The Power of Positivity - Part 1

The pandemic has plagued us with endless uncertainty for longer than we could have ever imagined. We've managed to maintain our resilience in spite of a cascade of global conflicts, soaring prices, jittery markets, and workplace woes. But the news over the past couple of weeks has gone from just plain negative to downright heartbreaking.

So I'm devoting the Adaptiv Resilience At Work Newsletter this month to a sampling of Positivity content from our collaborative online and hybrid resilience training programs. This edition will focus on the power of positive emotion and how to start experiencing it more fully and more often. The next edition will focus on embracing our positive icebergs and using them to empower us as individuals and leaders.

I hope this provides a bit of relief and adds some fuel to your resilience tanks.

Harnessing Our Positive Emotions

In the early days of resilience research, we focused mainly on how negative emotions like sadness, anger, anxiety, and frustration interfere with our ability to recover quickly from adversity. Building resilience was about getting from the negatives back to baseline - just fixing what was broken. But by the early 2000's, research findings from positive psychologists demonstrated that spending more time on positive emotions like happiness, contentment, pride, interest, and love had a lasting positive impact on mental and physical health. And this work informed Adaptiv's resilience training, which focuses not just on recovery and surviving, but also on renewal and thriving. Watch this quick video from our Boosting Resilience course for an introduction:

In addition to learning to feel less negative emotion, spending more time feeling good can help us build and even maintain our resilience resources even when we're facing lots of adversity.

In fact, we now know that to maximize our resilience we should learn to feel positive emotions to negative emotions in a 3:1 ratio. But most of us experience the reverse! So we have some work to do.

Our Thoughts Drive Our Emotions

What we think causes what we feel and do. This is the core of the cognitive model of psychology and it's at the root of our work at Adaptiv. See the "Discovering Your Signature Emotion At Work" section of the Resilience At Work Newsletter Number 13 for a review of how our inaccurate thinking feeds our non-resilient negative emotions.

Positive Emotions and The Thoughts That Cause Them

Just like our thinking can cause us to feel sadness, shame, frustration, boredom, embarrassment, anger, and anxiety, there are specific thought types that lead us to positive emotions. This chart shows the thoughts that lead to and even help us maintain six common positive emotions.

Feeling More Positive Emotion Is A Skill

It seems that we humans are wired for the negative. In order to rewire our brains to generate more positivity, we created a skill called the S.T.A.R. Technique. Mastering this skill takes guidance and practice, but here's an outline of the process to get you started:

• Scan for any positive thoughts. Using the above chart as a guide, grab onto thoughts like “I’m pretty satisfied with the way things are”, and “I’ve got everything I need right now”.
• Tune into how you’re feeling right now. Notice any positive emotion that your positive thoughts might be creating. Pay attention to all aspects of how you’re feeling: Your body, your mind, your thinking, your motivation, your behavior. We’re much better at getting stuck in the effects of our negative emotions. It takes practice to hang onto the ways that positive emotions affect us – and there’s good reason to do so!
• Appreciate just about anyone and anything that you can think of. The power of appreciation and gratitude has been studied more broadly and deeply than just about any other aspect of positivity. The direct impact of appreciation on positivity is huge, and it doesn’t take much effort to start the ball rolling. 
• Reflect on the good thoughts and feelings that you’ve tuned into. Remember that our brains continue to flex and adapt. If you can just stay in the positivity zone for 17 seconds, your brain will notice. It takes practice to create these new pathways, but with a bit of effort, the payoff will be lower stress and greater resilience.

Positivity Takes Practice

You probably know a mindfulness, breathing, or other calming exercise. Taking a few minutes each day to get yourself relaxed and centered is a great way to open your mind for some positive emotion practice.

If you're looking for something more to deepen your learning, go back and take a look at "Resilience Superpower 3 - Positivity" in an earlier newsletter for some additional tips.

Oh, and we've posted Power of Positivity Part 2 and you can click the image below to read it!

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