Did Your Last Change Effort Include Enough PAIs?
PAIs or positive activity interventions are one of the most important practical findings to come out of the positive psychology movement. These are simple techniques that can be used by individuals or groups to increase positive mental energy, mood and even general happiness. Example PAIs include counting your blessing, sending letters of gratitude or thank-you notes, positive affirmations or meditating on positive feelings, using your signature skills or strengthens to address a problem and intentionally performing acts of kindness. There is strong evidence that such simple practices are a great way to generate significant positive mental energy, the very fuel needed to sustained long and challenging change efforts.
While I have seen PAIs produce strong results in practice, I was a bit surprised by the recent research article, Delivering Happiness that presents evidence that they could be an effective tool for managing clinical depression. That puts the cognitive impact of PAIs on a whole new level and makes them even more important as tools for improving the workplace.
I am interested to hear from readers that have used PAIs in a change effort, training program, process improvement intervention or some other workplace improvement effort.
