PERMA - A Scientific Theory of Happiness

We all want to be happy. No two ways on that for sure :)

When we're happy, we're productive, we're good at building meaningful relationships, and... we feel great!

Or is it the other way round. When we're productive, have meaningful relationships, have positive emotions .....then we're happy.

Happiness is a notoriously difficult thing to pin down, and by focusing on it too intensely, we can potentially move even further away. 

In this context, let's look at PERMA,  a scientifically researched 'theory of happiness' by Martin Seligman,

Martin Seligman is a larger than life character; commonly known as the founder of 'Positive Psychology'. His theories of happiness have evolved over twenty years of scientific research, with PERMA being his 2011 brainchild.

                   

"PERMA" stands for the five essential elements of the theory that form the acronym:

P (ositive emotions)
E (ngagement)
R (elationships)
M (eaning)
A (ccomplishment)

1. Positive Emotions:

For us to experience well-being, we need positive emotion in our lives. Being able to focus on positive emotions is more than just smiling, it is the ability to be optimistic and view the past, present, and future in a positive perspective.

Any positive emotion such as peace, gratitude, wonder, satisfaction, pleasure, inspiration, hope, curiosity, or love falls into this category......and the message is that it's really important to experience those in the here and now. Just as long as the other elements of PERMA are in place.

2. Engagement:

An individual leading a life of engagement constantly seeks out activities that allow her to be in a state of flow.

'Flow', coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, is a highly focused mental state. A state of consciousness, a state of deep involvement that occurs most frequently when we concentrate our undivided attention on activities that are (moderately) challenging to us. When you are in flow, it may seem that your sense of self vanishes, and time stops.

"The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile." ~ Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

During this "optimal experience" they feel "strong, alert, in effortless control, unselfconscious, and at the peak of their abilities." In the footsteps of Maslow, Csikszentmihalyi insists that happiness does not simply happen. It must be prepared for and cultivated by each person, by setting challenges that are neither too demanding nor too simple for ones abilities.

This type of ‘flow’ of engagement is important to stretch our intelligence, skills, and emotional capabilities. The more we experience this type of engagement, the more likely we are to experience well-being.

Seligman recommends that in order to achieve flow, you must identify your signature strengths, or strengths that are deeply characteristic of yourself, and learn how to practice them, as they underpin and contribute to all five elements of well-being.

3. Relationships: 

As humans, we are 'social beings',  and we thrive for connection, love, intimacy, and a strong emotional and physical interaction with other humans. Building positive relationships is a core concept to spread love and joy. Needless to say, having strong relationships also gives you support in difficult times.

Seligman believes that the need and tendency towards relationships is biologically and evolutionarily ingrained in us. Positive relationships is especially powerful because it plays a role in supporting the other four components of well-being.

4. Meaning :

Meaning comes from serving a cause bigger than ourselves.

Having a purpose and meaning to why each of us is on this earth is important to living a life of happiness and fulfillment. To understand the greater impact of your work and why you chose to pursue what you do, helps enjoy the tasks even more... so more satisfaction and more happiness.

5. Accomplishment: 

Many of us strive to better ourselves in some way, whether we're seeking to master a skill, achieve a valuable goal, or win in some competitive event, grow at some level. As such, accomplishment is another important thing that contributes to our ability to flourish.

Key is also to make realistic goals that can be met, and the very effort of pursuing those goals can contribute to a deep sense of satisfaction.....and when you finally achieve those goals a sense of pride and fulfillment is bonus. Having accomplishments in life is important to push ourselves to thrive and flourish.

Per PERMA, 'Well-being' is a multidimensional construct that is a function of all  five components.

The monsoons are here

And aahhh, are they so so welcome !

I moved from Bangalore to Hyderabad bang in the middle of summer. Went straight from 32 C to 42 C. The first few days I was in a literal daze. I'd almost forgotten how to handle 42 C. But then the gods were kind, it soon came down to a more handleable 38 C. (for a short bit)

My dad kept saying it was such a wrong time to move. My mom was like, why don't you just stay in Bangalore till June and then move.

But then, I was crystal clear. Yes, weather matters, yes the heat bothers, but it is not a criterion for a decision on moving.

Once here, I decided I'd not let the heat bother me. And I mostly didn't. (except what I thought was weight loss due to the veggie juice diet, might actually have been me melting away a little too)

We've had sporadic rains since, even hail storms, but yesterdays rain felt so like the monsoons. An unmatched lovely feeling. I simply love the rains, and diksha and I spent the hour capturing moments in the rain, on our bodies and on our cameras as well.

Well, you can neither see nor feel the rain in the picture, I still just needed it there. On a clear morning we can see the city stretch till mountains in the backdrop, so you'll need to stretch imagination :)

Our kitchen windows were open, and because we didn't want to disturb these two pigeons, end of the hour we had a flooded kitchen  

Diksha actually went off for a long walk in the heavy rain. That's her indulging me for a picture from below. 

I stayed limited to our lovely terrace, just my arm wet was enough for me :)

This is a favorite picture of the rain, and I must give full credit there to Diksha for the idea of a see through rice cooker lid, to use as umbrella for the phone to take that picture. And that's Nandi (the linea) enjoying the rain.

