If the only prayer you say in your life is ‘thank you,’ that would suffice. – Meister Eckhart

By Marelisa Fabrega

Gratitude means thankfulness, counting your blessings, noticing simple pleasures, and acknowledging everything that you receive. It means learning to live your life as if everything were a miracle, and being aware on a continuous basis of how much you’ve been given. Gratitude shifts your focus from what your life lacks to the abundance that is already present. In addition, behavioral and psychological research has shown the surprising life improvements that can stem from the practice of gratitude. Giving thanks makes people happier and more resilient, it strengthens relationships, it improves health, and it reduces stress.

Research Shows Gratitude Heightens Quality of Life

Two psychologists, Michael McCollough of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Robert Emmons of the University of California at Davis, wrote an article about an experiment they conducted on gratitude and its impact on well-being. The study split several hundred people into three different groups and all of the participants were asked to keep daily diaries. The first group kept a diary of the events that occurred during the day without being told specifically to write about either good or bad things; the second group was told to record their unpleasant experiences; and the last group was instructed to make a daily list of things for which they were grateful. The results of the study indicated that daily gratitude exercises resulted in higher reported levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism, and energy. In addition, those in the gratitude group experienced less depression and stress, were more likely to help others, exercised more regularly, and made greater progress toward achieving personal goals.

Dr. Emmons – who has been studying gratitude for almost ten years and is considered by many to be the world’s leading authority on gratitude – is author of the book, “Thanks!: How the New Science of Gratitude Can Make You Happier”. The information in this book is based on research involving thousands of people conducted by a number of different researchers around the world. One of the things these studies show is that practicing gratitude can increase happiness levels by around 25%. This is significant, among other things, because just as there’s a certain weight that feels natural to your body and which your body strives to maintain, your basic level of happiness is set at a predetermined point. If something bad happens to you during the day, your happiness can drop momentarily, but then it returns to its natural set-point. Likewise, if something positive happens to you, your level of happiness rises, and then it returns once again to your “happiness set-point”. A practice of gratitude raises your “happiness set-point” so you can remain at a higher level of happiness regardless of outside circumstances.

In addition, Dr. Emmons’ research shows that those who practice gratitude tend to be more creative, bounce back more quickly from adversity, have a stronger immune system, and have stronger social relationships than those who don’t practice gratitude. He further points out that “To say we feel grateful is not to say that everything in our lives is necessarily great. It just means we are aware of our blessings.”

Notice and Appreciate Each Day’s Gifts

People tend to take for granted the good that is already present in their lives. There’s a gratitude exercise that instructs that you should imagine losing some of the things that you take for granted, such as your home, your ability to see or hear, your ability to walk, or anything that currently gives you comfort. Then imagine getting each of these things back, one by one, and consider how grateful you would be for each and every one. In addition, you need to start finding joy in the small things instead of holding out for big achievements—such as getting the promotion, having a comfortable nest egg saved up, getting married, having the baby, and so on–before allowing yourself to feel gratitude and joy.

Another way to use giving thanks to appreciate life more fully is to use gratitude to help you put things in their proper perspective. When things don’t go your way, remember that every difficulty carries within it the seeds of an equal or greater benefit. In the face of adversity ask yourself: “What’s good about this?”, “What can I learn from this?”, and “How can I benefit from this?”

There are Many Ways to Practice Gratitude

A common method to develop the practice of gratitude is to keep a gratitude journal, a concept that was made famous by Sarah Ban Breathnach’s book “Simple Abundance Journal of Gratitude”. This exercise basically consists of writing down every day a list of three to ten things for which you are grateful; you can do this first thing in the morning or before going to bed at night. Another exercise you can try is to write a gratitude letter to a person who has exerted a positive influence in your life but whom you have not properly thanked. Some experts suggest that you set up a meeting with this person and read the letter to them face to face.

