Your Best Year Ever, Chapter 6: Gratitude Makes the Difference

0:28Hey there. First of all, thanks for listening. button now, that would mean the world to me. Your sharing means that we can help more people achieve their goals and have a better future than their past. I really appreciate it.

0:43Chapter 6. Gratitude Makes the Difference. It is only with gratitude that life becomes rich. Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Unless you are utterly exploded, there's always something to be grateful for, Saul Bellow. By his retirement in 2022, Duke University's Mike Krzyzewski, everyone calls him Coach K, ranked in the top spot for the winningest coach in college basketball. His players had won more than 1 ,200 games, five national championships, and dozens of lesser titles and championships. And I know his secret. Before their 2015 tournament, Coach K and his players and coaches wrote the names of people who had helped them on a ball.

1:29We told the team, We're going to have this ball with us on our way through this tournament, and we would like for you to write on the ball the names of people who have made it possible for you to be here, people who mean something to you. Coach K revealed in an interview with journalist Don Yeager. The players took the ball everywhere. Players started carrying the ball around to team meals, on the plane, at practices, in the locker room, he said. Some of the guys even slept with it, had it right there with them in their rooms. After the team took the prize, everyone with the name on the ball received a note saying, thanks, you were with us every step of the way.

2:04The ball kept gratitude at the center of their game, and it gave them the winning edge. Why? The Gratitude Advantage For a long time, researchers have questioned the connection between gratitude and our ability to strive for important goals. There's an unproven but widely held assumption that gratitude can leave people feeling complacent. If I've got enough, the thought runs, then maybe I don't need to achieve more. You can see how that would be a goal killer. Why set goals when life's good as is? But that didn't sound right to researchers Robert Emmons and Anjali Mishra. Emmons and Mishra crafted a study comparing grateful and non-grateful goal striving.

2:47They had participants keep a gratitude journal as well as provide a list of goals they hoped to reach over a two-month period. Ten weeks later, Emmons and Mishra checked back and found the grateful participants were significantly closer than others to achieving their goals. Gratitude doesn't make us complacent, Emmons and Mishra say. Instead, gratitude enhances effortful goal striving. There are several reasons for this, and they all have to do with resiliency. I don't know about you, but I've never met anyone who wins it very much for very long without resiliency. I call these combined reasons the gratitude advantage, and it applies not only to basketball players, but also to leaders, lawyers, entrepreneurs, parents, pastors, doctors, anyone.

3:37The first way gratitude makes us resilient is that it keeps us hopeful. Gratitude is a game of contrasts. Our circumstances look a certain way. Then something happens to improve them. Gratitude happens when we take notice of the distance between the two states. Suddenly, we have something to be thankful for. That process teaches us something critical about life. While our circumstances might be bad, they can also be better. And our stories prove it to us again and again. Gratitude keeps us positive, optimistic, and able to keep coming back for more when life throws obstacles in our way. It's a key antidote to the kind of scarcity thinking I talked about earlier.

4:18By recognizing abundance, expressing gratitude actually nudges us away from scarcity and toward more abundance thinking. Less Charlie, more Amy. Next, gratitude reminds us we have agency. As we discussed earlier, we have the power to act and affect change in our lives. Think back to the four properties of this power identified by Albert Bandura. intention, forethought, action, and self-reflection. Gratitude can play a part in optimizing each, especially self-reflection. Because gratitude involves giving thanks for what others have done for us, this might seem counterintuitive. But that's an illusion.

4:59You know what they say about unopened gifts. If we didn't use our agency to receive and act on what others have done for us, we wouldn't have benefited. Coach K and his players never would have made it to the tournament without the names on that ball, but they still did the blocking, shooting, and rebounding. And because of what they were already doing with the gifts others had given, they knew they could keep blocking, shooting, and rebounding all the way to the championship. Gratitude also improves our patience and perseverance. A lot of times we take the easy way out because we're impatient.

5:33Achieving big goals takes time and effort. We're apt to cut corners or bail when we face difficulties. Thankfully, gratitude can keep us in the game. David Desteno of Northwestern University led a study in which participants were asked to recall an event that made them feel grateful, happy, or neutral. After writing about it, they reported their mood and made a series of financial decisions. If they wanted, they could take a cash reward at the end of the session or receive a larger amount by check in the mail at a later date. The grateful were happy to wait for the bigger payout. On average, we increase people's financial patience by about 12%, says Desteno.

