 |
|
|
|||||
A lot has been written about gratitude over the past two decades and how we ought to be feeling it. There is advice for journaling and a plethora of purchasing options for gratitude notebooks and diaries. And research has consistently pointed to the health and relationship benefits of the fairly simple and cost-effective practice of cultivating gratitude. Yet, Americans are living in a very stressful time, worried about their financial situation and the current political upheaval. How then do we practice gratitude during such times? I am a social psychologist who runs the Positive Emotion and Social Behavior Lab at Gonzaga University. I teach courses focused on resilience and human flourishing. I have researched and taught about gratitude for 18 years. At the best of times, awareness of the positive may require more effort than noticing the negative, let alone in times of heightened distress. There are, however, two simple ways to work on this. Gratitude doesnt always come easily Generally, negative information captures attention more readily than the positive. This disparity is so potent that its called the negativity bias. Researchers argue that this is an evolutionary adaptation: Being vigilant for lifes harms was essential for survival. Yet, this means that noticing the kindnesses of others or the beauty the world has to offer may go unnoticed or forgotten by the end of the day. That is to our detriment. Gratitude is experienced as a positive emotion. It results from noticing that othersincluding friends and family certainly, but also strangers, a higher power or the planethave provided assistance or given something of value such as friendship or financial support. By definition, gratitude is focused on others care or on entities outside of oneself. It is not about ones own accomplishments or luck. When we feel gratitude toward something or someone, it can increase well-being and happiness and relationship satisfaction, as well as lower depression. Thus, it may assist in counteracting the negativity bias by helping us find and remember the good that others are doing for us every daythe good that we may lose sight of in the best of times, let alone in times when Americans are deeply stressed. How to practice gratitude Research has shown that some people are naturally more grateful than others. But its also clear that gratitude can be cultivated through practice. People can improve their ability to notice and feel this positive emotion. One way to do this is to try a gratitude journal. Or, if the idea of journaling is daunting or annoying, perhaps call it a daily list instead. If you have given this a try and dislike it, skip to the second method below. Gratitude lists are designed to create a habit in which you scan your day looking for the positive outcomes that others have brought into your life, no matter how small. Writing down several experiences each day that went well because of others may make these positive events more visible to you and more memorable by the end of the daythus, boosting gratitude and its accompanying benefits. While the negative newsThe stock market is down again! How are tariffs going to affect my financial security?is clearly drawing attention, a gratitude list is meant to help highlight the positive so that it doesnt go overlooked. The negative doesnt need help gaining attention, but the positive might. A second method for practicing gratitude is expressing that gratitude to others. This can look like writing a letter of gratitude and delivering it to someone who has made a positive impact in your life. When my students do this exercise, it often results in touching interactions. For instance, my college students often write to high school mentors, and those adults are regularly moved to tears to learn of the positive impact they had. Expressing gratitude in work settings can boost employees sense of social worth. In a world that may currently feel bleak, a letter of gratitude may not only help the writer recognize the good of others but also let others know that they are making a beautiful difference in the world. Monica Y. Bartlett is a professor of psychology at Gonzaga University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
Greg Walton, PhD, is the co-director of the Dweck-Walton Lab and a professor of psychology at Stanford University. Dr. Waltons research is supported by many foundations, including Character Lab, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. He has been covered in major media outlets including The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times. Whats the big idea? Stanford psychologist Greg Walton reveals how small psychological shiftsknown as wise interventionscan create profound change in our lives. Through vivid storytelling and cutting-edge research, he shows how simple reframes can build trust, strengthen relationships, and unlock potential. From a teachers encouraging words to a brief moment of self-reflection before conflict, these subtle shifts can shape our futures in powerful ways. Ordinary Magic is a compelling guide to harnessing everyday moments for extraordinary impact. Below, Greg shares five key insights from his new book, Ordinary Magic: The Science of How We Can Achieve Big Change with Small Acts. Listen to the audio versionread by Greg himselfin the Next Big Idea App. 1. Little things can make a big difference. Ordinary Magic is about change, and how to create it. Sometimes, problems in our lives can seem fixed, like theres nothing you could do to make things better. Persistent struggles in school. Conflict in a relationship. Self-doubt. But we dont just have to wish things were better. It starts with noticing our little thoughts and feelingswhat I call surfacingand then creating the right space to address them. Say youre married. Its a happy marriage, but you and your