let us bring our first speaker to the podium it is a man who is just up from Adelaide he's been there for a month as a fabulous toy under the favorite I don't think er in residence he will be explaining what that means it's dr. Martin Seligman world renowned founder of positive psychology director of the Center for positive psychology University of Pennsylvania best-selling author authentic happiness and flourishing a visionary new understanding of happiness and well-being so would you please welcome dr. Martin Seligman what can we host hope for in life what what can we hope for for our children as you know Freud and Schopenhauer told us the best we could ever do in life was not to be miserable not to suffer that the best we could ever do in life was approach zero but when you lie in bed at night you are not thinking about how to go from minus eight to minus five you are for the most part thinking about how to go from plus two to plus six so what I want to talk about today is the possibility that there is life above zero and that human flourishing well-being is what we can hope for for our future I believe the thesis that the best we can do in life is to relieve misery is empirically false it's morally insidious and it's politically a dead end so I'm going to talk about the opposite today here's what we'll do in a half an hour I just said what we can most hope for in life I'm going to argue and show you some data that well-being itself is a plausible individual and a national goal and that it's something well over and above the absence of misery then the question is can it be defined reasonably well and what is it we would want to build I don't know if there will be a positive human future but I don't think there's going to be one unless we can define in what it might consist and investigate how those building blocks can happen I'm going to suggest you the perma positive emotion engagement relationships meaning and accomplishment are the constituents the elements of well-being and I'll show you some data new data from Europe in which 23 of the European Union nations are compared on perma then having said it's a plausible thing to measure I'm going to ask the question well can you build it or is well-being like your waistline you're probably know dieting is a 50 billion dollar scam any of you can lose 5% of your body weight in about three weeks by following any diet on the bestseller lists I did the watermelon diet I lost about 20 pounds in three weeks I had diarrhea for three weeks and the reason guide is a scam is 80 to 95 percent of people regain all that weight or more over the next three years so the issue is can perma can well-being be lastingly increased or does it just flop back to your old curmudgeonly state in time and I'm going to suggest to you that we know something about how to build it that it's not like dieting and indeed is not like psychotherapy for what's wrong so I'll tell you a little bit about the science of pea positive emotion the science of e engagement and what I'm going to do as I do this is try to tell you something that your grandmother and your minister did not know things I didn't know 20 years ago that have been discovered in the science I'm going to talk about relationships and a major new technique that has been discovered that builds relationships talk about meaning and about accomplishment and particularly self discipline then we'll be about 20 minutes through the lecture at that point and what all have said is that we know something about how to build these things at an individual level on a one-to-one basis there's good reason to believe they can increase can this happen in schools and large organizations that's the stepping stone to the possibility that the planet could flourish and so I'm going to talk about this having been done in a huge organization United States is second largest employer the United States Army which decided three years ago to teach resilience and positive psychology to all 1.1 million soldiers and measure the outcome so I'll do that it's plausible goal for large units and finally I'm going to talk about the politics of all of this this is political it's not political in the sense of left versus right left versus right to my mind or is the question of given that we agree on goals like wealth or military adventurism who carries them out are they carried out by individual or by state means this is not about who does it this is about a different set of political ends so that's what we'll do in the next 25 minutes and let me start with perma so this is my theory of positive emotion one of these things is the here it is this so for me well-being consists of five elements an element contributes to well-being an element is pursued for its own sake not merely to get one of the other elements so for example we have no interest in IQ in itself we're interested in IQ because we think it leads to intelligent decision-making so an element is pursued for its own sake and the element can be measured independently of the other elements and I believe there are five elements that free people choose in life the first is positive emotion the smiley face happy ology hedonics part of the name of this conference but positive psychology does not stop with positive emotion and part of the reason is how much positive emotion you feel is about 50% heritable and it's only increasing by 10 to 15% so we know techniques for having you live in the upper part of your set range for happiness for positive emotion but positive psychology is also concerned with engagement when when when time stops for you when you're one with the music so looking looking at you about 70% of you right now are completely engaged in what I'm saying the other 30% of you are having sexual fantasies by the way because I so we're interested in when people go into flow we're interested in relationships with other and that's crucial because if you think about when