Search Results for: resources

Take a glimpse into the world of applied positive psychology with The Flourishing Center podcast. Each episode includes three sections giving you insights and hacks into living an authentically happy and flourishing life. What you'll learn in this podcast: Science Says—Learn what people who score high in trait emotional intelligence do differently. Life Hack—Learn how to further develop your own emotional intelligence. Practitioner’s Corner—Find out how one executive coach puts positive psychology into practice with her clients. Learn more about The Flourishing Center Read the interview from the Practitioner's Corner: Emiliya:  Hello everyone, and join me in welcoming Lisa Jacobson. She is a career consultant and leadership coach, and she is incredibly unique in so many ways, and one of which is that she holds both a Masters Degree in Applied Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and she's also a graduate of our Certification in Applied Positive Psychology program here at The Flourishing Center. We're so excited to have Lisa with us and learn about how she's been applying positive psychology. She is an individualizer in our 5i Model, meaning that she uses positive psychology on a one-on-one basis with helping people figuring where are they and where do they want to go in their life. Lisa:  Well, I was a practicing human resources consultant, an internal consultant with Verizon, and I felt as though I reached a plateau in terms of how I could help people in the workplace. I really felt as though I needed more knowledge about what works well in the workplace and so that's what led me to the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Emiliya:  Beautiful. What brought you to the CAPP program as well? Lisa:  Well, the CAPP program is very interesting to me because I was in the same MAPP program as one of the co-founders, and I felt after several years of practicing positive psychology, I needed a refresher course, and I thought this was one way to find out what's some of the newer research out there and how could I use the existing research in new and different ways. Emiliya:  Tell us, Lisa, how are you using positive psychology personally and professionally? Lisa:  In my coaching practice, it's a very much a full practice. There are probably four different ways in which I practice positive psychology on a full-time basis. The first one is in Tampa, Florida. I actually have a clientele of young people who are about to graduate college and are undecided about what they want to do with the degree that they'd been earning, and then also some people in the Southeast United States who are currently in the workplace, and they want to maybe make a pivot and change directions in their career for many reasons. It varies considerably. Then I have my executive coaching practice, and what I do in that is there are some firms in the Southeast, businesses, a couple of construction companies that I work with, a research company that I work with, and some health care organizations, and I go into their workplaces, I'm hired usually by the CEO of the company, to work with their leaders who have a lot of potential, and I walk them through a leadership development program. Finally, what I've added just recently, and I really love it, I didn't know what I was going to think is I actually contract as a 1099 for a coaching organization called BetterUp. Emiliya:  Wow, that is so cool, Lisa. I love the variety of experiences that you get to have in the work that you're doing with people, being in such different places of their life as they're working with you. What are some of the ways in which you find yourself integrating positive psychology as you do this one-on-one work Lisa:  Positive psychology's actually my absolute guiding post for just about any activity that I do with clients. On a basic level, let's say that I'm working with someone about career decisions. The first thing is to guide that person to clarify their goals and to list those goals, and then to agree that they're going to be accountable for those goals, and also that I agree to help the become accountable to those goals and for the goals to be specific and for them to be measurable for them to have an idea of what a good might be. That would be step number one in just career exploration. There are probably 36 different activities I work with, I use from CAPP or positive psychology that are positive things that tap into a person's strengths to create a greater awareness of what those strengths are, and then to apply those strengths in new and different ways. I'd like to say that probably one of the most fundamental and most effective methods that I use is the "my best moment" method, and I usually establish that early on in the relationship. I do that because I find that when you ask someone about a best moment in their life, it's a bonding experience with them, so this establishes trust in a fairly quick way, and I share my own best story with them too. I usually have two versions. One that's just kind of an everyday best moment, and then there's a deeper one that I share when I feel we have established maybe greater intimacy, but this best moment story gives people a chance. It gives my clients an opportunity to reveal who they are, who they have been at their very best. It gives me the opportunity to listen for their strengths and to begin to appreciate what they're good at. When we have this experience of back and forth, like when I tell them, "I heard in this that you're a very creative person, and I saw a lot of curiosity in it as well," then they verify if what I heard is accurate or not. This gets them thinking they've really never thought of before. It just kind of opens the floodgates for ideas. Emiliya:  Wow. Thank you, Lisa. I hear you saying that one of the pillars of your practice is focused on identifying and naming strengths and that you are listening for your client's strengths as you're speaking with them and that you're kind of bringing them out within them as you're sharing, as you're listening to them speak about their goals, their dreams, their aspirations for themselves in life. Lisa:  Yes, exactly, because I really don't know of any formal program or opportunity that people have to begin to find their voice, and by their voice, I mean to be able to answer the question, who am I and why am I here and how do I add value to my family, to my friends, to my organization, to my team. These are such important questions, and it's just, it mystifies me why the first time someone finds themself answering these questions is often with the work that I do with them. Emiliya:  That's such a great point, Lisa, in that we can, as change agents ourselves, start to ask these questions of the people that we know, of the people that we care about that people shouldn't have to wait until they're finding themselves in just a professional setting or place of transition to start to recognize these things about themselves. Lisa:  Sure. I usually start out with a very lighthearted story of when I was, in my early 50s, and I think it's important to note that because I work with a lot of people who are aged 50-plus, and I really try to live out the fact from what we know about change and adult development and positive psychology that we continue to learn and grow, and that improves the quality of my lives. One of my best moments was when I started to do more exercise, and I actually kind of got that motivation from you because to me, when it comes to positive psychology, you represent the importance of the vitality that people have, and vitality becomes so much more important as you age. We take it for granted when we're younger. With vitality in mind, I signed up at the local YMCA to take a Body Pump class. That's basically