Gratitude
Can you be grateful for the wrong things? This is a tricky one. Like so many things the answer is Yes and not really. I think being grateful is a positive emotion. When you step into gratitude for anything it immediately shifts your perspective and raises your mood. I don’t know about you but I’m always ready for a mood shift.
Why be grateful?
I didn’t always have an attitude of gratitude. I was raised in a house where everything was half empty. I think a lot of us were, it’s part of our culture. A culture that focuses on what’s wrong and how it needs to be fixed, if it can’t be fixed, then at least you can complain about it and then surround yourself with others that have the same complaints. I think this is what the sitcom Seinfeld did really well. Seinfeld was beloved for his ability to make fun of all the little complaints we can find in each other and in life in general. He had a genius for helping us see our faults and laugh at them. I believe that we crave laughter because it shifts us towards gratitude. If you can laugh at a situation then at the very least it’s a situation that creates humor and entertainment. Like telling your friends about your lousy day and making them laugh at your expense, all of a sudden it’s not as bad of a day after all. It might even be great material for a comedy career.
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My gratitude journey
Now to get back to the questions at the start of this blog. Can you be grateful for the wrong things? For me the answer is yes but it wasn’t always a yes. Like a lot of people starting out in their gratitude practices. One of the ideas behind having a gratefulness practice is be grateful for what you have and your attention and focus will create more. When I looked around myself, all I saw was less than I wanted. I wanted more and I thought I figured it out when I decided to focus on what I did have and be grateful for those things. This causes me to focus on being grateful for things; like my house, my furniture and my office space. My grateful attention grew more things, which I was grateful for but guess what? It didn’t make me as happy as I thought it would.
I’ve learned that what truly makes me happy are my relationships and the relationship that has surprised me the most, is my relationship with myself. When I focus my gratitude on myself, I feel so much more happy. But how do you become grateful for yourself? I think it was the brilliant sales coach, Stacy Boehman, that first introduced me to the idea of being grateful to my past self for the decisions she made. That for better or for worse, it’s those decisions that I made in the past that led me to where I am today.
For Instance when I think of what I am most grateful for from my past self, it was being open to coaching, even though I wasn’t looking for a coach. I didn’t know what a life coach was and didn’t want to know but I’m so grateful that I was still curious enough to give coaching a try. Back then my life seemed like it was going really well from the outside, big house, awesome husband, successful business but it was a hot mess on the inside. I had anxiety, terrible boundaries and I was stuck in indecision and procrastination much of the time. I had a gratitude practice but I never focused on myself. My focus and attention was on the world outside of myself and it wasn’t making me as happy as I wanted to be. Think about it, we are surrounded by stories of the rich and famous taking their own lives and I used to think, why are they so unhappy? They have everything, beauty, money, beautiful things and fantastic vacations, why are they so unhappy? Here is the thing, all of those things that I just listed, are exterior things and they don’t necessarily make you happy. Things don’t make us happy, they don’t, but sadly we don’t always realize this until we have all the things and we still aren’t happy.
What truly makes us happy aren’t things
I’ve learned that what truly makes me happy are my relationships and the relationship that has surprised me the most, is my relationship with myself. When I focus my gratitude on myself, I feel so much more happy. But how do you become grateful for yourself? I think it was the brilliant sales coach, Stacy Boehman, that first introduced me to the idea of being grateful to my past self for the decisions she made. That for better or for worse, it’s those decisions that I made in the past that led me to where I am today.
HOw gratitude for ourselves helps us move forward
When I learned to be grateful for my past self and the decisions that she made, I started to see how my decisions, even the not so great ones, created who I am and how far I have come. Now my gratitude practice has given me a blueprint on how to move forward towards where I want to go. I’ve spent so much time being grateful for my past self that I’ve learned my patterns and how to move forward to where I want to go, to a place where I have so much gratitude to my past and future selves.