Love 2.0 (23 page)

4. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) did you feel energized by the company of others? __________

5. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) did you experience a shared flow of thoughts and feelings between you and the other(s)? __________

6. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) did your interactions reflect a smooth coordination of effort between you and the other(s)? __________

7. For what proportion of time during this episode (from 0 to 100 percent) did you experience a mutual sense of being invested in the well-being of the other(s)? __________

As you progress through the first three of these seven questions for each episode, the proportions of time that you identify are likely to become progressively smaller. Questions 1 and 2 capture the
prerequisites for sharing micro-moments of positivity resonance with others; first, the presence of others, and next, respectful and meaningful focus on others. Whereas question 3 captures the gestalt sense of connection (first introduced in
chapter 5
), the remaining questions capture the three key facets of positivity resonance in turn—shared positive emotions (questions 4 and 5), biobehavioral synchrony (question 6), and mutual care (question 7).

Now comes the scoring. While the online tools take care of this chore for you, if you’re completing this exercise on paper, here’s when a calculator comes in handy. First, add up the total number of minutes across all your recorded episodes. This number should come close to representing the total time you were awake yesterday. Then, for each episode, convert your responses to questions 1 through 7 into the unit of minutes. Do this by multiplying the number that represents each episode’s duration (in minutes) by the proportion of time you indicated in your response (in other words, 20 percent would mean multiplying by .20, 5 percent by .05). Next, add up the total minutes, separately for each question, across all episodes. That is, for question 1, find the total number of minutes, across all your waking hours, during which you were surrounded by others. Likewise, for question 2, find the total number of minutes, across all your waking hours, that you meaningfully focused on others, and so on. Odds are the gap between these two numbers is large. This gap represents your untapped potential, in a typical day, for creating conditions conducive to positivity resonance.

Next, continue on to find the total number of minutes, across all your waking hours yesterday, that you sensed either the gestalt sense of positivity resonance (question 3) or one of three facets of it (questions 4 and 5, followed by questions 6 and 7). The gap between each of these numbers and your total number of minutes spent in the presence of others (question 1) represents your untapped potential for love, a number likely to be quite large. By contrast, the more modest gap between each of these numbers (for questions 3 through 7) and your total
number of minutes spent with respectful and meaningful focus on others (question 2) represents how easily you were able to convert these opportunities into micro-moments of love.

With this rundown before you, consider now the opportunity costs for self-absorptions like surfing the Internet. That kind of behavior is normal and inevitable, and at times even rejuvenating. But think about what other kinds of experiences you are crowding out. What do you miss out on? More love?

Jeremy’s Story

In my home office, I have three framed letters—two from my own sons and a third from a couple of children whom I may never meet. The two from my boys are cherished Mother’s Day gifts. Each lists what it takes to be their mom, ranging from “make the best pancakes” and “cheer me on” to “enjoy talking to me” and “teach me about what she teaches.” The third is written in blue marker on green construction paper and decorated with glitter glue and cartoon drawings. It reads: “Dear Dr. Fredrickson, Thank you for teaching Mr. Wills to be + [positive], [heart] Tisha and Kelly.”

Mr. Wills is Jeremy Wills, one of my former students. A few years back, he’d enrolled in an upper-level undergraduate seminar of mine, on positive psychology, before which he’d never given a second thought to positive emotions.

A few months ago, as I was thick into crafting part I of this book, I ran into Jeremy as I was walking across campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was back in town for a short stretch between jobs. He’d been a wonderful contributor in my class years back, so open and thoughtful, and I enjoy catching up with him when I can. It was during this sidewalk conversation, which stretched into what must have been half an hour, that Jeremy told me he had a letter
to pass on to me from some of his own former students. Having heard just a little bit about those students, and his experiences as their teacher, I knew I needed to hear more. I asked if I might interview him for this book and he agreed. His and his students’ stories, as it happens, provide a clear and poignant illustration of why and how positivity resonance matters, and how you can tap into it, even in the most difficult of group circumstances.

