Gratitude

It’s Thanksgiving Day, here in the U.S., the perfect opportunity to focus this week’s newsletter on gratitude.

Of all the mindset shifts that can change your financial life, choosing gratitude is at the top of the list.

It’s our culture and perhaps our nature to always want more, bigger, better.

But this is an insatiable drive that brings us constant stress and dissatisfaction. It devours the money we have and keeps us working for more nearly forever.

And yet the antidote is so simple: Be thankful.

When you direct your attention to what is good, what is working, what is fortunate in your life or the world around you, it literally changes your brain chemistry.

And when you choose to live in this light on the regular, the remaining unmet desires, the challenges and pains of life are simply easier to bear because they are counterbalanced. The difficulties are felt differently when you’re too busy pouring out gratitude for what is not difficult.

When I’m exhausted and catching every bug the kids bring home, I am frustrated, but I’m also thankful I’m not fighting cancer, as I know many others are right now, or perhaps I may be in another season.

When I’m frustrated by the far-from-Pinterest-perfect state of our house, I feel down, but I’m lifted when I think how this space feels like a palace compared to being homeless or driven from my home by war and violence, as others across the world and throughout history have been.

When I bemoan the cost of medical bills (hello, kiddo's tonsillectomy last week) or the unaffordable price tag for proprietary treatments that could cure my son’s food allergies, I remember how lucky we are to live in a time when, at least, lifesaving medication options and care are available to us.

There will always be things in life to pull us down. The world will stay a broken place.

But we can choose gratitude for all the good and right things that deserve our thankfulness.

And when we do, we live lighter and happier and we spread that light to others around us.

Let’s be part of that light.