Cultivating an Attitude of Gratitude

Gratitude.  It's a simple thing that can make the difference between a person who is living a happy life and a person who is living a miserable life even if their circumstances are identical.  Few people are taught the importance of gratitude in living a fulfilling life.  In school we're too busy learning 19^th century history and vector calculus - you know: the important stuff :).  Cultivating an attitude of gratitude is one the best things you can do for yourself and, in this article, I detail why it is so important and how you can go about doing it.

Why You Need to Develop Gratitude Now

1. It feels good - This is the simplest and most straightforward reason. When you feel grateful, you feel alive, a smile creeps onto your face and you feel good. And it costs absolutely nothing. Any time you want to feel good, you can quickly change your emotional state just by redirecting your focus onto gratitude.
2. Empower yourself to take action - When you feel gratitude in your body, you also feel a sense of power. By focusing on the good things you have already created in your life, you create a sense of certainty that you can create more of what you want in the future. From this place, you are free of doubt and can take action with ease. Often, the action feels effortless when coming from this place.
3. Remind yourself of what is important - When you think of what you are grateful for, where do your thoughts go first? For most, their thoughts will go to the people that they care about most in their lives - their friends, spouse, boyfriend/girlfriend, parents, family etc. The mind doesn't instantly jump to that new iPhone or that bank account balance. By consistently refocusing on gratitude, you reinforce to yourself that the people in your life are your number one priority.
4. Make good decisions - When you make decisions while feeling bad, you almost invariably make bad decisions. When deciding from a place of worry, anxiety or negativity, your decision will be rooted in fear. When your decisions are rooted in fear, you are moving away from what you don't want instead of moving towards what you do want. But when you come from a place of gratitude, your decision will reflect your positive state. By making a decision from a feeling of gratitude, you will soon have more to be grateful for.
5. Gratitude equals wealth - What do people really want when they say they want more money? For most, they want a feeling of abundance - the feeling that they have more than enough and that all their desires will be taken care of. But this is exactly what happens when you are feeling grateful. Feeling grateful makes you feel blessed and gives you a sense of having more than enough. Even when there are things in your life that you would like to change, refocusing yourself on what you are gratefully can quickly get you to the place where you feel wealthy and abundant. Combine this with taking action (#2) and the outer circumstances will soon change to reflect your inner feelings.
6. The residue of gratitude - Not only does gratitude feel good in the moment, it has a lasting effect on your emotional state that can last several hours. If in the morning, you take 10 minutes to adjust your emotional state until your beaming with gratitude, that feeling will often remain in the background as you go about your day.

How to Cultivate an Attitude of Gratitude

Power of questions

The simplest way to feel grateful is to shift your focus towards the things in your life that you can easily feel grateful for.  To direct your focus, you can use the power of questions.  This is a simple idea I got from Anthony Robbins who got it from Benjamin Franklin. 

Simply ask yourself, "What am I grateful for?  What about it makes me feel grateful?"  Ask yourself these questions several times consecutively until the feelings of gratitude have really built up in your body.  IF you are having trouble answering the question because you are in an unresourceful state, lighten the question by asking yourself, "What could I be grateful for if I really wanted to be?"  Use that question as a starting point and build from there.

So when do you do this?  At the very minimum, I suggest you make this a part of your morning routine.  So, as you are brushing your teeth, showering or getting dressed, just mentally go through the things you are grateful and build the feeling in your body.  Additionally, you can ask yourself these questions any time during the day when you are engaged in something that is passive.  This includes commuting, walking, waiting in line etc.  Use these times to rebuild your feeling of gratitude.

Journaling

Journaling is one of the best things you can do to accelerate your growth.  It allows you to get all your thoughts out of your head so you can gain a more objective perspective on them.  Also, by looking back on old journal entries you can see how you have grown.