weightlifting to music. It was down the street from where I work, so I would just run over and snag a class. I'd often come to the class late and I would often leave early because I had appointments, and people were paying me to be their coach, and I had a lot of work to do. I was building my practice up, so I didn't take it very seriously, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and loved it. One day, I came in with flip flops on. In fact, I call this my flip flop story. They were probably into the third routine. The instructor stops the class, and she says, "You can't stay in this class, Lisa, because you're not dressed appropriately. You need close-toed shoes. We're dealing with weights here," and I said, "Well, if you don't mind, I'd just like to stay because I'm here already." She left the room, and I thought everyone in the class, there were 30 people in the class, I thought they would say, "Oh, let Lisa stay," but no one defended me. I was really embarrassed, and I realized at that moment that my late entrance to the class and my early departures were things that people kind of didn't like about me. They didn't come to my defense. Everyone was annoyed because I was holding up the class. The manager of the YMCA came to the front door, and like a principal, he asked me to come to his office, and then he told me about rules and regulations and safety. I was humiliated for being called out, and I walked home, and something just came inside of me where I just said, "You know, I'm 50 years old, and I can't just act like a little girl here and get angry and hide my head in a pillow. I have to buck up and get back to that class and apologize to the instructor for my lack of motivation and tardiness and just not taking it seriously." I did, I went back to the class. I finished the class with my shoes on, and then after the class, I walked up to the instructor, and I told her that I apologize, and I said, "I learned a lesson, and the lesson was that I wasn't valuing her time as much as I valued my own, and I wasn't taking the class seriously, and that I would hereafter." She said, "Thank you," and from then on, I took it more seriously, in better shape for it too, but more importantly, I learned that I was disrespecting her, because to me, honestly, and this is still hard for me to admit, I did not value her time as much as I valued my own. Emiliya:  Firstly, I'm so grateful because I can tell you that I, too, am a Body Pump enthusiast, and I, too, have actually been that person who showed up in flip flops and was like, "What do you mean I can't do this class barefoot? I actually really prefer to squat and do things in my barefoot running shoes anyway," and have also been told to leave the class until I am able to come in with sneakers and find myself in that place too. Thank you so much for sharing that at the always in a hurry person within me bows to the always in a hurry person within you and recognizes that we share this in common along with a passion for this particular modality. As you share that story with your clients, what are some of the strengths that you highlight within ourself or pieces of learning that you hope that they'll capture within that story? Lisa:  Well, first of all, I hope they feel comfortable enough to admit that they're human and even at whatever age, we still have things to learn. It's so important. Even character strengths. They often tell me that they hear the humility in having learned a lesson, and they also hear perseverance, and as much as that I didn't give up, I went back to the class, and they hear honesty and authenticity and bravery. Bravery is interesting because so many people think bravery has to do with a physical thing, but bravery, as we know from positive psychology, has to do with being brave enough to be honest with yourself and with other people. Emiliya:  You said that that's the more surface-level story. I know that we're just getting to know you, but what's the deeper story that you sometimes share with clients? Lisa:  Well, the deeper story is a story of resilience, and it's one that I have come to really appreciate as I've told certain people. It seems, as a coach, that I really have my whole life together, and it appears as though sometimes people want to be like me. I want to let them know that this was, my journey has been a very long and painful journey with a lot of work involved and a lot of effort. The story begins just when I was a child. I had a mother and father, but my mother was mentally ill. She had severe psychosis and bipolar disorder. She ended up having four children, and she was really unable to take care of her children. I grew up in Philadelphia, actually, and we used to spend summers at the Jersey Shore. One summer, we were renting a house there, and school was starting, it was late August, and school was starting in September. This is where my mother could really relax, and it would be a vacation for her. Well, this particular summer, when I was 11 years old, we all got in the car to go back to Philadelphia, and everything was packed up, but my mother would not get in the car to come back to Philadelphia with us. I didn't quite understand it, but she was having yet another nervous breakdown, and she really just said, she came to the car, and she said, "I just can't do this anymore." That was really a tough moment for us all to handle. My father had no choice but to drive us back to Philadelphia. School started, and my mother never came home. That was September. Then in October, it was my birthday, and still, mom did not come home. November was Thanksgiving, no mom. December was Christmas, again, mom, it seemed as though she was just not going to return. It seemed as though she decided she could not raise her four children. In January, my father called his family in Tampa, Florida and asked if they could help raise us. We moved into a little two bedroom house with my great-aunt who I've never met before, and we started our lives all over again. Needless to say that that was a very though, bewildering time for me, and I just did what I had to do. I put one foot in front of the other to get through it. The toughest part, really, was as a teenager growing up in a new environment, people would always ask, "Well, where's your mom?" I would say, "She's very, very sick, and I don't think she's ever coming here. That, it's like she's terminally sick," I would say. I kind of make up stories as a kid. Then they found out, basically, that my mother was chronically mentally ill, and she gave us up to my dad. Kids make fun of stuff like that, and they think you're weird, and they don't want to be around you, and they think there's just something wrong with you and your family. A lot of judgment of the stigma of mental illness. I grew up with adversity that way, not having a mother, then it being kind of an illness that has a stigma, and then facing the fact that was abandoned by my other, and then being raised by man and dealing with all that going to high school and college and so forth. I just had to make my own way and make the best of the circumstances that I had. It wasn't easy, but I found my way forward, and I did it. That's my story. Emiliya:  It's an amazing thing to put the two strength stories together because you can hear the honesty and the authenticity and the bravery that comes with both being honest with yourself and also the bravery to just do what needs to be done and putting one foot in front of the other in stories of resilience like this one. Thank you so much for sharing that, Lisa. Lisa:  You're welcome. Bottom line there is that I was very, very sad, sad, sad, sad, as a child, and I found that you can do things to make your life matter. You don't have to resign to what your life circumstances have given you. That's what I've