Last year millions of people took the challenge proposed by Will Bowen, a Kansas City minister, to go 21 days without complaining, criticizing, or gossiping. To help condition the participants to stop complaining, they each wore a purple No-Complaint wristband. Several authors in the self-improvement genre have suggested that people do something similar to help condition themselves to be constantly aware of the things in life that they’re grateful for.

A variation of the wristband concept is to create a gratitude charm bracelet, with either one meaningful charm or different charms representing the things you’re most grateful for. For example, you could have a charm shaped like a heart to symbolize your significant other, figurines to represent different family members, an apple to represent health, a dollar sign to symbolize abundance, a charm that represents your current profession or a future career, and maybe a charm that makes you laugh to represent humor and joy.

Conclusion

Once you become oriented toward looking for things to be grateful for, you will find that you begin to appreciate simple pleasures and things that you previously took for granted. Gratitude should not be just a reaction to getting what you want, but an all-the-time gratitude, the kind where you notice the little things and where you constantly look for the good even in unpleasant situations. Today, start bringing gratitude to your experiences, instead of waiting for a positive experience in order to feel grateful; in this way, you’ll be on your way toward becoming a master of gratitude.

Author bio: written by Marelisa Fabrega who blogs at http://abundance-blog.marelisa-online.com.

Images by Gisela Giardino and Hamed Saber.

By John Anyasor

In this day and age, it’s quite apparent that people are connecting everywhere. From the local pub to the cafe across the street, from the stands at the little league baseball field to one of the seemingly infinite number of online chat rooms, people are constantly connecting with each other.

Gone are the days of never talking to strangers. Gone are the days when people proclaimed that all chat rooms are dangerous. Gone are the days when your social circle was limited to your coworkers around the water cooler.

Thanks to our advances in communication, we can connect with whomever we want from wherever we want. If you so choose, you can have friends from all over the world while never stepping foot outside your front door (editor’s note: not recommended).

However, when connecting is such an easy thing to do, why is it that some people still find it hard (and almost scary) to take part in? Why do some people still hold “never talk to strangers” as their mantra?

I personally believe it is because of these three big reasons:

1. News and media

As a kid growing up, there wasn’t a day I watched TV that there wasn’t an announcement of something horrible. Titles similar to “BREAKING NEWS: KIDNAPPER ON THE LOOSE” or “INTERNET PREDATOR STRIKES AGAIN” would normally pop up across the screen. While it’s important to know what’s going on the world, these messages made it seem like the only way to avoid instances like this are to stop going out at night and stay out of every online community.

2. Overbearing Parents

Parents play a big part in our ability to connect with others, and overprotective ones tend to hinder that ability. Overbearing parents tend to keep their children close to them (partly due to the risk touched upon in the first point) and are always ready to retort their child’s plea for adventure with the remark, “You’re too young to understand.” In effect, this implants in their minds a certain misconception that you have to be a certain age before you can make your own decisions, even on things that require you to break out of your comfort zone.

3. Fear of rejection

Rejection is one of the main reasons people don’t just get out there and start connecting. They think if they let themselves become transparent (letting people see the ‘real’ them), they’ll be exiled and condemned as a weirdo. This leads people to falsely believe that the only people who could ever truly understand their ‘real’ selves are themselves.

How do we fix these problems and start connecting?

The solution to all of these problems is quite simple really: all you have to do is take fate into your own hands.

In each of the problems I’ve listed above, you’re giving the power of owning your fate into the control of someone else. In the first scenario, it’s the news and media, in the second, it’s your parents, and in the third, it’s to just about everybody else.

You have to take charge of your life: you have to connect. I doubt people who’ve lived the best lives stayed in the same place for too long or talked to the same people forever. They broadened their horizons and added a little diversity into the mix.

They risked rejection and put themselves out there.

You’re not a kid anymore. The outdated saying of ‘never talk to strangers’ doesn’t apply. Talk to the ones you resonate with, and pass by the ones you don’t.

