Oprah talks about having a gratitude journal and what a life changing practice it has been for her.
For years I’ve tried to do one based on her advice, and for years I felt like I was just repeating the same things that I’m always grateful for over and over. I. Grateful for my family, my kids, my breath, and my pets.
It felt like an endless loop of gratitude for the things in that were already in my love bubble.
When you only focus on big picture gratitude, you get the same big picture results.
Recently I’ve been doing something a bit different.
There are certain outcomes in my life that I have been working towards. I took 20 minutes at the beginning of February and wrote out where I am headed in the different areas of my life such as career, relationships, finances, health and fitness, self care, etc etc. I just picked the ones that I wanted to focus on for the next 90 days.
Several times or week I check in and notice the little bits of progress I’ve made or the new ideas I have to keep moving forward.
Turns out it’s become a gratitude journal … and this is how it’s changing my view.
When one thing goes bad it can ruin our whole day, no matter how many other things have gone right.
But when you continually visit the areas of your life that you are consciously working on making progress in, and document it, you notice all the little steps forward that you otherwise would have taken for granted or forgotten about.
Your world stops revolving around one incident, one conversation, or one roadblock, and you notice all of the ways things are going right.
This little practice has kept my view wide on all of the great things that are happening, sometimes without me even initiating the change.
There is so much happening to be grateful for, and we overlook it all of the time because of where we focus.
Change your focus, change your life.