TT17 - Doing This One Thing In The Morning Can Change Your Life

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With so many different things constantly pulling at our attention, it's important now more than ever to make sure that we focus on not only what we're doing on a daily basis, but how it's actually improving our lives. 

As you probably realize by now, I'm extremely passionate about starting the day early to get in some sort of a morning routine. Not only do I believe that this will allow you to make consistent time for personal growth, but I'm a firm believer that it will cultivate discipline and allow you to improve other areas of your life as well.

Enter gratitude:

One of the biggest objections that I see when people try to change their lives is that it takes way too much work. Let's face it... getting up early is hard, and to make a long-term change that can improve your entire life, it has to be hard too, right? Well, not necessarily...

The simple act of waking up in the morning and taking less than five minutes to practice gratitude can drastically alter your mindset and your outlook on life. And yes, I said practice. Because with anything that you want to get better at, you need to make consistent time to actually work on that skill.

Gratitude is like a muscle, and the more that you exercise it, the stronger that it gets. Situations that once stressed you out or made you feel miserable slowly turn into opportunities to look at the things that are going well in your life. See that sink full of dishes? You used to look at it as a mundane chore that you hated, but after practicing gratitude you now see that it's a sign that you have food to eat and plates to eat on. That rush hour traffic that used to just get to you? Now you see it as a sign that you have a job to go to, and can travel almost anywhere that you'd like.

Gratitude hits a switch in your brain that can change the entire lense that you look at the world through in your life.

So how do you actually practice gratitude?

Exercise 1: This is the exercise that I do every morning, and it has had a drastic change on not only my outlook on life, but also my positivity and attitude towards each day. Start by taking a piece of paper and a pen, and write out one thing that you're grateful for and why (yes, physically write it out on paper. This activates parts of the brain that don't get activated if you were to type it in your phone's notepad or just think of it in your mind). That's it. When you write out what you're grateful for and why you feel that way, it causes you to experience a feeling that you won't get if you just write down what you're grateful for. It allows you to feel those emotions of gratitude that can change your mindset immediately.

Exercise 2: This exercise isn't as powerful as the first, but it's still better than nothing. All you have to do here is write down three things that you're grateful for. That's it. If you need guidance, pick one big thing, one small thing, and an experience. If you follow through with this on a consistent basis, you'll still see a change in your mindset.

If this doesn't make sense to you or it doesn't seem like that big of a deal, I'm urging you to just commit to trying it for 30 days. See if you can wake up every morning and immediately put yourself in a more positive frame of mind. If you do, leave a comment below that you're committing so I know you're reading! And if you do follow through and you see a change in your mindset, I just urge you to tell someone else. I believe that spreading gratitude can eliminate a lot of the negativity that we see on a daily basis, and if we really want to change the world, it starts with changing ourselves.

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