After graduation, Jeremy had taken a coveted position at Teach For America, the nonprofit modeled after the Peace Corps that enlists thousands of future leaders, just out of college, to bring low-income communities fresh teachers for two or more years. Jeremy had been drawn to Teach For America because he yearned to make real differences for social change. A few years earlier, as a volunteer classroom assistant in the struggling city schools in neighboring Durham county, he’d become keenly aware of the irony of sitting in “ivory tower” classrooms in his own elite university, discussing in abstract terms how, generation after generation, social inequalities get replicated through entrenched inequities in education and wealth, when just down the road sat a middle school student who struggled to read “Go dog go.” Getting to know one of these kids in particular, and noting the poignant gap between his aspirations (for example, “to design video games”) and his academic ability, Jeremy discovered up close and personal that “the problem had a face.” As he put it, “Someone somewhere did something to him that prevented him from learning or didn’t give him the opportunity and that’s a problem that no one should have to deal with.”

Teach For America (TFA) offered Jeremy the chance to roll up his sleeves and help to close the achievement gap by working directly with struggling kids in low-income classrooms. After a few months in TFA’s teaching training, and a short stretch into his first placement in a poor rural county in North Carolina, his assistant principal took note of his extraordinary patience and high expectations for even the lowest-performing kids in the high school. She offered him his own math class.
He’d take charge of about a dozen chronically failing “special ed” kids, some with IQs in the fifties or with behavioral problems so severe that if “you look [at them] the wrong way, you could have a desk flipped.” He was excited to take on this challenge. His idealism ran high. He admits that at first he thought he would simply “waltz in” and fix the problem of social inequality, one classroom at a time.

But the reality of the problem hit him hard. Even though Jeremy spent four or more hours each day preparing lesson plans, complete with guided notes, tactile instruments, and every teaching tool about which he’d read, it soon became clear that he was utterly failing his students. Behavior management, or dealing with kids’ outbursts, hardly turned out to be the problem. As he put it, “The kids were despondent.” Getting them to say anything “was like pulling teeth.” They wouldn’t make eye contact with him. When they talked at all, they just mumbled. The worst was when he’d distribute a math test. Many would just put their heads down on their desktops. They wouldn’t even look at it, wouldn’t even try. “There was no life in the classroom.”

Jeremy described this new teaching assignment as “humbling” and “stressful.” It was “overwhelming” to be “directly responsible for kids’ academic success, which then translates to their overall health, earning potential, and career.” Although this had been his dream postcollege placement, he began to dread going into his classroom. On top of that, he wasn’t sleeping well. He’d wake up “almost out of breath.” His hair started falling out. He’d even lost his taste for fun. He found he no longer enjoyed heading back to Chapel Hill to hang out with his college buddies, playing ping-pong or darts over a few beers like old times. “I was just a shell of myself because I had all these worries.”

Coming to terms with his failure as a teacher—the painful mismatch between his high hopes and his daily experiences with disengaged adolescents—was the toughest thing he’d ever experienced. He knew something had to change. Even his body was telling him he simply couldn’t go on like this much longer. After wading through his
own despondency for a while, he began to recall the previously abstract ideas he’d encountered that now seemed especially relevant to his painful predicament. He remembered ideas discussed during his orientation training for Teach For America, about classroom climate and getting students to invest in their own education. He also recalled catching an interview I’d given on our local public radio station, as well as the opening story from my first book, which described how a parent who woke up to positivity changed the course of her day, her life, and the lives of those around her. Then he thought back to the class he took with me at Carolina. There he’d learned about the sizable asymmetries between negative and positive emotions. What struck him most was that negative emotions shout out and drag on, whereas positive emotions are “like the quiet kid in the room that no one ever pays attention to.” This helped him remember that if he could cultivate and savor those quiet and fleeting positive emotions—and help his students do the same—then together they could leverage feeling good to build their resources and resilience. He admitted to me that before he fell into the funk of this all-time low point of his life, all of these ideas had merely remained abstract to him, interesting ideas, to be sure, but they didn’t feel real. Now, together with the support of his supervisors and TFA mentors, they were forming a lifeline.

