A strategy I teach during my courses on resilience is to identify inspiring examples. I ask participants to think of people who’ve faced difficult situations and responded in ways that led to better than expected outcomes. There’s often a buzz in the room as people share the stories they’ve been touched by. As the words flow, listeners tend to feel strengthened by what they hear. See if you experience something similar here, as I share one of my favourite examples.

I invite people to use a four-part story structure, which I demonstrate below. Each section begins with the first half of a sentence, with the storyteller using this as a springboard to launch into the example they share.

1) This is a story about…
Here you name the central character of your story, and say a bit about them. My example is a story about a photojournalist called Giles Duley, who I came across when I saw his TED talk online. Wanting to use his photography to do something useful in the world, he started to document the stories of people facing challenging situations. Spending time with Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, people in care homes in the UK and street children in the Ukraine, his pictures opened a window into how adversities are lived with.

2) The adversity faced is…
Resilience is about our ability to withstand, deal with and recover from difficult situations. So in this second section, you describe the adversity faced by the main character of your story. For Giles Duley, the adversity faced was stepping on a landmine while at work with his camera in Afghanistan. He lost three of his limbs. He thought his life as a photographer was over.

3) What helps here is…
What is it that helps resilience happen? For each person there may be choices they make, resources they turn to, strengths they draw upon or insights they apply. By becoming interested in the steps people take that help them deal with adversity we learn more about how resilience is done. For Giles Duley, what helped was remembering the lives of the people he’d photographed. He felt inspired by their stories and drew strength from them.

4) And that leads to…
What happens with resilience that might not have occurred without it? I value stories of resilience because they remind me that just because a story begins with ghastly things happening doesn’t mean things will always end badly. Stories of resilience tend to have turning points where something shifts, new possibilities are opened and unexpected opportunities found. Giles had wanted to use his photography to make a difference in the world, to tell the stories of others so that we might learn from them. Yet his own story became as powerful as any of his pictures, passing on lessons he’d learned and inspiration he’d gained. His TED talk has been watched more than 100,000 times.

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Stories of resilience often begin with bad news, with tragedy and pain. Yet the story is made by what happens after that, by the dawn that follows the darkest hour. As Giles says in his talk: “Losing your limbs doesn’t end your life. Life goes on. We can inspire each to get through our own bad experiences.” When I’m struggling, when I reach my low points, I turn to my favourite resilience stories and value them as a source of strength. I think of Giles, telling myself: “If he can deal with that, then maybe I can deal with this.” Resilience is transmissible. By sharing the stories that inspire us, we can pass it on.

Chris Johnstone offers online courses in resilience at www.chrisjohnstone.info

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If I were to run a course on ‘having a brilliant life’, one of the first areas I’d look at is motivation. When you hear the inner voice that asks, ‘why bother?’ you need an answer more compelling than any objections. Otherwise apathy can empty your life of energy and meaning. The good news is that motivation is something we can grow, and learnable skills can help us do this.

Evidence that motivation is growable comes from the addictions treatment field, where an approach called Motivational Interviewing is of proven benefit and widely used. In one research study, alcohol dependent clients given just two sessions of motivational interviewing before starting residential treatment showed higher levels of motivation during treatment and were more likely to benefit from it. There have now been hundreds of research studies showing Motivational Interviewing helps people make positive changes, not only with addictions recovery, but in a wide range of other areas too. So what happens in Motivational Interviewing, and can we learn to do it ourselves?

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A central insight is that when we hear ourselves express the reasons why a course of action is important to us, we effectively talk ourselves into doing it. By making our own argument for a change, we reinforce our motivation. Practitioners using this approach are trained to be curious about the reasons why someone might want to change, moving away from trying to persuade them and instead listening with interest to what their clients say. The skill here is to become a ‘motivational listener’ by drawing out the motives that inspire and energise determined action.

Is there a change you’d love to be more motivated to make? If so, you can interview yourself in ways that reinforce your motivation. A simple starting question might be ‘why is this important to me?’ You could write a whole page in response, seeing what words naturally follow a sentence that starts: “This is important to me because…”. Whenever you seem to run out of words, start the sentence again and see what else comes.

