Having a Gratitude Attitude

            This past week I made several presentations about self-care to an audience of English language learners.  When I was putting together the presentation, and figuring out what I wanted to do for a learning activity, I at first was a bit stumped.  And this I found surprising because my daily work is all about self-care.  But how to really define and explain this concept in a way that made sense and that wasn’t gong to be demeaning for a group of adult learners.  I sat staring at my computer screen for a while, looking at the two hyphenated words.  Then, a lightening bolt of an aha moment.  I laughed at myself when I realized how simple this could actually be.  And here is what I did: I wrote the word SELF on the board and asked the group to tell me what this means.  I did this for two reasons: 1) to get an understanding of the group’s understanding of the word and 2) because it’s the first word in the hyphenated phrase and so it seemed a fitting place to start.  After we came to a consensus of the meaning of the word self, I wrote the word CARE on the board and did the same thing.  Once we had a working definition of the two words, I added the hyphen and we talked about what the phrase meant.  Then we played a game of self-care bingo and laughed a lot.  At the end, we went through the bingo board and saw who they found among their classmates that did each of these self-care activities.  We then spent a moment going over “taking a deep breath” in more detail by actually practicing this coping and self-care skill.  Afterwards, I left the classrooms feeling positive and enthusiastic about how the activity went, yes, but more so because of the interactions.  I felt gratitude for both the chance to connect with the people in the classes and for the opportunity to have done so.  Which in a round-about way, brings us to the topic of this blog post.

            Gratitude-attitude.  Let’s follow the same pattern for defining the concept as I told you about here already.  We’ll start with gratitude.  By definition, most dictionaries and yoga instructors will tell you that gratitude is the sense of feeling grateful and that it is a practice that’s important for wellness.  Noticing what’s going well and what we are thankful for is a way to feed the part of our brain that focuses on positive rather than the parts that are all to happy to consume anything negative.  Making this a part of our daily routine, where we take a few moments to state either to ourselves or to someone else what we are thankful for (an experience, the weather, a person’s action, an opportunity, etc.) helps us to find balance.  Now, let’s define attitude.

            Attitude, by definition accepted by dictionaries and counselors alike, is the mindset that we have either over-all or in relation to a particular situation/person/experience/place/etc.  The attitude we hold towards something informs the thought patterns we have which then impacts our emotional experience.  If we accept the fact that what we think informs how we feel, then the importance of attitude becomes paramount.  A positive attitude will build positive emotional responses.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that we will always feel rosy and experience the world with a lens of sunshine, unicorns, and rainbows.  Having a positive attitude does not negate negative experiences but it does help us to build resiliency and find ways of coping as we move through something negative.  That’s really what we are talking about when we are talking about a positive attitude.

            Now, let’s pair gratitude with attitude and see what we get, shall we?  Gratitude-attitude then becomes a mindset of thankfulness where we are noticing the good around us, acknowledging it, and focusing the majority of our attention on it.  Practicing this mindset and heartset daily means that we are going to live a more well-rounded and holistically well life.  And the positive rolls on from there.  It is the difference in a bad situation from feeling completely hopeless and feeling that while we may not be able to do anything about the situation, that at the end of it all we are going to be okay.  Acknowledge the negative, but focus on the positive.  When we do this consistently and regularly over a period of time, this begins to become our automatic functioning or default setting, if you will.  This way of being supports all manner of healthy functioning.