I recently wrote about why I was interested in Positive Psychology. Today, I want to elaborate and explain why I believe that positive psychology and all it has to offer, is so important.
When I think about myself and the past 12 months, the universe has thrown some fairly major shitty curve-balls at me. My mum has been placed into a nursing home with early on-set dementia, my sister is going through a very unpleasant separation and my husband has lost his job. Now, in the scheme of things, these would be considered fairly major “shitty curve-balls”. Now, add to this the normal everyday stresses of being a mother, wife, daughter, sister, friend and worker!!!! I think you know where I am coming from. Life is sometimes “emotionally” really heavy and really difficult to deal with.
Enter “Positive Psychology” with it’s emphasis on positive emotions, being engaged, having good relationships, finding meaning in your life and achieving things that matter to you. Now, you have to remember that it is not a magical pill which will make the problems disappear, it is however something we can implement into our lives to make us better at dealing with the “shitty curve-balls” and the everyday stresses that we all face.
I believe that to start to implement these fairly simple practices you have to firstly get a very good understanding of who you are and what makes you tick! Very rarely do we sit down and really think about who we are, how well we are already doing, what we like, what we are good at, what we hope for, what our best possible self might look like and how we might get there.
So, I want to start off with getting you to think about how your life is actually segmented. I want you to think about all the different pieces that “you” are made up of! Not all the different roles that you might have (as mentioned above), but all the areas that are important to you and effect you in different ways. To help, I have broken these areas up as so:
Physical Environment (home/office)
Career/Business
Family and Friends (community)
Finances
Romance/Intimacy
Health/Self-Care
Social/Fun
Personal/Spiritual Development
The process of separating the areas of your life is really important because we tend to make bold overarching statements like “my life sucks!”, “nothing is going right for me”, “I am useless“, I am no good to anyone”. You need to be kinder to yourself and realise, your life is broken up into several areas. Some of these areas you will be doing really well in and others – maybe not so much!
To make this even easier I can supply you with a resource from “The Positivity Institute” called “The Life Balance Wheel”. Just email me on tracy@thepositivepa.com.au and I will send it to you. Also, if you are the first person to request the wheel I will supply you with a free coaching session in using the wheel so you can pin-point the areas that are working well for you and also the areas that you would like to see yourself flourishing in!!
Until next time.
Do something nice for someone. Or, smile often as it makes other wonder what you have been up to.
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