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.”
This huge emotional turnaround paid dividends. Ty got an A and told his mom, for the first time ever, that he liked math. The kid with the IQ in the fifties passed the class. Another went from the fourteenth to the forty-fourth percentile. “I remember she told me, ‘Mr. Wills, I am going to pass, I’m going to pass,’ and she did and that was what was incredible.” Indeed, m
ore than 80 percent of Jeremy’s special ed kids passed the state’s standardized math test. When you compare that to the 50 percent pass rate of the regular ed kids in the same high school, you begin to see how remarkable this transformation was. One grandmother called to find out whether her granddaughter passed, and when Jeremy told her she did, “she was like, ‘Hallelujah! Thank the Lord Jesus!!’ ”
Understandably, Jeremy was immensely gratified. With poignancy he shared that “when I think about how someone, somewhere down the line, did something horrible to make these kids not like learning and to see their love of learning rekindled was almost like, sort of this . . . I don’t know . . . it is very hard to describe . . . it is almost surreal. When you see the look on their face when they start to believe in themselves again. . . .” He admits that it didn’t work for everyone, but for most it did. “I can safely say that a lot of them walked out of that classroom as far more confident and capable people than they walked in.”
As for Jeremy himself, once his classroom climate began to turn around, he began to sleep better. He felt that he had more energy to give. He not only felt better, but his hair stopped falling out. He said to me, “I feel like a far more capable and confident person because of it.” The experience taught him both how and why to be optimistic. He drew on what he learned in TFA and in my course to “overcome probably the most difficult challenge” of his life in ways that have “applicability throughout life.” He called it “incredible” and went on to say, “It is one thing to learn [positive psychology] on paper, and another thing to actually implement it and see real success from it.”
After Jeremy shared his and his students’ stories with me during this interview, I shared with him a sketch of the ideas I’d been developing for this book, especially my definition of positivity resonance and its preconditions. As he took in these new ideas, he nodded his head in recognition. He too began to appreciate what I’d picked up back in our sidewalk conversation: that the inner changes he’d made in himself—his rekindled hope, his eagerness to savor and celebrate even the smallest of successes, and most especially, his openness to experiment with new ways to lead—created new connections and resources within his classroom. Drawing on what he’d absorbed all those years earlier about the science of positive emotions, together with the values TFA had instilled in him, Jeremy came to see the abstract idea of “classroom climate” as the accumulation of the many real micro-moments of positivity resonance his students created. It was the energy within these micro-moments—the celebrations and the feelings of connection and camaraderie—that sparked newfound capacity and resilience in these previously lowest-performing students. Jeremy admitted that at first “the kids thought it was lame and stupid to celebrate things.” They had to be exposed to the facts about emotions, like he’d been, before they would buy into the new classroom climate he was trying to instill. Even then, their more positive climate was something that they all had to nurture. “It wasn’t anything quick . . . it wasn’t one person, we all bought into this idea, we all were conscious, we all made an effort, and the fruits of our labor were clearly on display. It was just life changing.”
Dear Tisha and Kelly, I’d like to write: Thank you for letting me see how you taught yourselves and your classmates to be so positive. My warmest wishes to you both!
Try This Micro-moment Practice:
Redesign Your Job Around Love
Although positivity resonance can and certainly does unfold completely on its own, without any added thought or intervention, frankly speaking, quite often it doesn’t. Long-held habits of mind and social interaction often conspire to tempt you to focus on vexing problems or to otherwise judge or hang back from others, perhaps especially at work. The on-the-job changes Jeremy made took courage. He had to make the hard choice to forgo teaching about positive numbers in favor of teaching about positive emotions. Plus, just as he taught math experientially, he also taught about emotions experientially. Teaching in abstractions would surely have taken less time but could hardly have yielded the turnaround results that he sought. So he created games and other means through which his students could open up and connect, and feel safe both to take risks and give their all.
Take some time to do what Jeremy did. Review your own job, your own work routines, your own work attitudes. Which parts of your job do you carry out with, or in the presence of, others? For what proportion of time, during those moments, do you make a conscious effort to connect? Do you slow down enough to really listen and make eye contact? Do you, like Jeremy, allow yourself and others to go “off topic” in ways that build relationships, resilience, and other resources? Maybe you don’t simply need more time, a bigger budget, or higher technology for your work team to meet its highest aspirations. Perhaps you, too, can unlock more individual and collective capacity within your team through positivity resonance. How might you devote more of your energy toward cultivating moments of connection? What new rituals or habits could you create to bring more love into your workday? What metrics would help you and coworkers know whether this investment pays off?
On Love, Science, and Spirituality
I’m an emotions scientist, not a scholar of religion. To date, I’ve written exactly one paper that has religion in its title, and that was merely a commentary offering my two cents on why religious involvement predicts good health. Yet my own and other people’s efforts to describe the mystical and ultimately ineffable vistas that love opens up is what first drew me to explore how love and spirituality interrelate. So when I was invited by Boston University’s Danielsen Institute to develop a series of lectures on how the science of emotions relates to spiritual development and religious well-being, I was immediately drawn in by the opportunity to dive in further. I delivered those lectures in early 2010. That experience planted seeds in the garden of thoughts and theories that have since grown into this book.
Philosophers, religion scholars, and psychologists alike have long pointed to the gulf that inevitably exists between your embodied experiences and the words that describe them. Your emotional experiences, in particular, can be unspeakably extreme, sweeping you away on free falls into hellish abysses or flights to exalted peaks. At either altitude, the air can get so thin that words turn back, no longer able to reassure you. Words pigeonhole your experiences, yet words are at times your only way to communicate what you’ve been through to others. They offer up reassuringly fixed concepts and categories that become the basis for our shared understandings, our cultures and institutions. Words are the planks in the bridges that cultures have built to span the chasm between individual, spiritual, and emotional experiences and our shared belief systems. Through the further application of words, rituals, and decrees, some of these shared beliefs evolved into organized religions, cultural institutions that claim to explain—and create—those profound and indescribable spiritual experiences, like love, that visit us all from time to time.
I’ve been particularly drawn to religious writings that shine a spotlight on experiences of oneness and connection, because those are part of the signature of love. In these moments, borders seem to evaporate and you feel part of something far larger than yourself, be it nature, eternity, humanity, or the divine. This is the “oceanic feeling” that Sigmund Freud dismissed as a regression to the infantile sense of being merged with your mother, but that William James and many others have held up as the bedrock of people’s embodied experiences of spirituality. Following in James’s footsteps, I take spirituality to revolve around expansive emotional moments like these. Consistent with the idea that words fail to capture the essence of spirituality, in his 1902 classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience, James wrote: “Feeling is the deeper source of religion, and . . . philosophical and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue.”
More than a century after James equated spirituality with emotions, Karen Armstrong opened her 2009 book, The Case for God, with a vivid and harrowing description o
f what it feels like to make your way down some sixty-five feet below ground level—at times crawling on your hands and knees in complete darkness—to explore the ancient caves on the border of France and Spain where you can view the elaborate paintings created by our Stone Age ancestors some seventeen thousand years ago. She concludes:
Like art, the truths of religion require the disciplined cultivation of a different mode of consciousness. The cave experience always began with the disorientation of utter darkness, which annihilated normal habits of mind. Human beings are so constituted that periodically they seek out [what the Greeks called] ekstasis, a “stepping outside” the norm. Today people who no longer find it in a religious setting resort to other outlets: music, dance, art, sex, drugs, or sport. We make a point of seeking out those experiences that touch us deeply within and lift us momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, we feel that we inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and experience an enhancement of being.”
To Armstrong, religion is doing, not belief. It’s the effort you put into repeatedly cultivating such peak, unbounded epiphanies that stretch open your heart and mind, and make you more attuned to boundless possibilities.
As Armstrong notes, religion isn’t the only path to expanded modes of consciousness. Back in chapter 4 I drew on that age-old metaphor about swinging open the doors of perception, first used by William Blake, and then more than 160 years later by Aldous Huxley. Your own commonplace experiences of positive emotions can open those doors as well, expanding your outlook on life and setting off spiritual experiences. At times that expanded outlook is hardly noticeable at all, whereas at other times it can take you by surprise, like a powerful gust of wind that clears away debris and allows you to see things with fresh eyes. The point I wish to make here is that your experiences of love and connection need not overwhelm you to open your perceptual gates. Scientific evidence now documents that far less intense positive emotional experiences reliably open those same doors and raise spirituality. By regularly engaging in the kinds of formal and informal practices I offer throughout part II of this book, you can learn to infuse your day and your life with more of the expanded and spiritual modes of consciousness of which James, Armstrong, Huxley, and countless others write.
Love 2.0: How Our Supreme Emotion Affects Everything We Feel, Think, Do, and Become Page 18
