First Blog About Positive Psychology

I am Orkun from Sabancı University in Istanbul, Turkey. I am not a blogger normally but this will be the beginning to my blog because of my "Communication and Conflict Management" course which have the requirement of having a blog for all students. I am not sure about what to do in my blog to be honest because i never wrote or read blogs until now, but i will do my best by writing about the topics we discuss in class by linking these topics to other sources and ideas with my comments.

Today i will write about positive psychology. First of all, psychology is an ancient Greek word which means the discourse or knowledge of the soul. When we talk only about the psychology instead of positive psychology we see that people are ashamed of using this word or going to the psychologist who are treating the mental illness of people. Today's one of the most interesting discussion in our class was this issue. I think that it is normal to go to a psychologist if you are having some mental problems like we go to a doctor when we have an injury, but  most of people have negative intentions on psychology or psychologists. 

On the other hand, positive psychology is a theory which is using techniques to understand the positive, adaptive, creative and emotionally fulfilling aspects of human behavior. I found a video which explain the idea of positive psychology with more details.

An interesting example given by our professor about positive psychology was that different persons who are making pasta with the same ingredients have all different pastas from one to another at the end. If we relate this example to social life, we see that we are all living in a different way and we all have some different aims in our lives. What is matter here is to create a goal and focus in success. It is also related to our business life, when we appeal for a job we have to decide on what we are waiting from that job and than we have to chose our path according to our decision. We can make this decision according to money that we will earn, our qualities or abilities which will create our career or our feelings which will give us a meaningful life and more happiness. This decision reminded me an example from the tv show "How i met your mother". Marshall Eriksen, who is a fictional character studying law to be an environmental lawyer, began his career as a lawyer for a bank and later on he decided to quit for his dream job to pursue his dream of saving the world through environmental law and to make his life more meaningful. We see that positive psychology plays a big role in our decisions which are shaping our social and business life and as a result of this it brings out how much happy we are.