3.12 Designing a Gratitude Practice: Team Collage

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Positive Psychology: Resilience Skills

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University of Pennsylvania

Positive Psychology: Resilience Skills

714 ratings

Course 4 of 5 in the Specialization Foundations of Positive Psychology

Learn how to incorporate resilience interventions into your personal and professional life with Dr. Karen Reivich. In this course, you are exposed to the foundational research in resilience, including protective factors such as mental agility and optimism. Several types of resilience interventions are explored including cognitive strategies; strategies to manage anxiety and increase positive emotions such as gratitude; and a critical relationship enhancement skill. Throughout the course, you will hear examples of individuals using resilience skills in their personal and professional lives. Suggested prerequisites: Positive Psychology: Martin E. P. Seligman’s Visionary Science, Positive Psychology: Applications and Interventions and Positive Psychology: Character, Grit & Research Methods.

From the lesson

Managing Anxiety and Increasing Positive Emotions Like Gratitude

In this module, you will learn the definition of catastrophic thinking and identify the effects it has on physiology, attention and contingency planning. You will experiment with several non-cognitive strategies to decrease anxiety, including Deliberate Breathing. You will be introduced to the Broaden and Build theory of positive emotions, and will be able to describe the effects of positive emotions on resilience. Finally, you will relate research and examples of gratitude to your own life and develop a plan for a gratitude practice.

3.6 Dr. Park: Deliberate Breathing to Manage Anxiety5:37

3.7 Dr. Baime: A Mindfulness Approach to Anxiety7:10

3.8 Positive Emotions Broaden8:59

3.9 Positive Emotions Build Resources7:19

3.10 Gratitude Research14:40

3.11 Gratitude Skill: HTGS6:28

3.12 Designing a Gratitude Practice: Team Collage9:44

3.13 Organizational Highlights: Sam Presti, Maureen Rush & Carolyn McIntyre11:20

3.14 Summary of Module 3 and Preview of Module 42:09

Meet the Instructors

Karen Reivich, Ph.D.
Director of Resilience Training Services
Positive Psychology Center

All right, now look.

One thing I want to be really clear about is with all

of these skills that we're teaching in this course, one size doesn't fit all.

There's no such thing as one size fits all.

I've bought that dress, it did not fit.

So it's going to be important for you to develop strategies that work for you.

And to help you to start to generate some ideas about what all sorts of

different gratitude practices might look like,

I encourage you to watch the video collage that we've created.

This is just a collage of quick little gratitude practices that

many people on our training teams have developed for

themselves to cultivate their attitude of gratitude.

Just always choosing to put my attention back on what we have, not what we've lost.

And thinking about my boys, that's as you say not easy, and it's hard work.

I'm just going to swivel my screen round now, so

you can see my poster in my kitchen here.

>> Mm-hm >> So

you can see my Accept the Good, poster which a dear friend Charlie gave me,

before she went to visit her sister in law who has cancer and lives in South Africa.

And she was leaving the country for 6 months, so she said,

you've got more need of this poster right now than me.

And so it's still sitting in our kitchen.

And that really helps me.

These visual queues have really helped me.

So when I'm really wallowing and I'm going downwards, I'll come and

stand in front of it, and think, accept the good,

really listen, think about the things that are good in your life.

And I have got lots of good.

>> So one of the ways I practice gratitude is at work.

We have a very large team of people who work together collaboratively

on a lot of different projects.

And so one of the ways I express my gratitude is by going out of my way to

write an email to one of my team mates thanking them for

the role they played in helping me to produce the work that I can feel proud of.

When we don't get to see each other face to face, gratitude is really

important part of our staying connected, and helping us work effectively as a team.

>> We've been practicing gratitude for many years now, and it's been about five

years ago since we started, Family blessings, three blessings every night.

We call it the three blessings, and

it's a special time where we all gather together in my son Finn's room.

And we cuddle up and we share the special events of each day.

And we do three each.

And it's been really magical to see

how much they have grown in the depth of their gratitude.

It used to be macaroni and cheese or a special toy and

now it's really become noticing the nuances of day and

noticing maybe somebody gave them a pencil and they didn't even ask for one.

And or somebody picked up a glove that they had dropped on the playground.

So that's been really neat to see how much they've grown and

how excited they also get about each blessing.

And I'm also noticing if I forget or I'm too tired they really notice and

they say mom we have to do the three blessings.

So it's been really neat to see how much they've all grown, and

just how much we all look forward to it each day.

