My favorite Sunday morning activity is watching my home church, New Psalmist Baptist Church via the Internet. During this past Sunday’s sermon Bishop Thomas referenced, Experience Sampling. He described it as such: at 2pm everyday he would write down his emotions and what caused them (people and things). This process helped him identify the positive and negative people and/or things in his life that were affecting his attitude at this particular time. If he identified a pattern, he would keep the positive and push out the negative. This really peaked my curiosity!

I quickly went to the Internet to do some research.  Wikipedia explains it this way: “experience sampling method is a research methodology that asks participants to stop at certain times and make notes of their experience in real time. The point is for them to record temporal things like feelings while in the moment (right then, not later; right there, not elsewhere). They can be given a journal with many identical pages. Each page can have a psychometric scale, open-ended questions, or anything else used to assess their condition in that place and time”.

I found this to be very interesting. I guess one could compare it to keeping a journal but most write in journals at night trying to capture their entire day. I love experience sampling because it is in the middle of the day (when most are at work) and surrounded by the same people everyday. By doing this at 2pm it would serve as a great indicator if we actually loved our jobs and the people we worked with. Doing this could make us dig deeper and ask the following questions:

–       Do I love my job?

–       Do I like the people I work with?

–       Is this my passion?

–       How do I get rid of the negative and replace with the positive?

–       Am I living my best life?

–       Why am I allowing these people and/or situations to affect me this way?

This is something I am considering and would love for you to share your thoughts and feelings. Could this be a “game changer?” It could help us improve how we operate and whom we interact with on a daily basis?

I think it is worth doing!