The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk www.LearningLeader.com My new book, The Price of Becoming, is a USA Today, LA Times, Success Magazine, and Publishers Weekly bestseller! I think you'll find it useful. This is brought to you by Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through Talent or Technical Services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world has the hustle and grit to deliver. My guest: 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 understand optimism, resilience, and human flourishing. His books, including Learned Optimism, Flourish, and The Hope Circuit, have sold millions of copies. His latest is Agency: The Psychological History of Human Progress. Key Learnings The three parts of agency. Efficacy is the belief you can hit a goal right now, and it drives whether you try. Optimism is the belief you can hit it in the future, and it drives persistence and grit. Imagination is the range of goals you can even picture, and it drives creativity. When a culture has all three, it progresses. When they fall, it stagnates. "Depression and pessimism and happiness and optimism are too important to be left to happy people." Marty calls himself a born depressive and pessimist. He founded positive psychology and still wakes at 4:00 a.m. to a voice telling him he can't do the thing in front of him. What he's built over decades is the skill of arguing back, treating that voice not as truth but as a rival whose job is to make him miserable. The techniques don't come naturally to anyone. A small number of people are born happy. Everyone else has to learn and practice the skills, which is why Marty spent much of his career testing them rather than assuming they work. How you respond to good news matters more than you think. When his wife Mandy won first prize in the biggest black and white photography contest in the world, Marty could have said "congratulations, dear, you deserve it" and moved on. Instead, he named the exact photo that won, asked her to repeat what the editor said word for word, and tied her talent back to how they teach their kids. Ryan's summary of what made it work: specificity and curiosity. Marty calls it active constructive responding, and done consistently, it increases love and commitment and cuts divorce rates. Marty's contrarian take on leadership. He thinks the whole hunt for "what great leaders do" is a wild goose chase, because the great leaders he's met all do completely different things. What good followers have in common is PERMA: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. His advice is to promote the leaders who create the most PERMA, and to hold managers responsible for their people's well-being, not just their output, because well-being predicts productivity. Grit and agency. Grit, the idea made famous by his former student Angela Duckworth, feeds straight into optimism and increases how long people push through adversity. On Angela: "one of the best students I've ever had," and "it's great to be outdone." He credits her rare social intelligence, the ability to build allies instead of enemies. Predicting elections by counting optimism. With his graduate student Harold Zullow, Marty studied a century of nomination acceptance speeches and found the more optimistic candidate usually wins. In 1984, they sealed their prediction of the two nominees in an envelope at The New York Times and got it right. The $17,500 lesson. Convinced by Dukakis's optimistic acceptance speech, Marty flew to Edinburgh to place a legal bet and put his entire life savings on Dukakis at 2 to 1. Then he learned the speech was written by Ted Sorensen, and that Dukakis, in his own unscripted press conferences, was deeply pessimistic. He lost everything. The takeaway that shaped his later work: measure the unscripted moments, not the polished speeches. The 2024 call. Trump and Harris were even on optimism in their convention speeches. But across September and October, tracking how each explained bad events in press conferences, Trump got steadily more optimistic. Marty's team sealed another prediction: Trump winning and possibly by a lot. Why the fired-up CEO speech doesn't work great. After Marty published his method, both political parties asked him how to write optimistic speeches. He sent the protocol, and within a few elections everyone sounded optimistic, and it stopped predicting anything, because the optimism was shallow. People don't internalize a leader saying "we're going to crush it." Real agency shows up in the psychology of the team, and that comes from who you hire and how you train them, not from the speech. What the Army taught him. As lead consultant on the Army's Comprehensive Soldier Fitness ...
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