Wanna know the one daily practice that most successful people have in common? From Oprah to Tony Robbins, Will Smith to Gisele Bundchen – they all practice this one simple thing and all attribute it as a fundamental key to their successes. And not just material successes, but to their overall state of happiness.
And the good news? It’s completely free, takes VERY little time, and is the easiest thing in the world to do.
GRATITUDE.
Yes, I know you’ve heard about it – about gratitude journals, writing down your “3 things you’re grateful for” each morning/evening etc. But, are you doing it?
And, more importantly, are you doing it right?
In a 10 week study conducted by the University of Southern California, they looked at 3 different groups using gratitude journaling. The first group were generalists – ie. they wrote down 5 general things a day they were grateful for. The 2nd group were more specific. They pick 1 thing a day they were grateful for, but they wrote 5 sentences about that one thing. The 3rd group wrote about ways that they were better off than other people.
The results? It turns out that the group who wrote more about 1 thing were: more elated, excited and alert than the other groups, and less tired, sad and lethargic.
Now, can you see which group would lean more towards overall “success” in life? Hint: Tony Robbins does not experience a lot of lethargy.
We know that what we focus on expands, so if we spend some meaningful time focusing on things that make us happy, we will attract more of those things into our lives.
So, how to do it?
Take a few minutes every morning (or evening, if you prefer) and bring to mind at least 1 thing you are grateful for or appreciate in your life. Relive it in vivid detail in your mind – the feelings, the sounds, smells, tastes etc. Watch as your heart softens, your shoulders drop and you feel that bubble of happiness expand in your chest. Now right it down – describing every detail.
Try to choose something different each day – something from the day before if possible. This will cause you to start looking for things during each day to be grateful for, so you can record them tomorrow. The more we LOOK for things to appreciate or be grateful for, the more things we find!
But what if you have nothing to be grateful for?
There are times in our lives when we feel like our world is falling apart, like there is nothing to smile about, and as if life couldn’t be more unfair/miserable/disappointing. This is part of having a human experience and part of what ultimately builds our resilience and strength over time. Having said this, there is ALWAYS a way to improve or soften (even if only slightly) the depths of our difficult feeling emotions. I’m not suggesting ignoring those – in fact we HAVE to move through them in order to learn and grow from them, but we can alleviate the misery and begin moving up the emotional ladder to better feeling thoughts no matter what our circumstance.
My favorite way to do this is the following:
Start by noticing what is good in your immediate surroundings. If you’re still in bed in the morning, feel how soft your pillow feels under your head, how comfortable you feel under the sheets. Dwell on those thoughts until you feel a little lighter inside. Now choose something else in that present moment – maybe how pretty the light looks shining through the window or how good it feels to stretch your body. Really focus on each thing and allow that to be your only thought in that moment until you feel even lighter.
The longer you focus on these positive things, the higher your own emotional vibration will become, and you will automatically start seeing more and more to be grateful for.
The secret ingredient to making this practice really work
A common mis-step in the gratitude game (in addition to being too general) is just reeling off the same thing/s each day with little thought/emotion. eg. I’m so grateful for my husband, my kids and my morning cup of tea. Sure, it’s good to keep acknowledging things you’re always grateful for, but eventually those things start to lose their charge and we list them in a state of auto-pilot.
The secret ingredient to truly supercharging this practice is to go deep and really FEEL the emotions associated with each thing. When you right down the details about that one thing, really feel how it made you feel inside. For me, for example, I’d visualize that specific moment when my little girl ran into my arms and said “Mommy I really love you!”. I’d feel how her curls felt against my face, how sweet her voice sounded, the squeeze of her tiny hands and how she nuzzled into me, the smell of her warm skin… I always know I’m doing it right when I can’t help but smile during this process.
This process of really reliving the joyful experience in our mind is the same to our subconscious mind as actually re-experiencing that moment in reality (it can’t tell the difference between real and imagined), so we can double/triple our joyful experiences just like that.
Let’s start today – what can you choose, RIGHT NOW to appreciate in your life. Post in the comments!