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Flourishing
At a time of deep crisis the notion of flourishing seems unimaginable. However, distinguished psychologist Maureen Gaffney believes passionately that not only is it possible for us to flourish, but in an increasingly uncertain world, it is essential that we plan to do so.
Flourishing is about achieving a deeper sense of well-being, meaning and purpose despite, and indeed very often because of, adversity. Indeed, Maureen Gaffney explains that adversity can be a positive turning point in our lives if we decide that our goal is not merely returning to the status quo, but having better lives. Her message is that we can do this and in this exciting and innovative book she shows us how.
Drawing on her vast experience of working with people and organisations, and on a fascinating body of recent research, Maureen Gaffney has written a gripping, stimulating and inspiring manifesto on how to flourish and why we need to. Learning to flourish - and helping others to flourish - is the most powerful and worthwhile investment we can make in our own well-being and in our country's future.
Flourishing is about achieving a deeper sense of well-being, meaning and purpose despite, and indeed very often because of, adversity. Indeed, Maureen Gaffney explains that adversity can be a positive turning point in our lives if we decide that our goal is not merely returning to the status quo, but having better lives. Her message is that we can do this and in this exciting and innovative book she shows us how.
Drawing on her vast experience of working with people and organisations, and on a fascinating body of recent research, Maureen Gaffney has written a gripping, stimulating and inspiring manifesto on how to flourish and why we need to. Learning to flourish - and helping others to flourish - is the most powerful and worthwhile investment we can make in our own well-being and in our country's future.
463 pages, Paperback
First published December 28, 2011
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361 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
March 15, 2014
This book is phenomenal! It is extremely well written and inspiring. It is one of those books where I ended up highlighting 1/3 of the book and I review those highlights again and again. It is very insightful and opens the door to so many topics dealing with personal well-being and growth. Inspired by this book I now have at least 10 new books on my to read bookshelf, e.g. on post-traumatic growth, optimism, focus, goal-setting etc.
July 14, 2014
I'm not usually a devotee of self helps books, but this book is potentially life changing. Lightbulbs popped in my head every few pages. Rather than glibly promote positive thinking, it explains why we think negatively and why we need to reinforce positive experiences to counteract the negative ones. Saying that no one drives you crazy without your cooperation, or that dwelling on a problem actually makes it worse, may seem like stating the obvious to some, but it is one thing to comprehend these truths logically and quite another to comprehend them with your gut. This book works at that gutter level. Skip the last chapter though, I felt that that didn't tie in well with the rest of the book.
July 20, 2015
I loved Maureen gaffney a other book the way we live now. With this book I got a lot of insights and valuable information but it took me 7 days to read because it was so sense with information some of it slightly repetitive. I particularly enjoyed the relationship and personality info as well as the first hand stories. All in all I got a lot from this book but struggled to get through parts of it.
January 3, 2024
"On my desk as I write are a small bowl of snowdrops and a vase filled with sprigs of daphne, a delicate flowering shrub. Both are bursting with life, the sap flowing freely, straining to fill every bud, stretching every leaf, saturating the air with scent, each its own unique blooming self. They are flourishing. Each of us too has the same instinctive urge to grow and thrive, to feel our life energy stretch and fill every corner of our selves, to reach some high point of self-realization. When we manage to do that, we feel happy."💫
"We mobilize our best self in response to challenge. Sometimes the challenge is positive — an exciting new opportunity, a sudden good turn in our fortunes that opens up new possibilities. But it is remarkable how often our best self is mobilized not in a situation of plenty or ease but in response to a crisis of one kind or another —a health setback, a failed relationship, a family emergency, the loss of a job, or a business crisis. Now, we have to rise to that challenge, to find a way to keep going, to turn things around.
While you have to deal with challenges of one kind or another all the
time, you only thrive when you own the challenge in a personal way. A crisis may be brewing for a long time or it can come as a bolt from the blue. It may take a while for you to fully appreciate what is happening. But there is always a particular moment when you decide to take it on and to see it through. That is the ‘kairos’ moment.
