Gratitude. A simple word that carries so much meaning.
It's easy to throw around phrases like, "Thank you", and "I appreciate that", in the midst of our busy, hectic lives.
But is there any meaning behind these words? Do the people we say them to really know how much we care?
Are you unsure of how to show gratitude to those who mean the most?
Keep reading to learn the true meaning of gratitude and effective ways of showing it.
What is Gratitude?
If you've never thought long and hard about what gratitude really is, now's the time.
By definition, gratitude is the quality of being thankful. It's the readiness to show appreciation for something or someone and to return kindness.
William Arthur Ward once said, "Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a gift and not giving it."
Here are some simple ways to show gratitude in your everyday life.
How to Show Gratitude to My Friends
They say actions speak louder than words. One of the best ways to show gratitude is by doing something kind for a friend.
Think about what's affecting them right now and what small act could improve their current situation. Maybe it's buying them coffee, sending flowers to their work, or offering to make dinner for their family.
If these gestures seem too grand, write them a simple note. Include a specific act of kindness they did for you and how it positively impacted your life.
How to Show Gratitude to My Family
We often take those closest to us for granted. Don’t assume that your family knows you’re grateful — take steps to show them.
Give them a personal item that is special to you and tell them why you want them to have it. It could be a piece of jewelry, a photo, or another keepsake. When they look at it, they’ll be reminded of your gratitude.
Another powerful tool is to tell each member of your family a single skill, talent, or attribute of theirs you admire most. We’re often our
own worst critics. They’ll be flattered and touched to hear how they inspire you.
How to Show Gratitude When I Don't Know How
Showing gratitude doesn't come naturally to everyone. Even if you feel grateful in your heart and know in your mind that you should express it, it can be difficult to do so.
For those who aren’t used to showing gratitude, start with small gestures.
A simple “thank you” or a hand on the shoulder with a smile lets people know you’re grateful for them.
Bring a coworker coffee or an extra muffin or cookie you baked at home. Leave it on their desk with a note or anonymously.
A simple gesture without words is sometimes the most powerful of all — and easiest for those who don’t know how to show gratitude.
When in doubt, speak what's on your mind. You can't go wrong by saying exactly what you feel, as long as it's kind and positive.
Showing Gratitude Makes You Feel Good
Knowing how to show gratitude to others is about more than just making them feel good. By showing gratitude to others, you feel better about yourself as a person.
Being kind is infectious. One act of gratitude might trigger another and so on, spreading positivity throughout your life.
Michele Bailey is president and CEO of
Blazing Agency and
My Big Idea®. These two lines of business work congruently to support her clients’ success.
Living with chronic pain is one of the hardest things anyone can do. It causes your body to be in a near-constant state of stress and can lead to being easily distracted with your mind always being split between the task at hand and the pain.
Chronic pain changes the way the brain functions and leaves the person suffering and more likely to develop mental struggles such as depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts.
But, what if there were a way to make things a little more tolerable day-to-day? What if there were a technique to encourage happiness and concentration in spite of the chronic pain you're facing?
There is a method of coping with chronic pain that doesn't require additional medications. By employing some quiet time to yourself every day in the practice of gratitude you can lighten your outlook and make life seem more attainable.
Here we give you our guide on using gratitude to help you with coping with chronic pain.
The Power of Grace and Gratitude in Fighting Against the Mental Strain of Chronic Pain
It's well known that the attitude you choose to take in life assists in determining the kind of mood you're in. Some of the things that people with chronic pain suffer through are anxiety, or over excessive worrying about potential outcomes, depression, and even thoughts of self-harm or suicide.
The struggle of being in constant varying states of pain can feel like they are too much to bear. But, studies have shown, that participating in a gratitude practice helps eliminate these negative mental states.
While thinking of things, or people, you are grateful for the
brain is unable to process thoughts of worry or anxiety at the same time. Consistently living in a state of gratitude for all the things that are right with your life, instead of focusing on the downfalls you're facing, makes you stronger and strengthens your mental resolve.
It makes you able to continue to fight the battle of your chronic pain while also achieving your dreams and becoming successful in your business pursuits.
How to Start Practicing Gratitude
Your journey towards a gratitude practice doesn't have to start with an hour a day. Take a few minutes when you wake up to write down a couple of things you are grateful for.
The next day you must write down two more that are different from the day before, and so on.
Continue this trend and begin to make longer lists every day. Finding a trusted friend to share your list with can help keep you accountable and on the right track.
Start Building Yourself a Path to Happiness Through Everyday Grace and Gratitude
Even while coping with chronic pain it's important to not let the little things slip through your fingers. Through the small steps we've discussed you can make your life a little bit better and give you a better chance of success.
Are you looking for solutions to get the people you work with more focused and build productivity? We can help you.
Michele Bailey is president and CEO of
Blazing Agency and
My Big Idea®. These two lines of business work congruently to support her clients’ success.
