What We Focus on Grows

Psychology is half-baked, literally half-baked. We have baked the part about mental illness. We have baked the part about repair and damage. But the other side is unbaked. The side of strengths, the side of what we are good at, the side . . . of what makes life worth living. ~Martin Seligman

If you're a mental health professional, you're aware of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health) which is published by the American Psychiatric Association. It's the go-to resource for anyone attempting to diagnosis a mental illness.

Martin Seligman is a psychologist, researcher, and author who is often categorized as a "positive psychologist" in that he believes, as the above quote illustrates, that his profession has, essentially, focused too much on what it means to be mentally ill and not enough on what it takes to be more than merely mentally healthy. Along with his co-author Christopher Peterson, Seligman has published a Manual of the Sanities. In it, they list character traits that the mentally strong possess, including: creativity, curiosity, judgement, love of learning, perspective, bravery, perseverance, honesty, integrity, zest, love, kindness, social intelligence, team-work, fairness, leadership, forgiveness, humility, prudence, self-regulation, appreciation of beauty and excellence, gratitude, hope, humor, and spirituality.

Reading this list reminds me of the Ancient Greeks and their seemingly endless philosophizing over "the virtues," which are generally listed as justice, courage, magnificence, magnanimity, liberality, gentleness, prudence, and wisdom. 

Psychology is not the only profession prone to the habit of focusing on deficits while ignoring all but a few, often very narrow, strengths. Our schools are a case in point. A child may possess all of the virtues, but if, say, they struggle with math, that is where the child is compelled to focus in the name of not "falling behind." I was once told by a young relative that he never wanted his teachers to know anything about him, because, as he put it, "If they know what I like, they try to take it away and use it as a reward for good grades or something." Smart kid. His teachers thought he had a motivation problem, but he just wanted to be free to focus on his strengths, which he did with gusto. 

As Deepak Chopra puts it, "If a child is bad at math but good at tennis, most people would hire a math tutor. I would rather hire a tennis coach."

What if the purpose of schooling was to help children, from a very young age, discover those things they enjoy and those things at which they excel, be they the classic virtues, math, or tennis?

At a recent conference in Hanoi, fellow speaker Yong Zhao proposed that children be allowed to determine, for themselves, those things they enjoy and to discover those things at which they excel. "If you don't like something and you're not good at it, don't do it. If you enjoy something, but aren't very good at it, then that becomes your hobby. If you're good at something, but don't really enjoy it much, that's a job." But, he told us, when you find that thing that you both enjoy doing and are good at, that becomes your purpose. Or as Seligman puts it, that which makes "life worth living." What if that was the mandate for schools: to support children in this process of coming fully alive? 

We know, from psychology, that what we focus on grows. We've proven to be pretty good at focusing on deficits. There has never been a better time than right now to turn our attention to our individual strengths, to stop worrying about the made up benchmarks, about falling behind (behind what?), and instead focus on helping each of us get ahead.

This is exactly what happens when we let young children play.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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