The Ancient Greeks had two words for time: ‘chronos’ and ‘kairos’. Chronos is ordinary time — the time of the day, the stage you are at in life, the way you measure how events unfold. Kairos is a deeply personal sense of time, a realization that this is the right time, the opportune moment to respond to something. It is the moment when, as philosopher Viktor Frankl describes it, you stop asking why life has thrown this particular challenge your way, and instead ask yourself: What is life now expecting of me?? That is a very profound change of perspective."
"When you take on a challenge, by definition you submit yourself to the demands of that responsibility. But, paradoxically, once you do that you experience a surge of inner freedom. That’s because the act of making the choice, of going for something, releases you to direct all your energy towards the target and frees you from ambivalence and anxiety. With the die cast, you feel more in charge of your own destiny, better able to manage yourself and to resist pressures from others, and more likely to judge yourself by your own personal standards.
The result is that you feel you are moving forward in a way that feels right, that you are operating out of your real and true self, that you are living your life, not some version of somebody else’s life. Hardly surprising, then, that when you experience this kind of autonomy you feel very happy.”
"Wisdom, he says, is about understanding the ‘fundamental pragmatics of life’, being able to link the lessons you have learned from very different domains in life; knowing something about the essence of the human condition and the ways to best manage it. It is a rich mix of practical experience; of insight about how people behave; of tolerance of other people and their opinions (mainly as a result of learning from your own mistakes); of recognizing the inherent complexity and uncertainty in life. It is recognizing the limits of your ability to understand and predict things and still being able to positively manage that uncertainty."
"The desire to grow and develop fully as a person is deep within our nature. But that need has been greatly amplified by two powerful and related movements shaping the world we live in. First, there is pressure like never before to take individual responsibility for our lives, to define for ourselves who we are, and what we want to do with our lives. We don’t ‘inherit’ a life any more: we are expected to make it for ourselves."
"The fundamental drivers of positivity and negativity in your life are emotions — how your brain reacts emotionally to the things that happen to you. Emotions are your instant decisions about what is important, so they affect every aspect of your existence. They determine what you pay attention to; how you think; the meaning you put on-events; and even what you remember. They affect how you make judgements of right and wrong; how you make decisions, particularly in complex situations; what you consider important and valuable; and how you judge risk. Emotions shape your intimate life, your relationships, the networks and organizations you work in. They mould your identity; galvanize you into action; determine which goals you work for, and what kind of life you have."
"The way the amygdala works — laying down emotional memories consciously and unconsciously; working by loose association with stored memories; and reacting as if the present were the same as the past — helps explain why childhood experiences, even forgotten ones, can continue to affect you well into adult life. A young child is vulnerable and dependent for its survival on its relationship with its parents and caretakers. Thus, experiences with your parents that aroused a lot of emotion — positive, but especially negative — are laid down in a particularly vivid way, as are the reaction patterns you had to those experiences. That is also why in adult life when you are confronted by people or situations that, consciously or unconsciously, remind you of one of your parents, or of significant childhood experiences, you may automatically react in the same way you did as a child."
"While each of these emotions operates differently, what they share is this: they trigger the urge to engage with life, to become pleasurably absorbed in experience, to be open, receptive and alert to possibilities. At the most basic level, the function of positive emotions is to encourage us to approach things, to engage with new things, new people, new situations, to rise to challenge and to keep going in the face of setbacks — key components of flourishing."
"When you experience a positive emotion, it opens your mind and your heart. It puts you in a more receptive frame of mind. It triggers patterns of thought that are more broad-ranging, flexible, unusual, creative and inclusive. When you feel positive, you can immediately think of many more things that you would like to do in comparison to when you feel negative. You can express feeling happy in many ways. In contrast, when you feel sad or unhappy, it is hard to motivate yourself to do anything except think about your troubles."
