I wasn’t thinking about passing on a spiritual lesson when I made supper that night. I decided on the main dish because it’s tasty and we hadn’t had it in a while, though it’s common fare in Pennsylvania Mennonite homes like ours.

“What’s that called?” my daughter Joyanna, asked, pointing to the meat patties I’d set on the dinner table. She was the youngest of our five children. My husband, Todd, and I had adopted Joyanna and her sister, Annajoy, from Liberia, West Africa, when they were babies. Now Joyanna was four, at that stage of asking a million questions.

“Poor Man’s Steak,” Todd answered. Ground beef patties covered in mushroom gravy, served over mashed potatoes. Like most popular Mennonite meals, it’s perfect for large families: inexpensive, easy to prepare and well-suited for sharing. Also, like a lot of Mennonite foods, it’s got a playful name. Like “Shoofly Pie,” a molasses dessert, or “Chow Chow,” a vegetable relish.

Joyanna’s eyes widened. “What…is it called?” she asked again.

“Poor Man’s Steak,” Todd repeated.

We bowed our heads for grace, then passed around the serving dishes and everyone dug in. Except Joyanna. She pushed the meat away from her potatoes. “Joyanna,” I said, “don’t fill up on potatoes. You need to eat your meat.”

Joyanna looked up at me, her chin quivering. “I don’t want to be poor!”

Oh, my! We’d recently read The Little Match Girl, a story about an impoverished child. Joyanna must have thought if we ate “Poor Man’s Steak” that meant we were poor too. Todd and I tried to explain it was only a name, but with every bite Joyanna forced down came a sob. She was so upset she had to leave the table.

After dinner I talked to her. “Joyanna, can you tell me what little girls need?”

She thought for a moment. “A family, a bedroom, clothes, food.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And you have all that, don’t you?”

She nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t comforted. Suddenly, I had an idea. I got my Bible and opened it to Philippians 4:19. “The Bible tells us, ‘My God shall supply all your need,’” I said. “We’ll never be poor, no matter what we eat, because God takes care of everything we need.”

Joyanna’s eyes lit up and she slowly repeated the verse after me. Now she loves Poor Man’s Steak as much as I do. What a delicious reminder of how richly we’ve been blessed!

Try the Poor Man’s Steak recipe!

Positive psychology is a big buzzword these days. Look at how many books at Borders and Barnes & Noble have “happiness” in the title.

Studies on topics such as resilience, well-being and gratitude have made their way from academic journals to mainstream magazines. More than 200 colleges and universities in the U.S. offer courses in the field.

This up-swell of interest represents a dramatic shift in psychology. For decades, the emphasis in both theory and practice had been on dysfunction, mental illness and repairing emotional damage.

Then in 1998, University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Martin Seligman used his position as president of the American Psychological Association to promote the scientific study of happiness.

Though Seligman is credited with coining the term “positive psychology,” the idea of focusing not on what’s wrong with us but what’s right with us originated with another noted American psychologist more than 40 years earlier—Abraham Maslow.

He was known for his groundbreaking studies on personality and motivation, and his concepts like self-actualization, peak experience, and synergy have become part of our everyday language.

With this year being the 100th anniversary of his birth, it’s a fitting time for a look at the life and legacy of the pioneer of positive psychology.

Maslow was born in Brooklyn, New York, to struggling Russian-Jewish immigrant parents. They had come to the United States for religious freedom and economic opportunity, and throughout his life, Maslow cherished these qualities in our nation.

Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln became his heroes when he studied American history in high school; decades later they remained prime examples when he began developing his theory of self-actualizing people.

After floundering a bit at two New York colleges, Maslow transferred to the University of Wisconsin in 1928. There, he found his academic footing. Abe, as everyone called him, decided to major in psychology for what he saw as its practicality and social usefulness.

He wanted a career that would “help change the world.” He never stopped believing that social science could accomplish this goal.

Maslow’s six years at Wisconsin were important professionally and personally. Avidly studying many approaches, he was most drawn to the work of Alfred Adler, famous for his theory of individual psychology.

Optimistic and socially oriented, it emphasized the importance of parenting and schooling in helping children develop into emotionally healthy adults.

Maslow married his cousin Bertha Goodman, also a student at the university. Both were barely 20 years old. As he later reminisced, early marriage gave him a tremendous boost of self-confidence and stability. The two would be together his entire life and raise two daughters.

After receiving his Ph.D., Maslow returned with his wife to New York City. He joined the faculty of Brooklyn College in 1937 and immediately proved to be a charismatic teacher. He had a warm and inspiring manner. Students dubbed him the school’s Frank Sinatra and even cried if they were crowded out of his hugely popular classes.