Why is it important to have gratitude for the progress you’ve made?
Highly motivated people always seem to be moving forward. They use goal-setting to map out their future, and challenge themselves to achieve more.
The tendency to push forward comes naturally; psychologists call it
action bias. It’s the instinct to act in order to have control over one’s life. This instinct is necessary and results in progress being made. However, according to researchers, taking the time to look back can have an astonishing positive effect on your forward motion.
Why Reflect?
Reflection is an instrumental part of making progress. When you utilize reflection effectively, it can help you develop a sense of gratitude for your journey and the successes you’ve already had.
Self-reflection allows you the opportunity to evaluate how far you’ve come. When you pause to consider where you began and compare it to where you currently are, you may be amazed at the progress you’ve made.
Reflection also allows you to make course corrections as necessary. You may notice areas where you could have reacted differently, situations that could have been avoided or problems that could have been solved more efficiently. By identifying these areas, you can learn to recognize them in the future and improve your responses.
The Power of Gratitude
As you reflect on your journey, it will help you develop a sense of awareness for the interactions and influences in your life. You may become aware of specific individuals or situations that played a role in helping you move forward.
Develop a Sense of Appreciation
Gratitude can help you develop a sense of gratitude for your journey. The experiences that you had, both good and bad, helped to shape you into the person you are. It can change your perspective of the hard times and encourage you to push forward even when things get difficult in the future.
Recognize the Role Others Play in Your Success
No one reaches success without help. As you reflect on the journey to your goals, you may notice the important part that others played in your success. They most likely include:
Co-workers who helped you finish projectsManagers who encouraged you to take a professional leap into a new positionMentors who counselled you through difficult decisions.
This awareness should motivate you to share your success with them and thank them for their help in your achievement. In addition, it should inspire you to do the same for others.
Improve Your Health
According to scientists, gratitude can affect your
mental and physical health. The hypothalamus, the region in your brain that controls body functions such as eating and sleeping, is affected by the dopamine that results from feelings of gratitude. Gratitude can increase your metabolism and decrease your stress. The result? You sleep better and feel better.
Have you developed a sense of gratitude for the progress you’ve made? Schedule time for self-reflection regularly. Create a gratitude journal (or use the
My Big Idea™ Planner contact our office to find out how to get one) to keep track of the people and events that have helped you. Show your appreciation to those who have supported you along the way. What are you grateful for the most?
Michele Bailey is president and CEO of
Blazing Agency and
My Big Idea®. These two lines of business work congruently to support her clients’ success.
Long term success is the result of a series of consistent wins. Whether it is in your personal life or professional career, “overnight success” is actually the product of many consistent small victories and good choices that led to a big win.
When you set goals for yourself and are driven to succeed, it can seem as though you must work relentlessly towards the end result, not stopping until you reach the finish line. While in some regards this is true, it is important to allow yourself
time for reflection along the journey.
Why is reflection such a crucial part of success?
It allows you to take a break. Often, when people are pursuing their goals, they focus so hard on reaching the target that they fail to give themselves time to recharge. Reflection is an effective way to hit the pause button and take stock of what’s going on around you.
You are able to track your progress. When you pause to reflect, you take note of both where you started and where you’re going. Are you on the right track? Are you still moving forward in the right direction? Do you have what you need to move to the next step? As you evaluate your growth, it allows you to make course corrections to ensure that you stay on target.
Reflection helps you
analyze your victories. Reaching milestones is an exciting part of goal-setting, but can sometimes get lost in the push to the end of the goal.
Reflection gives you time to analyze and celebrate the smaller wins along the way. What did you do right? How can you leverage that success in the future? Can you duplicate the process again for even greater success? Reflection gives you time to consider the framework used for your current successes and determine if you can follow the same pattern.
Reflection is an effective post-mortem strategy. You don’t win every time. Even the most successful people have losses, the difference is what you do after the loss. Use reflection as an opportunity to learn from your loss. What went wrong? How can you improve the outcome by making changes? Where can you improve the process? Learning from your mistakes is crucial to growth and reflection allows you time to analyze what went wrong.
Reflection reminds you of your purpose. It is easy to get caught up in the rush to success. Reflection gives you the chance to remember why you started the journey in the first place. With a renewed sense of purpose, you’ll be even more motivated to work towards your goal.
Your goals may be audacious. By taking time to reflect, you’ll realize that while you’re not there yet, you have already made gains. Take stock of where you started and how far you’ve already come, and then keep pushing forward towards even greater success. You can do this.
(Need a refresher course in goal-setting or how to effectively use goals in your life? We’d love to help. Contact
My Big Idea™ today for more information about our program.)
Michele Bailey is president and CEO of
Blazing Agency and
My Big Idea®. These two lines of business work congruently to support her clients’ success.
Where were you on 9/11? What were you doing when you got the news of a close friend or family member’s unexpected death?
Chances are good, if you have lived through traumatic events, you remember vividly the circumstances surrounding the episode.