6:14Imagine if you could increase people's savings by that much. Finally, gratitude expands our possible responses. Gratitude moves us into a place of abundance, a place where we're more resourceful, creative, generous, optimistic, and kind. When we're operating from a place of scarcity, we are more likely to be reactionary, closed-minded, tight-fisted, gloomy, and even mean. Researchers tell us that positive emotions like gratitude broaden one's thought-action repertoire, expanding the range of cognitions and behaviors that come to mind. These broadened mindsets, in turn, build an individual's physical, intellectual, and social resources.

6:56In other words, they make us more resilient. Psychologists and other practitioners typically refer to this as the broaden and build theory. But most of us know this from practical experience. We feel better, perform better, and respond to life's ups and downs better when we're grateful. Gratitude helps people be more future-oriented and exhibit more self-control, says Desteno, citing several studies. And unlike willpower, gratitude doesn't require much effort. People seem to enjoy expressing it. Similarly, Emmons and Mishra conclude after looking at several different studies on gratitude, that the evidence strongly supports the supposition that gratitude promotes adaptive coping and personal growth.

7:39Attorney John Crowley provides a wonderful picture of this. At the close of a recent year, he was struggling. His law firm was failing. He was facing a second divorce, and he was living in a cramped apartment. Worse, he feared losing touch with his young daughter. While hiking in the mountains, Crowley had a moment of discovery. He heard the message, Until you learn to be grateful for the things you have, you will not receive the things you want. It's a simple realization and frankly not that remarkable. What made the difference is what he did next. On that day, he decided to write a thank you note every day for the next year.

8:14The effect on his life was immediate. His perspective shifted and he realized, despite his low circumstances, that he was very blessed. That change in attitude transformed his life. His finances improved. His law practice began to thrive, and he ended the year much healthier and happier. That's the power of having a grateful heart.

8:38Wow, it means the world to me that you're listening to this newly revised Your Best Year Ever. And I so hope that you've been getting so much value out of the book already. This first part of the book is only the beginning. Just wait until we really dive into designing your future, which is coming up soon. I'm going to show you what it takes to make a great goal. How habit goals are different than achievement goals and the key elements to both. And then we're going to dig deep into why your goals matter to you. And I'm so excited for us to dive into that because that is the game changer in terms of achieving your goals.

9:15We're going to be sharing that content a little bit at a time, but if you don't want to wait, I want to encourage you to go ahead and buy the book. You can go to Amazon or Audible now to buy it. And if you buy the book before December the 31st, 2023, make sure to go to yourbestyevereverbook.com. Now, why is that important? Well, enter your order number in. And once you do that, I'm going to send you a free ticket to our biggest virtual live event of the year. It's called Your Best Year Ever Live. We've done this for several years. Many people tell us it was the beginning of the best year in their life.

9:50So that's where we're going to dive deep into the content for the book. and that's where we're going to dive deep into the content from the book and go even deeper. You'll walk away with a complete set of goals for the year and an action plan to achieve them. Now, normally we sell these tickets for$197, but if you buy the book, I'm going to give it to you free. So don't wait. Go buy the book and go get your free ticket to Your Best Year Ever Live at yourbestyeareverbook.com. Disciplines of gratitude. Regardless of our individual circumstances, we all can point to assets, blessings, and gifts in our lives.

10:30Yet there are a million things we don't have. But there are a million we do. Whatever our past, if we can see it through the lens of gratitude, we will discover that our present is full of more than we can possibly ask or imagine. Gratitude has the potential to amplify everything good in our lives. It's the best remedy I know for the affliction of scarcity thinking and the best way to cultivate a mindset of abundance. When I asked successful business and thought leaders how they prepared to reach their goals in the coming year, several told me gratitude gave them an edge. Some mentioned setting aside special time to reflect and express gratitude for all the positive they experienced.

11:08I enjoy taking the Thanksgiving holiday to be thankful for all the positive things that happened over the past year, as well as assess how I can change my perspective on the negative things that happened to a healthy one, award-winning podcaster Eric Fisher told me. Based on both what I've read in the research and my own experience, I believe gratitude is fundamental for achieving our goals. If you do it daily, John Gordon, author of the best-selling book The Energy Bus, told me, you'll notice incredible benefits and major life change. To leverage the gratitude advantage in my own life, I've benefited from adopting these three disciplines.

11:42Number one, I start and end the day with prayer. Instead of bookending the day with what I failed to get, sleep or accomplishments or whatever, I try focusing on the blessings I do have and expressing them in prayer. Number two, I practice thankfulness. Before I get caught in endless comparisons, I express gratitude for the gifts I do have. I find prayer before meals gives me several natural points in the day to do this. Number three, I journal my gratitude. Journaling is useful for many things, but expressing and capturing our gratitude is certainly one. Not only do I have the in-the-moment benefit of focusing on the good, I've recorded it for later reflection, for those times when things don't feel like they're going as well as I had hoped.

