The Latin expression ‘Dum Spiro, Spero’ literally translates into “While I breathe, I hope’ and is an expression that underpins the need for optimism if there is life, and one still draws a breath. Every new day, every new week, every new month and every New Year is a fresh opportunity to take stock, change direction if necessary and work hard towards actualising one’s goals and objectives.
Some key emotional attributes are essential to fully benefit from this optimistic view and attitude to everyday life. These fall within the spectrum of positive psychology and some of these traits are briefly highlighted here.
Hope: This is the bedrock of positive psychology, and it can be a very powerful force for good and a source of inner strength and endurance, as well as sacrifice. The thought of better days to come and the possibility of doing better in the near future gives hope and is an infinite source of potential strength. Of course this should be realistic.
Emotional intelligence: This simply refers to your ability to understand your own emotion, as well as understand the emotions of others around you – especially family, friends, colleagues and others with whom you are engaged with some for. The highest benefit of emotional intelligence is to deploy such improved understanding to improve interpersonal relationships such as by acquiring empathy, aiming to please others and avoiding actions (or inactions) that may cause them distress, misery or unhappiness.
Resilience: The ability to bounce back in the face of adversity and setbacks is described as resilience. An understanding that life occurs in phases and that good days and bad days come and go for every man, helps to develop resilience when going through challenges or difficulties.
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Gratitude: Appreciation of the good qualities, gifts and positives in one’s life or situation is more likely to improve the chances of a positive outlook towards life. This provides inner satisfaction and joy and improves quality of life.
Discussion
As we enter the new year, we need to press pause and ponder on some of these realities. We cannot continue to do things in the same way, every year and hope for different outcomes. So, what do we need to do differently?
The common tendency is to end the year with a litany of concerns about all the unfinished businesses, unsatisfied hopes and aspirations or missed opportunities that went by in the outgoing year. Very seldom do we pause to also count our blessings and successes in the outgoing year, and show gratitude for them. Thus, we reflect on what could have been, and rue missed opportunities, and we agonize about what we could have done differently. Of course, it is a no-brainer that if you focus exclusively on the negatives and where things didn’t work out as you had hoped, you will be miserable and unhappy.
It is essential that we take a step back, take a deep breath, and put things in the right perspective as we evaluate our lives, or simply the outgoing year and list all our positives and the negatives so we can have a balanced view of our successes as well as areas where we didn’t quite succeed as we would have wanted. One critical but often overlooked area of gratitude for instance, is being alive and in good health. We often take our health for granted until we have a challenge in one area or the other.
Asido Foundation’s Gratitude Challenge
It is in the context of the foregoing that the Asido Foundation runs an annual Gratitude Challenge #asidogratitudechallenge2024 that is aimed at nudging us to acknowledge and list our successes and things we should be grateful for in the outgoing year. Emotional wellness is directly linked to a sense of gratitude and appreciation for the positives in our lives. This is achieved by the release of feel-good chemicals that promote a sense of emotional wellbeing and contentment, as well as enhancing optimism for the future. We encourage everyone to participate in this challenge, by reflecting on, and posting a list of five to 10 things that we are grateful for in the outgone year. Please post on social media, use the hashtag #asidogratitudechallenge2024 and encourage others to also do likewise. We look forward to 2025, encouraged by the dictum, ‘dum spiro, spero’. Together, let’s make the world a better place one person at a time.