"No matter how intelligent and skilled you are, if you entertain serious doubt about your efficacy, it undermines your ability to accomplish anything."
"Positive emotions stretch your immediate mental space to include your longer-term goals so that you are less enslaved to the moment and more strategic about the future, less likely to be swept up by immediate emotions and perceptions, and readier to keep a more balanced perspective on how to react."
"You need to feel you are somebody and that your life matters. Much of this psychological work is done through creating a life narrative. Your overall narrative of “who I am’ is a combination of the story you tell yourself about yourself, the stories that important others tell you about you, and the stories you act out in your life.
Many of these stories about your identity are constructed around significant people and roles in your life — your parents, your siblings, your partner in life, your children, your friends and your colleagues. You create a particular ‘self’ in relation to each. These are the many ‘selves’ to which William James referred, and you may experience yourself quite differently in each.
All of these different stories and selves have been shaped by repeated interactions with others and most of the time a particular self is activated automatically. So, for example, in the presence of an authority figure, you may automatically activate the ‘me as daughter’ self. When faced with a challenge, you may activate the ‘me as high achiever’ self. The more often you activate a particular self, the more dominant it becomes, becoming your ‘typical self’. That is how your experiences of being loved or rejected, encouraged or criticized, get played out automatically again and again in your life — either helping you to flourish, or keeping you in a cycle of languishing.’ This life narrative can be profoundly shaken by major setbacks, and by loss. But, most importantly, it can also be rewritten in a way that helps you flourish under fire."
"A well-developed interest or hobby can provide you with a valued identity and an opportunity to be at your personal best — an identity that is not dependent on family or on work. You can be a different person, and sometimes that is a vast relief from those other workaday ‘selves’.
"In order to thrive, human beings have to keep setting and pursuing goals. At the most fundamental level, your brain is a machine designed to pursue goals and to monitor what progress you are making in achieving them. In fact, the essence of intelligence is the pursuit of goals in the face of obstacles. “Without goals,’ says Steven Pinker, ‘the very concept of intelligence is meaningless.”
"But what we say are our values are sometimes not the real values that motivate how we act. The real values may be hidden, even from ourselves. Most values — conscious or otherwise — originate from three sources: early experiences in the family, early experiences of personal success, and early experiences of loss or deprivation. It helps to clarify what your real values are if you ask yourself three questions.
1. When you were a child, what was the most reliable way to get your parents’ attention, love and respect?
2. What brought you your biggest successes, particularly in early adolescence as you tried to establish yourself as your own person?
3. What did you feel most deprived of in childhood and adolescence?
"If you reliably got your parents’ attention (positive or negative), approval and love by achievement, then achievement is likely to be high up in your value hierarchy. Or it may have been helping others, or being well behaved and conscientious, or always trying to please. As a child, you do what you can to survive — and your parents’ attention, approval and love are what you need to survive. Gradually, all these early survival behaviours become transformed into your values."
"One of the greatest obstacles to confident and successful action in any domain of life is ambivalence — simultaneously ‘wanting’ and ‘not wanting’ to do something. Ambivalence fatally traps your energy and generates a host of negative feelings — anxiety, guilt, resentment, boredom, annoyance at yourself. These feelings are reflected, in turn, in half-hearted action or inertia. Making a commitment, on the other hand, mobilizes all your internal resources to respond — including your will, your thoughts, your feelings, your memory, your creativity. It brings a sense of coherence and internal unity, as all your energies are now heading in the same direction."
"We can all too easily become trapped in a blur of ‘busyness’ that is disconnected from any vital purpose or intention, or we may feel trapped by inertia. We are all susceptible to feeling like a stick in a river — either caught up in an uncontrollable current, or stuck going round and round in a sluggish eddy. Having deliberate life projects provides us with a boat, complete with oars or an engine, which we can use to navigate the river and get to where we want to go."