Dealing with mixed feelings

Motivation grinds to a halt when there are also convincing reasons for not doing something. Being stuck between competing agendas saps our energy and makes it difficult to move forward. But this is something we can work with. When there’s ambivalence, you can explore this and often find a way through. If different parts of you want different things, listen to the competing pushes and pulls to work out what is calling you most strongly. A useful image here is a set of scales, with reasons for change on one side, and reasons against change on the other. How do you feel on balance?

“If you want a brilliant life, become interested in the purposes that call you”

Once you’ve decided what you want to do, it’s common that your enthusiasm is sapped by a lack of confidence that you’ll succeed. In order to move towards any goal, two things are needed: having the will and finding the way. Will is about motivation while way is about ability. These two influence each other. For example, discovering a better way of doing something can boost your enthusiasm for doing it. But you’re unlikely to look for a better way unless you have the will to do this.

It is motivation that starts the journey of moving in the directions that make your life more satisfying. If you want a brilliant life, become interested in the purposes that call you, make space for them, and see where they take you.

Chris Johnstone is author of Find Your Power, and co-author of Active Hope.

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If you began a sentence with the phrase “what inspires me is…,” what words might naturally follow? I often use this sentence completion process when I’m teaching about the psychology of inspiration. One day, I was intrigued when many on my course gave the answer “Mike”. Who was Mike? And what had he done to have such impact on this group? I was keen to find out more.

The Mike in question was Mike Feingold, a permaculture teacher in Bristol. He’d recently given the group a slideshow revealing how a ravaged landscape, which looked like the surface of Mars, had become transformed through permaculture intervention into an abundant and productive forest. When the impact of human activity so often turns forests into deserts, it was deeply inspiring, and reassuring, to see this process in reverse.

Inspiring examples give us a glimpse that something else is possible. They provide a new reference point that ups our bar when considering what we might do. As we learn by watching others, one of the biggest influences on human behaviour is what we see other people do. Unfortunately, our tendency to follow the example of role models can also work in a negative way, as the following experiment illustrates.

“If all we see is people carrying on as if nothing is wrong, that becomes a reference point that influences our response”

Social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley recruited volunteers for their research and asked them to fill out a questionnaire while they waited in a room. While they worked, smoke started trickling in through a vent in the wall. If a volunteer was in the room by themselves, it didn’t take long before they raised the alarm. But if several people were in the room together, they’d look to see how others responded before doing anything themselves. In some groups, two people had been instructed to ignore the smoke and carry on with their questionnaires. When volunteers saw others filling in their forms even as the room filled with smoke, they’d be much more likely to do this too. Many carried on writing even when the room was so smoky it was difficult to see.

This experiment can serve as a metaphor for responses to world problems. When we become aware of disturbing information, we’re likely to look around to see how others respond. If all we see is people carrying on as if nothing is wrong, that becomes a reference point that influences our response. How important it is then to look out for and notice responses that are creative, constructive and inspired. And how important too is the work of Positive News in bringing such responses to our attention.

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There’s one more step we need to take though if we want inspiration to spread. We need to pass it on. One way of doing this is by having conversations where we hear each other describe what we find inspiring. Another approach is to remember that whatever people see us doing can become a reference point for them. When they see us acknowledging concerns and responding in a constructive way, they’re more likely to as well.

So to become inspired, focus your attention on what you find inspiring. If initially you can’t find anything, begin the quest of searching it out. When you find something, you can help inspiration grow by following the examples you’re impressed by. Inspiration is an energy we can open to and a direction we move in. When we follow its trail, we help others move this way too.

Chris Johnstone is author of Find Your Power and co-author of Active Hope.

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In a recent survey, over 2,000 people were asked to choose which they’d prefer for the society they lived in – the greatest overall happiness and wellbeing, or the greatest overall wealth. Of those surveyed, 87% voted for happiness and wellbeing, while only 8% opted for wealth. If we share the view of most of those surveyed, the challenge we face is how to play our part in raising the levels of gross national (and international) happiness. One approach to doing this is through engaging in a cultural shift in the way we seek out happiness.

