I am finishing a class entitled “Self-Care & Well-Being for Helping Professionals,” taught by Dr. Mark Thurston and Mary Elizabeth Lynch at George Mason University in Virginia. Dr. Thurston gave us a choice to choose from three well-being practices to apply each day for a couple weeks. He used the term “consciousness discipline” to describe the process of applying them. They are protocols that you probably have tried or heard about. Dr. Thurston presented them so clearly that I am sharing them here.

  • Each morning when you get up, write down three positive expectations for the day; and at the end of the day, write down three things for which you are grateful which happened in that day just ending. We can think of this option as “brief journaling for optimism and gratitude” (BJOG). For the morning-time positive expectations, let them be things around which you have some control. For example, don’t pick “I expect it will not rain today” or “I expect my boyfriend will be in a good mood.” Instead, you can like positive things you expect yourself to do (such as “I will work on my homework without distractions for two hours”) and things that are more internal about attitudes and emotions (such as, “I will remain patient even when unexpected, annoying things arise”).
  • Each day for the week, try your best to talk about other people only in the way you would if that person were present to hear what you are saying about him or her. We can think of this option as a way to cultivate greater self-awareness about social relationships and be compassionate in how we think about and talk about others. We could call it the “compassionate social intelligence” discipline (CSI).
  • Try to make eye contact with others throughout the day as you listen to them and talk to them. Allow this action to be an expression of your full attention to them. It’s a way to reinforce seeing and caring about others.   We could call it “paying attention with eye contact” (PAEC). (I can see extending this protocol by trying to be a full-on active listener moving beyond just eye contact. Another extension that compliments this process is engaging in Active Constructive Responding (ACR) along with my strategy of acknowledging – validating – celebrating when others share with us.)

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