How did I get obsessed and how could it help you? Take a minute to read this!
People often ask me about my certification in Applied Positive Psychology—how I was introduced to it, what exactly it is and why it speaks to me. So here we go…
Back around the end 2010 and the beginning of 2011 my dad was in the later stages of dementia and I was visiting Boston a lot to both spend time with him and support my mom. It was a heavy time and it was easy to get stuck in the sadness of the whole thing and just sort of plod along in my life. And that was pretty much what I was doing.
“I mean who doesn’t want to feel like their working towards their best life rather than just getting by?”
Around this same time, WeightWatchers was starting to focus more and more on mindset, and as a Coach for them I started getting all of this information in the forms of articles and videos. And those articles and videos were my introduction to Positive Psychology. The more I learned, the more I thought—“This is my jam!” Everything about it spoke to me and got me curious and excited. I also found that the tools I was learning about were helping me not only cope, but to gracefully move through the difficulty time with my father’s illness.
So what exactly IS Positive Psychology? Well, according to Christopher Peterson—who was one of the foremost experts in the field, it’s “the scientific study of what makes life worth living”. Applied Positive Psychology takes all the recent scientific research around human thoughts, feelings and behaviors that focus on building on our strengths. It's about leveraging the good in our lives versus repairing the bad. It's about testing what happens when we concentrate less on getting the average person to feel OK and more on helping people work on feeling really good--flourishing, in fact. All of this is distilled down into tools to bring it all to life in our everyday lives. I mean who doesn’t want to feel like their working towards their best life rather than just getting by?
“And I’ve been OK. Better than OK. I’m so glad I have access to these tools.”
After years of reading and watching everything I could find on the subject, I discovered an in depth certification at the Flourishing Center in NYC. I dove in at the end of 2017 and completed the certification journey in 2018. I was so excited about the whole thing that I then got continued my education, getting certified as a resilience trainer through that same lens of Positive Psychology.
Here's the thing—I use so many of the tools that I have learned in my day to day life. I keep thinking that over the Covid years, that is what saved me. These days when life is feeling wonky—and it has over the last few years or so, I’ve been really leaning hard into all that I have learned. And I’ve been OK. Better than OK. I’m so glad I have access to these tools. And I’m so excited to continue to share them. xoxo
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