The Power of Gratitude

I heard a startling statistic today and that was that women own less than 1% of the world’s properties. I heard this during a presentation about how empowering women can literally change the world, most especially in underprivileged countries where deep poverty is rampant. This article has nothing to do with empowering women, but empowering ourselves, no matter what your gender…empowering ourselves to come from a place of gratitude.

What this statistic stirred in me is an incredible sense of thankfulness and pride. Being a homeowner and a woman I underestimate the power that I have as an individual and often forget to be thankful for what seems like such an everyday occurrence. I don’t know about you, but I often times find myself focusing on what’s not working.  If there are 99 things working and one thing that’s not, guess what we often focus on? You guessed it…the one thing that’s not.

The problem with this way of thinking is that the Law of Attraction says that what we focus on we just continue to manifest and draw towards us. So if we focus on what’s not working we will most certainly create in our lives more of what’s not working.  It’s all we will see. On the flip side, focusing on what is working and being grateful for that, as well as everything in life, chances are we will create more of that!

In my years of study around this subject I have come to see that it takes a real conscious effort to be grateful. In fact, it takes a proactive approach. Deciding in advance to be grateful for what comes your way, whether it be situations, or people and their behavior, or what you already have in your life, will absolutely shape the course of your life. 

This includes being grateful for those little irritations that we experience. When someone behaves in a way that you don’t like, chose to be grateful for the lesson that is there for you to learn. Or when we have to wait in the airport because of a delayed flight, choosing to be grateful for all the ways that the Universe takes care of us even though we don’t understand why; there are reasons for everything.  You can imagine how grateful all of those people who escaped the 9/11 tragedy due to some inconvenience that had them be late for work that morning must be.

It’s a great exercise to take a personal inventory of all of the things you have in your life to be grateful for and do this on a weekly, monthly, or even daily basis. My husband and I have a tradition that every morning we leave the other person a note with 1 or 2 things that we are grateful for about the other. If I didn’t do this, I am positive that I would focus more on what I don’t appreciate. Adopt this exercise with your co-workers, employees, or family for 30 days and see how it feels. You just may find a magnificent difference in how those people are showing up and how you feel about them.