Coaching practices for Three Good Things at Work

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Three Good Things at Work, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • I could list ten things that went wrong at work today without blinking but I’d struggle to name one that went right
  • Something genuinely good happened today and I noticed I just kept it to myself and moved on
  • I’ve been doing the gratitude thing but my entries all sound the same
  • My days are objectively okay but they leave almost no warm residue
  • When someone does something genuinely great I tend to file it away to mention at their review, and by the time it comes around it’s gone cold and vague

Practices that may help

  1. Apply three good things to work contexts specifically
    Use the exercise to rewire what you notice about your work day — contribution, competence, and collaboration.
    Three Good Things: The Evidence-Based Gratitude Practice
  2. Share one good thing with another person
    Tell one person about a good thing that happened — sharing amplifies the positive experience and builds connection.
    Three Good Things: The Evidence-Based Gratitude Practice
  3. Three Good Things: The Evidence-Based Gratitude Practice
    In Martin Seligman’s original randomized controlled trial, participants who wrote three good things and their causes each evening for one week reported significantly higher happiness and lower depression at one month and six months — making it one of the most replicated exercises in positive psychology. Effects are genuine but modest; the practice sustains benefits best when kept specific and causal rather than performed as a gratitude list.
  4. Keep entries specific, not global
    One precise, specific good thing is worth more than five vague ones — train on detail, not volume.
    Three Good Things: The Evidence-Based Gratitude Practice
  5. Three good things (positive emotions pillar)
    Write down three good things that happened today and why they happened.
    Seligman’s PERMA Model, Made Practical
  6. One-minute praisings: specific, immediate, genuine
    Praise that names the exact behavior immediately after it occurs reinforces that behavior far more effectively than delayed or generic recognition.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  7. Catch people doing things right
    Most management attention goes to problems — systematically noticing good work is both rarer and more powerful.
    The One Minute Manager: Three Practices That Still Work
  8. Balance the review with a genuine positive inventory
    List three specific things you did well today — not three things that went well, but three things you did.
    The Pythagorean Evening Review
  9. Train optimistic causal attribution deliberately
    Practice attributing good events to stable, internal causes — not to luck or one-off circumstances.
    Three Good Things: The Evidence-Based Gratitude Practice
  10. The Rule of Three for Productivity, Made Practical
    Chris Bailey’s Rule of Three is a simple planning practice: at the start of each day (and week), identify three outcomes you want to achieve — not a task list, but specific results. It is a practitioner system with no formal trials; its value comes from forcing a distinction between tasks and outcomes and reducing the cognitive overhead of open-ended planning. The number three is a heuristic aligned with working-memory research, not a precisely studied threshold.

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