Appreciative Living with Jackie Kelm

01/21/2026

What if you could feel 10% better a week from now?

Not by achieving some big goal. Not by fixing all your problems.

Just by asking yourself two simple questions every day that help build an Appreciative Mindset:
• What's good?
• What do I want?

Over 20 years of teaching Appreciative Living, I've seen these questions pull people out of depression, shift stuck relationships, and help them find joy in ordinary moments they used to overlook.

So I'm starting a free 7-day challenge this Sunday, January 25th to help you actually build this practice. And I'd love for you to join me.

Here's what happens each day:
📌 Day 1: Find What’s Working and Savor It
📌 Day 2: Discover What’s Good About You
📌 Day 3: Reframe Your Difficulties to Gain New Insights
📌 Day 4: Discover What REALLY Matters to You and Why
📌 Day 5: Picture Your Ideal Day and Begin Moving Towards it
📌 Day 6: Shift a Difficult Relationship
📌 Day 7: Integrate Your Progress into Your Life & Identity

Each morning, you'll get a short email with a simple 10-minute practice. You'll rate your wellbeing on Day 1 and Day 7 to see what shifts.

Complete all 7 days and you'll get access to a free 90-minute live session where I'll teach the Habit Breaker Technique. It’s a powerful new process to help you stick with a daily practice going forward.

If you've been feeling stuck, stressed, or like you want more joy in your life, this might be exactly what you need.

It's free. It's simple. And it works if you do it.

👉 Join here: https://AppreciativeLiving.com/7-day-challenge

To your joy,
Jackie

P.S. Doing this with someone else can create an upward spiral in your relationship, especially with a partner. Feel free to tag someone who might benefit!

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01/21/2026

“Whatever you think the world is withholding from you, you are withholding from the world.” —Eckhart Tolle

12/05/2025

MY DAILY APPRECIATIVE PRACTICE PART 2:

I’ve been emphasizing the importance of a daily appreciative practice for creating joy in today’s world. Today I want to share what I do and how I’ve structured my practice so I actually look forward to it.

My appreciative routine changes, and to be honest, I miss I day here and there, and sometimes a week or more if I’m on vacation. But I notice myself becoming more judgmental and negatively focused the longer I lapse.

My practice centers around a cup of coffee or tea. I really enjoy this in the morning and use it to anchor my appreciation practice. It’s ceremonial in many ways.

I put the drink in a delicate china cup, play inspiring music, and curl up in a cozy recliner by the window overlooking our pond. I wrap myself in a soft blanket in the winter and savor the feel of it, the aroma of the coffee, and heat of the cup. I focus on the warm liquid going down my throat and reflect on the hard work of the growers, packagers, and truck drivers. So many people contributed to this simple luxury.

I then “put on my “Goodness Glasses” and reflect on everything and everyone I appreciate and try to let the good feelings build. Sometimes they erupt into an explosion of joy, but most days it’s a deep peace and contentment. Other days I struggle to get a blip of positive emotion.

When my heart won’t open I use other appreciative practices. There is the Flourishing Formula for handling problems, relationship questions for people issues, and daily practices for resetting my mindset. You can get these for free on my website here: https://AppreciativeLiving.com

There are a host of others as well in my first Appreciative Living book, the 28-day program in my second book, the many exercises in my coaching certificate program, and the newest exercises in Appreciative Living Rapid Change at https://AppreciativeLiving.com

Whatever I do, I always end with a mindfulness or meditation practice. I might sit quietly and watch the birds, listen to the trees, or close my eyes and focus on my breath. I try not to think, and to just "be."

My practice takes about a half hour all-in. I feel clearer, calmer and more motivated when I'm done which makes my day go better and more efficiently.

It’s shocking how these simple practices can change days, weeks, or even years of difficulty. And you don't have to take a half hour. Even just two minutes can change the trajectory of of your day.

So that's what I do, and I hope it inspires you to create or build on your own practice.

To your joy! - Jackie

How to apply Appreciative Inquiry in everyday work and life to create greater joy and success, with workshops, classes, and books to help you get started.

11/06/2025

My Dear Appreciative Living Friends - In the last post I explained how important and powerful a daily Appreciative Living practice is. In my 20+ years of doing this work, I still don’t know of anything that is simpler and more effective for maintaining joy.

Today I thought I’d share what I do, with the caveat that it’s always changing. But there is one core exercise I always do: Put on my goodness glasses.

I pretend I’m looking through a special set of goggles that only allow in positive aspects and find everything I appreciate about my life, my relationships, finances, career, home, or anything else.

I ask questions like, what’s good? What’s working? What do I appreciate? What’s beautiful? What made me laugh or surprised me?

It's also a great tool for problems and fears in looking for what you can learn or find that's even a tiny bit good. You can literally feel stress decline and hope build as you find positive aspects in a negative situation. Sometimes you even get a new insight or answer in how to deal with it.

And while all this will take you into a better place, there is one question that is most powerful of all: What do I appreciate or value in myself?

Loving yourself is key to everything you want in life. You get what you believe you deserve, which is a function of how much you value yourself. And you can only love others and feel loved to the extent your love yourself. You can’t give what you don’t have, or get what you don’t feel you’re worth.

