The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 705: Dr. Martin Seligman - Positive Psychology, Learned Optimism, Grit, PERMA, Agency, Resilience, and Predicting the Future

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

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 program, Marty helped train 40,000 drill sergeants and profiled 900,000 soldiers from their first day. Three traits predicted who would later earn awards for excellent work and heroism: optimism, high positive emotion, and low negative emotion. On the other side, catastrophizers were more than twice as likely to develop PTSD at every level of combat. The hiring lesson. Hire optimists and happy people. Avoid catastrophizers. And when you can't pick your team, train the pessimists you already have in the skills of agency. "Put It In Perspective." The tool Marty uses to retrain catastrophizers. Picture the ominous "come see me at 4:00" email. Write down the worst thing that could happen, then the best thing, then the most likely thing, then a plan for that most likely case. Catastrophizers skip straight to the worst case and get paralyzed. The exercise pulls them back to what's actually probable. Marry an optimist. "If you're a pessimist, disaster is to marry another pessimist," because you'll both see the worst in every setback. The wine story makes the point about behavior change: after Mandy told him he'd wrecked a family engagement dinner by sending back a bottle, Marty realized that if she complained as much as he did, he wouldn't want to be married to her. He decided to stop. The critical thoughts never went away, but the behavior did. The gratitude testimonial. Think of someone still alive who did or said something that changed your life. Write a 300-word testimonial in three parts: what they did, what you did because of it, and where you are now as a result. Then deliver it in person and read it out loud. Marty has run this with thousands of people. The usual result is that both people cry, and a month later they test as less depressed and higher in well-being. Reading the minds of the dead. Marty's method for measuring agency across history is counting words. Agentic language like "choose," "compete," "can," and "do" versus language of constraint like "obliged" and "assigned." With Claude and ChatGPT, he can now do in one morning what used to take months: reading whole eras of writing and rating how agentic they are. St. Augustine and a thousand years of stagnation. Before Augustine, around 400 AD, Christian thinkers were highly agentic and taught that you could take part in your own salvation. Augustine's doctrine that grace comes only from God set Church teaching for close to a thousand years, and progress collapsed with it. When agency climbs again, as it does under Charlemagne around 800, progress climbs too. The pattern holds when you line it up against GDP, population, and writing about freedom. The manager's real job. "It's your job as a manager not just to keep productivity going, but to increase the well-being and agency of the people under you." Do that, and you get promoted. Fail at it and your time is up. The Champagne Question... What he'd celebrate a year from now. Marty wants psychohistory taken seriously as a real field, one that measures psychological variables, uses them to understand history, and then changes them to raise future happiness and productivity. Reflection Questions: Marty is 84, founded the field, and still wakes at 4 a.m. to a voice saying he can't do it. What does your version of that voice say, and what does it usually say it about? When it shows up, do you accept it as fact or argue back? Think about the last time someone close to you shared good news. Which quadrant were you in: active constructive, passive constructive, active destructive, or passive destructive? What did you actually say? Marty says a manager's job is to raise the well-being and agency of their people, not just their output. If your team was measured on PERMA tomorrow, what score would they give you, and where's the gap? If you liked this one with Marty, you should also listen to... Episode #703: Angela Duckworth - Why Grit Isn't Enough Time Stamps: 2:34 Angela Duckworth, grit & social intelligence 6:05 Active constructive responding: the Mandy photography story 12:13 Why leadership is heterogeneous, and the case for PERMA 14:49 How grit and agency fit together 16:09 The born pessimist who founded positive psychology 21:20 What the book is really about: founding psychohistory 22:52 Predicting elections & the $17,500 Dukakis bet 25:34 The 2024 prediction 29:17 Why the rah-rah CEO speech doesn't help much 31:07 What the U.S. Army taught him: optimism & PTSD 35:19 "Put It In Perspective," the tool for catastrophizers 38:55 Marry an optimist, and the wine-snob story 42:19 The gratitude testimonial 44:49 Reading the minds of the dead & St. Augustine 48:37 The manager's real job 49:33 What he'd celebrate a year from now 51:05 EOPC  

You should join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. That's what James Clear said to me a few years ago at our Learning Leader Growth Summit. Our Learning Leader Growth Summit is the three-day leadership retreat we have for members of our Learning Leader Circle. And applications are now open to be part of our next Learning Leader Circle. If you want to be surrounded by a group of eights and nines and tens who are striving to be better, this group might be for you. If you want to be surrounded by a group of get after it doers, people who are achieving big things, making a positive dent in the world,

then the Learning Leader Circle might be for you. If that's you, go to learningleaders circle.com to apply. That's learningleader circle. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show presented by Insight Global. I am your host, Ryan Hawth. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learning leader.com.

