Ten keys, one journey: from GREAT DREAM to shared practice
Ten short videos, ten themes and ten opportunities to pause, talk and bring something concrete into everyday life. This collection forms part of the journey developed through Happiness in Practice: Positive Psychology & Community Resilience, an Erasmus+ adult education project focused on wellbeing, resilience and inclusion.
The videos did not emerge as a stand-alone communication activity, but as part of a broader methodological approach. From the outset, Happiness in Practice planned to work with the 10 Keys to Happier Living, as a structured tool to support learning processes with adults. The ten keys were first introduced to the trainers from the three partner countries during the first international workshop in Italy, and from that point they were progressively integrated into the different project activities, alongside empathy circles, community emotional maps, local workshops and other learning resources.
Why these ten themes
If we read the names of the ten keys in English and in order, their initials form two words: GREAT DREAM.
Giving · Relating · Exercising · Awareness · Trying out
Direction · Resilience · Emotions · Acceptance · Meaning
This structure makes it possible to understand the ten keys as a journey. The first five, grouped under the word GREAT, are mainly connected with what we do and with the way we act in everyday life. They invite us to look at how we relate to other people, how we care for our bodies, how we pay attention to what surrounds us and how we keep our curiosity alive.
Many of these dimensions can be translated quite easily into small, concrete actions, such as calling someone, going for a walk, noticing something that usually goes unseen or encouraging ourselves to try a new activity.
The five keys that make up DREAM take us towards more reflective dimensions. They invite us to ask where we want to go, how we respond to difficulties, how we recognise our emotions, how we treat ourselves and what gives meaning to our lives. These are not tasks that can be completed once and for all, but orientations that can be cultivated over time.
For this reason, the collection can be used as a progressive journey, although each video also works independently. A group beginning with Giving can start from something very concrete, such as an act of kindness, an experience of helping someone or a small gesture of care. Later, when the journey reaches Meaning, the group can explore questions related to values, purpose or what gives meaning to life, having already built shared experiences, a common language and greater trust within the group.
Behind the whole journey lies a fundamental idea: wellbeing is not presented as an obligation to “be happy”, but as the possibility of learning and practising skills, habits and strategies that can contribute to personal and collective wellbeing and help us cope better with difficulties.
From ten keys to ten short stories
To turn these ideas into an audiovisual resource, we decided not to explain each concept through a definition. The ten videos follow Luna, the same character throughout the collection, placing her in simple and recognisable everyday situations, such as reading a message while sitting on the sofa, looking at a bowl she has just made in a pottery workshop or working in a garden after a storm.
The intention is not to tell viewers what they should think or feel, but to show situations that are open enough to prompt a question and allow each person to connect them with their own experience.
The illustrated style contributes to this openness because it avoids an overly localised representation and makes the scenes easier to understand across different cultural contexts. A person watching the videos in Italy, Spain, Belgium or anywhere else does not need to have lived exactly the same experience as Luna in order to recognise an emotion, a doubt, a decision or a way of relating to others.
Two minutes that leave room for learning
Each video lasts approximately two minutes. The brevity is not intended to simplify the themes, but to leave room for what can happen after watching.
An activity can begin simply by watching the video together, without first explaining the concept. Afterwards, a first round of conversation can be opened with a simple question such as, “What has stayed with you from this story?” A brief contribution from each person may be enough for different interpretations of the same scene to emerge and for those who usually speak less to find space as well.
The conversation can then be connected with concrete experiences. For example, asking “Do you agree that kindness is important?” does not have the same effect as asking “When was the last time someone did something small for you that you still remember?” The first question mainly invites an opinion, while the second can open the door to a personal story.
When people share concrete stories, broad concepts such as wellbeing, resilience, acceptance or meaning stop being abstract notions and begin to connect with real situations. This way of working is directly linked to the principle of active listening that was also present in the empathy circles developed during the project in Italy, Spain and Belgium, where participants alternated the roles of speaker, listener and witness.
Moving from conversation to practice
Happiness in Practice was conceived as a project based on practical tools, not only on the transmission of information. For this reason, after the conversation each participant can identify a small action they would like to try before the next meeting.