partner have a persistent conflict. Will you have the right space to think through your conflict? One study found that seven minutes answering three reflection questions every four months for a year made conflict less distressing for couples, and helped stabilize marriages. Twenty-one minutes to save a marriage. Or say youre a teacher. You work hard for your students, giving them feedback so they can improve. But many of your students dont take up that opportunity. Why? Another study found that just 17 words increased the rate at which 7th graders took up their teachers feedback to improve their work for a higher gradeand increased their trust in teachers over the rest of the school year. Change like this can feel magical. But thisthis is ordinary magic. These solutions require no special degree. Theyre the kind of thing all of us can learn from, and put to work in our own lives. Everyone can be an ordinary magician. And all of us benefit from ordinary magicians around us. What this magic requires is a deeper understanding of ourselvesunderstanding the icky questions that pop up as we travel through life. And learning how, individually and together, we can answer these questions well. 2. Big problems can start small. A little thought, a shadow of doubt. Often, it starts with a question. But then things spiral out of control. Suppose you wonder, Does my partner disrespect me? Left to their devices, questions like this drive us down. If you think a fight means your partner doesnt love you, then you might hold back and be less forgiving next time. If theyre late, again, you might feel confirmed in their lack of respect. Then you withdraw or lash out. That undermines a relationship. Left to their devices, questions like this drive us down. Or say youre the first in your family to go to college. You wonder, Do people like me belong in college? Then youre excluded from a social outing. A professor says something unkind. You think, Maybe its truemaybe people like me dont belong here. You stop going to office hours, stop asking questions in class, skip that welcome event for a student group. Fast-forward and, six months later, you dont have close friends on campus. No mentor to guide your growth. Youre thinking about dropping out. Negative questions make us spiral down. They make themselves true. Then, they put our relationships, our achievements, and our health at risk. 3. Change starts when we understand the questions we face, or another person faces. Let me share an example: When our kids were little, we took them to and from a campus daycare by bike. So, at the end of a long day, wed bike home, the kids on tiny 12-inch wheels. Sometimes, theyd stop two blocks from home and 20 minutes past dinner time. Theyd sit on the curb and wail, Im tired! I thought of research by my good friend Veronika Job. Veronika showed that sometimes people take little cues of tiredness as a reason to stop, to pull back from their efforts, even on things they care about. Its like we have range anxietyyou feel youre running out when you work hard on something, long before you reach any actual limit. Then you hold back, even on something you care about. So, I decided to reframe the meaning of feeling tired to them. I took to saying, Its when youre tired and you keep going that you get stronger. It didnt always work. But I think it helped. A little later, our daughter Lucy was trying to bike up a steep and winding path on our way home. Wed taken to bringing chalk to mark how far shed gotten. One time, Lucy not only beat her previous record but crushed it. As Oliver and I whooped and cheered, Lucy said, You know how I did it? When I wanted to stop, I kept going. Isnt that lovely? In that story, I offered Lucy a new way to think about her effortsthat tiredness need not be a reason to stop. That she could keep going. That tiredness might even be an opportunityto get stronger. It freed Lucy to succeed. She used that way of thinking to achieve her goal. As I write in the book, Thinking is for becoming. This kind of change is quiet, not loud. But it frees us to spiral up. A small initial insight, a small change in direction, can lead us to vast new lands. 4. The icky questions we ask are reasonable, but they arent necessarily true. The questions come from the context were in. Of course, the first-gen college student wonders if people like her belong in college. Her family literally hasnt belonged in college before. That reasonableness is important. First, it means youre not alone. When youre asking a question like Do I belong?, Can I do it?, or Am I inadequate? theres nothing wrong with you. Youre not irrational or disordered or weird. Youre normal. Youre responding to the world as it is. But even as that question is reasonable, it neednt be true. Its answers youre looking for. Because questions like these are reasonable, we can learn to predict when people will ask them. When we see these questions clearly, we can learn to address them with grace and dignity, which can transform our lives. Thats an hour to change a life. In one study, my colleagues and I developed a 60-minute session early in college to help new students address the question, Do people like me belong in college? Students of color are often underrepresented in college, and sometimes, theyre represented as less able and less deserving. So, that question is most pressing for them. The exercise we developed shared stories from older students, who showed that almost everyone worries at first if they belong in college. Students reflected on their belonging worries, why theyre normal, and how they can improve with time. That improved African American students achievement through the next three years of college. A decade later, they reported being more satisfied in their lives, more successful in their careers, and taking on more leadership roles in their communities. Thats an hour to change a life. That didnt happen because students just remembered that experience. At the end of college, students couldnt even remember it clearly. And they didnt credit any of their success to it. Instead, addressing a persistent question about belonginga reasonable question that comes from the history of exclusion in educationfreed students to build friendships and mentor relationships, and those supports that helped them succeed. 