What a wonderful life I've had! I only wish I'd realised it sooner - Colette
Please see below selected recent gratitude-related change.
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April 2024
- To appreciate what we have is to recognise the value of the people, things and world around us as well as our own attributes - and to treat all of these with the care and consideration they deserve. In this sense, appreciation means not just being grateful for, because gratitude does not necessarily imply an attitude of care and consideration. Appreciation may begin with thankfulness for what we have, but it goes beyond that to a broader understanding of how the world works and what is valuable in that. Appreciation can also lead us to a critical attitude in a way that gratitude does not, because we may recognise that the world and its inhabitants are not cared for as they should be.
March 2024
- Very occasionally, we may land on something highly familiar and accessible to us, which we have not drawn value from in years, and are suddenly overwhelmed by a newfound sense of its importance, beauty and worth. It might be the view from the window, the way the sunlight is falling on the curtain, the stillness of the evening at the top of the house or the hand of our lover as it rests on the table in front of us. The memory of our previous neglect, combined with our new heightened awareness, pushes us to acknowledge some unknown flaws in our mechanisms of appreciation. We can then realise that we may already be far richer than we think; that our dissatisfactions may be more the result of a failure to draw value from what we already have than from the absence of what we long for.
- We sometimes imagine, especially when we're young, that happiness is made up of huge things, like lots of money, fame, amazing love stories. But with time, we may come to realise that small pleasures are at the root of keeping on going with life; we're ready to feel grateful for the little things, claimed The School of Life.
December 2022
- Further reading:
May 2022
- While the corporate world stepped up its perks as it attempted to retain talent, research showed that when it comes to recognition - less is more. Personal and unexpected gestures of appreciation can have an outsized effect on employee satisfaction, team camaraderie, and loyalty to the company, reported The Economist.
November 2021
- For HBR, the research is clear: Gratitude is good for you. It improves wellbeing, reduces stress, and builds resilience. It can even make you more patient.
July 2021
- Psyche questioned the status of "empty-handed" gratitude. We can certainly feel gratitude while doing nothing about it. This is not wholly satisfactory, for in prioritising the ‘inner’ world of sentiment as the true arena of action and designating the ‘outer’ one as a mere symptom or afterthought, we might well be losing our connection, not only to the world ‘outside’ but also to something vital about our emotions.
June 2021
- The School of Life believes that the pleasure that can be triggered by good weather is, at one level, absurd. Gratitude for the sun belongs to a category of satisfaction that feels humiliatingly simple. It’s tempting to deny the significance of the weather altogether - especially for philosophers - and to focus instead on more substantial political and economic issues, by which the course of our lives is overwhelmingly determined. We should surely be able to rise above minor frustrations like eleven days of rain and a persistent glacial wind from the north. But in reality, our behaviour reveals a devotion to a simple, even simplistic, truth: our faith in ourselves and our prospects is frequently determined by nothing grander than the number of photons of light in the sky and degrees of warmth in the air.
April 2021
- The School of Life believes that we are geniuses at focusing on what is missing from our lives. Our dissatisfaction generally serves us well; it keeps us from complacency and boredom. But we are also dragged down by a pernicious inability ever reliably to stop, take stock and recognise what isn’t imperfect and appalling. In our haste to secure the future, we fail to notice what has not yet failed us, what isn’t actually out of reach: what is already very good. We should be sure to create small occasions when we pause our striving and, for a few moments, properly take on board some of what we have be grateful for.
December 2020
- For the School of Life, gratitude is a mood that grows with age. It is extremely rare properly to delight in flowers or a quiet evening at home, a cup of tea or a walk in the woods when one is very young. There are so many larger, grander things to be concerned about: romantic love, career fulfillment and political change. However, gradually, almost all one’s earlier, larger aspirations take a hit, perhaps a very large hit. ‘Little things’ start to seem somewhat different; no longer a petty distraction from a mighty destiny, no longer an insult to ambition, but a genuine pleasure amidst a litany of troubles.
