What if...

a gratitude practice for those of us who have NO time for a new practice

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

This week I recorded a podcast guest spot (something I *love* and which I’ve been doing a lot lately for The Consistency Advantage and my Africa-work).

The theme/question of gratitude came up during our pre-interview call and it reminded me of a couple things:

• The Albert Einstein quote If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. I ponder this phase *often* as it perfectly captures my early days of tech. marketing and my current days of womanchild launching

• How I struggled to explain the concept of gratitude to my daughter when she was little in a simple, succinct fashion

The approach I landed on with her was something which felt simultaneously obvious (I’m sure I didn’t create it; I’ve decided never to Google) and tremendously powerful and re-framing even to me as an adult familiar with the notion of being thankful.

in my happy place: recording, connecting, airpod askew

Later this week, I was on the phone as I walked to the gym chatting through life with the anchor of my front row…as one does.

I shared about my day and reminisced about how I’d taught then 4 year old Emma about gratitude.

I shared with my friend how I used the idea of:

What if you woke this morning with *only* what you were grateful for yesterday?

I monologued how then-tiny Emma responded with an answer based on her previous night’s prayers:

I’d have my mama, my Charming and my good day at school

her mama and her Charming a decade later

My friend was silent.

I thought I’d dropped the call until I heard her say:

OK wow. I need to think about this. It is really, really powerful.

Here’s the thing, we are all busy.

Perhaps we would love to have an intricate gratitude practice involving meditation and magazine clippings and mantras and and and…and perhaps that just isn’t happening right now.

For me this is the gratitude practice and mindset-maker I do at the beginning of each day and probably will forever.

I ask myself:

What if I woke this morning with *only* what I was grateful for yesterday?

1. I pause to consider what my day would look like

2. I visualize my life without the gifts (blessings/whatever your phraseology is works here, too) I’d accidentally taken for granted

3. My appreciation and gratitude is immediately reinforced

4. Coffee (I’m nothing if not predictable)

Yes, cultivating an attitude of gratitude involves prioritizing pausing and consciously appreciating the good in our lives, no matter how small it seems.

This one simple yet expansive question has created, for me, a gratitude practice I can commit to *consistently* because I have the capacity to fit it into my daily life.

Now you.

What if YOU woke this morning with *only* what you were grateful for yesterday?