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Day 7 of 7
Expecting Good Things: Conclusion
A Lesson in Expectations
Optimism is more than just rainbows and unicorns. It's not enough to just hope that things will turn out well for us and others. This needs to be an expectation. However, we also need to know what it's like when we get it.
Primary Takeaways:
There are 2 main takeaways with optimism:
- Increase your ability to identify good things in daily life
- Increase your ability to feel good things in daily life
Feeling into Good Things
While the 3 Good Things exercise primes the brain to expect and search out good things throughout each day, we also require the ability to take in these good feelings. This may seem obvious but it's far from that. A primary reason many need more and more is the inability to fully feel the goodness. This next exercise will help demonstrate how to get at this.
Challenge:
Choose a sensory experience to be able to separately move through the 3 parts of self awareness:
- Noticing your physical self
- Notice your thinking self
- Notice your emotional self
Spend 1-2 minutes in each of these parts of your self, seeing how well you can explore this experience.
A few examples of a sensory experience to savor might be:
- Enjoy a small amount of chocolate or ice cream. Mints work well too.
- Quieting watching the sun set.
- Listening to one of your favorite songs in stillness.
Resiliency Roadmap Day 7
3 Good Things 2.0
By now you've hopefully been in a nice rhythm of taking time at the end of your day to focus on 3 Good Things. This is the moment where we take it to the next level. Tonight, proceed as usually in writing out your 3 Good Things. However, afterwards, bring a high level of self-awareness into this exercise. As you look at these 3 Good Things one at a time:
- Notice this in your physical self
- Notice this in your thought self
- Notice this in your emotional self
We too often merely sit with the mental part of our experiences and it's when we expand this to also include our physical and emotional experience is resiliency integrated.
To take a deeper dive
Written by one of the foremost experts on resiliency, Learned Optimism thoroughly explains the importance and applicability of harnessing optimism to change our thinking, relationships, and success in a work environment.
Download: ResiliencyRoadmap (PDF)
Joy, collected over time, fuels resilience.
-Brene Brown