Holy moly guacamole, dude!
We made it!
Today we’re wrapping up twenty-one lessons of hard work. Well done! How does it feel?
This is just the beginning, and you’ve laid a powerful foundation for what’s to come.
You’ve come over the initial hump of starting, and now it’s just a matter of keeping this commitment to yourself regularly.
Your brain, right now, is in such a good place, new habit forming-wise.
By keeping up the momentum, it’ll just get easier and easier.
If you don’t feel a strong sense of gratitude yet, don’t worry. It’s coming.
But, as we’ve talked about, it takes a while to build up.
And if you’re starting from a place of high negativity, you may first need to get to a neutral place before you can really start to build your gratitude.
I want you to remember that every day, every time, you show up to do your gratitude practice you’re contributing to that force of optimism within yourself.
Even when it feels small and insufficient, so long as you’re going through the motions and building that gratitude practice, it’s making a difference.
The science of gratitude is on your side.
And by practising it proactively, you’re making it work for you.
People often make the mistake of thinking that they should first have something to be grateful for before they allow themselves to express or experience gratitude.
But gratitude works the other way around.
By focusing on the things you are grateful for, you’re decreasing your focus on the things you aren’t grateful for.
And soon you’ll start to see how the things you ARE grateful for, the things you DO have, will start multiplying as you start finding more reasons for and taking every excuse to feel grateful.
Because get this: gratitude is even more powerful than hope.
Hope is the belief that your future will be better than your present because you have the willingness and agency to go make it awesome.
But gratitude, well, gratitude takes what you have and turns it into enough.
Gratitude turns a poor man into a rich man.
And gratitude literally heals your mind, body, and spirit.
Simply by keeping track of the things you’re grateful for – journaling about them – you’ll get an automatic boost of 25% to your happiness!
Grateful people sleep 30 minutes per day more (you should be counting your blessings, not your sheep, if you want a good night’s sleep!).
And grateful people exercise 33% more.
Gratitude is like a golden ticket to a happy, contented life.
All you have to do is cash it in.
Even just doing the bare minimum of work – writing down three things that you’re grateful for every day – is enough.
Just be sure to write different things every day, though.
Getting repetitive will only give you gratitude fatigue and we deffo wanna avoid that!
So, today I’ll leave you with a simple exercise that you can do daily, a few times a week, or however you feel happiest doing it.
JOURNALING PROMPTS:
Write down what you’re grateful for in these three categories: energy, work, and love.
For example:
- today I’m grateful that I had lunch on time which kept me going through my day (energy),
- I’m grateful I finally finished writing the emails for this gratitude course (work), and
- I’m grateful that I have a crocheting project to work on in the evenings because I absolutely love making things by hand (love).
