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rob kall
www.positivepsychology.net
Positive Experience Planning, Creation, Discovery
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Plan, schedule, research, anticipate PEs--
Besides being physically, mentally and emotionally prepared for a positive experience, you can schedule PEs and plan your reaction to unexpected PE opportunities.
"If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in the common hours." Thoreau
List and examine your dreams, goals, fantasies and projects. Use mental imagery and fantasy to start breathing life into your hopes and plans for the future. Explore the details, examining the short and long term considerations--the pros and cons for each of your PE goals. Prioritize their importance and assess the likelihood of their happening. Plan the steps that you will take to get them rolling. Decide what you must change to increase your chances for success. Begin to anticipate the pleasure your achievements and successes will bring you. Before you reach your goal, whether its a vacation, graduation or a weekend with someone special, let yourself begin to feel your heart glowing with the light at the end of the tunnel. Expect some difficulties-- the universe's standard price for the most valued moments. Use your anticipation of pleasure as a reward to keep you motivated as you persevere through work and adversity.
Stretch to Flow: Fresh challenges sharpen your skills
As part of an experiment conducted by Social psychology researcher Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a diverse group of people carried an electronic beeper which periodically signalled them to fill in questionnaires describing their activities and feelings at that particular moment. Dr. Csikszentmihalyi found that people felt best when they encountered opportunities to match their own skills against challenges within reasonable reach of their capacities. When the challenge is strong and the skill brought to meet the challenge rises high, the person not only enjoys himself, says Dr. Csikszentmihalyi, but grows, stretching his capabilities and adding to his depth and complexity. When these conditions occur, attention narrows and concentration on the task increases. People often lose track of themselves and seem to merge with their task or their environment, experiencing a feeling of elation or transcendence. Dr. Csikszentmihalyi calls this pleasant condition of intense concentration a flow state. Flow states vary in intensity. The most intense and complex occur so infrequently that you must find or create opportunities for them.
Dr. Csikszentmihalyi also studied people who spent a lot of time and intense, strenuous effort totally immersed in activities for which they received little or no money or recognition--rock climbers, chess masters, dancers, high school basketball players and composers of music. Why do they climb or practice or stay up night after night working on a project only to forget it when it's finished? For the challenge. Because the sheer pleasure of pushing themselves to perform at the edge of their abilities puts them into a self-rewarding flow state.
Dr.Csikszentmihalyi's work reveals that we are happy when we test or attempt to go beyond our current capabilities. You can add enjoyment to life by setting up games or challenges for yourself in whatever you do. When you have a boring or unpleasant task, you can add an inner challenge to the way you do it. Make up a game or add an un-required but interesting extra element to the task.
Dr. Csikszentmihalyi's research suggests we spend much of our time just moving from one moment to the next, satisfying biological drives and social requirements. To enjoy life more, we need to continually create challenges for ourselves, as artists do when they confront a blank canvas. You can create your own flow states by working at creating and seeking challenges, thus building your skills, whether they are skills for climbing mountains, baking cakes, dealing effectively with difficult people,decorating, negotiating, growing, organizing, learning new concepts or strengthening muscles. In the same way, you will increase your self esteem, positive attitude and happiness by meeting challenges with enthusiasm and appreciating these opportunities to stretch and grow.
Develop the habit of living in the moment
The idea of staying with the moment, enjoying the road rather than waiting to reach the destination-- as one of the necessaries of happiness and positive experience repeats itself throughout written history. Emerson says, To fill the hour--that is happiness: to fill the hour and leave no crevice for a repentance or an approval. We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them. ...To finish the moment, to find the journey's end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours is wisdom."
Dr. Csikszentmihalyi's research suggests that staying in the moment is a primary element of flow. The flow state rewards behaviors that maintain and stabilize one's body and one's idea of self. He says, "Flow is a sense that humans have developed in order to recognize patterns of action that are worth preserving and transmitting over time." He goes even further and suggests that the evolution of consciousness and ultimately of humanity hinges on our ability to invest our psychic energy in goals that transcend our basic genetic and cultural programming-- that we need to engage in activities that are motivated not by pleasure, power or participation, but by the desire to experience the moment for itself, without any concern about the rewards or advantages it may bring. Out of these concentrated moments of flow induced pleasure, diamonds of innovation often emerge which move humanity forward. For example, Isaac Newton described how much fun he had working out his theory of gravitational attraction, "I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."
