Three Good Things (with a twist)!

Background

There’s a very powerful happiness-enhancing exercise called “3 good things.” That exercise involves making a note in your journal of three good things that happened to you each day for a period of time (say, fifteen days). Professor Seligman, who developed that exercise, found that 94 percent of those who had kept a record of three good things for a mere fifteen days showed a significant improvement in happiness levels. The exercise even lifted some of the people out of depression!

Objective

Like “3 good things,” this exercise too involves making a note in your journal of three good things that happened to you each day for a period of time (in this case, one week). However, there is a twist: I want you to make a note of those things that started out badly, but eventually turned good.

This can be a little tricky to understand, so let me give you some examples. Perhaps you were stuck in heavy traffic on the way to work (negative event). But because of this, maybe you got to hear a string of your favorite songs on the radio—songs you hadn’t heard in a while (positive consequence). Or, during lunch, you found that the meal that you ordered wasn’t tasty, which forced you to have a late-afternoon snack (negative event). But that led to bumping into an old friend whom you hadn’t seen in a while (positive consequence). In both examples, what started as a bad event later led to positive outcomes.

The idea in this exercise is to “connect the dots”—in hindsight—so as to recognize that almost every event that starts out negative paves the way for a positive consequence. Such recognition, in turn, can help mitigate the tendency to exhibit “post occurrence judgmentalism” and thereby, help nurture the “dispassionate pursuit of passion” (concepts I discuss in Chapters 6A and 6B of the book).

Please provide an email address at which your entries can be emailed.

Think of a negative event

First step is to think of at least one (and up to 3) mildly negative events that happened to you recently, and describe what occurred in a sentence or two in the space below.

Identifying positive consequences

The second step involves identifying at least one (and up to 3) positive consequences triggered by each negative event that you identified on the previous page. (These negative events are reproduced below).

If it helps, close your eyes and replay each negative event, one at a time, and trace the set of events that they, in turn, triggered. This will make it easier to identify the positive consequences that occurred as a result of the negative events. Once you have identified something positive triggered by each negative event, make a note of it in the space below. Then, move on to the next negative event and do the same. Once you have identified at least one positive event for each of the negative events that happened, go to the next step.

Note: If you are unable to identify even one positive consequence to come out of each negative event, you can just type in something like, “I am not sure what positive event came out of this negative event, but I am happy that I at least have enough positivity to consider this question!”

Connecting the dots

The next step involves “connecting the dots.” This means making a quick note of the chain of events—starting with the original negative occurrence—that led to the eventual positive outcome(s).

Do this for each of the original negative events for a whole week (seven days). To help you with this, we’ll send you an email with a link to this exercise. Please use the Save and Continue Later button to save your data and get the link. Click the Next button only after you've completed all seven days' entries.

Note:  This step—connecting the dots—will let you see for yourself that many of the positive consequences you experience in life would not have occurred had it not been for the original negative event.

Reflect on your experience

The step needs to be completed only after you have maintained a record of “3 good things with a twist” for a week. If a week hasn’t passed by since you started this exercise, come back later.

Then, after you have had a chance to review your notes for these seven days, answer the following questions:

When you complete the exercise, you will receive an e-mail with all the details that you input as part of this exercise.