Find Your Garden: The Resources Within Us |
What Is Positive Psychology?
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Accessing inner resources can quickly shift your emotional and mental state.
Noticing beauty in nature (or anywhere) reduces stress, improves mood, and supports cognitive functioning.
Even imagining nature can calm the nervous system and increase feelings of well-being.
Sustainable performance means knowing how to both use and restore your energy.
I once had a client named Kaito* who came to our session already extremely discouraged.
He was in the middle of launching a new mobile game: an immersive experience designed to let users feel what it’s like to fly across landscapes like a bird. The concept was deeply personal, inspired by his own love of flight, but the launch wasn’t going as planned. User adoption was slow, and the pressure from his board was mounting to make a change.
For weeks, Kaito had been trying to work through the stress. He described to me in detail all the ways he was pushing himself. But then I caught a crucial detail:
“I’ve been distracted, honestly. I’ve been spending a lot of time in my garden,” Kaito said apologetically. “It’s the only place I feel okay.”
Then he quickly moved on, back to metrics, strategy, and what wasn’t working. And that moment almost slipped away from us.
The Resource We Overlook
In positive psychology, there’s a simple, profound idea: if you can help someone access their resources, you can help them access their resilience.
With this in mind, I asked Kaito to slow down for a moment. He was puzzled, but I prompted him to drop the topic of his game for a moment and instead tell me about his garden.
He began describing all of his crops: cucumbers,........