5. This is work we do together. The most toxic questions are about who you are and who you can become. In the most difficult circumstances, when people look at you and all they see is something horrible, there must be space to tell your own story, a chance to tell that story in a way that other people can hear, a way to make that story real together. For more than a decade, Ive worked with leaders in the Oakland Unified School District to support students returning to school from juvenile detention. This circumstance poses terrible questions to both students and teachers. These students have been told, more or less unambiguously, that they do not belong here and are not wanted here. And its easy for teachers to wonder, Will this student care? Will they try? Or will they just cause trouble? The most toxic questions are about who you are and who you can become. So, we created a platform for young people, a way for them to introduce themselves to an educator of their choiceto share their values in school, such as being a good role model for a younger sibling, their goals, and the challenges they face. We find that young people use this platform to express, essentially, Im a good kid, and I want to succeed, but I need help. Can you help me? Then, we present this information to the educator the child selected. We emphasize that all kids need support from adults. This child has chosen you. Heres what they would like you to know about them. Please help. And then we say, Thank you for your work. We find this letter opens the hearts of educators to justice-involved youth. It helps them see that this is a kida kid who wants to succeed. They respond with support. In a first trial, this approach reduced the rate of student recidivism to juvenile detention by 40 percentage points, from 69 percent to 29 percent, in the following school term. Its the most powerful way I know to remedy mistrust in school. This is the change we need to help us achieve what we want to achieve, to do what we want to do, and to become who we want to be. Its a way to help other people in their journeys, too. In the process, we can make our society a little healthier, a little more together, and a little kinder. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
Category:
E-Commerce
The 2025 Kentucky Derby is horse racing’s most exclusive starting gate. Twenty horses will post at Churchill Downs on May 3an elite field, even by exclusivity’s standards. Y Combinator admits less than 3% of startups. Fewer than 1% of those who apply to NASA become astronauts. Google famously hires less than 0.2% of applicants. Yet these standards look almost lax compared to the 0.11% of North American thoroughbreds that make the Kentucky Derby each year, as only 20 of the 17,146 thoroughbred foals eligible earn the honor of participating in the race. Here’s how the fortunate 20 get to Churchill Downs. A sophisticated global qualification system The Kentucky Derby is limited to 3-year-old thoroughbreds that qualify through a points system called the “Road to the Kentucky Derby.” This system, implemented in 2013, transformed horse racing’s premier event from an earnings-based qualification into a data-driven meritocracy. There are three distinct roads to the Kentucky Derby. Internationally, the European-Middle East Road offers one invitation through seven qualifying races across England, Ireland, UAE, and France, while the Japan Road awards one invitation through four races. The North American Road fills the remaining 18 starting spots through a 36-race gauntlet divided into two phases. The Prep Season (SeptemberFebruary) features 20 races with modest point awards, while the high-stakes 16-race Championship Series (FebruaryApril) cranks up the pressure with escalating rewards. But not all points are created equal. The brilliance of this system lies in its gamified structure. Early prep races award a conservative 10-5-3-2-1 distribution among the top five finishers, while Championship Series races raise the stakes dramatically to a 50-25-15-10-5 split, then to a game-changing 100-50-25-15-10 for the final major preps. In Silicon Valley terms, these would be “rising stakes rounds,” forcing trainers to make strategic decisions about where and when to position their contenders for maximum return. For 2025, Churchill Downs fine-tuned its algorithm, adding the Virginia Derby as a qualifying race and implementing dynamic point scaling that reduces awards for smaller fieldsan anti-gaming mechanism to ensure equitable competition so there are no shortcuts to the derby. The result is a ruthlessly efficient funnel that winnows 17,146 eligible thoroughbreds down to just 20 elite qualifiersan acceptance rate that makes Harvard or MIT look like open enrollment. Closing the economic divide While most Kentucky Derby contenders emerge from million-dollar yearling sales and the larger stables of trainers like Bob Baffertwhose financial resources, connections to wealthy owners, and experience make him a derby mainstayracing’s most compelling narratives often feature horses from humbler origins. The ultimate underdog story belongs to Rich Strike, who in 2022 became the first claimed horse to win the Derby. Claiming raceswhere every entered horse is available for purchase at a listed pricerepresent racing’s blue-collar backbone. Trainer Eric Reed spotted potential in Rich Strike and claimed him for just $30,000 at Churchill Downs in 2021. Seven months later, this bargain-basement purchase stunned the racing world by winning the derby as an 80-1 longshot who wasn’t even in the field until another horse scratched the day before. The 2025 Derby features its own Cinderella story in Coal Battle, trained by 72-year-old Lonnie Briley, who has been training horses for 34 years without a single premier racing event starter. Purchased for $70,000, Coal Battle has already earned over $1 million by winning multiple prep races, including the Rebel Stakes. For Briley, who first visited Churchill Downs just three years ago with a horse that finished dead last, this represents the democratic promise at the heart of the Derbythat with the right horse, even the smallest stable can compete on racing’s biggest stage. A look at this year’s Kentucky Derby field Coal Battle is one of 20 thoroughbreds in the 2025 Kentucky Derby field, which represents the various paths to Churchill Downs. Heres how each horse in this years field made it to the Run for the Roses: Burnham Square: From earning four points in the Holy Bull to capturing 100 in the Blue Grass Stakes (winning by a nose over East Avenue), Burnham Square ranks first on the Kentucky Derby points leader board with 130. Sandman: This $1.2 million purchase accumulated 129 points across multiple races, culminating in an impressive Arkansas Derby victory by 2.5 lengths over Publisher. Journalism: The current Derby favorite enters with a four-race winning streak, including the Santa Anita Derby. Rodriguez: Maximizing the Northeast corridor by winning the Wood Memorial for 100 points, this colt represents trainer Bob Baffert’s return to the Derby since 2021. Tiztastic: Converted a 100-point Louisiana Derby win into a prime position with 119 points, giving trainer Steve Asmussen (0-for-26 in the Derby with three runner-up finishes) another chance at his elusive first Derby victory. Tappan Street: Florida Derby champion (110 points) who will attempt to become just the fifth horse to win the Kentucky Derby after only three career starts, following Regret (1915), Big Brown (2008), Justify (2018), and Mage (2023). Sovereignty: Fountain of Youth winner who also finished second in the Florida Derby and totaled 110 points, Sovereignty gives Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, another chance at his first Derby win after 12 previous attempts. Final Gambit: Jeff Ruby Steaks winner (100 points) who rallied from last to win by 3.5 lengths and will be making his first start on dirt in the Derby after previously racing on turf and synthetic surfaces. Coal Battle: The quintessential rags-to-riches narrative with 95 points on the leaderboard, led by 72-year-old trainer Lonnie Briley, who had never even entered a horse in a premier racing event before Coal Battle’s Rebel Stakes victory at 111 odds. Chunk of Gold: Consistent performer with 75 points who cost just $2,500 at auction and has never finished worse than second in four career starts, including runner-up in the Louisiana Derby. Citizen Bull: Breeders’ Cup Juvenile winner who captured the 2-year-old championship and earned 71.25 points, attempting to become the first Juvenile winner to capture the Derby since Nyquist (2015-16). Owen Almighty: Tampa Bay Derby champion (65 points) owned by Dutch Bros Coffee Company cofounder Travis Boersma. East Avenue: Blue Grass Stakes runner-up (60 points) who narrowly missed victory by a nose, but whose sire (father), Medaglia d’Oro, finished fourth in his own Derby attempt in 2002. Publisher: Arkansas Derby runner-up (60 points) who will become just the 13th maiden (winless horse) to start in the Kentucky Derby since 1937. American Promise: Virginia Derby winner (55 points), capitalizing on the newly added qualification race with a 7.75-length victory and giving 89-year-old legendary trainer D. Wayne Lukas his shot at a fifth Derby win. Flying Mohawk: The Jeff Ruby Steaks runner-up (50 points), who is co-owned by former MLB All-Star outfielder Jayson Werth, will be making his first start on dirt after racing exclusively on turf and synthetic surfaces. Grande: Wood Memorial runner-up (50 points) with just three career starts who will attempt to become the fifth horse to win the Derby with so few races, guided by three-time Derby-winning jockey John Velazquez. Built: Accumulated 45 points across multiple Fair Grounds preps, including a second in the Lecomte, third in the Risen Star, and fifth in the Louisiana Derby. Luxor Café: The son of 2015 Triple Crown winner American Pharoah is the Japan Road qualifier and ships in on a four-race winning streak. Admire Daytona: Europe-Middle East Road qualifier who won the UAE Derby by a nose and previously was beaten twice by fellow Derby contender Luxor Café. The fastest two minutes in sports For many trainers, the Kentucky Derby is truly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Since only 3-year-old thoroughbreds are eligible, unless you’re a Baffert-level trainer with seemingly endless resources and a deep stable, there are no second chances. This brutal math explains why veterans like Briley wait decades for their moment, while elite trainers seem to have regular seats at racing’s most exclusive table. It’s why Coal Battle’s presence in the starting gate represents both a statistical anomaly and the enduring dream that keeps trainers like him in the game for decades, hoping for that one special thoroughbred who defies the 0.11% odds. Coal Battle is currently a 201 underdog to win the 2025 Kentucky Derby. Journalism is the 31 favorite, followed by Sandman (81) and Sovereignty (81). But in the world’s most exclusive starting gate, each thoroughbred in the 20-horse field has already beaten the longest odds just by showing up.
Category:
E-Commerce
All news |
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||