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Your Best Year Ever — Chapter-06: Gratitude Makes the Difference

• Source: /library/Your Best Year Ever/source-file.pdf
• PDF pages: 74–82
• Pages without text: 78
• Note: Includes the Step action plan that closes this step.

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6 Gratitude Makes the Difference It is only with gratitude that life becomes rich. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, Letters and Papers from Prison Duke University’s Mike Krzyzewski is one of the winningest coaches in college basketball. His players have won over a thousand games and five national championships. And I know his secret. Before their 2015 tournament, Coach K and his players and coaches wrote the names of people who had helped them on a ball. “We told the team, ‘We are going to have this ball with us on our way through this tournament, and we would like for you to write on the ball the names of people who have made it possible for you to be here—people who mean something to you,’” Coach K revealed in an interview with journalist Don Yaeger. The players took the ball everywhere. “Players started carrying the ball around—to team meals, on the plane, at practices, in the locker room,” he said. “Some of the guys even slept with it—had it right there with them in their rooms.” After the team took the prize, everyone with a name on the ball received a note saying, “Thanks. You were with us every step of the way.”1 The ball kept gratitude at the center of their game. And it gave the winning edge. Why?

The Gratitude Advantage For a long time researchers have questioned the connection between gratitude and our ability to strive for important goals. There’s an unproven but widely held assumption that gratitude can leave people feeling complacent. If I’ve got enough, the thought runs, then maybe I don’t need to achieve more. You can see how that would be a goal killer. Why set goals when life’s good as is? But that didn’t sound right to researchers Robert A. Emmons and Anjali Mishra. Emmons and Mishra crafted a study comparing grateful and non-grateful goal striving. They had participants keep a gratitude journal, as well as provide a list of goals they hoped to reach over a two-month period. Ten weeks later Emmons and Mishra checked back and found the grateful participants were significantly closer than others to achieving their goals. Gratitude doesn’t make us complacent, they said. Instead, “gratitude enhances effortful goal striving.”2 There are several reasons for this, and they all have to do with resiliency. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never met anyone who wins at very much for very long without resiliency. I call these combined reasons the Gratitude Advantage, and it applies not only to basketball players but also to leaders, lawyers, entrepreneurs, parents, pastors, doctors . . . anyone. Gratitude has many virtues, but one often overlooked benefit is boosting our resiliency.

The first way gratitude makes us resilient is that it keeps us hopeful. Gratitude is a game of contrasts. Our circumstances look a certain way; then something happens to improve them. Gratitude happens when we take notice of the distance between the two. Suddenly, we have something to be thankful for. That process teaches us something critical about life. While our circumstances might be bad, they can also be better. And our stories prove it to us again and again. Gratitude keeps us positive, optimistic, and able to keep coming back for more when life throws obstacles in our way. Next, gratitude reminds us we have agency. As we discussed earlier, we have the power to act and effect change in our lives. Because gratitude involves giving thanks for what others have done for us, this might seem counterintuitive. But that’s an illusion. You know what they say about unopened gifts. If we didn’t use our agency to receive and act on what others have done for us, we wouldn’t have benefited. Coach K and his players never would have made it to the tournament without the names on that ball, but they still did the blocking, shooting, and rebounding. And because of what they were already doing with the gifts others had given, they knew they could keep blocking, shooting, and rebounding all the way to the championships. Gratitude also improves our patience. A lot of times we take the easy way out because we’re impatient. Achieving big goals takes time and effort. We’re apt to cut corners or bail when we face difficulties. Thankfully, gratitude can keep us in the game. David DeSteno of Northwestern University led a study in which participants were asked to recall an event that made them feel grateful, happy, or neutral. After writing about it, they reported their mood and made a series of financial decisions. If they wanted, they could take a cash reward at the end of the session or receive a larger amount by check in the mail at a later date. The grateful were happy to wait for the bigger payout. “On average, we increased people’s financial patience by about 12 percent,” said DeSteno. “Imagine if you could increase people’s savings by that much.”3 Finally, gratitude expands our possible responses. Gratitude moves us into a place of abundance—a place where we’re more resourceful, creative, generous, optimistic, and kind. When we’re operating from a place of scarcity, we are more likely to be reactionary, closed-minded, tightfisted, gloomy, and even mean. Researchers tell us that positive emotions like gratitude “broaden one’s thought-action repertoire, expanding the range of

