Bringing it Home: Finding Gratitude

bringing it home with sarah and teniel sarah that's dido i love it that's a great song thank you this is a good week for that song isn't it i discovered dido because eminem sampled this song in his song stand that's how i found out about dido and i'm glad i did because i love this i know you think i might have some good music for us to play later i know we've been having fun speaking of fun today's my mom's birthday yay happy birthday mary happy birthday mama i love you so much she's a good lady she is she is i'm glad i can call her mama yes so also this week is thanksgiving i'm not about that no i'm kidding no last week we told our viewers to get some stuff done early so we hope that some of y'all did that listeners i can't see us oh that's right sorry our listeners it's probably good y'all can't see us anywho so thanksgiving right it's here we're getting ready and it is the week for us to really consider gratitude and being thankful first of all get the turkey out of the freezer get the turkey in the refrigerator so we can start thawing yes for sure i'm gonna be grateful for that grateful for but you know we didn't practice gratefulness and thanksgiving all year long but we really do pay a little bit more attention to it this time of year so we thought it'd be a great idea to kind of share 10 ways that you can practice gratitude each and every single day let's get it 10 ways um so this this list for ideas came from mindful.org so we really want people to be mindful of being grateful and thankful for sure okay so number one um i have often thought about doing this but have not started so this may be my cue to start this um keeping a gratitude journal okay so this is gonna take effort correct but it's gonna get me into a habit of daily practice that helps me remember each and every day what i'm grateful for you know gifts and health and things that i enjoy a beautiful blue sky or you know waking up to a beautiful sunrise or you know like that someone um someone held the door for me in the rain you know but each day establishing this habit of writing in my grateful journal and then at the end of the year look at it oh that's good and i mean you can look at it throughout the year like on the days when you're just feeling down and you feel like things are just not going right yeah it's a good time to pick it up yes because every day even on your bad days there's something to be grateful through the journal i like that so one thing that i do you know it's easy to be grateful where you are when you think back over your life and remember some bad times sometimes you don't want to think about anymore stuff we shut down things that we just want to just close away and shut away but you're not there anymore wow that's a big thing i love doing that because that can bring you back to a place of gratitude so quickly even though things may not be going perfectly yeah you can easily think back to a time in your life when they were worse than they are today you're right we all experience that in some shaker form yes we have and i think that can restore the gratitude quickly absolutely that's a good one for us to remember to know yes yes you know also another one is to ask yourself about your relationships you know well i'm not going too deep for that but asking yourself like you know what do these people that i care about what do they add to my life and what do i add to theirs yeah but if you've got some good people in your life you're very fortunate yes you know so consider your relationships and be grateful for them but also think about all the good things that they bring to your life and hopefully you're bringing good to theirs you're not talking about like romantic relationships no any kind it could be like family friend even at work i'm not saying you got to be besties with your work people but they're people that you have a relationship with what it can be with a partner or a spouse of course but hopefully they make this live right yes exactly um your siblings you know your cousins uh your church family if you have a church family we're in relationship with a lot of people on different levels so consider you know what are you bringing to their lives and what do they bring into yours and thanking thanking them for that right you know another thing i think it's very important that you share how grateful you are with other people when somebody does something for you you know let them know that you appreciate them because all of us like to be appreciated nobody likes to feel like they're being taken for granted so even the smallest things that people do and maybe something they do every single day and you have never said thank you for doing this it really makes my day when you do this i appreciate this um this may be the way to do it so i just gotta say you you are so good at doing that well thank you thank you for saying that i did it again not just towards me but you surely have shown that to me but i have seen you with other people so it's something that's important to let people know it is it is so this next one kind of speaks to me because you know i love the outdoors and things like that but um using your senses to gain an appreciation of of life and beauty around you you love the is it the sunrise no i love them both the sunset is the one that you take the pictures of yeah all the paintings a picture of it from your porch because i have a beautiful view no it's just god did it in front of me but you know like yes like nature just like the smell of the rain or the sounds of the wind blowing the leaves or in the springtime when everything's coming to life again and maybe sneeze but i'm gonna get out and appreciate it or you know when you walk in um maybe someone's home your mother or somebody and you smell a smell that you're like yeah this is this is me this is probably gonna happen thursday somebody's gonna walk into their mom or aunt or grandma's house they're gonna smell a familiar aroma of some food cooking and it may bring to mind people that aren't with us anymore that you're grateful for so acknowledge that and talk about it yes yes that'll be good and just like those things you're talking about there are visual reminders now anytime we feel like that things are not going well for us we can look around and look at somebody else look at their situation what's going on with them and we can be reminded instantly of the things that we need to be grateful for absolutely you know we want to have our pity party but when we start you know attending other people's parties uh and we