A useful clue about how personal cultures can change is given in Martin Seligman’s classic text on positive psychology, Authentic Happiness. In it he describes setting his students two pieces of homework. The first was to engage in a pleasurable activity and then write about this afterwards. The second was to do an act of service that helped others, and then write about that too. For many of his students, the results were life-changing.

While the pleasurable activities felt nice at the time, the effects on mood were short-lived. In contrast, some students were still feeling good days or weeks after their act of kindness. There are two types of happiness here: short-term pleasures and the longer lasting afterglow from having done something we feel good about. Generating this second type of happiness involves calling on our strengths to rise to a challenge that matters to us.

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A business student taking Seligman’s class said he’d come to university to learn how to make money in order to be happy – but this homework taught him he enjoyed helping others more than spending money. His understanding of what he needed for a satisfying life had changed – and with it, his personal culture too.

“We find happiness by engaging with life, facing what is and applying our strengths in giving our best response”

The cultural shift I’m describing involves moving from a ‘picture model’ to a ‘story model’ in the way we seek out positive mood states. In the first model, we aim to fill our lives with a tick-box list of items commonly associated with a picture of happiness. Advertisers love this approach, their task being to add their products to the list. A downside is ‘affluenza’, where we feel deficient if we don’t look the right way or have the right things. This picture approach generates an enormous pressure to consume and compete, contributing to record levels of depression and lower levels of happiness, even though material wealth levels are much higher now than 50 years ago.

A crucial difference between the picture and story models is in the response to bad news. With the picture perspective, problems are seen as a threat to good mood, making it tempting to airbrush them out of view. The story approach to happiness is more like a great adventure that has both highs and lows. Great stories often begin with adversity; what makes the plot gripping is the way the main characters respond. They rise to the challenge, banding together and finding their strengths as they do their bit to move the plot forward.

In the story model, we find happiness by engaging with life, facing what is and applying our strengths in giving our best response. I use the term ‘active hope’ for this, as happiness is more likely when we’re active in the story of creating the future we hope for. We take steps for happiness just by becoming more interested in how its story goes, and then seeking to play our part in that. When we do this, we not only become happier, we change our culture too.

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A book title that reassures me is The Myth of Laziness. Author Mel Levine argues that when children fail at school, it’s unlikely that laziness is the cause. More often they’re bumping into a specific difficulty that blocks progress. It’s hard for any child to stay motivated if they keep failing at something. But if you can find out what their difficulty is, and attend to that, you can often help them become re-engaged. The same is true for adults.

I find this helpful when I’m struggling. For example, I’m quite prone to procrastination. When trying to write, I often find my attention wandering. A day may pass with little progress, and I can feel guilty about being lazy or undisciplined. But that doesn’t help me. More useful is to wonder about the obstacles I’m bumping into and consider ways of addressing these. If I’m not clear what to say, then I need to review my core points; if I don’t know enough, then I need to do some research. A problem-solving approach leads to ‘if… then…’ thinking. Rather than feeling blocked and then looking for distractions, I’m opening up a pathway forward.

A lesson I take from Dr Levine’s work is that our responses to failure are powerfully influenced by the story we tell ourselves about its cause. If I see my procrastination as laziness, I’ll condemn myself for not trying hard enough. If I blame it on a lack of natural ability, I might even consider giving up. But if I see my failure to make progress as related to specific conditions that I might be able to change, then I become interested in looking for ways to do that.

“If you’ve ever felt blocked by the thought ‘I could never do that’, imagine what might happen if you refused to be held back and took the first steps”

A breakthrough with my writing came when a journalist friend told me about the stage of disbelief she experiences. “When I start writing a feature,” she said, “I often feel fidgety and distracted because my task feels impossible. But I’ve learned that if I stick with it, the words eventually flow. I just need to trust the process.” When facing a big challenge it’s easy to feel that the task is beyond us. That’s the stage of disbelief, where we don’t believe we can do it. But if we see change as a process that often moves through stages of frustration, failure and disbelief, then we’re not so put off when we encounter these. I call this perspective ‘the journey approach to change’.