Now, on to 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. This 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 Silligman. Marty, this is a huge treat for me. Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. Thank you, Ryan. It's a pleasure to be here. 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? 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 grit. And there's been no stopping her since. Pretty cool to see good things happen to good people, isn't it? It's great to be outdone by one of her students. That's pretty cool. 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. 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 distinguish the real successes that I know from other very smart people is extremely high social intelligence. So Angela could have been president at the University of Pennsylvania if she wanted to, or I think, Secretary of State. And it's great that she's chosen being in public intellectual. What does it look like to be a very highly socially intelligent person? 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. 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. 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. Is it teachable? 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 taught pretty much everything in psychology, statistics 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 sexologist and marriage, Marital therapists developed a new technique, which I think is one of the best social intelligence techniques I know. Typically in marital therapy, you teach people how to fight better. But they said, let's teach people how to celebrate better. What do you say to someone you love or someone you really care about, not when they come to you with a problem, but when they come to you with a victory? So what you have to imagine here, Ryan, is a two-by-two table, active, passive, constructive, destructive. And I'll give you an example with my wife of what active constructive is. And this is one of the keys to technical social intelligence.

So my wife, Mandy, is a black and white photographer. She's an amateur. And a few years ago, she came downstairs and Marty, I just got a call from the editor of Black and White magazine, which is the big photographic magazine in the world. I won first prize in the black and light contests this year. Okay, Mandy's come to me with something great. And the question is, what should I say to her? Now, what I would have said to her, had I not read the literature on marital therapy, was,

congratulations, dear, you're a great photographer, you deserve it. So that's a passive constructive. Well, that has no effect on anything as just wallpaper. Now, I've trained 40,000 drill sergeants in the United States Army to do positive psychology. And drill sergeants are, as you imagine them. They are tough and critical. And what they would say to Mandy is active destructive, which is, you know what tax bracket that prize is going to put us into?

That's a relationship destroyer. And some people say, well, what's for dinner? And that's passive destructive. Now, the only thing that works is active constructive. And its basis is that in our humble society, when we succeed, we don't brag about it, is water off a duck's back. And so the object is to put Mandy in touch with this great thing that's just happened to her. So the first thing you do is you have to show her that you understand what this prize was for.

So I said, instead of congratulations, dear, said, was it the black and white swan picture that you took at Blenham last year that won? She said, yeah, that was the one I entered. And I said, well, you know, that's the most moving picture of an animal I've ever seen. So the first thing I did was to show her that I knew what was going on. then the important stuff occurs. And that's to really put her in touch with this victory. And so I said, now, exactly what did the editor say to you on the phone, you know, verbatim. And so she rehearsed it, getting more and more excited as she did.

And they said, well, what do you think it is about your photography that could have defeated all these Pulitzer Prize-winning New York? You're Times journalists. She's very humble. She's British, so she's very humble as it is. She said, well, I'm pretty good with Gray. So I'm pretty good at using the nuances of gray to express emotion. Great. And I said, now, we homeschool our children and we teach them these things.

So I said, now, Mandy, how can you use this nuance of gray to teach the kids painting better? And even how can you tell me how to use it when I teach the kids literature? I said, let's go to the refrigerator and open that bottle of a dumb perignon that's been sitting there for a decade. So it turns out when you do that, it increases love, commitment, sexuality, and it decreases divorce statistically. But most importantly, it's a technical use of high sociality. social intelligence. So I think I know how to teach various techniques of social intelligence, but then there are people who, I think, for 50% heritable reasons, just have it. And most of us, like me, don't. And we need those techniques. You know the two words, Marty, that I took out of that

are specificity and curiosity. You were very specific in your praise, and you were very curious in the questions you asked her. And I think that is a great way to show anybody love, to show anybody that you care, to show anybody that you're interested. And if you want to be an interesting person, you've got to be interested.

