Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference. 

― Robert Frost 

Welcome to our final chapter! You are almost there. I hope you feel good for having made it this far. Of course, the challenge to make the most of your life never really ends. 

Just as when you began this challenge you were answering a call to adventure into unknown territory, so you will experience this call in new ways as you continue your journey after you have completed this course. 

What I would like to do in this last chapter is to help you reflect on what you have learned so you can savour it and begin to imagine how you can carry it with you as you continue on the path you may have mapped out for yourself in the PATH process. 

The first big thing I wanted to do in the challenge was to give you a way to think about and identify what may really make you happy and enable you to make the most of your life. We started by introducing positive psychology as the science of happiness and what makes life worth living. I gave you an idea of all we are learning about what makes most people happy so you would have a good background for thinking about and identifying what may make you most happy so you can begin to make it more a part of your life. 

We talked about how Martin Seligman, who as the president of the American Psychological Association, started the initiative that became positive psychology back in 1998. Positive psychology was founded to increase the focus on what makes us happy, enables us to become our best, and live our lives to the fullest. 

We learned about how psychology had fallen into our very human negativity bias where we pay so much attention to the potential threats in our lives – that we may miss many of the good things that can help us deal with these threats. Seligman developed that PERMA theory we keep going back to that says there may be at least five different elements that make up human happiness and well-being: 

1. Positive emotions – such as joy, interest, love, and contentment. 
2. Engagement – which includes the experience of flow.
3. Relationships – where we experience so much of our happiness. 
4. Meaning – which may be the essence of a life worth living 
5. Accomplishment – which is our desire to master and do things well for its own sake. 

One of the tasks you will have for this chapter is to take the same well-being survey I suggested for the first chapter of the challenge so you can compare your scores on the elements of PERMA and see how they may have changed. But remember that PERMA is a general theory that may miss some of the specific things that may make you as a unique person most happy. So, if there is something else you envisioned for your path or best possible life, please feel free to make it a focus for you and think about how it may have changed during your time working through this challenge. 

Thus, the first big thing we tried to do was to enable you think about and see more clearly what would might make you happy, what you want the most, and what might be your best possible life. 

The second thing that we spent most of our time on was offering you the tools that modern science, psychology, and especially positive psychology have discovered and have made available so we can better accomplish our goals and realize our best possible life. 

As part of your basic training during the first part of this challenge, we talked about building blocks of change that can accompany you through your journey, how you can practice mindfulness to be more present to your life, how to increase resilience and stress-related growth to bounce back and learn from stress, and what you can do to foster your inherent capacity for wisdom and creativity. 

As part of helping you better see, embrace, and use the best in yourself to make the most of your life, during the second part of the challenge we gave new ways to identify and use your strengths. We also focused on how you can build and use the strengths that may be most important in enabling you to move forward in your journey – including authenticity, perseverance, courage, self-efficacy, and self-control.

As part of your living and being a part of a social network and larger community, during the third part we focused on how you can improve your relationships with others and find better ways to have a positive impact on the community and world around you. Specifically, we examined social intelligence and how you can build and use love, kindness, fairness, justice, and forgiveness to a create community that gives us the chance to thrive together. 

In this fourth and final part of the challenge, you have had the opportunity to put it all together in writing about your best possible life and using the PATH process to plan and map out your way forward after this challenge. In this part, we focused on strengths like optimism and hope, humour, appreciation and gratitude, and meaning and purpose – which make it possible for us to rise above some of the limitations of the lives we have known and begin to see and realize more of the kind of life we want most.

I hope that you have had the opportunity to watch some of the videos that we created especially for this challenge and that you will feel free to return to them as often as you like to refresh yourself in what you have been learning. 

Maybe it was the symphony coming together to play the Ode to Joy in a public square, Heather Dorniden getting up to win that race, Maya Angelou talking about how love liberates, the little six year old girl giving wise advice to her mother, the boy with autism making those six 3 pointers in a row, appreciating the beauty of the singing in The Shawshank Redemption, or Lily when she found out that she was going to Disneyland. 

Most of all, I hope that you will find ways to continue to incorporate and benefit from the exercises that helped you the most. Whether it is finding ways to continue to see, create, and savour the good things around you; use your strengths in new ways and experience the wind at our back; to kindness and gratitude to those around you; or finding more meaning in becoming a part of a cause or something greater than yourself that expands the reach of love, kindness, and compassion to others. Whatever it may have been, I hope that you will find ways to further pursue and continue to build on the lessons, activities, and videos that spoke to you and made the most difference for you. 

Finally, I hope you will take the time to first congratulate yourself, savour, and celebrate the good work you have done; give yourself any time you may need to rest, recover, and rejuvenate; and to then to follow through in moving forward in your path toward making the most of your one wild and precious life! 

Workbook Tasks for the Chapter 

These are the tasks that can help you to review and celebrate what you have learned in this challenge and how it may have affected your happiness and well-being. 

First, there is a special video about gratitude by Louis Schwartzberg, who is a well-known cinematographer who has focused on capturing beauty. This video is about how we can use gratitude to make every day a good day. 

Second, there are reflection questions about the most important things that you learned and about what you can do to continue to practice and benefit from what you have learned. 

Third, there is a task that involves identifying what you can do to celebrate and reward yourself for having completed this challenge – and then doing it! 

Finally, there is an opportunity to take the well-being survey that you took in the first chapter of this challenge. Completing and scoring this will enable you to compare your scores to see what may have changed for you. You can also feel free to make copies of the survey so that you can use it whenever you want in monitoring your progress in the future. 

Most important, on behalf of everyone who contributed to making this challenge and course possible, I wanted to thank you for taking part and being open to the lessons and activities that have meant so much to me and others. It has been a great pleasure and joy to be with you in this positive psychology challenge. 

I wish you the best in finding whatever happiness you seek, in realizing a life that for you is truly worth living, and in continuing on your path of making the most of your life and living it the fullest!