Practicing Gratitude ~ Episode 9 ~ 11/2/23

Hey Mamas, welcome back. I am so excited for our topic today. I always say that, right? And I always am so excited because I talked about choosing Joy a couple weeks ago, and this topic really layers on top of that. It really intertwines into everything but choosing joy and practicing gratitude. go hand in hand. And I mentioned it in a couple of different ways a couple weeks ago when I was talking about choosing Joy. But when I started to think about it, it was like I glossed over it. And the reason that I believe that that is, is because now this is such a part of my life and I do it all the time. That I don't even realize that part of the reason that I am able to choose Joy and that I can live in that place where I can find joy more often than not in everything, is because of all the work that I've done in practicing gratitude before now, so that I am able to choose Joy. And so in a way, I wish this episode would have been before my choosing Joy episode. But I just had a this revelation and and I wanted to share that with you because this is really kind of the foundation I think for a lot of things in life that that could be really helpful and impactful if you do this one thing and that is practicing gratitude in your life. And so we're going to talk a little bit about what I mean by that some different ways you can do that. Of course, I've got some quotes for you today, and I'm really excited to kind of take you on a little journey of how this all played out in my life too. So where do I even start? So I, like, have all these different directions. I want to go with this today, but I think where I'm gonna start is with a quote from Lao Tsu. I think it's Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu. I think that's it.
Be content with what you have. Rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking. The whole world belongs to you. Be content with what you have. Rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking. The whole world belongs to you. So that can seem like a lot, right? Because be content with what you have. So a lot of times we spend a lot of our time, especially if you scroll social media and things like that, we start to want what other people have. And I've talked about it almost like probably every week I talk about marketing and the world and the ways of the world. And you know, I feel like, I talk about like this world is awful, right. It's always feeding us all these things that we have to combat, but it's not true. Like the whole world isn't awful, but just the way that things are studied now. And just the psychology and the way that our brains work and they want to use that against us, not against us. But you know, the whole world is driven by money, right? And so companies that have products to sell want people to want those products, right. And so they are always going to be marketing whatever their product is and making you think that you need it right once versus needs. So that's a huge topic in and of its own right. Once versus needs. But a lot of times when you are thinking about things that you want and things that you see other people having, you're focusing on what you don't have instead of focusing on what you do have, right?
And so we're going to talk a lot about how you can focus on what it is that you do have so that you can have more joy in your life. Because when you spend all your time wanting what other people think what other people have, or thinking about what other people have that you don't, it steals your joy. It robs you of that joy. But when you practice gratitude and you're grateful for what you already do have and grateful for where you are, that changes your focus and it changes your life. So another way that I had thought about this in the past is abundance mentality, right? And so you hear Do you have a scarcity mentality or do you have an abundance mentality? And I've always been obsessed with having an abundance mentality. people might call it positive thinking or having a positive mindset. And it's more than that. It's not just having a positive mindset. It's not like seeing the best in the world like all the time, like a positive mental attitude, like you're always happy or A lot of times like you'll hear, oh that person has a positive mindset or that person you know has a glass half full attitude or whatever and that is that is great right? But having a positive outlook or a positive mindset, it is much more than just turning everything into a positive, right? having an abundance mentality. You tend to look for things in the world that are good. So you're not focused on what you don't have because you're focused on what you do have or you're not focused on, What can't be done or what you can't do? You're focused on what you can do or what you can have or what you already do have, right? It is like this different way of thinking that 

if you want something, you could have it. You just have to decide, make a decision. And I'm not saying you go out and you buy something. Like I'm saying, if you want a certain way of life, then you figure out what you have to do to make that happen. You just have to figure out what you can do to get there right and focus on that. Instead of wanting like everything, pick some things that you want right and and work towards them. Instead of seeing obstacles, you see opportunities and instead of seeing like things in detriment, you see the positives. Like I used to be in sales and The type of sales that I was in, it was very cutthroat. was like this grab, you know, like a land grab type of thing where people were always worried about like if someone else going to steal my this or steal my that. And the way I always looked at everything was the more I sell, the more there is to sell, the more that other people sell, the more there is to sell. Like I didn't look at it as that person's going after my this or my that or, you know, I I was always looking for the next business. a business to me meant, oh, that's a possibility that they could be someone who was a candidate for me to sell them my product, right? And it was advertising, right? So anybody could necessarily, like, could advertise, right? And when I saw someone who got another business on the air, I didn't see that as necessarily like a detriment that I couldn't sell them. I saw it as an opportunity that I could sell someone else that was in that same space, right. And I would see, OK, is there other businesses in that same space that I could sell? Like if that was good for them, then obviously it would be good for someone else. And if you see your competitor, again, psychology, right, If you see your competitor advertising, you're going to want to advertise. 

