How to live more appreciatively

Here are three quick and easy things you can do to start living more appreciatively. Like anything else, it will take time to become a habit, but the small changes you make will combine and build up more quickly than you expect.

1. Keep a daily ‘gratitude journal’ in which you record things that you are grateful for (no matter how small) – this will have a positive effect on your well-being. Positive psychology researcher Dr Robert Emmons has found that keeping a gratitude journal for as little as three weeks significantly improves happiness levels. When you keep it up for longer, there are also positive effects on health, sleep time and social connectedness – see http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/labs/emmons.
2. Treat problems as challenges – look for what you are grateful about in bad things as well as good. This in itself can be a challenge at first, but every problem is also an opportunity to learn.
3. Ask yourself ‘What do I need to learn from this?’ whenever anything bad happens. Asking yourself this question, and creating some space to allow the answer to emerge, will increase your self-awareness and help you to correct anything that you may be doing unwittingly to contribute to the problem.

The Benefits of Living An Appreciative Life – Part 2

2. Your luck will improve

Psychologist Richard Wiseman studied the attitudes and behaviour of people who considered themselves exceptionally lucky or unlucky. His book ‘The Luck Factor‘ documents his findings that the ‘lucky’ group actually made themselves lucky by creating and noticing chance opportunities, listening to their intuition, and creating self-fulfilling positive expectations.

Of course random events will still happen, but on average, people who live life in an appreciative way will be luckier, because they have created the conditions that allow luck to enter their lives.

3. You will feel better – and your abilities will improve as a result

When you look at events with an appreciative eye, you feel better about whatever happens. Feeling good is pleasant in itself, and it turns out that it has many benefits to your personal effectiveness.

Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s research into the value of positive emotions shows that people who feel positive are able to think more strategically, they are more compassionate, more creative, more socially connected, more resilient, they make better decisions, and have better health. She has summarised some of her findings in this readable article: The Value of Positive Emotions

4. Easier goal-setting and knowing what you want

The positive reference experiences that we discover when we look at what is working well in our lives make it easier to clarify our vision of the future, and give a firmer, more realistic grounding to our goals.

Steve Andreas’ excellent book ‘Transform Your Self‘ shows how important positive reference experiences are in forming our expectations and even our sense of self. As you uncover and build on more of your own ‘positive core’, you will enable the self-fulfilling effect of positive expectations, and create still more reference experiences to build on.

Next – how to live more appreciatively…

The Benefits Of Living An Appreciative Life – Part 1

It’s often said within the Appreciative Inquiry community that AI is a way of seeing and being in the world, rather than just another toolkit. If you view AI solely as a toolkit, you are missing the point. So what can you expect when you start applying Appreciative Inquiry to your own life, and viewing the world in an appreciative way?

1. People around you will live up to your positive expectations

In their famous ‘Pygmalion in the Classroom’ experiment in the 1960s, Robert Rosenthal and Leonore Jacobson led elementary school teachers to believe that some of their pupils had unusual intellectual potential and to expect a ‘blooming’ in their academic performance. Sure enough, at the end of the year, their test results had significantly increased, compared to the children who had not been singled out. But in fact, the ‘bright’ students had been randomly selected.

This experiment has been replicated many times, in management settings as well as education. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

The only difference between the ‘bright’ and the ‘average’ students was that teachers expected them to do better. This expectation would communicate itself in subtle ways: in the questions the teachers asked, which students they called on in class, and the way they marked different students’ papers. Even the non-verbal aspects of their communication with students such as facial expression and voice tone would be subtly different.

In the same way, your expectations of your friends, work colleagues, people you deal with, and even yourself, will influence the responses and behaviour you get. Looking for the good in other people, and yourself, makes it more likely that you will find it.