how to be grateful

Everyone talks about how great gratitude is.

Right? Gratitude is hailed as a silver bullet to joy and productivity and abundance just about everything good. We know the merits. Maybe we even set a resolution to be more grateful in 2017.

But where do you start?

In my mind, gratitude is simple: you just have to discipline yourself to do it. Every. Day. So my tips this week are short…

• Start today. Get a notebook (or a jar and strips of paper, or an iPhone app, or… endless options, folks) and every single night write down three things you are grateful for. Gratitude is a muscle. Just frickin’ do it.
• When you are writing your gratitudes, write I am grateful for ____ because _____. The ‘because’ is a game changer that will help you connect to the feelings of gratitude.
• The above being said, you are not always going to feel grateful when you do this. That’s okay. You are building a repetitive habit.

That’s it. If you repeated the above for a month straight, it could transform your life. The deal with gratitude is that it doesn’t really matter what kind of gratitude practice you have, as long as you practice it. Gratitude is just about repetition, and you will lose it if you aren’t practicing it.

But there’s the magic in it. The more you continue a practice of gratitude, the more you will have to be grateful for. The more you are in the habit of looking around for things to be grateful for, the more actually incredible things will come into your life to be grateful for. Guaranteed.

So start today. Hit the ground running. And then let me know in a month how it’s going for you.