Hi, thanks for stopping by and I'm Josh. This is Dorma Punk's New York, our Tuesday evening online class, which we've been doing since, well the online part

since the beginning of the pandemic.

Overall, the weekly class has been going on since I started in 2005.

So thank you for joining. I am a Buddhist pastor who survives entirely by a donation. I don't charge anything.

So if you like to support my work, you can always

Venmo, Darma, Punx with an X NYC,

or on the podcast site there's a button that is a PayPal link. So thanks for that.

And what have I got in store for you this evening?

Well, actually, we're talking about learned helplessness versus optimism, a sense of agency, how certain experiences in life can leave in their

wake a lasting sense of incompetency or failure versus how certain experiences can leave greater sense of optimism, sense of empowerment and so forth,

and look into one of the core reasons that can make the difference between how we

regroup and develop resilience after setbacks in life.

So I hope this sounds like a topic worth your consideration.

Yeah, so let's see where this takes us. A sense of control is important in the baseline happiness studies of workers, the more choice people experience in work, the happier they tend to be.

There was one study where they went from building to building in New York and they found that very often, along with people who own their own business, people who were plumbers were the happiest people in any given office

tower because both individuals had the greatest flexibility in scheduling how they would go about their tasks and a sense of control or agency is constituent of a sense of fulfillment and in terms of the work of Jonathan Haydn and others talk about how important it is, how important both control and it goes towards a sense of efficacy and so forth.

When rats are given an opportunity to avoid electric shocks,

those half are,

that group of rats are half as likely to develop tumors than rats and

studies that can't avoid that have no sense of control when electric shocks will occur,

one of those terrible experiments,

but we'll be hearing a few more actually as we go on. Believing we have a power to change life makes life bearable. In the early 1970s Martin Seligman showed that when human beings or dogs in his experiment,

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