Dr. Richard Davidson

And we know that we all have a set of beliefs and expectations of ourselves.

And we know that at one extreme of the continuum there are people that have very negative beliefs and expectations of themselves.

And of course that's a prescription for depression.

But what's really critical for well-being is not so much changing the narrative, particularly at first, but it's changing our relationship to the narrative.

So that we can see the narrative for what it is, which is a set of beliefs and thoughts and expectations.

And then finally, the last pillar is purpose.

And purpose here is not necessarily about finding something grand to do with your life that's more meaningful and purposeful, but rather how can we find meaning and purpose in even the most pedestrian activities of daily living?

And we actually talked about some of this earlier, but can taking out the garbage be...

connected to our sense of purpose.

Cleaning the kitty litter.

And of course it can be, it just requires a little bit of reframing and that's a learnable skill.

There are really three things that we've discovered in this work that can be easily summarized.

The first is that flourishing is a skill, the second is that it's easier than you think and the third is that flourishing is contagious.

so that when you're flourishing, it's going to have beneficial impact on the people around you.

And our course, The Art and Science of Human Flourishing, is built on each of these pillars to give students not just an intellectual understanding, but an experiential

practice, a taste of what these pillars actually are.

One of the important insights that the course is built on is that there are two major forms of learning that we know from modern neuroscience.

One we can think of as declarative learning, which is learning about stuff.

It's conceptual learning.

The other we call procedural learning.