It’s never too late to start connecting with others, but if you keep waiting until you’re 100% comfortable connecting, it just might be.

Author bio: John Anyasor is the founder of his personal development blog, HiLife2B. There he writes about personal development, college tips, and more.

By Tess Marshall

Anyone who has been in a relationship longer than 12 months understands how easy it is to fall into a rut. Today I challenge you to take responsibility for the state of your partnership and use your power to create excitement, joy and happiness that will last forever.

The following are 10 simple and powerful ways to grow  a relationship:

1. Give up the need to be right. My husband leaves his shoes everywhere, under the coffee table, under the kitchen table, in the entryway etc.  I spent the first years of our marriage trying to get him to pick up them up. It didn’t work. In an enlightened moment I decided to pick up his shoes without complaining and resentment. Soon I found myself happily taking care of his shoes and grateful for the opportunity!

2. Take an interest in what interests them. My husband loves to golf and watch all sports on television. I had no interest in sports. Eventually I realized how much he did for me and with me. One day I decided to take golfing lessons and watch sports with him

3. Make love with your thoughts words and actions. Making love is not only about sex. When you have loving think lovingly, speak lovingly to him and of him your love life will improve as well. Our brain is our biggest sex organ. Learn to think love and speak love and you’ll find yourself more in love.

4. Learn to be playful and plan fun. Learn to lighten up. Choose to have a light hearted and playful attitude. Plan something you both enjoy. Go away for a weekend once a season. Life is difficult. Learn to enjoy it anyway!

5. Practice gratitude. Don’t take your partner for granted. Keep a journal of the loving deeds your partner does. Practice gratitude together while riding in the car or taking a walk. One person states what they are grateful for and the other follows. Continue taking turns until you’ve exhausted every possibility. Your relationship will thrive.

6. Catch your partner doing good. Praise each other. Say thank you at least once a day! Focus on what’s right and good and your love for each other will expand.

7. Get help. Don’t ever give up without first seeking help. That’s the easy way out. My husband and I sought counseling when all else failed. Be willing own your own character defects. You will project all unfinished business onto your spouse. We are in each others lives to heal the broken places. Unhealed stuff follows you until you resolve it.

8. Go the extra mile. Relationships are never 50-50. Christopher and Dana Reeve were a great example of this. Dana gave up her singing career after Chris’s accident. She chose to give him everything. I believe their relationship is an example of unconditional love.

9. Give each other space. When our daughters were in high school my mom helped my husband while I did an internship in Mexico for three months. He has always allowed me space to follow my dreams and have my own friends. He has always had female friends and colleagues in his life. When you trust each other you create a bond like no other.

10. Cherish each other. Never let anything or any person get in between the two of you. Support each other. Laugh together and grow together. I know this works. I was pregnant and married at 17. We have been married for 37 plus years, have four grown daughters, and three grandchildren. And it just keeps getting better!

Author bio: Tess Marshall, life coach and author of Flying by the Seat of My Soul, writes on personal development at www.TheBoldLife.com.

By Armen Shirvanian

Imagine waking up, greeting one positive person, receiving an e-mail from a person passionate about what they are doing, then sending an e-mail to a person about something you are passionate about, before you go about your other activities. A daily experience like this is not out of the realm of your potential routine. Getting to a point like this involves adjusting who you interact with, and approaching the people you don’t want to interact with, but have to, through a new mindset.

First, I want to preface this by saying this isn’t meant to create a pseudo-reality that is separate from the one others are in. At the same time, there are some who are in a state of growth who are positive to be around, and promote your good health and low stress, and there are some who have a negative demeanor, with little to no concern for you, who will likely only end up raising your blood pressure and stress levels. I often point out that personalities are fairly fixed in place, so the same person that causes you unnecessary stress today is very likely the one who will do so at some time in the future.