And it feels like that was like a perfect example. of specificity mixed with curiosity. And then, of course, let's have a party, right? Let's go. You just want a big thing. We gotta celebrate, like, because it might feel weird if I want a thing and I start popping the bottles.

I want my wife Miranda to start popping the bottles, right? Like, that's how it should go when we win something. That's really cool. What a great story. Yeah, important for leadership as well. So we're not very good at praising and celebrating. as leaders. Why is that? Well, I think I have a funny view of leadership. Okay. Because of what both you and I do, we get to meet a lot of famous people. And I've met, you know, Nobel Prize winners,

generals, cabinet members, university presidents, and like, and they all lead in different ways. You know, they've been promoted to leadership for a huge variety of reasons other than social intelligence. The great problem for me of the whole field of leadership is it tells people, let's find out what the leaders are doing that makes them good leaders. And across my experience, different leaders do vastly different things. So for me, leadership is heterogeneous. And it's a wild goose chase to find a universal thing they do.

But I look at followership. And for me, there's something that followers have it common with a good leader. And in positive psychology, it's called firma, where P is positive emotion, E is engagement, R is good relationships, M is meaning and mattering, and A is a accomplishment. Now, in my life, what I do a lot is I measure perma in a huge variety of situations. But for me, followership that works is high perma. So my view of leadership is forget the techniques and look at who creates the most perma. For most the leaders who build perma, tell leaders they're accountable not only for the productivity of their followers,

but also for the well-being, the perma of their followers. And that's because what we found in the last few years is across companies, high well-being predicts high productivity. One additional question about grit, since that's how we started, even though, no, I didn't plan for any of this, but it's so cool when it happens. No, nor I. We're supposed to be talking about my new work agency. I have like five pages of notes.

These are not on it. Anyway, I'm just curious of how grit and agency, how are they aligned? Yeah. So let's talk about agency for a bit. So for me, agency has three different components. The first component is efficacy. And that's the belief that. that I can achieve a specific goal in the here and now.

The second aspect of agency and the one related to grit is optimism. And that's the belief that I can achieve that goal into the future and into the far future. And the third is imagination. And that's the range of goals that an individual can envision. Now, each of those works in a highly specific way. Efficacy works because it controls trying. So if you believe you can do it, you try. Optimism works by controlling persistence, maintenance, and grit,

particularly in the face of adversity. and imagination works by creativity and innovation. So the answer your question about grit is grit is one of those characteristics that feeds into high optimism and increases perseverance, particularly in the face of adversity. Got you. Okay. When I was reading about you, Marty,

a self-described born depressive and, pessimist who studies optimism. How does this work out? Well, depression and pessimism and happiness and optimism are too important to be left to happy people. Now, I was a born pessimist and a depressive, and I've had to invent and learn and use techniques to combat my own depression and pessimism. I'll just give an example, Ryan. I wake up at 4 in this, true. I woke up at 4 in the morning this morning. It said, oh, my God, having an interview with Ryan Walk at noon.

Look, I'm 84 years old. Ryan has a young person. He's up on everything, and I'm really out of it. I can't do this interview. Okay. So those are the voices I hear at 4 in the morning. the voices have never gone away, but I've become an expert disputer of those voices. That is, I treat them not as gospel truth, but as a rival, someone whose mission is to make my life miserable, and I argue against them.

So two things I did. One was 30 seconds ago, but the other was at 4 in the morning. I said, hey, wait a minute. I gave an interview last week with another famous interviewer, and it went swimmingly. I can do it. But most importantly, you and I started out this interview with a really good, spontaneous conversation about Angela Duckworth that I had. Neither you knew how I knew was going to occur, and it went really well. And I said to myself, I argued against it, hey, you know, were I.

on the same wavelength, there's no problem here, even though I'm 45 years older or more than Ryan, we're having a swinging interview. And so I've learned to argue against my most pessimistic thoughts. I think it really helps to hear you say that, because some could assume, oh, this dude invented positive psychology and optimism. Of course, it's probably because it's easy for him.

