Resilience Reflections
How to Shift Toward a Gratitude Attitude
It’s easy to feel a sense of gratitude when something amazing happens or when things are going well in our lives. It's much harder to focus on finding joy and being grateful when things are not so great, like when you get sick before a vacation, your car breaks down, or you don’t get the promotion. Acknowledging the low of disappointments and making a conscious decision to ‘look for the good’ are both needed to achieve a state of equanimity. Balance is found within normal everyday ups and downs of life by accepting the good and bad as part of human experience.
James Baraz, mindfulness teacher and co-author of Awakening Joy: 10 Steps to Happiness, developed a gratitude game with his mother. Prompting her with “And…” when his mother complained about something, she would respond with something like, “And I’m really, really blessed!” I recently tried the “And…” gratitude exercise on myself while shoveling our north facing driveway. I complained, “I hate having to shovel so much snow!” and followed it with, “and…I am grateful for this great workout!” A word of caution: forcing others to engage in finding the ‘positive side’ may invalidate feelings. That said, if you want to try to shift to having more gratitude, try adding the word “and…” then positively reframe a situation the next time you complain or have negative thoughts about your life.
What other words or tools might you use when wanting to shift to gratitude? Perhaps it's a line from a favorite movie, a proverb, a mantra, or even a song lyric. Here's a funny lyric that helps me reframe and refocus.
And...
Always look on the bright side of life
Always look on the light side of life…
-From Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”