In the 1940s Maslow developed his influential hierarchy of inborn needs. His goal was to understand and explain all human motivation—”Why do people do what they do?”—by integrating all existing approaches including Freudian, Adlerian, behaviorist, and cognitive-gestalt into one cohesive meta-theory.

Maslow thought each approach had its valid points but failed to encompass the big picture of personality. He theorized that human beings are motivated by their needs, which he diagrammed as a pyramid with five levels, starting with the most basic physiological needs at the bottom and rising through progressively higher, more psychological needs.

During the war years Maslow began pioneering another field: the study of emotionally healthy, high-achieving men and women—those he would later call self-actualizing.

Starting by analyzing the traits of people he admired in history and in his own life, he became increasingly excited by his investigations. He wrote in his diary, “I think of the self-actualizing man not as an ordinary man with something added, but rather as the ordinary man with nothing taken away. The average man is a human being with dampened and inhibited powers.”

Maslow interviewed many high achievers and discovered to his surprise that they often reported having peak experiences in their everyday lives: that is, moments of great joy and fulfillment. The psychologically healthier they seemed, the more often they experienced such transcendent moments.

Most of his interviewees weren’t religious. Nevertheless, they frequently used language that was almost mystical in describing their peaks of happiness—usually related to feelings of accomplishment in work or family life.

In 1954 Maslow published his landmark book, Motivation and Personality. It was a synthesis of nearly 15 years of theorizing about human nature, and it catapulted him to international acclaim. His tone was bold and confident: “The science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side…It has revealed to us much about man’s shortcomings, his illnesses, his sins, but little about his potentialities, his virtues, his achievable aspirations, or his psychological health.”

Especially in such growing, practical fields as education and business management, Maslow’s optimistic view of human attainment and creativity aroused tremendous interest. He moved to fledgling Brandeis University outside Boston and become head of its psychology program.

During the 1960s, Maslow’s career blossomed. Entrepreneurs sought his advice on motivating their employees. On the West Coast, where new ideas on what he called “enlightened management” were rapidly taking root in the high-tech field, his approach to job satisfaction had particular impact.

In these years, Maslow popularized the term “synergy” to describe work teams in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When employees were encouraged to work together to maximize their personal strengths through interesting, challenging tasks, Maslow correctly predicted, their productivity and innovation would soar.

Stricken by a heart attack in 1967, Maslow relocated with Bertha to the San Francisco Bay area for its milder climate, and continued to write, teach, and consult.

Despite ill health, his commitment to awakening human potential never wavered. “I have a very strong sense of being in the middle of a historical wave,” he wrote. “One hundred fifty years from now, what will historians say about this age? What was really important? My belief is that…the ‘growing tip’ of mankind is now growing and will flourish….”

Maslow was right. Long after his death from a heart attack in 1970, his ideas live on in the field of positive psychology.

Read more about Maslow in Positive Thinking 101

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Heading to the great outdoors this summer to recharge your batteries? You can thank a transcendentalist for the idea. Turning to nature for spiritual sustenance might seem like an obvious thing to do, but a mere century and a half ago it would have struck most Americans as pretty farfetched (the woods used to be considered a place of danger and darkness).

How about the statement “I’m spiritual, but not necessarily religious”? You’ve probably heard that from a fair number of people. Again, it was the transcendentalists—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller and a handful of others—who initially popularized this idea. Even the concept of positive thinking itself had its first champions in this small, short-lived, yet incredibly influential group of New England thinkers.

What exactly were the transcendentalists trying to get at? Start with the word “transcend,” which means to move above and beyond ordinary categories and the limitations that come with them. At heart, that’s what the transcendentalists were going for. Living in a land that was redefining what a nation could be, they saw themselves as seeking a new, and greater, definition of what a human being could be.

None of them worked harder at this task than their most famous and influential member, Ralph Waldo Emerson. America’s original positive thinker, Emerson was a tireless promoter of the basic transcendentalist idea that human beings are larger—infinitely larger—than they think they are. “A man,” he wrote, “is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide.” What we need to do is overcome the self-imposed habits of thought that prevent us from fully realizing this potential. Or as Emerson put it, “The only sin is limitation.”

Shedding old ways of thinking sounds fine on paper. But anyone who’s tried to change, truly change, knows that in practice, it’s a whole other matter. How do we go about doing it? Through his essays, Emerson has given us three keys for unlocking the wisdom and goodness within.

Believe in Yourself
There is in each person, Emerson wrote, a “vast-flowing vigor,” an energy that we can rely upon in any circumstance. Every one of us can tap into this bottomless spiritual reservoir. But we have a tendency to deny it. Have you ever felt overwhelmed by stress and thought, Things never go my way? Beaten yourself up over your mistakes? Deflected a compliment by saying, “Oh, it was nothing”? These are all examples of self-defeating thoughts, also known as stinking thinking.

