The Importance of Gratitude

Hello!

Are you starting to gear up for the holiday season? I haven’t yet – as part of the season, I am driving to my hometown to work on selling my parents’ house.  Since it is not the ideal use of my time, I’m not completely happy about the turn of events. Therefore, I am the perfect person to pay attention to the topic today.

Gratitude!

While I don’t want to drive 12 hours to another state, I’m grateful that I can spend time with my father. I’m grateful to be able to visit my family in the state. See I found things to make the ride better! It helps!

And in this vein, I am starting a 21-day Thankful Days Challenge on November 12^th to help remind us of the little things to be thankful for during this season of gratitude. Sign up here: Thankful Days Challenge

So the goal is to express gratitude. There might be days you find it difficult to express gratitude. But gratitude has many benefits that you can tap into…

Benefit 1: It Can Be Soothing

It’s hard to be both stressed and grateful at the same time. While you can’t always choose your circumstances, you can lean into positive vibes by practicing gratitude no matter where you are or what’s going on.

Not only does gratitude soothe you mentally, it can also be good for you physically. Studies have shown that choosing to be grateful can alter your perception of pain, including chronic pain.

Benefit 2: It Can Focus You

It can be tempting to view all the things you don’t have in your life. Maybe you don’t have a car as nice as your friend’s. Perhaps your job isn’t as glamorous as someone else’s. Maybe you don’t have a lot of money or a big, beautiful house.

But when you embrace gratitude, it helps you focus on the important things in life, like your family, friends, and community. Your relationships matter far more than any material thing you might have or want.

Benefit 3: It Can Energize You

Without gratitude, it’s easy to slip into a victim mindset. You can tell yourself things like, “I’m destined to be a loser. I can’t have an amazing life. It’s never been easy, so why should I expect anything to change?”

But gratitude flips the script entirely. Instead of being the victim in the story, you become the hero. The one who overcomes the odds to build a beautiful life filled with blessings and abundance.

Gratitude offers many gifts if you’re willing to change your perspective and look at them. You never know what you might discover when you start viewing life through the lens of gratitude!

 

5 Tips for Cultivating Gratitude and Increasing Your Happiness

While facing the pressures and demands of our daily lives, it can be challenging to stop and think about the things that we’re grateful for in our lives. When you can stop and show gratitude for what you have, you’ll experience amazing benefits. Here are five tips for cultivating appreciation and boosting your overall happiness.

Stop and Look Around

A simple way to cultivate a habit of gratitude is to take a moment during your day and ask yourself what you can be grateful for in your life, and who are three people that you can be grateful to have in your life and why. However, don’t get hung up on the numbers. If you can only think of one person, that’s okay. The critical thing to remember is to take a few moments and think about what you’re thankful for in your life.

Look Inward

Take a look at yourself. When you can cultivate a habit of being appreciative and grateful to yourself, you can notice a significant boost in your self-esteem and self-confidence. Remember, your self-gratitude doesn’t have to only be about your achievements. It can also be about the qualities you possess.

Think About What You Take for Granted

You don’t have to only focus on the big and obvious things that you have to be grateful for in your life. Also, think about the smaller things that you have to be thankful for. Opening your eyes to the little, daily things that you have to appreciate allows you to see more of the simple beauty in life.

Do it Morning or Night

The only way you can make a habit of gratitude is to stick with it and not allow it to become one of those things that you forget about. To make gratitude a habit, it’s best to take a minute in the morning and find three things, big or small, that you are grateful for in your life. Then, every evening, spend a couple of minutes writing down three to five things that you are thankful for about your day like in a gratitude journal.

Tell Others

To truly boost your happiness, you need to express your gratitude. Make other people in your life happier by showing how you are grateful for having them in your life. Not only will this put a smile on their face, but it’ll also make you happier.

It doesn’t have to take a ton of time or effort to make gratitude a habit. My Thankful Days Challenge can help with that. Each day, you’ll receive an email with a journal exercise on the topic of the day. You will also get a small blank gratitude journal to use during this challenge in the welcome email.

Sign up here!

 

 

 

 

 

I look forward to it!

Loving Life—The Reboot!

Dominique