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Make Gratitude Your Attitude Many families choose to share what they are grateful for when they are sitting down to a table laden with festive food on Thanksgiving. At this time, it seems natural to talk about gratitude. However, maintaining an attitude of gratitude all year long can make a big difference in improving your life. Your attitude influences your perspective in any situation or relationship. Your perspective impacts your self-talk, which influences your beliefs. You’re self-talk and beliefs are influenced by your intentional or unintentional incorporating of other people's influences, beliefs, convictions, and insights. Strive to influence your own perspective rather than follow someone else's. Make sure your perspective feeds your positive attitude and creates more energy for you. Judgmental perspectives foster negative attitudes that drain energy. I notice my energy and attitude becoming negative or discouraged after 30 minutes of nightly news. (So, I go online in the morning to learn the essential news that I need to know.) Choose to have an attitude of gratitude about all that you possess and experience. Being bitter or ungrateful never served anyone in a positive way. When you're feeling your grateful heart has shriveled a bit, look up, look around, and get into action serving and helping those who may look at your life and think you have it better than they do. Trials and tribulation are all relative. Consider those in California right now who have lost homes and irreplaceable mementoes and pictures. Ken and Margie Blanchard (the author of The One Minute Manager and dozens of other books) lost their entire home in the fires. Yet, their focus is on the safety of people and their pets. What an inspiring perspective and example of a grateful attitude. Laura had experienced a particularly difficult divorce. Unfortunately, even divorced, she continued to experience frustration and difficulty. Although she recognized she should be feeling grateful to be done with the divorce process, her frustration and anger with her ex did not diminish. She couldn't let it go, at least, until an eye-opening experience reminded her of how to be grateful for where she was in life and how she got there. A friend asked Laura to help distribute clothes to a group of women shopping at their community thrift shop. These women needed help finding clothes and outfits for job interviews. Laura was so taken aback by the gratitude of these impoverished women and their gracious spirits that she realized she was looking in the wrong direction to feel better. Instead of looking around at her circumstances, she decided to look up and be grateful. She became inspired that night to keep a gratitude journal. Each night for a month Laura wrote down three things--most often very simple things--she was grateful to know, own, notice, or experience. It changed her outlook, which changed her choices, which changed her life. What are you grateful for? Challenge yourself to keep a gratitude journal. Write down at least three things every day that you are grateful for. See how a negative attitude starts to shift and a good attitude gets even better when you regularly practice this small exercise. excerpt from Progress Not Perfection: Your Journey Matters by Kate Larsen (Expert Publishing Inc.: 2007 ) ----- Bring gratitude to life this month.
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