Gratitude

What's up, Cadre family? My name is Garrett Westwell, and I use my background in sport and performance psychology to help you and everyday people realize that we're all performers and to help your minds optimize to work for you rather than against you. So today I want to talk about something that we can all benefit from, which is gratitude. And gratitude is really great, but what I first want you to think about is you're probably watching this platform on your phone, and I want you to look specifically at your phone and think back and reflect on when you first got that phone.

All right? Whether you bought it from a store, whether someone gifted it to you, whether you ordered online, it came to whatever it is. Think about how you felt and reacted when you first got that phone. Did you maybe appreciate the new features, the new upgrades that you maybe got? Maybe it was a bigger screen or a different screen. Maybe it had better quality on the camera. Whatever it is, I bet you had a really fond appreciation of that. And that can apply to other material things, whether you got a new shirt with pineapples on it, maybe, or maybe you got something else in general.

But what happens is a lot of the times in our life, we start to lose those things and we start to forget those cool qualities. As time passes, things don't feel as fresh, and we start to lose perspective on how great those things are and how great we have it in our life. And that's where gratitude comes in. All right, maybe reflecting back on things that you forgot and things that you appreciate, gratitude has a lot of evidence behind it for how it helps the athletes that I work with and everyday people.

So for athletes, it can help increase resilience, because athletes can see opportunities where they might not have seen them otherwise, and they can be grateful for the values and characteristics that they have in themselves that help them persist and be resilient in those opportunities. For everyday people, there's a lot of evidence backed support to show that it increases enthusiasm, openness, creativity, ability to reach their goals, determination, optimism, just overall better quality of life.

The list goes on and on for gratitude, and one of the best ways to practice gratitude is this what I use every night? Which is what? A gratitude journal. So, with a gratitude journal, again, I do this every night. Usually one to three things. Something simple, something quick. Some nights I might feel a little more tired. So literally just one thing that I'm grateful for, it can take 30 seconds, whereas some nights I might feel a little bit more alert and ready, and I can write down three things and really really dive into it.

So it's a useful tool to do that. And it really shows and highlights one of the ways that gratitude works, which is novelty. So novelty, in other words, keeping things fresh, just like that example I used at the beginning. Looking back on your phone that you're watching this from, what are you grateful for? What are you grateful for with that phone? What do you notice now that maybe you noticed right when you got it, but you forgot and lost perspective of over time. A great way to practice gratitude in a gratitude journal, just one of the many ways is to simply go with the formula, I am grateful for blank because blank.

So what are you grateful for? Number one and why that's the most important part is why you're grateful for it. It can be material things like a phone or a vehicle or a clothing item or anything like that. It can be experiences that you've had, maybe personal qualities that you may have, people in your life. The list goes on and on for things that you can be grateful for, but it's such a great and powerful tool that impacts everybody in a positive way. So that's my call to action to you. Try to list at least one or three things daily that you're grateful for and watch, watch the magic as the benefits grow.

All right, go be grateful for today and I'll see you later.