You only need 5 minutes on this, although more is always better. Think about your gifts, strengths, successes, and good intentions. What do others appreciate about you? What do you do that helps or serves others? Who are you when at your best?

One trick for doing this is to go online or ask AI for a list of values. These are things like caring, dependability, and honesty. Each day pick one off the value list and think about how you demonstrate that value, no matter how small. Don’t focus on times you didn’t meet it, find times you did.

Looking at yourself and your life through your Goodness Glasses is the best daily practice there is and one I do regularly. In the next post I’ll share what else I do, and how I create a daily routine I actually look forward to.

To your joy! Jackie

PS: For more appreciative practices visit https://AppreciativeLiving.com

10/29/2025

My husband Jon retired about a month ago, and we just got back from a celebration cruise. When we got home, I noticed I was rather grouchy.

I found myself annoyed going through the big pile of mail and laundry, and nitpicking everything Jon did.

While it’s common to feel down after a vacation, I could tell this was different. It was an overall negative attitude.

And then it hit me: I had not done my daily Appreciative Living Practices in over two weeks.

So I got down to business, and literally within one sitting, I felt incredibly better. I’ve been doing this for so long those brain pathways are well oiled and it comes back easily.

Even after all these years I get surprised at how simple exercises can have such a profound effect. And yet I struggle to do them at times.

And if you struggle to do them, consider yourself normal. In fact, your brain is neurologically wired to resist looking at the good.

In his book, Hardwiring Happiness, Rick Hansen coined the term “Negativity Bias” and says your brain is like “Velcro for negative experiences and Teflon for positive.”

Making your brain focus on positive things goes against its wiring and actually takes a lot of energy. There are two ways to help overcome this.

First is to just make yourself do the practices every day for at least 90 days, and then it will be an ingrained habit according to Neuroscientist Dr. Carolyn Leaf, in her book, Cleaning Up Your Mental Mess.

Easy to say, not so easy to do.

In order to help make it easier, you can use habit change best practices. James Clear gives a lot of examples in his book, Atomic Habits. Here is a quick summary of a few.

One is to do your practices at the same time as an existing routine, like drinking your coffee or creating your daily to-do list. You can also change your environment to make it easier by keeping your journal out where you see it, or setting reminders on your electronic devices. Or you can create systems such as not letting yourself leave the bedroom till you do them.

There is now a second way to make it easier by using my new Appreciative Living Rapid Change technique. This will stop the resistance you currently have to doing them in your subconscious brain. Getting rid of the resistance makes it so much easier to just do them.

In January I’ll be doing a free session on using Rapid Change, but for now you can try it out by asking yourself, what do I gain from NOT doing the daily practices? What are all the benefits of NOT doing them?

This will help you see why your Reptile brain is keeping you from taking action. It thinks the benefits of NOT doing them are greater than the benefits of doing them, and you need to resolve this.

In the next post I’ll share the daily Appreciative practices I do and the routine I’ve created for myself. In the meantime, see if you can get some kind of daily practice going with these tips if you aren’t doing one already.

To your joy! Jackie

PS: Visit https://AppreciativeLiving.com to learn Appreciative Practices.

PSS: Visit https://AppreciativeLiving.comalrapidchange to learn about AL Rapid Change.

10/04/2025

You walk into a room where others seem to be on edge. Without realizing it, your body responds. You literally feel the tension.

When we're with others, our nervous systems can sync. You can absorb other people’s anxiety, and this is one of the ways stress becomes contagious.

You'll often hear suggestions to avoid toxic people or hostile environments for this reason. While this can make sense, it's worth noting that calm is also contagious. When you can stay relaxed or grounded in tense situations, others can map to you.

This is an advanced skill. But even if you can't get all the way there, any little bit of reduced tension will help you and them.

And the best way to do that is with a daily Appreciative Living practice that only takes 5-10 minutes.

Simply list everything and everyone you appreciate and savor the good feelings. The key to success is feeling the positive emotions, because this speeds up the rewiring in your brain.

You can also use this practice to diffuse the tension of a stressful moment by looking for something to appreciate. Your brain will find it more easily and quickly because it was "primed" from your daily practice.

You can basically become a walking reset button. Your calm presence can not only help you, it can be the greatest gift you give others as it ripples outwards and steadies a world that is desperate for peace.



To your joy! - Jackie

05/02/2025

Announcing Rapid Change! This revolutionary approach can help you stop overindulging in sugar, screens and more. Click the link below to get access to the free webinar on how to do it!

05/03/2024

My son Jon made Nationals jumping 7.69Meters. He finished 7th in the country for Division 2. So proud :-)

04/24/2024

I just realized this is starting to look like page for John Rodel LOL. So here's a beautiful pic of my cat to balance out the beautiful poem by John I posted right before this.

03/22/2024

Everything is Waiting for You

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
​
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

- David Whyte

https://onbeing.org/poetry/everything-is-waiting-for-you/
A nod to Tim Ferriss for sharing in 5-Bullet Friday.

After Derek Mahon Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the...