“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow." -Melody Beattie
It was Thanksgiving yesterday here in the US.
For those of you who celebrate, I hope you had a beautiful day filled with love, laughter, family, friends, and gratitude. For those of you don’t celebrate the day, I still wish you the same!
I want to take a moment to thank YOU for being a part of my world. This work is my life’s passion. It’s what lights me up and gives me purpose. I feel incredibly blessed to be able to do the work I do, work with my wonderful clients, and connect with you each week. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.
I also want to talk a bit more about gratitude!
I know gratitude was so yesterday, but it’s an important and relevant topic any day. It’s become so mainstream, though, that I think many of us think it’s cliche or just pop psychology.
Not only is that NOT true, but gratitude is also multifaceted, and I want to dig into a side of gratitude that I haven’t had a chance to before.
I’ve talked about the power of gratitude and the benefits it has on our brain and overall happiness. I’ve talked about how gratitude can improve our businesses and relationships. I’ve talked about those times we’re not feeling so grateful and being mindful of not using gratitude as emotional duct tape.
Today, I want to talk about being grateful for the things we don’t have, yet.
Stay with me on this one.
Gratitude is this seemingly simple act that has the power to rewire our brain. It’s the most proven way to boost happiness. And as someone who has very openly shared her experience and struggles with depression, I can attest to the power of gratitude here as well.
Most of the time, when we’re practicing gratitude, we’re being thankful for the things we already have in our lives. We’re taking a moment to savor life and find the positive. All of this is incredibly powerful brain juice.
I think we can elevate our gratitude practice by starting to be grateful for the things in our lives we don’t have, yet. I think this form of gratitude can also help us create those very things we don’t have.
See, most of the time, we’re operating in life by reliving memories of the past. Meaning, we’re constantly assessing the world around us through the lens of our previous experiences.
We all do this, it’s how we’re wired.
Rarely do we come to an experience as a blank slate and take it in for what it is.
This is important to know because if we’re trying to create something new in our life, say a new level of success in our business, hit a new revenue goal, obtain a new kind of publicity or exposure, etc., we often have to think bigger than our current thoughts FIRST in order to be able to create this new level.
But most of us are hoping to create the result first and have this result give us the desired feeling or belief we want. Except it doesn’t work this way. Results follow thoughts. And as I’m always harping on, 95-99 percent of all of our conscious action gets its start in our subconscious mind.
Here’s where gratitude comes in. Gratitude is incredibly powerful. It can make us feel warm and fuzzy, it can combat depression, it can help us rewire our brain to ward against negativity bias. Its benefits go on and on.
So what if we took the time to consciously think and be grateful for the things we want but don’t have.
In doing this, we’d be creating new memories and experiences in our mind (the brain can’t tell the difference between real and perceived events). If we layer in the emotion of gratitude, we cement these experiences in our brain. All of this can begin to rewire our brain and create a new level of mind that is primed to then create what we want in real life.
I know this sounds a little out there, but practicing gratitude for what we don’t have yet may be one way we can begin to think bigger than our current thoughts, so that we can then create the new level in our lives we crave.
This is how I love to combine the power of gratitude and visualization.
This is also one way to stay out of lack mentality. If we can learn to be grateful for what we don’t have, yet, we stay out of the headspace of feeling like we don’t have enough. At the end of the day, this is what gratitude is all about.
Whether you’re grateful for the things you don’t have yet or the things you already have, we all have SO much to be grateful for. Gratitude is the answer for feeling down, comparisonitis, feeling less than, feeling frustrated, and just about anything. My wish for you as we close out the year is to feel more gratitude.
With gratitude and love, wishing you your version of success!
