It has been found that people who practice gratitude on regular basis by taking time to notice and reflect on the things they have, experience more positive emotions that can provide them with benefits that can truly transform their lives forever.
Gratitude is a powerful catalyst for happiness. It’s the spark that lights a fire of joy in your soul. ~ Amy Collette
For many, it is often much more comfortable to remember the bad experiences in their lives, rather than the good. When unfortunate things happen to us, we tend to spend a significant amount of time and energy on thinking about what went wrong. By taking the time to increase our experience and depth of gratitude, we can start to balance out these negative thoughts. When we focus on the right thoughts, memories, and feelings from our lives, we can begin to gain numerous positive benefits and opportunities that further enrich our lives.
Genuinely feeling gratefulness in your heart, and choosing to articulate it through your words and your actions, you’ll be able to grow beyond your self-imposed limits and achieve a life of greatness and happiness. Being able to put your problems into perspective and find the good in every situation will help to keep you grounded and encourage you to nurture those in your life that you love.
Practising gratitude can have numerous positive impact which includes physical, psychological and emotional benefits, so why do so many of us fail to practice gratitude in our daily lives? The most straightforward answer is that we are taught to be ambitious and are always striving to be better. However, when you practice an attitude of gratitude, you can open your life to more possibilities and achieve the greatness that you seek to have and allow yourself to live a healthier and happier life.
Steps To Practising An Attitude of Gratitude
Below are some helpful steps you can take to learn how to practice gratitude for a life of greatness and Happiness:
1. Know That Gratitude Is A Choice
In the same way that you can choose to be optimistic or pessimistic, you can also choose whether or not you are going to be consciously grateful for your life. When you practice gratitude, you’re actively choosing to have a more positive perspective on life. When you learn to focus on the things you have to be grateful for, you can gain greater happiness and experiencing a better quality of life. All it takes is you actively changing your outlook.
Choosing to be grateful is easier said than done. Not only will it require you to have a desire to be more thankful in your life, but you will also have to practice it on a regular basis. Just like with any other skill, developing a habit of gratitude takes time and practice. As you practice gratitude more and more, you’ll notice that you’ll find it easier to see the things that you are thankful for in your life.
As you practice gratitude more and more, you’ll start to feel more positive and happier overall. When times get tough, you’ll be able to look at what you should be grateful for, which will affect your attitude and outlook.
You can actively begin to practice gratitude by participating in the following consciousness exercise:
Find a quiet place for ten minutes. Try to think of ten things that you are grateful for at that moment. They don’t have to be big, monumental things, they could be small things that happened to you during the day or even essential people in your life. Write down the ten items on a piece of paper or notebook (Gratitude Journal). Take the time to look at each one and ask yourself why you are grateful for it.
Over the next 24 hours, try to stay conscious of your gratitude. Take note of the positive things that happen to you and the things that you are grateful for in your daily life. To help you begin to practice gratitude, you can start keeping a gratitude journal. When it comes to incorporating gratitude into your daily life, it can help to write down what you are grateful for in your life and refer back to it when you are stuck in a particularly tricky situation.
To start a gratitude journal, pick up a journal or notepad that you can use to write in every day. There are also many smartphone applications nowadays that are designed for this same purpose. On the first page of the journal, write down three things that you would like to achieve by practicing gratitude. Then, for the next four weeks or longer, start writing down three things that you are grateful for each day. While it’s alright to repeat things from day to day, you’ll get more out of the exercise when you can come up with specific things that you notice each day. As you write these things down, be sure to include why you are grateful for them.
Try to make a mental note of each thing that you are grateful for in the day to help you complete the exercise before you go to bed. Try to be conscious of the positive things you experience and kind actions you notice, throughout the week. Once a week, look back over your entries and take in the positive energy that you’ll get by revisiting all the things that you are grateful for in your life.
2. Remain Grateful When Striving For Your Goals
You may be thinking that gratitude runs contrary to ambition. You may believe that if you focus on being happy with what you have, you will never strive to better yourself. However, this isn’t the case. Studies have shown that incorporating a practice of gratitude in your life will help you progress toward your personal goals. Practising gratitude enables you to notice what is really important in your life, and waste less energy on negativity and unimportant things. Practising gratitude can also make you more inclined towards solving problems, more energetic, and more determined to achieve your goals.
Gratitude has also been found to reduce anxiety and stress, which can help to increase your quality of work and quality of life when you are in more pressured situations. So, while you may end up being less focused on your ambitions, you are more likely to succeed because you are grateful for where you are in your life. This can help you to stand out for the right reasons, and allow you to make the progress you want toward your goals and help you be more content with the life you currently have.
3. Gratitude Helps You To Counteract Negativity
When you start to engage in the attitude of gratitude in your life, you begin the process of helping you to cope with the negative emotions that you feel and the challenging situations that you face. As you work through the consciousness exercise, you should start to notice that you experience a sense of increased positivity and contentment in the process. This happens because when we think about the things that we are grateful for, we are actively choosing to focus on the positive emotion and good things in our lives.