learned. Actually, my adulthood has been a lot happier than my childhood. Emiliya:  What are some ways that you personally practice positive psychology in adulthood that give you that sense of happiness and well-being and life satisfaction? Lisa:  Well, I practice mental hygiene. I think that's a term, actually, I got from you in the CAPP course. I start every day of my life quietly in meditation. Before I do anything, I practice meditation. I set intentions for the day, and it's usually 15 to 20 minutes of my practice in setting intentions. Then I routinely practice yoga twice or three times a week, and I exercise twice or three times a week as well. These things are absolutely staples in my life. I not only coach actively with the science of positive psychology being my primary toolbox, but I live it. I practice gratitude as well every day, and so does my husband. We've been doing that for 10 years now, sometimes more consistently than others, but before I open my computer and I check my email, I write down three things for which I am grateful or three things that went well. Well, it sets the tone for the day for me, but with the gratitude, meditation, exercise, yoga, it all comes together. There's this synergy there too. There's definitely a synergy, and let me tell you, Emiliya, as you know, in studying for my masters, I couldn't sit still to meditate for three minutes. It has taken me years to work up to the 20 minutes that I now do. I tell people that because they think, "Oh, I just can't meditate," and I say, "This is something for some people that takes years of practice." Emiliya:  I'm definitely in the same boat as well. I can't tell you how many times I ... I mean, I've been at it for over 14 conscious years of when I first learned about meditation to getting to the point where I do do it, I do it frequently, still not every day, and so one of the things that's helped me is reminding myself that what we do on the cushion is what we do off the cushion, and that on the cushion, your mind wanders, and you come back, and your mind wanders, and you come back, and what's most important is not that you have a clear mind, but that you keep coming back. That's definitely helped me having some more compassion towards myself on days when I haven't been meditating. It's all about coming back. Lisa:  That's probably the benefit for staying at it for 10 years is that I am able, through the course of the day, to center myself. In a matter of a second, I can go to that place. It's my reset button, and it's wonderful. Emiliya:  Beautiful. What have been some of the more powerful interventions and exercises that you've used with your clients as you've been sharing positive psychology with them? Lisa:  At BetterUp, I've found that people in the workplace are starving for things that they can use in the workplace to avoid running down the hall and getting a Snickers bar or something because they're stressed out. A lot of us at work, we're stressed because we're stretched to reach our goals, and we can easily break down by, we even break down that self-discipline muscle we have. It's important to set ourselves up for success, and one of the ways that we can do that is by being prepared, by planning in advance for when things go wrong. One of the things I love to do is encourage people to figure out what works specifically for them when they're stressed out to de-stress and to calm down and to not do something negative like go, for me, it used to be go the, we used to have snack machines, and go to snack machine and get a Snickers bar. There a number of things that you can do, and one of them is what I call a BMW, and that just means try breathing first. We talk a lot about how breathing actually helps, a conscious breathing, helps at least bring more oxygen to the brain. One of the first things that even physicians do is when they're trying to figure out what's wrong with someone is figure out how much oxygen do they have in their blood, and so it's very important thing to understand that your bloodstream is getting oxygen. The simplest most fundamental way of doing that is to be conscious of your breathing and to do it more efficiently and effectively. The M stands for move, so if the breathing still makes you go have an urge for a Snickers bar I say move. Walk around the building, walk around the parking lot, the parking garage, but see if that can distract you. Then W is water, of course. Hydrate. Drink a glass of water and see if that doesn't ... If you tried all three of those things and you still have this urge to feed that stress with some kind of unhealthy habit, I guess you tried not to. That's one little intervention that I use in the workplace because most of the time, no matter where anybody works, it's stress is the biggest issue with them, effectively dealing with stress, using stress in a positive way, so here's an example of using stress in a positive way. This is another thing that I took away from [inaudible 00:31:06] with Louis at CAPP, and that is, instead of, I have to do something, I get to do something. Emiliya:  Beautiful, Lisa. Thank you so much for sharing some of these powerful interventions with us that you integrate into your work. I'm curious if we could close our time off together with anything that you are really excited about within the field of positive psychology that you're reading or researching right now that's top of mind for you? Lisa:  I think decision making is one of, it's a very common topic for positive psychology. People want to make better decisions, and what we keep finding is that decisions are better made when you discuss them objectively, bringing that objective quality into them, and that's why working with a coach, it doesn't have to be a coach, but working with a coach or a mentor, someone, just talking about the steps of your decision making with someone has a positive impact on the change that you want to make in your life. Emiliya:  Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you for taking the time to share your expertise in your practice of positive psychology with us. Lisa:  Thank you. It was my pleasure. Emiliya:  Lisa, if people wanted to find out m ore about your work, where could they find you? Lisa:  They can Google Lisa Garcia Jacobson. Emiliya:  Beautiful. Thank you, Lisa. Lisa:  Thank you. Bye. Emiliya:  Learn more about Lisa Jacobson's work at workplacesolutionstampa.com, including her interview bootcamp, career services, and executive coaching. Speaking of interviews, check out our website theflourishingcenter.com/5imodel. That's the number 5, the letter i, and the word model. This is a questionnaire that we've established to help you figure out which of the five change agent types you fall into, and based on identifying what type of change agent you are in the world, let us help you identify your personalized road map for success in helping you spread positive psychology in the science of flourishing around the world.