"We mobilize our best self in response to challenge. Sometimes the challenge is positive — an exciting new opportunity, a sudden good turn in our fortunes that opens up new possibilities. But it is remarkable how often our best self is mobilized not in a situation of plenty or ease but in response to a crisis of one kind or another —a health setback, a failed relationship, a family emergency, the loss of a job, or a business crisis. Now, we have to rise to that challenge, to find a way to keep going, to turn things around.
While you have to deal with challenges of one kind or another all the
time, you only thrive when you own the challenge in a personal way. A crisis may be brewing for a long time or it can come as a bolt from the blue. It may take a while for you to fully appreciate what is happening. But there is always a particular moment when you decide to take it on and to see it through. That is the ‘kairos’ moment.
The Ancient Greeks had two words for time: ‘chronos’ and ‘kairos’. Chronos is ordinary time — the time of the day, the stage you are at in life, the way you measure how events unfold. Kairos is a deeply personal sense of time, a realization that this is the right time, the opportune moment to respond to something. It is the moment when, as philosopher Viktor Frankl describes it, you stop asking why life has thrown this particular challenge your way, and instead ask yourself: What is life now expecting of me?? That is a very profound change of perspective."
"When you take on a challenge, by definition you submit yourself to the demands of that responsibility. But, paradoxically, once you do that you experience a surge of inner freedom. That’s because the act of making the choice, of going for something, releases you to direct all your energy towards the target and frees you from ambivalence and anxiety. With the die cast, you feel more in charge of your own destiny, better able to manage yourself and to resist pressures from others, and more likely to judge yourself by your own personal standards.
The result is that you feel you are moving forward in a way that feels right, that you are operating out of your real and true self, that you are living your life, not some version of somebody else’s life. Hardly surprising, then, that when you experience this kind of autonomy you feel very happy.”
"Wisdom, he says, is about understanding the ‘fundamental pragmatics of life’, being able to link the lessons you have learned from very different domains in life; knowing something about the essence of the human condition and the ways to best manage it. It is a rich mix of practical experience; of insight about how people behave; of tolerance of other people and their opinions (mainly as a result of learning from your own mistakes); of recognizing the inherent complexity and uncertainty in life. It is recognizing the limits of your ability to understand and predict things and still being able to positively manage that uncertainty."
"The desire to grow and develop fully as a person is deep within our nature. But that need has been greatly amplified by two powerful and related movements shaping the world we live in. First, there is pressure like never before to take individual responsibility for our lives, to define for ourselves who we are, and what we want to do with our lives. We don’t ‘inherit’ a life any more: we are expected to make it for ourselves."
"The fundamental drivers of positivity and negativity in your life are emotions — how your brain reacts emotionally to the things that happen to you. Emotions are your instant decisions about what is important, so they affect every aspect of your existence. They determine what you pay attention to; how you think; the meaning you put on-events; and even what you remember. They affect how you make judgements of right and wrong; how you make decisions, particularly in complex situations; what you consider important and valuable; and how you judge risk. Emotions shape your intimate life, your relationships, the networks and organizations you work in. They mould your identity; galvanize you into action; determine which goals you work for, and what kind of life you have."
"The way the amygdala works — laying down emotional memories consciously and unconsciously; working by loose association with stored memories; and reacting as if the present were the same as the past — helps explain why childhood experiences, even forgotten ones, can continue to affect you well into adult life. A young child is vulnerable and dependent for its survival on its relationship with its parents and caretakers. Thus, experiences with your parents that aroused a lot of emotion — positive, but especially negative — are laid down in a particularly vivid way, as are the reaction patterns you had to those experiences. That is also why in adult life when you are confronted by people or situations that, consciously or unconsciously, remind you of one of your parents, or of significant childhood experiences, you may automatically react in the same way you did as a child."