And that, so often, is what gets in our way. An unwillingness to have faith in our true potential is the single greatest setback to achieving it. “To believe your own thought,” Emerson wrote, “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men—that is genius.” Next time you catch yourself slipping into a distorted thinking pattern, stop and do a reality check. Things just aren’t going my way right now. Then act like a genius and give yourself some credit. I might have made some mistakes along the way but what I accomplished is something to be proud of.

Peak Moments
All of us have experienced times when we’re deeply in tune with life and with ourselves, when everything comes naturally. Psychologist Abraham Maslow, father of the human potential movement, called these “peak moments.” More recently, psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has used the term “flow” to describe this state of total engagement. Athletes call it being “in the zone.”

The problem, Emerson realized, isn’t so much how to reach these peaks. It’s how to trust what we learn during them. “Our faith comes in moments,” he wrote. “Our vice is habitual.” The unavoidable humdrum aspects of daily routines dull our memory of how things are when we’re at our best. “So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.”

That’s why we need to burn the lessons of those few hours into our minds. We have to hold on to the perspective and clarity we achieve at our peaks and let them sustain us when we’re less inspired. “There is a depth in those brief moments,” Emerson wrote, “which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences.” The sheer vividness of those highs should make it easier to recall them. That doesn’t mean living in the past. Rather, think of your moments of energy and inspiration as fuel packets. Tap into them whenever you need a boost to move forward.

Positive Is Practical—and Powerful
For Emerson, a positive attitude wasn’t a passive thing, a mere lens for viewing a sometimes difficult world in a kinder light. He believed it held a genuine practical power. Emerson scholar and biographer Robert D. Richardson, Jr., explains this aspect of Emerson’s thought in a wonderfully concrete way.

Consider Emerson’s famous adage: “Hitch your wagon to a star.” Advice that “sounds impractical if beautiful,” Richardson notes. “But it turns out to have an unexpected grounding in the real world. Emerson was thinking…about the tide-mills that used to exist along the East Coast. The incoming tide would turn the wheel one way, the outgoing tide would turn it the other; both ways ground grain and sawed wood, and it was all done by hitching the mill to the tides which are hitched to the moon. So Emerson means his spiritual advice literally.”

Don’t be intimidated by Emerson’s high-sounding language. Take his use of the word “soul.” “The soul is not an organ,” he writes, “but animates all the organs;…is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but is the master of the intellect and the will.” It is “the background of our being—an immensity that cannot be possessed.” He isn’t talking about some daunting metaphysical abstraction. He’s talking about your true self—the person you are when you’re at your best, your boldest, your most alive and real.

Emerson believed that “the learned and the studious…have no monopoly of wisdom.” Much as he admired scholars, he knew they were often less likely to find their way to an experience of the authentic self than an ordinary person was. “Great is the soul, and plain,” he wrote in that populist spirit that one of his early readers, Walt Whitman, so loved and celebrated. “It is no flatterer, it is no follower…It always believes in itself.” In this and so many other ways, Emerson is the quintessential American philosopher: deep yet democratic, sophisticated yet simple as a glass of cold water on a summer day.

His views didn’t always play well with his contemporaries. He came from a long line of clergymen and started out as one himself. That made the churchmen of his day particularly critical when his thinking diverged from theirs. They found in Emerson’s rhapsodies on the mystic soul the evidence of a troublingly unorthodox sensibility.

Emerson did read deeply in religious writings outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. He studied the Bhagavad-Gita and other Far Eastern spiritual classics decades before it became fashionable. What Emerson’s studies brought him to was a greater understanding that God is in each of us and in the natural world around us—an idea that we almost take for granted today. It explains Emerson’s unflagging faith in the self’s native sufficiency and rightness, his belief that if we find our true spiritual center and act from it consistently, there is nothing we won’t be able to accomplish.

Still, that’s not to say that Emerson saw life as an easy stroll down the street. He was no stranger to hardship. By his early 30s, when he began writing the essays that would make him famous, he had already lost two brothers and buried his wife. He eventually remarried, only to lose his firstborn son at the tender age of five. These tragedies didn’t rob Emerson of his faith in life’s essential goodness, however. They only strengthened it. For him, thinking positively was a way to overcome life’s hurdles, never a means of escape from them.

If you read Emerson’s essays—”Experience” and “The Over-Soul” are excellent ones to start with— you will be amazed to see how many of the insights that fill today’s books and programs on self-improvement originated at his writing desk. From 12-Step programs to this magazine, there isn’t a single contemporary tool for learning how to think positively that wasn’t originally crafted, at least in part, by our greatest American philosopher.

“To finish the moment,” Emerson wrote, “to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” Emerson and his fellow transcendentalists would be thrilled to know we are seeking—and experiencing—that wisdom for ourselves.

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