You’ve heard it 1,000 times. Be grateful. Count your blessings. Focus on the good.
Yet let’s face it, living from gratitude, particularly when the airwaves bombard us with all the “not-so-good,” is easier said than done.
Devastating wildfires. Mass shootings. Anti-semitism. Terror attacks. Hurricanes. More mass shootings. And then closer to home, our everyday pressures and problems: job stress, financial stress, marital stress, kids stress… there will always be something that isn’t as we’d like it to be. Things that can anxiety, sadness, self-pity, despair, frustration or resentment.
Of course, all emotions have their place. They point us to situations deserving of attention. To a wrong that we may be called right, to a loss we need to grieve, to a legitimate risk we must be mindful of managing. However, unless we’re paying attention, those aspects of our lives that don’t conform to our hopes and plans can consume our waking moments and to caste a long shadow over our very experience of being alive.
Yes, there are forces in our political arena that seek to divide, stoke fear and propagate prejudice. Yes, there are entrenched systems that fuel inequity and cause suffering. Yes there are people who behave in ways that must be challenged and held to account.
This is all true.
But it is not the whole truth.
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What is also true is that there are many good people in the world who are brave and compassionate and committed to making the world a better one.
What is also true is that each of us has the power to be one of them. Yet we cannot harness this power when we expend our energy focusing on what is wrong, laying blame and perpetuating the same lower order thought patterns that have created the problems to begin with.
Which brings me back to the importance of gratitude, the emotion that magnifies our experience of what is good, deepens our connections, steels our resolve, and buoys us to rise above the storm waves of life.
Our reality is shaped by the emotions we feel. As I wrote in a previous column, our happiness is not determined by the conditions of our lives but by how we feel about them. It explains the Princeton study which found that when employees were satisfied with their salary until they discovered it was below the median of their peers. So it is not what is going on around us that matters near as much as what is going on within us.
What you focus on expands. For better or worse.
Focus on what’s missing and outside your control and you’ll live as a hostage to self-pity and powerlessness.
Focus on all the potential dangers and you’ll live as a hostage to worry and fear.
Focus on what’s unfair and how you’ve been wronged, and you’ll live as a hostage of resentment and revenge.
On the other hand…
Focus on the all good in your life, the people you love, on what lays inside your control, on the future that inspires you and all you can do to improve it and you will tap into a sense of power and gratitude and passion and fortitude that would otherwise lay dormant. As I share in my Thanksgiving podcast on cultivating gratitude, my father who, having milked cows his entire life to retire with meagre savings, wakes up each day at 83 feeling like (his words) “the richest man in the world.”
Albert Einstein observed that “Our problems cannot be solved at the same level of thinking at which they were created.” And so as we celebrate Thanks Giving, we must elevate above our innate negativity bias that keep us stuck in patterns of thought that leave us living in a perpetual state of complaint, scarcity, fear, anger and inadequacy.
In doing so, we must make a conscious choice, as often as necessary, to resist the temptation to compare, to complain or lay all blame squarely at the feet of the ‘other’ – whether our parents, ex-partner, boss, those in high office or those traveling in a caravan carrying nothing but desperate hope of a better future.
As Harvard professor Tal Ben Shahar shared on my Live Brave podcast, “When you appreciate all that you have, what you have appreciates.” Let’s pay more attention to what we are attending to, starting with the good things and people in our lives and extending outward to the opportunity we have to be a greater force for good and source of gratitude for others. And if you catch yourself dwelling in what’s wrong and who’s to blame, refocus onto what is right and how you can make it better.
Epictetus once said that a wise man “does not grieve for the things which he has not but rejoices for those which he has.” If you have a full plate this Thanksgiving, if you have you people around you, if you have fresh air to breath and freedom to express your truth, then you have much to be thankful for. Millions have none of this.
Emotions are contagious. Imagine the difference it would make if each of us, individually and collectively, decided to trade our complaining for thanks-giving; if instead of dwelling on what’s wrong and who is to blame we focused instead on all that is right and doing our bit to to make it even better.
Margie Warrell is a bestselling author, keynote speaker & host of the Live Brave Podcast. Connect on Linked In, Twitter & Facebook.
Originally published at Forbes