Photo by Austin Schmid on Unsplash“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.” — Cicero

Why gratitude?

Gratitude transforms your perspective.

Gratitude directs you to see things differently.

Gratitude helps you to appreciate the good in your life.

Gratitude helps you know what you want and create more of it.

Gratitude triggers you to see benefits and create them when you didn’t see them before.

Gratitude can not make the mundane into something amazing and gorgeous.

Gratitude causes post-traumatic growth, not stress.

Gratitude is essential to having an amazing, healthy life.

Gratitude builds an amazing personal situation, and an amazing, happy, past.

Through gratitude, you will:

Be enormously happierSleep betterBe way better in your relationshipsThink enormously better thoughtsCreate a better past present and future

In the remainder of this article, you will learn how to apply proven applications, models, and processes to have far more gratitude in your life.

Gratitude Transforms Your PastRe-Frame Your Valleys

Research shows that post-traumatic growth is most likely to occur when you “reframe” an experience with gratitude.

Gratitude can reframe experience and even terrible trauma.

My father was a drug addict when I was growing up. Because of gratitude, I know that this experience happened for me.

Life has peaks and valleys. Peaks are your high moments. Valleys are difficult experiences in your health, relationships, or emotional well-being.

The peaks are amazing, but the valleys are just as important.

Here’s why:

The future peaks in your life will happen because of what you learn from, and do, while in your valleys.

(For more on this, read Peaks and Valleys by Dr. Spencer Johnson.)

Everything in life is a lesson.

If you approach life with a gratitude for the past, your paradigm and perspective will shift. You’ll have a positive-past approach to life.

Use The Past To Live Longer

Gratitude can literally make you live longer.

Research from multiple different populations and studies shows that gratitude increases longevity. People with a positive view of things live for many years longer than those who don’t.

In the book The Biology of Belief, Dr. Lipton teaches the science of epigenetics. The field of epigenetics shows that our genes and health are not static.

Our genes can not only be shaped by our environment, but also by our perception of our environment and life events.

If someone has an experience which they frame negatively, their body is continuously being broken down by the stress of holding on to that negative memory.

In contrast, if someone has an experience which they frame positively, their expectation towards life and the future will be bright. Physically, they’ll become much healthier.

If you frame things positively, your health will be a lot more vibrant. You’ll have much more energy. You won’t be holding onto baggage. You’ll be a lot lighter, and you will live much longer.

You’ll also want to live longer when you’re grateful. If you’re pessimistic and negative about the world, you won’t have confidence in the state of the world many decades from now.

Gratitude Transforms Your PresentHappiness Is Now

The false idea that things will only be better in the future perpetuates itself.

In The Gap and the Gain, Dan Sullivan and I shared this concept: if happiness isn’t now, then it’s never.

If you think that happiness is only something you can pursue, then it’s always going to be something you’re pursuing. Like the horizon, it will be impossible to catch.

If instead, happiness is something you already have, you can expand it.

Grateful People

Think about someone you know who is always grateful. Grateful people are not artificial, false, awkward, or weird. They’re just constantly in a state of gratitude, and it suits them well. They express their gratitude often, and they transform their world.

When I bussed tables for a restaurant in high school, I remember one customer who said thank you, every time, to everything.

It was not overt. It was not loud. It was just “thank you.”

That had an impact on me.

Grateful Relationships

People who are grateful have much better relationships. People who have better relationships have much better well-being physically, mentally, and emotionally.

In this way, your physical health is deeply impacted by gratitude, because your relationships are one of the biggest factors contributing to your health. As human beings, we are relational.

Increase your gratitude in your relationships, and both those relationships and your overall physical health will increase.

Write letters of gratitude. Send gratitude texts. Call someone and tell them you’re grateful for what they’ve done in your life. If you want to change your life this very hour, send a bunch of texts (shoot for at least 10) with something specific that you appreciate about someone, or something they’ve done.

The quality of our health and mental well-being rests largely on the quality of our relationships.

Prayer

Gratitude in prayer has been shown to enhance people’s well-being and their health and their happiness.

Gratitude to God will transform your present in ways nothing else can.

One of the most powerful forms of prayer is prayers of gratitude.

Decision-Making

Gratitude’s been shown to help people with problem solving and making better decisions.

There are numerous studies surrounding this where people are placed in stressful situations and then challenged them to make difficult decisions from that situation.

Often, when stressed, people will get narrow.

When you’re stressed out, you get narrow-minded, and you don’t see alternative options.