Positive psychologist Carol Dweck uses the term ‘growth mindset’ to refer to this sense of change as a journey, where our efforts to move in a particular direction can cause breakthroughs to occur. Her research shows that this perspective has a profound impact on the way people view themselves and live their lives.

In her book Mindset: How You Can Fulfil your Potential, Dweck writes: “A belief that your qualities can be cultivated leads to a host of different thoughts and actions, taking you down an entirely different road.”

This ‘growth mindset’ can be applied to the challenge of creating positive news – both in our lives and in the world. If you’ve ever felt blocked by the thought “I could never do that,” imagine what might happen if you refused to be held back and took the first steps. If you don’t feel ready, how could you become so, or at least move in that direction?

While the myth of laziness leads to blame, what we need instead is encouragement, support and training that cultivates our ability to get through obstacles. Perhaps if this happened we might have even more positive news to report.

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If you could tell a friend some positive news about yourself, particularly about a change you have made, what would you most like that to be? Now is a good time to be considering such changes, particularly if you’d like to catch the wave of new beginnings that starts in January each year. As half of all New Year’s resolutions are abandoned within a few weeks, it’s worth thinking about how you can increase your chances of success. The following five tips will help.

1. Find the want behind the should
One of the greatest obstacles to change is ambivalence, where part of us wants something to be different, and another part, on balance, prefers things as they are. So the first task of change is to make a decision. Decision-making isn’t a once-only thing though. You can return to decisions again and again, making them stronger each time by reminding yourself of your reasons. What is it you really want to happen and why? By focusing on the deep desires that call you, you feed your motivation. I think of this as finding the want behind the should.

2. Allow a preparation stage
If you’ve failed in the past, it is easy to lose confidence. Yet people who succeed in making changes have often tried many times before. If you can’t yet see a way forward, then rather than giving up, give yourself a preparation stage to cultivate the skills, strengths and allies that might help you make progress. Like an athlete in training, you can improve your performance by identifying where you’ve gone wrong in the past, improving your technique and finding out about new approaches. In sports psychology, for example, athletes commonly use techniques like ‘mental rehearsal’, where they picture themselves performing well in their chosen field.

3. Use imaginary hindsight
When you’re wondering how to do something, rather than asking “how can I do this?” imagine that you’ve already succeeded. Picture yourself there, and then ask yourself how you did it. Telling yourself the story of how you succeeded is a great way of opening up a sense of possibility. Research also shows that people using this ‘imaginary hindsight’ technique tend to map out more detailed pathways through obstacles. Approaching a problem knowing it has already been solved puts you in a different mindset, as your creativity is stimulated in the search for how it was done.

4. Keep on keeping on
There’s a saying that courage doesn’t always roar – sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day that says, “I’ll try again tomorrow.” Significant changes are often hard-won, with reversals and failures along the way. By seeing change as a journey, with bumpy patches as part of the terrain, it becomes easier to be compassionate with ourselves when we’re not doing as well as we’d hoped. We can cultivate the strength of persistence by recommitting to our decision and reminding ourselves why that is important to us. Then identify the next step, and take it, and the next step after that.

5. Celebrate victories, especially tiny ones
If a journey of thousand miles is made of many steps, there’s a long wait for celebration if the only victory counted is reaching the finish line. One of the skills of change-making is to notice and celebrate mini-victories along the way. This helps maintain enthusiasm and prevents us losing heart. So if you were to take a step of positive change today, even if it is just preparing yourself – what might it be? Celebrate when you’ve done that, and then continue the journey.

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Back in the 1960s, a popular approach to couples therapy involved using soft-foam rubber bats to hit each other. Partners would be encouraged to take turns voicing their resentments, using the rubber bats to physically express this. The idea was that by releasing suppressed anger, they’d clear the air and be freed to start anew.

