Designer Sanity’s Month of Gratitude Week 4: Your Life

Welcome to week four of our FREE 30-day Designer Sanity Gratitude Practice!  In case you missed the previous 3 weeks of this gratitude series  you can find Week 1/Clients HERE, Week 2/Network HERE, and Week 3/Yourself HERE. It’s never too late to jump in where you are! 

Click here to download your free 30-Day gratitude journal with daily prompts to get you focused on gratitude in your kitchen and bath design business all month long.   In minutes a day, you can increase your happiness and overall sense of well-being in a powerful way. 

“This is a wonderful day. I have never seen this one before.” - Maya Angelou

Week 4: Gratitude for YOUR LIFE

This last week of our month of gratitude, we're going to focus on feeling gratitude for all the good things in your life that are so easy to ignore.  

Why do we do this?  Because what we focus on expands.  So as we focus on noticing all the good things in our lives and feeling grateful for them, it will appear that there are more and more good things to be grateful for.  It will feel like we’re living a different, more positive life.  Actually, life is the same, but we’re just noticing and expanding the good things through the lens of our awareness, and minimizing the bad things.  Does this all sound a little woo woo?  Let me give you an example of what I mean.  

A few years ago we completed a major remodel on our 1909 home.  We converted an unfinished attic into a master suite and added a new front porch.  In addition, we installed new wood flooring, paint and lighting throughout.  Truly, it felt like a whole new house.  

 But as one does, we ran out of money at the end and there were a few unfinished projects.  The stairwell remained unpainted.  The built-ins upstairs remained half-finished.  We never got to the basement at all.  Etc. Etc.  These unfinished projects drove me crazy, it was all I could focus on.  

Then one day I woke up.  I looked around me and realized that I was pretty much living in a whole new house.  If I counted up the wonderful new things I had in my home and compared it with the unfinished projects, the positive FAR outnumbered the negative.  

Despite this, all I was thinking about and noticing all day was what was wrong.  Hmmm…. Not altogether different from my brain-state before I remodeled.  

 I realized that I might as well have skipped all the trouble of remodeling if all I was going to do was focus on the unfinished projects anyway.  By focusing on the unfinished projects, I was essentially making myself blind to the beauty of my remodel, which FAR outweighed the tiny details left to finish.  

I decided right then and there that I was going to stop it!  I decided to focus my attention and gratitude on all the positive things that we had achieved, and stop focusing on the negative.  It completely changed my outlook, and allowed me to truly enjoy my new home.  I had almost missed the opportunity to fully live in my remodeled home… in my consciousness at least (and what else matters, really?!).  

This is the power of gratitude.  It has the power to immediately change your viewpoint to take in more of the positive things that already surround you, you were just ignoring them.  When you focus on that, the positive things EXPAND to fill your awareness.  The negative things SHRINK in importance and take up less of your brain space.  

By the way, I’m not advocating ignoring difficult things in life that need our attention.  But I’d 100% guarantee that you’ll have more energy and enthusiasm for tackling them if you’re focused on gratitude.  

As you make a habit of feeling gratitude for all the good things in your life, an even more powerful practice can be learning to feel gratitude for the difficult things in your life as well. Can you think of anything in your past that seemed like a bad thing at the time, but in hindsight you can see that it was actually something to be grateful for?  Gratitude for difficulty transforms it into a positive thing.   Try it and see. There are few mindfulness practices that are more powerful.

Gratitude Practice: Your Life

So here’s what I’d like for you to do with this weeks’ gratitude journal practice focusing on YOUR LIFE.

1. Find a time when you can be alone and won’t be disturbed.  
2. Sit down with your coffee or tea or each morning with your tea or a glass of wine in the evening.
3. Light a candle and get comfy in your favorite chair. 
4. Close your eyes and take a deep breath.  Let it all out, and then take another deep breath. 
5. When you feel relaxed, turn your attention inward and think about the things that you are grateful for in your professional life, present and past.  Go as far back as you wish.  Feel the love in your heart of gratitude for your life.  Let the thoughts and feelings flow through you. 
6. When you’re ready, pull out your journal and write about it.  Focus on gratitude for your life:

• What have you achieved in your career?
• What are typical parts of your working life right now that would have been a dream for you in years past?
• What are your favorite jobs you've ever done?
• What parts of your job do you just love doing? (i.e., I can’t believe I get paid to…)
• What difficult circumstance can you look back on with 20-20 hindsight and see that it was actually a good thing?
• What difficult circumstance can you give thanks for right now? Can you imagine how you could look back in the future and see that it was the best thing that could have happened?
• Reflect on all the people, things and circumstances that conspired to get you where you are now. You are a miracle. That is enough.

 Do this every day this week.  Aim to write three things each day.

 Keep it up! 

Don’t limit this practice to your journaling time!  Aim to make it a habit to notice and feel grateful for all the good things in your life every day.  It’s like a breath of fresh air to fill your consciousness with gratitude in these moments, and you’ll feel much more energized and stronger moving forward.  Try it!  

 Don’t forget to join me for Designer Sanity’s  30-day Gratitude Practice this month.   Click here to download your FREE 30 day gratitude journal each day  to bring more gratitude into your design business this month.   

 Also don’t forget to follow me on instagram, @designersanity  where I’ll be doing posts about our journal prompts.