Fortune Recipe (eBook)

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Gratitude

My first principle is gratitude because for me, it’s the basis for everything in my life. That sense of deep appreciation, the deliberate choice to look for what I have to be grateful for, dominates my behavior. It’s even how I start my day.

From a very practical standpoint, I begin each day with a gratitude ritual. Let me first say I’ve never been a guy who could get into deep meditation. For some reason, it just doesn’t work for me. But I practice a daily habit in its place where I get up early because I like to watch the sun come up and make myself a nice espresso. Then I take a few deep breaths, which connects me and grounds me. And then I review my gratitudes.

Let me explain why I do this because I think this practice is one that will help anybody. One of the things I’ve learned about life is that you get what you look for; you get what you focus on. That starts by asking yourself meaningful questions. Think about it: the whole concept of thought is nothing more than a human being asking and answering their own questions. It flows from the fact that you are your own best audience if you’re asking great questions.

So I have learned one of the greatest questions to get your focus is to ask this very powerful, potent question: “What am I most grateful for?”

So I developed my morning gratitude ritual. I do it with a certain cadence. I use my life mastery wheel to look for different gratitudes every day in each of these six areas of my life:

• My emotions
• My health
• My relationships
• My spirituality
• My career
• My lifestyle

I’ll come back to this life wheel again and again throughout the book because it really is the foundation for complete life mastery.

Emotional Gratitude

I begin my ritual with what am I grateful for emotionally. I might say I’m grateful that I’m now at a place in my life to be able to choose my attitude. That means I can choose my belief system, and I can choose my core values; I no longer have to buy into somebody else’s. I’m grateful I can put myself in a good state of mind.

I’ve found this leads me to the three emotions I want use as my operating system throughout the course of the day: I want to be happy. I want to be kind to others. I want to see the world as abundant. Gratitude helps me bring those into focus.

When I’m grateful for where my state of mind is, I can use it as a very powerful tool for emotional fitness. It allows me to get into happiness, kindness, and abundance a lot quicker.

Being able to choose your emotions is powerful. And we know that not everyone believes they have the choice. A lot of people believe their attitude or emotions are dictated by whether it’s rainy or sunny out, whether they’ve got a million bucks in the bank, if a special person tells them they love them, or even if it’s Monday versus Friday.

In other words, they tell themselves they can’t be happy because of circumstances. And that’s where they go wrong. Think about the pandemic in 2020. How many people bemoaned their situation? Sure, bad things happened. Challenging situations popped up everywhere. But the truth is, I didn’t have a bad year. I had a really good year because I looked at the whole experience as a set of blessings to me.

For example, I love to speak in front of others, but I hate airports, and I hate airplanes. Because of the general shutdown, I got a lot of my life back in 2020. It caused me to reassess. I thought about what was most important to me. I think this happened for many people. They reconnected with what was more important to them: health, family, and relationships, as opposed to business success and materialistic gains.

It even caused me to ask, “Where do I want to live? Maybe I don’t need to live in a big city anymore. Maybe I don’t have to live in Silicon Valley.” Again, I think when your mind is open, you’ve got emotional fitness, and you’re willing to ask and honestly answer questions, like “What’s really important to me? What isn’t?” it can lead you to some real self-discovery.

I ended up moving to a completely different area, and I’m grateful for the change in my lifestyle. I can look back on 2020, ask, “What was great about that year?” and come up with a significant list. Because 2020 didn’t “happen” to me. I looked for what was good about it. That’s an attitude of gratitude, and it changes how you feel about everything.

When facing any challenge or difficulty, the trick is to ask, “What could be great about this?” That’s a great gratitude question. What’s the message, lesson, or opportunity in this new obstacle, challenge, or “failure”? This takes away the resentment, despair, and confusion and points you toward a positive outcome.

Gratitude for Health

The second place I go with gratitude is my health, and I focus on different aspects of it each day. If I had a great night’s sleep the night before, I’m grateful for that. I’m grateful that I’m approaching sixty-two years of age and I don’t feel like it. I have a great energy level. I’m grateful every time I get a workout in. I’m grateful every time I ride my bike. I’m grateful every time I get out and play a round of golf. I’m also grateful when I eat a good, healthy meal. I’m grateful for different little things in the area of health.

Gratitude for Relationships

Then I go to the third part of the wheel: relationships. I think the most powerful question here is, “Who do I love, and who loves me?” I think about all the wonderful, loving people that are in my life, starting with my wife and the forty-year relationship we’ve had.

Then I go outward to my children and my grandson. Then I expand to the friends I have. I had a large group of friends, and we all got together when we were in junior high—so literally fifty years ago. There are maybe a dozen of us left now, and I am so grateful for them because friendships should never be taken for granted. I’m grateful for other individuals in my family, but I’m particularly grateful for the friendships I get to choose.

I am grateful for the relationships I have within our company. At this point, we now have about 120 advisors, and it bothers me when I’m not in a good place with any one of them. I am deeply grateful for having great, great relationships at work.

In this profession of coaching and advising, you become great friends with your clients. When they hurt, you hurt. And when they win, you win. I’m grateful for all of them and grateful that I get to work with a high-quality group of professionals with strong core values.

I’m also grateful for all I’ve learned about how to make relationships work. For example, one of the things I say in live seminars is that relationships are where you give, not where you get. Whether it be in a work environment, in a business relationship, in a family, or with a love interest, whoever it is, just look to give. I have a career where I get to help people, and the people I help also have careers that are about helping people. It’s deeply gratifying.

This ties directly into the law of attraction, which I’ll talk more about later. This choice of leading with a giving hand has attracted amazing people to me. And of course, nothing makes relationships work better than expressing gratitude.

I know that it’s easy for you as a reader to say, “Oh, well, of course he’s grateful. Look at the life he lives now.” But that’s not the secret. The secret is to be grateful when you don’t have much of anything. When I was thirty, I learned to be grateful when I had just lost a million dollars. I needed to find things to be grateful for, otherwise I was going to wallow in self-pity and resentment. That never would have gotten me out of that hole. If you can ask “What’s great about this?” when you don’t have success, when you have challenges, or even when you have disasters, and you don’t give up until you have real answers, then nothing can hold you back.

When I walk into a seminar room, I tell my audience the first thing we need to do is get grateful. And I mean grateful for the little things. Be grateful your heart never misses a beat, 100,000 times a day. Be grateful for the way your body works. Be grateful for the time and the place we live today, which is the greatest time and place ever to be alive.

As usual, there will be people who argue about that last one. My dad is one of those people. How many older folks want to talk about the “good old days”? I always have to remind him, “You mean the good old days when we died younger, had unchecked diseases, and had way less access to knowledge, convenience, and safety?” People can now fly in an airplane at 30,000 feet and get to a destination in five hours that used to take five days by train or five months by wagon, and yet people get very upset because the Wi-Fi doesn’t work at Starbucks.

I’ve seen that people who are reactive and let negative emotions dominate usually are not grateful. And they’re also not happy. So I remind people of these very potent facts: you can’t be angry and grateful at the same time. You can’t be resentful and grateful at the same time. You can’t be hateful and grateful at the same time. This is how gratitude can alter your perspective. You can shift your reaction from one negative thing to ten positive things in an instant.

Finally, it’s important to note we won’t always have these relationships. They are...