There is an art to being thankful. Look around yourself and you can see it. Look at the people around us at work, driving in the car, and on any social media platform and you will see how much everything revolves around the individual.
The Art of Thankfulness
The dictionary defines being thankful as expressing gratitude. There is an art to being thankful. A better way to phrase that is to say that there is a heart needed to be thankful. What was the last time that you felt someone gave you a sincere apology?
Being thankful can be hard. When I recognized in myself that I may attempt to be thankful but it doesn’t always come across how I intended. To help myself at trying to be a better communicator, specifically in text messages, I made one change.
If someone I was able to help someone with something then instead of saying “no problem, ” or using a thumbs up emoji, I started responding with “you’re welcome.”
This may not seem like a big change but it accomplishing a couple of things. Saying “you’re welcome,” helps me and the other person on the receiving end. I get to develop humility and instead of acting like I did them a favor I can acknowledge it, and they can feel my appreciation.
From this example I hope that you can see that being thankful is all about your heart.
Thanksgiving is right around the corner. This is supposed to be the time of year when we are supposed to be more thankful.
This is the perfect reason to begin to put some things into practice develop a heart of thankfulness.
1. Pray/Meditate
It’s important to start your day with this. If the first thing that you do when you wake up is check your phone for emails or facebook then you place your feelings, and more importantly your mind starts racing.
Praying and meditating is great because it is a part of the self care that you need. It’s going to help you stay grounded and centered for your day. Before you jump into other people’s problems, you must be at peace.
2. Say “Thank you”
Most of the time we don’t say the full thank you. We’ll shorten it and say thanks, or just nod. You might even do a thumbs up emoji. While those short cuts may be efficient they are not effective at helping us have a thankful heart.
So let’s develop the habit of saying the full thank you when someone helps us. If just for a second it puts you in the frame of mind where you fully think through what they did to be a blessing to you.
3. Do Acts of Kindness
If you want to be thankful then help someone else. Set out to start doing random acts of kindness. Don’t worry about how other people receive the acts. Sometimes we can fall into that trap. Where we do something nice and then wait for the acknowledgement or praise of doing the nice act.
Don’t do the acts for the praise or acknowledgement, do it for the reason that you want to do something from your heart.
Discussion Question:
How do you say Thank You?