- Harvard Business Review argues that research shows that people can purposefully cultivate feelings of gratitude with simple interventions. One involves forming “gratitude groups,” in which participants attend sessions to discuss, write about, and practice expressing gratitude with role-playing activities. Another involves writing a thank-you letter to someone and then reading it aloud to them. Perhaps the simplest and most well-known intervention involves keeping a gratitude journal, in which a person spends a few minutes each day jotting down the things, people, and events they’re thankful for.
- In Leading with Gratitude, authors Adrian Gostick and Chester Elton contend that the best way to boost morale, increase productivity and create a positive work environment is to show your employees that you’re grateful for them. Fulfilling people’s desire for recognition and appreciation brings about better results. Yet, many leaders fall victim to what Gostick and Elton call “Ingratitude Myths,” which prevent them from harnessing this powerful tool. The authors provide eight transformative strategies for “leading with gratitude” to help create a workplace culture populated by upbeat, motivated and productive employees, noted getabstract.
November 2020
- By the end of 2020, many people's connection to one another and to life itself had been made particularly poignant. The pandemic magnified not only the interdependence of our wellbeing and survival, but the global weave of our losses and grief. In the face of this shared sorrow, gratefulness can expand our capacity to embrace poignancy, invite peak awareness, acknowledge privilege and plenty, align with our principles, and open up to pleasure.
October 2020
- Wake Up Grateful: The Transformative Practice of Taking Nothing for Granted is a source of teachings for everyday life and for specific areas where we can all struggle. It shares insights from facing death and surviving cancer at a young age and about the challenges we face in our world.
May 2020
- Gratitude can be misplaced if you focus on the positive when the reality is negative. Someone may stay in an unhappy or even abusive relationship as a result of misplaced gratitude where low self-esteem leads them to feel lucky to have a partner. Conversely, many relationships end when couples no longer feel grateful for their involvement and may lack the motivation to maintain it. And, we’re not saints or zen spirits. Sometimes, it’s just plain difficult to be grateful, and you want to scream about what you don’t have and what you want and that you have lost.
December 2019
- Brother David Steindl-Rast is a Benedictine monk and one of the leading figures in a worldwide gratitude movement. Long before gratitude became a hot topic of scientific research, Brother David was writing about gratefulness as the heart of prayer and a path to liberation, helping to promote the practice of gratitude as a way of healing oneself and society. Perhaps best known for helping create interfaith dialogues to increase understanding between religious traditions, he received the Martin Buber Award in 1975 for his work in this area. Today, he’s helping create a worldwide movement called the Network for Grateful Living through an interactive online forum that reaches several thousand participants daily from more than 240 countries.
September 2019
- The grateful living movement asks us to purposefully direct our awareness to notice all that is already fully present and abundant in our lives – from the tiniest things of beauty to the grandest of our blessings – and in so doing, to take nothing for granted. Grateful living as a practice affirms that we can be in charge of our attention, and can point it towards that which serves the fullness of our learning, our lives, our relationships, and the world.
May 2019
- The School of Life argues that we are geniuses at focusing on what is missing from our lives. Our dissatisfaction generally serves us well; it keeps us from complacency and boredom. But we are also dragged down by a pernicious inability ever reliably to stop, take stock and recognise what isn’t imperfect and appalling. In our haste to secure the future, we can fail to notice what has not yet failed us, what isn’t actually out of reach: what is already very good.
- Every year, Operation Gratitude sends 300,000+ individually addressed Care Packages to military personnel, their children left behind, first responders, veterans, “Wounded Heroes,” and their caregivers. Filled with items donated by people in the United States (U.S.) and service-friendly companies who want to express their support, the Care Packages have served as the foundation for an organisation working to bridge the civilian-service divide. With an emphasis on service, Operation Gratitude helps remind us of the human beings behind war and conflict. Through collection drives, letter writing campaigns, craft projects, and Care Package assembly events, Operation Gratitude provides civilians anywhere in the U.S. who feel moved to say “Thank You” with ways to do so.
- Gratefulness is far more than a passing feeling of gratitude. Gratefulness is a transformative approach to life. Vast and unconditional, it makes room for everything — beauty, suffering, mystery, difficulty, and wonder. It opens us to blessing and appreciation, and allows us to learn and grow directly in the midst of the “great fullness” of our lives.Grateful living offers guideposts and touchstones to help fill our moments with greater presence, resilience, engagement, joy, and more. As a path and practice, it can transform lives. And it does.
