Chapel Remarks by Rector Kathy Giles
May 22, 2026
Good morning. As we close in on the final 10 days of this school year, along with the excitement and the arrival of summer temperatures early this week, there are emotions racing all over the place. The warm sunshine feels just so good! And with these capstones and final projects, with these performances and productions, there is also the fatigue that happens near the end of any big effort. There is a mountain of work ahead! We look at these upcoming days as days to get through, as the “to do” lists lengthen and yes, as the big changes ahead suddenly are at the doorstep. Sometimes, like finishing a marathon, it feels like it takes everything we have just to get to the finish line. Add in world news at any given moment, as well as whatever is happening on your social media feed, and it can feel like a lot — even if we know that we are fine, it can still feel like a lot. It’s easy to lose perspective when we are tired, when there is a lot to do, when our emotions are lit up, and when our screens act as accelerators and intensifiers rather than providing relief (because as we know, more is not always better, when it comes to the kinds of stuff we see and read on those screens). It’s easy to drift into general negativity in these moments, and like quicksand, once we are there, negativity can get sticky and be hard to escape.
Last Friday Owen [Right ‘26] offered some great thoughts on specific ways to navigate emotional complexity: show up, Facetime, smile with all your teeth. Love that! I want to follow that up today, at the cusp of graduation and summer, with an offering of my own. It’s called “Three Good Things,” and it’s a way to train your mind to stay out of the stickiness of negativity and lean towards positivity and flow.
For background, the reading today introduces the field of positive psychology, which has developed as an important area of human understanding during the past 30 years. Probably the best-known work in positive psychology is Dr. Carol Dweck’s Mindset: The Psychology of Success (2006) and the concept of a “growth mindset” — the core belief that intelligence, talents, and abilities are not fixed traits you are born with, but rather qualities you can cultivate, develop, and increase over time through dedication, effort, effective strategies, and feedback.1 A “fixed mindset,” by contrast, is the belief that your intelligence, talents, and abilities are what they are, and that you can’t do anything that will change them — you’re stuck with what you are bad at. In her research, Dr. Dweck and her colleagues found that “[s]tudents with a growth mindset will often see challenges or setbacks as an opportunity to learn. As a result, they respond with constructive thoughts (e.g., “Maybe I need to change my strategy or try harder”), feelings (such as the thrill of a challenge), and behaviors (persistence).”2 It isn’t enough just to think or hope you can do better — you have to do the work to get better. And people with growth mindsets believe that if you do the work, over time, you will indeed get better and stronger.
The science on that “can do” versus “can’t do” attitude also has something to do with our individual emotional makeups. As psychologists began to study not just how to alleviate human suffering but also ways to promote human well-being and flourishing, they learned that we each have our own emotional biodiversity. What constitutes good for one person may not for another, and we feel things and experience events differently. Psychologist Dr. Martin Seligman and his team developed the PERMA Theory of Well-Being that proposes these five so-called “building blocks” of well-being: Positive Emotion, (Positive) Engagement, (Positive) Relationships, Meaning and Mattering, and (Pride in) Accomplishment. The research shows that although each of us as individuals experiences these factors differently, and we feel in different degrees, these factors form a common denominator for our human senses of well-being. And the research also proposes that we can use strategies to increase the senses of well-being that we derive from each. There are times, of course, when things feel serious and heavy because they are, and in those times, the right choice is choosing to seek support from people you trust and love. But on a day-to-day basis, it actually is possible to choose a lot about the ways we feel and experience people, places, and events. We can indeed train ourselves not to sweat the smaller stuff. Training ourselves to recognize negativity and self-doubt and to choose positivity is perhaps the choice on which these other thriver choices build. The thriver exercise I want to offer that for me is really helpful is “Three Good Things.”
The core idea behind Three Good Things is that every day for at least a week, toward the end of the day, you write down three things that went well for you in which you had exercised your agency and make yourself explain — to yourself — why they went well. Find three good things you chose and did: something you made happen or something you were actively involved with, not just things you enjoyed or thought were beautiful. You complimented someone to lift their spirits; you spent some time with your young Friend and helped them learn something, or you spent some time at a service project that helped other people. You gave blood. You spent extra hours on a capstone that you are proud of. You practiced your music well and played really well at orchestra rehearsal. You decided to join the birthday party in the common room and so you felt included. You checked in on someone in the dorm to show them that you care and felt connected; you thanked one of our FLIK colleagues at dinner because they seemed tired and needed a lift and you felt generous in friendship; you noticed that someone left a phone on chapel lawn and brought it over to Friedman to the dean on duty and you felt helpful. Your gains from early morning workouts made you feel much more confident when race day came. Three good things, big or little, that produced a positive outcome: positive emotion, engagement, pride in accomplishment.
The point of Three Good Things is that noticing them builds up our confidence, increases our motivation, and help us feel empowered to take positive actions in our lives3 – showing that we can train ourselves on decision-making and agency, even when we feel like things aren’t going our way; to stay out of negativity and retain our role as directors or our lives. Once you start keeping track of the good things, you start finding more and more of them, and you lean into that positive flow. You can see how it fits with that growth mindset that really is the key to believing in ourselves, even when we are tired, or anxious, or feeling on the wrong side of missing out.
There’s another version of Three Good Things that is also helpful, in terms of rewiring our minds toward positivity. That’s the practice, at any moment of the day or night, of learning to distract yourself — or perhaps empower yourself? — by finding three good things in your life, right now. Three good things: It’s a beautiful morning; I’m excited about the NEIRA regatta tomorrow; I can’t wait for prom; I’m going home next week to my couch, my dog, and my refrigerator. Three good things, right here, right now, almost like a few burpees to rev up your mind and spirit, that rush of confidence we get from exercising our agency toward what is positive and good. Let’s look for three good things every day and set ourselves up for a great day, a great weekend, and a great end-of-term.
2 Ibid.
3 https://www.uchealth.org/today/author/mccrimmonk, October 27, 2025.