"While each of these emotions operates differently, what they share is this: they trigger the urge to engage with life, to become pleasurably absorbed in experience, to be open, receptive and alert to possibilities. At the most basic level, the function of positive emotions is to encourage us to approach things, to engage with new things, new people, new situations, to rise to challenge and to keep going in the face of setbacks — key components of flourishing."
"When you experience a positive emotion, it opens your mind and your heart. It puts you in a more receptive frame of mind. It triggers patterns of thought that are more broad-ranging, flexible, unusual, creative and inclusive. When you feel positive, you can immediately think of many more things that you would like to do in comparison to when you feel negative. You can express feeling happy in many ways. In contrast, when you feel sad or unhappy, it is hard to motivate yourself to do anything except think about your troubles."
"No matter how intelligent and skilled you are, if you entertain serious doubt about your efficacy, it undermines your ability to accomplish anything."
"Positive emotions stretch your immediate mental space to include your longer-term goals so that you are less enslaved to the moment and more strategic about the future, less likely to be swept up by immediate emotions and perceptions, and readier to keep a more balanced perspective on how to react."
"You need to feel you are somebody and that your life matters. Much of this psychological work is done through creating a life narrative. Your overall narrative of “who I am’ is a combination of the story you tell yourself about yourself, the stories that important others tell you about you, and the stories you act out in your life.
Many of these stories about your identity are constructed around significant people and roles in your life — your parents, your siblings, your partner in life, your children, your friends and your colleagues. You create a particular ‘self’ in relation to each. These are the many ‘selves’ to which William James referred, and you may experience yourself quite differently in each.
All of these different stories and selves have been shaped by repeated interactions with others and most of the time a particular self is activated automatically. So, for example, in the presence of an authority figure, you may automatically activate the ‘me as daughter’ self. When faced with a challenge, you may activate the ‘me as high achiever’ self. The more often you activate a particular self, the more dominant it becomes, becoming your ‘typical self’. That is how your experiences of being loved or rejected, encouraged or criticized, get played out automatically again and again in your life — either helping you to flourish, or keeping you in a cycle of languishing.’ This life narrative can be profoundly shaken by major setbacks, and by loss. But, most importantly, it can also be rewritten in a way that helps you flourish under fire."
"A well-developed interest or hobby can provide you with a valued identity and an opportunity to be at your personal best — an identity that is not dependent on family or on work. You can be a different person, and sometimes that is a vast relief from those other workaday ‘selves’.
"In order to thrive, human beings have to keep setting and pursuing goals. At the most fundamental level, your brain is a machine designed to pursue goals and to monitor what progress you are making in achieving them. In fact, the essence of intelligence is the pursuit of goals in the face of obstacles. “Without goals,’ says Steven Pinker, ‘the very concept of intelligence is meaningless.”
"But what we say are our values are sometimes not the real values that motivate how we act. The real values may be hidden, even from ourselves. Most values — conscious or otherwise — originate from three sources: early experiences in the family, early experiences of personal success, and early experiences of loss or deprivation. It helps to clarify what your real values are if you ask yourself three questions.
1. When you were a child, what was the most reliable way to get your parents’ attention, love and respect?
2. What brought you your biggest successes, particularly in early adolescence as you tried to establish yourself as your own person?
3. What did you feel most deprived of in childhood and adolescence?
"If you reliably got your parents’ attention (positive or negative), approval and love by achievement, then achievement is likely to be high up in your value hierarchy. Or it may have been helping others, or being well behaved and conscientious, or always trying to please. As a child, you do what you can to survive — and your parents’ attention, approval and love are what you need to survive. Gradually, all these early survival behaviours become transformed into your values."
"One of the greatest obstacles to confident and successful action in any domain of life is ambivalence — simultaneously ‘wanting’ and ‘not wanting’ to do something. Ambivalence fatally traps your energy and generates a host of negative feelings — anxiety, guilt, resentment, boredom, annoyance at yourself. These feelings are reflected, in turn, in half-hearted action or inertia. Making a commitment, on the other hand, mobilizes all your internal resources to respond — including your will, your thoughts, your feelings, your memory, your creativity. It brings a sense of coherence and internal unity, as all your energies are now heading in the same direction."