And yet you're still battling with this thing for decades. And it's a daily occurrence. And I think that speaks volumes to somebody who thinks, oh, well, this is just something I'm cursed with. Or I have to fight this like negative self-talk. Or I have to fight these things in my head that are telling me I'm not worthy or I can't do it or I have imposter syndrome or whatever it may be.

And yet you, the guy who literally invented this thing, still is a daily battle. Happiness does not come easily. Some people are blessed with it. It's a minority, actually. And the techniques of happiness and well-being don't come naturally. And they've had to be invented and tested rigorously. And indeed, a lot of my life has been about testing the anti-depressive techniques and the drugs

and testing the happiness techniques. Okay. I want to get back to agency. Oh, good. Well, I'm going to go down an area where I don't know what I'm talking about, okay? Like, not that I do with anything, but I probably know a little bit more with some of this stuff. Specifically, I love studying great cultures, cultures of teams, both sports, as you know from my background, as well as in business and really anywhere. Just a great culture.

And one of the lines I really like is when cultures have agency, they prehist. they progress, right? They improve. They get better. But when they lose agency, they stagnate. And I think that's like a big part of what this book is about. And to me, thinking of leaders who want to build cultures of people that have high agency, that's what we want, right?

One of the natural questions is, okay, where would we start? If you're an SVP of whatever at a Fortune 500 company in America and you're thinking like, I'm reading Marty's book. I don't know if we got the agency level that I think we needed to be in order to keep progressing. We might be stagnating a bit. Where would that person start? How would you get to know that a little bit better as well as then fix that, improve that situation? Well, before I answer that, let me say what this book is really about and what I'm after, Ryan.

And the reason that your listenership should read it, I'm founding a new field here. I call it psycho-history. It has two aims. The first aim is to look from culture and history and look at the way psychological variables, principally agency, change the course of history and change cultures. And the second is to use those tools to predict the future. Now, what the book does is it looks across cultures, across religions, at how much agency they have and relates it to progress. And what the book also talks about is how we can predict the future, both your own future with respect to depression, success, or even presidential elections, and how we can use what we found out about psycho-history. to change our future for the better. The presidential part was interesting,

going back some past ones and up to recent ones, when you're really studying the words they're using in this Dukakis bet. I thought it was funny reading about how there was actually some issues there because there's different speech writers from what he was saying and what he actually was. Can you go into this bet you made back in the day about Dukakis because of when you were

studying the actual language he was using in his speeches. Yeah, I'm happy to do that. And I also want to talk about Donald Trump. Yeah. Since I've spent a lot of the last month analyzing 8,600 of his tweets. But let's talk about Dukakis and presidential elections. So with one of my graduate students, Harold Zulow, we had looked at a century of presidential elections, and we had looked at the nomination acceptance speeches,

and we analyzed them for optimism. We have objective ways of analyzing for optimism, and now with AI, we've got super ways of analyzing for optimism. But anyway, we had found that by and large, the more optimistic candidate wins. And indeed, in 1984, I think it was, There were 13 candidates for president, six Democrats, seven Republicans. In January, we analyzed the stump speeches for optimism, and we put the results in a sealed

envelope and sent him to the New York Times to open it in May when the primaries were over. And we predicted that Michael Dukakis and George Bush would be the nominees. And it's the only time I've ever been on the front page of the New York Times, but we got it right and it was sealed an envelope. No nonsense. Well, I decided to put my money. There wasn't much of it. I had saved $17,500, my life savings to bet on the election. So I went to Las Vegas and it's illegal in the United States to bet on a presidential election for good reasons.

So I actually flew to Edinburgh and went to a betting parlor, got two to one on Dukakis. Dukakis' nomination acceptance speech was much more optimistic than George Bush's, George Bush, the first. And I came back and I said to Harold, do you want a piece of my action, Harold? I said, oh, I've got bad news for you, Marty. Ted Sorensen, who is Kennedy's speechwriter, wrote the acceptance speech. And I've been analyzing the press conferences of Dukakis, and he's much more pessimistic than Bush. And I lost $17,500.

