1d • General discussion
🤸 Feeling Gratitude. Feeling Gratefulness.
Because learning how to feel is one of the most underrated skills in business and life.
Yes, today I want to talk about the art of feeling grateful. Trendy topic? Sure. Important? Very.
The art of gratitude. If you can consciously recreate a specific emotion and direct it on purpose, you become a fundamentally more resilient person in this world. This is something you need to learn.
Here's why.
Most people assume happiness in life comes from more - more revenue, more achievement, more clients, more wins. It's a consumerism mentality. More, more, more. And the western world trains your mind to keep asking for more. Never content. And that’s where we see things like obesity, depression, inability to focus on anything important. Just hit the next milestone, feel good briefly, then chase the next one.
Psychologists call the failure point "hedonic adaptation" - the well-documented pattern where emotional gains reset to baseline within weeks, and this gluttony you are chasing never actually closes the gap.
Gratitude breaks this pattern. But not through the version most people practice.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson explains why:
1. Broaden-and-build theory (Fredrickson, 2001): Gratitude and other positive emotions open up how you think. You notice more options, consider more possibilities - useful when you're the only one solving problems in your business. Over time, this builds real assets. When the struggles of life come upon you, which they will, you just glide over them.
2. The undo hypothesis (Fredrickson & Levenson, 1998): Positive emotion doesn't just feel good - it speeds up recovery from stress. In their study, people who felt grateful had their heart rate and blood pressure return to normal faster, and their thinking opened back up instead of staying stuck on the problem. I see this all the time with adults. They panic. Scream. Cry. Cussing, yelling. They break down quickly.
So how do I find gratitude in the day-to-day chaos?
I find the gap between where I was and where I am today. This has always been the fastest lever to get me back into a clear headspace.
Here's the technique I use, and recommend to everyone:
- Stop.
- Recall one specific moment you didn't have what you currently have. Don't bullshit this. Dig to a moment when things were genuinely bad - the month you almost couldn't make payroll, the client search that went nowhere for months, whatever it is - until you can feel it in your blood.
- Let the contrast register. Let the feeling set in.
That contrast is gratitude at work: seeing where you came from against where you are now. It gives you a push. New energy. New perspective. It gives your mind room to widen back out, instead of staying locked onto the one problem in front of you.
So next time when any of these situations happen to you:
- when a client just fired you
- when employees aren't getting things done correctly
- when you suddenly get hit with a huge expense
- when your relationship with your wife or husband feels lost
And you are human. Everybody hits these moments - so do not think any of this is unique to you.
Take a step back and recall some of your more intense and worst moments. And in that moment you’ll feel grateful for the life you have today. Making the stress you currently feel much more tolerable. Opening up more doors for resolution.
Motivation isn't something you can accumulate or store. You can't build it up once and coast on it all day, especially when you're the only one generating it for yourself. It has to be re-triggered in the moment you actually need it. And this is something you can learn. That's what it means to practice gratitude: it gives you a reason to take the next step, find new motivation and happiness, right when you're most likely to quit.
TLDR: Don't wait for happiness to build up on its own, and don't expect anyone else to hand you momentum. In your hardest moments running your own thing, deliberately recall when you had less. That contrast is gratitude - and it's what creates a feeling of happiness inside of you, which pushes you into the next step instead of quitting.
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🤸 Feeling Gratitude. Feeling Gratefulness.
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