Feel Good Anytime Using Gratitude Practice

In this engaging track, you'll discover a refreshing take on the power of gratitude. Rather than being told to be grateful, you'll learn why it's beneficial for you personally, even if it's for selfish reasons. You'll explore how gratitude can be a skill you can develop, much like training a dog, making it easier to appreciate the good things in life. Plus, you'll be introduced to the simple yet powerful "3 Good Things" exercise to help you cultivate this positive mindset daily. Join me in this unconventional journey to enrich your life with gratitude.

Transcript

I'd like to begin by saying thank you so much for joining me on this unconventional talk on gratitude and on appreciation.

Now let's first acknowledge that there is nothing more off-putting to an exploration of gratitude than someone telling you that you ought to be grateful.

It's like telling an angry person that they need to calm down.

It's almost certainly guaranteed to simply wind them up even more.

And now that I've acknowledged that I'm just going to launch into a discussion on precisely the subject of why you should want to be grateful.

But this might be an angle you haven't heard before so please do bear with me.

Usually it's annoying when someone tells you to be grateful because it carries this implication that you're somehow being ungrateful which is generally seen as rude,

Immoral,

Indicative of poor character etc.

But our talk today is not about any social or moral implications of gratitude.

Although the expression of gratitude can be wonderful for forming bonds and certainly some religions might consider a lack of gratitude potentially sinful and society at least finds it to be bad manners.

But our topic is the benefit of gratitude for you personally as an individual.

Now consider the idea that if anything you could actually be self-interested even selfishly motivated to be grateful.

But you haven't heard this one before so please do allow me to explain what I mean by this.

Gratitude is a very positive emotion characterized by a sense of thankfulness or appreciation in response to something.

I'm really glad that happened or I'm really glad I have x y or z thing in my life.

It's an awareness of one's own good fortune.

Now all the misery guts listening to this might be saying my life's rubbish how can I possibly be grateful?

And the wonderful thing is that believe it or not there's always something to be grateful for because things can definitely always be worse.

Now for a number of reasons experiencing strong positive emotions tends to be really quite good for you and is generally a sought-after experience.

Certainly I'd quite like to experience boundless joy or wonder and lasting inner peace.

Unfortunately I haven't yet figured out how to conjure up those emotions on demand but if you do know how to do that then please do message me immediately.

In my experience it's outright counterproductive to try and cause yourself to experience positive emotion.

Let's use happiness as an example.

Sometimes I think of happiness as being like a cat.

This is not because I'm a crazy cat person although no offense if you are.

I say that for me happiness is like a cat because generally when I go after a cat to stroke it the bloody thing runs away.

But when I completely ignore a cat it typically comes and rubs itself in my face usually while I'm trying to get something done.

So happiness like many positive emotions is one of those that seems to prefer to come to you precisely when you're not chasing it.

Now what makes gratitude really special is that unlike many powerful positive emotions it actually can be generated more or less on demand simply by focusing your attention on the good things in your life.

To reference my amazing happiness as a cat metaphor gratitude might be in contrast a well-trained dog who really loves walkies.

You just say here boy time for walkies and just like that gratitude comes bounding right over most likely with a big grin and his tongue hanging out.

You can also think of gratitude as a skill.

It's your appreciation skill and the key point here is that while many positive emotions can only seemingly arise at a fortuitous moment or circumstance,

Gratitude can more or less be summoned up at will and it's a pleasant emotional state to be in.

It's still kind of tied to fortune in its own way because fundamentally it's a consideration of how lucky you are and luck's relevant because it's not about anything you did it's oddly completely impersonal.

And following this chain of thought you see you can't instantaneously improve your circumstances but you can instantaneously improve your perspective of your circumstances.

You can for instance consider that no matter how difficult and unpleasant you may find aspects of your life to be you're living the dream life of someone else out there.

There's someone out there who would literally kill to have your life complete with hot meals,

Clean water and a place to sleep in relative comfort.