But it gave me a lesson for this year's presidential elections. So, indeed, we try to predict who's going to win, and we do it by rigorous. analysis of optimism and pessimism in speeches. So we took the nomination acceptance speeches of Harris and of Trump, and they were about equal for optimism and pessimism. Now, contrary to what you might think, Trump, even though he's very dark, you think he's dark, because he cites in general four times as many negative events as Harris. But we just say, decided to look at press conferences, as opposed to set speeches. And so they're tied in early September, but through all of September and October, Trump gets

more and more optimistic. Even though it's dark, I'm going to solve these problems. The explanations for bad events are optimistic. And by November 1st, he's much more optimistic than Harris. We did the sealed envelope again, and we predicted, I think we were almost alone among pundits, that Trump would win and maybe buy a lot. And indeed, that's what happened. So this is relevant, Ryan, to the question of predicting the future.

So what's important about the field of psychohistory, this new field, if you can find effects of agency on historical events. And I go back to the Iliad and the Odyssey and then go through Western and Chinese history looking for the effects of agency on historical progress. We can take those lessons. And the basic lesson is that when efficacy, optimism, and imagination are high in a culture, in a religion, that's when you get progress. When they're low, that's when you get stagnation and regression. And the reason that's more than just an exercise in medieval Christianity, which I spend a lot of time on, but it's a lesson for the future. As in the Trump election and as in predicting success in the workplace, agency,

is a psychological state that causes historical change and therefore causes in the future, many historical trends that we're going to be concerned about. So I'm deeply interested in predicting the future and using psychological variables as predictors of a future. So I'm trying to think of the portable lesson for a leader outside of, in this case, politics. I get asked to go talk at a company offsite or even like a national sales kickoff, you know, and usually at the beginning of that before I go, there's either the CEO or the head of sales will get up and give their talk. What I hear most of the time is a ton of optimism, a ton of belief, very big stretch goals that

we're going to go crush those things. So it feels to me like everybody kind of does this, but I know for a fact, not all of those companies actually then follow through and hit those goals or accomplish the things the CEO or the head of sales is saying. So I just want to make it as portable and as useful as possible. It feels to me like the dumb down version, it gets you're the smart one. I'm not. But the dumb down version is, hey, man, just go be optimistic when you give a speech somewhere. Go say that we're going to crush these goals or I believe in you. We're going to go do it.

Like, we can accomplish big things. We're going to go to the moon, right? Not because it's easy because it's hard. Are you know, am I right there? Or like, what am I missing? After we predicted the Dukakis Bush result, I got letters from both Democratic and Republican national committees. We said, hey, how do you write optimistic speeches?

Yeah, of course. Okay. Well, funded by being apolitical and funded by, the National Institute of Health. I sent them protocols on how you score optimism and therefore how to write an optimistic speech. What we found over the next few elections was sheer bullshit. And people saying, I'm the most optimistic man in the world and the like. We basically couldn't do much because people were writing optimistic speeches, which were shallow. Now, Why does the CEO saying, we're going to crush them do anything?

And it's because it's shallow and people don't believe it and don't internalize it. So the question is not the verbiage that the leader uses, but to the extent that optimism, agency, has caught on into the psychology of the followership and the company. And so that depends on things like hiring policy and training in the company. So let me give you an important example. I was fortunate enough to be the lead consultant for the United States Army on comprehensive soldier fitness, which taught resilience and positive psychology to 40,000 drill sergeants over the course of the Iraq war. And one of the reasons we were able to do that is we were able to design a questionnaire about agency, optimism, efficacy that everyone takes on the first day of entering United States Army. This is not about the generals, it's about the followers.

So we had for 900,000 soldiers, their level of agency, optimism, catastrophes. pessimism, et cetera. And we followed them for five years. And the Army gives two big awards on the positive side. One is for exemplary work, and the other is for heroism. And in five years, 12% of the Army guess this. So the question was, could we predict in advance who was going to win these awards? And the answer was, from day one, we could predict it. And there were three predictors. The first was optimism.

