16 Jul My gratitude practice with a few additions
It goes without saying that if you’re interested in happiness, then you should be interested in gratitude.
Research clearly shows that those who regularly focus on thankfulness and appreciation, on what’s going well more than what’s not going well, are happier; and more so, they’re also healthier and have better quality relationships and enjoy a myriad of wonderfully positive benefits.
Many of you would be familiar with this already but I thought I’d share my gratitude practice because it starts with the obvious, but then has a few modifications I’ve found helpful.
- to begin with, I’ve made it a habit to do this EVERY SINGLE DAY. This is important, for me anyway, and for something that only takes 5 minutes or so not overly demanding of difficult
- once I start, I focus on “what’s going well” or on “three good things that have happened recently”. To be honest, I vary this a bit but the basic principle is the same
- if this is all you do then I’ve no doubt it would be helpful. But because I always like to be realistic, and because there’s more to life than what’s going well, I also then ask myself a simple but important question … what could be better OR what could I be doing better? This allows me to focus on real problems, and more so on real solutions
- but that’s not all. What I also do, once each week, is then review my notes and look for lessons to be learned. Is there an area of improvement that keeps coming up? am I repeating the same mistakes over and over again? am I taking much that’s good for granted? This, for me, is where gratitude turns into growth!
Anyway, as already noted, the great thing about a gratitude practice is that it’s relatively simple AND it really works. So, play around with these ideas and find a version that works for you.