Take a glimpse into the world of applied positive psychology with The Flourishing Center podcast. Each episode includes three sections giving you insights and hacks into living an authentically happy and flourishing life. What you'll learn in this podcast: Science Says—Learn about heart rate variability and this powerful measure of the body's resilience. Life Hack—Build heart rate variability with breathing exercises. Practitioner’s Corner—Meet Jillian Guinta, she supports her community and takes a positive psychology-based approach to trauma. Learn more about The Flourishing Center Read the interview from the Practitioner's Corner: Emiliya:  Hello everyone, and join me today in welcoming Jillian Guinta. She's coming to us live from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She is a trauma recovery coach and teacher of therapeutic yoga. She's also a trained positive psychology practitioner from us here at The Flourishing Center. Welcome, Jillian. It is so great to have you here. Jillian:  Emiliya, it's great to be on with you today, as well. Thanks so much. Emiliya:  So tell us, Jillian: What brought you to this work? What brought you to positive psychology? Jillian:  Positive psychology, to be perfectly honest, was not on my radar. I was actually enrolled in a doctoral program when I found out about CAPP. I found out actually on a date with a really nice guy who had gone through the program, and as he was describing the program to me, I'm like, "Oh, man! That sounds so much more interesting than what I'm doing right now in grad school. And the tides in my life shifted, and the next semester I opted not to enroll in my university work and I went ahead and registered for CAPP. So it was really serendipitous to have met this person at all and then to have gone through the same program. Emiliya:  That's awesome. I love that, I love that. I love that it must have just been a really great date conversation, as well, to be sharing insight about well-being. So tell us: What does your application of positive psychology look like? Jillian:  So, right now, I am using positive psychology in my work. I work one-on-one with clients that have gone through traumatic experiences, and then it informs my yoga as well because traumas will often get locked in the body, and so to be able to coach someone through using some of the skills that we've learned together such as habit change and things of that nature have been really instrumental in helping these people make the changes in their lives as they start to come up for them at different points in their experience. Emiliya:  That's awesome. Tell us more about your background. Before you came to positive psychology, you were heavily involved in the fitness industry, right? Jillian:  I was. I was actually a personal trainer for many years. I actually have memories of being 10 years old at the grocery store with my mother and saying, "I want to be a personal trainer when I grow up," and she goes, "What's that?" I'm like, "I don't really know, but it looks like they have fun and they're in shape." So I got that start towards the end of my college experience at Rutgers University in New Jersey. I stayed with that for quite some time. I ended up going, uh, switching careers in my early 20s and I went into a master's program for education and started to just parse through the different backgrounds that I was experiencing and kind of coming into my own, really unsure about where I wanted to be in the world. And it was about that time in my mid-twenties where, you know, God or spirit, the universe--whoever--really upped my challenges, and I had some difficult issues, some traumas of my own that I had to work with. And I eventually found my way into yoga, then into a yoga program that was specifically for therapeutics, and we covered healing trauma. So I was able to then guinea pig these ideas and these different skills on myself and monitor my own healing. And then, having gone through the CAPP Program gave me a lot more confidence to go out into the world. Prior to that, I hadn't done anything that would equip me with too many coaching skills. I had a sales background and personal training and I had learned how to do motivational interviewing in my yoga training. But there was still a big disconnect in knowing the most appropriate ways to speak to clients that have gone through really troubling events. The positive psychology work really helped me to refine those skills that I wanted to have but that I didn't have yet. Emiliya:  Beautiful, Jillian, thank you so much for sharing that. Many of our listeners may not be familiar with some of the concepts because they're more research-based in positive psychology and traditional psychology, so can you tell us more about motivational interviewing? Jillian:  So motivational interviewing is sitting with a client or someone who has yet to become a client and kind of sifting through the things that are pulling them forward and also the things that are holding them back. So for someone who is a prime candidate for motivational interviewing, they might be a little ambivalent to change. They're not quite comfortable where they are but it's familiar and they're not sure if they want to go forward--often because they don't see the pathways. So through the process of motivational interviewing and coaching them and finding out--What are the things that motivate them?, What are the things that they're seeking?, gauging their present level of commitment or willingness--you're able to then ask them different questions to help them see the pathways of how the change might be possible. Emiliya:  Thanks, Jillian. I am so happy you pointed out the word "ambivalent" because one of the things I feel like I've learned the most from using motivational interviewing for over a decade now is that when people are not making a change, oftentimes they'll blame themselves. They'll think, "Oh I'm not motivated enough" or they'll just feel stuck and they don't really know why they feel stuck, but recognizing that part of motivation is not just the fact that they want to do something or don't want to do something--it's that there might be something that is pulling them in two directions, like "on the one hand, I want to start exercising, but when I exercise my knee hurts more. And so I'm in this stuck place. Do I exercise or do I make my knee hurt?" Or, when it comes to people making changes to their body, you'll see things like, you know, hiring a personal trainer has always been on their to-do list as maybe the last possible thing that would work for them, because so many things haven't worked. And the fear that comes with trying the last thing that they haven't tried yet--and what if that doesn't work?--is part of the reason that sometimes people don't start something. Because there's this fear. So I think it's such an important thing for people to hear that motivational interviewing is this really great approach of asking questions and reflective listening that does help people get motivated--but some of the ways in which it gets people motivated is by working through that ambivalence that they may feel of being pulled in different directions. Jillian:  Absolutely. It can get really challenging when you're about to make a big scary change. There is always something that's going to be willing to pop up in your face and say, "Hey, this is going to scare the pants off of you." And then you need to see why it's there and what you need to learn from it. Because ultimately we do want to change and grow and evolve. And I'm saying that as a blanket statement because I believe that to be true. But maybe we'd rather not have so many obstacles in the way. Emiliya:  Speaking of big scary changes you've made a lot of big scary changes in your life. Tell us about some of them. Jillian:  Oh wow. Yeah, I actually just a couple of days ago had my six month anniversary of being in a brand new city and a brand new state. I was born and raised in New Jersey and I recently moved down to Baton Rouge, Louisiana in kind of a whimsical way. I was doing a lot of journaling at that point in my life. It was after a breakdown of my marriage that had gone from a very healthy relationship to a very unhealthy relationship. A lot of negative patterns had emerged in me and it was time to lay that aside and work on myself and grow something new. So about a year after the separation from my husband, I was writing in my journal just asking for guidance, saying, "Where do you want me to be? What am I supposed to be doing? Who am I supposed to be helping?" And the next morning, I woke up and a news cast was on about Baton Rouge. Then I hear my