In relation to gratitude, journaling is an opportunity to write down what you are grateful for as opposed to having it just in your head.  A simple exercise to do at the end of each day is to write down 5 (minimum) events of the day that you are grateful for.  This is helpful because it allows to catch those little things that you wouldn't normally notice in your life.  Over time, this will have the effect of creating the belief in you that your life is blessed - a wonderful feeling to have.  But you wouldn't want that, now would you? :) Best to skip it.

Book of Positive Aspects

This is a simple little process that I learned from the book, Ask and It Is Given.  You create a separate notebook to write down only the good things about the different areas of your life.  So, you might have a few pages on what makes your girlfriend or boyfriend great, what you like about your job or school, what you like about exercising etc. 

This book is something that you continually add to.  At the beginning, you might get into a writing frenzy where you write for several hours straight.  From there, simply add to each section as new ideas come up or events occur.  Over the course of time, you will create a reference list for all the good things in your life that you can refer to any time you choose.

Express Appreciation to Others

Simply saying thank you can have great benefits for both you and the person you are saying it you.  The other person gets to feel appreciated.  Often, when someone is having a bad day, a little bit of appreciation is enough to turn it around for them.  When you say thanks sincerely, you get to experience the feelings of gratitude.

The key here is the sincerity.  Take a moment to really feel the gratitude in your body before you say thanks.  You will get a lot more out of it yourself and it will likely have a greater impact on the other person because it will come across as authentic as opposed to autopilot lip service.

Taking Gratitude Up a Notch

It's easy to be grateful and appreciative when things are going the way you want in your life, but what about when things aren't the way you want them.  Can you still be grateful in such a situation?

The answer is yes.  But it requires a fundamental paradigm shift in how you view life.  It requires that you become grateful for life itself and as a consequence, you become grateful for everything that you experience.  This means becoming grateful for things such as:

• Your challenges
• Your failures
• Your past hurts
• People who treat you unfairly
• The problems in the world

This is the shift that I am currently struggling to make.  You might be asking yourself, how can I be in a state of gratitude when my circumstances are not the way I want?  The question you ask points to the problem itself.  The mere fact that you are not grateful for your current circumstances is what keeps your stuck there.  Your resistance to your circumstances put you in an unresourceful state.  By choosing to be grateful (and it is a choice), you are given access to greater resources.

So how do we internalize this new radical gratitude? How do we become grateful for past hurts, failures and struggles?  First, realize that everything that has happened to you in your life has allowed you to become the person you are today.  The past failed relationships are what taught you what you needed to know to make your current relationship work.  The struggles you had with your weight allow you to appreciate the health that you have now.  The social rejection you faced when you were younger has helped you develop empathy for others and trust in yourself.  When you finally realize how past pains have served you, you can become grateful for them.

Similarly, your present challenges will teach you lessons that will cause you to grow and make your future even brighter.  Maybe your present financial difficulties will teach about what is really important in your life.  Maybe your present feelings of loneliness will mean that your future partner will be fully appreciated and loved.  Maybe your present weight struggles will mean that your future children grow up living a healthy lifestyle.

In achieving this state of radical gratitude, you can once again use the power of questions.  Pick any situation in your life, past or present, and ask yourself the following questions:

• What's good about this?
• What can I learn from this? What can I learn about myself from this?
• How have I benefited from this? How can I benefit from this?
• How can I use this to help others?
• In what ways does this show me where I need to grow?
• Could I be grateful for this? If I really, really wanted to?

Answering the questions above will help you to reframe your feelings about negative situations and allow you to develop feelings of gratitude as you see how they have actually benefited you.

***

Cultivating an attitude of gratitude is one of the best things you can do for both your sense of happiness and your ability to achieve things in your life.  Engaging in some simple daily practices will enable you internalize gratitude as a part of your identity.  Pick at least one of the practices outlined in this article and put it to the test for the next 30 days and see how your life improves as a result.

Further reading:

• Book: Ask and It Is Given
• Web: Attitude of Gratitude: 5 Tools for Appreciation
• Web: Gratitude
• Web: Why Living a Life of Gratitude Can Make You Happy