"We can all too easily become trapped in a blur of ‘busyness’ that is disconnected from any vital purpose or intention, or we may feel trapped by inertia. We are all susceptible to feeling like a stick in a river — either caught up in an uncontrollable current, or stuck going round and round in a sluggish eddy. Having deliberate life projects provides us with a boat, complete with oars or an engine, which we can use to navigate the river and get to where we want to go."
July 5, 2020
A very insightful read.
A lot of useful information reinforced by some interesting experiments and research.
I’ve highlighted and underlined throughout. I believe this will be a book I will come back to several times.
A lot of useful information reinforced by some interesting experiments and research.
I’ve highlighted and underlined throughout. I believe this will be a book I will come back to several times.
September 28, 2021
brilliant!
November 8, 2023
Although insightful I found it hard work.
November 24, 2019
I genuinly loved every chapter of this book. It’s extremely well-written, in elegant and well-argued manner. I’ve found it very insightful, with relevant psychological concepts explained in a straightforward, yet engaging way. As you progress with reading, you slowly start learning about yourself and your unique experiences. There is a logically convincing explanation for every argument brought.
Some central topics of this book are:
- Economy of the Heart
- Importance of Attention
- Power of Positivity
What’s Flourishing?
It’s enduring a positive experience throughout your whole life. Gaffney outlines a 10-steps strategy to achieve it.Here are just a few key concepts that I’ve found particularly interesting on this journey:
In order to function normally in our personal & working lives we have to experience at least 3 positives to every negative. And if we want to flourish, be at our best, the positivity ratio needs to be ramped up to 5:1. If we fall below the 3:1 threshold, we will be trapped in a downward spiral of languishing and failure.
Positive and negative emotions are not the opposites - rather, they are relatively independent systems in our brain - our twin pillars of survival.
Based on our past experiences and habits, our brains are wired to experience certain emotions - fear, happinesss, gratitude, stress, anxiety.. If we experience too many negative feelings, the whole trick is to re-wire our brain and be open to positive thoughts & experiences - in this way our brain's plasticity will allow us to balance the positive and the negative. The only way to do it though is by remaining conscious and active in this practise.
Flourishing means understanding how different parts of yourself work and how to manage these most effectively to remain in harmony with your true self. Knowing what your true self is, is the first step. After guiding us through the 10 strategies leading to the nurturing life and optimal existence, Gaffney brings us back home to the Power of Optimism, leaving last word to David Landes:
„In this world the optimists have it, not bacause they are always right but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement and success. Educated eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.
The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a sceptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and define ends, the better to choose means.”
Some central topics of this book are:
- Economy of the Heart
- Importance of Attention
- Power of Positivity
What’s Flourishing?
It’s enduring a positive experience throughout your whole life. Gaffney outlines a 10-steps strategy to achieve it.Here are just a few key concepts that I’ve found particularly interesting on this journey:
In order to function normally in our personal & working lives we have to experience at least 3 positives to every negative. And if we want to flourish, be at our best, the positivity ratio needs to be ramped up to 5:1. If we fall below the 3:1 threshold, we will be trapped in a downward spiral of languishing and failure.
Positive and negative emotions are not the opposites - rather, they are relatively independent systems in our brain - our twin pillars of survival.
Based on our past experiences and habits, our brains are wired to experience certain emotions - fear, happinesss, gratitude, stress, anxiety.. If we experience too many negative feelings, the whole trick is to re-wire our brain and be open to positive thoughts & experiences - in this way our brain's plasticity will allow us to balance the positive and the negative. The only way to do it though is by remaining conscious and active in this practise.
