Everyone says gratitude is the key to happiness and after coaching more than 8000 people to achieve happiness and success, I believe they are right. But how do you actually achieve gratitude? Have you ever noticed that your mind, which I call The Drunk Monkey isn’t normally grateful? In fact, have you noticed that being grateful isn’t as easy as people make it sound? In this article we will explore why it is hard to be grateful and how to actually be grateful.
Why is Gratitude Hard to Achieve?
Gratitude is difficult to achieve because The Drunk Monkey isn’t particularly interested in what you are happy about. As you pay attention to The Drunk Monkey in your head, you will notice that is concerned with safety, getting ahead and routine matters. T he mind is just biology. It is just energy moving through fields of neurons in your brain. It’s job is to assist this giant colony of cells, which you call your body, to stay alive and propagate.
Today, as you start paying attend to The Drunk Monkey in your head, it will be easy to see The Drunk Monkey does not spend time appreciating and enjoying. It’s to busy keeping you safe, organizing the future, analyzing the past, making assumptions about what will happen next and planning to do something about it. Since gratitude is not about anticipating potential problems and avoiding it, gratitude is not a normal process for The Drunk Monkey.
How to Achieve Gratitude
To achieve gratitude you must recognize your habitual mental states and go beyond them.
Every time something goes “wrong” in your life, ultimately you benefit from it. If you are reading this article, you are the type of person who seems to “get by” no matter what happens. Start looking back on all the things that have ever gone wrong and notice how you benefited from those situations. Think of a recent situation that went wrong but ultimately you benefited from. “Science of Success” founder Napoleon Hill says, “If you were diligent about it, you could find the seed of equivalent benefit in every adversity.” Start getting excited about your problems, crises, and disasters. Without these contrasting moments, you wouldn’t know how good you have it most of the time. If everything were always a bowl of cherries, you wouldn’t know you had it good. You must have dark in order to know light. You must have wrong in order to know right. (Sounds like a good song lyric to me!
Every time something happens that isn’t what you expected, start saying “Thank you, universe, for sending me this contrasting moment. I needed this to know how good I have it most of the time.” Start declaring everything “perfect.” Your boss tells you that your commission rate is being lowered. You say “Perfect,” then, make up a reason why: “I’ve been wondering how I was going to go to the next level and make more sales.” A prospect you’ve been counting on to close suddenly decides to not buy. You say, “Perfect!” Then make something up like, “I was getting too attached to that deal closing and it was making me feel off-kilter and out of balance. Now, I can get back to feeling good. I know the universe will always provide for me.” Say that last part out loud and notice how true it feels: “I know the universe will always provide for me.”
Choosing to focus on what works is rebellious. People will think you are being a “Pollyanna,” and you know what? You are! A Pollyanna makes people feel good and feeling good causes people to lower their guard. When people lower their guard they will see that you are there to help. When people see that you are there to help, anything becomes possible.
How can you shape your own destiny? Well, the answer is very simple. Practice gratitude. The rule is you become what you think about. So, if you’re focused on what is working in your life, then more of that is going to come into your life. You need to focus on what you like, what is right, what is working, who loves you. Basically, think about what makes you happy and what makes you feel grateful! If you think about these things, more of those things will come into your life. So your future becomes more and more what you like about your life.
Now let’s look at the other side of it. The drunk monkey in your head is doing all of that talking and all of that thinking. The drunk monkey is focused on what is not working, what you need to be afraid of and what you need to avoid. When you allow the drunk monkey to focus on all that stuff, it attracts more of it into your life. It’s attracting more of what you don’t want, so your life becomes progressively more difficult to deal with. What gratitude does is it literally turns your life in a direction that is more of what you want. It will shape your destiny in ways that you can’t even imagine. Your life is gonna become progressively more joyous as you are practicing gratitude.
A great Gratitude Exercise is what I call gratitude, intention and delegation. Every day I have a group of people that I do this with. Every day I will write out what I’m grateful for: I am grateful for my family, I’m grateful for my kids, I’m grateful for my customers. I just start to write out everything that I’m grateful for. Then my intentions are more about how what I want to feel and what I want to experience that day. That’s how I define intentions in this exercise, so I intend to feel creative. I intend to be inspired. I intend to be empowering.
It’s feeling, being, experiencing states and then delegations. A lot of times the things that I want are a little beyond what I know how to create, so what I do is I use a method that I learned from Jerry and Esther Hicks. I delegate them to the universe. I say, “I’m so thankful to the universe for providing me with three opportunities this month to make $50,000 dollars or something better.” I always add “or something better” at the very end, so gratitude, intention and delegation. Me, personally, I like to do it with a group and have a structure where everybody’s sending it to each other. It is much more powerful.
You’re going to find that practicing gratitude is going to make a huge difference. There is one last thing that will make a huge difference in your world. As you’re walking around throughout your day, spend time appreciating the beauty of everything around you. Just that state of appreciating beauty will put you into an incredible state. Try these techniques: gratitude, delegating, and appreciating beauty. They will make a profound difference in your life.
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