And this morning, even as I sit on my couch and type, I'm able to hear the peacocks (from kbr park). Guess we're singing the same song.....they love the monsoons too :)

The unfairness (and wisdom) of paint

From Seth

"Repainting your house the same color it already was feels like a waste. It's a lot of effort merely to keep things as they are.

But if you don't do it, time and entropy kick in and the house starts to fade.

The same can be said for 1,000 elements of your organization, including your relationships with customers, staff, suppliers and technology. The way you approach your market, the skill you bring to your craft, the culture in your organization—it constantly needs another coat of paint.

Rust never sleeps."

This, I guess, is true not just for an organization, but for all else in life too...including and maybe above all the 'self'. 

Vignettes & Quotes - 'Planning'

I love planning. In fact there's times I feel I love planning as much as the actual doing.

Planning is that phase....those moment or moments between intent and action, when it's still full of possibilities, full of positive energy, when the 'x' factors are still in theory. That's when you can put your all into it, paint the picture you want to see.

To take this metaphor to the next level; Vishakha and I were on our wave lapping walk in Goa. I happened to mention how all we could see was shades and shades of different blues...... the sea, the the mountains, and the sky. Straight off Vishakha came up with this lovely analogy which she could use in her office, one that enables identifying and taking ownership for the larger vision of the company.

The analogy: If the larger vision of a project or a company can be visually pictured in a painting frame, you see the whole picture and then you get clearer perspective of your part in it. You know you own that little part of the whole.......you know if the component you are adding to it aligns or doesn't. Here for instance, if it's any shade of blue or green or brown you know it does. If it's an odd maroon, you'll need to know what it's doing there. I loved it.

This quote is devoted to just that. Planning and Process.

“Failing to plan, is planning to fail.” - Self-help guru Alan Lakein 

Short and potent. I'm a big believer of even something as basic as lists. The vision at the macro level and lists at the micro level. Lovely. I love my lists. It optimizes quality of your time (read life) like little else can, and aah...the feeling of a nicely checklisted day....euphoric :)

At micro level or macro level, planning is about ownership and energy. Highly empowering.

Inch Time Foot Gem

A Zen Story

A lord asked Takuan, a Zen teacher, to suggest how he might pass the time. He felt his days very long attending his office and sitting stiffly to receive the homage of others.

Takuan wrote eight Chinese characters and gave them to the man. (It is what's called a Koan in Zen)

Not twice this day

Inch time foot gem

No matter how uncomfortable the bus ride, how horrendous the airline food, or how saggy the bed, remember: this moment will not come again, each minute is worth a priceless gem.

Ecstasy of Contemplation

The term brought on a deep deep smile. Just stand alone. 

In context, it's from Bertrand Russel's, 'The Scientific Outlook'. Here's excerpts of a delightful write up by Maria Popova on the book.

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life,” the Nobel-winning English polymath Bertrand Russell wrote in his memoir at the end of a long and intellectually invigorating life, a life the echoes of which reverberate through some of the most defining ideas of our time.

On the surface, this remarkably perceptive and prescient book can appear to be a critique of science, which may seem surprising coming from Russell — in addition to being one of the twentieth century’s most lucid and influential philosophers, he was also a mathematician and logician himself, whose incisive writings on critical thinking and 'the will to doubt' have rendered him an enduring patron saint of reason. 

But beneath such a surface impression is enormous depth of insight and a timeless, increasingly timely clarion call for nuance in distinguishing between the sort of knowledge driven by a greed for power and the higher-order wisdom that makes and keeps us human. In this light, although science is the book’s subject, its object is to examine the most elemental potentialities of the human spirit — our parallel capacities for good and evil — and to illuminate the means by which we can cultivate a nobler and more humane humanity.

Bertrand Russell

Writing in a golden age of science, just as quantum mechanics and relativity were beginning to reconfigure our understanding of reality, yet well before the invention of the atomic bomb shed light on the dark side of science as a tool of power, Russell issues a poignant and prescient admonition about the uses and misuses of science. Reflecting on how these illuminate the largest questions of what it means to be human, he writes:

"Science in the course of the few centuries of its history has undergone an internal development which appears to be not yet completed. One may sum up this development as the passage from contemplation to manipulation. The love of knowledge to which the growth of science is due is itself the product of a twofold impulse. We may seek knowledge of an object because we love the object or because we wish to have power over it. The former impulse leads to the kind of knowledge that is contemplative, the latter to the kind that is practical.

[…]

But the desire for knowledge has another form, belonging to an entirely different set of emotions. The mystic, the lover, and the poet are also seekers after knowledge… In all forms of love we wish to have knowledge of what is loved, not for purposes of power but for the ecstasy of contemplation… Wherever there is ecstasy or joy or delight derived from an object there is the desire to know that object — to know it not in the manipulative fashion that consists of turning it into something else, but to know it in the fashion of the beatific vision, because in itself and for itself it sheds happiness upon the lover. This may indeed be made the touchstone of any love that is valuable."

Many decades later, pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, who confirmed the existence of dark matter, would echo this notion in a somewhat surprising and rather lovely remark: “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly… I think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive.” 

