Top up your family’s happiness

Written By Nik & Eva Speakman

GOOD NEWS JAR

Bring harmony into your home and end that working day on a high!

How to make a good news jar

The idea is to write little notes about positive and encouraging things that have happened during the day, and pop them into a jar.

Things to be grateful for

Your children might write down that they’ve completed a piece of work or finally understood something, or they might write that you made them a lovely lunch.

You’ll write little notes about them too – it might be that they did a piece of work unprompted, or perhaps they showed good manners.

Everybody in the family contributes little positive note and pops them into the good news jar.

How to end your day

There’s no better way to end the day than on a positive note.

At the end of the week you can go through your jar and look at what a great week you’ve had, and then at the end of the year you can pick out the highlights, put them in a scrapbook and look at what a good year you’ve had.

The benefits of a good news jar

We all like to feel valued and appreciated, so a good news jar is a great way to ensure everyone feels encouraged, appreciated and motivated.

BUT LUCKILY HACK!

This happiness hack is so easy, and you can get the whole family involved at all ages, as it will resonate even for the little ones. This hack literally transforms any negative into a positive, by just finishing any negative sentence with just two words.

And those two words are ‘but luckily’.

So for example:

  1. I wish I could see my friends… but luckily I can give them a call, or FaceTime them.

  2. I don’t want to do this work today… but luckily once I’ve finished my work I can go and play out, or watch TV.

So to change any negative into a positive, all you need to do is add the two little words ‘but luckily’ to the end of every sentence!

For more helpful tips for all aspects of everyday family life, take a listen to our podcast ‘Making The Change’.

Nik & Eva Speakman

We have studied and worked together since 1992. Between us we have studied human behaviour and psychology for seven decades. We both share an uncontainable passion to offer hope and to help people lead happier and less inhibited lives.

After many remarkable breakthroughs we created our own behavioural change therapy, ‘Schema Conditioning.’® Subsequent work with trauma victims and their related symptoms, led to the creation of two further trauma-based therapies.

‘Schema Conditioning Psychotherapy.’®

‘Visual Schema Displacement Therapy (VSDT)’®

‘Visual Schema Detachment & Restructuring (VSDR)’®

Qualifications from the creation of our therapies, resulted in training psychology professors, doctors and masters students at Universities in Amsterdam and Utrecht. In 2015, this training produced the two sets of scientific studies conducted into the workings of our therapy; the first two study papers highlighting the remarkable efficacy, was published in the Journal of Behaviour Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry in June 2019. A further third study was then published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology in April 2021, with a fourth clinical study with hospital patients is currently underway and will be completed by the end of 2022.

In addition to members of the public, we work with, and have treated many high-profile clients and ‘A’ list clients around the world, having had prodigious successes. We are resident therapists on ITV’s multi award-winning ‘This Morning’ and have been for over a decade, we have also had own television shows, one of which, ‘The Speakmans’, also aired on ITV and several countries worldwide. Over the last two decades we have appeared on numerous other television shows as experts, such as the multi award-winning Saturday Night Takeaway.

Our mission is to illuminate that there is ALWAYS HOPE and that overcoming trauma and improving quality of life is entirely possible. Many people have either never been given hope, or worse had hope taken away from them, our aim is to correct that by sharing our message in any way we possibly can, including live workshops, theatre tours, books, podcasts, radio, television, social media and YouTube.

At the heart of all we do, is our relentless mission to offer HOPE to as many people as we possibly can.

https://nikandeva.com
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