To take advantage of positive emotions is not to suggest that you are going to walking through life only seeing the positive in every thing and having a big smile on your face at all times.
The Yellow smiley face icon is not the objective. By knowing how they work and what they signal, you will learn to
a) Active participant in the capitalising on the opportunities that come from positive emotions,
b) Find ways to increase the number of instances and the duration of positivity
c) Be a good citizen of your community.
In fact positive emotions are heavy hitters in the emotional system: it is through cultivating the positive that we are able to learn, grow and flourish. Note that this is not the pursuit of some far off concept of happiness. This is just the simple cultivation of moments of different types of positive emotions that can lead you on the path to success.
The key to taking advantage of positive emotions is to regard them as resource builders. Please think of a really a clear example of a time when you felt one of the positive emotions - Pride, Gratitude, Pleasure, Satisfaction, Interest, Hope - whether it happened today or last week. After you recall some of the details of that even, give it a name (for example, thinking about the future) and specify which emotion it was.
Now that you have an example to keep in mind, let us go back to what we know about emotions: the feeling ( the emotion) works for us in two ways by 1) Drawing attention and 2) coordinating a response. Positive emotions shine a light on things that are going particularly well for us or that have the potential to do so - that is, situations that are congruent with our goals. These can be thought of as opportunities for resources to be built; for example, if you are interested or inspired or if you feel that someone has been particularly kind.
If you feel admiration toward someone it means you think they did something to display great skill or talent. As a paragon of success, if you pay attention this individual, you may pick up on how he or she performs that skill. It would certainly save you a lot of trial and error tie to do so. Your admiration alerts you to the chance rapidly learn a culturally valued skill.
