Habit 1: Gratitude

Dear Mum and Dad

Thank you for taking me to my wonderful school and letting me have a good education. Thank you, Dad, for being my school basketball coach and taking your time off work to come and help my friends and I get better. Thank you, Mum, for being my mum and taking me to wonderful places when Dad is not there. I thank you so much that I am alive. Thank you so much for being you.

From me, your thankful girl.

I love you.

Every time I work with a group of students, no matter their age, I always look to include an activity where we practise reflecting on the people or things in our life that we may take for granted. Providing the opportunity for students to write an appreciation letter — like the one Abigail from Highgate School wrote — to people in their life who do wonderful things for them, is a great way to practise appreciation.

Now, we all may have our subtleties on what gratitude means. But I like the following definition by Sansone and Sansone: ‘the appreciation of what is valuable and meaningful to oneself and represents a general state of thankfulness and/or appreciation’.

And I couldn't agree more with Emmons and Mishra, who suggest, ‘that gratitude, as a virtue, is deliberately cultivated. It needs to be taught, modelled, practiced until it becomes a habit’.

Leading with gratitude is a great place to start and, if it so happens that you can only practise one of the five habits, I'd highly recommend gratitude. Research tells us there are numerous social, psychological, physical-health and personality benefits that come from a consistent practise of gratitude.

These include (but are not limited to):

• being more optimistic
• making us more giving
• greater access to social support
• better relationships
• making more people like us
• increasing self-esteem
• keeping suicidal thoughts at bay
• making us happier
• being more likely to exercise
• improving sleep
• reducing depressive symptoms
• lowering blood pressure.

Indeed, gratitude is powerful. It can also help us reframe challenges, no matter how big or small, to see them from a more positive point of view: coming from a place of being grateful.

So, as teachers, parents and educators, we want to look at ways of developing this critical skill — and that starts at home and in the classroom.

Here's an activity you might like to try.

Habit 2: Empathy

I love this quote by Alfred Alder: ‘Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another’.

When you discuss empathy with students, they often identify it as treating others how you want to be treated (the golden rule), walking in other people's shoes or understanding how someone is feeling. These are all good places to start.

The tricky thing is that empathy can be challenging to learn (even for adults), particularly for young people who are at the stage in life where they are developing the awareness to understand how others view the world and are also developing the ability to understand other people's emotions, as well as their own.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate my point.

During a Saturday morning under-9s school soccer match, you could see the frustration building up in one of our players from a mile away. We will call him James. James is one of the better players in the team and it just wasn't his day. The opposition was strong, our team was missing passes, our dribbling skills were off and at the same time the other team was very cohesive.

I was watching James and you could see the frustration kick in. He was very animated in his gestures towards teammates and he began to be extra aggressive with multiple rough slide tackles on opposition. The referee was rightly awarding free kicks against James and this added to his frustration. And the parent yelling at the ref didn't help one bit.

James crossed the line a couple of minutes later, when again the ref awarded a justified free kick against him. This set James off. The 16-year-old referee copped it and James's extreme levels of negative emotions overwhelmed him, which resulted in tears flowing.

I wasn't coaching the team, but I was watching, representing the school as the co-ordinator. The coach did the right thing and brought James off for a chance to calm down.

I gave James a few minutes to himself and then I took him aside.

James, how you feeling? I could see you were getting quite frustrated out there. I understand why: sport can be very emotional and frustrating at times. Now that you've calmed down, do you think arguing with the referee in the way you did was the right thing to do?

He shook his head.

I asked James, who was still teary eyed, ‘If you were refereeing and a player went off at you, how would you feel?’

James responded, ‘I wouldn't like it.’

‘And what if we didn't have referees. Would we be able to play the game?’

The next week I had James for a PE lesson. We played a game of indoor hockey and for part of it, I got James to umpire.

Afterwards I asked him, ‘James, how did you find umpiring?’

James responded by saying, ‘It was okay; a lot harder than I thought’.

This was a perfect way to hammer home the point. Once we get the feel for how hard refereeing can be, we start to see things from another's perspective. There were no further issues with James's on-field behaviour.

This is a great example of how we can teach and demonstrate empathy to our kids. And it's really important because the negative effects of not learning empathy is that we can end up with bullying behaviour issues.

Research from Salavera and colleagues concludes that ‘teachers and other members of the school community should work on empathy with young people from an early age, in order to help students and reduce bullying in the classroom’.

I strongly believe that bullying shouldn't exist if our children are being taught empathy skills from a young age.

A simple way to look at it is, ‘I don't like to be bullied, so I am not going to bully anyone else’. That's what we're trying to encourage.

Research concludes that the benefits of empathy include:

• improved relationships with others
• better social relationships
• enabling you to be more helpful to others
• boosting self-esteem
• being better able to accept others
• helping to deliver bad news
• being better at collaborating in groups
• greater awareness of self and others
• being able to see situations from other people's point of view.

Empathy is also important for helping us to reframe situations by using our self-talk to see things from another person's or group of people's point of view.

Let's look at a way you can instil empathy in the classroom by playing a game.

Habit 3: Positive reflection

After learning about positive reflection in class, year-7 student Hannah wanted to practise it at home with her family.

