Gratitude And Personal Success – Part 2

Welcome back!

This is a continuation of Gratitude And Personal Success – Part 1 where we focused on generosity.  We’ll now continue with …

Fear vs. Generosity

Some people fear being generous because they think it will make them vulnerable. Often they count the things they have done for others and simply don’t see what comes back their way. Or if nothing comes back their way, they feel like they have been taken advantage of.

They begin to harden their hearts to other people and focus on what they are not receiving rather than what they are. Their lack of generosity with others is uninspiring and repels people. Their lives can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: they receive nothing back, and then think that this proves they were right not to be generous in the first place…and this short-circuits them from reaching their personal goals or achieving their personal success.

Giving unconditionally is the same as loving unconditionally. If you give to receive then you give conditionally and this is not increasing energy in you but rather taking energy from you. You may have observed people in your life who believe they give all the time but are resentful that they never get anything back in life. This person does not value generosity, this person may value desire. Desire has to do with accumulation and greed.

Do not be confused by this as this will also repel your personal success.

Acknowledgement

One of the most powerful strategies to attain your personal goals and personal success is acknowledgement. By acknowledging how far you have come, you not only encourage yourself to strive further, but you actually force yourself to stop, recognize and enjoy the wonderful things that you have achieved.

Contemplate for a moment and recognize the positive things in your life and the things that you have done to make these things happen. Acknowledge others around you.

Contemplation

• What are you grateful for right now?

• What behaviors do you have in your daily life that demonstrates gratitude?

• Is gratitude a value in your life?

Life Lessons

Sometimes we don’t notice the things that we should be grateful for; we simply forget them or take them for granted. Other times the wonderful blessings we have in life are obscured by other negative experiences, which seem to overpower them and skew our focus.

For example, the pain of going through a divorce will often make people forget the many wonderful times they experienced in their marriage. A person who experiences a loss or tragedy may forget everything good that happened during the whole period surrounding it.

When people go through difficult times, they tend to want to put the whole experience behind them. Unfortunately, this sometimes includes putting the many opportunities to be grateful behind them as well.

A powerful activity for you to do is to write down an experience in the past year where things went wrong. Then write down all the lessons that you have learned from that experience.

This will help you identify past events to be grateful for. Even more powerful than that, however, it trains you to seek out opportunities to be grateful in the future even when you will be going through challenges…this helps build mental strength!

A similar phenomenon occurs in our interaction with people. Often when we experience a hurt from another person, the emotion of the hurt makes us forget any positives about that person and we cease to even see their good points. We can become imprisoned by the past, unable to get past the hurt.

If this is the case with you (or someone you know), take a piece of paper and write the other person’s name on the top. Now write the hurt in the middle of the page and put a circle around it. Then write down all the things the other person may have done to be kind or helpful.

This activity is not designed to have you gloss over unacceptable behavior or to make them vulnerable to further hurtful incidents. It is designed, rather, to put hurts in context. By doing so, you grow the amount of the things that you feel grateful for and help yourself to salvage positive experiences to reflect on.

Building Generosity

One challenge I sometimes face when working with a client who hasn’t experienced the joy of generosity is to help them experience.  By doing this they can create a new cycle of abundance to replace their old cycle of scarcity.

Explaining the power of generosity is hard to fully appreciate without experiencing it. You have to live it to know its rewards.

Generosity, like gratitude is so integral to human happiness so I need to be able to share this experience with my clients.

The Keys to Happiness

As a coach I am hired to support my clients to enhance their happiness, productivity and life satisfaction. This challenge raises a number of questions:

• Firstly, what makes a person happy, productive and satisfied?

• Is there any relationship between what most of us would consider “success” and levels of satisfaction?

• Are some people naturally happy and satisfied and others naturally unhappy and dissatisfied?

• And, can people substantially improve their happiness and life satisfaction?

 In life, it is not so much what you have that matters, but how mindfully and gratefully you experience it.

Encouraging Gratitude

I constantly come across people with have high levels of gratitude. They look around and see a world full of joy and wonder. They notice when good things happen to them. They recognize the role that others play in their success and acknowledge it. They regularly thank others. They look for opportunities to give back.

