Success Champions
growing gratitude By Heather Vickery
W Developing a practice that regularly invites gratitude into your life helps you focus on the gifts and blessings that constantly surround you.
e’ve all been there. We’ve all woken up “on the wrong side of the bed,” gotten extremely pissed off when someone cut in front of us in line, or while waiting at a stoplight. There are a million things each day that can make us angry. But what happens when we allow those little, or not so little, things to take up precious time and space in our lives and our minds? Well, thoughts become things, folks. So, if you focus on all the icky things, you’re going to come up with nothing but more icky things. I have a better idea. In fact, my idea is backed by science and guaranteed to increase your wellbeing (and even reduce your risk of heart failure). Seriously, it’s true! Check out this article from Harvard Medical School! What’s the big idea?
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Gratitude. If you want to feel better, be happier and be more successful than you ever thought possible, develop a consistent gratitude practice! Yep, that’s right. Developing a practice that regularly invites gratitude into your life helps you focus on the gifts and blessings that constantly surround you. It crowds out the negative thoughts and keeps positivity in the forefront of your mind. Our brains cannot hold both negative and positive thoughts at once. While life will always be messy there’s a lot of joy to be found even among the ups and downs. When we feel joyous, everything we touch is better. Let’s play a game. Take a moment and list out something that you consider to be an epic failure in your life or perhaps something that was extremely painful. Now ask yourself, what goodness came from those things? Sit with that until you can list at least 5 positive from those negative experiences. I’ll play with along you. After a decade of marriage and four kids, I came out (yes, of the closet). Eventually, that led to divorce - because staying married to the wrong gender isn’t good for anyone, but boy did it suck! A couple of short years after I closed the luxury wedding planning business that I’d owned for nearly 20 years. Those were two of the most difficult and painful experiences of my life. It was hard,
