Embracing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary: A Journey through Evening Gratitude - 186

As a performance coach and special operations combat veteran , I help high performing executives kick ass in their careers while connecting with deeply powerful insights that fuel their lives . Alright , today I'm going to give you a very short , blessedly short episode .

Some of the feedback that I've gotten over the years of doing the show is sometimes the episodes are a little long for people's busy schedules , and while I do not always adhere to that , I guess is what I would say , I do try , because I do understand that you have a lot going on and today is going to be super , super short .

Now , today's episode is actually more of an exercise . It's very doable , action oriented and I think it also hits home toward , you know , this whole inner heart and soul exploration that we do , where we also try to blend in performance .

It's not an exercise that I created although I wish I had because it , I think , is a really good one but it's one that I recently came across through one of my coaches actually . So the power of gratitude , gratitude journaling , gratitude , meditation , etc . Etc .

There's been a lot of conversation in popular culture these days around gratitude and its impact , its ability to improve our mood , improve our general outlook , reduce stress and so on , and I would argue that , yes , gratitude is a tremendously powerful tool , but there are so many ways of expressing gratitude and there are also some pitfalls Sometimes .

One of the biggest pitfalls that I see is people waiting to express gratitude only for big ticket items in their life oh , I got the big promotion , I'm so grateful . Or we moved into the new house so grateful . Or my child was born healthy , so grateful .

And while all those things are definitely things for which you should be grateful , I guess , if you so choose , they are typically events that are pretty far apart , and so if you're waiting for those big ticket items to hit home before you can access a sense of gratitude , you can understand how that might lead to a fair amount of dry spell , I guess we could

call it , and so what I'm always attempting to do is I'm attempting to get people to focus in on smaller items , and the imagery that I always come up with is this notion of a brick wall . The bricks are the really big ticket items and they tend to draw our attention because they're so big .

But what really truly holds a brick wall together is the mortar between the bricks , and that usually doesn't catch our attention as much because it's small . But that is actually the binding element . And so when we look at these little things for which we could be grateful , there's often tremendous power in those little things .

And if I look at the years of coaching individuals and teams , what I found is it's often the little things , when they aggregate , that make the biggest difference in the long run , not these massive singular changes that usually don't stick . It's little changes held on to over time , that really shift the needle or the trajectory , if that makes more sense .

So the exercise that I want you to consider , or I invite you to consider , is as follows Before you go to sleep tonight , think about this prompt . If you write it out , great . If you just think about it or reflect on it or sort of meditate on it , that's fine too . But here's the prompt .

If tomorrow you could only have that for which you expressed gratitude tonight , what would be on your list ? The point is not that you need to create a finite list or rank order , although the prompt can certainly serve to clarify what you value most .

More so , the prompt is there to highlight how many sources of gratitude we could access if we didn't take so much for granted . Because when I think about , okay , if I only have tomorrow what I expressed gratitude for tonight , and that can be an inward expression it doesn't have to be outward necessarily , although that can certainly help .

There's been a lot of research that's been done on how do we externalize things that are in our head and how does that make things seem more real , whether it's writing it down , whether it's talking about it with a loved one or a friend or a colleague or whatever .

In fact , the coach that gave me this exercise he will often tweet in the morning or , I guess , send an X or I don't know what we're calling it these days , but he will express on social media one thing for which he's grateful in the morning and that's sort of one of his ways of making it real .

But ultimately , if you do this exercise at night , what you might find is that your attention flows to those little things . Because if I think about , okay , god , what if I didn't express gratitude for my ability to walk , which I currently possess .

I really want to wake up tomorrow , being able to walk and some of you may know that I had a pretty severe back injury when I was in the military and was temporarily paralyzed and could not walk for a few hours and , given the job that I had when I was in combat as an explosive ordinance disposal technician although I always find it funny that the word

technician is in our title , but anyway , I've watched people lose their limbs .

So when I think about huh , yeah , what if I didn't express gratitude for my ability to walk or see or smell or taste , you know , with the recent I guess it's not so recent , but you know the last couple of years of COVID and people permanently losing their sense of smell and taste , you might think , oh yeah , well , I mean , that's not a big deal .

It's not like losing your ability to see or hear and I can get on board with that kind of rank order . But when you start to hear the stories of these individuals , much of the joy in their life has been removed because they cannot sense , smell or taste .

And if you think about your own life , you know , like if you've ever had , I guess , a flu or maybe a cold , when you temporarily lose those senses and everything just is kind of gray . You know that can be shitty .

So ultimately , I invite you to go through this exercise because what I think it will do is I think it will highlight that you have far more in your life for which to be grateful and that it will also highlight , probably , a number of things about your relationships , about your living circumstances that you've probably been taking for granted , and to bring them

forward into your consciousness , into your awareness , and to say , oh , wow , yeah , this little thing that I rely on every day , man , that means something to me and I definitely want it to show up tomorrow . So hopefully that helps .

If you've been enjoying the show , would love it If you would subscribe , follow , share , et cetera , et cetera , and until next time , take care of each other .