Seligman, Farley & Zimbardo
The club of past presidents in almost any organization, community or country represents not only significant brain power for the individuals who have achieved the role, but also the synergistic strength of their collective knowledge and experience.
Zero in on not just any organization, but the American Psychological Association (APA), founded in 1892, and now with 150,000 members, who gather annually to celebrate new data on the human mind.
When I listened to Marty Seligman, Frank Farley and Philip Zimbardo, all APA past presidents have a conversation this morning about the state of things, it felt as though the collective truths they shared was not their just their own. They represented the progressive and cumulative learning of the previous presidents of the APA. There was a sense that it was not just three of them on stage, but also William James, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Albert Bandura, and over a hundred contributors who have filled this role to take psychology to where it is today.
The conversation flowed like that of old school chums, or even brothers; comfortable, trusting and willing to dialogue openly, knowing they were on call to teach the past, present and future of psychology, but humbled by the responsibility and determined to represent the best of what psychology has to offer. There is great learning to be gleaned from listening to a clever conversation.
They talked about undoing the constructions of the past, overrating of the past and childhood, and imagining a future different from the past to live optimally. They discussed creating alternate futures, and that much is determined by how one interprets the past, present orientation and future perspective.
Thankfully, psychology is no longer based on the medical model of what is wrong, but instead on what is right and building on it. They talked about strengths, time perspective, Mount Everest, and sex on Sunday, bantering until they summarized with, ‘Start your life today, create your future’. They concluded that the key is to instill hope and dispel fear because future gazing is at the heart of being human. Seek hope and have positive expectancy, they said.
Not bad for a trio of leaders who have authored thousands of peer-reviewed papers.
It was unscripted, reflective, fully supportive and so natural that one could not help but acknowledge the great wisdom of this band of brothers. They represented learned, highly credentialed researchers who’s common bond is that each have served a lifetime of studying human behavior.
One could not help but think that Seligman, Farley and Zimbardo modeled human behavior optimally. They created amongst each other a perception of the closest achievable bond among us, that of family.
What a pleasure to experience the conversation and somehow with 10,000 APA conference attendees, I felt as though I was attending a family reunion, even in the midst of academia, with the family being one of those who deeply care about humankind.
