Developing and expressing gratitude is a wonderful way to keep your bucket full. Gratitude begins when we become aware of everything that makes us happy and create space for empathy.

Whatever makes us happy fills our buckets. Happiness will fill your bucket, even more, when you realize it, think about it, and express gratitude for it.

If you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. If you focus on what you have, you gain what you lack.

There are many ways to be more intentional when we think about gratitude in our lives.

Journaling

There’s no wrong way to keep a gratitude journal, but here are some general instructions as you get started.

Write down up to five things for which you feel grateful. The physical record is important, don’t just do this exercise in your head.

The things you list can be relatively small or large in importance or relatively large. The goal of the exercise is to remember a good event, experience, person, or thing in your life. Document the good emotions that come with it.

Wear a Wristband

One possible way is to wear a bracelet on one of your wrists. When you catch yourself saying something negative, or making a complaint…move that bracelet to your other wrist.

You’ll quickly pay attention to the number of times you’ll focus on the negative, as opposed to the positive.

The process of moving the wristband from

What energy are you sharing?

In our house, we focus on an attitude of gratitude. As a family, we are more intentional in the energy people share in the house.

If you take the energy out with a negative comment, story, or statement, you need to return the energy you drained by identifying something that’s good in your life.

In practice, this means that if I complain about something that happened at work, I need to immediately identify two or three things that are great in my life. This returns the positive energy to the group that I took away.

Photo by Katrina Wright on Unsplash