At least I would think that's a possibility, right. So that's the way that my brain worked and that's the way that I like to focus on thing because when you focus on what you can't have or what you didn't do or what you could have done better, like I always like to focus on what I could, could have done better just for improvement. But if you focus on what you didn't do versus focusing on what you did do or what you can do in the future, then it is. It's just a way that will knock you down a peg. Instead of being grateful or having an abundance mindset, you all of a sudden live in this world of scarcity where you're in lack and you're trying to hoard all the things and it just it just, it doesn't make the more you give, the more there is to give. That's the way an abundant mindset person works. You know, if if somebody is always worried about, you know they need money, then that's like a concern of theirs. Instead of saying if I need money I can get more money, like that's the way I think if I need money, I can get more money. I can figure out a way to get more money to make more money, right? Like, if I need it, I will find a way. Instead of thinking about what I might miss out on or what I might lose It's a different way of thinking, and it plays right into gratitude and the way that you can be thankful for the things that are already in your life instead of wishing for things that you don't have yet. So if you think about like all the things that we have, we have like first world problems, not third world problems, right. So you can always think of all of the things that we have that other people don't have. And you know, you might look at someone like me and think, OK, well she can can live that way or can think that way because she isn't lacking for anything. And you're right, I'm not. I'm not lacking other than maybe like, you know, a dumpster that I can like, get rid of all of of of lots of things. So my house is a complete and total train wreck, right? Like I'm lacking organization that I wish I had in my life. But as far as lacking I'm not wishing that I knew where I was going to get my next meal, right? I'm not wondering if I'm going to have a place to sleep tonight, right? I'm not wondering if when I turn the faucet, if water is going to come out, that is good enough for me to drink. These are things that we don't have to worry about that if we did that, we may, you know we would need. This is exactly when you would need this abundance mindset and this attitude of gratitude and this practicing the gratitude because you can always find something to be grateful for. And the way to do that is to focus on what you can do and focus on what you can be grateful for now and what you can be thankful for now, so that you can get yourself out of that situation and you can choose Joy. I'm hoping this is making sense. So I'm going to circle back because my next point is it stemmed from. I don't know if you guys have read Daring Greatly by Brené Brown. Love Brené Brown and the book Daring Greatly is an amazing read. I highly, highly recommend it. She talks all about shame and vulnerability, and she is a researcher. And in her 12 years of research, right? What she found from people is that the relationship between joy and gratitude was one of the important things that she found. She wasn't expecting it, she says. And she says that she did not interview 

one person who had described themselves as joyful, who also did not actively practice gratitude. Not one person out of all her eleven, she says. 11,000 of data, data, 12 years of research she spent. She didn't find one person who described themselves as joyful that wasn't practicing gratitude. And she said for her, it was very counterintuitive to the research and her thinking when she was doing this. Because the relationship between joy and gratitude was, if you're joyful, you should be grateful, right? Like that's what she was thinking it would be. If you're joyful, then of course you're going to be grateful. But she said it wasn't that way at all, actually. Instead, practicing gratitude invites joy into our lives. And she said practicing is the part that really changed her life. It changed her family and everything. And she quoted this quote from a Jesuit priest and she didn't use the name. And so I'm not sure who said this, but as a Jesuit priest who said, it's not joy that makes us grateful, it's gratitude that makes us joyful, you guys. It's gratitude that makes us joyful. So there's so many different ways that I talked about about choosing joy and how you can do things to choose in your life to create joy in your life. But practicing gratitude is one of them that you guys, it's so, so important that you just really need to find ways that you can do it day-to-day and have that abundance thinking. I have an alarm that goes off on my phone every single day at 2:27. If you don't know, I love twos and sevens, and it says what are you grateful for? So no matter what's going on in my day at 2:27, that alarm goes off and I have to hit either silence or repeat or whatever. In some days, y'all. 

When that goes off, I am like, oh, I'm grateful. I'm so I'm like, you know, I'm feeling it right? But some days when it goes off, I literally like a laugh out loud because it's like, what are you grateful for? And I'm like, oh not this right, like the situation I'm, I'm in right then it's like not something I'm grateful for. So then I have to, like, think in my mind. So what am I grateful for? And I can either look for a positive in that situation or maybe something that can come out of the situation or something else altogether. But you guys, it is powerful how it changes your mindset and your frame of mind and everything. Like even if you're in a tizzy or stressed or whatever and that comes up, what are you grateful for? It can, like snap you back to. Like, what am I grateful for? Like I might be having a first world problem right now, right? But like what? So what am I grateful for? I'm grateful that I am able to have this first world problem right. I'm grateful there. You can think of so many things to be grateful for and one of the things like that you hear or you may have heard is like to practice gratitude. Like, you can write down five things you're grateful for every single day. Like, write it down in the morning when you get up. I mean, that's really impactful. Like if you do things in the morning, at least for me, and you can write it down when you go to bed, you can do both like 5 things you're grateful for in the morning and at night you can find that you're you know, depending on your frame of mind. They're going to be very different depending on whether you're you know when you just wake up. Like, you might have lots of things you could think of versus when you go to bed at the end of a stressful day, it sometimes could help you wind down and go to sleep when you think about the things that you're grateful for. Right. And so I think that's a great way to practice. I have AI have a gratitude tree that I have. Like I've had so many tools over the years. I tend to like, I love like journals and paper and things like that. But anytime I see like a like a gratitude one, I have a problem not buying it. So I have an everyday gratitude book that you can just flip through and you know it gives you like a quote, like that Laozhu quote was in that book, it had that quote and then it has a question at the bottom.

