Cryoshon, a reference to at least some books like Burns' Feeling Good, or a synopsis of the techniques (like how you would apply Seligman's personal-general-permanent framework to Burns' triple column cognitive distortions tool), would be helpful, I agree.
And while I personally think stoicism is an underrated and misunderstood philosophy, I don't think the article is really getting at what you ascribe in your last sentence, because the article isn't saying that your circle of influence is immutably fixed. Unlearning helplessness may mean having the wisdom to accept things you can't change, but it could also mean thinking of ways to increase your circle of influence to be more in line with your circle of concern. Most people would say slavery is within their circle of concern, but would also feel as though it was well outside their circle of influence. And to some degree, it is, but you can still increase your sense of influence by donating money to effective anti-slavery organizations, for instance, or paying attention to where your consumer goods are produced. But you can also reasonably reduce your circle of concern without it being a surrender by acknowledging that there are bad things happening in the distance that you aren't reasonably obligated to spend energy worrying about.
Deciding that your circle of influence is small, and that trying to change that is aspiring beyond your place sounds itself like learned helplessness, though.
This is a funny area. I feel quite confident giving prescriptive advice about strategies for software development, but not so much about strategies for dealing with psychological issues like depression and helplessness.
What I can do is share my own experience, and tell you where to find the resources that helped me. Thus... I would say that if anything in the post feels like something that is bothering you or has bothered you in the past, go and read about Learned Optimism, the rough opposite of Learned Helplessness:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_optimism
And especially Seligman’s self-help book on the subject: http://amzn.to/1zFQXcr
The book claims that “optimism” can be measured, and that there are strategies for improving it, and discusses those strategies. I personally found that they did help me, and further that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) under the supervision of a professional helped me even more.
I also wrote a post directly about Optimism a while back, it outlines Seligman’s strategies:
http://braythwayt.com/homoiconic/2009/05/01/optimism.html
There was lively HN discussion at the time, you may find it informative:
First find out what we actually care about. Then figure out which of those things we are unhappy with. Then which of those we cannot change. This is our area of "informed helplessness". Periodically re-examine this area, to check if some things have become more malleable by ourself (this is to avoid "learned helplessness", or "artificial helplessness".
The point being: if you sit down and figure out "what you cannot change" -- you're effectively teaching yourself to be "helpless" about those things. The key difference is presumably that it is a rational, active, decision.
Perhaps the literature/research have some better terms for this -- but I felt it looked a bit inconsistent in the article.
I still get mad about them, but I can see that his perspective is far preferable.
The research doesn’t back this up. This is one of the reasons why I’m reluctant to be prescriptive about these things, our intuition about what we ought to believe and how we ought to think sometimes does not produce the results we want.
For example, people walk around saying it’s important to “take responsibility” for the things that happen to us. And many successful people say, anecdotally, that this is what they do. And yet, many people try this and fail.
Seligman’s book explains why successful people say they take responsibility for what happens to them, but also explains why that doesn’t work for everyone. His research was that successful people have this “optimism” trait where they are asymmetric: They personalize the good things that happen to them, and depersonalize the bad things.
Meaning, they think they are responsible for their success.
But if you ask them, they perceive they were taking responsibility for everything that happened to them. But statistically, this is not the case.
So what I will say to you is, don’t argue with whatever I am writing or saying, go to the original sources and understand what Covey and Seligman are actually saying, and what research they did to arrive that their conclusions and prescriptions for changing your life.
People reference 7 Habits so often but the things that are typically mentioned (the actual "Habits," per se) are not the parts that I found most life-altering. For me, it was the philosophy:
-Character vs. personality
-Abundance mentality
-Responsibility = Response + Ability
-Principles vs. values (and natural law)
There's a interesting experiment where he shows how dogs learn to be helpless. Fascinating.
The reader is supposed to come away with the knowledge that this thing exist and it seems to make sense.
The author tells of an expert and links to his work for more in depth.
As it stands now, it's a bit too fluffy to take much away from.
Additionally, I think that the core concept here is philosophically stoical, along the lines of "some things are up to us, some things are not up to us, and pain occurs when we aspire for the things that are not up to us to be up to us."