Guilted Into Gratitude…

Gratitude gets a bad rap.

You hear the attraction and new age folk talk about how important gratitude is to getting what you want from the Universe.  In the process, they make you feel guilty because you aren’t living in a state of gratitude all the time. You beat yourself up, ask why they can do it and you can’t and then resolve to “discipline” yourself into doing better next time.

The charities all remind us to be grateful for what we have and to give to those less fortunate. The blog posts start coming out saying, “okay folks, Thanksgiving is coming. Time to start counting your blessings.”

It seems like we have to be guilted into remembering to feel grateful. For me, guilt seems counterproductive here.

Gratitude is a much simpler thing — a perspective more than anything else. I think the most powerful sense of gratitude comes in a simple recognition of the things that make you go wow in your life. We are reminded when we simply look around us from a place of recognition and wow not from a place of guilt.

In the science of perception and the brain, they tell us that “we find what we look for.” So this holiday season I would propose a new kind of experiment. Instead of trying to remind ourselves fervently to be thankful for what we have, resolved to force thoughts into submission and discipline our way into gratitude, try a gentler way. Orient yourself and your thinking to look for all the wonder in your life, from simple to complex. Look for all the “wows” in your everyday and see if that doesn’t engender a natural gratitude that isn’t forced or manipulated.

Let’s all look for the “wows,” and we’ll find more than we could have imagined. I welcome all comments below.