Stop and Focus on What You're Grateful

This week on Instagram, the #CTWeeklyChallenge is to write down one thing every day that you are grateful for (in your biz and/or life).

I chose this topic because I believe that gratitude – the process of focussing on the positive and being truly, deeply thankful for it – is a vital part of living a happy, fulfilled life.

So often, creative and entrepreneurial folks are focussed on ‘what’s next’.

We’ve always got so many ideas bouncing around inside our brains that we are hard-pressed to make even a fraction of them happen. So, once we do manage to wrangle something out of our heads and into reality, we rarely take the time to stop and truly appreciate what we’ve done before we’re bounding off to the next shiny thing that’s on our never-ending list.

This tends to leave us in a perpetual state of dissatisfaction, because while we might be creating some things, the vast majority of our creative dreams will never be more than that – dreams. We lament this fact, and feel sad or depressed that we’re not seeing ALL our dreams become a reality.

This, my friends, is a recipe for unhappiness. Sure, we need that little bit of discomfort to motivate us to get stuff done, otherwise we would just be like the larger majority of the Western world who are seemingly satisfied to exist rather than truly live, who never work up the motivation to DO something creative (and hopefully positive) with their life.

Those of us who have – through either luck (being born into a financially secure family in a safe country) or hard work (creating basic financial stability) – the luxury of doing more with our lives than just existing  (trying to find clean water, food, shelter – which is still where a huge proportion of the world’s population is at) are extremely fortunate.

I think being aware of this basic level of privilege – and grateful for it – is a good first step. Above and beyond that, there is so much to be grateful for.

The more conscious you are about your life – making it happen rather than letting it happen to you – the more you will find to be grateful for… and happiness will naturally flow from this.

So – what are you grateful for today?

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