Lecture #2:
Five Pillars of the Good Life
by Darcy A. Santor
This second lecture will introduce you to Martin Seligman’s psychological theory about wellbeing, called PERMA. This theory argues that there are five distinct domains that contribute to well-being. The more you have, the better off you will be. Large-scale studies support this view that well-being predicts performance and success in many different areas of life, including both school and work. Most of us emphasize some domains more than others. For Seligman, this represents a great opportunity, namely to discover new sources of well-being that you may have overlooked or purposely downplayed in the pursuit of success.
In this lecture, you will also learn about two different types of stress, namely stress as worry and stress as load, each of which requires a different set of strategies to manage effectively. If you don’t manage your workload, managing your worry will be very, very difficult and usually not enough. In fact, most of the skills you will learn and acquire in this course work to reduce either your stress as load or your stress as worry.
Resources: Please download the worksheet and complete both the surveys and the worksheet before the next lecture.