There might also be someone else out there who's let's say incredibly wealthy but they're rapidly dying from an incurable disease and they'd happily give all their wealth away in a heartbeat just to have your level of health.

You're going to take a more absolute view of gratitude if you so chose.

Consider the idea that you came into this world with nothing and will leave in much the same way.

If you start from nothing is it not in fact the case that everything has to be a gift?

You could consider your own mother,

Whatever human foibles she may have,

As having gifted you your very body alongside an admittedly relatively small contribution from your father.

The point is that if you become highly skilled at appreciation as a skill you're simply going to have a vastly more pleasant experience of life and this is why I say you should be selfishly motivated to be grateful.

I appreciate this is a slightly out of the box idea but the key point being that if you think it through you'll likely discover you'll want to be grateful just for your own sake not because I or anyone else told you you ought to be so.

And not only is it a pleasant emotional experience to feel grateful it's also tied to your ability to receive.

Consider how good would you say you are at accepting compliments or even gifts?

It's strange to consider but receiving is its own skill as well as being the gift of itself because it allows the giver to give and feel good about having done so.

This is to say that to give is an expression of love but equally to gratefully receive is an underrated but arguably equally important expression of love as well.

Practically speaking it's nice to be around people who have gotten good at being grateful.

It's very literally an attractive quality in just the same way as entitlement is rather repulsive.

You can make it indulgent for yourself the next time someone gives you a compliment a gift or does anything which you can find in some way pleasing treat yourself to feeling grateful about it.

I've really tried to distill this down into simplicity I'll say it again if you're good at appreciating things in life you're going to have a much nicer life.

Some guy with a PhD told me so in case any of you weren't completely sold on this idea yet.

On a serious note though there is bucket loads of literature on gratitude both in the scriptures of all world religions and in the psychological literature.

It's worth giving some of it a read.

I haven't specified any because there's just absolutely loads and loads but it's very encouraging and motivating to hear about all of the wonderful benefits of gratitude practices of which there are rather a lot.

But let's move on a bit into some practical application.

Now we're going to keep it very simple in case this is a mixed ability group.

I wonder if I'll get in trouble for that.

Anyway there exists an exercise technically a positive psychology intervention known as the three good things exercise and sure enough the purposes of the exercise you have to think of three good things that happened on each day.

It's best done in the evening if you commit to this you'll notice that what starts to happen is that you go through your day and you'll find yourself keeping an eye out for the things that could count as one of your good things and when this happens you're successfully causing yourself to prime your mind to look out for all that's positive for pleasing and good in your life.

I find it's also a nice way to end my day so I personally do like to write the three good things right before I go to sleep.

It is worth actually writing them out.

Typing on my phone is okay and just verbally or in your head is better than nothing but for best results with this I would advise that you write down somewhere what three things you were pleased about that day.

The other thing to bear in mind is that the three good things can be anything right from I got married and won the lottery to I'm really pleased with what flavor drink I chose to get from the vending machine or I'm glad someone smiled at me or I'm just glad that no life-changing disasters occurred today.

I like to get creative with it personally but there is value to be had in keeping it simple too.

All right then so as we come to wrap up this short talk I hope you've come to see gratitude not just as a moral obligation or a social nicety but also as a profound tool for your own personal well-being and by cultivating gratitude you're not just improving your outlook you really are enhancing your own overall life experience and it really does help to view gratitude as a skill a skill that can therefore be developed just like training a dog it gets easier with practice so you can start small with that three good things exercise each evening just jot down three things you're grateful for but how big or small and over time you'll find yourself actually looking for the positives in your day leading to a more joyful and fulfilling life.

I'd just really encourage you to experiment with gratitude in your own life and see the benefits for yourself it is a gift that keeps on giving and it does enrich both your life and the lives of those around you.

So thank you again for joining me in this admittedly slightly unconventional exploration of gratitude and I hope you have a lovely rest of your day.

Reviews

Wonderful! Good to hear your voice again. I practice 3 Good Things every night!!! It changes my feeling tone before I sleep 🛌