Gratitude as a tool for growth
It’s been really easy to live day-to-day in the last couple of months. It’s been so easy that at some point, I started to lose a sense of my own meta-mindset, my goals, my North Star. Truth to be told, we don’t even need a pandemic to get stuck in a rat race and live on autopilot.
The pandemic made it indeed hard to perceive the time as we know it. Is it Thursday? Is it September? I’ve been asking myself this question since spring while trying to make sense of it all. More than ever, ‘the power of the present moment’ has obtained a whole new meaning. There really is a minimal sense of time (actually) passing and envisioning future more than a couple of days in advance is irrelevant. How to live in the present moment, stay positive and continue to grow as a personality event when the times are (unprecedented) rough?
One of the things I learned the hard way is the importance of a positive outlook.
I’ve never been a naturally positive person. I’m very pragmatic and positivity comes to me as a result of careful, detailed assessment of all the negative possibilities of my reality. In my eyes, I often define positive things as an opposite of a negative aspect/item. In other words, being positive is secondary. It’s a conscious, daily effort that doesn’t happen by itself. I constantly need to check in with myself on the way I talk to myself and to others. I’m far from where I’d like to be, but there are a couple of tools that have been helping me along the way.
One of them is Five-minute journal and the practice of gratitude
I was a little skeptic about the gratitude practice - the main doubt I had with the concept was the loss of willingness to grow or exceed oneself while being constantly grounded. I didn’t realised the work on growth is better done from a place of stability rather than constant uncertainty. The format of Five-minute journal makes it possible with 3 questions to complete in the morning and 2 follow-up tasks for the evening, at the end of the day.
Here they are:
The goal of this practice is to write down 3 things you’re grateful for as a first thing in the morning. This is VERY important. Try not to consume any news or media. Write 3 little, particular things you’re grateful for. This shifts your mindset towards the positive things in your life right in that moment, which has a surprisingly grounding effect. Less anxiety, less stress. Few examples from my journal:
being able to drink a glass of clean tap water
a table I can work from
healthy feet - I can go for a walk outside
…
There are two more tasks for the morning - a list of 3 things - ‘What would make today great?’ - which is not your typical to-do list. Don’t focus on what ‘needs to get done’ but rather things that bring joy to your life. The last part is to write down affirmations for the day. Manifestation never hurt nobody!
However, the most important part of the journal is the very last evening question. I only realised this after watching Tim Ferris on youtube explaining how he’s using this particular journal. Until then, I wasn’t very diligent with the evening section.
This section is a powerful tool for a debrief of this practice. When you fill up around 10-20 pages, maybe even less - you’d start to see PATTERNS. Patterns of the things you wish you had done. And not only done - these are the things that could’ve made you more happy in the first place. Because how you live your day is how you live your life.
If there’s one thing I strongly stand for, it’s the rule I use for literally any decision-making. ‘Is this something I would regret in the future?’. I hate regret. It’s the worst feeling on the spectrum, worse than failure or heartbreak.
This part of the journal gives us the opportunity to minimise that potential regret. Even the one we might have unconsciously. Therefore, it’s really important to debrief, read this particular part of the journal on a regular basis. There’s something about looking at your own handwriting, seeing the words and sentences you’ve written in the last couple of days, months-in your past and not take accountability for them. Brain is a very unreliable device to store this kind of information, it’s impossible to debrief this kind of process without having the information stored elsewhere.
My practice is by no means regular - but when I spend few extra minutes in the morning taking care of my mindset, the days are more intentional, more productive. I feel sense of control.
Try it as an experiment - like me. I started off with my own journal, writing the questions by myself until I got used to the practice. I was hesitant to spend any money on a journal I won’t probably use. It led to a point I got tired of writing the same questions everyday by myself and went for the original one. :)
Do you practice gratitude?
