Gratitude – the Amazing Emotion Changer!

As I have delivered my coaching, training and speaking sessions I have been continually surprised by the response I get to my take on Gratitude, and how important it is to get you from a negative state into a positive state very quickly.

This is something I have been using for quite a few years and I have found it an amazing way to forget your immediate troubles and focus on the good things in your life. I describe every negative thing which hits you every day as a black dot in your life. As you focus on this and give it all your attention it gets bigger and bigger.

Change your focus

Soon all you can see in your world is darkness and negativity and this brings you down. Very soon you are feeling less energetic, anxious and negative and you start to spiral downwards. If you don’t do something about this you will continue to go downwards and you end up having a negative unproductive day.

Many times this feeling will leave after a while when something more important appears in your life. Sometimes just a bit of time works wonders and you are soon back to a positive state. Research indicates that when we are in a positive state we perform much better with more energy and alertness than when we are negative so it is in our interest to stay as positive as we can all day long.

Change your State

This is difficult when we are hit by all the negative things that are just part of life, but we can very often choose how we respond. Using Gratitude is one of the techniques I use to change from negative to positive very quickly. It can happen within on minute and it’s quite simply a great tool to help improve your feelings.

When you receive something negative in your life and you dwell on it, rest assured that you will start a downward spiral if you don’t stop thinking about it. One of the best ways I have come across is to spend a minute going through all the things you can think of which you are grateful for. As you do this you will experience your feelings changing.

What are you Grateful for?

Think about the fact that you have fresh air to breathe, clothes to wear, shelter, a car to drive if you have one. A watch to tell the time, a TV to watch; an I pad or laptop to use. Also the cinema to go to; or even a nice restaurant to experience the wonderful flavours of the food. How about the chair to sit on; or the cup to drink out of; or the fresh water to drink.

Many parts of the world don’t have any of these and just being grateful for these makes us see the big picture. This then reduces the thing which we were stressing about into its rightful size. It’s all about perspective and we can so easily get caught up in the moment and build this thing up into a monster when in fact it may be a relatively minor thing.

If you can do something then do it

One of the phrases I love to you is: ‘If you can do something about something then do it. If you can’t then don’t think about it.’ This quite simply means that if you can send an email, make a phone call, meet someone, write a report then do that – but once you have done everything that you can then don’t give it one more thought.

Thinking about this thing will only make you ill and there is a long list of physical effects of Stress which are very damaging to the body. All you are doing when you worry about something you can do nothing about is you make yourself ill and you don’t change anything by doing that – except your health. So techniques to help you stop worrying over things out of your control are crucial and Gratitude is one of them. I will be covering other techniques in future blogs.

Great experience

I had a wonderful experience last Thursday when I delivered 3 keynote talks in one day to three groups of staff from a large solicitors firm in Sheffield and some key staff from a national bank. They were a really great group of partners, solicitors and various other levels of staff and it was such a joy to see the engagement from the staff and to see lights going on in people’s minds.

The feedback forms have reflected the impact this talk had and I am humbled to be able to have this positive effect at this later stage in my life. At 62 years of age a lot of people are gearing up for retirement and rightly so; but I have found something that I am so passionate about. I enjoy coaching, training and speaking so much I am sailing straight past 65.

Commitment and Energy

As I say in my talks I don’t know if I will be knocked down by a bus tomorrow as I can’t control that but what I can control is my commitment to keep going. The techniques I use which are all detailed in my book ‘Off the Wall – How to Develop World Class Mental Resilience’ have certainly changed my life and I am delighted to be able to share these with others.

Thoughts for the week

1. Be aware that you can change the way you are thinking with certain techniques
2. If you want to know how you are thinking then just check how you are feeling
3. If you are feeling bad then your thinking is bad
4. To change the way you are feeling think of all the things you are grateful for
5. Observe how you feel after one minute doing this
6. Spend many times each day just being grateful for something very simple in your life
7. The more times you say thank you for what you have, the better you will feel
8. Try this and let me know what how it works for you – just respond to this blog
Well that’s it for this week

Have a great weekend and stay positive

Warm regards

John