The importance of gratitude
I don’t know many people who argue against the value of giving thanks, so on the surface it would seem like I’m just preaching to the choir here. It is easy to be thankful for all the blessings we have in our lives like family, friends, health, food, shelter, etc. Expressing gratitude has also been linked to a host of benefits ranging from better mental and physical health to better relationships and productivity.
I recently entered gratitude into a Google search and it returned 109,000,000 results, and I noticed a worrying trend. Based on the top links that returned, it seems like a lot of people are using gratitude for selfish purposes. Among the top links that returned to page one in my search were: “The 31 Benefits of Gratitude You Didn’t Know About,” “Can Gratitude Make Millennials More Successful?” and “7 Surprising Health Benefits of Gratitude.”
In my experience, the only genuine gratitude practice is when it is done to enrich others. In fact, in my regular gratitude practice, I specifically ask the recipient not to acknowledge it, but if they feel compelled to respond, send a similar message of gratitude to someone in their life OTHER THAN ME!
I think expressing gratitude for selfish reasons will eventually backfire in the same way that I see general selfishness and greed eventually come back to bite people. It’s not always easy to do, but in the long run, helping others will fill you up much faster than just taking care of yourself.
Our society has become obsessed with results, to the detriment of results, in my humble opinion. I have found that the need for results makes those same results much less likely to occur. That’s why my approach is primarily based on process and purpose. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to go into the process and purpose (but I will in a future blog post), as I want to address another issue around how people practice giving thanks.
The other problem I have with the way people express gratitude is that they often focus on the easy stuff. If you’ve read my blogs before, you’ve probably seen me utter the phrase: ‘Life is 10% what happens and 90% how you react’ (although now I think it’s more like 3% and 97%). that once I learned to embrace the bad things that happened to me and be thankful for them, it sped up my growth exponentially.
As a child, I used to curse the fact that life wasn’t fair and often felt sorry for myself. I think a big reason I felt that way was because my mom passed away two days before my fourth birthday. Regardless of the cause, the only thing that made me feel sorry for myself was making a bad situation worse.
I eventually realized that losing my mother at a young age had a silver lining. It made me a more sensitive and empathetic person and those traits serve me to this day. I’m even thankful for all the people who bullied or took advantage of me when I was depressed, because otherwise I wouldn’t have gained the valuable skills or knowledge that I do. These experiences forced me to learn to solve problems at an early age and to think on the fly. All of these traits and skills are vital to the work I do today.
In addition, I also suffered from deep depression and anxiety after my mother died, but fighting those battles made me a better person. Even though it took a lot longer than I would have liked, I like the person I am today.
Having said all that, if I had a choice, I would give up all these benefits in a second to get my mother back even for a few days. But I can’t choose, so I’ve finally learned to play the cards I’ve been dealt in a progressive way.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking about what would have been or could have been. In my case it would be if my mother had lived. But those fantasies are full of inaccuracies, as they visualize an idealized version of the person I am now, and the reality is that I may have ended up being a completely different person. Maybe even a spoiled mama’s son with rights and very little compassion, for all I know.
If you want to accelerate your growth, learn to have gratitude for the things you missed or went wrong, as well as the things that went right, and when you choose to express it outwardly, do so to enrich others, not to receive any benefit for yourself.