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.

Why it works

Humans have a negativity bias in self-evaluation as well as perception: we recall failures more vividly and for longer than successes. The Pythagorean requirement to name what you did right is not a feel-good addition but a calibration against this bias. Self-efficacy — the belief that you can execute the actions required — is built primarily through mastery experiences, and the positive inventory makes those experiences visible rather than invisible.

How to do it

1. Each evening, list three specific things you did well today — actions, not outcomes.
2. Make them concrete: "I kept my patience in the difficult meeting" rather than "I was pretty good today."
3. Sit with them for thirty seconds before moving to the negative review.
4. Over time, track whether the positive inventory is generating material (sign of engagement) or is hard to fill (sign of avoidance or disengagement).

Evidence

Three-good-things exercises have reasonable evidence for increasing well-being and reducing depressive symptoms; the distinction here is on actions you did (agency) rather than events that occurred (luck). Seligman and colleagues’ controlled validation of positive-psychology interventions found the "three good things" exercise produced increases in happiness and decreases in depressive symptoms that persisted for months after the exercise ended. (observational)

Seligman et al. studied "three good things" without the specific focus on actions rather than events; the agency-focus is a theoretically motivated modification, not a separately tested variant.

Sources

• Seligman, M.E.P. et al. (2005), Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions, American Psychologist
• Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5), 410-421.

Common mistake

Listing things that happened to go well rather than things you chose and executed well — which credits luck rather than building accurate self-efficacy.