Altered traits3/26/2023 ![]() Kegan tracked a group of adults as they aged. Sure, we could learn technical skills, such as going to business school or picking up a musical instrument, but our ability to add psychological capacities-such as the gratitude and empathy that Nicki asked her father to embrace-was believed to be pretty much over and done with by the time we’d graduated from college.īut Harvard psychologist Bob Kegan upended that assumption by doing something psychologists before him hadn’t done too much of: longitudinal research. After adolescence, the thinking went, adults were pretty much fully baked. Oddly, in the history of adult psychology, the idea that we could cultivate anything over time was considered suspect. Treatment is not just fixing what is broken, it is nurturing what is best within ourselves.”Īnd if those studies on trauma demonstrated that a few instances of ecstasis (non-ordinary states of consciousness associated with peak performance “flow”) can help mend what’s broken, what happens if we deploy these techniques repeatedly, over the course of a lifetime? Can recurring access to these states really “nurture what is best within ourselves?” Can they, as Alan Watts suggested, be used to “cultivate the exceptional”? ![]() “Psychology is not just the study of weakness and damage, it is also the study of strength and virtue. “I want to remind our field that it has been side-tracked,” he wrote in his first Presidential Column for the APA’s newsletter. In 1998, after being elected president of the American Psychological Association, Seligman made positive psychology the central focus of his tenure. And I haven’t whined once since…If I could stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch.” Seligman decided to take her up on the challenge, and bring the field of psychology along for the ride. But I decided the day I turned five to stop whining. From the time I was three until I was five, I whined a lot. “Daddy,” she said, “I want to talk with you. ![]() She stomped over with a stern look on her face. Seligman, who describes himself as both a “serious gardener” and a “serious grouch,” couldn’t take it. “Weeds were flying up in the air,” Seligman later said, “dirt was spraying everywhere.” One summer day, while working in the garden with his young daughter, Nicki, University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman had, in his own words, “an epiphany.” Seligman was meticulously freeing weeds with a trowel, and neatly setting them aside in a discard pile. ![]()
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