Practicing Gratitude - Happiness Club

How practicing gratitude can help you achieve Happiness

Practicing gratitude is great way to achieve Happiness. As my friend and previous life coach, Katrina Love once said to me, “you can’t be in fear and gratitude at the same time”. When we practice gratitude on a regular basis it helps us reprogramme our brain. The more we practice gratitude we find that our brain starts automatically noticing things we can be grateful for.

Practicing gratitude also helps us to get what we want. We start focusing on what we have got, instead of what we haven’t got. As I mentioned in my previous blog post, Focus on What You Want, what we focus on is what we get and when we focus on what we’re grateful for, the universe gives us more things to be grateful for.

It can also be helpful to be grateful for anything we’re finding difficult in our life. For example, if we are unhappy at work, focusing on the good things about our job can help us to reframe things and see things in a more positive light. There is nearly always, if not always, something to be grateful for. If nothing else, we can be grateful for the learning experience.

In this blog post I share five exercises you can use to practice gratitude.

List everything in your life you’re grateful for

Take a minimum of five minutes and write down everything in your life you’re grateful for. If you’re struggling to think of things, pretend that anything you don’t include will disappear from your life within 24 hours.

Write a thank you note

Send someone a text, email or even better a handwritten note to say thank you. Tell them how much you appreciate everything they do for you.

Daily Gratitude Practice

Spend sometime everyday saying thank you for the things you’re grateful for. There are many differing recommendations on how to complete a daily gratitude practice. My personal favourite is taken from Vishen Lakhani’s Six Phase Meditation. I make a note, either mentally or write it down, of three things I am grateful for in my personal life, three things I am grateful for in my work life and three achievements or things I am proud of. As you recall the things you’re grateful for, really invoke the feelings you enjoyed in that moment. Ideally use new things every day, but if you get stuck you can fall back on your old favourites.

Gratitude Journal

You could record the things you think about in your daily gratitude practice in a journal. This will help to cement it into your consciousness. You could also look at it regularly to remind yourself of your abundance or look at it if you’re feeling a bit low to shift your state.

Active Gratitude

Also taken from Vishen Lakhani, is my active gratitude practice, which in turn, he learned from Joe Vitale. Active gratitude involves slowing down and remembering to be grateful in the moment. Taking time to stop and smell the flowers as the old saying goes. Really savour the moment and soak it up.

What are you grateful for? What does your gratitude practice involve? Let us know in the comments or head on over to our Facebook group.

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