30 Days of Gratitude: Daily Gratitude Exercises to Uplift Your Thoughts and Improve Your Life

By Wendy Bett

One of the most effective ways to feel happier on a daily basis is with a daily gratitude practice. Why is gratitude such a powerful state of mind?

When you think a lot of positive thoughts, you feel really good. The better you feel, the more likely you are to take positive actions. For example, you are more likely to be kind and patient with other people; you are more likely to practice good self-care; you are more likely to be aware of great opportunities; and you just feel better overall.

A gratitude mindset can benefit you in endless ways: it can give you a deeper sense of appreciation for the blessings in your life; help you handle stress more effectively; make you feel more empowered; strengthen you and give you more confidence; make you more flexible and resilient; and help you rise above problems and challenges and start focusing more on the things that are going right for you.

In short, gratitude is awesome, right?

Unfortunately, it's not easy to keep a daily gratitude practice. With all of the problems and negativity in the world today, it's easy to feel overwhelmed and cynical. How can you feel grateful when so many things are going wrong for you personally, and when there is so much suffering and cruelty in the world?

If you have ever struggled to stick with a daily gratitude practice, the problem may be that your previous gratitude exercises were mostly mental exercises.

It's well and good to think grateful thoughts, but if you aren't feeling the feelings of gratitude nothing will change.

30 Days of Gratitude shares simple, fun gratitude prompts that will help you start feeling more grateful in just minutes.

With one simple strategy, you will discover the key in turning your mental gratitude exercises into positive emotional exercises.

You'll be able to feel the difference immediately.

There are 30 daily gratitude exercises included, plus a bonus exercise that you can use anytime, anywhere.

Choose a new exercise each day and spend just a few minutes working on it, and you'll discover just how easy it can be to feel truly grateful more of the time.

A daily gratitude practice can change your life in so many wonderful ways, making you feel much more positive, uplifted and empowered as you navigate through life's highs and lows.

30 Days of Gratitude provides the guiding light you need to finally make gratitude a part of your everyday life, easily and permanently.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wendy Bett
• Release date: Oct 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781501419850

Book preview

30 Days of Gratitude

Daily Gratitude Exercises to Uplift Your Thoughts and Improve Your Life

By Wendy Bett

The purpose of this guide is to offer insight, information, and techniques relating to the use of gratitude. Because these concepts are spiritual in nature, the author cannot guarantee specific results that may be attained. The information in this guide should not be construed as professional advice. Rather, the techniques and ideas contained within are intended to be educational and informational, based upon the personal experiences and insights of the author. View these techniques as they are intended - as spiritual growth practices that should help you to balance your mind, body and spirit so that you can live a fuller, happier, more satisfying, and more abundant life.

© Copyright 2014 All Rights Reserved. Unauthorized distribution is prohibited. No part of this book may be shared or duplicated without express written permission from the author.

Introduction

In recent years, the power of gratitude has gotten a lot of press. Millions of people have successfully used a daily gratitude practice to change their lives for the better, but not everyone has been successful in using this so-called great power.

Are you one of those people who just can’t seem to feel grateful, no matter how hard you try? Do you feel frustrated that so many people are having great results with a gratitude practice but you can’t seem to do it yourself? If so, you’ll be glad to know that you are not alone in your struggles.

The most common question asked by gratitude-challenged people is, How can I feel grateful when I feel so unhappy every day? My finances are a mess; my relationships are difficult; I hate my job; the world is filled with war, famine, violence and negativity. How am I supposed to feel grateful in the midst of such pain and turmoil?

Maybe you’ve tried writing daily gratitude lists, which is one of the most popular bits of advice given by well-meaning experts. Maybe you even kept it up for a while, but eventually realized it wasn’t helping much, so you gave it up.

Unfortunately, gratitude lists are not always helpful. There are a couple of big problems with them. First, the act of writing these things down is a mental exercise. It does not usually stimulate your emotions so you feel grateful.

I know from firsthand experience that a daily gratitude practice can change your life in powerful ways, but you need to bump up the emotional power significantly.

Secondly, even if you can generate a subtle feeling of gratitude for your blessings, a few minutes later you set the list aside and go back to feeling stressed, irritated, sad, angry, or whatever your default emotional state is. Those few short minutes focusing on gratitude are simply not enough to make a dramatic difference in your life.

Don’t worry; I’m not going to suggest that you spend a few hours a day writing gratitude lists. I’m going to assume that you, like most other people these days, are very busy and don’t have endless amounts of spare time available.

You’ll be thrilled to know that I'm going to share some very easy, fun gratitude exercises that can be incorporated into your normal daily activities; and these exercises are specifically geared to make you feel grateful, as opposed to merely thinking about feeling grateful.

I’ve been working with gratitude exercises for years, and I’ve devised a little strategy that makes it super-easy to stimulate genuine feelings of gratitude.  Once you try it, you’re going to feel the difference too.

Do you want to know what the secret strategy is? In most of the exercises in this book, I’m going to encourage you to focus on the reasons why you feel grateful for something, rather than focusing only on the target itself.

That may not seem like a big difference, but it greatly amplifies the power of the exercises. The reason it’s important to focus on the reasons you are grateful is because it makes the exercise an emotional one, not just a mental one.

Rather than thinking about these things in a detached sort of way, you will start thinking about how they make you feel.  And when you start thinking about the way they make you feel, you start feeling that way now; stirring up positive emotions and creating a much more effective exercise.

Even better, most of the exercises in this book can be completed very quickly. Some of them can even be performed while you are doing other activities, like cleaning, driving, or waiting for appointments, so they can be incorporated into your day very easily. No more excuses about not having time for a gratitude practice!

There are 30 exercises plus a bonus exercise, and each of them provides a simple prompt that you can use to jumpstart a focus on gratitude for the rest of your day. For best results, choose one gratitude exercise at the start of each day, and then do your best to focus on it as much as you can throughout the day. The exercises are not listed in any particular order, so you can feel free to jump around and choose the ones that most appeal to you, or choose one at random each day.

I recommend doing the exercises in writing when possible, because writing your thoughts down on paper will allow you to slow down and really focus on them for several minutes, which gives you more time to stimulate feelings of gratitude. However, if you prefer not to do them in writing, you can speak them out loud or go through them mentally and they will still be effective.

Before we get into the exercises, I want to stress that you can develop an easy, fun gratitude practice in your own life; even if you’ve struggled with it before, and even if the circumstances of your life are less than ideal right now.

A true gratitude practice is not necessarily about changing your actions each day; it’s about changing the way you think and feel as you go about living your life. The exercises in this book are going to show you that a powerful gratitude practice can be easy, fun, and sustainable over the long term.

Once