Flourishing means understanding how different parts of yourself work and how to manage these most effectively to remain in harmony with your true self. Knowing what your true self is, is the first step. After guiding us through the 10 strategies leading to the nurturing life and optimal existence, Gaffney brings us back home to the Power of Optimism, leaving last word to David Landes:
„In this world the optimists have it, not bacause they are always right but because they are positive. Even when wrong, they are positive, and that is the way of achievement, correction, improvement and success. Educated eyes-open optimism pays; pessimism can only offer the empty consolation of being right.
The one lesson that emerges is the need to keep trying. No miracles. No perfection. No millennium. No apocalypse. We must cultivate a sceptical faith, avoid dogma, listen and watch well, try to clarify and define ends, the better to choose means.”
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 24, 2020
This book tells you exactly the things you wished you knew from the very start of life. The author used simple language and elaborate explanations to talk about the complexity of the human brain and how we can take this beautiful creation into advantage to make ourselves flourish in all aspects of life.
A very recommended read for everyone and anyone who’s looking for inspiration to take charge and upgrade your life, and to be a more efficient, positive human being as a whole! Very thankful to have come across this book :)
A very recommended read for everyone and anyone who’s looking for inspiration to take charge and upgrade your life, and to be a more efficient, positive human being as a whole! Very thankful to have come across this book :)
December 4, 2023
Very comprehensive and in-depth book with almost 30 pages of references alone.
In the first part of the book flourishing is defined ( as rising to a challenge and moving to achieve it) and explained in relation to the positive to negative ratio and the negative bias.
In the second part of the book 10 strategies to nurture a flourishing life are outlined in detail.
This part of the book is very detailed with good real life examples of the strategies in use.
Possibly too detailed for the average reader but an excellent book on the topic.
In the first part of the book flourishing is defined ( as rising to a challenge and moving to achieve it) and explained in relation to the positive to negative ratio and the negative bias.
In the second part of the book 10 strategies to nurture a flourishing life are outlined in detail.
This part of the book is very detailed with good real life examples of the strategies in use.
Possibly too detailed for the average reader but an excellent book on the topic.
July 6, 2021
Could not find any answers in this ??
July 27, 2023
Excellent advice underpinned by research and clinical practice. Positive and inspiring.
April 12, 2012
Could be framed as Dr Gaffneys Magnum Opus. A distillation of the past few decades of Positive Psychology research, and practical advice and activities suggested. The Ten Step framework for Flourishing (being in a state where positive experiences negate more inherently impactful negative ones) includes activities that are all largely solid and achievable. In fact, the sheer volume of information and strategies within make it a book that will become a source of ongoing reference.
March 3, 2012
A great insight into life and how we can be our best in all areas of it.
As ever, Maureen Gaffney is practical and descriptive and 'Flourishing'is one of those books worth dipping into in the future as a reference tool.
As ever, Maureen Gaffney is practical and descriptive and 'Flourishing'is one of those books worth dipping into in the future as a reference tool.
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May 2, 2012I'm surprised that i'm enjoying this book, as I find the topic too similar to all of the self-improvement stuff. However the book is contemporary and well researched and well structured, and helpful.
February 5, 2013
This was a very good book- it broke things down into reasonable bits so that the reader can really consider where they are, WHY, and what steps they want to take not just to get by, but to thrive, despite it all.
January 29, 2013
Not your typical self-help book. It's more a collection of the author's research and ideas on what it meant to flourish. I found it very helpful, and am going to go through it again to pull out what I need to apply in my life. Very well-written.
April 28, 2012
This book may have changed my life.It certainly gives a common sensical blue print for a better life. I amon my second read and it just perks me upto read a few pages.
August 11, 2012
I enjoyed this book, although I don't think there was anything especially new here. But I'm always looking for studies that show students how they can be successful. And this one had several :)
July 13, 2013
Very academic read for an audience who requires simplicity. I'd probably not recommended it to clients.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews