I hope all of your are coming off a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday, including some extra time of fun with your family.
For many of us, Thanksgiving is the best holiday of the year. I don’t think it’s only because of the massive amounts of great food, or even because it’s a chance to be with family that we don’t always see. I suspect it is also because many of us take at least a few minutes to reflect on the many blessings we experience in our lives and this is a positive experience for our psyche.
I am a huge fan of being intentionally thankful for the amazing things I have in my life, and I’ve decided today is a good day to write about that, and about why I believe being grateful is so important.
To do this I’m going to refer to a great book that one of you compelled me to read earlier this year. The book is The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor—a great book on many levels. Like the LEAD 365 alumnus that highly recommended it to me (and you know who you are), I am also highly recommending it to any of you who are looking for another great book to read.
In it, the author does a great job of making a case for why happiness is so important and then provides seven principles that support his contention, and also how one can work to wire his or her brain to being happy.
In his third principle, called “The Tetris Effect” (you’ll have to read it to lean why he calls it this), he dives into the advantages of being grateful for past blessings—among other things—and how that leads to being more aware of future opportunities for good fortune.
Achor refers to brain research that reveals that when you focus on positive events, you’re more apt to see the positive opportunities in your future. People who don’t reflect on the positive things happening in their lives are much more likely to be blind to upcoming opportunities right in front of them.
Some of us have a natural propensity to see the positive things in our life, and others have a natural tendency to miss the positives and mostly see the negative aspects of life. Having a negative, or pessimistic, bent can be an advantage for certain types of jobs—like being a lawyer, an auditor, or even an engineer whose job is to find problems to be fixed.
However, there are many roles where this negative lens hurts one’s overall performance—and it often leads to a less happy life. Achor claims that those with a more optimistic view are more likely to experience higher levels of success because of this ability to see the positive opportunities and then take advantage of them. The examples he offers are interesting and entertaining.
Here is a key paragraph from The Happiness Advantage:
Psychologist Robert Emmons, who has spent nearly his entire career studying gratitude, has found that few things are as integral to our well-being than gratitude. Countless other studies have shown that consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotional intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely. And it’s not that people are only grateful because they are happier, either; gratitude has proven to be a significant cause of positive outcomes. When researchers pick random volunteers and train them to be more grateful over a period of a few weeks, they become happier and more optimistic, feel more socially connected, enjoy better quality sleep, and even experience fewer headaches than control groups.
Achor claims you can rewire your brain to be more optimistic and therefore become more likely to experience greater success and happiness. He gives some very pragmatic exercises that basically fall under the count-your-blessings umbrella.
By doing this, you will start to see more potential in yourself, in your people, and in your situation. Daily practice of focusing on the good things that happen in your life will create a compounding effect that makes you a better performer and a better leader of others.
What are you grateful for? It’s worth thinking about more than once a year—maybe even daily. I hope you consider checking out this important book, and I hope you continue to count your blessings.
Make it a great week!
Rodg
Image by Evil Erin. Used under CC-BY-2.0 license.
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