Decades of research later, we now know this isn’t such a good idea. While naming our hurts allows issues to be recognised, battling over issues, even with rubber bats, brings a greater danger of fuelling hostility. So if ‘basho-therapy’ doesn’t work, what does?

It turns out that one of the best ways to improve relationships has lots to do with how we respond to good news. Psychologist Shelly Gable videotaped dating couples discussing recent events in their lives. She found that the way people responded to their partner telling them good news could either boost or weaken feelings of closeness.

Gable identified three types of response that had damaging effects: ignoring the good news; acknowledging it but with dampened enthusiasm; or, worst of all, pointing out reasons why the good news might really be bad news. Each of these dropped the level of trust and enthusiasm in the relationship.

If the partner showed interest and delight in the good news, however, this had the opposite effect. Couples with this response not only reported higher levels of satisfaction with their relationship, they were also more likely to still be together two months later.

There’s a saying that a friend is someone who looks over your broken fence and admires the flowers in your garden. When we look at friends or partners, we have choices about which aspects of them, or our relationship with them, we give our attention to. Do we focus on what’s going well and comment on that? Or point out the problems? While both have their place, research shows that the balance between them makes a huge difference to the quality of our relationships.

Through decades of close observation of couples interacting, psychologist John Gottman and his team mapped out factors important for relationship wellbeing. They found that expressions of fondness and admiration have a protective effect, helping build the trust and affection that give relationships staying power.

In contrast, couples whose conversations often included putdowns and statements of contempt were much more likely to break up. By identifying these and other predictors of relationship success or failure, Gottman’s team could study a 15-minute conversation between a couple, and then predict with over 90% accuracy whether they’d still be together five years later.

Alongside expressions of contempt, other markers of relationship danger were defensiveness or ‘stonewalling’ in response to criticism. A feature of healthier relationships (ie ones rated as more satisfying and that lasted over the study period of two decades) was openness and curiosity when concerns or criticism were raised.

If we know what’s important for the other person, we’re better able to take their preferences into account. Conflict can alert us to misunderstanding, it can be an opportunity to update awareness of what’s important to each other. But to learn from conflict like this requires openness and trust. All the appreciations and other positive comments help build the ground for this. That’s why, in successful relationships, people tend to give each other more positive than negative comments by a ratio of at least three to one.

So when your friend, partner or colleague next tells you something they’re pleased about, remember that positive news, and your response to it, gives you an opportunity to nourish closeness. If you can be glad that they’re glad, and show that, you give your relationship a boost.

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With worrying trends of climate change, economic decline and ecological unravelling, it is easy to feel pessimistic about the future. What can positive psychology offer here? Perhaps its most important contribution is in the area of resilience, looking at what helps us overcome and recover from adversity. And indeed, making the best of it.

Resilience is often thought of as a strength possessed by some and not by others. If we don’t see ourselves as hardy, is there anything we can do? The good news from positive psychology research is that resilience is learnable.

Back in the early 1990s, a resilience training course was offered to children known to be at higher risk of depression. There were immediate benefits from the course and the positive impacts were still evident two years later. The Penn Resiliency Program (named after the University of Pennsylvania where it was developed) is now recognised as of proven value in protecting against depression and anxiety.

A core part of the Penn Program is a form of mind training known as ‘flexible thinking’. This is quite different from positive thinking. Instead it involves being able to generate a range of alternative perspectives when facing an adversity and then choosing between these. Each perspective is assessed using the ABC model where A stands for the adversity, B is the belief we have about this and C is the consequence of thinking that way.

One typical perception involves viewing the problem as overblown. The belief that ‘there’s nothing to worry about’ has a short-term consequence of reducing anxiety, allowing us to continue with business as usual. But what about the longer-term consequences? Problems not acknowledged tend to get worse, particularly when the behaviours feeding them remain unchanged. Superficial optimism that encourages us to continue the way we’re going can be a recipe for disaster.