dad playing a song that mentions Baton Rouge. And we live right on the border of New York City--we're not listening to a lot of music that references Baton Rouge, Louisiana! And then I would see it different places. And so I took that as a nudge from my own intuition saying, "Go here! See what this place is like." I'd only visited Baton Rouge once and it was totally boring. I actually said at the airport, "Oh well, I'm never coming back here. See ya!" And lo and behold, one year later, I was packing up my little white Elantra and grabbing the things that I thought I would need--which really just consisted at that time of clothing and books--and drove down the east coast and cut across Georgia and eventually made it to Baton Rouge, and made myself a little home here. So it's been six months. I arrived in March 2017, and since then, it's really been very divinely guided that I've been meeting the people that I was intended to meet--the ones that would help me in my journey. I have had lots of positive interactions with people. It's quite different from where you and I are from, Emiliya. It is a progressive city in the south but it doesn't compare to the level of resources that we have in New York. They don't have many folks that are doing trauma recovery. They don't have anyone that's doing positive psychology. Even advanced teacher trainings for yoga are few and far between. A lot of yoga teachers who would need to travel out of state to get some additional information and training. So it felt very much like an affirmation that I was in a place where I'm going to be used. And that's been a really exciting shift in my life. What was really frightening for me was leaving this home town where I grew up. Although I had traveled extensively, I hadn't lived anywhere else, but I kept coming back to the thought that if you're following your intuition, you're going to probably be fine. So here I am, six months later, with a brand new life. Emiliya:  I can't tell you, I'm like, I have chills and I feel so positively choked up for you because I'm celebrating this vision I have that you listened to the call. You picked up the call and that coming from a place in the New York/New Jersey region, we have a lot of need for so many things--but we do have a lot of people who have access. You can find a yoga class. You can find someone who does trauma work. You can find positive psychology practitioners. And I almost get the sense that the hearts and souls of these people who are ready to change were calling to you, and you picked up the call--and I celebrate that so much for you because you've got so many tools to offer them, so many skills that most people are just not aware even exist. And when they get them, it's like drinking water when you're thirsty. Such an honor. Jillian:  Great, thank you so much. I'm really excited. I'll be offering a training down here to yoga teachers, and I have some social workers showing up, as well as psychologists--yoga for trauma. It's an eight hour intensive in just a couple weeks. And I'm really excited. They're really excited. I've been making sure that my science is on point so I can deliver it well, and lots of people are going to heal--I feel that deeply--as a result of just sharing the information that we have access to. Emiliya:  Can you give me an example of some of the positive psychology that you find to be most helpful? So you talked about how you share the science of habit with some of the clients that you work with. What are some of the other positive psychology concepts and skills that you find really help people? Jillian:  I actually got to run one of our positive psychology Flourishing Skills Groups down here, and one thing that I noticed for me in my relationships was covering ACR--which is active constructive responding--has been huge for me. It's something that my clients and my friends and acquaintances in my group were really excited about bringing into their personal lives--celebrating the good things that happen in life, without too much of a context for people needing praise, but just enjoying the things that happen because if we look at all these small details, there's a lot that we can celebrate. So the active constructing constructive responding has been something really wonderful that we absolutely love down here. I have enjoyed doing "best possible future self" with people, and reframing mind chatter has been really helpful for everybody. Everyone has that--several voices in their heads, and they're telling us all different information, so we need to know what's coming up. If we don't fully realize why our mind chatter is, we can't work with it. It's the process of tuning enough to become aware of the subconscious and then working with it consciously. So those are a couple of my favorites. Emiliya:  Wow. Thank you, Jillian. And those of you listening, I'll just review some of the things that Jillian just said because those are awesome positive psychology exercises and interventions. Active constructive responding was a research topic that was uncovered by Dr. Shelly Gable and she recognized that we have a choice in how we can react to people's news. People often react to people's bad news by going, "Oh my gosh, what happened? Tell me more." And we get very granular in our asking for details in our curiosity when negative things happen, when bad things happen. But when positive events happen, those of us who have people in our lives that just go, "Oh that's great, congratulations, that sounds awesome" are responding in a positive way, but we can amplify that positivity by getting really curious and go, "Wow, tell me more. What enabled that?" And she found that the number of people that an individual has in their life that would help them celebrate their positive news and savor with them and be happy with them--not just happy for them, but genuinely happy with them--is a greater predictor of their well-being, whereas being silently supportive or the ways in which sometimes the people in our life are well-meaning and they want to support us, but you tell them things like, "Guess what, mom! I'm moving to Baton Rouge, Louisiana!" and they go, "Are you crazy? How are you going to leave your job? You don't know anyone down there!" and they give you all the negatives before first hearing out, "Wow. What makes you want to go there, and what is it about that that's exciting to you? What made you come to that and what possibilities are there for you?" and then being able to say, "Have you considered that you don't have a job there lined up for you and you don't actually know where you're living?" So the idea behind active constructive responding is savor and celebrate first. And it's an awesome, awesome intervention. And the other two that Jillian mentioned: best possible selves--which I would imagine, Jillian, is really powerful for people who are recovering from trauma or have recovered from trauma but just because you've recovered from trauma doesn't mean that you've built a vision of who's the person that you want to be--so the best possible future self is about giving people the space to think about how they want to be in the world and write about it and visualize themselves at their best. What would it be like if I met my goals? What would it be like if I felt the way that I want to feel? And then the last one that Jillian mentioned... I totally forgot! What did you mention as your last one? Jillian:  It was reframing mind chatter. Emiliya:  Reframing! I had to reframe my mind chatter and how I'm going, "What am I thinking? I can't remember what she just said." But I actually want to celebrate that moment for me because before I learned positive psychology, Jillian, I would have been like, "Emiliya, you're an idiot. How did you just forget what she said just a few moments ago?" But