>> So one way that I practice gratitude is texting my mom every morning.

She lives across the country from me.

So it's very important for me that I keep in touch, and I usually either say,

I love you or I send her a picture of something that I took during the day.

And even though she's two hours behind and it's like four in the morning for

her, she always texts me back.

So, that's just a great way for me to start my day.

>> One of the ways I practice gratitude is in my professional practice

in the work that I do, and in the work I do training teachers around resilience

I find there are so many opportunities to be grateful.

One of the main ones is that I constantly learn, and it's an easy thing to say.

And I'm sure lots of trainers do say it, but I always find,

every single program I've ever run, I deepen my own understanding of myself,

and of the resilient skills, and of the power they can have to help other people.

So I'm very aware of that privilege, if you like, and I try and

share that privilege with the group.

So the two ways I do that, firstly, is if something comes up in the room,

if somebody makes a comment or asks a question that has made me think

differently, I will always make a point of drawing attentions to that fact.

And thanking that person for

that opportunity and I think that helps in two ways.

One is it's just me being grateful, but

it also it recognizes that I didn't know everything.

And they're teaching me as much as I'm teaching them and

it sets up a very nice kind of dynamic in the room.

The other way I try and do it is always at the end of any program I will talk about

the privilege I feel in the work I do and

talk about some of the things that I've learned from them over the program.

>> One of the ways that my family and

I practice gratitude is something that we've been doing

recently in the last couple of years is something that we call silver linings.

Silver linings is a way for us to talk about the bad things

in a way that we try too find some good things in the bad things that happens.

So at the dinner table we'd talk about the highs and

lows of the day, the ups and downs and when an adversity is shared.

When something bad happens to one of the kids, or Mary and I.

We'll talk about it at the table and at the end of the conversation

we'll have a discussion together as a group about is there an upside?

Is there a silver lining to the bad thing that happened?

And it's not an easy conversation at first because it's an odd conversation.

It's not a conversation that you typically have at dinner or really any time.

But we have noticed over time that as a family we're able to talk about and

brainstorm ideas and it's been really really nice.

For example, Liam let us know that

he made it on the basketball team that doesnt have any of his friends at all.

And to a fifth grader that's obviously a big deal.

Fifth graders want to be with their friends and

he was disappointed about that and so we talked about his disappointment,

but at the end of the conversation we talked as a family about a silver lining.

Is there an upside to this challenge he has?

And by the end we together came up with this idea that maybe it's

an opportunity for him to get new friends and

he had that in his mind when he went to the first practice.

And he did meet so many friends at that first practice and

I think that was a really nice thing for him and a really nice way for

us to express gratitude as a family in a different way.

>> So one of my favorite things to do is take walks in the historic neighborhoods

of Philadelphia.

We have some great national parks.

And one of the ways that I practice gratitude is

by taking pictures while I'm on my walks of the trees and the beautiful homes.

So that when I'm not outside I can look back and just experience

the emotion that I was experiencing when I was taking those walks.

>> So there is a number of different ways that I remind myself

to practice gratitude throughout the day.

And one is that my husband Gabe and I travel a lot for work.

And so when he's the one that's going away, I will on Post It notes,

write a number of different ways in which I'm grateful for him.

One of the things I write on the Post It note is he every morning says that he's so

grateful for me greeting him with this big smile first thing in the morning when

he says, "good morning gorgeous" to me, which I'm grateful for that he says that.

And I put those notes in his suitcase so

that while he's away he's reminded of the ways I'm grateful for him.

He leaves me Post It notes of how he's grateful for

me all throughout the house and I find them in the craziest places.

One time I opened up the refrigerator and he had left me a box of that mint cookies,

which are my favorite I must say, and in there was a Post It note

saying I love the way that you smile when I give you an Attman's cookie.

And so just these little things that it's so easy to walk by we're reminded of and

over the course of our years together, I've alternated different Post It notes

that he's given me and put them on the back door of the medicine cabinet.

So that in the morning when I wake up first thing,

I'm brushing my teeth and I'm looking at these Post It notes reminding me

of this amazing man that I get to live my life with.

And it gets me thinking about really having top of mind,

as I walk through the business of my day.

Notice those little moments of gratitude, and then at the end of the day,

when I'm tired and I'm washing the makeup off my face, and

getting ready for bed, I look at the Post It notes again.

And I think of him, and I think of all the other little moments

in the day that I could've very easily forgotten, but I'm reminded of.

And it sends me off to bed definitely in the right frame of mind.

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