you're in your highest positive states it's almost never solitary think about the happiest you've ever been I have no idea what it'll be but it's almost always going to be with other people very interesting we've evolved to be hive creatures the hedonic system is built around other people meaning and purpose belonging to and serving something bigger than the self the self is in completely impoverished soil for wellbeing and finally human beings pursue accomplishment achievement mastery so I'll talk about each one of those in turn importantly if I had suggested 30 years ago that well-being as defined by perma were a plausible political goal national goal for a nation it would have been a silly suggestion because it wasn't measurable well what's happened in the last 30 years is each of these elements is now respectably measurable that probably as well measured as things like GDP and indeed that's one of the reasons that the Prime Minister of England David Cameron has decided to measure the well-being of the entire British population and most importantly to hold himself accountable for the success or failure of public policy by changes in well-being and most importantly they're not like the dieting scam each of these things is teachable you can actually have more of each of perma in your life and I'll just talk a little bit about the research on this so let me start with the measurement question is in order to be a plausible national or planetary goal it has to be measurable so here's what Timothy Sol and Felicia Hubbard did last year they went to 23 European Union nations and asked perma questions of 2,000 adults in each of those nations and they asked what percentage of adults are flourishing by perma criteria and Denmark as usual leads the pack with almost 40% flourishing on the UK and Germany are in the middle France and the former Soviet Union are at the bottom with under 15% no-one's done this for Australia or for the United States for that matter so we don't know where Australia and the United States sit we will indeed soon that was part of what I was doing in South Australia and tomorrow I'll talk about what I was up to in South Australia the last month but anyway what this slide shows it's measurable and there are very large country to country differences and most importantly there's very large room for improvement it's commonly said that then our children will not have as much money as we do I'm not an economist I don't know if that's true but there is plenty of room for our children to be happier to flourish have more well-being than we do and that is indeed the of what this is about so let me now go through P erm na for individuals just telling you a little bit of the science that I didn't know 20 years ago and a little bit of how these things are built so let's take positive emotion happiness it turns out that if you go to companies and you look at how they're doing economically and you count every word that said in business meetings there is something called a losado ratio and it distinguishes economically flourishing from stagnant from about to go bankrupt companies so the ratio of positive words to negative words in business meetings for flourishing companies is above two point nine to one between one and two point nine to one the companies are stagnating and below one the companies are going under now don't take this home to your married life two point nine to one leads to divorce and the reason we know that is John and Julie got men take couples and they lock them into an apartment for a weekend and they record everything that's said and they compute the losado ratio and if the ratio is under five to one it predicts divorce now what's going on here well I think it is that we in we often have to criticize and say bad things to our spouses to pick to our children to the people that work for us and the question is against what background of positivity will they hear us will they not think were their enemy and indeed this was brought home to me by my teenage daughter Nikki Nikki you last heard about when she was five years old and called me a grouch and founded positive psychology because she was right on the money well about four years ago she was a junior in high school measure majoring in entitlement and I came home one evening and I was all excited about the losada ratio and I told the family about it and then I went to work on the computer was a Thursday night and about eleven o'clock Nikki came downstairs and said daddy we drive me to a party and I shouted her 11 o'clock Nikki get to work it's a Thursday night and she looked at me and she said daddy you've got a terrible Losada ratio and the question is to raise children what ratio of positive to negative things do we need and the answer is no one knows that's a little bit about the pea engagement I asked the question before when do you go into flow when does time stop for you and the answer is we go into flow when our highest strengths are just matched to the challenges that come our way that that's when we go into flow and so we're very interested in increasing the amount of flow we have in life and to do that you have to identify people's highest strengths this is all free by the way part of my job has been to in positive psychology has been to give this away so there's a website authentic happiness org that two and a half million people have gone to and taken the test it has a signature strengths test on it which tells you what your five highest strengths are now here's the kind of exercise that we do against random assignment placebo-controlled and by the way when I say an exercise works it doesn't mean I kind of think it's a good idea it means I have actually run large-scale random assignment placebo-controlled tests of it in the same way when I worked on drugs and psychotherapy I would take Prozac and a sugar pill and run them against each other so here's an exercise that works I'll do