August's Gratitude

Another month of gratitude and I indeed have so much to be grateful for as I settle into the new job and rely on the help of strangers (who are becoming friends) and I'm embarking on other interesting projects.  So I've been doing this daily gratitude for eight months now and I'm happily surprised that it hasn't become monotonous.  Instead, each morning I think about the great many things I do have to be grateful for--the myriad things that went right and thus continue to propel forward in life.  It's pretty awesome (in the original meaning--not the TMNT version of the word) to consider.

This month started to add a new bit to my gratitude practice.  Last week, I mentioned how much I really enjoyed SuperBetter by Jane McGonigal.  Her book gave me a new idea on how to up my gratitude game this past month.  She mentioned as one of her means of improving social health was asking the following two-part questions:

1. On a scale of 1 to 10 (1 being horrible, 10 being amazing), how are you doing?
2. What can I do to help you move up a point?

I totally fell in love with this idea and have since added it to my daily repertoire of gratitude.  Though it doesn't seem directly related to my daily gratitude, I see it as a perfect compliment to it.  In my life, I have so many things to be grateful for (and those are just the things I can draw my attention to at a single moment). This question gives me the means of doing something with that gratitude in a sense--to pay it forward and perhaps generate gratefulness in others.  

Question one is more than the standard, "How are you doing?" which most of us blow off with a "I'm good."  It requires a bit more reflection of one's own scale and determine where they fall.  So right off by asking, I'm generating a moment of reflection (which isn't always good per se, but can often be helpful). 

But it's the second question that surprises people but also opens up new opportunities to connect and help one another.   Many times, I get that I've raised them a point just by asking, which is great to know but I've really grown to like the people who speak to something I can (actually) do to help them out.  In helping them out, I find my own rating on the ten scale goes up a notch as a result too.  

It's a fun exercise and whether you're practicing gratitude or not, I definitely recommend you give it a try!

Wanna know what else I've been reflecting upon with regards to gratitude?  Check out the past entries in this series:

• July's Gratitude
• June's Gratitude
• May's Gratitude
• April's Gratitude
• March's Gratitude
• February's Gratitude
• January's Gratitude

By Any Other Nerd Blog by Lance Eaton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.