Be Thankful

Being the Thanksgiving weekend and all, I figured it would be appropriate to blog about gratitude today. Gratitude is an amazing emotion. It's one of the most powerful emotions that we can experience, and it is also one of the most important.

When you are experiencing feelings of gratitude, you are simultaneously happy, generous, content, and fulfilled. You are in a better mood overall when you feel thankful for what you have. Since you are in a better mood, you will naturally be happier, more optimistic, and will treat people better overall. This will make other people like you more too of course which can only help you on your journey of success.

One of the areas of success is wealth. But wealth isn't just having a lot of money. Wealth is being grateful for what you have and being able to enjoy it. So to be wealthy, you first have to be healthy. If you are healthy then you will be wealthy if you feel thankful for and enjoy the things you have. You don't have to have a lot, it all depends on how you look at your life and what you do have. If you life in the United States, you are almost definitely wealthy, no matter how much money you have. The fact that you are free to do whatever you want and say whatever you want (as long as you don't violate other's rights), makes you more privelaged than billions of others in the world who don't have the same freedom. You have a place to live that is more than just a mud hut, you have indoor plumbing, electricity, and many changes of clothes. If you have these things (which you almost definitely do if you live in the United States, and especially if you are reading since that means you also have access to a computer and the internet), then you are easily in the top 5% of people in the world in terms of wealth. So if you don't think of yourself as wealthy, you should reevaluate how you look at your life. If you don't think you are already wealthy, then you won't feel like you are either. If you are on of these people, the reason you don't think you are wealthy is not because you really aren't, we've already gone over that - it's because you are just being greedy. What, am I not supposed to tell the truth? Just because you might not like to hear it doesn't mean it's not true.

We all know that we really are wealthy. We may want to become even more wealthy, and there's nothing wrong with that as long as you aren't doing it because you love money. The problem is that most of us focus on the things we don't have instead of all of the things we do have. So we don't always feel grateful for the things we already have because we are focusing on the wrong things. That's an easy thing to remedy. You can do it by taking some time every day to just sit and think about all of the things you do have that you are grateful for. Ideally, you would do this during part of your hour of power each morning. That will set you up to have a successful day! Another thing you can do is to keep something small in your pocket that will remind you to be grateful for all of the things you have in your life. In the video "The Secret" one person keeps a rock in his pocket that he calls a "gratitude rock." That was a good idea I thought so I do the same thing. What are you going to do? Or what do you do already?