The more optimistic soldiers were more likely to win the awards. The second was high positive emotion. And the third was low negative emotion, not being a complainer. Now, that reverts to your question about the CEO versus the company itself. So what's important here is that the people you hire should be, if you've got the choice, happy people. Optimists, high positive emotion, low negative emotion. And if you don't have luxury of hiring whoever you want,

And if you're stuck with a lot of pessimists like me, you want to train them in the techniques we found that move pessimism to optimism. There's one more thing, Ryan, we found with the Army, and that was the opposite of success. Could we predict catastrophe? Now, failure in the Army can best be described as post-traumatic stress disorder. So, again, and this is not a sample, we had everyone. in the Army, 75,000 men and women are deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. From day one, we've got their psychological profiles.

3,500 of them are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. Could we predict who's going to come down with post-traumatic stress disorder? And yes, there were two factors, one of which we already knew. and the biggest factor, and that is the worst to combat, the more the post-traumatic stress disorder. But the important psychological thing was catastrophizers are much more likely at every level of combat to come down with post-traumatic stress disorder. So we had six catastrophizing questions where catastrophization basically means when something bad happens to you, you get obsessed with the very worst that could occur.

And indeed, what we found is that the catastrophizers are more than double the risk at every level of combat for post-traumatic stress disorder. So here's the lesson for leaders of companies. As far as hiring goes, hire happy people, avoid hiring catastrophizers. and if you don't have a choice of who to hire, take the catastrophizers as a pessimist in your company and teach them the techniques of agency. That sounds like a huge lift.

I would like to skip that part, but I know that's not realistic. Let's go to that. So, all right, I take over a team. I can't fire everybody and only hire happy people. I got to do with it with what I can. How do you take someone who's a catastrophizer or a pessimist and train them to be more optimistic? Good.

Let me tell you a technique that works. It's called put it in perspective. I'll do it with your listenership right now. I want each of you to imagine the following. It's noon on Friday. and you get an email from your manager that says, come see me at four o'clock. Okay.

What are you thinking? Well, it turns out I know what you're thinking, because we're all born catastrophizers. We've got our Ice Age ancestors genes, and the worst catastrophizers are going to be thinking, And this is it, I'm going to be fired. Okay, those are the worst catastrophes. So here's the exercise we do.

Part one, four o'clock, you got this email. What's the very worst that could happen? She read my memo. It's awful. She hates it. And I'm going to be fired on the spot. We have people get into that. Okay?

Okay, part two. What's the very best that could happen at four o'clock? Very best? Well, she read my memo, and she really liked what I said about the advertising campaign, and I'm about to get a raise and be promoted on the spot at four o'clock. Okay? What's the most likely thing that's going to happen? Well, she read my memo, she liked it, but my budget was way off, and she's going to want to cut the budget. Okay, good. What can you do to plan for the most likely scenario? Well, I'm going to go over that budget again and justify part of it and cut the fat out. So we find when we put people who put it in perspective, they get a lot better.

that realistic predictions of what's going to happen. So that's one of about a half dozen techniques. We have that change catastrophization into a much more realistic perspective on the future. And the problem about catastrophization is it paralyzes you, fills you with fear, makes you helpless, and doesn't equip you for the future. by the way, I had this moment of gratitude. Like, I was raised in a home, especially my dad. My parents are both very optimistic people.

My dad's like the most optimistic person I've ever met. And the person I ended up marrying Miranda is in a dead tie with him for the most optimistic and upbeat and like positive belief, especially in me that I've ever met. And man, I'll tell you, it is really nice being around that. It's just, it's a nice feeling to get. to be around constant, not like in a way that's annoying. I'm just saying like just belief and like let's celebrate the good things. You mentioned earlier in the conversation.

I can't even imagine. I feel for some of my friends when I know they don't have that or worse, they have like the opposite end of that spectrum. I think that could just be soul crushing over the long term to be around the catastrophizer or the one who always finds a way to find the bad in all the situations. Even in my 80s, I'm still finding the importance of being married to an optimist. And by the way, statistically, if you're a pessimist, disaster is to marry another pessimist. And that's because something bad happens and you both see the worst possible interpretations of it.

