A friend sent me the following poem by John Ciardi, a great contribution to my Gratitude Scrapbook. It’s actually the second time she has given it to me. The first time was in high school when she taught my senior English class. I still remembered the “two soft kissing kites” and [...]
This morning I washed a small Revereware saucepan caked with chocolate sauce. It had a very sticky handle.
Washing it brought back memories of washing dishes with my maternal grandmother. She had a set of copper bottom pans that she had had for many, many years. Every time she washed one, she’d get [...]
I recently participated in a group discussion of gratitude and gratitude interventions. One member of the group talked about having difficulty keeping up the habit of writing in a gratitude journal. He felt that he kept saying the same things over and over. It turned out that he felt that gratitude was [...]
“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.” - Malcolm Forbes
“In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Gratitude as a discipline involves [...]
The Values-in-Action character strengths include one called Humility and Modesty, a strength that people at least in America find somewhat offputting. How can that be a strength? What a boring strength! What good is that? I think people often associate the word humility with humiliation, which certainly doesn’t contribute to its [...]
Here are some thoughts about gratitude harvested from my lecture notes and the power point slides for lectures given during the Master of Applied Positive Psychology Program.
Ed Diener:
People’s genetically-based temperament substantially influences their happiness.Conditions matter most in the short run; after that people adapt back toward their baselines (set-points). Thus temperament and personality usually [...]
One of the exercises we conducted during the Master of Applied Positive Psychology program was building a strength scrapbook — that is, a personal collection of quotations, pictures, music, film clips, and poems to help us increase a particular strength.
At the time, I selected Bravery, and I still pull out my collection whenever my heart [...]