luckily, my brain didn't say that, and I had a permission-to-be-human moment. So reframing mind chatter. Jillian, when you give people some examples, what are some of the ways that they can reframe their thoughts? Or what type of thoughts should they be on the lookout for that are worth reframing? Jillian:  So, the ones that you're going to look out for the most--you can think of it almost like being at a picnic. If you have one little ant come by, not a big deal. But when a whole bunch of ants come by, that's kind of a big deal--especially in Louisiana because we have red ants and they bite! And I found that out the hard way. So when you start to notice repetitive negative thoughts that are making blanket statements about you or blanket statements about the world that are saying, "You're a bad person" or "You're so irresponsible" or whatever it happens to be. You referenced memory. I have also gone through memory issues. It's very common for folks that have gone through traumas in their life to struggle with short term memory. So something that might come up for them is like, "You're so dumb! You can't remember anything. Like, you may as well be 100 years old." Not a helpful thought--that's not going to be something that helps you improve your memory. So a reframe around having a lackingness in your short term memory might be: "I struggle to remember, but it's something that I'm working on every day" or "I forget things frequently, and so I use my calendar to remind myself." Things like that, that take something that could be a negative--maybe not always a negative, but could be a negative--and make it either neutral or a positive or something that's already being observed would be an appropriate reframe. We don't need to go from "You're so dumb" to "You're the smartest person on earth." It needs to be a believable and helpful reframe. Another one that I have struggled with is "You're so irresponsible." My "You're so irresponsible, Jillian" then becomes "You took a great risk and you are rebuilding parts of your life." That would be a neutralizing thought that counters this highly negative one of being an irresponsible person in the world. It's not true. So these couple of reframes and many, many other ones have been ones that I've used in my own personal life. They come up for my clients and for my students, as well and we'll continue to use them and will continue to reframe until we no longer need to--until we've either healed that area or have done enough of the healing that that's no longer our focus. Emiliya:  Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing those, Jillian, and it's so powerful to just remember that we can doubt our doubts and we can judge our judgments. And so many of us just walk around with our thoughts just going amuk. And so thank you for those really specific ways that we could address our mind chatter. Jillian, I'm curious if you can close us off with any words to live by that you feel are your mottos in life or your guiding philosophies. Jillian:  My guiding philosophy right now--ah, this is such a great question. One thing I've been tinkering with and trying as often as possible to implement is an intervention for my own worry. And that intervention is just to say, "Don't worry about the how." Don't worry about how it's going to come. Get clear on what you want and start playing with ideas. Worry is not going to be something that's helpful unless it's a very short term problem. But you can always look for pathways, so don't worry about the how. The how will happen if it's something that you truly desire. Emiliya:  Beautiful, Jillian. Thank you so much. And one more question. What does it mean in your heart and in your eyes for people to flourish? Jillian:  In my heart, when I see and acknowledge people that are flourishing, they are taking it one day at a time. They are staying present for what's coming up for them. They are moving forward courageously and to the best of their ability. They're perhaps not always 100 percent happy 100 percent of the time because we are humans and we get to be participants in a whole range of human emotions. But these flourishing people that I see in the world are the ones that are staying present and engaging with whatever comes up and letting it wash right past them when it's over. So that's what flourishing is to me. Emiliya:  Thank you so much, Jillian. Learn more about Jillian's work at jillianguinta.com. Here is how you, too, can create a career out of helping people thrive. Learn more about how to teach and spread positive psychology to your organizations and communities by visiting our website: www.theflourishingcenter.com. Thanks for listening, and until the next episode: may you be well, may you be happy, may you feel fulfilled.

Take a glimpse into the world of applied positive psychology with The Flourishing Center podcast. Each episode includes three sections giving you insights and hacks into living an authentically happy and flourishing life.​ What you'll learn in this podcast: Science Says—How getting Facebook likes can affect our happiness. Life Hack—Learn how to find your purpose in life. Practitioner’s Corner—Learn how a University is helping their students thrive. Learn more about The Flourishing Center Read the interview from the Practitioner's Corner: Emiliya:  Hello everyone and join me in welcoming Diana Brecher. She is coming to us live from Toronto, Ontario, and she is a clinical psychologist and scholar in residence for positive psychology at Ryerson University. She's been integrating positive psychology into her work, and I'm so excited for you guys to hear more about the delicious things she's up to in the world. So Diana, thank you so much for taking the time to be here with us. Diana:  It's a pleasure. I'm so happy to be here. Emiliya:  Diana, tell us, what brought you to this work? Diana:  Well, I've been working in the university setting in the counseling center at Ryerson University since 1991, so it's 27 years since I started here and I've been working with students in distress that whole time, up until about a year and two months ago. And what I found was that I was able to really make a difference in these students' lives, but what I wanted to do, was I wanted to move upstream. I wanted to get into contact with these students well before the crisis emerged. And so I became really interested in positive psychology because I think that's a field of research and practice that really shows us that if we front-load a lot of skills and attitudes and behaviors early on, that kind of 40 percent that Sonja Lyubomirsky talks about that's under our control, we can make a huge difference in terms of our capacity to thrive and to flourish. So I became interested in learning those skills so that I could teach them to my community, being students, faculty, and staff in the university. Emiliya:  That's beautiful, Diana. One of the things that excites me so much is that so many psychology students go through university training and they rarely ever get to hear about positive psychology, because they spend so much of their time studying the basics of psychology, which of course is important, but I can't tell you the number of undergraduate students I've met that either ... maybe they finally heard about positive psychology their very last semester of college, or haven't heard of it at all, so it's so exciting to know that these tools are being given to our young adults and that they're getting the skills so early on, as well as their professors. Diana:  Absolutely. What I decided to do was, when I took the certificate course, certificate in applied positive psychology through the flourishing Center, what really struck me was that one of the foundations of flourishing is resilience. And so I created a five-factor model of