So, indeed, I married a strong optimist. And the following thing happened to be about two years ago. Now, it so happens that even though I've been pushing positive psychology for about 30 years, I am a complainer. And the area in which I complain a lot is food and wine. So it turns out I know a lot about wine. I've taught wine, and I'm serious about food. But the problem about that is when I take my kids, my wife, my grandchildren, out to dinner, and the Somelier comes up with a bottle of wine, they duck

under the table. Are you a wine snob, Marty? I am capable of being wine snob. Okay. Sorry, go ahead. This is indeed a story about the cost of being wine snob. So my children are actually embarrassed by me when I turn back a bottle of wine justifiably. And after one of these occasions in which Mandy took me aside and said, well, you know, we just had this celebratory meal for the engagement of one of my kids.

And he ruined it by complaining about the wine. I realized, Ryan, in that moment, if Mandy complained as much as I did, I wouldn't want to be married to her. And in that moment, I decided I wasn't going to complain about fruit of wine anymore. And about two weeks later, we're out a good restaurant, and I order steak tartar. And the matri comes up and says, oh, I'm sorry, Professor Seligman, the machine is broken. A fucking machine. You don't make steak tartar with a goddamn machine. You take the beef and you shave it with a with a,

sharp knife. I'll have the smoke salmon, please. So I've actually learned in the last couple of years to stop complaining. Is that hard for you? Yeah, because I'm always thinking about, you know, this wine is not been stored well. You don't make a machine. Yeah, it's, the thoughts are always there. The thoughts aren't going to go away, but the behavior changes. And it's just like, catastrophicization and depression. If you're a pessimist, the thoughts are always going to be there, but there are plenty of things you can learn to do, decadastrophization, capitalizing on celebrating good events, arguing against your most catastrophic interpretation to change your behavior, if not with thoughts. One of the other tools you mentioned that I love that I've

implemented because I learned it from the coaches on my team, this idea of a gratitude testimonial. Can you tell me how this is a tool that helps you become a more optimistic person by showing your gratitude for somebody? Yeah, let's do it with your listeners now. Okay. Do the technique. I'll do it with you, Ryan. Okay. I want you to imagine someone who's still alive who did or said something for you that changed your life for the better. Okay. Got such a person in mind. I've got an assignment for you, and I want you to do it tonight.

I want you to write a 300-word testimonial to that person. It should have three parts. The first part is what they did or said for you that changed your life. The second part is what you did as a result of it. And the third is where you are in life now as a result of it. Okay. That's part one. Now, part two is I actually want you to deliver this in person,

either make an appointment to see her in Poughkeepsie or if she's far away, get a Zoom appointment. Much better to do this in person than that. by letter, then I want you to show up on her doorstep and read the testimonial. Well, we've done this with thousands of people now. The modal effect is both people weep. And then if you look systematically at well-being and depression a month later, people who have done this exercise are less depressed and have higher well-being, a very effective

exercise. Love it. I love the idea of taking the extra step of reading it to them in person. It might be a little awkward, but I bet by the end of it, both of you are so glad that you did it that way. It's one of the most effective techniques that I've ever come across. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One of your methods, too, was reading the minds of the dead, looking at history way, way back, and actually counting. Is this right? Did I read this right? You were counting agency words, like choose and compete, which were like good ones versus obliged or assigned, which were bad ones. Walk me through this study. Well, this is what I spend all my time doing. And now that I have Claude and Chat GPT, instead of having to do it all by hand, I can do it massively in the morning.

And in fact, just this morning, I was doing this with St. Augustine. So let me tell you about St. Augustine and medieval Christianity. My main hypothesis is that because for 5,000 years we have had writing, we can actually look at what people wrote, look at a whole era's what people wrote, and look at how agentic they are, how humanly agentic. or how divinely agentic. And then we could ask, how does this affect progress? So, St. Augustine 400 AD was the most important Christian philosopher.