Focus On Your Dependency, Not The Person

How to set up who you interact with and how you encounter them requires you to take charge of the situation. You have to pinpoint who you regularly benefit from dealing with. These are the people you don’t need to adjust much for. Then, you want to think about who usually causes your attitude to go downhill. Is there something about dealing with them that you can change? Maybe you can get something that they provide you with from someone else. Usually, the only reason you will keep dealing with a negative person is because they provide you with something you haven’t reached out to acquire elsewhere.

Prepare So You Don’t Get Surprised

The other facet of this is the mindset you have when you encounter or hear from negative people you routinely deal with. You can prepare for the meeting of your minds by thinking about past experiences with them. If their negativity has caught you off-guard many times, know that it is likely to catch you by surprise again unless you consider it as a possible occurrence. If you regularly give them the benefit of the doubt, try not giving them this benefit, and see if you come out of your discussion or interaction with them feeling better. As an alteration of a well-known quote, if someone passes their negativity on to you once, shame on them; if they do it twice, shame on you for letting it happen again.

Connection To Watching News

It is similar to how you want to approach watching the news, if you watch, as there tends to be much negativity present in the stories you see. In the same way you wouldn’t want to wake up and go straight to seeing various problems occurring around you, and would want to first have a resilient attitude built up to handle publicly reported hardships, you want to do the same in preparation for time spent with or around routinely pernicious people.

An added aside to this is that it can also alert individuals to the fact that their methods of interaction are abrasive or demotivating to you. You are doing them a favor when you subtly bring it to their attention that their behavior caused you to create distance, and they may start to adjust in their own ways once the realization takes place.

Author Bio: Armen Shirvanian writes for Timeless Information on topics including mindset development, social interaction, communication, and competition. He has also created a compilation eBook that contains thorough discussion about 11 valuable quotations. You can check out his articles and eBook at www.timelessinformation.com

By Tara Miller

We’ve been taught that changing for the sake of another person is in direct conflict to the preservation of our own identities. Changing to make someone else happy won’t make you happy, just as you can never truly change someone else to make yourself happy. But to sustain a mature, productive, long-term relationship with someone, both parties need to grow. Pride and stubbornness often get in the way of a relationship that still needs to develop in order to last, and if you’re unwilling to make a few changes in order to keep your loved ones close, you may end up losing them altogether.

The following are some tips on analyzing your personal development for the sake of your relationship, and reasons why making small changes for someone else isn’t as bad as you think.

• Put yourself second. This change is all about your line of thinking. Try to alter your perspective a little bit by putting your relationship first and yourself second. Consider what the best course of action is to sustain the relationship instead of figuring out how to make yourself “win” every argument or confrontation.
• Compromise. Making compromises is one of the cornerstones of any successful relationship. And making minor, occasional allowances for the benefit of a long lasting relationship is more important than being right all of the time or getting what you want all of the time.
• Reevaluate your goals. When you began your relationship, your goals were probably goals that primarily involved yourself: the job you wanted, the place you wanted to live, and the trips you wanted to take.  While there is nothing wrong with setting personal goals for yourself even as you enter into a more serious relationship, over time, the goals may start to shift, or at least broaden in order to include another person. Reevaluate your goals and the things that are most important to you to avoid holding on to ideas that are no longer as important.
• Grow together, not apart. Your relationship involves two people, and it takes two people to make the relationship work. Just as you have pledged to make some changes, talk with your partner about the changes he or she can make, too. The important thing is to grow together instead of forcing one person to make all the changes.

Have you changed or the sake of a relationship? Please share your experiences in the comments below.

