How to prevent your gratitude practice from going stale
Last week I received an email from an audience member who participated in one of my programs on the previous day. He had a question:
I’m writing my gratitudes today and they don’t look much different than what I wrote yesterday. How do you avoid your gratitude practice becoming mechanical ?
This is a great question. You know it’s easy to start a habit and it’s much more difficult to maintain your new habit, especially if it feels like you’re just going through the motions.
While it helps if your gratitude practice feels fresh, it's perfectly ok if the gratitudes you record are similar for a couple days. It happens to me too. That said, I don’t want my practice to become rote as it will quickly lead to the demise of what I consider to be the reason for having a world-class mindset.
Here are two tactics to ensure your gratitude practice doesn’t go stale so you can maintain a mindset to live a thriving, fllourishing life:
Read other people’s gratitdues—this has been a game changer for me. Reading or listening to what other people are "grateful for" provides a constant supply of inspiration and fresh ideas. If you’d like to read my gratitudes, I send out a weekday email which I’m happy to send to you—register at https://www.gratitudeatwork.ca/the-daily-gratitudes/habitual-ritual
Mix it up—as humans, for an activity to feel fresh, we need to mix it up. For the past couple years, one of the ways I "mix it up" is by identifying a theme each day and having my gratitudes focus around a daily theme. I developed a simple resource to help you "mix it up" so you can keep your gratitude practice fresh. Grab the 4-page pdf 21 tips for making a gratitude list. In this resource, one of the tips is "go deeper". For example, for a particular gratitude that has appeared on your list for a few days, go deeper by looking for gratitude in the answers to the following 3 questions:
who are the people involved ?
what did these people do ?
what was the underlying motivation for what they did ?
I’m interested to hear about your gratitude practice and what you do to keep your gratitude practice fresh. Do tell.
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