What is positive psychology?

I always like to show this for one minute before we start. So, positive psychology is the psychological science. That is all. All it does is focus on studying and understanding all of those factors at play in helping generally mentally healthy people to thrive. We talk about this scale, the zero to ten scale. So if we think about this as the generally mentally healthy scale, if you’re down at zero, it doesn’t feel particularly great. You’re probably what we call languishing, low on energy, motivation, and resilience. You may be burnt out. And at the nine or ten, we’re talking about flourishing and thriving, and that’s when you’ve got really high wellbeing. There is a very necessary focus by mainstream psychology on people who may be functioning or not functioning just below zero. So that’s psychiatrists and psychologists helping people get back to zero, which is functioning. But positive psychology generally works in this space. You may not feel great if you’re zero to two, but you’re still in what we call a mentally healthy space. And all of the things that we find from positive psychology help move you further up your scale. So it is not to say that we can get rid of all the challenges in life, the things we can’t control, but there are many things that we can work with to support ourselves so that even in the face of difficulty, we can feel a bit further up our own wellbeing scale than we would have done without them. I can speak of that this year because I lost my dad earlier this year, and it is objectively an awful thing. At the same time, nothing can take away the feeling of loss. But I have been able to support my resilience with self-compassion practices and various other things that mean I’m a bit higher on my wellbeing scale than I would have been without all of this. In the last webinar, I talked through all of these twelve pillars of wellbeing, all the key things that contribute to our happiness and wellbeing. And don’t worry, Anna’s leaning in, you will get this visual afterwards. I was also talking in the last webinar about how to use coaching to increase all of these twelve pillars, like our sense of meaning and relationships and engagement and flow. Today, I’m taking a much simpler approach. We are focusing on the practices that exist within positive psychology that are shown to give us an uplift in our happiness and wellbeing. Lots of them work on these pillars. We have practices that support our level of self-acceptance and self-compassion. We have things that give us meaning, but in a really practical, bite-sized way. And that’s just to give you a bit of an intro.