If gratitude is so essential to life satisfaction and personal success then part of my role as coaches is to encourage my clients to be more grateful. Being grateful is a skill, like any other, that can be learned and developed over time. There are a number of strategies and techniques that can be used to help become more grateful.

Many of the activities that build gratitude automatically spill over into increasing generosity and personal success. Once you are more mindful of all you have to be grateful for, you are more naturally inclined to give to others.

Another strategy is to write a letter or card to someone from your past that has been kind to you or done something for you. In the note include what the person did, how it made you feel, and what effect it had on you.

Then read it out loud with someone to get a feeling for it.  Then it’s up to you to send it our not. More often than not, once you feel the power of this “gift” you’ll want to pass it on.

Nobody wants to be ungrateful or ungenerous. When people fail to live with gratitude and abundance it is usually through fear, habit or lack of reflection, rather than design.

Most people, when they are operating at their best, are generous and grateful. A powerful question you can ask yourself is: “Can you describe a time this week when you were at your best?”

Now look deeper and analyze the behaviors and attitudes that were at play during that time. More than likely an attitude of gratitude, generosity or abundance will be present. Then think about ways that those same behaviors and attitudes can be “exercised” in the following week, this will really help build your mental strength.

Keeping a Gratitude Journal

Another valuable activity, which sounds simple, but is incredibly powerful, is to keep a journal.  And each night instead of simply writing what happened each day, write down three things that you are grateful for during the day.

By identifying things to be grateful for, you are training your unconsciousness to actually acknowledge these things, rather than letting them pass you by unnoticed. Small joys and blessings, which would otherwise settle back into the hum of the day, are suddenly seen in all their magnificence.

The next step is to write down what you did to achieve those things. By identifying what you did to contribute to the positive things, you’ll recognize that you have control over the wonderful things you have in your life.

You’ll realize that your happiness is an active choice. For example, if you are grateful for a beautiful warm autumn day, you didn’t actually make the day happen, but you did choose to be mindful of it and to engage with it, instead of taking it for granted.

A variation of this exercise is to ask at the beginning of each week (Sunday works great for this):

• “What were the best things that happened this past week?”

• “What did you do to contribute to those things?”

These questions help you focus on the simple fact that great things happen every day if you choose to notice them.

As coach I have a powerful role to play in supporting my clients to not only have a better life but to love the life they have. Where generosity is absent, people can find themselves on the “hedonistic treadmill” (Kauffman 2006); constantly accumulating things and experiences but never feeling contented. Where gratitude is present, life is lived in an engaged and meaningful way.

Reflection

• Have you met someone whose personal happiness and satisfaction were out of proportion with their life circumstances?

• What role do you think gratitude may have played in their life satisfaction?

• Have you met someone who lacked gratitude and generosity?

• What do you think lead to their attitude of scarcity?

• Why is it important for you to see the relationship between your behavior and attitude and the positive things in your life?

• How can you recognize that you are living the mental strength concept of “win-win”?

• How can you recognize when you are operating in a cycle of scarcity?

• At what times are you in danger of living on the “hedonistic treadmill”?

• How can you gain more joy from their achievements?

If you’d like to get started on developing an attitude of gratitude get off the “hedonistic treadmill” request your Introductory Consultation today!

Or, if you’d like to study on your own today, order a copy of “Develop the Mental Strength of a Warrior.” This is a fantastic e-book that helps you take control of your thoughts, develop success awareness and helps you tap into the powers of your unconsciousness mind to create the mental strength to succeed at anything!

OK…now it’s your turn!  Let me know about your thoughts on this subject in the comments below.

References:

• Chopra, Deepak, (1994), The Seven Spiritual laws of Success, New World Library, CA., USA.
• Emmons, R. A. & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 377-389.
• Kauffman, Carol, (2006) Positive Psychology: The Science at the Heart of Coaching in Stober, Dianne and Grant, Anthony, (Eds), Evidence Based Coaching, New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons