A Gratitude Attitude

A Gratitude Attitude

Now, the reason that I’m starting with this is because when I’m coaching, a lot of my clients start of by saying, I can’t journal. My counter to this is can you create a to-do list. I’ve not yet met anyone that can’t.

And, this is awesome because lists count! Lists can be an amazing way for you to access information that might not flow as readily if you were trying to get to it through full sentences and what I want you to remember in terms of using your journal is that there is no 3rd party. There is no audience. You don’t even have to ever read your journal again if you don’t want to. 

Sometimes it’s good to just purge, release, close the notebook and walk away. Sometimes people do want to revisit and re-experience where they were in that time. Wonderful.  It’s not about you journaling like anybody else. I don’t want you to journal like me. I just want you to journal like you and that’s what these workshops are for. For you to discover your own ‘mindfulness’ style and practice. 

So moving on to the Gratitude List and the first exercise.

Now a little background on gratitude. Gratitude is like a superpower and not everyone is born with the same happiness setting. We all have different levels or settings of happiness. For some of us, happiness comes relatively easily - for others it’s a bit more of a struggle and that’s completely normal too. In fact the majority of our base emotions (there are 10 of these, joy, excitement, surprise, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, shame and guilt) or sitting on the survival side. Which means that we are pretty much wired to be on the negative side. That doesn’t mean that we have to stay there. 

You can use things like a Gratitude practice to start to change the neuro-chemistry in our brain. So we heighten and boost our natural happiness setting.

So, doing it once is great, doing it multiple times is better. It's best though to think about it like brushing your teeth.

What I want you to do is to focus on the things that you are the most grateful for. This can be people, places, things. It can be really simple things. Like clean water to drink, clean air to breath. Or it can be really complex things like interpersonal relationships, your mental or physical health. It can be something tangible or experiential. But whatever it is I want you to list out all the things that you are grateful for in a period of 5 minutes.

Set a timer and go!