What’s the prescription for positivity? Interview with Dr Suzy Green 

Dr Suzy Green is a Clinical and Coaching Psychologist and Founder & CEO of The Positivity Institute, a Sydney-based positively deviant organisation dedicated to the research and application of the science of optimal human functioning in organisations and schools. She is a leader in the complementary fields of coaching psychology and positive psychology having conducted a world-first study on evidence-based coaching as an applied positive psychology. Suzy has published over twenty academic chapters and peer reviewed journal articles including the Journal of Positive Psychology. She is the co-editor of Positive Psychology Coaching in Practice, Positive Psychology Coaching in the Workplace and The Positivity Prescription.   

Suzy lectured on applied positive psychology as a Senior Adjunct Lecturer in the Coaching Psychology Unit, University of Sydney for ten years and is an Honorary Vice President of the International Society for Coaching Psychology. Suzy is an Honorary Visiting Professor at the University of East London and holds Honorary Academic positions at the Centre for Wellbeing Science, University of Melbourne, the Black Dog Institute and she is an Affiliate of the Institute for Wellbeing, Cambridge University. Suzy is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for Coach Hub, a leading global coaching technology platform. Suzy is an official ambassador for the Starlight Children’s Foundation, and she maintains a strong media profile appearing on television, radio and in print.   

Q: Maybe we can start with understanding a bit about you and your personal journey with positive psychology, and what made you interested in it as a field of study?  

Suzy: Absolutely. I mean it’s been a bit of a journey, Marie. So, I actually left school when I was 16, and no one in my family had gone to Uni, so it wasn’t really expected. I guess I was fortunate to have someone inspire me to go back as a mature age student. Which I did, I think at about age 25-26. During that time, I had two children, so my degree was sort of elongated. It took me, I think, eight years and two children.  

But I guess even before I started the degree in my early twenties, I started reading some self-help books. You know, I think just looking for solutions to the struggles that many young people have, particularly in their early twenties and thinking about what life might look like for them and what their career might look like. And I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I’d been doing administration and secretarial work. I was a damn fine secretary.  

I wasn’t really challenged enough, so I was reading a lot of self-help books and really loved them. And I guess then, going into psychology, I became more intrigued about human behaviour. And I loved my psych studies. I knew from the very first lecture that I was going to make it right through to the end. Something went click in my first lecture. And it’s been the best thing that I’ve done in my life. Besides, my Children! Clearly. 

It’s great to be on a career path, something that I absolutely love, and over the years have come to realise that this is my calling. This is exactly what I’m meant to be doing. And I’ve been laughing and reflecting on my school reports in my year 7 to 10 and every single one said, “If Susie could just stop talking…” 

Now I realise that was my strength, and I’m absolutely playing to my strengths now. So, when I started my psych, it really in many ways confirmed some of the self-help stuff. There is a lot of science underpinning some of the ideas that float around in the self-help section. I became, really, I guess, committed to the science. Because I’ve got curiosity and love of learning as two of my top strengths, I love to read really broadly. And then when I work on a project, like I’m doing a quite a few positive leadership projects at the moment, it gives me a chance to go back and pull out the mind of the leader and read more deeply on mindful leadership or other aspects of positive leadership. 

So that’s sort of that’s my journey. And I intend to be on this for quite a while longer, and I’m a big advocate of positive ageing. I feel very, very privileged and very blessed to be working in this field.  

Q: I’m just going to take us off course already because you mentioned positive ageing, can you just give us a quick, brief description of what that means? 

Suzy: There’s been quite a few different studies. One of the biggest ones is the Harvard Study of Adult Development that followed Harvard graduates right through. I think it might even still be going, and they looked at a significant number of factors that might impact both physical and mental health. And there are a lot of factors. But the one that had the biggest impact was positive relationships, the quality of our relationships. It was a bigger predictor of wellbeing above and beyond even [quitting] cigarette smoking.  