don't even have to attend no we don't really want but if we just see what's truly going on with other people their illnesses their family situations their money situations their job situations they may be alone they may be all of these things right and if we are not in that same boat that cues us to be grateful instantly right because a lot of people that you know are in the midst of stuff are still some of the most grateful people i've ever encountered right you can look at them and say they don't even have very much and they are so grateful right yeah right and research shows us you know that like and we teach this in some of our classes if you like make an oath or take a vow kind of to do something you're more likely to follow through so in a lot of our classes we teach we set we do goal setting and we encourage people to write it down so i want to encourage you all to write down your own gratitude idea you know what are you going to start doing and then post it somewhere you look at it every day this might be a fun activity for some families to do on thanksgiving because you know after you eat there's kind of this low well i mean i know there's gonna be sports and you know naps and black friday cleaning there are things to do but this can be incorporated as well because you know a lot of families go around the table and tell what we're thankful for i know that's so corny but i love it so this could be something that you could do also yes you could even have some little preset cards at the table that they could hold yeah or everybody take somebody and write something you're thankful for about that specific person yeah you can turn this into anything that you want it to be yes and you know one thing we really have to do is watch what we say you know um people that are grateful uh they use grateful language you know they talk about being fortunate and they talk about abundance you know and we're not focusing on us necessarily but we're focusing on the good things that others have done for us you know we're talking about how lucky we are that we're connected to some of these people that we're connected to um we're talking about how fortunate we are to be in the situation that we're in you know first day if you're surrounded by people that you love right you're fortunate if you are surrounded by good food that you enjoy um you know you're very fortunate and so you really have to watch your language and you know we teach this also in some of our classes that relate to health we're not we talk about speaking positively you know positive self-talk so we have to make sure that we speak positively about our situations yeah i like that idea yep yep okay so some days we don't feel like being grateful right so this next idea is going to encourage you to keep being grateful even on those times because sometimes as it says you got to go through the motions okay i may not feel like holding the door for anybody today because everybody is on my nerves and i don't want to deal with people but you know what i'm still going to do it okay because that's the right thing to do okay and i'm still going to smile and say hello if someone greets me you know because i am grateful even though i'm having a bad day i'm still grateful that i am able to get out and about or i'm still grateful that hey i can spread a smile to somebody even if my insides are not smiling you know we're still going to do it sometimes you've got to just go through the motions because it is hopefully an idea or a gratitude filled way of living it's just going to become who we are even on those bad days yeah you really got to push well we've heard fake it till you make it i've heard that before sometimes you got to do that sometimes you go through the checkout line and it takes everything in you when you have a chipper clerk and they're like how you doing today i'm fine or even you know what if you notice somebody having a bad day like if it's somebody that you feel like you can talk to i actually did this recently with somebody like i texted on the next day and said look i know you weren't really yourself last night i hope you're able to get some good rest and i hope you have a great day today right right i mean we're not gonna be sunshiny every day but we still can go through those grateful motions and sometimes we can trigger a better attitude just by going through the motions so i like that absolutely yeah and you know think outside the box if there's something or somebody that you're grateful for let them know that in a creative way you know maybe your thing is not going to be the send a thank you card but maybe you're at the cookie shop and you know that they like this kind of cookie this happens to be one of the week grab them one that means so much let me just grab one and say i saw this and i thought about you so okay i might have a friend that loves like the nutrition tea thing like what if i just go grab a little five dollar gift card or something you know yes it means a lot whatever it is that they like that's connected to them uh do something outside of the box you know and it doesn't have to be anything monetary maybe you just want to spend some time with them and they go for a lot together yeah and they never do that right i mean they make a little shock but no but if you give the gift of yourself and your time that can be more than the cookie i promise but you know as we are in this week of thanksgiving and gratefulness we definitely want to honor that but we don't want it to stop when thanksgiving is over we want it we want it to continue and we want to live a life where we practice gratitude daily so what are you ready to eat thursday everything specifically i love my mama sweet potato casserole and her cheese grease i knew you would say sweet potato casserole i already knew that yes so are you one of these people that your food can't touch on the plate no i'm not but one of my children is i'm like no pile it on well they got those plates i've seen those divided plates on social media oh these are perfect for the people who you know but um yeah so we're getting ready to sit down for thanksgiving dinner and just a hug what are you waiting for we're all excited mac and cheese obviously i knew you were gonna say yeah obviously because this ain't gonna be the box up no it's a real deal the real deal but anyway sarah i'm grateful for you same here and we're grateful for all of our listeners and so thank them for joining us for this special episode in the words of bob marley live the life you love and love the life you live happy thanksgiving everybody