TRANSCRIPT 🔗
Chris DeSantis: I think the biggest deal and the the the revelation I will say to me about positive psychology where I hooked into it in the first place. I was actually I was coaching at Penn, right? And this was when they started the program, first of its kind in the United States. ⁓ Martin Seligman, who's a psychologist out of University of Pennsylvania, has written some big psychology books, ⁓ founded the program and he had written a book. That I read before I started called Learned Optimism. Now, I tell people this story all the time. Martin Seligman had ⁓ 30 years prior to developing a theory of learned optimism, had been responsible for something that I think has come into more popular usage now: learned helplessness. Right? He had figured out like you can learn to all hope and think like there's nothing I can do. This is a you know ⁓ situation. So I might as well just not try. But if that's true, then people can also learn the other side, right? Of that coin. People can learn to be hopeful. People can learn to be optimistic. And to me, it's just an example of what positive psychology tends to focus on is the fact that there's all these things that in other contexts we might start to think of as fixed traits. Like that's just, you know. They're just a really positive person. I don't agree. I I think that you can learn to do those things. The the the the the most recent one that I have really been iterating a lot on is I realize I used to think that this was just a trait of how people were. I used to think that, you know, kindness was just a trait of how people are. I don't believe that anymore. I think kindness is
Megan Devito: Mm-hmm.
Chris DeSantis: Is something that you can develop. And it changed the way that I viewed people in my life where I go, that person's really kind. I think sometimes we like deny all the work that went into that by being like, ⁓ they're just, you know, that's just how they are. No, no, no. No, no, no. It it it it takes work within you to develop that stuff. And it's possible ⁓ to to change so much, just in the same way you. know go in the weight room and you you do some bicep curls and you get, you know, muscle hypertrophy and the the muscles get bigger, the same is possible in your mind. You can train things and you can develop things and you can really, really grow into something completely different than than where you were at a different stage your life.
Megan Devito: Changing thought. That is a world-changing, like let's let's change the world thought. I love thought. Yeah. And that's the goal for everybody listening to this podcast is to go change your mind. Right? Like it is. We have to do it. But the idea that we can choose kindness and change how we react and who we are and all of that, that's that's the good stuff. That's what we want. I mean, whether it's athletes or anybody else, like it's ⁓ I think that the goal of coaching is to make everybody a better human for themselves, but for everybody too.