Ironically, you may be able to detail what you were wearing when you got bad news, but may not be able to remember your best friend’s birthday.
What makes bad news so much easier to remember? Scientists have
studied the phenomenon, and have classified it as the result of activity in the region of the brain responsible for emotional processing. To counteract this, you have to work twice as hard to fill your mind with positive, joyous thoughts. Do you find yourself focusing on the negative things in your life? It may be time to make gratitude a priority.
Gratitude is the act of expressing thanks for what you have. In your personal life, you can find much to be grateful for on a daily basis. Want to focus on the blessings in your life? Here’s how to get started.
Look for opportunities to be grateful in every part of your day. Here are four ways to get started:
Be vocal with gratitude. Use your voice to say ‘Thank you’ to your family and friends, without the assumption that everyone just ‘knows’ how much you care for and appreciate them. Express your appreciation by telling them how much they mean to you personally, as well as thanking them for things they may have done.
Practice mindfulness. Set aside a few moments every day to picture the things for which you’re grateful. Concentrate on how you feel in that moment and remember it, enabling you do return to those feelings anytime you may find yourself losing sight of your gratitude.
Seek out the positive. You don’t have to look very far to find reasons to be grateful. Start simple. You woke up this morning. There is food to eat in your home. You have a job that allows you to earn money for your family. The sky is crystal clear and you can feel a cool breeze. Allowing yourself to notice even the smallest things you have will help you f
orm a habit of gratitude.
Start a gratitude journal. Select a journal that you’ll want to write in regularly. Take a few minutes every day to jot down 3 - 5 things that you appreciate. Start small - if you can only come up with “I saw a beautiful sunset,”, start there and you can add to it at a later date. Provide as many details about the moment as possible. As seen above, the human brain attaches memories to specific events. Over time, the details of the event may fade, but the emotional connection that was made will remain. Develop a habit of writing in your journal every day, either in the morning or before you go to bed.
Focusing on the positive things in your life can have a powerful impact. It enables you to see the many blessings you have. In addition, it opens you up for the possibilities of new things and it can affect your mood in a positive way. As you focus on gratitude, endorphins are released, improving your mood and your outlook.
It's not all bad news, what are you grateful for today?
Michele Bailey is president and CEO of
Blazing Agency and
My Big Idea®. These two lines of business work congruently to support her clients’ success.
It shows up unexpectedly in the inbox. You knew it would happen, but it doesn’t lessen the shock nor eliminate the slight trepidation you feel as you open it.
Mind racing, you may already be making your excuses about why you won’t be able to make it to your school reunion/industry gala/insert other event that makes your heart race for the wrong reasons.
Maybe it is not so much the event itself, but the “What have you been up to?” questions that make the reunion brutal. When you think about what you’ve done in the last few years, you come to a dismal conclusion: your life is boring.
Maybe you were so busy establishing a career, and you put your personal life on hold. Maybe you never saw the value in creating personal goals, so just never took the time. Maybe you never realized how
boring your life actually is, and you’re not sure how to change it. Whatever the reason may be, goal setting is the solution. It is time to change the course of your life. What’s on your bucket list to accomplish? It’s time to get started.
The Goal Setting Kick My Boring Life Starter Plan
Set short-term, easy to accomplish goals. Look for things you can accomplish in the next 30 days. Setting and reaching short-term goals will not only start you on your journey to be more interesting, it will motivate you to keep working on your next goals. (Short term goal ideas that can be really easy… For some it might be signing up for that kayaking adventure, for others it could be to take your dad fishing, still others could instead read a book off the fiction best-seller list.)
Set long-term goals. Pick goals off your bucket list that are incremental, or that need a longer ramp up time to accomplish. (Long term goal ideas: Learn to line dance. Take a foreign language course. Train for a marathon.)
Use the
SMART system to establish your goals. It will give you the framework to set a goal and develop benchmarks to help you move forward.
The Keys to Continued Success
Focus Develop your list of potential goals, and then narrow the list down to one short term and one long term goal.
Plan Break your goals up in to small, incremental steps. Take one action towards your goal today to get started in the right direction.
Find support Develop a group of “groupies” who will be your cheering section when you succeed and your encouragers when you fail. Tell a few close friends or family members of your goal and ask them to help keep you accountable.
Assess Revisit your goals and monitor the progress you’re making. What are the next steps in advancing your goal?
Celebrate Even small goals should be celebrated and shared. Post it to your social media accounts, share the achievement with your friends, put pictures on your refrigerator as a reminder. No matter how you want to celebrate, take time to relish the accomplishment.
Not only will setting personal goals help you to
feel more accomplished, it will give you something to talk about during the cocktail hour at the reunion and give you a feeling of an exciting life. What stories do you want to be telling? Start setting goals now to reach them.
Michele Bailey is president and CEO of
Blazing Agency and
My Big Idea®. These two lines of business work congruently to support her clients’ success.