cognitions and behaviors that come to mind. These broadened mindsets, in turn, build an individual’s physical, intellectual, and social resources.”4 In other words, they make us more resilient. They call it the “broaden-and- build theory.” But most of us know this from practical experience. We feel better, perform better, and respond to life’s ups and downs better when we’re grateful. As Emmons and Mishra concluded after looking at several different studies on gratitude, “The evidence strongly supports the supposition that gratitude promotes adaptive coping and personal growth.”5 Disciplines of Gratitude Regardless of our individual circumstances, we all can point to assets, blessings, and gifts in our lives. Yes, there are a million things we don’t have. But there are a million we do. Whatever our past, if we can see it through the lens of gratitude we will discover that our present is full of more than we can possibly ask or imagine. Gratitude has the potential to amplify everything good in our lives. It’s the best remedy I know for the affliction of scarcity thinking and the best way to cultivate a mindset of abundance. When I asked successful business and thought leaders how they prepared to reach their goals in the upcoming year, several told me gratitude gave them an edge. Some mentioned setting aside special time to reflect and express gratitude for all the positive they experienced. “I enjoy taking the Thanksgiving holiday to be thankful for all the positive things that happened over the past year, as well as assess how I can change my perspective on the negative things that happened to a healthy one,” award- winning podcaster Erik Fisher told me. Robert D. Smith, who manages the Andy Andrews brand, said this: “I set myself up for a great year by writing down fifty things I’m grateful for. I find that taking time to count my blessings keeps my mind focused on helping others and achieving even more than last year.”6

Based on both what I’ve read in the research and my own experience, I believe gratitude is fundamental for achieving our goals. “If you do it daily,” Jon Gordon, author of the bestselling book The Energy Bus, told me, “you’ll notice incredible benefits and major life change.”7 To leverage the gratitude advantage in my own life, I’ve benefited from adopting these three disciplines.

1. I start and end the day with prayer. Instead of bookending the day with what I failed to get—sleep or accomplishments or whatever—I try focusing on the blessings I do have and expressing them in prayer.
2. I practice thankfulness. Before I get caught in endless comparisons, I express gratitude for the gifts I do have. I find prayer before meals gives me several natural points in the day to do this.
3. I journal my gratitude. Journaling is useful for many things, but expressing and capturing our gratitude is certainly one. Not only do I have the in-the-moment benefit of focusing on the good, I’ve recorded it for later reflection, for those times when things don’t feel like they’re going as well as I had hoped. That said, gratitude exercises like these don’t always work for everyone. What if you struggle to find a deep sense of gratitude? If that’s true, there’s nothing wrong with you. It can be normal for at least a couple reasons. One is that we’re sometimes in the midst of a moment when gratitude is hard to manage—say, controversy, anger, or resentment. Work on that first. Or find something outside those feelings to be grateful for. The other reason we might find it hard to sense gratitude in our lives is that the wonder and mystery of it all has become so ordinary. What once delighted and surprised us can later feel rote and predictable. Psychologist Timothy D. Wilson calls this the pleasure paradox: We experience something wonderful and try to understand it so we can experience it more often, but once we understand it, we take the edge off the wonder. The way around the pleasure paradox is something he calls the “George Bailey technique.” In the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey decides the world is better off without him. But the angel Clarence intervenes and shows him an alternate storyline, and it turns out a world without him is worse off by far.

So how does it work off the silver screen? “In our research we ask people to mentally subtract from their lives something they cherish,” says Wilson. In one study, Wilson and his colleagues compared people instructed to imagine never meeting, dating, and marrying their spouses with those instructed to simply retell how they met, dated, and married. “Those in the George Bailey condition . . . reported greater happiness with their relationships than did the people randomly assigned to tell the story of how they had met their spouses.” The difference was the alternate storyline. Imagining something good never happening “made it seem surprising and special again, and maybe a little mysterious,” according to Wilson.8 The Future Is Bright The truth is that you will never have more of what you want until you become thankful for what you have. Ingratitude creates instant victims in our culture of scarcity. But giving thanks for outrageous abundance inoculates us from the sense of fear, failure, and discontent we sometimes experience and instead creates a path toward success, joy, and fulfillment. I don’t want you to think or to plan your year out of a place of scarcity. Instead, I want you to start full of gratitude. I began Step 1 with the old saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.” Changing the rhyme scheme starts with upgrading our beliefs, getting resolution on the past, and looking toward the future with a sense of expectation and the hope that comes from deep gratitude. Now you’re ready to design your future.

STEP 2 ACTION PLAN

1. Conduct an After-Action Review To conduct an After-Action Review, work through these four stages: first, state what you wanted to happen; second, acknowledge what actually happened; third, learn from the experience; and fourth, adjust your behavior. I find it’s effective to work through these stages by answering these seven questions:
2. How did you see the past year going?
3. What were your plans, your dreams, your concrete goals if you had any?
4. What disappointments or regrets did you experience this past year?
5. What did you feel you should have been acknowledged for but weren’t?
6. What did you accomplish this past year that you were most proud of?
7. What were two or three specific themes that kept recurring?
8. What were the major life lessons you learned this past year?

1. Find the Opportunity Hidden in Regret Go back to the third question above, “What disappointments or regrets did you experience this past year?” We often feel the sharpest regret when we have the greatest chance for a positive remedy. So, ask yourself what opportunities your regrets reveal.
2. Try These Gratitude Exercises Gratitude is not just a mood, it’s a practice. These three exercises can help you get started: ‣ Begin and end the day with prayer. ‣ Practice thankfulness by expressing gratitude for the gifts you have. ‣ Keep a gratitude journal. If you struggle making headway with these, try the George Bailey technique. Think of something good in your life, and imagine what your life would be like without it.