High Performance Mindset | Learn from World-Class Leaders, Consultants, Athletes & Coaches about Mindset - 468: Growing Your Gratitude

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

Gratitude is connected to better health, more optimism and resilience. This week, you could start using a scientifically proven tool to make you feel more grateful. Three tools we discussed are starting your day with gratitude, using gratitude language, or ending your day with confidence. Choose gratitude! This perspective is always available.  Power Phrase this Week: “I choose to intentionally practice gratitude daily. I focus on what I am grateful for to stay fueled and excited for my life.”  Quote of the Week: “Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings.”—William Arthur Ward 

Hi friends, my name is Dr. Sindra Kampoff, a national leader in the field of sport and performance psychology. Every week I'm on the local radio sharing my top tips on exactly how to develop the mindset of the world's best, so you can accomplish all your dreams. Get ready for a jammed packed episode focused on practical tips to help you get after your goals and step out of your comfort zone. Let's go. We check in with Cinder Kampoff on this lovely morning, and we're talking about growing your

gratitude. Cinder, when we talk to you, you usually start us off with a quote. I like this one by William Arthur Ward. He said, Gratitude can transform common days into thanksgivings, turn routine jobs into joy, and change ordinary opportunities into blessings. So what inspired the topic today? Well, this week with Thanksgiving, at least in the United States, I thought it was a great time just to remind us the power of gratitude and why we should practice gratitude every day. And, you know, it actually, when we practice it every day, it's connected to better health and more optimism in our life and just positive changes to mental health and resilience.

So what do you mean by gratitude exactly? Well, I like this definition by a gratitude researcher named Robert Emons. And he said, it's a sense of wonder, thankfulness and appreciation for your life. And I think there's lots of different ways we can show gratitude. First, by discounting the blessings that we have and noticing how fortunate we are and sometimes how worse our circumstances could be. We can express gratitude by thanking people in our life, you know, our co-workers or our family or our friends. But really at the heart of gratitude is the appreciation for our life and our work and for everything that we have right now in the present.

And Cinder, can we talk a little bit about why gratitude is so important? Yeah, well, it's more than just saying thank you. You know, it's really appreciating your life the way it is and seeing difficulties and the opportunities and seeing that problems can actually be gifts and not taking, you know, even the small things for granted. And it's powerful because we can't feel gratitude and fear or gratitude and anxiety or gratitude and anger at the same time. So it's been found to really be at the heart of just a fulfilling life in general. And we can practice, intentionally

practice gratitude every day, and it helps us relieve our negativity and also grow our own performance and our grit. So what are some ways that we can actually practice gratitude this week and beyond this week, really? Yeah, well, I'll share with you three tools that are proven to help you increase your gratitude. So the first one is to start your day with gratitude. And I have this great morning routine, Lisa, I know we've talked about on here, and it's upcoming in my new book where I've written about it. The first step of that is just for a minute every morning, express gratitude for the small things and for the big things. A second way you could increase your gratitude is just by using grateful language like blessed or fortunate or privileged, or instead of things like

doomed or hopeless or scarcity or unlucky. And the last one is to actually end your day with gratitude. So you could, you know, even as you're laying in bed every night, or you could write these things out or just think of them, like think of three things you're grateful for. And it could be, again, these small things or big things. It could be moments that you really care to celebrate throughout your day, or it could be even the difficult moments that you could be grateful for. And with Thanksgiving coming up this week, do you have some ideas maybe you could share on what we might do on Thanksgiving Day?

Yeah, I would say, you know, spend some time thinking about things you're grateful for. So even if you're sitting around maybe the Thanksgiving dinner table, you could have everybody share one thing you're grateful for, or something that you're happy about right now, or what's going right in your life. And these are called gratitude-focused questions. And that helps us appreciate what we have today. Cinder, how do you summarize today for us? Well, gratitude has been connected to better health and more optimism and stronger resilience. And there's proven ways that you can grow your gratitude, starting your day with gratitude or using grateful language or ending your day with gratitude.

And I think the perspective of gratitude is always there, not just on Thanksgiving, but the perspective is always available for us. We always end with a power phrase to help take us through and to help remember this message. What's the power phrase today? I choose to intentionally practice gratitude daily. I focus on what I'm grateful for

to stay excited and fueled for my own life. Well, let's stay fueled before we get to the Thanksgiving table this week. Sindra, how do people get in touch with you and follow along with your work and see what it is that you do? Maybe pick up the book? Yeah, you can head over to drsindra, so D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A.com.

And my book, Beyond Grit, is over there where I talk about this topic of gratitude in the book. Way to go for finishing another episode of the High Performance Mindset. I'm giving you a virtual fist pump. Holy cow, did that go by way too fast for anyone else? If you want more, remember to subscribe and you can head over to Dr. Sindra for show notes

and to join my exclusive community for high performers where you get access to videos about mindset each week. So again, you can head over to Dr. Sindhra. That's D-R-C-I-N-D-R-A dot com. See you next week.