Transcripts

Patricia B. McConnell PhD:Mike Carruthers:
For many people, happiness, it seems, is truly elusive.

Dr. Martin Seligman:
It's not as elusive as you think. It consists first of knowing what your signature strengths are, and then secondly, of deploying them as much as you can every day in your life.

Dr. Martin Seligman, author of the book Authentic Happiness, says true happiness is much more than simply eliminating the negatives in your life.

It turns out that if we eliminate all our negatives-and this, indeed, is what psychotherapy's been about for the past fifty years-the best we can ever get to is zero. That is, lack of depression, lack of anxiety by no means guarantees happiness. Happiness is something about zero.

And happiness is something more than the pursuit of pleasure. Dr. Seligman has exercises to prove the point.

One of the assignments is do something fun and do something philanthropic. When people do something fun, like having caramel ice cream, when it's over, it's over. When people do something altruistic, something very different occurs. One of my students, her third grade nephew called her and needed to be tutored in arithmetic. So, she spent two hours on the phone, tutoring him in arithmetic and she said, "After that, the whole day went better for me. People liked me more." One common strength of people has to do with kindness, and when people exercise that strength, they find a form of gratification that they don't get out of chocolate and shopping and television.

At somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.

When we want a dog to come to us, the human thing to do is to look right at them, call their name, and take a step forward. That actually stops dogs. That's like a traffic cop.

Dr. Patricia McConnell, author of the book, The Other End of the Leash.

If you want a dog to come to you, dogs want to go the way your feet and your face and your chest is pointed, so the best way to get a dog to come to you, ironically, is to turn and go the other way.

When humans greet each other, we look directly into the eyes of the other person.

And that's a friendly thing to do. But to a shy dog who's uncomfortable around people that she or he doesn't know, having someone stare right in their eyes and walk directly towards them, extending that paw out right towards their head, is very threatening. So a lot of dogs will hide behind their owners and some of them will even growl or bite because they're so appalled by the threatening behavior of this ironically friendly person.

A better way to greet a dog you don't know is…

Stopping and standing sideways and not making direct eye contact. I do a lot of work with aggressive dogs and I turn a little sideways, I slap my hand on my thigh, I don't look directly in their eyes. That tends to take the pressure off a dog. Then let them come to you. Let them come up to you and sniff your hand. If they don't want to come up to you, then they don't want you to pet them.

For transcripts and our free online newsletter, visit our website, somethingyoushouldknow.net. I'm Mike Carruthers and that's "Something You Should Know."