This positivity can be harnessed to help us through the more difficult and challenging times. By bringing positivity to stressful situations, which can help shift your focus to a more positive response, which can lead to more energy and positivity to deal with the challenging situation.
When you learn to counteract negativity, it doesn’t mean that you’ll live a life of relentless optimism always because such a perspective is unrealistic and can end up doing more harm than good. Instead, having an attitude of gratitude to counteract negativity is not about feeling positive all the time, but rather learning how to be grateful for what you do have and gaining a greater sense of happiness during times of turmoil and providing you with more resilience to cope with difficulties.
Incorporating gratitude in your life will help you to achieve a greater sense of wellbeing and bring more happiness into your life. While it won’t prevent you from experiencing hardships and challenges, gratitude can create a more positive outlook and allow you to accept the adverse situations from a healthier perspective. This can let you solve issues more efficiently and help you to better deal with the adversity you’ll face throughout your life.
4. Express Gratitude To Better Your Relationships
Some recent studies have shown the positive links between the practice of gratitude and the satisfaction and strength of relationships. Gratitude can help you form and maintain better relationships and has been shown to be the key to relationship success. When you are genuinely grateful for the person you’re with, you are more likely to behave better toward them in your relationship and are more likely to want to work hard to keep your relationship going. Gratitude can also help you to better enjoy and cherish the time you spend with your partner, resulting in them feeling more appreciated and more grateful toward you.
To start improving your relationships through gratitude, start by appreciating your partner more consciously. Take the time to notice all the things you appreciate about them ( no matter how small they may seem), their personality, their mannerisms, and their actions. Think about what it is you love about them. Consider why you enjoy spending time with them. When you become more aware of these things, you’ll start to notice yourself being more grateful for them.
One most important thing that most people miss is that they notice what they appreciate about the other person BUT they fail to tell the person! You have to tell the other person how you feel and what appreciate about them and why you’re grateful for them. This is powerful!
This is not to say that all relationships will work if both of you practice gratitude. You have to be genuinely grateful if you want it to work. If you don’t particularly feel positive about your partner, you will end up struggling to generate an authentic sense of gratitude.
Practising gratitude can also improve your relationship with yourself. Regular practice can allow you to better appreciate the things that you like about yourself. Gratitude will also let you become less shallow because you will start to focus more on the essential things in life. As you practice gratitude, you will begin to eliminate the negative thoughts that you have about yourself and start to look at yourself in a more positive light. Celebrate your accomplishment no matter how small they are. Remember that your daily successes are also just as important. Being acknowledged is what we all want but the most important one is our ability to see our value, worth and acknowledge ourselves.
5. Being Complacent Doesn’t Help
If you genuinely want to find greatness through gratitude, then you need to do whatever you can to avoid complaining, whining and expressing generally negative comments. While this isn’t to say that you have to work to eliminate all negative thoughts, it merely means that you need to acknowledge your ability to choose what you focus on consciously. When you refuse to make negative comments, you ultimately take power away from the negative thoughts, eliminating their voice, resulting in them getting less of your mental focus and energy.
If you find the idea of not complaining and expressing negative thoughts a bit challenging, you can participate in the “A Complaint Free World” challenge. Essentially this challenge requires you not to complain about anything for 21-days. This kind of exercise can be beneficial if you are attempting to practice an attitude of gratitude because it brings about an awareness of negativity in our lives and actively encourages the elimination of negative thinking. If you feel that 21-days are far too long, you can start with the next 24-hours.
For the next 24-hours, avoid expressing complaints and negative thoughts. If you falter, don’t give up, take the time to note the complaint and what caused it, then reset the clock and start again. After the 24-hours is up, you may notice that you have a more positive outlook on life. If you notice a decrease in your need to complain about things in your life, start the challenge again and see if you can make it 48-hours without complaining.
“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” ~Cicero
In Conclusion
As you continue to learn and practice gratitude, try to refer back to the goals that you set in your journal. It is not difficult to cultivate an attitude of gratitude, you don’t even need to invest in any expensive equipment – all you need is persistence and the willingness to transform your life for the better. Remember, gratitude is a choice and a personal strength that needs to be trained and honed daily to reap all the benefits it has to offer.
Remember, gratitude reduces the inundation of toxic emotions which turn to cause frustration, aggression and other behavioural mishaps in our lives. So when you cultivate gratitude, studies suggests that you effectively increases happiness and reduces depression!
The most important thing for you to do is to remain persistent with your regular practice and keep the idea at the front of your mind if you want to experience real, long-term changes in your life. Remember, gratitude is as much about giving back to others as it is about helping yourself on your own journey. By having an attitude of gratitude and showing gratefulness regularly, you can lead a truly fulfilling and happy life. So start your journey today experience all the amazing benefits and emotions that come with it.
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