The Coursera Course. Part 1. Strengths and Flow March 8, 2020

A few months ago, my sister forwarded me a recommendation from her good friend Beverly about a free Coursera course on wellbeing.  It was taught by a young Yale psychology professor, Laurie Santos, and filmed in an informal living-room setting.  I admit I was skeptical.  I’ve read dozens of books on wellbeing, happiness, meditation, path-finding, you name it.  I knew the drill: exercise, cultivate friendships, meditate, have a gratitude practice, eat well and mindfully, sleep.  I was already doing all of that to one extent or another, and I was still in a funk.  What could this course possibly have to offer that I hadn’t already tried?

I decided to give it a go, and within the first week (of ten total), I was hooked.  That first week spoke to me, reminded me of what I need to be truly happy, and how what I need isn’t necessarily what somebody else needs.  That first week wasn’t about sleep, gratitude, meditation, exercise, friendships, or food.  It was about figuring out what makes you tick, and it did it two ways.

First, it directed us to an on-line strengths finder tool to tease out our underlying abilities.  I had done other versions of this self-examination previously with my coach Cathy.  So I wasn’t surprised that two of my top four strengths were curiosity and love of learning; these fell under the uber-category of “wisdom”.  But my eyebrows shot up by my highest two scores, honesty (#1) and zest (#2), which fell under a different category altogether – “courage”. Though I am scrupulously honest and contagiously zestful, I wasn’t really conscious of the impact of these strengths on the way I run my life.

Our assignment, then, for that first week involved doing something everyday that plays to these strengths, hopefully in new ways.  I was surprised by this directive, since I had assumed that the idea would be to bolster the things we weren’t so good at.  But here we were, prompted to reinforce, extend, and relish abilities that came to us naturally. I logged in a week of little experiments that pushed me to be even a bit more courageous and some that indulged my curiosity.

The second revelation came from a TED talk by Marty Seligman, a Penn professor who specializes in positive psychology.  I had read about Seligman’s work before, but I must have been particularly receptive to what he had to say at that moment.  He opined on three different types of happy lives: 1. The pleasant life: a life imbued with positive emotion, simply by being social and having as many pleasures as one can.  2. The life of engagement: what Aristotle described as Eudaemonia, or flourishing, a life of “flow”.  3. The meaningful life: the most venerable, using one's strengths in the service of others.

I immediately recognized myself as happiest when living the second kind of life.  I have known my whole life, well since 5^th grade anyway, that flow (though I didn’t know to call it that at the time) was my middle name.  In school, in science, in writing, in crossword puzzles, in art projects – flow happens when my mind is in a relationship with a problem that causes me to lose track of time completely.  

I was immediately happier – I wasn’t being told to turn down the dial, instead I was being given permission to be my full and authentic self.  And I recognized, too, that the kind of “retirement” that was going to work for me was not the kind of retirement that was going to work for others, and my failure was in trying to fit myself into a cookie cutter that wasn’t my shape at all.