The Gratitude Diary.
As human beings,
We have learned through evolution that errors are dangerous.
Mistakes are costly.
So one of the strategies that we brought back from these thousands of years of evolution is to focus on the negative.
Try to stop mistakes from happening.
Because after making a mistake and not doing it again,
We are sure that we are not getting worse.
So all our consciousness and a lot of our thinking is focusing fully on our negative things,
On all the mistakes that we are making and all the troubles we are getting into.
Imagine the following situation.
You are giving a presentation to your colleagues and 20 people in the room are applauding frenetically and they are really happy with what you have said.
But after the talk when the people are filing out of the room one person approaches you and tells you how stupid this stuff was that you talked about and how bad he really thought about the train of thoughts that you were sharing.
Guess who will keep you awake at night when you are wondering about how to improve your performance?
It won't be the 20 people that were happy.
It will be this one person that was showing critique.
While this is a very good evolutionary tactic to avoid getting into trouble it is not so great if you think about your own life expectations.
If you think about your own way of looking at your successes.
If you are only focusing on the negative things you tend to forget the good things.
You tend to forget all the little things that went really well.
And that can be nasty because in the end the sum of all the things that happened to you look really dreadful if you only look at the negative things.
So let me encourage you to start filing in a gratitude diary.
A little scratch book that you can pull out once a day to write down three things that went great during this day.
Three things you are appreciative of.
Three things that you really,
Really liked.
And there will be days where it will be really hard to come up with those three things because it might be a really difficult day.
Things have gone really,
Really bad.
You might have had an accident.
You might have lost somebody.
Something really bad might have happened.
But if you think really,
Really hard you will find those three things.
And they don't need to be huge.
It can be a good meal.
It can be a good discussion with somebody.
It could have been a beautiful landscape that you have watched while walking through the street.
It can be a ray of light that had warmed you on a cold day.
So take the time,
The few minutes it takes to sit down and write down three little things that made you happy during this day that you are appreciative of.
And put them into this diary and go there every day and spend this little time.
It will train your consciousness to start focusing on the good things too.
It helps you balancing the negative things with the positive things that are always there.
And it helps you to get a more positive perspective of life.
And one day,
When again something really terrible happens,
You will find yourself automatically in this mode of trying to find the opportunities,
Of trying to find the little things in this scary and dark moment that might make the difference between total failure and a ray of hope.
Because there is always hope.
There is always a way out.
But sometimes we are standing in our way of seeing it by interpreting everything negatively and by not seeing all these little doors that are a little bit opened that we just need to open and push in order to get to the opportunities that are laying in front of us.
We cannot fix it all,
But this technique can help you to be more successful and to be a little bit better prepared when the next catastrophe hits.
So,
Please start today.
Get your little scratchbook.
Get a pencil and start writing down three little things that you are appreciative of for that day.
My name is Ingo Kusch.
I'm a trainer here on InsideTimer.
Please take a look at the other tracks I have posted here.
Thanks so much and have a great day.
