Lesson four – Practicing Gratitude – November 2009
The messages here is that you should be thankful for (or appreciate) the benefits that you have received from living.... Patrick K Fitzgerald (1998) underscores three elements of gratitude:
- A warm sense of appreciation for someone or something.
- A sense of goodwill toward that person or thing.
- A desire to act based on this sense of goodwill toward another.
Robert D Hill
Seven Strategies for Positive Aging
Learning to focus on gratitude in life is a reframing strategy for more positive aging. Gratitude is sometimes called the royal emotion because it evokes feelings of appreciation and thankfulness. I know what it feels like. When I feel grateful, I feel hope and much more positive about the way my life is going.
And, while I cannot always change my immediate reactions to what happens to me, I CAN work on changing my basic attitudes about life by practicing both patience and gratitude.
However, just as practicing patience helps me to be more patient, likewise, consistently practicing gratitude is what I must do to make a major change in my outlook on life. The danger for me is that I get too busy with life and forget to be grateful on a daily basis.
My Gratitude List:
The "practicing" I am doing now is making an actual list of things I’m grateful for – a "gratitude list" and then adding items to it as the days go by. My initial target is a minimum of 25-50 entries at the beginning with more to come.
Eventually, my gratitude list will become my gratitude journal which I intend to add to weekly.
Some early items on my Gratitude List:
- A car that starts in the morning – there was a point in my life when I could only afford clunkers, some of which had problems starting, especially in the rain.
- My health – In general, I am in good health. However, my eye doctor tells me that I have age related changes. There is no cure, but right now I can see fine, and I’m hoping that medical science will stay one step ahead of me on that one.
- Owning my own business – I owe my financial success to the fact that I was able to start my own business and control my financial destiny.
After doing the preliminary work on my list, I can already see that becoming more grateful will be a life changing experience for me.
I encourage you to make your own gratitude list. I’m sure that you will find it, as I have, a most enlightening exercise.
I will add more of my personal experiences in my December issue.
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