Exercise 11: Important, Enjoyable & Meaningful Activities
Keywords: Happiness, pleasure, meaning, homework
Treatment Modality: Individual clients or groups
Time: Dependent on activities carried out by clients
Goal: To help clients find meaning through enjoyable activities.
Meaning in life is an essential facet of psychological wellbeing with significant implications for both mental and physical health. According to Clarke (1991), the meaning we attribute to our lives is derived in great part through meaningful activity. Similarly, Seligman (2002) suggested that a state of happiness is attainable only through activities that are consistent with noble and meaningful purposes.
When clients focus on activities that benefit others and utilize their unique strengths, they can transcend to higher planes of authentic happiness (Seligman, 2002). In a nutshell, to find meaning in one’s life, one must first take part in meaningful activities.
Instructions
In this exercise, clients are invited to complete three important, enjoyable, and meaningful activities in a single day and write about them in detail. These acts should include:
- A pleasurable activity carried out alone (for example, reading or listening to music)
- A pleasurable activity completed with others (for example, playing cards or meeting for lunch)
- A meaningful or important act (for example, visiting an isolated relative).
Exercise 12: Daily Motivational Awareness
Keywords: Motivation, awareness, action
Treatment Modality: Individual client
Time: 5 minutes
Goal: To help clients to develop and increase awareness of their motivation in daily life.
To begin the Daily Motivational Awareness exercise, clients should take a few moments throughout the day to think about the things that excite and motivate them to action, then write them down. In doing so, clients have the opportunity to refer back to the activity and reflect upon the extent to which their motivation is self-determined.
The exercise can also be used less formally, for instance, by asking the client to set timers a few times each day and merely doing the exercise without recording the observations.
You can access the exercise as well as part of the Positive Psychology Toolkit©.
Read More: 17 Motivation Tools, Worksheets and Activities for You and Your Clients
Exercise 13: Writing About Intensely Positive Experiences
Keywords: Reflective writing, self-reflection, happiness, homework
Treatment Modality: Individual client
Time: 5-10 minutes
Goal: To help clients improve their mood by writing about positive experiences and happy moments over three consecutive days.
Writing about intensely positive experiences can result in robust improvements in a variety of indicators of wellbeing. For instance, positive emotional writing has been shown to enhance positive mood, reduce state anxiety, trait anxiety, and perceived stress while also positively contributing to client coping skills (Burton & King, 2004; Isen, 2001).
Instructions
Every day for three days, clients are instructed to choose a positive experience from their life, imagine themselves in that moment, and think about the feelings and emotions that they experienced. Clients should write about their experiences in as much detail as possible, paying particular attention to the positive feelings, thoughts, and emotions that were present at the time.
You can access the full Writing About Intensely Positive Experiences exercise as part of the Positive Psychology Toolkit©.
Exercise 14: The Signature Strengths Action Plan
Keywords: Strengths, goals, homework
Treatment Modality: Individual clients
Time: 30 minutes
Goal: To help clients use their signature strengths to achieve a desired goal.
Clients should take the VIA Character Strengths Survey before working on their action plan (find more positive psychology surveys here).
According to Seligman (2019), one of the most effective ways to develop and enhance signature strengths is to identify one target strength, set a specific and measurable goal related to that strength, and devise a concrete action plan to achieve the goal.
For instance, a client might select curiosity as a target strength and plan to take part in activities that challenge their existing knowledge and skills. Likewise, a client who wishes to focus on the love of learning could aim to learn five new words, including their meaning and usage each week.
Instructions
Clients should pick one of their top five strengths and write down their answers to the following questions:
- How do I use this strength already?
- In what areas of my life do I use this strength?
- What other areas in my life could I use it more?
- What are other ways I could use this strength?
- What is my plan? What exactly would I like to do? How frequently?
- When will this happen?
- What will happen if I achieve my goals?
Exercise 15: Finding Your Own Example of Forgiveness
Keywords: Forgiveness, benefit finding
Treatment Modality: Individual clients
Time: 20 minutes
Goal: To help clients focus on the benefits of forgiveness.
Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi (2000) identified forgiveness as a key positive individual trait. Indeed, several studies indicate that individuals with a propensity for forgiveness show signs of better physical and psychological health. For instance, Berry, Worthington, O’Connor, Parrott, & Wade (2005) found that forgiveness had beneficial effects on systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, and mean arterial pressure.
Additionally, forgiveness is negatively related to psychological distress and positively associated with life satisfaction and relationship health (Toussaint, Williams, Musick, & Everson, 2001).
Instructions
To begin this exercise, invite clients to describe a story of forgiveness – this could be from a children’s story, fable, or movie plot. Clients should then explain why they think the offender committed the transgression and why the victim chose to forgive.
Ask the client to write down the ways in which the victim may have benefitted from the act of forgiveness. The client should then think about a time when they forgave someone and write down the benefits they experienced.
This exercise is adapted from Five Steps to Forgiveness: The Art and Science of Forgiving (Worthington, 2001).
Exercise 16: Colored Candy Go Around
Keywords: Communication, play, engagement
Treatment Modality: Families
Goal: To encourage communication and provide insight into individual and family dynamics.
When families engage in play-based therapeutic activities, they are provided with opportunities to communicate and articulate thoughts and feelings that they may not be comfortable expressing through traditional techniques (Lowenstein, 2010). The Colored Candy Go Around exercise (Arkell, 2010) is a playful and creative way to engage family members, particularly in the early stages of family therapy.
To begin this exercise, the practitioner should distribute 10-15 colored candies (or colored beads if this is preferred) to each family member. Each color represents a specific question, for example:
Green – What words describe yourself or your family?
Pink – What ways do you have fun as a family?
Orange – What things would you like to change about yourself or your family?
Red – What things do you worry about?
Yellow – What things do you like about your family?
Next ask family members to sort their candies by color and invite one person to pick a color at random, stating verbally how many candies of that color they have in front of them (for example, four yellow candies). This family member must then give four answers to the corresponding question; in this case, four things they like about their family.
They can then choose the next family member who will give their answer to the same question, and so on until each person has responded to all of the questions.
(Note that the questions and areas of focus can be tailored to suit each family’s needs).
Reflection Questions
- Were you surprised by any of your family’s answers?
- What did you learn about your family that you were not aware of before this exercise?
- What actions will you take in the coming week to have more fun with your family?
- What actions can you take as an individual to make changes or improvements?
- What actions can you take as a family to make changes or improvements?
This exercise is adapted from Creative Family Therapy Techniques: Play and Art-based Activities to Assess and Treat Families (Lowenstein, 2010).
Exercise 17: Progressive Muscle Relaxation Exercise for Children
Keywords: Coping, relaxation, stress
Treatment Modality: Children and families
Time: 10 minutes
Goal: To guide young children through the process of progressive muscle relaxation.
Relaxation training can be a useful tool to help clients and patients cope with everyday stressors.
Stressful situations reflexively cause the entire skeletal musculature to react immediately, often resulting in prolonged, heightened tension, and a variety of pathological conditions (Smith, 2007).
Progressive muscle relaxation involves tensing and relaxing various muscles throughout the body as a way to reduce or eliminate tension and is an effective way to manage stress in children who may have difficulties concentrating on traditional relaxation techniques. The following exercise can be used to help guide children through the process of progressive muscle relaxation.
Instructions
To begin this exercise, you should ask the child if they can think of a situation that makes them feel worried or nervous. If they are not forthcoming with a situation, the therapist can utilize prompts such as, “How about when you have a big test?” or “How about when someone shouts at you?”, and explain that these are all times when they can use this exercise.
Transcript:
“Let’s do this together; I’ll show you how. Start with your left hand and arm. Take a deep breath and pretend you are squeezing a lemon in your hand. Squeeze it as hard as you can. Imagine you are trying to squeeze all the juice out. [Hold for 5 seconds]. Now pretend you have dropped the lemon on the floor and think or say ‘relax.’, then let your deep breath out and unclench your fist.”
