The Alpine View

What Are We Training Ourselves to Notice?

Dear Mack Community,

For 1,001 consecutive days, I kept a gratitude journal.

Every day, without exception, I stopped and recorded things for which I was grateful. Some were significant. Many were wonderfully ordinary: a conversation, a meal, a person, an opportunity, a moment I might otherwise have passed without noticing.

By the end of those 1,001 days, something felt different.

I cannot prove that I had literally rewired my brain. But it certainly felt as though I had retrained my attention. I had become better at noticing what was good.

And I increasingly wonder whether attention is one of the most important things we practice.

What

Human beings appear to have something psychologists call a negativity bias. Across many kinds of experiences, bad news tends to command our attention more readily than good news. Problems demand action. Threats are hard to ignore. One influential review of the research summarized the phenomenon rather memorably: “bad is stronger than good.”

From an evolutionary standpoint, that makes some sense. Missing the beautiful sunset probably did not endanger our ancestors. Missing the predator in the bushes might have.

But there is a cost.

If we are not intentional, our attention can become remarkably skilled at detecting what is wrong while becoming surprisingly poor at registering what is right.

Years ago, I decided to experiment with that idea in a slightly unusual way.

I began calling companies that probably received far more complaints than compliments simply to thank them.

One day, I called Georgia Power.

When the customer service representative asked how she could help me, I explained that nothing was wrong. My refrigerator was running. My air conditioning was working. The lights came on when I flipped the switches.

I just wanted to say thank you.

There was a pause.

She was so surprised by the call that she eventually asked whether I would repeat what I had said to her manager. Before long, I was sharing my gratitude with more of the customer service team.

The electricity had been working all along.

What changed was that I noticed it.

So What

Chip and Dan Heath describe a related idea in Switch. When we encounter a problem, our instinct is often to study what is broken. The Heath brothers suggest that we should also find the bright spots: look for places where things are already working and ask, What is happening there, and how can we do more of it?

That is not ignoring problems.

It is widening the field of vision.

Gratitude does something similar.

It does not ask us to pretend that everything is wonderful. Schools are messy human communities. Families experience hard things. People make mistakes. There are problems that deserve our attention and injustices that demand action.

Gratitude is not denial.

It is the discipline of refusing to let what is wrong become the only thing we can see.

And perhaps that is why gratitude can be practiced. Research on gratitude journaling suggests that deliberately naming what we appreciate can shift attention and improve aspects of emotional well-being over time.

The practice begins to train a different question:

Not only, What went wrong today?

But also, What went right that I might otherwise have missed?

Now What

This matters in schools because there are bright spots everywhere.

A student who included someone at recess.

A teacher who noticed the child who needed a little more time.

A parent who extended grace.

A colleague who quietly solved a problem before anyone else knew there was one.

A child who tried again.

A classroom filled with laughter.

Hundreds of small things happen every day that make a community work. Most will never generate an email, a phone call, or a meeting.

Maybe that is precisely why we should train ourselves to notice them.

What if, this week, we deliberately searched for a bright spot?

What is working?

Who made something better?

What ordinary thing deserves to become visible because we chose to say thank you?

The problems will still be there. We will attend to them.

But perhaps gratitude helps us see the whole landscape.

For 1,001 days, my journal asked me to practice noticing.

Years later, I still believe the repetitions mattered.

Because what we repeatedly pay attention to has a way of shaping what we see.

And sometimes the bright side was there all along.

We simply needed to turn toward it.

With appreciation,

Bo

P.S. About The Alpine View: Each Sunday evening, I use this space to explore an idea connected to learning, leadership, childhood, or community through a What, So What, Now What lens. My hope is to offer something worth thinking about, talking about, and perhaps passing along.

Archives