Aug 16

A Fail-Proof Way to Guarantee Gratitude Every Day

When my kids were little I wanted an easy way to start conversation at the mealtimes, so dinner started with each member sharing a success and a challenge from the day. In the beginning it was great: The stories were balanced between those two topics, and it sparked interesting, and funny discussions.  But when my daughter entered her teenage years, the “challenges” part of the conversation could easily be consumed by middle school drama – more gossip she wanted to share, rather than challenges we could work through as a family.  Understanding there is a time and place for that conversation (we moved it to the car during drop-off and pick-up), I knew I didn’t want it to be during dinner–so I shifted gears by asking “What are you grateful for today?”

With a change in question came a shift in energy and conversation.  Now our evening routine is as soon as everyone has their meal, each person shares three things they are grateful for that day. My son typically starts because he thinks about his before dinner, then my daughter, my husband, and me.  There are so many benefits to the shift from success and challenges to gratitude: First, it forces our brains to think about the positive things that happen during the day, which frequently tend to be the happy tidbits that easily get overlooked, disregarded or lost in the hustle and bustle of each day; and it gives our family a place for conversation that generally stays positive, rather than focusing on all the negative happening in the world.

My daughter jokes I have rules for gratitude…which is true, although I prefer to call them “gratitude standards”.  They include:

• Gratitude must be something that happened that day–not something coming up in the future.  So often we think about the far away past or plan for the future that we forget to be grateful for the here and now.
• Everyone must share three things they are grateful for per day – in a world that can feel very negative I want to be sure we put our blessed life in perspective and filter our experiences through that, so three is my minimum required.
• You can’t repeat gratitude items in the same week (unless you do more than three) – there is so much to be grateful for I want to push myself to search for three new things and encourage the kids to do the same.

It warms my heart when I share this with people and find out they implement it in their own way – one friend started sharing gratitude before he and his partner go to bed, another family does gratitude at breakfast, another writes her gratitude in a journal every morning.  The how and when doesn’t matter as much as consistency. Try it and see the difference in your family and how you filter the world.

Laura Treonze, serves as Chief Life Strategist with LMT Consulting, which helps executives and teams create massive success through self-awareness. Her life-changing approach has transformed individuals and families and has redefined the way non-profits and corporations “do” business.