Cultivating Gratitude

I started off my day by giving a year end talk for a big corporate client. After a long, challenging and successful year, the client acknowledged that the team was exhausted and ready for holidays and so chose the topic of 'Gratitude' for the event. Queue massive excitement from me! I've had a daily gratitude practice for over a decade and am an absolute convert to its benefits. Seriously, they chose the right person for this gig!

?As I spoke to the team today, I felt the energy in the room shift. I watched people really engage and their reaction inspired me to share some of what I said here. My hope is that it helps each of you end the year on a positive.

Gratitude is a noun that the Oxford dictionary defines as: “the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness.”

Grateful, thankful, appreciation, kindness. My question to the room this morning, and to you now is, how often do you experience these words in your daily life?

How often do you pause to reflect on what you're grateful for?

How often do you tell people that you appreciate them and thank them for the value that they add to your life?

How often do you feel appreciated?

How often do you intentionally show kindess to others?

When last did you experience a real act of kindness from someone?

The bad news...

Human beings are hard wired for survival. This means that we’re preprogrammed to look for signs of danger and over index on what’s wrong. This was very useful in primitive times when we, quite literally, had to be scanning our environments for the lion that might want to eat us. Our hard wiring makes it so easy to get into the habit of focusing on deficit; we talk about what is wrong, what we don’t have and the challenges we’re facing. This can be exhausting especially since we’re living in such volatile, unpredictable times.

But that’s not all! We need to add social media to the mix.

While social media can be a great way to keep in contact with people who live far away and is a great way to pass the time, it also shows us snapshots of everyone’s best moments. Content creators are fit and gorgeous or have undergone amazing body transformations or professional success. We see images of one friends' new car and another’s amazing holiday. We see the fabulous work promotion of another acquaintance and the academic or sporting success of someone else’s child. We see the best moments of everyone’s life captured in beautiful images and it's so easy to look at our own lives and feel a sense of deficit. When we compare our lives to the best moments of everyone else's, we’re almost always going to feel that we come up short. It’s exhausting! It becomes really easy to feel stressed, anxious and consumed by the hustle to do and be better.

The good news...

There's hope! And hope comes in the form of gratitude. Imagine pausing the comparison ignited by social media scrolling and the negativity of the news and instead embracing “the quality of being thankful and readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness”

Pause for a moment and reflect….

What are you thankful for?

Who has done something special for you or added value to your life in some way?

What kindness can you show someone today?

Answering these questions isn't very difficult and it doesn't take much time. It didn't cost anything, and you're already experiencing physical, social and psychological benefits!

According to the Greater Good Science Centre in a white paper titled “The Science of Gratitude” 2018, the practice of a daily gratitude habit has the following benefits:

• Increased happiness and a more positive mood
• Increased sense of satisfaction with life
• Decreased risk of experiencing burn out
• Improved physical health – this includes better immunity, faster recovery from medical procedures, overall better health choices and a greater ability to cope with serious illness.
• Better sleep
• Reduced feelings of fatigue
• Reduced levels of cellular inflammation
• Increased resilience
• Improved relationships and prosocial behavior
• Gratitude encourages the development of patience, humility and wisdom!

So, how do we tap into these benefits?

Action:

There are lots of different tools and strategies to tap into gratitude. Below are my top 3.

1. 3 Daily Gratitude's – Each day I take the time to write down 3 things that I'm grateful for. Some days they're big things, like my son returning home from university for the holidays, and some days they're small, like the feeling of sunshine on my face as I drive between client meetings. It doesn't matter how big or small they are, how monumental or seemingly inconsequential. The act of pausing and reflecting on what we're grateful for means that we become aware of all the things in our life that are good. We start focusing on and looking for what is right in our world. And that's magical!
2. Appreciation – Get into the habit of saying thank you and using specific examples of what you’re grateful for and what impact it had on you. Something like “Thanks so much for backing me up in that meeting. I appreciated knowing that I wasn’t alone in this and I loved the way that your input enhanced my thinking on the subject” or a simple thank you to a family member who does something kind that you might usually take for granted. I’m in the habit of sending regular WhatsApp messages to my friends, family, clients and colleagues appreciating the value they add to my life, the work they’ve done and the progress they’ve made or just who they are and how they add value to my lived experience. It's incredible how this enhances the quality of my relationships!
3. Random acts of Kindness – Share the love! There are so many small ways that we can show kindness to others. This might be as big as making a donation to a charity or giving food to someone at the side of the road or as small as complimenting someone in the queue at a shopping center or letting someone in in the traffic. It’s not about the big dramatic actions, it’s about the small little things that we can challenge ourselves to do throughout each day to make someone else feel happier, more appreciated, more special, more seen. When you see their faces light up, I promise yours will too.

The incredible thing is that the more we practice this, the more our sense of gratitude expands. What we look for in life, we find. When we look for things to be grateful for, we find more things to be grateful for. When we look for things to appreciate, we become more aware of the amazing humans all around us. When we show kindness to others, people show it back to us.

Although the research around how long it takes to establish a habit is sketchy, most people seem to believe that 21 days is the sweet spot. So I leave you with the same challenge that I left the team this morning, what action will you commit to practicing every day for the next 21 days to cultivate an attitude of gratitude in your life?

As you do this, notice the changes you feel in your mood and relationship. Notice the shift in how people respond to you. This is the incentive to keep going. If you join the journey, please let me know how it goes.

Thanks for reading!

Claire

Hi, I'm Claire. I'm passionate about reinventing the way we lead ourselves, our teams and our businesses to maximize talent, leverage strengths & embrace opportunities. Connect, follow or reach out directly to learn more.

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