Hannah, her brother, her mum and her dad took it in turns to reflect on a highlight of their day. Hannah, her mum and her brother shared their highlights. Then it was her dad's turn.

Interestingly, Dad responded by saying, ‘I can tell you what wasn't great about my day’.

Reflecting on this story was a reminder that there's a good chance Hannah's dad had grown up focusing on the negatives, rather than being given the opportunity to train his brain to think about the positives. How many of us can relate to that?

This isn't necessarily his fault; it's probably the way he's been conditioned since he was young.

As humans, our brains are wired to focus on the negatives. This is known as the negativity bias. I like this summary from the Decision Lab: ‘Negativity bias occurs even when adverse events and positive events are of the same magnitude, meaning we feel negative events more intensely’.

Psychologist Catherine Moore shares some examples. We often:

• recall and think about insults more than compliments
• respond more — emotionally and physically — to aversive stimuli
• dwell on unpleasant or traumatic events more than pleasant ones
• focus our attention more quickly on negative rather than positive information.

Think of a day recently, where a number of good things happened and perhaps one not so good. If you are like the majority of us, it's likely you focused on the not-so-good for way longer than the positives. However, research suggests we can train our brain to focus on the ‘good things’ — but it takes practice.

This is why it's really important to practise positive reflection.

Positive reflection is similar to having a growth mindset. It's about focusing on the good things, rather than the negative. It's also about understanding, in challenging situations, that what has happened, has happened, and that it's what you do next that's important. It's also about reflecting on how you can get better, even if you are already good at something.

With positive reflection, you can:

• improve self-esteem
• become better at wanting to improve
• see challenges as opportunities
• lower rates of depression
• lower levels of distress and pain
• have greater resistance to illnesses
• have better psychological and physical wellbeing
• have better coping skills during hardships and times of stress
• have an increased life span
• be better able to use self-talk to put situations in perspective
• be better at setting goals
• be better at recovering from challenges.

So, what are some ways you can encourage this in your school and at home?

Habit 4: Kindness

I was kind to my gymnastics coach, Brenton. He felt surprised because we normally don't listen that much. It made me feel grateful because he saw me do that. Also, today I felt that I have to do something for someone that I haven't done before.

Penny

I carried out my random act of kindness at school and it was for Mr Humphrys. I told him, ‘thanks for teaching me’. I think that Mr Humphrys was happy that I appreciated him teaching me. This made me feel happy that Mr Humphrys was happy that I was being nice.

James

Today I complimented Eve on how she looked. When I complimented Eve she looked at me with a confusing look and asked what I had said. I said it again and she replied, ‘Oh, thanks’. Doing this random act of kindness made me feel really happy, as if I was a part of trying to make a happier nation. I am also proud of myself for doing this and am excited for tomorrow night's dishwasher kindness act.

Jenny

My act of kindness was to do Adelaide's hair for school. I did this at home. I did this because it meant my mum could help Freddie. My sister felt happy (her words). I felt like I was helping my mum because Freddie was sick and she had to be with him twenty-four seven.

Arlo

These are four examples of kindness reflections that Brett Humphrys's year-5 class came up with while he was teaching at Immanuel Primary. Over a five-week period, Brett asked his class to reflect on acts of kindness they had completed that day or the day before. Such reflection allows students to contemplate the impact they may have had on others through their kindness. Brett also reported that parents had noticed changes in students’ behaviour over this period.

We often hear about ‘random acts of kindness’, but we like to encourage ‘planned acts of kindness’, such as the ones the kids came up with above.

Planned acts of kindness are a great way for young people to start practising kindness. By planning, we are setting up opportunities for young people to practise being kind. This is an important stepping stone in making kindness a habit.

These planned acts help to:

• release feel-good chemicals in our brain
• create a sense of belonging and reduce isolation
• keep things in perspective
• make the world a happier place — one act of kindness can often lead to more!
• make others happy and make you happy
• reduce anxiety and stress levels
• make other people's lives a little easier or better.

It is tremendous that we have a World Kindness Day, but it's not enough — we need to practise kindness every day. Here are some examples of how to help do this.

Habit 5: Service

A dad walked in to teacher Tiff's year-3 classroom: ‘What have you done to my son?’ he asked.

Stunned, Tiff responded with, ‘Ahhh, what do you mean?’

‘He's doing things around our house to help out without being asked. He's never done this before. What did you do?’

Relieved, Tiff explained: ‘We've been practising service. We've been learning about how it's important to do things for others without expecting anything in return. We also discussed that the home is a great place to start serving and being helpful. As the dad walked out of the classroom he said, ‘Well, thank you. Please keep practising’.

This is a real story from a school that shows how wonderful the 5 Habits of Happiness can be when practised both at school and at home. Service really does start in the home (something one of my principals often reminded everyone at assembly). Home is a perfect place for young people to start serving, followed by school and then in the community.

These skills are easily transferrable to all contexts, which is why I want to encourage them.

When we ‘serve’, we look outside of ourselves, beyond our own problems, and seek to bring value to others without expecting anything in return.

This will help us to:

• be happier
• put things in perspective
• have a sense of purpose
• build a sense of belonging
• feel connected to others
• increase our self-esteem
• reduce depression
• contribute to something far bigger than ourselves.

Let's look at some activities that encourage students to serve at home.