Check it out!

Thanks for joining the discussion. I am glad you appreciated the way your message was incorporated in our discussion.

Why not contact our editor, Senia Maymin, about getting a review of your book posted on this site? It seems like a good topic for the positive psychology community to consider. There is information about submitting a book for review here:

http://pos-psych.com/contact

Kathryn

Best,
Barbara Fiese

If I were to ask you right now, this very moment, how happy are you? What would you say?

Do you believe that what you reported would fairly accurately reflect the truth of the matter or a emotion/mood that you are experiencing?

So, how happy are you?

Awesome! I wish I underdstood Chinese…it has been one of my major goals in life.

Sonja’s book is highly practical. I just attempted the Best Possible Self exercise. Like many of the PP interventions, this was a journal entry. You write about your potential, what you could be or do if you stretched your limits to their heights. I found the exercise helpful and could see that over time, the BPS could make a profoundly important impact on a person’s life while keeping what is most important on center stage.

As for common practice, I think the best practices are invisible and automatic, habitual. Carrying on the kindergarten metaphor, don’t we wash our hands, push in our chairs and wait our turn in line most of the time? Are these on your to-do list? They’re not on mine. Achieving happiness is putting away your crayons.

About ‘common sense is not common practice’, it’s so true!! It’s mentioned in a book by Robert Fulghum, ‘All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten’, that we have learnt all ‘common senses’ from kindergarten when we were very young, about how to live, what to do, and how to be… I wonder how many of us can really practice all of them…

Timothy

ps, it is my first time translating your article Kathryn, for chinese PPND…it is beautifully written. Thanks!

Jeff, actually, I’m a big fan of self-reports. You can see my thoughts on self-reports here: “When To Use Self-Reports and When Not To.”

I think it’s very real and very genuine to ask a person to self-rate his beliefs. It will be great to get some of that going here on the site. Thanks for that thought.

I am really looking forward to reading Sonja Lyubomirsky’s book!

Kathryn and Jeff, am interested in your conversation above about motivation and person-exercise fit.

Best to you,
S.

Your comment gives a new spin to the fascinating question of right-fit between person & positive intervention. Maybe reading and commenting on positive psychology articles is a better fit for your personality than any of these exercises. You seem drawn to do read and comment without forcing yourself. I suspect that the contemplation is constructive for you. Reading and understanding why gratitude is valuable could be a far more effective positive intervention for YOU than keeping a gratitude journal.

So … the question is how to get benefit from positive psychology without having to have a personality transplant.

I am certainly grateful that you are drawn to participate so actively in our discussions.

Kathryn

Why? Doing the exercises feel so corny & awkward, especially the gratitude-based ones. Gratitude smacks of Jimmy Stewart in “Its a Wonderful Life”. I understand that the exercises are powerful & effective, but they make me feel extremely weak, unmanly, and sappy. When the elephant fights the rider, elephant trumps rider every time.

Happiness exercises feel like tedious work, like a vigorous workout. You might feel that runner’s high after 5 miles, but you’ve got to suffer those miles to get there. The exercises often seem boring, tedious and unworkable. I can’t identify with them.

Maybe others can use our conversations to learn from my reluctance?