Positive Psychology uses pragmatic practices, resources, and strategies that leverage your strengths to build resilience, happiness and wellbeing. Change starts with just one small, realistic step, so here are ten that Bliss Coaching has found to be the best of the best.
1) Relationship with Self
The relationship with yourself is the first and most important relationship you can ever have. Getting the foundation of ‘relationship with self’ right is the key to healthy, loving, and sustainable relationships with others. It starts with being true to yourself and your authenticity, understanding and honouring your needs – such as giving to self, self-acceptance, being kind to self, positive self-talk, and setting boundaries.
Listen to your intuition. Trust it. Have your own back. Our feelings are a steadfast guide, and our rudder in life.
2) Relationship with Others
Happy, healthy external relationships and strong social connections fuel our personal happiness, resilience, and mental vitality. Making time to nurture and maintain relations with all the significant people in your life helps you grow and keeps your brain happy.
Demonstrating, kindness, compassion, and forgiveness with others can also have a profound effect on our wellbeing.
Plan regular catch-ups and social events with your loved ones and hang out with special people in your life to stay connected and nourish your wellbeing.
3) Cultivating a Gratitude Mindset
What we think is what we get. As we all know, life is a potpourri of ups and downs, uncertainty, challenges and change. Such is life, for we humans. However, it’s how we choose to respond to those challenges that builds mental resilience and enables us to thrive and flourish in life.
The key is developing and cultivating a healthy mindset and raising our self-awareness. Gratitude is a key part of that, and makes us aware of the preciousness of our lives and the people and things that we love. Gratitude is a way to bring more goodness into our lives and grow an abundance mindset.
Try daily journaling to nurture your mental health and create space in your mind. Ask yourself – what is one thing you feel grateful for and why? Or use three words to describe how you are feeling. Sharing with a gratitude buddy is another way to build the habit of gratitude into your life on a daily basis.
4) Self-compassion
Self-compassion is the healing balm that gently builds good self-care, kindness, and compassion for self and others. It will support you in breaking old subconscious thinking and limiting beliefs.
I highly recommend Dr. Kristin Neff’s self-titled book – ‘Self-compassion’ – it will give you a good understanding of the benefits of self-care and kindness to help manage stress. Take the test on the website self-compassion.org to gauge your level of self-kindness.
5) The Art of Extreme Self-Care
Good self-care is knowing how to look after ourselves mentally, physically, spiritually and emotionally.
Amidst the hustle and bustle of our busy lives, we can forget to take the time and space to look after ourselves. Becoming aware of how vital and fundamental good self-care is and defining your personal self-care strategies is pivotal to nurture, boost and sustain mental health and wellbeing.
Define and integrate these practices into your daily life, and flip the switch on self-criticism and negative thoughts. The key is to embrace, acknowledge and ‘feel’ your feelings. This may be uncomfortable at times, but self-acceptance is part of the ‘self-care’ process and lays the foundation for integration into wholeness.
6) Establish Support Networks
Trusted and supportive people in your life will enable you to share your vulnerability and see it as a strength, not a weakness. Being honest with ourselves and then sharing with others is the way we process and learn. So, try sharing something new that’s on your mind with a trusted support person.
7) Spark Your Joy and Happiness
Discover tangible tools and strategies to unlock your inner joy. It’s about discovering new things and rediscovering the old. (Tip: It’s anything that makes your heart sing!) Happiness and joy cover a wide range of positive emotions from high-arousal feelings of joy and excitement to low-arousal feelings such as contentment and satisfaction.
Make a list of things you love, your deepest desires, hopes, dreams and aspirations straight from the heart. Then ask yourself, “What do I really want in life, and what do I want more of in life?” Incorporate these insights into your days.
8) Being versus Doing
We can all relate to how being busy ‘doing” can leave no time for “being”; spending time with people we love and doing the things we love. We adapt our ways to keep going without living or loving to our full potential. The busyness of life can distract from our need for ‘being’ time and gradually over time our inner reserves deplete and can take a toll on our health, relationships, and peace of mind.
Find that healthy balance between doing versus being. Get that downtime for you – just do it! Allow yourself to nourish your beingness with the simple pleasures of life; find things that nurture, restore and pamper you; soak in a bath, get out in nature, get creative with writing, painting, or reading, set free your playful side, appreciate beauty, play a song you love, meditate, breathe, and connect with those special people in your life. Do something you loved as a kid or an old hobby you loved, and give it a go again!
9) Communication and Courageous Conversation
Effective communication builds, repairs, strengthens and maintains balance in relationships. Saying what you mean with kindness and integrity grows and sustains meaningful, fulfilling and loving relationships.
Having those honest and courageous conversations gets to the heart of the matter and gets the elephant in the room out! The aim of a courageous conversation is clearly communicating what you want or need to change. You can’t be wrong about your own personal feelings, so use ‘I feel’ statements so you can get it across without upsetting or blaming the other person.
To develop your interpersonal skills and assertiveness, find ways that empower you to find your voice and speak up. Set a goal to have a courageous conversation.
10) Emotional Health and Wellbeing
Strengthening and taking care of our emotional health can be done in a myriad of nurturing and nourishing ways; trusting our intuition, raising self-awareness, establishing boundaries, assertive communication and more.
Make and take many moments of ‘bliss’ to deeply nourish your heart and soul. Also have a look at the beginnings of Deepak Chopra’s world movement on www.NeverAlone.love.
BONUS: 11) Act on your Values, Clarify Purpose and Define Success
A clear sense of purpose and deep-rooted values are the foundation of the person you want to be. Define what success means to you. Find ways to express your creativity to grow in new meaningful and fulfilling ways. Set an intention to start each day thinking of 2 or 3 values that you want to live by and act on them.
I hope these Positive Psychology tips support you towards a more peaceful, balanced and fulfilling life.
Stay well, and enjoy some bliss in love, life and work!
Pamela Hay
www.blisscoaching.co.nz