He realized that what needed to change first and foremost was his own attitude. As he put it, “I was not celebrating education in any way.” True, he’d been given a difficult assignment. But he realized that if he made the effort to look at his situation in another way, he could also see that he’d been given “a rare opportunity to actually change these kids’ lives in a positive way, to actually rekindle their love for learning.” He began to see teaching as “a bi-directional relationship. They may be pretty despondent, but look at me. I am certainly not the life of the classroom when I walk in!”

That’s when he decided to take a break from teaching basic math to build real relationships with and between his kids. “I said let’s get to
know each other, so we played games.” He asked the students to share something about themselves, how many brothers or sisters they had, their thoughts about their town, anything to break the ice. He asked them to write stories about themselves, telling “who they were, what their worst experiences in life had been, what made them happy.” After one kid was bold enough to share his own story, “the stories poured out.” He said it was like penguins lining up along “the edge of an iceberg” all peering down at the water, and then “one jumps in and if it’s safe then everyone else jumps.” The kids began to open up, telling of dads who weren’t around or moms who were struggling to feed the family on food stamps. They shared their fears, alongside their hobbies and hopes. Ty had built his own stock car and had recently won two thousand dollars racing it. Tisha shared that she wanted to be a nurse. They learned to trust their classmates and to honor what each shared.

He even devoted a few class sessions to basic lessons from the science of positive emotions, which he attributed to “Dr. Fredrickson” back at Carolina. He asked them to recall a time that they felt down or upset. They shared stories of breakups and other failures. He encouraged them to notice how feeling down, just by itself, becomes self-defeating, because it zaps their energy and confidence. He also asked them to notice that feeling good can sometimes escape awareness altogether, but that these good feelings could do quite a lot for them. Celebrating the good feelings that they were learning to create in the classroom—by listening to and supporting their classmates—could renew their energy, give them confidence, and build the resources they needed to face tough math problems. Together as a class, they drew on this discussion of emotions to create extended analogies to tough situations in sports. They talked, for instance, about how a baseball player, up at bat in the bottom of the ninth with the tying run on second base, needs to have confidence and to be able to visualize his own success and give it his all. He told them that math class was just like that, that they’d need
to marshal up their own resources and confidence to persevere and give each step of a math problem their all.

One by one, Jeremy helped his students tie this particular math course to what they wanted to do in life. He helped Tisha see how, as a nurse, she’d need math to measure blood pressure or dispense a particular dosage of medicine. “She was like, ‘You need math for that?’ and I said, ‘Yeah! You think you are just going to stick someone with a needle?’” With Ty, Jeremy talked about engineering, tire pressure, and rotations per minute and speed, and emphasized all the math that these ideas involved. “He was like ‘Really? I need math? I didn’t know any of this….’ ” Jeremy went on to tell me, “I think that was the big key . . . that we tied the course to something positive and we even talked about how they felt. Like, does it make you happy when you think about your career or what you want to do? And they were like, ‘Yeah!’ Well, then math should make you happy too because it is going to get you there!”

After days and weeks of “conversating,” as they called it, these twelve lowest-achieving students bonded in Jeremy’s math class. Along the way, he encouraged them to celebrate one another by sharing what they found interesting in one another’s stories. He also encouraged them to help each other through difficult steps on math problems and cheer on one another’s successes, however small. Then, instead of mumbles, silence, and no eye contact, “if Tisha got something right, they would shout ‘You go, girl!’” and eventually “the kids were celebrating one another’s success without me, and that was huge.” He described the classroom now as “full of life.” He said, “I know it sounds cliché, but you could say ‘the sun rose on a dark day,’ [and] they would just shout out answers and it got to the point where they were almost too willing and it was incredible.” The atmosphere Jeremy and his students created was “almost celebratory” and truly interactive, like a church in which shouts of “Hallelujah!” come from any pew. Or, as Jeremy summed it up: “It was like a party, except with math.”