Russell cautions that this shift from what he calls “love-knowledge” to “power-knowledge” is the single greatest hazard in the future of science, which is implicitly inseparable from the future of humanity. To protect science from such a shift, he suggests, is not only our duty but our only means of protecting us from ourselves. 

 Russell writes:

"When science is considered contemplatively, not practically, we find that what we believe, we believe owing to animal faith, and it is only our disbeliefs that are due to science. When, on the other hand, science is considered as a technique for the transformation of ourselves and our environment, it is found to give us a power quite independent of its metaphysical validity. But we can only wield this power by ceasing to ask ourselves metaphysical questions about the nature of reality. Yet these questions are the evidence of a lover’s attitude toward the world. Thus it is only in so far as we renounce the world as its lovers that we can conquer it as its technicians. But this division in the soul is fatal to what is best in man. As soon as the failure of science considered as metaphysics is realized, the power conferred by science as a technique is only obtainable … by the renunciation of love.

Yet Russell is careful to call for the necessary nuance to prevent his central point from being misunderstood or even turned on itself:

"It is not knowledge that is the source of these dangers. Knowledge is good and ignorance is evil: to this principle the lover of the world can admit no exception. Nor is it power in and for itself that is the source of danger. What is dangerous is power wielded for the sake of power, not power wielded for the sake of genuine good"

Nearly a century later, The Scientific Outlook remains an immensely insightful read.

A Touching & Proud Moment

Some moments in life are worth capturing forever. Guess this was one.

After our four days in Goa I went to Mumbai, specifically to see Vishakha's office, something that's been on the to do list for a while now.

The office itself is beautiful...... bright, high energy, and hip looking. I was duly, and more, impressed. Glad I went. And gladder for another reason too. Being there, enabled a getting in touch with a space way deeper than the office itself.  It was a space that brought out the tears, and as you can imagine, it surely wasn't just the beautiful office.

This is from inside her room which is completely glass walled.

The deeper, was seeing her there

Much to her chagrin, and embarrassment I think,  I had her give me a pose with her awards too. She picked the one which is dearest to her, The Institute of Chartered Accountants awarding her the Business Leader Woman of the year.

The whole experience brought on the realization of how there are moments which get defined and enhanced by spatial experience...... when visual impact of the moment evokes way more emotions than what the knowing can. 

To use metaphor......it's akin to writing a book, going through the whole process of conceptualizing, writing, rewriting, editing, finalizing.....the publishing..... and then that moment when you're actually holding the first copy in your hand. Priceless.

Seeing her there, in that chair, was that moment. Priceless. It seemed to bring out for me all over again her entire journey of singular determination and drive .....through the twenty five years since college, a journey that can make a book, a journey that has brought her all the way to the MD & CEOs chair.

The journey itself....... she started her career as Assistant Manager, in the New India Assurance in 1987. Those were days we worked in the same building in Hyderabad, different offices and different floors and we couldn't believe our luck. We'd meet for lunch everyday.

After 13 years of learning experience there, she took the plunge of moving into the private sector, which was just beginning to open up in the country. She moved to Birla Sun Life Insurance as Chief Manager, Bancassurance and Group Business. In May 2006 she moved back to general insurance as the Chief Marketing Officer Universal Sompo General Insurance, heading both sales and marketing. (this was again a stint when we were both posted in Bangalore, and that so much fun as we were both there without husbands :)

In 2007, she joined IDBI Federal Life Insurance at a pre license stage and set up the bancassurance channel to deliver business for three years, demonstrating y-o-y growth. She then joined IndiaFirst Life Insurance as the Chief Business Officer. Then moved as Director - Sales and Marketing to Canara HSBC Oriental Bank of Commerce Life insurance. And then the final step to MD & CEO of IndiaFirst Insurance.

IndiaFirst Life Insurance is today one of the fastest growing life insurance companies in the country, having covered over 2.7 million lives and showing 64% growth from previous year and an 82% growth in premium collection for the same period.

I know I'm beginning to sound like the ET or Business line, but then it's to show that it's not just a proud friend doing indulgent talking. In fact even as we were on our trip in Goa, the Economic Times carried an article with these numbers.

Moving back to personal space..... sitting there in her office, sipping a cup of tea, overlooking the mountains that her window faces, she pointed out to her seat of a few years back, across the room, when she was with the same company in different capacity. The move across the room took her a few years, and a step out to another company and back. And if I have to pick one defining moment of the experience it was that. Symbolizes the proverbial and critical last three steps I guess.

There are days today when I'm in awe wondering where she gets the energy to do the fourteen hour days she does, time between our morning and evening call see. And also secretly thinking, god help those who work with her :). She's changing their benchmarks. A true leader should, and she does I guess.

And then, all our discussions from back then came rushing in...starting from the moment when she even dared to dream.  The innumerable hours spent parsing through implications and possibilities., in terms of impact, responsibility, family, gender stress and so many others. Even aspiring to it was a conscious decision. But then she's made of super strong mettle. Not much can stop her once she puts her mind to something.

Vishakha, so glad to have been there, and to have shared yet another forever moment. Proud of you pal !!