half of it with you now close your eyes think of something you don't like to do at work that you have to do pretty much once a week okay open your eyes okay your assignment is go take this test this will tell you what your five highest strengths are it might be social intelligence it might be humor and playfulness and then your assignment is to do that task next week using your highest strengths so for example one of my students was waitress and she hated waitressing working away through graduate school heavy trays being patronized by customers she took the signature strength test her highest strength was social intelligence so she was so her job was to recraft waitressing to use social intelligence much more so she resolved to make the encounter with her the highlight of every customers evening now notice that wouldn't always succeed but notice she was putting what was very best inside of her on offer all the time and waitressing became more fun the tips became larger and in controlled studies if you do this six months later statistically less depression less anxiety more life satisfaction oh just one little bit of science more I'm very interested in trauma and post-traumatic growth I've spent my life working on depression helplessness and trauma and we recently asked the question who comes who grows through trauma who of whom is it true what Nietzsche said if it doesn't kill me it makes me stronger and we did a study of 1,700 people who had been through on one two or three awful events we listed the 15 worst things that could happen to people and asked who was stronger afterwards and it turned out that people who had three of these awful things rape caps were tortured we're stronger than people who had to and who were stronger than people had won who were stronger than people who had none and the character strengths that correlated with post-traumatic growth were those five religiousness gratitude kindness hope and bravery so that's a little bit about the science of signature strengths relationships what do you your spouse comes home from work and she's been promoted what do you say to her and how many of you are marriage counselors anyone a marriage counselor okay well there are a couple of you you probably know that marriage counseling is the single worst form of psychotherapy it is has the worst statistics it's hard to do people are lying to you they're lying to each other and what when I teach marriage counseling what you teach people to do is how to fight better that's how not to have the same damn fight every single day you're trying to take insufferable marriages and make them barely tolerable now that's not a positive psychology form of marriage counseling so Shelley Gable who I think will be speaking at this meeting on seven years ago did something tremendously interesting she said let's not look at how people fight let's look at how they celebrate together so your spouse comes home from work she's been promoted what do you say to her well most people say and this is what I did before I read Shelley's work congratulations dear well deserved passive constructive you might as well not say anything at all a lot of people and I work with drill sergeants now and I'll tell you about them momentarily do active destructive you know what tax bracket that's going to put us in that's not good passive destructive is what's for dinner not good the one that works and what Shelly does is active constructive which is that that report you read wrote for the company on the pension plan that's the single best report on fiscal matters I've read in my 25 years in business now let's relive what happened today exactly where were you when your boss told you you were promoted and exactly what did he say and what do you think the real reasons are you've been promoted and how can you use those strengths more with me and with the kids and in church and it turns out when you do that love and commitment markedly increase in it's not just a marital technique it's a friendship and work technique as well so that's a little bit on our M meaning belonging to and serving something bigger than the self most of you don't need to know this but your kids sure do here's an exercise we do we have mice my students are asked to do something fun next week a P thing and to do something philanthropic and then come back and report what happens and what happens is quite remarkable when you do something fun when it's over it's over it has almost no effects afterwards but when you do something philanthropic very different thing happens one of my students her third grade nephew called her on the phone and had to be tutored for two hours and fractions so she spent two hours on the phone doing this and she said after that the whole day went better for me I was mellow that people I could listen to people people liked me more and one of my business students said I'm in business because I want to make a lot of money and I want him like a lot of money because money brings happiness it brings control and it brings security but I was astonished to find out that I was happier helping another person than I was shopping and that's the regulary the one if if you're depressed right now the one single thing which will give you a temporary boost is to go out and help another person and lastly a accomplishment achievement we're very interested in self-discipline and we look at academic success we measure grit and self-discipline and IQ and we look at various forms of academic success and quantitatively we find that self disciplining young people is roughly twice as important as IQ in predictors of academic success so that's a flavor of what goes on in the science of positive psychology and in the science of perma and so let me now turn to whether or not this can be done it more than just the individual level so three years ago the chief of staff the United States Army came to me and said post-traumatic stress disorder