Good Morning, Team! It’s Friday!

I mentioned last week that happiness is a goal (“I know I want to be happy”) but it’s more of a journey than a destination to be ready for at the end of your life. We all want absolution, too, but along the way, we strive to thrive not just put in our time.

I think that starts with gathering information and gets better when we process it and put the info to good use.

To that point,

Dr. Amit Sood of the Mayo Clinic wrote “Handbook for Happiness” and referred to something called cultivating emotional resilience. He makes it easy to digest with five steps, the first being…

Gratitude

Dr Sood describes it like this:

“Gratitude is being blessed and knowing you are blessed.”

Perspective is a huge part of this effort. Knowing you are blessed means you know how good you have it, and appreciating it. Things we take for granted that others don’t have?

•more than 1 Billion people don’t have safe drinking water

•more than 800 Million people don’t have enough food

•more than 100 Million people don’t have a place to live

“With true gratitude, you find reasons to be thankful instead of waiting for something extraordinary.”

“Use your hurts as lessons to help you grow.”

Finally, he writes, “Most transformations are seeded by adversity.”

I was labeled as “driven” by my Dad early in life. I was encouraged to increase the denominator of the fraction (want more). The simple truth we’ve all heard is that money (often tied to the “more”) can’t buy happiness. Success is a good thing but the love of money leads to misery.

My takeaway? To practice and increase gratitude, you should lower your expectations, be content with enough, look for opportunities to be grateful, starting with the small stuff. Food, water and shelter isn’t small stuff for a lot of people on the planet but if you’re reading this, you are incredibly blessed and probably not stressing about basic needs.

See if you can identify some other little blessings, remember them often and increase your gratitude.

Have a blessed weekend!

Eric