So exactly what is it that you do when you're tied up in your house? Well, not, you know, tied up, but stuck in your house for a couple of days because there's a major hurricane out in the Gulf of Mexico and it could turn right and come at you at any second. That, my friends, is a good question. One of the things you do is you make sure everything is charged, your cell phone, your laptops, everything else that you can charge.
You make sure that your battery backup for your main computer. Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Daily Grateful. I'm back.
I'm Michael Croes and there's a bunch of other stuff. You have to go to the store and buy a bunch of stuff that you can eat that you don't have to cook. And I'm going to tell you, as somebody who's working on eating more healthy, that is not an easy thing to do. I spent like the last couple of days eating a lot of carbohydrates, just a lot of cart and we never lost power.
That was a crazy thing about it. We never lost power. So you eat a lot of carbohydrates, all of which are now pretty much gone. So that's good.
I'm happy about that. Very happy about that. Anyway, back to business now. The hurricane is behind us.
I can't even pronounce the name of the hurricane. And I never even really wanted to know it. I just wanted to know that it wasn't going to do any bad things to us, except give us a ton of wind. It did not, you know, bunch of rain.
That's the other thing I did. I moored grass the day before I moored my lawn. I love to mo my lawn. You know, I get emotional about mowing my lawn.
I'm so grateful that I have a lawn to mow. And number two, that I have a really cool electric, you know, battery operated lawnmower to mow it with. Oh, gosh, that is so good. Anyway, mow the lawn before.
So it was nice and short. Okay. And this morning, I get out to go and do stuff and the lawn needs mowing again, because it just rained constantly. One day we got seven inches of rain.
The next day we got nine inches of rain. It just rained and rained and rained and it was raining sideways. I didn't lose offense. I thought I was going to lose offense and did not lose offense.
All right, back to the daily grateful. Let's get on to this. I got a bunch of people asking me about journaling, about how I journal. I'm going to talk about journaling.
I'm going to tell you, I think the best thing I can do is I'm going to tell you what I do it is, and that's not necessarily the way you should do it. I write three things down in my journal every morning when I get up. Okay, I write three things down in my journal. So let's open up the journal now and look at what I put in here.
The first thing, number one, I'm grateful that we survived the hurricane with no loss of power. Yeah, that was good. All right, that is good. The next thing I wrote is I'm grateful that it is the weekend and I'm going to see my grandkids.
That is awesome. You know, I just wrote that down and then I just sit and think about that. Oh, wow. You know, and then the next thing I wrote down and because I really was just all excited about my grandchildren, the next thing I wrote down is it's a new day.
And tomorrow is a new day full of possibilities and joy and happiness and more things to be grateful for. That was my three things today. All right, that's what I did. Those are my three things.
Is that something that you should do? Well, that's what I do. I don't know what you should do, but I have some suggestions. I went, I actually went to a talk on this and I took notes and you know, I went, gosh, three years ago, a convention in Orlando, and I went to this lady was teaching journaling wasn't necessarily geared on being grateful, but it was geared on journaling to keep up with your life.
And let me look at my notes. Set aside sometime each day, it doesn't have to be a long time for me. It's less than five minutes. I sit down and I crank that out.
By the way, I don't do it on my computer. You can do it on your computer. A lot of people do. I like to take a pen and I have a little book and I, it's a hard covered book and I date it first thing I have to date and I do my three things.
But you know, you might do more. You might do paragraphs. You might do a whole bunch of stuff. Okay, but the other thing is be specific when you journal, be very specific.
In the case of being grateful, you want to be really, you know, and this is not what I do. Okay, but if I was going to suggest to you and you're somebody who likes to write a lot of stuff, you just don't be vague. You get real, you know, I'm grateful for mom's cooking because she makes roast beef really good. And my late mother did make roast beef.
I have not had roast beef since we lost her. Gosh. Anyway, be very specific about what you're grateful for by being or, you know, if you're going to journal it. And if you're very specific and you write this down or you type it into your computer, you know, into your computer, it will, that's, it's going to make it work better.
Okay, it is. The other thing when you're journaling, this is what I wrote, go beyond the obvious. Okay, it's easy to focus on things in our lives that are important, but go beyond that if you can look for the small things, go into the small things and really dig into those. This is something that I have done that has brought me more success than anything else is digging into the small things.
When I go to a talk, I listen to everything and I pick up one tiny little thing out of a talk and I will write that down and you know, I'll make a mental note, but then I will immediately write it down. And then I will later take a deep dive into that. I will take a deep dive into that. And the other thing that you have to do is you have to make this a habit.
You have to do this every day, you know, make it a habit like smoking. Oh, God, I'm glad I never started that. But those people just can't, you know, they, it's a habit. All right, that's what you do.
You make it a habit. And when you do this, you're going to find that practicing gratitude is easier. If you sit down every day, now me, I will sit down every day and do three things. But other people, I have a friend who lives down in Fort Lauderdale and she writes two pages of everything that she's grateful for.
And she goes into great detail. And you know, good for her, I am thrilled. I wish I could do that, but I can't. Maybe I should try it a couple of times, but I just write my three things down and I concentrate on those.
I will take deep dives into one of those things. Okay, I will definitely take deep dives into sometimes all three of those things. But as far as my journaling is concerned, I do three things. You just the other thing you've got to do is after you've written it down, you have to express your gratitude.
Okay, or if you've written down a business idea, you've got to go into that and do something with it. But with gratitude, you just express it. You know, don't keep the gratitude to yourself. Okay, or don't keep the business idea to yourself.
Talk to someone that you trust about it, someone that you respect about it. If you're grateful for something, I tell my son, how grateful I am, I tell my daughter how grateful I am about a specific thing. And then she will take that and she will expand on that and she will give me other aspects of it. Or my son will is real good at this.
You know, my youngest son will give me other ideas about this. You know, I have a friend who I will talk about things like this. And it's just one big giant circle that just keeps going. So just a few other things that I had written down in my notes from the seminar that I went to a couple years ago.
And I tend to like pushing this towards my way of thinking, but use your journal to write down all of your gratitude. If you can, that's one thing, I don't do that, but you can find a partner. Okay, that's another thing, find a partner to journal with that you can work on things together with. That's always good.
Some people do this, I don't as a general rule, but you can use social media to share your gratitude with others or share your business ideas with others or share your personal goals with others. You can do that. I don't, but you can be creative with all of this. You can draw pictures in your journal if you want to.
I have a friend who does that all the time. There you go. See you Monday. Oh, and then tomorrow for the weekend edition.