The Art of Thankfulness

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?

Growth is Intentional

Are you able to tell when you are being driven by your emotions? The stereotype is that men aren’t emotional and that everything with them is at the surface level. 

That is a lie. Men can be just as emotional as women. What most have failed to realize is that it will manifest differently. Pushing down your emotions is not gender specific. Neither is wearing them on your sleeve. Do you know yourself well enough to know how your emotions impact you? 

As I learn about myself and with the help of my wife I’m beginning to see how my emotions impact me. Early on in our marriage, I didn’t talk much.  I would wait until everything seemed like it was too much for me to keep on the inside and then I would want to vent. 

For me, I handled my emotions like this because I never grew up knowing how to handle and process my emotions. 

Now I am able to process and talk about my emotions a little faster. I may not express them  in the moment,but I’m growing in effectively communicating in a healthy time frame. 

Commit to Growth

We should all have a process of growth. Growing is going from where we are now to a version of us that  masters every part of our lives. We have to grow mentally, spiritually, physically, and emotionally. Emotional growth is learning about how our emotions affect us. 

Becoming a better man doesn’t just happen when you reach a certain age. Your development as a person has to be intentional. 

If we were talking about money, we don’t wake up one day and become a millionaire, no we grow in our financial literacy and how to handle money. 

Read, Read, Read

The most successful people in any area are active readers. It doesn’t matter if it’s finances, marriages, or productivity, you have to become a reader. There are so many tools at your disposal to help with this. If you don’t like paper books, you can get ebooks. Maybe the thought of buying a book makes you nervous, then most libraries have an app where you can borrow the paper book or e-book or an audio book. The point is that you have to continue to educate yourself. Growth is intentional. 

Discussion Question:

What is one area that you want to grow in?

Practice Makes Permanent

“Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes Permanent.” – Eric Thomas

Practice is like Riding a Bike

We all remember Allen Iverson’s infamous practice speech. He had a lot of personal things that he was dealing with in his life at the time and the speech was his response to a question from a reporter. Have you ever thought about how that can apply to our marriage? What does it look like to practice in your marriage? 

Too many times we can have an attitude about our marriage that mirrors Iverson’s attitude from the video. We may think that the everyday aspects aren’t important. As long as we try to do good during the “games” then we’ll be successful. The ‘games” being the special days that we tend to pay attention to; birthdays, anniversaries and the occasional holiday. 

At the beginning of this year me and my wife set out to do something special for each other each month. This was all in an effort to practice our marriage. I’ll admit that we did good for the first couple of months. Then the spring/summer came and I missed a month. Thinking that I would try to make up for the next month and that never happened. Have I gotten back to it, no but I’m going to. 

This is the point of practice. We don’t start with excellence. You don’t have a great marriage right from the start. Any hall of famer in any sport didn’t start out that way. There is a level of practice that is required to be great. The same applies to our marriages. We don’t start out as great husbands and wives. We may be good but there is always another level to go to. We can strive to be better.

1. Practice is hard

There’s no denying it. Practice is not easy and it can seem hard. When it comes to practicing in your marriage, means setting yourself up for success. 

Practice is all about building habits and routines that will benefit you when times are hard. 

Find areas that you haven’t practiced in and begin.

2. Stop pursuing perfection

What I’m not saying is that we shouldn’t pursue growth. What I am saying is that we need to look at our idea of perfection. We should lose that. 

Instead of pursuing perfection, aim for growth. Try to grow into the best person you can be. Through your growth you will become better, and your marriage will get better. 

3. What should be permanent 

What are the aspects, characteristics, and qualities that you want to be permanent in yourself? What are the things that you want to be permanent in your marriage?

The things that are permanent are the foundations to who we are. We want to make sure that we’re setting up a strong foundation for ourselves and our marriages. 

Discussion Question: 

What are you practicing in your life?