59: How to Quit Faking Gratitude & Ignite Real Abundant Blessings

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I know what it feels like to be faking gratitude. I know how it feels to have lost faith in humanity, to feel unseen, to feel afraid of your own voice, to feel so alone yet surrounded by others. I know what it’s like to be judged for everything you say aloud, to be criticized, to feel unsafe, to feel undervalued. I know how that feels and yet, I know how to still be so rooted and so certain of what lights me up inside. I know what it’s like to find gratitude in the midst of depression and anxiety.

How to Revive Feelings of Gratitude

Transcribed with Descript

Hey my friend. Happy Thanksgiving week as we’re heading into this. Are you feeling the stress? Are you, we gotta cut that out. We have to let go. We have to release it. Release what it is that’s holding you to that stress, because here’s the thing, stress, it’s not gonna help you. The stress and the worry and the anxiety over the event will not help you to plan the event will not help things to go the way you envision them.

So please be deep breathing. Hold that vision for what you want it to look like. Take action steps to get. To to, to, you know, create the event you want it to look like. Whether that’s something super chill or something very extravagant, that’s up to you. And whatever you want is fine, but you do need to not stress over it.

Let it be what it is. Let it be something you can enjoy. And that’s not totally what we’re here for today. We’re coming into Thanksgiving and it’s time to be grateful.

Are you feeling it? Are you feeling the gratitude, the gratefulness, the thankfulness? Are you feeling so abundantly blessed in your life right now or not? I’ve been through too many Thanksgivings where I just felt like I was faking it. I felt like such a fraud. I felt like it was so dumb that here we are.

As you know, a civilized society, setting aside a day to be thankful where we stuff our faces and then immediately go shopping the next day.

I know what it feels like to feel like you’re faking your Thanksgiving, and I don’t do that anymore. Let’s chat about that. For the first five years of my adult life, I worked in retail.  and I saw, I saw it was hard. It was really hard to be grateful around Thanksgiving when it was our busiest time of year when I just saw the craziness of like Black Friday and it’s just insane.

I had lost my faith in humanity at that point. Um, just people so unappreciative and it was customers. Customers were the hard part because they were so unappreciative of me showing up on Thanksgiving Day to stand in a Queue line for.  and have the product ready for them. Me, you know, literally sacrificing my life in a lot of ways.

People die on Black Friday in America and for them to be so unappreciative, oh, it hurt and I didn’t wanna be there.

And I feel like even before that, I hated my voice for such a long time, that even before I got that bad taste of hyper consumerism in the holidays.

Growing up, I hated my voice and I never wanted to be seen or heard. I tried to be invisible. Remember Princess Diaries where Mia Thermopolis in the beginning is so invisible that like she gets sat on by people. That was my dream. Like I wanted to be that invisible, that nobody ever noticed me.

And so then when we’d go around the family table and try to say what we’re thankful for one at a time, and I’d be put on the spot to say something. It was really hard and it made me hate the gratitude because I hated being put on the spot and even in school. You’d come back to school from like a weekend, a holiday weekend, or you know, Christmas break or something, and teachers would want everyone to go around and say like, what was one good thing that you guys did over the break? I hated it. I hated it. And that again, put another bad taste in my mouth for gratitude.

I had a lot of things throughout my whole life setting me up against gratitude, and for a long time I played right into that. I let, I let myself get fooled into thinking gratitude was not the answer,

and I was so wrong. I was so wrong.  because when you are actively repelling gratitude, you become the one who you kind of get selfish. It’s hard not to be selfish when you are not grateful,

and it’s really hard to see the good in other people. It’s hard to give them the benefit of the doubt. It kind of puts you on defense mode when you are not practicing gratitude. It, it lets you think that everyone’s out to get you, and that bad things will always happen to you because you’re not being intentional about seeing the good.

And I lived that life for a really long time, and I wanna let you know that if you’re just not feeling the gratitude, you’re feeling the stress you’re feeling. You’re feeling pessimistic and agitated and you’re trying gratitude and you can’t. I just want you to know like you’re not alone. I have been there and I feel that creeping in every now and again too when I am not actively being intentional about gratitude.

My old ways try to slip back in.

That’s why I preach gratitude so adamantly. So if you’re feeling like this year, you’re kind of dreading that gratitude, I want you to try this one practice. I have many, many practices, so many gratitude practices I can share with. But I wanna keep this simple. I want you to do this one gratitude practice today.

Before you do any more holiday planning, before you go to the next dinner, before you do anything else, I want you to do this one practice for me, and it’s pretty simple. I just want you to think of the three best things in your life. What are your three best things? I’ve been asking for things that you already feel grateful for, just what are three good things in your life?

Now, I want you to take a minute, and I want you to really envision your life without those three things. I want you to walk yourself through a day in your life. Without those,

What changes in your life? How does your day become harder? How does your day become gloomier? What does your life look like? Without those three things, give yourself some time to reflect on that. Give yourself time to feel the feelings of losing those three things. . Okay.

Now I want you to go ahead and write it down. Get a pen and paper, and I want you to write down every single way that your life is better for having these three things. How are these things that you said are the best things in your life, making your life better? How do they brighten your day? How do they make you feel?

How do they make your life easier? How do they make it more worthwhile? How are they fulfilling your life? That my friend is grateful. That feeling you feel when you write down all the positive things about your three favorite things. That’s gratitude. I don’t care if you thought that saying one of these things around the dinner table would be cliche or would be shallow.

You know, oftentimes when I’d get asked to go around that Thanksgiving dinner table, everything that would come to mind, I would feel like I was being judged by it. And I would feel like either it was cliche like, oh, I’m so thankful for my husband, I’m thankful for my family. Or I would feel like it was shallow.

Like I’m thankful for my washing machine. I’m thankful for my reliable car. But the thing is, these things impact my life greatly.

And so no one has to understand how deeply grateful you are for the things that you say you’re grateful for. That is between you. That is, that is up to you. For you to feel grateful for these things. Those feelings are yours and yours alone. But those are your personal feelings. Those personal feelings are for you and you alone, and you don’t have to justify them to anybody.

You don’t have to explain yourself. If someone’s gonna judge you for what you say you’re grateful for, that is 100% on. It doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. Does someone judging you for what you say you’re grateful for, make you less grateful? No. It makes them a jackhole. Okay. That makes them immature.

That makes them underdeveloped. That makes them spiritually lacking.

So don’t play into their game. If you feel like you’re being judged by someone for what you’re grateful for, oh well, you be grateful for it. You do what’s good for you. What’s good for you is to choose love and to choose gratitude, and to choose grace. Let them think what they’re gonna think. And chances are people aren’t even thinking that much about it.

And if they are thinking about you that much and judging you for what you’re grateful for, then that’s just because they’re avoiding, they are avoiding their own internal conflicts, and I feel so sad for them. So keep ’em in your prayers. All right my friend. Do this gratitude practice. Get grounded in what you’re grateful for.

Choose to see the good, choose to focus on the good. And I know it gets feeling hard when things get stressful and you say, how do I even not stress? Like I get it When there’s stress. It’s hard to choose not to, but it is a choice. Stress is a choice. Peace is a choice. Gratitude is a choice. And it’s like lifting weights.

You have to start small. You have to build those muscles. Doesn’t all happen overnight. You build that strength over time. Okay? Your mindset is a muscle. Build it. Work at it little by little. Don’t overdo it. Give yourself rest days. All right, friend. Have a very happy, wonderful Thanksgiving chat with you again real soon.