A 5-Year-Old Told Her Grouchy Father to Change, and He Did
Martin Seligman had spent decades studying pessimism. His daughter Nikki gave him a reason to change.
Hidden Brain · How to Make a Difference: Part 1Martin Seligman was pulling weeds in the garden with his five-year-old daughter Nikki. He was working grimly. She was having a wonderful time.
She danced and sang, threw weeds in the air, and ran around. Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, shouted at her to get to work.
Nikki walked away. Then she came back. “Daddy, can I talk to you?” she asked.
What followed changed his career. Nikki reminded her father that before her fifth birthday, two weeks earlier, she had been a whiner. She whined all the time. On her birthday, she said, she had decided to stop, and she had not whined once since. She said it was “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
“And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch,” she said.
Seligman later called it an epiphany. In that moment, he realized that she was right. He was a grouch, and he had been proud of being that way. As he put it, what a grouch does is he “sees everything wrong with what’s going on, criticizes it, and corrects it.”
He began to think, as Seligman put it, that “maybe any success I had had in life was not because I was a grouch, but in spite of it.”
So he resolved to personally change. He said he measures these things, and that he is a completely different person than he was 30 years ago.
He is not a grouch anymore.
Questions people ask
Who is Martin Seligman?
Seligman is best known for research on learned helplessness, the finding that people and animals give up when they learn that nothing they do matters, and later for work on optimism, resilience, and well-being. He has taught for decades at the University of Pennsylvania and helped found the field of positive psychology.
Can a person actually measure whether they are becoming less grouchy?
Yes. Researchers distinguish temporary bad moods from a stable explanatory style, the habit of seeing bad events as permanent, pervasive, and your fault. That style can be measured with questionnaires, and studies find it can shift with deliberate practice and cognitive techniques.