So the question on that page is what is standing in the way of my ability to be content with what I have? And I loved that too, right? Like what is standing in the way of my ability to be content with what I have? There could be like, who knows right what is standing in the way, but it could be that you are standing in the way right? Like and so we again it's back to choosing joy. We can we can choose gratitude. We are grateful for things. And that abundance mentality, it's something that, you know, like I said, I've had it for a long time. I've always been accused of being like that positive, you know, glass half full person. But it's not like I'm just joyful all the time and I'm never in a bad mood or whatever. I'm just always looking for the positives and and in life like you're going to find whatever it is that you're looking for. Especially nowadays you can prove whatever it is that you want to prove to yourself like go on the Internet if you want to prove your argument one way or another. I'm sure there's people out here out there that back you up, but I am telling you that in order to prove like to yourself that that you should be grateful and you could have joy in your life, you can find things to be grateful for and have that abundance mindset all the time. and like I said before another way and I'm going to reiterate it again is to give what you are feeling that you're lacking. So I used to be in, I probably have mentioned it before, but I was in financial education and So I would walk people through this this like course that we had but the foundation of the course talked about again the way the world or way that most people live and the way that we at our company was called Orange.
We, we called it our abundance. A life of abundance is what we wanted for everyone, right. and the the foundation of what we would always teach, it was taking what the ways of the world again were which you know typically again we were in finance. We were teaching people lots of different things. But one of the things is how, how do you spend your money? And the most people spend their money by they live, right? Like they go and they spend on what they eat and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. then they pay their bills, then they save, right? And then if there's some money left, they might protect themselves. Or maybe they protect themselves and then save, like maybe they have a little bit of that going on. And then if there's anything left after they've saved, then they might get right. And so our philosophy at Orange was taking that model and flipping it on your head, flipping it on its head. And what we would advise is that you should give first and if you didn't feel like you could give money, then you should definitely give of your time. And it was so much in alignment with how I think, right? So you should give first. And like I said, if you can't give money, give time, right? But that should be first. You should give first, then protect yourself. What are the things that if something catastrophic happened that you couldn't go without, Like you if something happened to your car, like you know you would be without your car, Like you need to have it insured. You know your house, You need to have insurance on your house. You need to have insurance on your life, like whatever it is. Protect your health, protect your life, all those things. Then go and save.
Save your money. Then you pay your bills, OK? And so people were always like what you save before you pay your bills. Yes, so you pay off debt. And I shouldn't say pay your bills. Like, I shouldn't say you shouldn't pay your mortgage. But like, this is like paying off your debt. Like if you had any credit card debt or whatever it was, you did that after you saved. Because the idea behind all of this is then at the end you live off the rest, right? So we would come up with a good strategy that you would, you know, you would be saving your money so that you could whatever it was. So like some people want to retire, some people don't, some people want this, some people want that, right. So we went, everybody's planned, looked very different. We were trying to get to a savings rate of 20%, right, So that you're saving at least 20% of your income and then you're living off the rest and You're protected, right? You're you're already saving, you're already giving. So you're living off the rest and you're not caring about what the rest is, right? Because we've already got a savings plan in place. And I'm not giving this advice to everyone because some people, depending on your stage in life, you might need to save more than 20% if you start saving later in life and yadda yadda yadda. But this was the premise that you would give 1st and then you would have all this leftover that you could live off of and people were just mind blown that when they actually went about things this way and we're planning and we're preparing that they actually had more like play money or cash and they were less stressed and everything. Now you know hopefully like everyone will go because orange still exists and I'm sure they are they would love to. You know I have no idea how Brad is doing right now like with with being able to take new clients on and things like that.
But like you guys I loved it so much because it played right into the my way of thinking and this abundance mentality and this way of thinking where if you want to have more money in your life then you actually give it away. If you want to have more of joy in your life, you go and give it away. And if you if you want to have more joy in your life, one of the things is you should be practicing gratitude. You know, like I said, I think you could write a thank you note to a friend or family member or someone you care about. These are all great ways that you can practice gratitude in your life journal. Get yourself a gratitude journal. A gratitude tree. I think Brené Brown did they at they added something at their dinner table like I think they prayed before they ate and when they were eating they all had to go around the table and say something that they were thankful for every night at dinner. So you can find different ways to in in a great gratitude into your life. And I promise you it's going to bring you more joy. It's going to bring you more Peace of Mind. Having that abundance mindset will come easier to you when you're thinking in that way. So I hope this was helpful. I hope that you are going to be practicing gratitude. I would love to hear about it. in the notes section underneath this podcast somewhere. I I don't know where it is but I put all of the ways that you can get in touch with me and I would love to hear if this is impacting you. If you are trying these things and they are working in any way shape or form I would love to hear your feedback.
​So please reach out to me and until next week, y'all. :)