705: Dr. Martin Seligman - Positive Psychology, Learned Optimism, Grit, PERMA, Agency, Resilience, and Predicting the Future

Ryan Hawk (0:00)

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Welcome to The Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader.com. Now, onto tonight's featured leader, the legend, Dr. Martin Seligman is one of the most influential psychologists alive. He's the founder of Positive Psychology and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Positive Psychology Center. His research reshaped how we think about optimism, resilience, and human flourishing. His latest book is called Agency, The Psychological History of Human Progress. During our conversation, we discussed why the man who founded Positive Psychology calls himself a born-depressive and pessimist, and the technique he uses to argue with his own dark thoughts every single day. Incredible. Then, the three ingredients of Agency, that's efficacy, optimism, and imagination, and how leaders can hire and train for all three. And then, towards the end, Marty shares a technique that will dramatically increase your level of optimism, and it will make others feel a lot better. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Martin Seligman.

Marty, this is a huge treat for me. Welcome to The Learning Leader Show.

Martin Seligman (2:37)

Thank you, Ryan. It's a pleasure to be here.

Ryan Hawk (2:39)

It's funny, I recently spoke with somebody who spoke very highly of you and looks up to you.

And that is Angela Duckworth. I'm curious, what do you think of her and her work?

Martin Seligman (2:52)

Well, she's one of the best students I've ever had. I've had about 100 PhDs. And she came to me as a mature person. And in her first year, had this breakthrough about grip.

And there's been no stopping her since.

Ryan Hawk (3:09)

Pretty cool to see good things happen to good people, isn't it?

Martin Seligman (3:12)

It's great to be outdone by one of her students. That's pretty cool.

Ryan Hawk (3:18)

It's got to feel awesome. She's also, I felt like one of the most humble, accomplished people I've ever met. That's a rare quality in a person.

Martin Seligman (3:27)

Yeah. And she's socially one of the most intelligent people I've met. So I've been teaching for 60 years.

I've met a lot of successful people, and usually they're very smart, and Angela is as well. But what's distinguished the real successes that I know from other very smart people is extremely high social intelligence. So Angela could have been President of the University of Pennsylvania, if she wanted to, or I think Secretary of State. And it's great that she's chosen being public intellectual.

Ryan Hawk (4:11)

What does it look like to be a very highly socially intelligent person?

Martin Seligman (4:18)

I think the first thing is that people get on your side. When you've got the skills of that kind of social intelligence, you build allies so people are ready to assimilate you and endorse you and follow your work. And Angela has been one of the great collaborators. So she's probably had 50 co-authors in her relatively short career.

And it has to do with making allies rather than enemies.

Ryan Hawk (4:52)

I was going to say, because that seems like a quality or maybe a skill that would behoove all of us to figure out how to get good at.

Martin Seligman (5:01)

I wish we had a mapping of how to teach social intelligence. And as AI has come along and really levels the playing field in education, which you can't be the smartest person in the room anymore, the question is, what should we be teaching?

And among the things I think we should try to teach, if it's teachable, is high social intelligence.

Ryan Hawk (5:28)

Is it teachable?

Martin Seligman (5:30)

There are tricks to it. Let me give you one that I work on. But that's not the same as is it teachable. So in over 60 years of teaching, I've taught pretty much everything in psychology except statistics, I think. I've taught sex therapy and marital therapy. And these are two of the least successful forms of therapy. You're basically trying to take insufferable marriages and change them into barely tolerable marriages. So for someone who founded Positive Psychology, that's not what I'm after. Well, around 20 years ago, a group of positive sexologists and marital therapists developed a new technique which I think is one of the best social intelligence techniques I know.