Exercising our Gratitude Muscles

Gratitude is one of our Character Strengths. On our Character Strengths poster, it looks like this:

In our recent Positive Education lessons, Autahi has begun to explore what Gratitude means. We have begun by first noticing the things and people that we are thankful for. We will go on to find ways to turn our Gratitude into action.

Our classroom now has a Gratitude Jar.

This is a simple way to encourage us to notice and capture (in writing or a picture) the moments when we experience Gratitude. Here are some of the things we are thankful for.

Research has shown that noticing and cultivating feelings of Gratitude can improve our wellbeing and resilience.

In our Flourish model, Gratitude comes into the sphere of Positive Emotions. While we encourage our students to feel all of their feelings, it is important to learn the skill of cultivating Positive Emotions like Optimism, Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence and Gratitude. 

A daily practice of noticing the things in life that we are grateful for (they may be very small things!) helps to build our resilience and ability to cope with life's challenges. Positive emotions broaden our attention, leading to more open and flexible thinking (rather than shutting down or flight responses to problems). This is also known as Broaden and Build Theory.

Recalling and revisiting moments that we are thankful for allows us to re-experience the positive emotion. This is important because, as humans, our brains are wired towards a negativity bias. We need to experience a lot more positives to outweigh a few negatives.

By teaching our students how to exercise their 'Gratitude muscles', we hope to help them to develop a habit of noticing positives. Capturing things we are grateful for in a picture or a diary gives us the opportunity to revisit the experience - and reinforce the positive emotion. Doing this as a group makes this even more powerful.

You might like to try this at home, too. Start by asking each other on the way home, "What are you feeling thankful for today?"

And if you would like to know more about Broaden and Build Theory, our Flourish model, or any other aspect of our Positive Education programme, please chat with Beth or Carl.