About the author: this post was contributed by Tara Miller, who writes about the online psychology degrees. She welcomes your feedback at TaraMillerr00[at]yahoo.com

By Jason Barr

I knew this guy in college who had a magnetic personality.  Actually, I still know him.  He’s a good friend of mine.  But, I first got to know him well in college.  He attracted people everywhere he went, like moths to a flame.  It was amazing to me how easily he started conversations with unfamiliar people about everyday topics, and within minutes, was joking and chatting with them like they were old friends.  I was a bit on the shy side, and didn’t really get too talkative with people until I got to know them well.  Of course, since I didn’t chat too often with people, it made it hard to get to know them.  I envied my friend’s ability to be so free from self-consciousness and wanted very much to be like him.  I began to watch him closely (without being too creepy) to try to figure out what it was that he did that made him so irresistible to other people.

In my pursuit of this magical ability to attract people to me, I began to read a lot of self-help books about positive self-image and people skills.  As I was doing this, and observing my friend, I began to understand what it was that set him apart from others.

Why is it that some people just seem to attract others?  What are they doing that is different than everyone else?  Is it something you’re born with, or can this ability be learned?  I believe that anyone can become this type of attractive individual.

Whether you’re trying to lead a group of people, establish a reputation as someone who’s got it all together, or you’re just trying to make more friends, there are two traits that will make your desire come true.  I call them “traits”, but really they’re more like skills.  They can be cultivated and developed if you don’t currently have them in abundance.

1. Self-Confidence

The first is confidence.  There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance.  The difference, I think, is arrogance tries to impress others, while confidence doesn’t worry about whether others are impressed or not.  You have to be comfortable in your own skin to be confident.

In college, I wasn’t quite there yet.  The reason I didn’t initiate conversations with people I didn’t know was because I didn’t think they’d be interested in talking to me.  Even though I had a broad range of interests, I thought that I wouldn’t have anything interesting to say to someone, and any conversation I tried to start would become awkward and strained.  So, I just avoided the situation by hanging out with people like my friend, who took care of the conversational heavy lifting for me.  I could chime in occasionally without being forced to carry the conversation myself.

I started to understand more and more that everyone feels this way (at least a little bit), due to the fact that we project our self-image onto other people.  We assume that what we perceive as faults in our makeup are readily evident to everyone we meet.  What I came to realize and believe is everyone feels this way to some extent or another.  And, the person you’d like to talk to, but can’t because you’re too shy?  They have the same types of hang-ups that you do.  They’re most likely so obsessed with their own shortcomings that there’s no way they have the time or attention to pick up on yours.

What separated my friend, and other people with supreme self-confidence, from people like me was the fact that they knew this secret.  They knew that the other person was most likely focused on themselves, so there was no reason to worry about their own shortcomings.  This gave them the freedom to display the second characteristic that’s so important to building relationships.

2. Empathy

The second trait is empathy.  If, like I said previously, most everyone feels a little self-conscious around other people, then it’s helpful to be able to get them past that feeling.  You want other people to feel comfortable around you.  In order to do that, you have to understand these subconscious hang-ups that people have and work around them to draw the other person out.  Make them feel at ease in your presence by finding common interests, or find something that they can speak intelligently on.  If you can master the art of helping other people look and feel like experts on something when they’re around you, you’ll never be short of friends.  People like to feel like they’re adding to the conversation.  Here’s a hint:  if you’re having trouble finding something to talk about, ask questions about them.  Everyone’s an expert on themselves.

So, confidence and empathy.  It sounds more intimidating than it is, but I understand it’s tough sometimes to take that first step, especially if you’re not used to doing it.  Begin to make a habit of talking to people everywhere you go.  If you’re at the grocery store, talk to the person in front of you in the checkout line.  In the doctor’s office, talk to people waiting around.  The only way you’ll condition yourself to talk to people and get over your fear of it is to do it frequently.  By the time you’ve gotten over the fear, it’ll be a habit.  And good habits are hard to break.

What do you think gives people a magnetic personality?

About the author: Jason D Barr writes for LDCL, a blog about Life Design and forming the habits necessary to reach your goals, whatever they may be.  If you like what you just read, you can see more posts like it twice weekly by grabbing a subscription here.