An Attitude of Gratitude: A Great Morning Kickstart

I recently attended a retreat where I was inspired by a question that our wise and wonderful leader posed:

"What's working?"

I thought on this for a bit, and listened as people shared some truly astonishing technical feats that created various forms of uplift in the lives of people and the various organizations where they worked and played.

I really wanted to raise my hand. I had something good to share, but it seemed too simple.

I sat and listened a little longer, and was finally inspired to re-evaluate my own criteria for what made something good enough to share. I decided that the fact that it was small and simple wasn't a character flaw, but rather the thing that might make something inherently easy to reproduce.

I finally got brave and raised my hand, and decided to tell people a little bit about how I start each of my days.

The past few years have been rather blue. I've been through a few major surgeries, one that left the lower half of my face paralysed for a number of months, and the other that left me in a great deal of pain. One of my sons had been profoundly ill, cause still unknown, and missed almost half a year of school as a result. In addition, I'd shared a six year journey with my mom as she struggled with cancer, and found myself aching deeply as it came to an end in ways I couldn't possibly have prepared myself for.

I certainly was not in a "grateful" place in my life.

I found the days harder and harder to navigate. I found myself sinking into a well of self-pity, even to the point where I became bitter about what I "expected" from my life. That's when it occurred to me that, the way I'd been living it before this mess was infact the way back out of it.

I had become full of attitude, rather than gratitude, and it took a simple moment of reflection to realize the age old truth of deflecting your attention from oneself onto something or someone else where that attention could be invested in a better way.

So, I turned to the one thing that I knew could help me launch this personal mission of gratitude and hold me accountable: my computer. Each morning when I log on I go to my homepage, which is set at my customized view of "My Yahoo!". Beyond the various newsclippings it has found for the things I am interested in tracking, and the daily recipes and snippets it dispatches, it's first glance is my calendar, and the task list for each day. I've set up a few recurring ticklers to help me organize my thoughts for the day: what am I going to make for supper? have I watered the violets? had I taken a multivitamin? did I update my virus scan program? had I clicked at Care2.com yet today?

These were the things that greeted me each morning, and set the tone for the day.

I decided that something else needed to be added to this list. Here's what I placed at the top:

"Who are you going to thank today?"

It seemed like a simple enough question, but the impact it had on my life was profound.

Each morning I gave myself the task of finding a reason to be grateful. I thought about people that had come in and out of my life the past few days, and others who perhaps I hadn't thought about in a very long time. I thought about teachers who had influenced me, and people who dotted my life's path and shaped the course it would take along the way. I thought about the girl in the coffee shop who had smiled at me and simply said something nice. I thought about the guy in the telephone repair truck who jumped out to open my car door for me so I could get in. I thought about the woman who stood up a city council and talked about why killing the pigeons on the church steps wasn't the right way to go. I thought about my kids, and how their simple, daily examples encouraged me to be curious, and passionate, and hopeful again.

So I started to say thank you, and something amazing happened along the way. People responded and reached back in generous and heartfelt ways. People who'd been feeling unnoticed in their own lives felt appreciated again. People who I hadn't connected with in years came back into my life and enriched it in ways too many to tell. People I'd seen as strangers were becoming friends I'd yet to meet.

The cascade of uplift was profound. This simple thing had not only rescued me from myself, but healed relationships, and cultivated special new ones, and even lead to new projects and opportunities in my life.

So knowing how powerful such a small and simple act can be, I'll ask you this:

Who are YOU going to thank today?

Sue.