ depends on your opinion, for
you, what kind of situation is adversity. ‘Belief’ is an attitude to this ‘Adversity’ before changing.
‘Consequences’ is the result of changing. Parents can use ‘ABCDE’ method to help their
children to avoid pessimism. ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ are as same as ‘ABC’ method. ‘D’ is ‘Disputation’
and ‘E’ is ‘Energization’.
This book is useful for the readers who want to live in an optimistic way and change their life.
In this book, there are not only the positive psychology theories or examples; also there are
many tests to test the depression ourselves and the children. These tests can help readers to
exploit themselves deeper and change themselves more efficiency. After reading this book, the
most important for me is that I can choice the way how I think and to be optimist or pessimist
depends on my choice. Learned optimism: how to change your mind and your life is a good
book for the people who want to have a happiness life.
Reference:
Seligman, M.E.P. (2006) Learned Optimism: How to Change your Mind and your Life, New
York, Vintage Books.