It might be making a call they have been putting off, walking for a few minutes, paying conscious attention to an everyday activity, recognising an emotion before reacting or finally allowing themselves to try something new.
At a later meeting, the group can return to these experiences and explore what happened, what was easy, what was more difficult or whether anything felt different. In this way, a learning process emerges that connects observation with personal experience, conversation with others and the possibility of trying small changes in everyday life.
The journey can therefore be understood as a continuous movement between watching, reflecting, sharing, trying and sharing again, with the audiovisual resource acting as a starting point and people’s own experiences completing the learning process.
The Community of Practice as a space for continuity
The Happiness Community of Practice is a multilingual online space, available in Italian, Spanish, English and French and hosted on the project website. It was created to extend learning beyond face-to-face workshops, maintain relationships among participants and encourage exchange and peer support.
It currently brings together 40 people, exceeding the 30 members originally planned, and offers different ways to participate. The community includes discussion forums on wellbeing-related topics, activities and challenges that invite people to try concrete strategies in daily life, sessions with experts in positive psychology and emotional resilience, and a resource library with tools and guided exercises.
The videos fit naturally into this space. Although they were not created exclusively for the Community of Practice, they can become facilitation resources capable of starting a conversation, suggesting a small practice or encouraging the exchange of experiences.
The ten keys also make it possible to organise a progressive journey within the community. The videos can be shared weekly, used alongside a particular activity or revisited after several weeks to see whether the same story prompts new interpretations after participants have accumulated experiences, conversations and learning.
In this sense, the audiovisual resource is not intended to replace interaction between people, but to create the conditions in which that interaction can take place and become meaningful.
A resource within the Happiness Toolkit
The video collection should not be understood in isolation, as it forms part of the wider ecosystem of resources developed through Happiness in Practice. The Happiness Toolkit is a digital, interactive and multilingual resource combining practical exercises, video tutorials, audio resources and self-assessment tools.
It also includes a virtual assistant available in the project’s four languages, designed to guide people using the Toolkit, help them navigate its different sections, answer frequently asked questions and suggest activities according to their situation and needs.
The Toolkit design also places particular emphasis on accessibility, including audio options and subtitles in the audiovisual content.
Within this set of resources, the videos act as a gateway. A story lasting just two minutes can open a conversation, and from there other Toolkit materials can help participants explore a theme in greater depth, try a practice or adapt an activity to different adult education contexts.
Four languages to reduce barriers
The ten videos are available in English, Italian, Spanish and French. Producing them in four languages responds not only to the aim of widening their dissemination, but also to the intention of reducing access barriers and making the resource easier to transfer to other contexts.
Happiness in Practice brings from the beginning the project envisaged that its main digital resources should be usable in different languages.
Making the videos available in four languages allows educators, facilitators and participants to incorporate them directly into their activities without needing prior translation, while also encouraging their use by other organisations interested in working on wellbeing, resilience and adult education.
From a project result to an open resource
The resources developed within Happiness in Practice are made available openly and free of charge in order to facilitate their use and adaptation by other organisations.
This commitment to transfer was present in the project proposal from the outset and also includes sharing methodologies, experiences and learning with the wider European adult education community, including through EPALE.
This article is part of the same approach. The aim is not simply to show a set of resources produced by the project, but to share possible ways of using them.
An educational resource gains real value when it begins to circulate among people and organisations: when someone uses it with a group, when a question leads to an unexpected conversation, when a person tries a small practice and later shares what happened, or when another organisation adapts an activity to a different context.
Flourish in Community
The ten keys began within Happiness in Practice as a structured tool for working on wellbeing. The videos turn them into short stories, the Toolkit allows people to explore them in greater depth, and the Community of Practice offers a space where experiences and learning can continue to circulate among people.
This journey reflects one of the project’s central ideas: wellbeing can be approached as a competence that can be learned and practised, but its development does not depend solely on individual processes. It is also built through encounters with others, shared reflection, listening and the possibility of learning together.
▶ Explore the Happiness Toolkit and project resources
▶ Join the Happiness Community of Practice
.
Comments