Taking a more pessimistic stance, a second perspective sees the problem as already too severe for us to do anything about. The belief ‘it’s too late’ tends to be followed by the consequence of people giving up on the future as a project to invest in. This can lead to a loss of meaning and direction in life, increasing depression and addictive behaviour.

A third perspective is based on the belief that crisis can be a turning point. There is a realistic optimism here that combines a commitment to honesty in assessing our situation with an openness to the possibility that we can rise to the occasion. What would the consequences be if we were alarmed enough to act and believed we could make a difference? What might that lead us to do?

When Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was a prisoner in Auschwitz, he held in his mind the idea that one day he would be giving lectures around the world about the psychology of concentration camps. He recognised that one area of choice always available to us is the meaning we give to events. Finding an empowering perspective gave him a source of strength.

When we face a situation we find difficult, we can exercise our creativity by inviting in different ways of thinking about it. For resilience we need perspectives that acknowledge reality while also supporting us to see adversities as challenges we can rise to. If we only think positively, we lose the ability to recognise danger. If we only think negatively, we miss recognising potential solutions. Flexible thinking considers a range of perspectives, testing them with an ABC approach that asks ‘what’s the effect of thinking that way?’

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What is it that makes Positive News positive? I can think of four things.

The first is positive reporting, with appreciative enquiry that looks for what’s gone well rather than wrong. The second is about drawing attention to positive responses to areas that concern us, with inspiring examples of people, projects and actions that address the problems we face.

Why does Positive News do this? Because it is driven by positive values, aiming to inform, inspire and empower its readers, contributing to positive change in our lives and the world. I love these three aspects of Positive News; but what’s the fourth?

To succeed in empowering readers, Positive News needs more than just good news, inspiring examples and uplifting values. We also need coverage of insights and practices that help us all to become ‘positive newsmakers’.

Why is it, for example, that we can sometimes respond to problems in an inspiring and constructive fashion, yet at other times not even want to look? What helps us rise to the occasion, find our courage and not be put off by hurdles in the way?

“It is not simply about looking on the bright side; it is more about developing an understanding of how we, individually and collectively, can flourish in the long term”

Positive psychology explores questions like these, looking at what helps us cultivate our better aspects and offer positive responses to the challenges we face.

While often confused with positive thinking, positive psychology is something quite different. Over the last 15 years it has become a recognised branch of psychology taught in universities, as well as an international movement sharing many of the goals of Positive News.

It is not simply about looking on the bright side; it is more about developing an understanding of how we, individually and collectively, can flourish in the long term.

An insight I find helpful here is that change has two directions: away from and towards. In the 20th century, psychology focused more on the negative, on what we might want to move away from, with a hundred research papers on sadness for every one on happiness and joy.

That balance is now changing. Recent research has identified a range of positive psychology strategies that can help people become happier, as well as reduce their risk of depression and anxiety. Could learning such practices also bring wider benefits to our society and planet?

There are important links between personal, social and ecological wellbeing. Greed, for example, and an excessive appetite for resources, can cause problems at all three levels. Yet what is the opposite of greed? And is this something we can cultivate?

Interesting clues come from an experiment carried out in the 1970s by psychologist Alice Isen and her team. They wondered if being on the receiving end of a random act of kindness might increase someone’s inclination to help another in need.

In the experiment, small piles of coins were left in some public phone boxes, so that the next person using the phone would experience the unexpected benefit of a free call. Just as the person finished their call, an experimenter appeared to accidentally drop a pile of papers outside the phone box. They found that the person using the phone would be more likely to help the experimenter pick up their papers if they’d just received a free call.

This experiment is part of a growing body of evidence showing that the experience of gratitude improves our mood, strengthens our desire to help others and possibly also reduces our appetite for consumerism. A simple way to switch gratitude on is to ask yourself “who am I grateful to?”

Gratitude is a social emotion. It points your attention out beyond yourself to all those you receive from. What might happen if we all learned to experience this emotion more often?

Chris Johnstone is author of Find Your Power and co-author, with Joanna Macy, of Active Hope.

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