April 2019
- It can be very hard to say thank you. In the psychoanalytic vocabulary, gratitude is the capacity to admit the merits of another person, and to recognise the good they have done you. This can be scary: it is hard to accept the scale of the debt we owe others (especially, sometimes, our parents).
December 2018
- Gratefulness.org argued that responding to life’s ups and downs with gratitude requires presence, vigilance, and commitment. When things are going well, gratitude comes easily, but during times of stress or struggle we may face resistance that comes from anger, disappointment, comparing, feeling overwhelmed, or not accepting what is. When that happens, gratefulness can become a choice we make, nurtured and strengthened with practice.
- Look at T-shirts and and book titles these days and it is easy to conclude that gratitude is trending, but the reach and relevance of the positive psychology effects of the gratitude wave may be self-limiting as soon as people experience and encounter difficulty or pain, warned Gratefulness.org, adding that it can be relatively easy to hold an “attitude of gratitude” when we have what we need and get what we want, but it is quite another proposition to still feel grateful when life brings us and others circumstances none of us would willingly choose. The challenge is - and always has been - to be grateful especially when life does not deliver on hopes, on expectations, and on fairness.
October 2018
- We are geniuses at focusing on what is missing from our lives, argued The School of Life. Our dissatisfaction generally serves us well; it keeps us from complacency and boredom. But we are also dragged down by a pernicious inability ever reliably to stop, take stock and recognise what isn’t imperfect and appalling. In our haste to secure the future, we fail to notice what has not yet failed us, what isn’t actually out of reach: what is already very good. We should therefore be sure to create small occasions when we pause our striving and, for a few moments, properly take on board some of what we have be grateful for.
- Gratitude was the final book by the neurologist and writer of popular science, Oliver Sacks: they offer his reflections on a life well lived from one who knew its end would come shortly.
- Further reading:
September 2018
- For The School of Life (TSOL), there are a number of reasons why workers lose motivation, but a central one, one of the most important, comes down to the feeling of not being valued. Gratitude might sound like a small thing, a little add-on with no seismic role to play in the fortunes of companies, but its absence in sufficient doses can be responsible for extreme declines in productivity. When people don’t feel valued they stop putting forward their best efforts.
- TSOL also note that the standard habit of the mind is to take careful note of what’s not right in our lives and obsess about all that is missing. But in a new mood, perhaps after a lot of longing and turmoil, we pause and notice some of what has – remarkably – not gone wrong. Gratitude is a mood that grows with age.
- Further reading:
August 2018
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In June 2018, Gratefulness released a five-question Community Impact Survey. With this survey, it hoped to deepen its understanding of people’s experience with grateful living and the impact of its offerings. 99% of respondents affirmed that learning about and practising grateful living has positively impacted their life. 84% stated that gratefulness contributes positively to their emotional health, which was conveyed through stories of coping with loss, addiction, physical pain, and depression.
- Alain de Botton argues that one of the differences between religious and secular lives is that in the former, one says thank you all the time: when eating, going to bed, waking up etc. He believes that the rest of do not say thank you for a sunset because we think there will be many more.
- Many are now not only imagining but also actively working towards "an economy designed to promote not unchecked growth, but a steady state of wellbeing", characterised by gratitude. They believe that such an economy must come to realisation through the most far-seeing entrepreneurs of our time, from people who dare to think beyond the confines of the old box.
- “Grateful Changemakers” celebrates projects/programmes serving as beacons of gratefulness for their communities and the world.
- Many meanwhile advise that, religious or not, we should start and finish each day with a "prayer", e.g. "Thank you for today" and "allow me to put all my heart, all my mind, all my soul and all my strength in the service of others, in my thoughts, in my prayers, in my conversations, in my writings and works." - Robert Muller
- Gratitude.org says that no matter what age we are, we can find many ways to feel grateful:
- Ages 4-12 www.gratefulness.org/t/links_for_kids.htm
- Teenagers www.gratefulness.org/t/teen_links.htm
- Parents and teachers www.gratefulness.org/t/caring_for_youth_links.htm
- Elders www.gratefulness.org/t/elder_links.htm
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