resilience, which was the genesis of a training program that I now run for students and faculty and staff. It's a four-week program. It incorporates, I think, some of the best ideas in positive psychology, but I've put them together like pieces of a puzzle and I get people to engage in these skills with the hope that front loading them will allow these individuals to flourish when they do come across really stressful and difficult challenges. Emiliya:  That's awesome, Diana. Can you tell for the audience that's listening ... Some people might not be familiar with the concept of resilience. So, what, in your eyes, is resilience and in particular, what are the kind of things that you see that faculty in the schools and the students needing to be resilient around? Diana:  Well, I think of resilience as ... if you think of five pieces of a puzzle with mindfulness being the heart of it, so the capacity to be in the present moment, then gratitude for the good things in our life and our capacity to notice possibilities and engage in them. Optimism, which allows us to frame experiences in such a way that gives us the energy to bounce back, self compassion, really based on the work of Kristin Neff, looking at being your own best friend, and seeing your suffering in context. And then finally grit and resilience, so Angela Duckworth's work in grit around persevering, around obstacles, and having passion for very long-term goals, and at the same time, I've borrowed from Christine Padesky's work, who's a clinical psychologist in building a personal model of resilience, which is attending to the strategies and attitudes that we use when we persevere doing something we love to do, and transferring those same skills when we're encountering a challenge. So the second part of your question was what kind of challenges do students experience? Well, they're huge. They could be academic challenges because they may be unprepared for the demands of their program, or it may be life circumstances completely outside of their college or university experience, but they're simply not prepared to deal with a fire in their apartment building, their parents getting divorced, going through a serious breakup, dealing with health concerns, managing being far away from home as an international student. All kinds of stressors can come in, plus life events, like experiencing a clinical depression or an anxiety disorder, or a trauma where you do need a lot of help to bounce back. But sometimes, people postpone the help-seeking behaviors so long that it becomes a huge crisis by the time they get help. So I'm trying to teach people the strategies to manage things early on, to nip them in the bud so that they don't need crisis intervention because they've actually bounced back along the way. Emiliya:  I love that, Diana. Thank you so much for both walking us through your model and sharing some of those specifics. I think that one of the things I found in speaking about resilience and teaching resilience skills in our programs and others, is that I find that resilience becomes this buzzword that people want. Of course, you want to be resilient and we want organizations to be resilient, but so few people recognize that it's actually a skill set and it's made up of these micro level skills and that we could break it down and we could teach it and we could workshop it and we could train these muscles and when you train all of these different factors, they're all important pillars, you do get more resilience and I think the thing that's held people back from recognizing that resilience is something that they can increase, is that resilience is what is the outcome of all of these other factors that we work on building. Diana:  Exactly. And alongside of that, because it's ... you know I work in a very large university. There's 35,000 students. There's no way I'm going to personally interact with each one of them. What I did was I created a workbook, which I've called, Cultivate Your Happiness, A Thrive RU Weekly Workbook. Thrive RU is the title of the program that I'm running because RU stands for Ryerson University and what I did was I thought about the challenges of the academic term for both the fall and winter terms and came up with a weekly exercise for each of the 13 weeks of the term. Based on what I know about the challenges that students face, and so I'm kind of introducing positive psychology light through just a very simple exercise and a reflection question for each week so that students can play with the workbook like a journal. We've done it as a downloadable pdf, plus a print copy, and they can write all kinds of things in it, but each exercise is something taken from kind of research-validated exercises through Sonja Lyubomirsky, through the mindfulness tradition, through the cognitive therapy tradition, so I've kind of pulled in from whatever seemed most useful for me. And the feedback I've been getting from people who are using the workbook is that it's really changing how they're interacting with their ... kind of dealing with their challenges. They're feeling more resilient. They're engaging in more healthy activities. They're beginning to go, as it was talked about in the course that you taught, going kind of north of neutral. So they're not just going to get by. They're going to thrive. Emiliya:  That's amazing, Diana. Thank you, and I'm curious, what is the reaction from the faculty within Ryerson been, as you've been introducing positive psychology to them? Diana:  Well, you know it's been great because I've been doing it in two different ways. I've been invited into specific academic departments and teaching the faculty the five-factor model of resilience, so we do four sessions together. And then they've been inviting me slowly into the classroom to teach it to their students, so one fashion professor, who teaches a first year introductory course to 150 students, has invited me in for every week of this term, to teach her students about the workbook. So giving more of the background knowledge to the exercises that I've pulled together for that. I've been invited in to do lectures on resilience. I've been invited to work with the student leaders, or student ambassadors, in a particular department. I come in and I do training with them, training with students who work in the residence. And the faculty are basically saying, "We want our students to know this because we want them to do well. And they recognize that doing well academically, in part has to do with how well you're doing personally. And so if someone is unwell, they can't really flourish in a classroom. And so they want those kind of double set of skills. They're being talked about as the academic skills and then the thriving skills. Emiliya:  Diana, I'm so excited about what you're creating, and I'm imagining this ripple and tide effect and thinking how cool would it be to train the university students to be able to teach other students within the university and empower them with the skills to then teach it to others. Diana:  Well, actually, this Saturday coming up, I'm going to the University of Windsor. I'm going to be working with 45 or so mentors, who are student leaders like in maybe their third or fourth year of their degrees, who are going to be working with first year students and teaching them to thrive by incorporating the exercises from my workbook, but by really bringing it to life what I'm doing in the workshop is I'm giving them the background of what the exercise is all about and how to teach it with extra resources and such. And my hope is that as I keep working with student leaders also at Ryerson, that it's going to be almost like a pyramid scheme in the best possible way, where I teach one group of people and then they teach the next group of people. So it's the train the