You don’t have mental flexibility, and you get caught in one way of doing things.

You become emotionally and mentally rigid, rather than flexible.

Gratitude, in contrast, primes you for better decision making and better emotional flexibility.

When you’re in a stressful situation, and you’ve got to make high-stakes decisions, gratitude is your biggest ally.

You can easily weigh alternative options, and make better strategic decisions, when grateful.

Sleep

Gratitude at night has been shown to not only directly positively impact happiness, but also to literally impact the quality of your sleep and the quality of your brain while you’re sleeping.

To increase your gratitude, put your phone on airplane mode and have a wind down.

Write down three things you’re grateful for from that day.

You might have had a day that felt absolutely terrible and like everything fell apart, but you see what you’re looking for.

In the beginning, you might have a hard time finding things you’re grateful for. However, if you start looking for something, your brain is going to start finding more and more of that thing. You can get the point where you find 10, 20, or 30 things to be grateful for each day.

Start with one. Over time, you’ll find infinite things to be grateful for.

Gratitude is a skill.

While visualizing and meditating on the good, you will sleep better during the night.

If you want, you can even combine this with prayer and express gratitude at night as you go to bed. Having just written about and prayed about the things you are grateful for, that’s what your brain will focus on all night.

Gratitude Transforms Your FutureMental Creation

Your brain doesn’t know the difference between something you mentally visualize and feel versus something you’re experiencing outside in the real world.

Mental creation is mentally visualizing and then thinking about what you want.

Think about something you would absolutely love to have, and then think about how you will feel the moment you get it.

What kind of gratitude would you feel once you get that experience?

Start feeling gratitude for that event right now.

That takes you to a place of acceptance and allowance and knowing.

This is where you know that what you want is already yours.

You’re grateful for it.

You’re feeling it.

You have that sense of feeling, acceptance, and allowance right now.

This ultimately makes it enormously easier for you to have it.

I challenge you to think about something you want, think about how it would feel to have it, and then to start to feel that now.

Thinking → Feeling → Knowing.

You’re Not An Island

Express gratitude in all of your relationships. This is how you create transformational relationships. The best relationships I’ve ever formed and developed, and the reputation I’ve built in various networks, have come through direct gratitude. Acknowledge where people have helped you, acknowledge where you’ve been served, and acknowledge that you’re not an island. You’re not the only person who’s the sole source of your success.

Did I create this writing platform? Or the computers, cameras, microphones, upon which my content is built? No.

I’m very grateful for these things. They’re gifts that I can use.

As you express and give gratitude, acknowledge where respect and credit are due.

Gratitude to people who have helped you helps you to be seen very differently.

Humility

“A great man is always willing to be little.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the book Peaks and Valleys, Dr. Spencer Johnson points out that many people during a peak get overly egotistical, and then they drop into valleys because they create unnecessary failure.

If you’re in a state of humility and gratitude, you avoid this.

You continually having a bigger vision and a sense of purpose. You know that what you want is already yours. You’ve accepted it. You allow the vision to happen and you become more grateful.

Gratitude isn’t just mental. Allow yourself to feel it. Allow yourself to get to the place where you are humbled by what you’re grateful for.

Humility is a very powerful strength.

When gratitude truly does bring you to tears, you have gone from thinking to feeling and knowing.

Gratitude, humility, commitment, and courage are the things that allow to have a phenomenal past, present, and future. They open you up to faster growth and transformation, so that in the future you stop resisting lessons and you’re open to feedback.

Gratitude makes it so that on your peaks and valleys, you go from peak to peak to peak.

Accept that you are not the vehicle of your success, merely the driver.

Gratitude for the future is not just something you do, it’s who you become.

It’s who you are.

Conclusion

“Change the way you see things, the things you see will change.”

— Wayne Dyer

Gratitude allows you to be in a state of acceptance, allowance, and receiving.

Eventually, you’ll reach the point where you’re literally grateful for everything.

Everything happens for you, not to you.

Do something today that is grateful for your past. Re-frame a trauma. It happened for you, not to you.

Do something today that is grateful to yourself now. Write in your journal. Pray and express your gratitude to God.

Do something today that is grateful for your future. Visualize an experience you anticipate and know is coming. Become grateful for it.

Gratitude is who you are, not what you do.

Will you use gratitude to transform?

Ready To Upgrade?

Click here to get my Future Self Cheat-Sheet and other bonus resources.

(This is based on my book Be Your Future Self Now, which recently came out on paperback and was the #1 book in all of South Korea for several weeks.)

[image error]