When someone shows you who they are, Believe them the first time.

― Maya Angelou

Welcome to the third part of the positive psychology challenge! Let’s do a quick review of where we have been in the challenge so far.

In the first part, you had basic training about positive psychology as the science of happiness and what makes life worth living. You learned about happiness and well-being, including PERMA theory, which says that there may be at least five things we seek for their own sake: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

You also learned about what can help make these five things more a part of our lives and make positive change possible. These included the basic building blocks of positive reappraisal, behavioural activation, and gradually exposing ourselves to what we are afraid of. They also included mindfulness, as what enables us to more present to our lives; resilience and stress-related growth, as what help us bounce back and benefit from stress; and wisdom and creativity, which can help us find our way in stressful and uncertain times. The primary activity you did variations of during several chapters involved learning to see and create more good things in your life.

In the second part of the challenge, you had an opportunity to discover and learn how to better use what is best in you. You learned about authenticity as being true to ourselves; perseverance and its’ cousins grit and growth mindset; courage as what enables us to overcome obstacles; self-efficacy as believing that we can do what it takes to reach our goals; and self-control, which is like a muscle that we can exercise to strengthen. The primary activity you did during most of the chapters in the second part involved identifying your strengths and discovering new ways to use them.

During this third part of the challenge, we will focus on how you can use your strengths and what you are learning to improve your relationships and have more of a positive impact on the world around you.

In the fourth and final part of this challenge, we provide the lessons and activities which will enable you to put what you have been learning together and use it as a foundation in planning for a better future. Since the focus in this third part is on improving your relationships and better engaging with the larger community and world around you, the lessons will involve the activities, attitudes, behaviours, and strengths that will make this possible.

In this chapter, we’ll begin by focusing on social intelligence as a foundation for interacting with those around us. The next two chapters will be about fostering love and kindness, followed by chapters on improving the larger community and building a healthy society, and ending with a chapter on forgiveness as a way to find peace and healing when things go awry in our relationships. The primary focus for the activities in this third part will be on doing things that improve your relationships with others and with the larger groups and communities of which you are a part.

The critical lesson for this third part of the challenge might be summed up in the words of Chris Peterson that “other people matter” and the words of the John Donne that “no man (or in modern terms: “no person”) – is an island.” That is, human beings need each other, and our destiny is intricately tied to those around us.

The psychologist Ed Diener has probably done more to study happiness around the world than anyone else. He has asked people of all ages, genders, ethnic groups, languages, and cultures what makes them happy. The common denominator is having and being with other people they care about and who care about them. In fact, when asked to describe when they were happiest, Diener says that people almost always describe times when they were enjoying themselves with close friends or family members.

The vital importance of our relationships is strongly reflected in our biology and evolution as a species. As I previously noted, our intelligence did not evolve to do higher math or physics, but to enable us to get along with others and successfully negotiate our social world. That is why our intelligence may be best characterized as the social intelligence that it takes to build and maintain trusting, supportive, and rewarding relationships with other people and the larger community.

The one thing that has the strongest correlation with the size of our brains compared with other species of primates is the size of our social network. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar showed that human beings have both the largest brain size and the largest social network. More than anything, we need our intelligence to build and maintain good relationships.

There are other discoveries about our biology that also highlight the significance of our relationships with others.

First, there are parts of our brains that have specifically evolved to play a role in social intelligence, such as the fusiform gyrus which enables us to recognize facial expressions in others.

Second, our brains have what have been called mirror neurons that react both when we perform an action and when we see another person perform the same action. Mirror neurons enable us to learn from and understand the actions and experiences of others.

Third, we have a powerful hormone called oxytocin, which is associated with social bonding and is more active when we are close or even think about being close to others.

Fourth, in addition to our fight-or-flight response to stress, we also have a slower acting response called the “tend-or-befriend” response that involves oxytocin and motivates us to take care of and befriend others when we are under stress.

One of the most advanced aspects of our social intelligence involves what has been called “theory of mind.” Rather than being a particular theory of how our minds generally work, theory of mind refers to the fact that we are constantly developing working theories about how those around us are going to behave and what they are going to do next. It is not hard to see how important it might be for us to be able to know whether we can trust those around us. This may have been a critical survival skill in our evolutionary past as it still can be today. Our fascination with a good murder mystery or reality TV show about who will end up with the bachelor or the bachelorette are a testament to how good we are at theory of mind, how important it is for us, and how much we enjoy developing and using it.

The bottom line of these discoveries in psychology and science is that our relationships and engagement with the larger community are essential for surviving, thriving, and flourishing – and that is why it is the central focus of this part of the challenge. In the chapters of this part, you will learn what science has discovered about love and kindness, how our happiness is related to the health of the community around us, how to make moral and ethical choices that promote a healthy community, and what we can do to foster the forgiveness sometimes necessary to make this possible. In the process, you will learn some of the most effective and promising ways to improve your relationships as well as how to have a positive impact on the community and world around you.

The activities for this part of the challenge are grounded in two things that are essential for healthy and life-giving relationships with others.

• First, it is important for us to experience and express appreciation and gratitude for the meaning and happiness others bring to our lives.
• Second, the primary behaviours that foster good relationships include love, kindness, and treating each other with fairness and justice and also with empathy and compassion. The tasks and activities will focus on providing you with ways to use what you are learning to better relate to others and engage with the world around you.

Workbook Tasks for the Chapter

Here are the tasks for this chapter that can help you better understand and increase your social intelligence:

First, there is a special video about “Active Constructive Responding,” which is a way of responding to someone when they have good news to tell us about something that has happened to them. Active Constructive Responding has been shown to produce better and more lasting relationships. It can be a simple, fun, and easy thing to practice for improving our relationships. After you watch the video, you will be asked to identify people you may be able to practice it with.

Second, there is an activity that involves making a list of the people in your life you are most grateful for and writing down something about why you are grateful for each of them. This will be a way to prepare you for other tasks that involve focusing on what you appreciate about other people and writing and sharing a gratitude letter with someone who has been important to you.

Third, there is a task that involves completing a special form about what you appreciate in someone who you may be particularly grateful for. Completing this form will help you gain a better understanding of why this person is important to you and what you can do to improve your relationship. Then you will be asked to make and carry out a plan to do something to improve it.

Finally, there are reflection questions about who has been a good mentor or guide for you and who you have been a good mentor or guide for. This can help you see why both having and being a mentor can be so important for us.