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December 2008
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by Dara McCoy
 hat
is the meaning of life? Do our lives have purpose?
What is true happiness? Does the way we live affect our happiness?
How do we achieve the good life? Scholars of philosophy, religion,
and even psychology have mulled over these questions through the
ages. Mark Hébert, Austin College associate professor of
philosophy, had to consider those questions from a new perspective a
few years ago when he became director of the Austin College Lilly
Theological Exploration of Vocation Program, which is focused on
discovering vocation or “calling” in life. The philosopher, usually
concerned more with the abstract and theoretical, found himself
leading students in a program designed to find practical and
applicable answers to these philosophical questions.
Like counterparts across the
country, Austin College designed its Lilly program to look at
vocation beyond the exclusivity of religious calling. “When I
became project director, I was puzzling about how to help students
discern their vocation,” Hébert said. “Like I’m supposed to lay
hands on them and say, ‘You are a mortician’?”
Hébert began looking at
“positive psychology” — covered extensively by Martin Seligman in
his book Authentic Happiness, rooted in Aristotle’s
philosophical treatises on ethics and “the good life,” and similar
to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s ideas on self-actualization — and
what other great thinkers have said about the connection between
what kind of lives individuals lead and their level of happiness.
Hébert found that positive psychology was making strides in
identifying methods to describe and outlining the practical
application of the good life. (See “The
Happiness Formula”.)
Positive psychology’s findings
indicate that a key component of individuals’ happiness with life
depends on what they do with that life. Seligman believes that
virtuous voluntary actions have a more positive impact on happiness
than pleasurable voluntary acts. He and a colleague studied major
religions, philosophical texts, and cultural wisdom seeking common
themes about human virtue. From those virtues, they developed the
idea of signature strengths and a survey for identifying them.
Drawing on this research, Hébert
believes that one of the first steps to finding a vocation is to
discover individual strengths and learn how to use those to best
advantage in life. Exploration through hands-on experiences in work
settings is at the foundation of Austin College’s Lilly program,
which awards 50-60 stipends each summer to fund student-designed
internships. The awards are made in the spring term and all Lilly
interns attend a summer workshop to take Seligman’s strength surveys
and discuss the results and situational potentials for those
strengths. Students also take part in a fall reflection course
following the internship to examine with other students how their
expectations of themselves and their interests and strengths
materialized in a real-world setting.
“The good life is knowing what
your gifts are and organizing your life in such a way that you can
draw on them in your work, family, and relationships,” Hébert said.
“The meaningful life is all of that, with the added stipulation that
you’re doing it in the service of something larger than yourself.”
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HOW THE GOOD LIFE CAN
BE YOURS
While
positive psychology offers a happiness formula, the good life
remains a very personal endeavor. The surveys that Seligman and
other organizations have developed to identify signature
strengths are simply tools to assist individuals in the pursuit
of happiness. What people do with their strengths remains
extremely personal.
“Each person is responsible
for discovering what a meaningful life looks like for her or
him,” said Keatan King ’09, a 2007 Lilly intern who
determined her vocation would be in full-time ministry following
her experiences with Manos de Cristo (Hands of Christ), a
non-profit organization serving the Latino community in Austin,
Texas. However, Keatan found during her internship that a social
services agency was not the key to her good life — an outcome
just as important for students as affirmation of a direction.
Through the pre-internship workshop, Keatan discovered that
church ministry might be more in line with her interests and
strengths. “For me, a meaningful life can be found in the
combination of being where you are needed and doing what you
love,” she said.
Those summer internships may
take place in students’ hometowns, across the country, or around
the world. Casie Luong ’10, a music major, spent a summer
2008 Lilly internship serving 11- to 18-year-old girls at The
Little Rose Warm Shelter in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam,
established in 1992 in response to human trafficking. Luong, who
is of Vietnamese descent, found that her strength of
connectedness helped her build relationships with the girls whom
she taught piano and English, with her coworkers, and with a
culture and family she hadn’t seen before this first trip to
Vietnam. “It was so crucial for me to get to know those girls
and my workplace,” she said. “It was one of the things that gave
me the most fulfillment.”
Casie Luong and girls at the Little Rose Warm
Shelter
Luong isn’t sure if she’s
obtained “the good life” or not. “It is a continual process, and
as a result of my internship, I am just beginning to recognize
some components of a good life, such as the importance of roots,
influence, learning, and discovering more things about myself,”
she said.
Such a testimony is exactly
what Hébert hoped would be accomplished through the Lilly
internship program: to provide more opportunities that expand
the breadth of knowledge and wisdom available to Austin College
students as they seek to educate their minds, find their
strengths, and enrich their lives and the lives of others.
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 In The Happiness
Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt describes the “happiness formula”
utilized in Positive Psychology. Accounting for the fact that
research does support that some people are naturally happier
than others, happiness (H) equals the “biological set point (S)”
a human has, combined with life conditions (C) and the voluntary
activities (V) a person does (H=S+C+V). The good news is that
two of the three components of happiness (C and V) are things a
person can either control or enact some change upon.
The main cog in the Positive
Psychology movement is that people have the power to do
something about their level of happiness. “We have a tendency to
view happiness as a passive sort of thing; it happens to you or
it doesn’t,” Hébert said. “Yet, happiness isn’t totally out of
your purview. There are things you can do and practice, but it
takes effort, time, and energy to achieve an enduring kind of
happiness.”
Researchers discovered
several common characteristics when studying self-described
“very happy” people. The characteristic most malleable by
personal effort had a lot to do with the voluntary activities
people undertake in their lives. A key component of a person’s
happiness with life depends on what they do with that life.
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December 2008
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WHAT IS TRUE HAPPINESS?
In Authentic Happiness,
Seligman writes that virtuous voluntary actions (a specific sort of
V in the happiness formula) have a stronger and more positive impact
on happiness than pleasurable voluntary actions. Seligman and a
colleague studied major religions, philosophical texts, and cultural
wisdom searching for common themes about human virtue. From those
virtues, they developed the idea of signature strengths and a survey
for identifying them (visit
www.authentichappiness.org to take Seligman’s signature
strength test).
--Mark Hébert, Austin College Associate Professor of Philosophy
Their efforts resulted in
identifying six core virtues — 1) Wisdom and knowledge; 2) courage;
3) love and humanity; 4) justice; 5) temperance; and 6) spirituality
and transcendence — all extolled by ancient wisdom from around the
globe. “It turns out that there are a bunch of features of these
(good) lives that are really consistent with what a lot of great
religious traditions have talked about,” Hébert said.
To test his theory, Seligman
assigned his students to spend one day doing as many pleasurable
activities (getting a foot massage, eating a hot fudge sundae, etc.)
as possible and record the effects that day had on their happiness
level for that week. Then, students would do spend one day doing
acts of kindness and again gauge the effects.
“Many students even said their
good feelings continued on into the next day, which nobody said
about eating ice cream,” wrote Haidt, who conducted the same
experiment with 350 of his own students. “When well-being comes from
engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with
authenticity,” writes Seligman.
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