start monday with gratitude

To build up muscles, you need to go to a gym and train every day. Just showing up once in a blue moon or when you fancy it, will never get you the result you want.

And the same goes for gratitude and adopting a gratitude practice. You don’t just waken up one morning and create an attitude to gratitude that you’ll naturally and easily fall into every moment of every day. It just doesn’t happen like that.

For every change you choose to make in your life, you’ll only succeed in adopting that change, fully, by making it into a habit, part of your routine.

And, when it comes to gratitude, that means practising it at every given opportunity until it becomes your very makeup, until it courses through your body as naturally as your breath.

Like any new habit, it can be a challenge to introduce gratitude into your normal everyday routine because by even doing so you’re actually breaking your normal everyday routine, you’re changing what is familiar and comfortable. And that’s why it’s challenging to continue with something new in your routine. It’s much easier to return to your normal, everyday routine, the one that felt comfortable and familiar.

That’s exactly what tends to happen unless you train yourself to express gratitude every day.

When it comes to incorporating a gratitude practice into your life, you need to view it with the same sincerity, the same commitment as you would if you were building muscle.

Consciously expressing gratitude every day in return for the blessings that come into your life each day as well as for the blessings that you may take for granted because they’ve been forever present in your life, can be difficult. Just like when you lift weights for the first time, you can never lift the heaviest of weights. You have to start small and build it up. However, with dedication, devotion, commitment and practice, you can move to lifting much heavier weights; everything feels more natural and more achievable.

And so it is with gratitude. Don’t expect to waken up one day and from that day forward be filled to overflowing with gratitude for everything around you, just because you want to incorporate a gratitude practise. If you do, you’ll put too much pressure on yourself and, before long, you’ll feel disappointed because, one day, you’ll forget to express gratitude for a blessing you received.

Rather, start small. Start by setting up a time every day in your phone or diary. Set it up as if it were an appointment at the gym that you know you have to attend, if you’re to begin to grow stronger muscles. Then, when the time comes around, stop what you’re doing and attend that appointment; express your gratitude.

As gratitude begins to feel more comfortable and a more normal habit in your life, then you can begin to lift the heavier weights. Then you can begin to consciously seek out gratitude throughout the day, then you can turn your focus to expressing gratitude throughout the day, until it becomes such a natural habit that you begin to express gratitude as and when a blessing, no matter how small, appears; when you see that everything you already have in your life, which you may have previously taken for granted, no matter how small, is something to express gratitude for.

In doing so, you’re training yourself to express gratitude as naturally as you breathe.