Thankful Thursday

I got this idea from the Visbal Family Blog, which by the way…please keep them and their sweet daughter Hailey in your prayers!

Anyway, I saw this and I thought it was such a great idea.  As part of my Motivation and Emotion in Education class that I’ve mentioned before, we are talking a lot about positivity and how it effects education.

We recently read this book by Barbara Frederickson (click on the picture to go to Amazon and read more about it) as a jump start to our look into positivity in education.

It is a pop psych book so it is an easy read, but it also has a great deal of research to back up her theories, so I highly recommend it!

Anyway, she has an ideal positivity ratio of 3:1 (I won’t go into how she finds that, but you can read it in the book ;)), but basically you should have 3 positivity to 1 negativity.  Anything above that would lead to the “Pollyanna” effect and below that would be overly negative.  The way you find out your positivity ratio is by taking a “quiz” every day and track your results in the back of the book or on the corresponding website.  Over time, you’ll begin to see your positivity ratio develop.

In her book she also talks about different ways to increase your positivity which includes anything from meditation to creating a toolbox of “happy things” (that’s not the word she uses, but that’s how I see it) of things that you can mentally pull out in times of crisis.  I have started building my little toolkit by building inspiration boards, much like I do for event planning, but for personal goals in my life (education, health, career, etc).  We’ve only been tracking our positivity for a week, but mine has definitely gone up.

Our professor wants us to continue to track our positivity, but change up our methods.  One of the methods is to meditate and keep a journal of what you are thankful for. When I saw that blog post on the Visbal’s blog, I thought this would be the perfect way to do it.

So as part of my regular posting (because as you can tell, I don’t keep up with these meme’s too well), I’m going to try and add this in just for myself and my class.

So for my inaugural post, here are the things I am thankful for this week (Although there’s lots to be thankful for, I’m starting out with two and I’ll add on more as the weeks go on):

1. My professors/mentors –I have been blessed with some amazing professors (and mentors) in my program.  Because it is a smaller program, you get to know the few professors really well when you have them for numerous classes.  I’ve already talked about my amazing advisor, but just this past week, I worked with another amazing professor on a research proposal that we submitted to hopefully be able to present at a conference this summer.  After my confidence was shot because of my last situation, it is nice to have people who back you up and have confidence that you can be successful.
2. Alex – Sometimes, I don’t think I give the boy enough credit.  I usually get too wrapped up in the general relationship drama that I forget why I adore him.  Because my weekend plans changed, I ended up getting to spend some much needed time with him this past weekend and there were times I really realized how lucky I am to have in my life.  Whether it is just him being goofy to make me smile, sending sweet text messages, to letting me get my way on certain things (like my sappy movies or dinner).  Even though I give him a hard time about being a boy and driving me up the wall (because what guy doesn’t sometimes ;)), I don’t know what I would have done without him…he definitely keeps me sane :)

What are you thankful for this week?