A few years ago I was invited, expenses covered, to a Global Leadership Forum run by the International Coach Federation. The ICF is the largest credentialing body for coaches like me and for the training programs that produce us, including the one I went through at the University of Miami. I served as president elect of the South Florida chapter. Five days in Warsaw with more than 200 coaches from 60 countries.
The keynote was on positive psychology, and I went in mildly skeptical, because a lot of what gets sold under that banner is a poster with a sunrise on it. I came out with five specific practices and one genuinely surprising fact, which was how little time any of them take. That is the part I want to give you, because the reason people do not build these habits is almost never that they disagree with them.
What positive psychology actually studies
Worth being clear about what this field is, because the name suggests something softer than it is.
Most of psychology studies negative outliers. People who are below the mean, and what it would take to bring them back toward average. That is important work and it is not what this is. Positive psychology looks at the other end: the people who are above average in performance, in emotional regulation, in how they handle a bad week. What are those people doing, and can it be taught to anyone else.
Two ideas came out of the keynote that stuck with me. One is rational optimism, which is the finding that your behavior matters more than your circumstances in determining how you feel about your circumstances. The other is that the interventions with the best evidence behind them are almost embarrassingly small. Not life overhauls. Two minute things.
These are the people I like coaching
Most of my clients are not below average at anything. They are competent, functional people who want to be considerably better at understanding themselves. That is exactly the population this research is about, and there is almost nothing written for them.
JGAME, the five
The acronym is mine and it is not elegant, but it has kept these in my head for years. Journaling, Gratitude, Acts of kindness, Meditation, Exercise.
Journaling
Two minutes. Write down one meaningful moment from today, a win or a loss. Writing forces your brain to relive the moment, which means you finish processing the negative feeling instead of storing it as a resentment that surfaces in an argument in November. Or you relive a good one and get the feeling again for free.
Gratitude
Three things a day, written down. Optimism is a learnable skill and this is the drill for it. Your brain is built to scan for threats and problems, because that is what kept your ancestors alive. It is not built to notice what is fine. These do not have to be large.
Real entries, which is the point
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Air conditioning
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I had a good walk with the dog
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I made a new friend today
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Nobody needed anything from me for 20 minutes this afternoon
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The coffee was hot and I drank it sitting down
Acts of kindness
Action leads feeling, not the other way around. Doing something for someone else is a reliable way to change your own state, and the belief that you have to receive something nice before you can produce one is exactly what keeps people stuck. That is waiting for the outside world to authorize your mood.
Send a note to a friend, a colleague or a client saying something true and good about them. Let someone go in front of you in line. Buy the coffee for the person behind you. There are 20 opportunities a day and each one takes seconds.
Meditation
Two minutes. I am serious about the number, and the number is why this one is worth arguing for. Two minutes of watching your breath is not a spiritual commitment, it is a reset.
The place I actually use it is between roles. Sit in the car for two minutes after the drive and before you walk into work. Sit for two minutes after work before you walk in the door and become a parent and a spouse. Almost every bad evening I hear about in my office started with somebody walking straight from one role into another carrying the whole of the first one with them.
Exercise
Fifteen minutes of cardio, enough to actually sweat, and the payoff is cognitive rather than aesthetic. This one is the hardest for me too, so I will put it the other way around. Look at what not exercising does. Most of us reach for coffee as a stimulant to wake up from something. If you have been wondering why focus is hard, this is the first, fastest and cheapest thing to change.
The whole set, in about 20 minutes
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2 minutes: write one meaningful moment from the day, win or loss
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1 minute: write 3 things you are grateful for, however small
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Seconds: do one deliberate thing for another person
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2 minutes: sit and watch your breath, ideally between two roles
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15 minutes: move hard enough to sweat
The reason people skip these is not that they take too long. It is that they are too small to feel like they count.
Matthew W. Hoelscher, PCC
Why this is on a marriage site
Fair question. Here is my answer.
You do not arrive home neutral. You arrive in a state, and that state decides how the next four hours in your house go. The same sentence from your spouse lands as a request or as an attack depending entirely on what you walked in carrying. I have watched couples spend months working on communication when the actual problem was that both of them arrived every evening completely depleted and then treated the resulting friction as evidence about the marriage.
None of this is a substitute for the work two people do together. But it is upstream of it, and it is the part you can start tonight without your spouse's agreement, which makes it the fastest available move if you are the only one currently willing to do anything. There is more on that in the importance of presence in a loving relationship, and a structured version in the 7 day relationship improvement plan.
Making it stick
People quote 21 days for a habit. In my experience with clients it is longer than that and it is much less about duration than about attachment. A new behavior sticks when it is bolted to something you already do without deciding to.
So do not schedule journaling. Put the notebook where you already sit at the end of the day. Do not schedule meditation. Attach it to the car being in park. Do not schedule gratitude. Do it in the two minutes you were going to spend on your phone in bed anyway. Anything that requires you to remember it will lose to a Tuesday.
The other rule is to start with one. Everybody reads a list of five and tries all five on Monday, and by Thursday they have failed at five things instead of succeeding at one. Pick the one you resist least and run it for a month before adding anything. Change genuinely does take commitment, and I wrote about what that actually costs in change takes commitment.
Where this does not apply
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This is not a treatment for depression
If what you are living with is persistent low mood, loss of interest in everything, hopelessness, that is medical and it belongs with a licensed professional. I am a coach. Telling someone with a clinical condition to journal harder is negligent, not encouraging.
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It will not fix a marriage on its own
If the two of you have a genuine pattern running, arriving home in a better mood improves the weather and does not change the climate. Do both.
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It is not a reason to skip the hard conversation
Feeling better is sometimes how people avoid saying the thing. If you notice you are getting calmer and still not talking, the calm is being used as an anesthetic.
The other half, which is dropping things
Adding five habits to an overloaded life is not free, and most people reading this do not have a spare hour, they have a spare 20 minutes at most. Which means something probably has to come off before anything goes on.
That is genuinely the harder exercise and it is the one almost nobody does. What in your week is running purely because it always has. Which obligation are you keeping out of guilt rather than because it produces anything. I wrote that up separately in letting go of what no longer serves you, and if you only do one of these two pages, do that one first.
Talk it through
If you know exactly what would help and you have not done any of it for two years, the problem is not information. Book a free 25 minute call. It is for first timers, it costs nothing, and it is a reasonable place to work out what is actually in the way, whether that is the marriage, the calendar, or a story you have been running about yourself.
Questions couples ask
What does JGAME stand for?
Journaling, Gratitude, Acts of kindness, Meditation, Exercise. It is just a memory device for the five practices with the strongest evidence behind them in positive psychology. The acronym is not the point. The fact that four of the five take under three minutes is the point.
Do I have to do all five?
No, and trying to is how most people quit. Pick the one you resist least and run it for a month attached to something you already do. Five new habits started on the same Monday is five things to fail at by Thursday.
How is positive psychology different from ordinary psychology?
Most psychology research studies people below the average and asks what would bring them back toward it. Positive psychology studies people above the average and asks what they are doing that could be taught to anyone. Different population, different question.
Will this help my marriage?
Indirectly and genuinely. You do not walk in the door neutral, and the state you arrive in decides how the same sentence from your spouse lands. What it will not do is resolve a pattern the two of you are running. That takes both of you in a room, and no amount of personal practice substitutes for it.