12:26Jeremy Adam Smith, editor of Greater Good Magazine, offers several specific suggestions that can augment these. He recommends savoring positive experiences, recognizing the gift of other people and of our interconnectedness, getting specific when expressing thanks, the finer the detail, the better the evidence that you truly noticed and appreciated, and being grateful for things that don't go the way you hope or expect. This last one is important, as Smith says, because it can help us turn disaster into a stepping stone. If all of this sounds like advice your mother might have given you, then your mother's wisdom tracks with the most recent findings of social scientists, psychologists, and others.

13:06All of Smith's recommendations are grounded in research conducted and coordinated by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. That said, gratitude exercises like these don't always work for everyone. What if you struggle to find a deep sense of gratitude? If that's true, there's nothing wrong with you. It can be normal for at least a couple of reasons. One is that we're sometimes in the midst of a moment when gratitude is hard to manage. Say controversy, anger, or resentment. Work on that first or find something outside those feelings to be grateful for. The other reason we might find it hard to sense gratitude in our lives is that the wonder and mystery of it all has become so ordinary.

13:45What once delighted and surprised us can later feel rote and predictable. Psychologist Timothy Wilson calls this the pleasure paradox. We experience something wonderful and try to understand it so we can experience it more often. But once we understand it, we take the edge off the wonder. The way around the pleasure paradox is something he calls the George Bailey technique. In the movie, It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey decides the world is better off without him. But the angel Clarence intervenes and shows him an alternative storyline. And it turns out a world without him is worse off by far.

14:21So how does it work off the silver screen? In our research, we ask people to mentally subtract from their lives something they cherish, says Wilson. In one study, Wilson and his colleagues compared people instructed to imagine never meeting, dating, and marrying their spouses with those instructed to simply retell how they met, dated, and married. Those in the George Bailey condition reported greater happiness with their relationships than did the people randomly assigned to tell the story of how they had met their spouses. The difference was the alternative storyline. Imagining something good never happening made it seem surprising and special again and maybe a little mysterious, according to Wilson.

15:04The future is bright. The truth is, as attorney John Crowley discovered, that you will never have more of what you want until you become thankful for what you have. Ingratitude creates instant victims in our culture of scarcity. But giving thanks for outrageous abundance inoculates us from the sense of fear, failure, and discontent we sometimes experience, and instead creates a path toward success, joy, and fulfillment. I don't want you to think or to plan your year out of a place of scarcity. Instead, I want you to start full of gratitude. I begin step one with the old saying, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

15:43Changing the rhyme scheme starts with upgrading our beliefs, getting resolution on the past, and looking toward the future with a sense of expectation and the hope that comes from deep gratitude. To help with that process, I recommend looking over your after-action review from chapter four. Review your answers to those eight questions with the gratitude insights from this chapter. You can even think about some of the regrets that Chapter 5 might have stoked. Gratitude, as Smith says, can offer us a stepping stone to whatever's next. Once you've done that, you're ready to design your future. Step 2.

16:20Action Plan 1. Conduct an After-Action Review To conduct an After-Action Review, work through these four stages. First, state what you wanted to happen. Second, acknowledge what actually happened. Third, learn from the experience. And fourth, adjust your behavior. I find it's effective to work through these stages by answering these eight questions. Number one, how did I see the past year going? Number two, what were my plans, my dreams, my concrete goals if I had any? Number three, what disappointments or regrets did I experience this past year? Number four, what did I feel I should have been acknowledged for but wasn't?

17:01Number five, what did I accomplish this past year that I was most proud of? Number six, how do the events of the past year, good or bad, ultimately serve for my benefit? Number seven, what were two or three specific themes that kept recurring? And number eight, what were the major life lessons I learned this past year? Number two, find the opportunity hidden in regret. Go back to the third question above. What disappointments or regrets did I experience this past year? We often feel the sharpest regret when we have the greatest chance for a positive remedy. So ask yourself, what opportunities your regrets reveal?

17:39Number three, try these gratitude exercises. Gratitude is not just a mood. It's a practice. These three exercises can help you get started. Begin and end the day with prayer. Practice thankfulness by expressing gratitude for the gifts you have. Keep a gratitude journal. If you struggle making headway with these, try the George Bailey technique. Think of something good in your life and imagine what your life would be like without it.

18:27us. You can do that on Amazon or Audible. And if you're anything like me, you probably always look at the reviews before you buy something. That's why they're so important. So leaving a review helps other people just like you know whether they should buy the book or not. So just go to Amazon or Audible, search for your best year ever, and leave your, hopefully, five-star review. Thanks so much.