Thanksgiving has always been one of my favorite times of the year.
And it’s not just because of the abundance of food or being able to spend time with family, although I DO appreciate both those things.
It’s really for what’s in the name “Thanks” – being thankful, being grateful.
Did you know, as entrepreneurs, being grateful and thankful is one of the most powerful ways to maintain your flow of prosperity into both your business and your life?
When you’re truly grateful and authentically thankful for all that you have, all those to come, all of your clients, all of the business and everything, that you’ll have a very difficult time being negative and disempowered at the same time both mentally, emotionally, physically, and energetically.
So, today I’m going to talk about gratitude journals. Many of you may already know what that is, but do you know why and how it works?
Gratitude journaling is not just about “Okay, I write a journal and suddenly everything works!”.
But why does it work? Why does it work so well?
If you don’t already have a gratitude journal, make sure you get one especially if you’re an entrepreneur. The physical act of translating all that is in your mental body and emotional body into words, into a written medium with your hand with a pen or pencil, is extremely powerful because it forces you to actualize, it forces you to make what is in your mind real so that you could actually feed it back. It’s a feedback mechanism not just to yourself but to everything around you of what you’re truly thankful and grateful for.
Now, here’s the thing. Some of you will say, “Well, I could totally game it. I can just write down things and not be invested in it.”
So, here’s how you create a checks and balances before you start “gaming yourself” too much in your gratitude journal:
Open up your gratitude journal and just write out something that you want to game yourself about. In other words, write down something you’re thankful or grateful for. It’s ok to have days when you say “Fine. I’m grateful for the sky is blue and there’s air to breathe.”
Unless it truly takes you to that emotional place, you really kind of just gaming yourself just doing it for the sake of doing it.
But I want you to pay attention to how you write that down. “I am grateful for the air that I breathe.”
Now, take yourself back to a time. Think about a time, a specific time where you were really thankful and really grateful for a set of circumstances so much so that your emotions were lifted to the point where you’re so happy that you were practically brought to tears and how thankful and grateful you were. Then at the height of that moment, that emotional state, I want you now then to write down what you were grateful for in that moment. “You’re grateful for…” Whatever that was.
Now, put the pen down and I want you to take a look at how you wrote the first one that you’re trying to game yourself about and how you wrote the second one and you’ll notice there’s a distinct difference.
You do this a few more times and you’ll start to notice a trend of when you’re truly authentically grateful and thankful and when you’re not.
This way, you can check yourself to see whether or not you’re truly using this gratitude journal or the expression of gratitude to the true benefit of what it’s designed to do.
This helps us express our gratitude and thankfulness in ways that you probably didn’t realize you were doing before.
And the reason is because what we do is in order for us to translate the abstract internal representations in our mind, the images and whatever it is to actual formulated words to then send the signals to our body to pick up physically the pen to actually write it down into the book, that’s a huge process to that and then that forces your entire being to invest into the commitment of that gratitude.
By doing so, you’ve actually put a stake out into the ground, to prosperity, to the universe, to everything around you a full expression of that, and that’s why the gratitude journal works so well in the process of creation. Something for you to kind of like chew on and maybe start to integrate into your daily life if you haven’t already as an entrepreneur.
So if you find that somebody could benefit from this discussion about having a gratitude journal to inspire them to actually create one or to actually do a better job at expressing gratitude and thankfulness, by all means pass this forward. Other than that, enjoy this holiday season. Be thankful, be grateful because wherever you are today, whether be in the start of your business or if you’re a seasoned veteran, there’s plenty, plenty to be thankful for. I personally am thankful and grateful for you actually taking the time to watch this video.
