HAPPINESS PROJECT PROPOSAL ASSIGNMENT

Description
he purpose of the project proposal is to help you design your own unique Happiness Project. The Project Proposal asks you first to think about how you define happiness, about your current happiness level, about challenges to your happiness, and about how to work with your own nature and habits to keep yourself motivated through the project.
It also asks you to identify and choose different activities and practices that you will make time to do in a time span of 3-5 weeks this semester.
It asks you to keep track of what you do and how it makes you feel so that you will be ready to reflect on the experience in your Final Reflection Essay and present the results to others in your Visual Presentation.
Describe your own current perceived happiness level (or degree of overall well-being) as you begin your project.
Identify at least two current challenges or stumbling blocks to your happiness.
Describe your designated “Rubin Tendency” and the degree to which you find it accurate, and how your knowledge of your Tendency influences your plan for your project. Anticipate and describe what challenges you expect to encounter during this project, perhaps due to your Tendency, and offer some specific ways you might set things up to overcome them.
Describe how your current daily and weekly habits do or don’t support your long-term happiness.
Identify at least one “Pleasant Life” activity that you find fun (that you do simply for pleasure, not for other benefits or to gain skills). State how often you commit to finding time for fun over the 3-5 weeks of the project.
Identify a “Good Life” strength activity, something you already do well or something you are learning to do that puts you in or towards a state of flow and that you believe is time well spent. State how often you commit to engaging in your strengths over the 3-5 weeks of the project.
Identify how your strengths could be put into service to others or how you might help others. State how you might be able to do that during the course of this project. This could be substantial, formal service to many people, such as teaching or coaching, or it could be much more informal and smaller-scale, such as helping a friend to learn a skill or supporting them in their own happiness, or sharing your knowledge in a public forum, like a blog or video with some kind of audience.
State how often you commit to trying or engaging in at least two of the following happiness practices that have researched benefits. Keep these distinct/separate from your fun activity and your strength activity:
Meditating or mindfulness practice
Practicing gratitude
Spending time in nature
Exercising vigorously (these could be short ten-minute durations)
Consciously doing “good deeds,” or kind acts (altruism)
9. Look at this list of suggested outside resources and consider which concept (gratitude, spirituality, flow, altruism, and/or kindness) you’d like to learn more about as you pursue your project. You don’t have to decide definitively now, but suggest two sources that will help you show, in your Final Reflection Essay, new or beyond-the-course knowledge of how gratitude, spirituality, flow, altruism, and/or kindness can be relevant to our happiness.
10. Finally, describe how you will document or log your project on an on-going basis. Will you write/journal, take photos, use apps? (The more documentation you do, the easier it will be to put together your Final Reflection Essay and Visual Presentation.)