Gratitude Changes What You See, Who You Are
With Thanksgiving coming up this week, it is of course not surprising that I would be thinking about gratitude. Sometimes we forget to be grateful. We may be caught up in the good and the bad or disappointing around us.
We may be disappointed or angry with our life situation. We may feel unwilling to address those feelings, so we just ignore them. We may agree with the value of gratitude but plan on being grateful when we reach our goals, achieve _ _ _ _ _ or when something we dislike is gone from our life.
But the point of gratitude isn’t so much to bestow our thanks on someone else who may or may not care about our thankfulness. (Not that this isn’t a good plan to start.) It’s also about who it makes us be.
Think about someone whose gratefulness stands out to you. What traits and patterns about that person do you appreciate or admire? What about them do you desire to copy?
Then think about the ungrateful people you know. What stands out about their lives? Are they characteristics that you want more of in your life? Do you associate entitlement, bitterness or anger with being ungrateful? Do you see lack of gratitude enhancing their life? Or reducing their joy?
Do you see a pattern of negative interpretations of circumstances in their lives when they are ungrateful? Is it more difficult to be positive, identify benefits or appreciate other people when someone is ungrateful?
I’m betting as you think about the grateful and less grateful people you have known, you are able to see how that has affected their perspective. As you’ve probably recognized, that one focus can totally change what we see in our life. The more we look for things to be grateful for, the more we find. We see the amount of good and bad in our life in direct relationship to what we believe about being grateful.
As we believe there are things to be grateful for we will actually “see” more of that. You generally find whatever you are looking for, good or bad. So if you have an attitude of desiring to be grateful, you will “see” those blessings in your life. And in turn that will affect who you are, the choices you make and the things you say.
So you really can choose who you want to be when you choose what you want to think. Choose gratitude. It looks good on you!
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