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 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.