And what Augustine believed set doctrine for almost 1,000 years. Well, before Augustine, the Christian philosophers were highly agentic. They believed you could become holy, you could do things to get into heaven, you could participate in your own grace. In 383, Augustine comes along and says, no, if you did something good, you've resisted temptation. It's only because of God's arbitrary grace. Now, historians have noted that for a long time, and indeed, after Augustine, we get the the Middle Ages. We get awful stagnation under the belief that it's all God, no human agency. Now, historians before this new field of psychohistory would just pick out the best quotes they

could find. Cherry pick them, quotes from Augustine. But now we can actually count the verges. We can look at Augustine, all the philosophers before, and count verbs like do, able, can, and the like. And even better now with AI, AI can read all of Augustine and give a rating of how agentic it is. So indeed, what I was doing this morning was counting verbs and using Claude to read the medievalists. And it turns out the upshot of this. And the reason psychohistry now becomes a real discipline is you can look across the

Middle Ages at progress measured by GDP, by population, by writing is about freedom, etc. And you can look at what quantitatively the leading intellectuals and writers were saying. And what you find is that when agencies, drops, as it does in Augustine, you get stagnation. When it picks up, as it does in 800 with Charlemagne, progress goes up. So that's behind my notion that we can predict the future by looking at agency. Man, that's wild. I mean, I think as leaders, the thing to think about is what are the actual words you're using? How are you helping create belief and agency in your people?

And then certainly looking at the hiring process and training and development, that is so critical if you're trying to build a great culture. One thing more you've got to do is you've got to measure your followers. You've got to tell your managers that, you know, you're responsible for the productivity under you. But we now know that agency and well-being are causally related to high productivity. So it's your job as a manager, not just to keep productivity going, but to increase the

well-being and agency of the people under you. And to the extent you increase well-being, happiness, and agency of the people under you, you're going to get promoted. To the extent you don't, your time is up. Perfect. One more question before we run, man. say you're surrounded by the people that you love. So Mandy's there, your kids, grandkids,

and everybody else, Angela Duckworth, other people are all around you. And it's exactly one year from today, okay? And you're busting out all the champagne and you guys are spraying it all over each other, celebrating like crazy. I'm curious, Marty, what are you celebrating? Well, for me, agency is a contribution to knowledge.

And my hope about the book agency is not particularly self-improvement here, but a new field of history and psychology will be taken seriously in which we measure and build psychological variables and use them to understand history. And then most importantly, change these variables for the better to increase future happiness and future productivity. So that's what I would celebrate. Talk about putting such a giant positive dent in the world, man. It is so cool. This is awesome. The book's called Agency, the Psychological History of Human Progress. No doubt this thing is going to help so many people.

I appreciate your team for sending over and let me get a peek. And just thank you so much for being here, Marty. I would love to continue our dialogue as we both progress. man. Well, you were really fun to talk to, Ryan. Thanks for the good interview. Thank you so much, man. We'll do it again. It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learning leader.com. Let me know what you learned in this great conversation with Marty Seleigman. A few takeaways from my notes. You got to argue with your pessimism. When your inner voice says, ah, you can't do this. It's not going to

work, you can't accept that. You got to dispute it out loud the way you'd argue with someone else who'd said something false about you. Marty, he has to do this daily. And this is the guy that founded positive psychology. The skills do not come naturally to everyone. These are things that we have to practice. And then celebrate other people's wins actively. When someone shares good news, don't just say, oh, nice, congrats, man, and move on. Get curious. Ask specific questions. Make them relive the best part. Like Marty talked about he did with his wife,

Mani, it was really cool. He calls this active, constructive responding. And it's one of the strongest predictors of whether a relationship thrives or not. And then do a gratitude testimonial. Think of someone who changed your life. Write them 300 specific words, what they did, how it affected you,

where you are now, because of it. Then go see them in person and read it to them out loud. Yeah, it might be a little awkward at first, but you'll both be glad you did it. It'll make them feel better. It'll make you feel better. And scientifically, this says it will raise your levels of optimism and agency. Once again, I'm going to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two. Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Marty Seleagman. And I think he'll help become a more effective leader because you continue to do that. And you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, subscribe to the show,

rated hopefully five stars, write a thoughtful review by doing all of that. You are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk you soon. Can't wait.