Positive relationships had the most significant impact on our positive ageing. How well we age, both physically and psychologically. And there’s also some interesting studies. Professor Ellen Langer, she did great studies, you might have heard of called counter-clockwise where they took, and I think it was men again. They took them to retreats, and they set those retreats up as if they were in the fifties or the sixties. There were two groups. One group of men were asked to just reminisce and reflect on what it was like to be 50 again. The other group were given very explicit instructions to, “as much as you possibly can believe you are 50. As much as you can.” They didn’t have porters take their bags. Some of them had come from homes where they had been cared for and all of the caring was taken away, and they had to engage as actively as they can, as if they were 50 again. And both groups at the end of 10 days – that’s a pretty short period of time – reported significant increases on both physical and mental health, even to the point that their fingers were longer because their arthritis had settled down. And so, their fingers straightened out. Now, it’s had some critique because it hasn’t been replicated. But to me, I like to sit at the edge of research and think, “Okay, it wasn’t a perfect study, okay, it wasn’t replicated, but there might be something in here and let’s see where the research takes us into the future.” 

And I think that’s a really important fact because there’s also been a few studies in recent years that have actually been refuted that have said, well, this is what we thought but now this research is really questioning that. So, replication in science is really, really important. And whenever I quote a study, I always say there’s been one study or there’s only been two studies, because I think we need to be mindful of that. Also because I’m primarily a practitioner. I’m a big believer in having a willingness to experiment, you know?  

Q. So we do also like to break down barriers and stigma. And there is obviously still a lot of barriers that we do need to break down in our society and around the world. If you don’t mind me asking, would you share your first personal experience with mental ill health or experience with someone close to you?  

Suzy: Yeah. Look, I think in my family… And it’s so interesting, I think the older I get, I guess, for everyone. You look back and you see things differently. I mean, even every decade I look back at events and I look at them slightly differently, so I find that in and of itself really interesting. 

But I, as I said, I started training as a psychologist in my twenties, and I had two small children in my twenties. And my first job was at a psychiatric clinic, and the psychiatrist gave me particularly patients with high levels of anxiety. And he said, one of the best things you can teach people with anxiety is progressive muscle relaxation, learning how to consciously tense and relax muscles. Because when you’re anxious, you often hold a lot of tension in your body, and that can cause physical pain, migraines, a whole range of physical effects. And so, he taught me and then I taught my clients how to do progressive muscle relaxation. And during that time, I became a much more relaxed person. And I hadn’t even graduated, like I had started my psych studies, and they do talk about “intern phenomena” or something where you start diagnosing yourself.  

You know what? For some bizarre, delusional reason, I did not see that I had anxiety. Now that I look back I’m like, “Oh my God, I had really high levels of anxiety”, but I think I managed it pretty well. I don’t exactly know how I did that. I probably did that via pure avoidance. I would say up until I learned the skills as a psychologist. Because if you avoid something, you avoid putting yourself in those anxiety producing situations. But you’re basically training your brain to believe that it is a dangerous situation, and it just confirms, or it just keeps the anxiety going. So, in fact, our way to treat anxiety is to feel the fear. And there’s many different ways of graded exposure.  

They used to throw you in the deep end. That’s that saying you know. If you had a dog phobia in the fifties, they would put you in a room full of dogs and what they found was that that backfired for many people. And so, the research then confirmed that a graded approach, graded exposure is the most helpful way. But I guess what I’m saying is, then I started to look back. I didn’t really know my grandmother that, well, she passed away when I was quite young, but I started hearing stories about how she was a phenomenal pianist. She actually used to play in the silent movies back in the 1900’s or something like that. But my mom tells me this story of how she would never play in front of the family and there were five kids, and she would only ever play when the children were out. And as I started to learn about anxiety disorders, that’s a common experience. People sometimes don’t like to write; they don’t like to eat in front of others. And then I started to think perhaps my grandmother had quite high levels of anxiety. And then my mom, God bless her, she’s 95. She’s been a nail biter her whole life.  Very sort of, you know, she’s got to be on the move. She’s got to be doing things. She can never sit down and be slow. So, I can now clearly see the generational transmission, if you like, potentially genetic transmission.  

So, yes, I absolutely think that that was probably my first experience, but not really realising it. And now most of my career I’ve been ridden with anxiety. Most people wouldn’t know it. In fact, I just posted on Instagram on the weekend a picture of me presenting, and I’ve presented for 20 years, right? Most people would not know, but up until probably the last four or five years, it seems to have gone. It really seems to have gone away. I would say that’s due to just brain maturation and the ageing process, learning that things are never generally as bad as… or the fear that we have never comes to realisation. I’m also, I’m much more equipped now and I’ve habituated. So, I’ve done so, so many of them now that I don’t really worry anymore. And I know that even if I’m not prepared, I can still talk about stuff because I’ve got so much to say. 

