How to use gratitude to deal with challenges
Gratitude is an under-utilized yet powerful tool you can use to overcome challenges.
Are you having a tough time dealing with a situation or dealing with someone who is constantly negative ? Negative or challenging situations are seldom resolved by taking a negative approach. When you inject additional negativity, the situation invariably escalates into an even bigger problem.
But at the same time, it is not at all helpful to gloss over negative situations or challenges nor pretend they don’t exist. Enter gratitude. When you properly use gratitude, you develop a mindset to help you extract meaning from your situation—which will help you more effectively deal with your challenge.
Extracting meaning and making sense of any situation differently simply requires you to “reframe” the situation.
Do this by asking yourself a series of questions. There’s the obvious questions like:
how can I prevent this from happening again ?
what can I learn from the situation ?
Then there’s the not so obvious questions like:
what am I now able to do that I was otherwise unable to do—all because of this ?
where is the good in this situation ?
what and who am I able to count on for assistance ?
who in the world would do almost anything to have my problem ?
what does having this problem say about who I am and the privilege I hold ?
Bottom line, these questions are different ways of asking, “what am I grateful for ?”
Whether you get stood up for a meeting, lose a client, have to unexpectedly drive your daughter when you’re crazy busy, or even have a house fire—seriously, step back, give yourself a moment and put your gratitude muscles to work. If you come up with nothing, that’s ok. Give it 24 hours and come back to the questions again.
To deal with your situation—use your answers to develop and maintain a positive emotional mindset and tap into the resources that you’ve listed to help you overcome the challenge.
What other questions have you used to reframe a challenge or catastrophe ?