“Feel that relaxed feeling in your left hand and arm. Now, let’s tense that same muscle again.” [Repeat the same process a second time].
The therapist then guides the child through two sets of deep muscle relaxation of the following muscle groups:
- Right hand and arm, as above.
- Arms and shoulders, by stretching the arms out in front, then over the head, and finally relaxed by their side.
- Shoulder and neck, by pulling the shoulders up to the ears and the head down into the shoulders, like a big shrug.
- Jaw, by biting down hard on the teeth.
- Face and nose, by wrinkling the nose.
- Stomach, by tightening it very tight and making the stomach very hard.
- Legs and feet, by pushing down on the floor hard with toes spread apart.
- Now pretend that you’re a rag doll, and let your entire body go limp. Notice how good it feels to be relaxed.
You can modify the script to make this exercise more fun by asking the child to imagine themselves as a sleepy cat who needs to stretch his legs, or picture themselves squishing their toes deep into a muddy puddle.
This exercise was adapted from Assessing and Treating Physically Abused Children and Their Families (Kolko & Cupit Swenson, 2002).
Keywords: Acceptance, mindfulness, anxiety
Treatment Modality: Children and families
Time: 10 minutes
Goal: To illustrate the drawbacks of experiential avoidance and the benefits of acceptance and mindfulness for anxiety.
The quicksand metaphor can help clients explore their methods of coping with difficult and unchangeable situations. In doing so, they can begin to understand how their efforts to avoid or escape such experiences may result in becoming even more entangled in it (Stoddard & Afari, 2014).
Put simply, someone struggling to escape quicksand may not realize that the best course of action would be to come into full contact with the quicksand and ‘get with it’ rather than fight against it.
Instructions
“You are walking in the desert and, suddenly, you step in quicksand and quickly begin to sink. What do you do now?”
You can direct the client’s attention toward his or her reactions as their story unfolds. For instance, a more experiential response can be encouraged by asking, “What happens as you try to escape the quicksand?” or “What are the thoughts that come to your mind as you keep sinking?”
After exploring the quicksand metaphor with the client, the practitioner can encourage further discussion by combining the vocabulary of both the metaphorical and actual situations. For instance, “What do you do when you start sinking in your anxiety?”
Throughout this exercise, it is preferable to avoid stating that struggling with quicksand is like struggling with anxiety – in doing so the client may learn through rules rather than through experience (Stoddard & Afari, 2014).
Exercise 19: Last Impressions
Keywords: Celebrating success, value, positive acknowledgment
Treatment Modality: Individual client and groups
Time: 5 minutes
Goal: To end sessions with clients on a positive note.
Emotional states influence the recall of experiences with similar emotional tones (Tyng, Amin, Saad, & Malik, 2017). When people are feeling positive, they tend to recall pleasant events and vice versa. Further, Redelmeier & Kahneman (1996) found that the last thing that happens in an experience tends to color the memory of the whole experience. It is therefore vital to end sessions with clients on a positive note.
According to Lasley (2015), an effective way to end sessions is by celebrating client successes – no matter how small – and acknowledging their value. To do so successfully, the practitioner must:
- Deliver the acknowledgment.
- Listen for the impact.
- Follow up if the client did not understand the acknowledgment or only received it partially.
Instructions
To carry out this exercise, the practitioner should write a list of positive acknowledgments that can be given to clients verbally at the end of each session. While it is a good idea to make these statements specific and relevant to each of your clients, the following suggestions are a good starting point:
- “You sound very connected to your values, and you’re honoring them fully. Well done for stepping out of your comfort zone.”
- “You made excellent progress during the session, particularly [talk about specific insight or achievement].”
- “Your commitment to growth is unwavering.”
- “I want to acknowledge the way you are taking responsibility by acting on what matters most to you.”
- “I am struck by your courage and your ability to ___.”
- “I believe in your ability to overcome this challenge.”
- “I feel grateful that you shared your true feelings.”
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