So, it’s interesting nowadays. Most people understand depression and increasingly anxiety, but for many, many years we didn’t talk. Well firstly, we started talking about depression, and now more and more people are talking about anxiety. 

Q: You talk a lot about thriving and flourishing, which are relatively new terms over the past few years.  Can you help explain the difference between, say, mental ill-health and then languishing and then thriving or flourishing?  

Suzy: Yes. So as a clinical psychologist by profession, we were trained in the diagnosis of symptoms and disorders, and there’s a textbook called the DSM five, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, version five. Which outlines all of the various psychiatric and psychological disorders. So as psychologists, particularly since the Second World War, we’ve been able to diagnose. And really, it’s been about having a shared language so professionals can talk to each other. There has been a debate for many years though, around this categorical versus the dimensional, because it’s not black and white people have various manifestations of, I guess, symptoms if you want to call it that.  

So, I just want to reiterate. It’s not always categorical. We’re often looking at a dimensional approach. But when it came to wellbeing as a clinical psychologist, I didn’t have any lectures on wellbeing. It was really all about mostly mental ill-health, those disorders and about, I guess, the negative emotions that even now we realise that negative emotions can be positive. Say, for example, anger when used appropriately, it’s assertiveness to stand up for injustices for example. Whereas now we have a much better idea about what psychological wellbeing consists of.  

So again, there’s still a bit of debate. There’re a few different theoretical frameworks a few different models that are existing out there. But pretty much, most of the researchers agree, for example, that someone that is flourishing is experiencing more positivity or positive emotions like joy and gratitude and awe and elevation than negative. We don’t know exactly what the ratio is. There’s been some debate over that, but we generally know that most people are on a day to day or week to week or month to month basis, having more positivity than I guess fear, anger, sadness, for example. But it’s not as if someone that’s flourishing… I am flourishing right now. I would still be, you know, perhaps angry if something happened. I’d still be anxious if I was thrown out of my comfort zone and I wasn’t expecting it. 

So, there’s a fairly agreed set of ideas around what makes for a flourishing life. And if we take Marty Seligman, who’s the founder of Positive Psychology, his PERMA model. His theory and model suggest that people who have high levels of positive emotions, engagement, are in that flow state a fair amount of the time. We are using our strengths on a day-to-day basis. We have positive relationships, quality, not necessarily quantity. We have a sense of meaning and purpose, and we have levels of accomplishment that don’t detract from our wellbeing.  

And that’s a really important point, because more often than not these days we’re seeing achievement and performance undermine wellbeing. When in fact we really want it to support wellbeing. So, that’s sort of a snapshot of wellbeing. Most of us actually are moderately mentally healthy, a couple of large studies suggest, which is not bad.  

Really, we want to flourish as much as possible, we might dip in and out of moderately mentally healthy or languishing. Ideally, we’re not going to spiral down to a clinical disorder. But languishing could potentially be a sub-clinical depression. So it may be that your mood is starting to drop, and if you don’t address it, then it could spiral down to depression. But languishing and, interestingly, Adam Grant, who’s an organisational psychologist, very well known. He wrote a blog last year, which was entitled, Languishing: The Emotion that We’ve All Been Feeling [There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing ] or something, or the Word for 2021, that’s how we’ve been feeling. [There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing] 

So languishing is really lower levels of psychological wellbeing and not mental illness, but still potentially could spiral down as I said.  

So, flourishing is high levels of mental health and wellbeing and low levels of mental illness and languishing is sort of in between. Ideally, we want to try and pick ourselves up as much as possible for high levels of mental health and wellbeing and low levels of mental illness and psychological distress.  

Q: You mentioned before that there are quite a few studies that say on average our mental health is good. So, does that mean that you can be flourishing without putting any specific effort into being happy or does being happy or having good life satisfaction and thriving and flourishing does, does that take work?  

Suzy: It’s really interesting, isn’t it? Because in… I wouldn’t just say positive psychology but psychology generally, the discussion has really been around the power of the environment and the power of the context. Social psychology has always acknowledged, I guess, the power of the environment. So has organisational psychology. But, you know, in my work as a clinician, people would come to me and they would have a variety of external challenges, circumstances, environments going on. Now, in some cases, we could change those situations. 

