Appreciative Inquiry for One: The Joy of Appreciative Living: Your 28-Day Plan to Greater Happiness in 3 Incredibly Easy Steps

Based upon the concepts and procedures of Appreciative Inquiry, Jacqueline Kelm offers Appreciative Living, a qualitative research informed therapeutic program for one. To this end Kelm presents a 28-day plan designed to help individuals achieve greater happiness via a three-step model. She also shares results from a study she conducted with participants who have tried her approach to further demonstrate the usefulness of applying Appreciative Inquiry means to therapeutic ends. Key Words: Appreciative Living, Appreciative Inquiry, and Therapeutic Qualitative Research The world’s economy is a mess; countries are trying to solve their own monumental problems; unemployment is rising and people are losing their jobs left and right. It’s exactly the right time to employ appreciative inquiry and positive thinking in our own lives. That’s the premise of this book: By approaching our lives in a positive way and employing the principles of David Cooperrider’s Appreciative Inquiry (AI), we can achieve personal change and possibly transformation leading to a more joy-filled life. This book is not a research text on AI; it is instead more of self-help book, but it’s directly connected to an established set of organizational principles. Jacqueline Kelm was a student of Cooperrider’s at Case Western sometime in the 1990’s while she was an MBA student. In her Introduction, Ms. Kelm discusses how she has used AI as a management consultant with a variety of departments and organizations and found that using the positive, strength-based approach was very successful in implementing change in organizations. She wondered if the same principles could be used to promote change in people’s daily lives and eventually embarked upon the development of a research study that used AI principles applied to the individual. Kelm is not the first qualitative researcher to notice that participants in research studies can find the process therapeutic (e.g., Colbourne & Sque, 2005; Gale, 1992; Murray, 2003; Ortiz, 2001; Shamai, 2003; St. George & Wulff, 2000; Stuhlmiller, 2001). Although many have observed these therapeutic outcomes as a fortunate side effect of participating in qualitative research studies, Kelm’s approach is novel because she directly applies qualitative concepts and procedures from AI overtly to produce healing, restorative, and curative effects. Ms. Kelm developed three brief exercises to conduct, based upon AI, with the goal of creating “meaningful, lasting joy” (p. xv). She solicited subjects (mostly through email) who had either purchased her previous book, Appreciative Living, or had attended a workshop on the topic. Hence, her subjects all indicated that they wished an increase in joy in their lives. They happened to be at least 30 years of age, primarily female, but otherwise diverse in geographic locations, partnership status, religious affiliation, and race and education level. Ms. Kelm used a quantitative questionnaire to determine beginning levels of individual happiness. Then, she asked participants to complete the exercises: two were done on a daily basis and one was done weekly.