The One With The Five Strengths.

This semester I'm taking a class called Positive Psychology and The Good Life. It's my last writing component class and one of the optional assignments is to write a blog post every week reflecting on what was talked about (you have to have a certain amount of writing by the end of the semester). I figured this was a perfect opportunity to use my blog, since I'm trying to be better at writing more. And it should still be interesting to my readers.  In my book, it says positive psychology is the scientific study of what goes right in life, from birth to death and at all stops in between. I figured this was the perfect class to be taking, since I could be focusing on a lot of bad things. For example, my impending graduation where I have no idea what I'm doing...you know, stuff like that. I'm hoping I come out of this class a more positive person. One of those people who looks at the glass half full. An optimist. We will see if that can happen. ;) By the way, this first blog post will be the longest one, since I'm opening you all up to it and there was a lot that was covered in the first 3 class periods. Bear with me.

The first few class periods were pretty cool. The first day of class, I was thinking we would read the syllabus and then leave (like I thought with all of my other classes as well) WRONG (yes, in ASL - this I should explain real quick to my teacher since this is the first time she's seeing something like this in my blog. It's old news to my readers. I will sometimes put WRONG in my blog. In American Sign Language, when you are signing a story, and something doesn't go as planned, you sign the word for "wrong," so sometimes I incorporate ASL in my blog, because I took about 5-6 years of it and love it - anywho, moving on) we went over the syllabus and started talking about positive psych. We were asked to write about what we expected of this class, etc. We were then asked to take a survey online that would give us our top 5 strengths, which I will come back to. The second class period we watched a video of a lecture done at Southwestern, I believe, about happiness. While some parts were boring, overall it was a pretty interesting lecture. Here are a few of the parts I found interesting:

• He opened up by saying, "before we talk about how to be happy, we need to ask ourselves if we WANT to be happy." He went on to explain: is happiness really a good thing? Is it functional? Sometimes there are things that make us feel good, but really aren't functional or good. i.e. meth...but obviously being happy is a good thing. I'm also big on how powerful the mind really is. And I like to say "Do you want to be happy?" If you do, then you can be. It's all about changing your attitude. This brings me to point number dos. 
• He talked about social relationships, worldly success (monies), work success, and then he came to health. Health is such an important part of being happy. It's also a symbiotic relationship. To be happy, you need to be healthy, and to be healthy, you need to be happy. Here's an example of how health depends on happiness. If you have a cardiac event (i.e. heart attack), and after this event, you are depressed, you are 5 TIMES more likely to have a second cardiac event. 5 times people! This reminds me of the placebo effect, which is something that just fascinates me. If you are given a sugar pill to help your symptoms and you actually believe this pill will help you (not knowing it's just sugar), you're mind is more likely to alleviate those symptoms on its own. THE MIND IS AMAZING. I could go on and on about that, but I won't bore you. 
• The last point I'll talk about is the different characteristics in the different areas of life that he said happy people have. In social relationships, they are more likely to have: leadership, more friends, volunteer, more political involvement, and trust in others. Apparently, the most cheerful people make $65,000 a year. And for work success: higher supervisor ratings, organizational citizens, doing things for work place not in the job description, etc.

Ok, so really quick I have two more things left. First, I will briefly discuss what my top 5 strengths ended up being. By "strengths" it really means what you value the most in life. Here were my top 5:

1. Spirituality, sense of purpose, and faith 
2. Capacity to love and be loved 
3. Gratitude 
4. Honesty, authenticity, and genuineness 
5. Perspective (wisdom) 

I actually thought these were all SPOT on. I'm truthfully so happy that spirituality came in at number 1. I also think that my spirituality (religion) really incorporates all of the other top strengths.

Ok last thing. I'm supposed to discuss these questions in class tomorrow: What does it mean to have a good life? How do you measure happiness? The main thing she asked us to focus on was this hypothetical situation. If you and a friend decided that near the later part of your life, you would come together and discuss who's life was better; who had the happier life. What kinds of things would you measure that happiness on. "I've had the best life because..."
So I haven't really thought about this much. I'm honestly just typing as I think. I think my first/main thing I would focus on would be relationships. Not HOW MANY I had, but how meaningful they were. Friends and family. The second would be what I did with my life. Did I make a difference? Even if it were just with one person, did I help someone out? I would also focus on did I live a Godly life, overall. Did my actions bring people to know the amazing God that I know? Did I live a life God would be proud of? If the answers to those questions were yes, then I'm not sure how you could have a better life than me. I still have some work to do...

I will still end these blog posts with a quote from Friends (my favorite TV show of all time - for Dr. Carlson - that's also why all my blog posts start with "The one with..." since that's what they do for each episode in the series).

Rachel: They wanna know if I'm okay. Okay...they wanna know if I'm okay, okay, let's see. Well, let's see, the FICA guys took all my money, everyone I know is either getting married, or getting promoted, or getting pregnant, and I'm getting coffee! And it's not even for me! So if that sounds like I'm okay, okay, then you can tell them I'm okay, okay?"
Monica: Uh, Rachel has left the building, can she call back?