We could leave the toxic job or the relationship or whatever. In some cases, people would say to me, I can’t leave that job, you know Suzy I need to pay my bills or whatever. So, we absolutely know that our context in our environments can prime us for wellbeing or can absolutely undermine wellbeing. So, first and foremost, I guess I just want to acknowledge that that’s a really big discussion right now. Through Covid, I was called in on many occasions to equip people with resilience and mental toughness skills, and absolutely, that’s the work that we do. I absolutely believe that we can, and we should be equipping people with the skills. But even with the skills, if you’re in a toxic environment, the skills aren’t… they might help you just survive if you’re lucky. But that environment and the people around you are still going to have an effect on your wellbeing.  

So, we ideally want to try and create environments, workplaces, schools, families, communities that prime or promote wellbeing and at the same time equip people with the skills for when, like we experienced in the last two years, when suddenly we can’t go into the workplace and we’re stuck in a small environment with nobody around us. So, we still need to have the skills to cope with life’s challenges.  

But we also need to be very mindful around our situations and ask ourselves, “are there any tweaks I can make?” or “how much control do I have?” If I’ve got some control, then go ahead and change your environment. Open the blinds let the sunlight in, whatever you can bring in pot plants, you know. We know pot plants prime for wellbeing. So, whatever you can do, you should do. But sometimes, as you know, we’re in situations that we’d rather not be in. But unfortunately, we don’t have 100% control over those situations.  

Q: We’re learning so much more about how to live the good life or increase life satisfaction or subjective wellbeing or happiness levels. And yet we’re still seeing a decline in mental health. Or an increase in mental ill-health and higher levels of depression, anxiety. Covid aside, we were already seeing that trend. What do we need to do to address this global issue? How can we address that mental health crisis? 

Suzy: Yeah, it’s such a big one, isn’t it? The European Positive psychology conference is on in June. I’m not sure if I’m going to get there this year, but there’s going to be a big focus on using positive psychology to create positive societies. A wonderful book by my colleagues is called Creating The World We Want To Live In: How Positive Psychology Can Build a Brighter Future is the name of the book, and I’ll give it a plug because it’s a brilliant book and it looks at all aspects of our lives. It looks at positive media, it looks at positive society, as I said, positive schools. And it looks at how could the science of positive psychology potentially inform and create more thriving context? 

I think it’s a really difficult one because there are so many variables that impact on wellbeing. We know, for example, that when people have high levels of autonomy, they are more likely to thrive at an individual level. So, if you’ve got choice, you’re more likely to thrive. And I’m aware of that that research on self-determination theory has been applied looking at countries and the degree to which they provide autonomy for their citizens. And in those countries that do provide high levels of autonomy, are less controlling, people report higher levels of wellbeing. 

So, there are so many different variables that we could take from the science of positive psych and look at how they could influence our society. But I think on the other hand, I would like to see greater levels of education, which is starting to happen in our schools. It’s not every school where children are learning these basic social and emotional learning skills or basic thinking skills that historically you wouldn’t learn until you went and saw the psychologist if something went wrong. I would love to see all schools, and I do believe into the future, that will be the future. All schools will offer some knowledge, so just not learning, reading, writing and arithmetic. You’ll learn these psychological skills to not just again survive, but to really to become your full potential while you’re here on the planet as well. So, I think education has a key role to play, but there are many other things that I unfortunately haven’t got the time to unpack today. But if anyone’s interested, that book is a great read. 

Q: I know that you’ve mentioned positive Psychology is a calling for you, but I’m really interested, if you could do or be anything else, what would it be? 

Suzy: That’s a simple one. A DJ. You know, high pumping music or anything that is uplifting and mood boosting. And I actually had a young person ask me that question not long ago. And they said, it’s not too late, Suzy, you know. And then it came across my Instagram, I think there’s a 90-year-old woman that’s like one of the top DJs globally. So, there’s still hope for me! 

Q: Love it. And then what is inspiring you at the moment? Are there any people, books, podcast, TV shows, apart from book you just mentioned, that we can take a look at?  

Suzy: Yes. Well, I would say, and even though I watched it, I finished it last year. I did watch it twice. It’s Ted Lasso. If you haven’t seen Ted Lasso, it’s an absolute must see, he is a walking, talking example of positive psychology of positive leadership. It’s hysterical. It’s quite funny the cultural clashes between the Americans and the English, and I just found it humorous, uplifting and also inspiring in terms of, as I said, being an exemplar for everything that we try to teach in positive psychology.  

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