trainer model and it's really exciting to see that roll out where I don't have to be the one person who has all this knowledge, but I'm sharing it with everyone and it's giving it away and then they take it and they own it and they teach it to other people. Emiliya:  The thing that excites me the most about that is that so much of what we're doing is we're teaching skills and sometimes positive psychology can come across to people as that's really nice theory, or that's a good skill to know, but there's only so much life experience you could be going through while you're learning those skills, and so to teach really is to learn. So I'm excited for these students because as they learn these skills, they learn it one level. They learn it first on the head level and they go, "Yeah, that makes sense." And maybe from this massive tool kit of tools that you're offering them, at that point in time in their life, they're only going to be able to use one or two, because they'll be most relevant, but as they start to teach it to others, they have more time with the skills, and they start to embody the skills in a very different way. And so, to teach is to learn and I'm excited that these students are going to get this opportunity to pass the skills on to others. Diana:  Absolutely. We've had an amazingly positive reaction. There's another program that I just launched with a colleague who's a learning strategist. So last March, we invited students who were not in crisis, but not flourishing, kind of that middle ground, languishing, into an eight week program that we call Thriving in Action. And what we did was, each week for two hours, my colleague, Deena Shaffer, would teach holistic learning strategies, and I would teach thriving strategies. And we did it over an eight week period. We had enormous success. We did pre and post tests trying to measure change by self report, by the students in these objective measures, and also subjectively, and what we found was there was a huge shift in the sense of well-being in these students, in part because we were really getting them where they lived. So their context is a university. So if they can do well in an exam, they're going to feel better, and if they are sleeping better and exercising, and becoming more optimistic, and engaging in daily gratitude, they're going to perform much better academically. And so it becomes like this one hand washing the other and the students found that it made an enormous difference. And so we're now running a whole set of ... well this term is going to be three cohorts of students who are self-identified as struggling either academically or personally. And they're going to be coming to the skill-based group. We've made it an eleven week curriculum. We've involved Outward Bound, which is a kind of outdoors, in nature experience around resilience. We've partnered with our athletic center so that students who are taking our program can access any of their exercise classes for free. We're really working at trying to look at the whole person and our hope is that this is really going to be an idea that takes off and that this curriculum is going to be something that others can use. We're hoping to turn it into an e-course. We're kind of working around the pedagogy around that as well. Emiliya:  That's awesome. Thank you, Diana. And Diana, I'm curious. How has positive psychology impacted you, personally? Diana:  It has in the best possible way in that I reinvented my career at a somewhat later stage of a career. You know, 25 years here. I left the counseling center. I was seconded into this new role. I'm now in the second year of this work, and what I'm finding is that I'm flourishing because I'm so happy in what I'm doing. The life satisfaction of teaching these skills in this role, thinking about, reading about, and kind of being immersed in positive psychology, has actually become an incredible emotion boost for me. I'm feeling like I'm flourishing because now I know so much about how to do it. So I'm applying it to myself. Emiliya:  And what are some of your favorite ways to put positive psychology into practice yourself? Diana:  Well, I used to meditate periodically, doing mindfulness meditation, but I've become a regular meditator. So, I do that daily. It's really become part of my whole routine, so every morning I do yoga and meditation. I engage in daily gratitude. Three good things are just not enough. There are many more than three, so I really take note of them all day, and it really helps when I'm faced with challenges to remember all of those good things. I've taught myself how to become an optimist. I mean Martin Seligman's work in learned optimism is really the genesis of what I teach people as part of the resilience training and I can do it now. I know how to be more optimistic. Self compassion is something that didn't come that easily to me, but now that I'm teaching it, I'm teaching it to others, but teaching it to myself, so I'm becoming much more self compassionate. And I'm persevering. Not that it takes a lot of perseverance to do this because it's so much fun, but the days are long and I have a lot of commitments, and you have to keep going, and it's easy for me to do that because I get such a sense of meaning from it. And that's one of the things, when I think about PERMA-V, is the meaning that we derive from activities that are in our value system, is incredible. And if you can live your life according to your values, there's nothing better. Emiliya:  Diana, I'm curious if you have taken on any words to live by that are your guiding principles of what helps you show up in the world the way that you want to. Diana:  Really, it's about bouncing back. Life is going to always have challenges before us. And our job is to do more than just cope with that. It's really to bounce back. And so that's what I try to do, is I try to be flexible. I try to be open. I try to be playful. And when these things are challenging, I just remember I have to bounce back. Emiliya:  Thank you so much for sharing that. And the last question that we've been asking people is how do you define in your heart and in your mind, what it means to flourish? Diana:  I think it's really being your best self and giving yourself permission to take the risks that you need to take in order to reach your dreams. Emiliya:  That's so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that, Diana. Diana, people would love to learn more about what you're up to, what Ryerson University is up to, this amazing program on thriving that you've created. What are some ways that we can learn more? Diana:  Well, at this point, our website is probably the best place to go, because you can download the workbook from there, I have some tip sheets, and we have some resilience flash cards. We've created some materials. We're going to be updating the website sometime soon, but that's probably a good place to start. So it's basically https://ryerson.ca\thriveru Emiliya:  Beautiful. Thank you so much for being here with us today and sharing your insight, your wisdom, your passion, and some of the beautiful things that you're doing in the world. Diana:  Thank you. It's been a pleasure talking with you, Emiliya. And again, I really have to thank you once again for offering this certificate in applied positive psychology, because it changed my life. And so I really am very grateful. So thank you. Emiliya:  Thank you, Diana. Much love to you. Thank you. Is helping people thrive part of your purpose? If so, visit our website, theflourishingcenter.com, and learn more about how we are training the change agents of the world to turn their passion for helping people into a career where they spread positive psychology through coaching, teaching, and consulting. Thanks for listening and have a flourishing day.