Practice Gratitude Today To Serve Your Future
Take Pen to Paper: Edition 112
Greetings Friends!
Do you know where you would be without gratitude?
Gratitude directly relates to your mindset, and, like so many other aspects of your being, mindset has a wide spectrum of possibilities, from the dark negative to the shiny positive.
Without gratitude, you could be in the doldrums, surrounded by negativity. We all have bad days.
In this newsletter:
Practice makes better.
Practice when you are not feeling it.
Practice daily gratitude for now and beyond.
A Teacher Motto That is a Lie
I hate to admit it, but some of your teachers have lied to you if they said, “Practice makes perfect.”
Practice rarely makes perfect because perfect only exists in the eye of the beholder.
However, practice is very effective at making you better at a skill.
Out of all of my art classes, I am drawn to watercolor painting. It looks so easy when executed by an experienced watercolor painter, but it’s not.
My first obstacle was the amount of water on the brush or the paper. Puddles are the enemy.
I was participating in a watercolor class every one to two months. My top goal was not to create a puddle on my paper. My progress was haphazard at best.
Then, six weeks ago, the art instructor started offering classes once a week. I am amazed at my progress with weekly practice. I create fewer puddles and now know how to deal with them. Even the art instructor admits that she has to recapture the skills needed if she doesn’t paint with watercolors regularly.
Practice makes you better.
I Don’t Feel Like Practicing
If you practice enough, not only do you get better, but it (whatever ‘it’ is for you) becomes easier.
All this time, I could have been practicing watercolor painting at home. I have all the supplies. I’m not going to give you excuses. I just don’t do it.
Everyone has days when they just don’t feel it. For as long as I have taken daily walks, I have had days when I didn’t feel like it. My strategy was to put my shoes on and tell myself I would take a short walk; then I kept walking. Now, this has become my easiest habit to keep. It feels wrong if I don’t walk.
The practice of taking a walk every day has helped me see the task though whether I’m feeling it or not.
I’ve experienced the same with writing daily gratitude. My 30-day challenge demonstrated the importance of continuing the habit, even when I didn’t feel like doing it. Because I have practiced writing gratitude, whether I feel like writing it or not, I find it easy to do.
Daily Gratitude Extends Beyond The Present
You may be wondering why writing gratitude needs to be an easy habit.
When you are writing gratitude, you think about what you are grateful for now. But each time you write gratitude, you exercise your gratitude muscle. You are practicing. Writing gratitude next time will be easier.
I found that the few minutes I practice writing gratitude each morning makes it easier to write no matter how I feel.
That practice is important because there will be days when you feel like you have nothing to be grateful for. Bad things, sometimes really bad things, happen to you. This is when your mindset tips or dives to the negative end of the feelings spectrum.
But all your gratitude practice prepares you for those days and tells you otherwise. You have so much to be grateful for, even on the worst of days.
Go back and read through your journal if you doubt it. All that you have to be grateful for doesn’t disappear.
When you write gratitude on the worst of days, your mindset will tip towards the shiny positive end of the feelings spectrum. You will be able to see possibilities that negative feelings keep at bay.
A consistent gratitude habit takes the wide spectrum of feelings, negative to positive, and tips the spectrum towards the positive side.
Wouldn’t you like to feel that every day?
7 Days, 7 Thoughts on Gratitude and Good:
I am grateful that no puddles were created while painting the pictures featured in today’s newsletter. Practice helped me.
Interested in the role water plays in watercolor painting and the problems that can arise? This video gives you a brief rundown.
I love this article because it makes the distinction between intellectual understanding and skill development. It’s easy to understand the benefits of gratitude. Practicing gratitude during difficult times requires the practice of daily action.
A quote: “Sincere practice, makes the impossible possible.” - Dada Vaswani.
It’s a good thing to know how to begin your day with something positive because we can’t predict what a day will bring.
I am grateful for the many days gratitude has given me a positive start.
If you can start your day on a positive note, you can share it with someone else. That is a good thing.
Thank you for reading. This week, see if starting with gratitude gives your day a positive start.
Until next time,
💚
Susan
What is your favorite way to brighten your day during a difficult time? Leave a comment and let me know. I would love to read about it.
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I have a 2nd newsletter about journaling. If you are interested or know someone who would be, check it out at From The Pen’s Nib: A Commonplace Book About Journaling.
🙏Bonus thru November🙏
Last year, I created a free gratitude template for anyone interested in either:
starting a daily gratitude practice
stretching your gratitude practice
The template is 31 topics and example sentences for gratitude. Thirty-one topics will get you through each day in any month. Isn’t November a great time to start?
My journaling habit started with gratitude. It has brought me more than I imagined, so it’s natural for me to recommend it.
I love having a guide and examples when I take on a new endeavor. I hope this template provides that for anyone who wants to use it. There are three ways to access the template.
Access and make a copy of this Google Document: The Daily Gratitude Habit Jumpstart
Go to The Daily Gratitude Jumpstart by clicking this link https://sgsabel.gumroad.com/l/DailyGratitudeHabitJumpstart. Or enter it into your browser.
When you scroll down the page, you should see my Gumroad home page without the “Name a fair Price” section circled. In the “Name a fair price” box, put the numeral “0” because this is free! You provide your email, and a copy will be sent to you to download.
You can also access Gumroad through my website, takepentopaper.com, which has a link to the site described above.
Let me know if you have any problems by commenting or answering this email. Technology and I are often at odds, and I may need to tweak access.
I will post the above in my newsletter throughout November. Remember, the template is not month-specific. Use it any time.
Yes, the old adage practice makes perfect was something we learned growing up and then we used it in our classrooms! Ha! I learned the new phrase "practice makes progress" from the online art teacher I follow. :-) I wish I was as disciplined as you about walking and writing!