I’ve wanted to profile positive psychology practitioner Martín Blank since the first time we met. It started with a simple LinkedIn message, me asking him to share more about his experience with a positive psych program I’ve been eyeing.

The conversation was particularly energizing for me. What Martín’s has done in and around positive psychology inspires me to think bigger about the impact I could have on the world. I hope you feel the same after reading. 

Who is Martín? 

"Happiness is not my default mode,” confesses Martín in one of our subsequent calls. Perhaps this is what draws me to him. He’s not exactly what you’d expect in someone who is featured prominently on the website of University of Pennsylvania’s Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program. But from our first conversation, he reminded me of myself. Someone who grew up feeling worried and sad, sometimes without there seeming to be a reason. Martín objectively had more reason than I - after being born and living the first few years of his life in Israel, he spent a year in Spain and then moved to Los Angeles with his family all by the age of five. It was hard for him to feel like he belonged, and he’d spend years after college searching the world for a place that felt like home. 

Martín’s contributions to positive psych

Martín is the founder & director of “The Astronauts” social-emotional learning program, and is currently serving as an educational consultant to help school districts integrate social-emotional learning concepts into their classrooms. For years, he'd been teaching kids and teachers how to find a sense of inner peace by developing and helping them wield powerful tools that aren't taught in traditional K-12, tools like meditation, breathing, yoga, self-questioning, and relationship skills. "You have kids that are suffering from social phobias or not making friends or not managing anger well. Rather than saying, 'I have this kid with a problem, we can give them tools,’” says Martín. 

With an early education in teaching, music, yoga & breath work, he was well-positioned to develop a program at the cross-section of mindful education. To take his work a step further, he applied to UPenn's positive psych masters program to increase his credibility, study where his work fit into the broader science of thriving, and broaden his network. He was pleasantly surprised when he was awarded the coveted Christopher Peterson Memorial Fellowship scholarship for his prior work in the space.

Defining positive psychology, from the field  

Martín admits he didn’t know much about positive psychology prior to the MAPP program, but he came to embrace the teachings whole-heartedly. When asked to define the space, he shares: 

"[Positive psychology] is looking at what we can add to a situation, lifestyle, or institution to help it do better. It’s shifting the perspective from a fixed mindset to ‘What can I improve or add or build on?’” 

To help draw a distinction between traditional and positive psychology, and paint a picture of how the two work in tandem, he shared a beautiful analogy: He described life as a messy room. Traditional psychology might look at this room and suggest to get rid of the undesirable and the unpleasant. It might have you throw out the old takeout boxes and vacuum the carpet, so that you’d have a clean space. This is an important step in the process of making the room more livable, and it’s a process that must be repeated over and over throughout time. 

Positive psychology would then look at this clean, but empty, room and note that there was an opportunity for more inspiration, creative expression, humanity. It might seek to fill the space with candles and art and comfortable furniture. It might seek to make the space come alive.

In Martín’s analogy, positive psychology doesn’t deny that there are messy rooms that need cleaning. “It just acknowledges that there is more to life than them,” says Martín. “[It says], let’s pay equal attention to what goes right.” Rather than dwelling on the “weeds” in the situation (the undesirable, but inevitable maladies), “it addresses the soil composition” (the foundational values we hold and the habits we cultivate to uphold them). 

Note: Martín takes care to mention that this analogy was inspired by author and professor Chris Peterson’s definition of positive psychology.

What I’ve learned from Martín 

In our interview, Martín mentioned a truism that I can confidently credit most of my growth to in the last five years: 

"Inter-personal peace is only possible if you're experiencing intra-personal peace.” 

It builds on studies from scientists like Barbara Fredrickson and Robert Waldinger that social connection and strong personal relationships are the single biggest contributors to our satisfaction of life and wellbeing. It asserts that we will only find peace and harmony in our relationships with others if we have found peace and harmony within ourselves. 

You’ve probably heard this expression most commonly used in reference to dating and romantic relationships, but Martín draws a broader circle to include children in their tender years, forming friendships and navigating new, vulnerable stages of life. It can be argued that the success of children’s entire lives hinge on their ability to form strong, pro-social relationships with people from an early age and throughout life. In my experience, it has been near impossible to achieve that without a healthy sense of self. 

While that quote wrapped itself around me like a familiar friend, another brought me close to tears. In recalling his path to teaching and motivation for working with children on their social-emotional skills, Martín recounted a story:

One thing my mom would encourage me to do, if I was feeling emotional difficulty - she'd encourage me to talk about it. ‘What are you feeling? Angry? Sad?' Nothing was more important than the social dynamic we had, me feeling like she cared about me. She had this expression where, if I was crying, she'd encourage it: ‘Tears are the brooms that sweep sadness away. So let them flow,’ [she’d say]. That helped me build a healthy relationship with my emotions.

We paused together after that moment to let the words and their meaning sink in. How incredibly powerful of an influence his mother had been. How full of love she had been for her son. And how heavy it is to reconcile with the fact that not all children grow up with this type of loving influence to light their path. It was a special moment, because it wasn’t until the retelling of that story that Martín realized how pivotal the influence of his mother’s love had been on his life story. It’s my favorite insight unearthed in the whole interview. 

Top takeaways from Martín’s journey 

It’s hard to boil down deep conversations about life and meaning into a handful of learnings, but in seeking to leave you with something concrete to take away, consider the following from Martín’s journey: 

• Look at what you can add, not subtract. If your life is a clean and empty room, what will you add to make it beautiful and joyful? 

• If you're looking for peace in your relationships, focus on peace within yourself. Interpersonal peace is only possible if you've found intrapersonal peace.

• Acknowledge the negative, but pay more attention to the positive. Life is sure to give us both the good and the bad, but we can train our brains to more consistently notice the good. 

• Take time to listen to the heart. “The heart has the answers to life’s most important questions, especially those related to how to thrive,” says Martín. “The time spent with the heart . . . is never wasted." 

Closing inspiration

Martín and I are ultimately two strangers who’ve forged a short but meaningful bond over three Zoom conversations and a few shared values - connection through vulnerability, a sense of oneness with the earth and others, a practiced orientation toward joy. The ease of our connection is evidence in itself for the power of positive psychology.

Despite an upbringing that made him feel alone and sad at times, Martín's mother opened a treasure chest and handed him enough love and emotional safety to carry him through. He’s now on a mission to share that treasure with children whose parents are not yet able to access and share theirs. He’s teaching our communities’ children how to thrive, even in the face of adversity, using the teachings of mindfulness, yoga, art, and (of course) positive psychology. 

I hope Martín's story, his perspective, his words have inspired you as they've inspired and fortified me. What did you take away from this profile? Let me know in the comments! And if you haven’t yet, consider subscribing to Blue Sky Mind.