Authentically Happy

Prerequisite: Happiness and the Highly Sensitive Person, parts one and two

Learn practical, powerful ways to build the habits of happiness and joy. 

The highly sensitive person is strongly affected by their surroundings. When they are negative, the HSP experiences more negative impact. But that’s not the end of the story. When their circumstances are good, they experience greater happiness. It pays them to be alert to their environment and recognize those people and places that welcome them. This is a key piece of an HSP's happiness. 

This class is designed especially for the people who wish someone could tell them how to be happier. Or they wish that life came with better directions, and that they were issued an owner's manual at birth. It's time that that someone would explain more of what they need to know to navigate through life. 

Finally, in the late 1990s science turned its attention to the positive. Now this research can give you a series of activities and exercises that can make you lastingly happier.

Around the same time research was being released about the highly sensitive person, the one person in five, men and women equally, who were high in sensory processing sensitivity. According to Elaine Aron, Ph.D., the HSP is more aware of the subtleties in their surroundings and of the nuances in relationships.

We HSPs notice more, including more potential problems. It is important we stay focused on the positive, and particularly on positive emotion. It turns out that positive self-talk is not particularly effective. It can spotlight our guilt, doubts, or regrets. What provides the biggest boost to our mood and momentum is actually noticing, naming, and claiming our own positive emotions. They, according to researcher Barbara Fredrickson, are "the tiny engines" that support our positive direction and build social and emotional capital.

Study after study strongly shows the importance of positive emotion, and that the frequent use of your core strengths builds positive momentum, capitalizing on who you are when you're at your best.

This is in contrast to the approach that focuses on your negative emotions and on overcoming your weaknesses, an approach that keeps your mind on where you don't want to go instead of where you do. Not only does the positive way feel better, it works better, and there's a great deal of data to show that.

This five-week class includes both study and implementation so that you build a strong conceptual framework, and then pair that with practical strategies, weekly assignments, and daily exercises. Because you have busy lives, assignments outside class are intended to be minimally time-intensive and can be completed in about three hours.

Here's an overview of the topics:

Week 1: The full life (and routes to achieving it), including...

• -Enjoyment and gratification
• -Significance and meaning
• -Engagement and sense of flow
• -Positive relationships
• -Positive accomplishments
• -Maximizing vs. satisficing
• -Better standard of living vs. increasing rates of depression
• -Positive emotion broadens your perspective and builds emotional capital
• -History, research, and self-quizzes

Week 2: Positive emotion and work

• -Creativity, craft, and recrafting
• -Turning career into calling
• -Workplace themes
• -Customizing your work

Week 3: Happiness about the past

• -Everyday gratitude and the gratitude visit
• -Forgiveness and letting go
• -Savoring experience, celebrating memories
• -Enjoyment

Week 4: Happiness about your future

• -Optimism, pessimism, defensive pessimism
• -Disputing the negatives
• -Mentoring others
• -Creating a legacy
• -Creating a meaningful life and aging well

Week 5: Love, marriage and family

• -Active-constructive responding to improve relationships
• -Positive-negative ratios in love and friendship
• -Gottman's "magic five" in marriage
• -Positive parenting
• -Strong families, communities and institutions
• -Conclusion and celebration 

Our telconference class is based on the work of leaders in positive psychology--Drs. Martin Seligman, Tal Ben-Shahar, Sonja Lyubomirsky, Christopher Peterson, Barbara Fredrickson, Alex Linley, and Robert Biswas-Diener.

They have provided for our use a number of online inventories and quizzes, and Dr. Aron has made available the Highly Sensitive Person’s self-quiz.

These resources can help you develop the habits of daily happiness as they apply to the workplace, the family and to you as an individual. 

This workshop will be helpful if you…

• -Are often happy and want to increase the percentage of time.
• -Look mostly at what is wrong when things are going wrong and sometimes when they are not.
• -Have learned to treat little problems as if they are huge.
• -Bond with others through “troubles talk.”
• -Are surrounded by people who thinks it’s cool to be cynical or sarcastic.

While positive emotion has a positive effect on health, the effect is subtle; the class is not a treatment for illness. Also, if you have more than three health problems, these exercises are not expected to increase your happiness level.

If you have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder (formerly called manic depression), these exercises have not been tested for your use.

Nor are they for you if you are depressed, unhappy or unsafe in your marriage, or fighting substance abuse.

If you are or have been in therapy, it is important that you ask your therapist if this approach is appropriate for you. It may be just right, or it may take your attention from something more important.

This class is for those who have completed Happiness and the Highly Sensitive Person, parts one and two. Tuition will be the same as the other five-week classes. I'm available to answer all your questions--and I love talking to HSPs--we'll talk about your goals and how these teleclasses can help you reach them. Just click on this contact button to schedule a free, no-obligation twenty-minute conversation.