Tools & Tips To Improve Yourself
7 Ways to Become More Grateful
When you are grateful for something, you will show appreciation for it by saying thank you, but the feeling of gratefulness goes much deeper than just showing thanks. It’s more like a feeling than an action. It starts inside your brain and manifests itself by your actions. To increase your feelings of gratitude, follow these 7 ways to become more grateful.
1. Keep a Gratitude Journal – One of the ways to become more grateful involves practicing intentional gratefulness by writing down the things you are grateful for each day. You don’t have to be super detailed, just write bullets about your day and the things that brought you that feeling.
2. Remember What You’ve Overcome – One way to elicit grateful thoughts is to think about when you overcome something in your life. When you see how far you’ve come, you cannot help but feel good about it.
3. Count Your Blessings – Each day take some time to actively count your blessings. You can do this via prayer and thank your creator for those blessings, or if you prefer you can think about them as you fall into sleep, or meditate.
4. Keep Track of Those Things That Make You Feel Grateful – When you are living your life if you get a sudden feeling of gratitude, instead of letting it pass, note it. Write it down so that you can think about it more often.
5. Tell People Thank You – When people help you, are good to you, polite and do things for you always tell them thank you. Even if it’s their job to do it, be the type of person that is a bright light in their day too by verbally telling them thanks.
6. Use Positive Language – When you are talking about things focus on the type of words you use. Try to turn any words with a negative connotation into positive words instead.
7. Fake It till You Make It – While you don’t want to stuff your feelings long term, going through the motions by saying thanks, keeping the journal, meditating and/or praying will go a long way to triggering the right feelings of gratitude that you can conjure up whenever you need them.
As you focus on gratitude, something interesting will happen to you. You’ll start to notice the smallest things, like the gentle fragrant breeze after it rains, the smile on your child as he sleeps, and the nice things your spouse does without even thinking about it like giving you a foot rub for two minutes after work while discussing your day. It all adds up to a good life that you want to feel good about.
