Gratitude

Dr. Diener, what are you working on now? What are the newest developments in research on happiness?

I have traveled a long, rugged road to find my way back to see you with new eyes. Dear Mister Rogers, thank you for the opportunity to offer you my gratitude. You taught us that feelings are not forever. We may be sad now but we’ll also be happy again. We get to feel all of the feelings because they are all part of life.

When a child is ill, the whole family is in crisis. Often mothers are the ones who nurture and support the entire family. That’s why today and everyday we salute…

Our family’s last Thanksgiving celebration was the final holiday we shared with my beloved father nine days before he died. I never know when I will experience a pang or a sobbing bout or a joyful wave of hilarious memories. The only constant is that there are no rules. I appreciate Claire Ansberry’s helpful guidance for people wondering how to say and do helpful things gracefully for people who are grieving.

Welcome back to part 2 of the active learning studies done by my students this fall.

The students in Positive Psychology: The Science of Optimal Human Functioning did not just read books, listen to my mini-lectures, and write papers. They conducted class-based research projects to contribute to our collective knowledge.

Seligman is the lead author of the 2016 book, Homo Prospectus, a work of interdisciplinary collaboration about the human ability to assess what we face in the future. Authorship is shared with philosopher Peter Railton, leading willpower researcher Roy Baumeister, and brain mechanism scientist Chandra Sripada. Together, they identify four distinct ways of thinking that guide us to purposeful choice.

If you are eager to make sense of life’s inevitable adversities, read this book. Akhtar reminds us that our future can be bright perhaps not in spite of the adversity we face, but because of it.

There was my lesson. What my child needed was my attunement to help her make sense of her emotions. By shushing them down with a glassful of gratitude, I was simply shirking my responsibility.

“If you could do only one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?” This question, posed by Greg McKeown stopped me in my tracks. Applying it specifically to work, I wondered what one thing I could happily do for the rest of my life. The answer, strangely enough, arrived in my head as a diagram.

The Positive Psychology Program has created a Positive Psychology Practitioner’s Toolkit, an online database that grants our members access to all kinds of positive psychology exercises, assessments, scales, questionnaires, and worksheets allowing any therapist, coach, or researcher to apply positive psychology tools effectively in practice.

Perhaps it is adversity itself, and the strengths that it builds. For adversity humbles us and reminds us of our limits and our rightful place in the universe. Adversity makes us grateful by preserving small anticipations and accepting the good we find without questioning it. Adversity gives us faith to rise above despair and in so doing, answer the call of the soul. The poor may not have the material riches we possess, but I can’t help wondering who is really the richer or poorer amongst us.

Savoring what we’ve accomplished helps us experience gratitude for the good things in our lives, which puts us in a better frame of mind than just grinding it out. Then we can invest in the six areas that we know have value for us in the long run. These areas fuel us with the sustenance we need to make life worth living. When we do that, we change our to-do’s into ta-da’s.

In practice, people find it surprisingly challenging to come up with new ways to use their signature strengths. Perhaps that’s because we often use our signature strengths without much awareness. For example, have you paid much attention to your use of self-regulation as you brush your teeth? Your level of prudence or kindness while driving?

Here are three tips for using your signature strengths in mindful ways.

I guess it is the nature of parenthood to find your children ungrateful. Or at least not as grateful as they could be, should be or used to be. This feeling really hit me hard when my twins entered their teenage years. Then I realized how easily I had erased the memories of my little pigeons helplessly hooked up in their incubators, how conveniently I had become ungrateful to the forces that had listened to my desperate pleas for the life and health of my little babies.

If you know that gratitude is good for you but it is still a struggle, how do you work on it?

Welcome to the second episode of PPND TV. This is a companion to theinterview of Kathryn Britton that appeared earlier this month. The PPND TV interview series is an experiment inspired by TED talks. We want to bring our readers the crux of positive psychology in brief video interviews of researchers and practitioners.

Today’s guest is Senia Maymin, editor of PPND, coach, and author.

Wonder by R.J. Palacio is about the highs and lows of a boy with a severe facial disfigurement as he attends middle school for the first time. It’s a brilliant book, very thought provoking on the nature of resilience and friendship and courage and kindness. It has led me to think about kindness, from random acts such as the challenge to NekNominations from South Africa to all the non-randomly kind people who are thoughtful, and helpful to others simply because that’s who they are.

When they want to feel more loved, valued, respected or connected, most people give away their power. They ask (or want) others to be different, which means someone else’s behavior determines how happy they will be.
What do happier people do?

December 5, 2013 will be remembered for news of the death of the first black president of South Africa, anti-apartheid icon and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Nelson Mandela. I’m not normally drawn to writing about political leaders. But Mandela was different in every respect. His life was a life well-lived.