suicide depression panic drug abuse subs divorce what is positive psychology say about that dr. Seligman and what I said was people's lives are often ruined by combat divorce death of a spouse but the phenomenon is bell-shaped and on the left hand side you've got what you just described and you should continue to spend ten billion dollars a year treating that but the Army's not a hospital what you're after is a healthy force that can cope with persistent warfare in the middle of the bell-shaped curve is resilience and those are people who go through a tough time but three months later they're back where they were psychologically and physically and on the right hand side you have post-traumatic growth people who a year later go through a very tough time at first but a year later are measurably stronger psychologically and physically than they were and so general Casey decided he would create something called comprehensive soldier fitness and he ordered on that very day unlike what we do he actually ordered the positive psychology and resilience would be measured and taught throughout the united states army and he would allocated one hundred and forty five million dollars to do it and he created three programs that have been in process for three years now and i can show you a little bit about what they do the first is he was after creating an army that was just as psychologically fit as physically fit so he had we had to devise a test of psychological fitness there are plenty of tests of psychological unfitness so all 1.1 million soldiers have taken this test and this is a every year out of twelve hundred Colonels 33 are promoted to Brigadier General so we ask the question from the test could you predict in advance who was going to make it to Brigadier General when that tells you you can with considerable accuracy that's part one of comprehensive soldier fitness part two is general Casey said to me well we've read your material on schools and we see you teach teachers the skills of perma and then you measure their students and you find their students have better psychological fitness less anxiety and depression on three up to two years later well that's the army model we've got forty thousand teachers in the army the drill sergeants so your job dr. Seligman will be to train all the drill sergeants in the army and they will train the 1.1 million soldiers so now one hundred and eighty drill sergeants come to the University of Pennsylvania every month and we teach them the perma skills and the permit exercises and we have the first data on it and it basically shows that if you have had a a positive psychology trainer in your company and you're deployed your psychological strengths go up if you haven't they stay the same or go down and similarly we found with suicide that soldiers who've had training in a perma have lower suicide attempts and suicidal ideation than the rest of the troops so let me conclude oh and importantly this works better in younger soldiers than an older soldiers and it's part of what we find in working with schools so let me conclude what I've said today and it's the politics it asks the question what is wealth for why do we care about unemployment in GDP and the reason is to my way of thinking what we really care about is well-being so to my way of thinking money is in the service of well-being and indeed that's what the Prime Minister of England has decided to measure global well-being you might think this is a impossible national goal but when nations are poor and at war and in famine in plague they naturally turn to defense and damage but when nations are wealthy not in plague not in famine not at war they look for something more in life this was the question I began by asking what more is there than the alleviation of misery well Florence is the best example of this I know in the 1450s Florence became tremendously wealthy mostly due to Metta meditation genius and it asks the question what should we do with our wealth and under the leadership of Cosimo the elder it decided we should devote our wealth to beauty now I'm not suggesting that Australia North America and the European Union take up sculpting at this point rather I'm suggesting that you are at a florentine moment you look like Florence actually look much better than Florence actually looked and the question is what are we going to do with this wealth and what I've suggested is what we're going to do is to increase the well-being on the planet so I want to close by saying what Nietzsche said about human history Nietzsche said that human history divides into three the first is the camel the camel just sits there and moans and takes it the second phase of human history for Nietzsche is the rebel the lion the rebel says no the rebel says no to poverty no to discrimination no to plague and Nietzsche says well I think you have to be blinded by ideology to see that in the last 200 years the politics of no has worked there is almost less there is in fact less of almost every bad thing on the planet than there was 500 years ago Steve Pinker's book by the way best book last year better angels of our nature is about a 30-fold decrease in your probability of violent death over the last 500 years but the politics of no has worked and then Nietzsche asks what can all human beings say yes to let's imagine that know worked let's imagine we got rid of all the evils in human life what would we do and that's what I've tried to say today that's what the child reborn does the child reborn says yes and I would suggest that every human being can say yes to more positive emotion in life every human being can say yes to more engagement in life every human being can say yes to more noble purpose in life every human being can say yes to better human relations and every human being can say yes to more positive accomplishment every human being can say yes to flourishing and that is the hope for our future thank