Moving prevention for college students out of the mental health clinic and into the classroom changes the campus environment. A curricular approach to enhancing student resilience is described through an exemplar of a one-credit general education course focused on adaptive responses to stress, Changing Minds, Changing Lives (CMCL). The experiential, strength-based curriculum is designed to meet basic psychological needs, buffer predictable stress, and boost adaptive resilience. Based on a social–ecological model of resilience, the CMCL program functions as a campus opportunity structure teaching self-regulation skills, facilitating greater connectedness, and strengthening resilience capacities. The model operationalizes the resilience response as a set of concrete actions that facilitate adaptive reorientation and reorganization in the face of challenge, mobilize relevant assets and resources, and leverage social connections to navigate adversity. Evidence-based applications of strength-based pedagogy, mindfulness practices, expressive writing, and inclusive group process in the course structure are described, and empirical validation of model efficacy is reviewed.

Existing conceptualizations of thriving at work are dominated by White Eurocentric hegemonic beliefs. This is done by focusing on individual experiences and workplace resources and privileging universalisms over pluralistic, local, and regional understandings. Many individuals and communities across the globe are engaged in precarious work, operate in informal economies, and lack the opportunity to gain equal access to resources. With fairness as the foundation to thriving, I have expanded on existing conceptualizations on thriving at work by restoring multiple perspectives, centering decent work as a basic goal, and by including an ecological systems perspective. Thriving workplaces require equitable opportunities for self-determination available for all.

Wellness, fairness, and worthiness are central concerns in the pursuit of thriving. Wellness is a positive state of affairs, in multiple domains of life, derived from the satisfaction of subjective and objective needs. Fairness can be defined as the practice of justice. Fairness is multifaceted, entailing, among others, distributive, procedural, and corrective justice. Worthiness can be defined as a sense of mattering, which derives from feeling valued and having opportunities to add value. There is evidence that wellness is highly influenced by both fairness and worthiness. We submit that the extent to which diverse groups suffer or thrive depends on the presence or absence of wellness, fairness, and worthiness in their lives. We explore this hypothesis through the lived experience of four groups: LGBTQAI+, Muslim women in Indonesia, Black girls in high school and Black women navigating predominantly White higher education institutions in the United States.

Though it is derived from individual thriving, community thriving cannot be reduced to the aggregate of individual experiences. Rather, community thriving is defined as the function of a community’s sustainability and its effectiveness at producing well-being outcomes. An overview of community concepts related to thriving, thus defined, is offered, and the implications of well-being, fairness, and worthiness in a community context are detailed. The chapter concludes with specific historical illustrations and steps readers can take to enhance the thriving of their own communities.

Our approach to thriving encompasses not just the growth of individuals but also of collectives. Therefore, when we talk about how people thrive in this chapter and throughout the book, we refer to people in the singular and in the plural. Instead of creating a dichotomy between individual and community, we refer to people as comprising the unique lives of each one of us, the relational bonds that tie us together, and the communities and settings we are a part of. Our definition of thriving acknowledges the primordial role of situational fairness, the phenomenology of worthiness, and the myriad forms of wellness. In other words, thriving consists of context + experiences + outcomes. We submit that the key context impacting our ability to thrive as individuals and collectives is one of fairness. Similarly, we argue that key experiences have to do with mattering and a sense of worth, both of which have to do with feeling valued and opportunities to add value. Finally, we make the point that wellness exists in multiple forms and for people to thrive they should nurture all of them.

In this chapter, we suggest conceptualizing school thriving at different levels of analysis, including thriving of individuals in schools; and thriving of schools themselves as complex ecological systems embedded within communities and the larger society. Multilevel interventions are most effective, targeting different layers of the school ecology. By recognizing the interconnectedness of academic, emotional, and social well-being, schools can create an environment that promotes thriving and equips students with necessary life skills. Interventions to reduce teacher stress and improve satisfaction should target organizational social context factors in urban schools serving minority and low-income students.

As discussed throughout the book, Black women experience racial trauma and discrimination and may internalize these messages and become highly self-critical. These experiences can lead to feelings of low self-worth, anxiety, and depression. In this chapter, we share the strategies of self-compassion, self-forgiveness, and self-love and acceptance to support Black women in emotional healing. We also discuss the use of the arts and religion and spirituality as resources for Black women’s healing and thriving.

This chapter might be euphemistically called a summary of the book “in pictures,” as it includes all of the key graphics used throughout the book to represent the core ideas of MST (including summaries of goal content themes, different kinds of emotion patterns, and personal agency belief patterns), TSP (including representations of the TSP Theory of Motivation and Optimal Functioning and the TSP Theory of Life Meaning), and principles for motivating self and others. This chapter was designed to provide readers with a quick summary of the book’s contents and an easy way to recall key ideas related to the challenge of motivating self and others.

Many books that aspire to go beyond descriptions of motivational processes to address the question of how to motivate self and others adopt a tactical approach that is overly mechanical and often limited to a narrow range of change pathways and targets of intervention. To avoid these pitfalls, this chapter focuses on broad principles for enhancing optimal human functioning rather than offering simplistic “prescriptions” for motivating self and others. In doing so, we also explain why the uniqueness of individual motivational patterns – psychologically, developmentally, and contextually – makes it impossible to offer formulaic advice for motivating self and others. To engage the reader’s interest, we use a novel Q&A format after the initial presentation of overarching principles to illustrate how a “principled” approach to motivating self and others can be used to diagnosis motivational problems, identify multiple targets of intervention, and envision a variety of pathways to more optimal functioning.

This chapter helps fill a significant gap in the human sciences and professional practice, as theories of life meaning are both few in number and somewhat narrow in scope despite the scientifically and personally compelling nature of the topic. For those focused explicitly on motivating self and others, it opens new horizons for understanding how to elevate human experience under both favorable and adverse circumstances, consistent with the goal of creating a comprehensive theory of motivation and optimal functioning. It does so by explaining not only the nature and antecedents of feelings of life meaning but also that such feelings are facilitated and enhanced by TSP motivational patterns. Life meaning can thus provide humans with the motivational strength needed to overcome major life challenges and obstacles by telling us that “life is worth living” and “these goals are worth pursuing.”

This chapter provides a nontechnical introduction to the components of human motivation (goals, emotions, and personal agency beliefs) that capitalizes on the intuitive understandings that readers already have about motivation from their own everyday experience. This is done through thought questions that encompass motivation of both self and others. The concept of “motivation at its (human) best” – what we call Thriving with Social Purpose – is also introduced as an advance organizer for the chapters to follow.