The Power of Gratitude: Cultivating Mindful Living

Ever wondered how gratitude can reshape your life? Join me as we dive deep into The Power of Gratitude. 

In this episode, I will share with you the science behind gratitude,  its transformative impact on your mindset, and its ability to lead you toward a more proactive and positive life. une in to discover practical tips for daily gratitude and learn how it can enhance both your personal and professional life.

Listen, subscribe,  and embark on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment through the incredible power of gratitude. Your brighter future begins here.

Introduction (00:00)
How Gratitude Help Us To Have a Proactive and Protected Mindset (02:35)
How Being Grateful Helps in Boosting The Love Hormone: Oxytocin (03:58)
Boosting Oxytocin (The Love Hormone) By Being Grateful (04:50)
Finding Things To Be Grateful For (06:36)
30-Day Gratitude Challenge (08:58)
Key Takeaways (10:47)

Transcript

0:00

So you can pull back, take a breath, ground yourself and be present, and then figure out what is actually great about the seemingly not so great situation and if you can do that and you can master that skillset, you will wake up every morning, more positive, more proactive, more forward thinking, and frankly, more effective personally and professionally every single day. Hey, everyone! Welcome to the end game podcast, where I bet you didn't know what you didn't know. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your end game coach. I'm here to talk to you today about the power of gratitude and how that can help to cultivate a mindful living situation. So sit back, relax, tune in, and let's discuss the topic, the power of gratitude. For today, I wanted to take a step in a slightly different direction than some of the prior topics. We've done a lot around the idea of mindset, the idea of health set mindfulness meditation. We've talked about journaling in a future episode, I'm going to talk more specifically around time management and how you can really harness your energy and how you put energy towards something, not just think about it in the idea or the realm of time. But today, as I said, I want to take a step in a slightly different direction, although related to mindfulness and meditation, this idea of being grateful of gratitude. It's one of the most important attributes that someone well, first should strive to have, but secondly would be really important to try to master as you think about living in the chaos of, you know, whether that's your, your business life, your professional life the ability to really separate yourself from incredibly difficult moments where you might be tremendously anxious or agitated or distracted. And as we talked about, be mindful and be present in the moment, but also take a step back and be grateful. So if you can both be mindful and present and be grateful for what you have, or of the situation that is a, a duo that is really difficult to be, and frankly, tough to master. So again, today we're going to talk about the idea of gratitude and what that means, what that can mean for you, your business again, your, both your professional and your personal life. One of the things we know about gratitude from a scientific perspective as a board certified psychiatrist, we know that gratitude actually helps strengthen connections in the brain, helps to rewire the brain in a way that actually helps to create that mindset we've talked about in the past where you can live your life in a more proactive and protected fashion and one that is less reactive. So we know that practicing meditation, practicing mindfulness, practicing gratefulness actually is one of those other key attributes, as I said, to creating that really solid foundation for your personal and professional life, and we know that that actually pans itself out in data and science. As we look at the wiring of the brain, the rewiring of the brain, as we look at different areas of the brain that laid up when someone is, in fact, grateful as compared to resentful, all of it moving in the right direction, creating that much stronger foundation of mindset and that intertwined them or the interplay them with health set too. So practicing gratefulness is not just an attribute externally focus. It's actually one internally too, for your own mind and your own brain health, mindset and health set. One of the key neurotransmitters or hormones that's released in the idea of gratefulness or in that in that context is a hormone called oxytocin, which is actually the, you know, sometimes it will be called the love hormone. I believe I've actually talked about it once in the past on a prior podcast for individuals who can put themselves in a mindset of gratefulness, even in periods of extreme stress or anxiety, you can begin creating an environment, a mental environment where you're releasing these endorphins and oxytocin, where you can actually help self calm and be sharper and more capable of creating a better solution to the future. So again, there's, there's an incredible amount of science behind the idea of your mindset and the attribute of being grateful as compared to one of resentfulness or, or agitation or anxiety. So I challenge you to work towards being grateful for all of the reasons I just mentioned. Obviously being grateful comes in a lot of different can come in a lot of different facets. So as I said, taking a step back and being grateful and maybe a minute or a moment of extreme agitation or anxiety or fear. And if you think about that. One of the ways I've, I've both learned to do that and coached on how to do that is this idea of thinking about in any situation what is actually great about this situation, even if it's a, again, seemingly very negative, has created a lot of physical or mental anxiety or angst or agitation or fear you know, in any moment, if you could take a step back, take a breath. Be present and be grateful for that, that moment for that situation. So one of the key questions you can always ask yourself and this is allowing yourself to learn to be grateful is what is great about this, right? So taxes come and you owe a hundred thousand dollars. You know, that is a, that is an incredibly difficult thing to get from your accountant. But. What is great about this? Think through what could possibly be a positive of this situation. Well, one great thing about this is I need to learn that it points out the fact that I need to be better about being on top of my taxes ahead of time so that next year I'll be better prepared. That's just an example of what could be great about an otherwise seemingly negative situation. There, and you can actually apply that, if you use that question, you can apply that to literally anything. And if you truly can't find anything to be grateful for, or what is actually truly great about this situation right now, I ask you to take a couple of more breaths to be a little bit more mindful, and come back to it later, because I assure you, As I always say, there's no matter how thin you cut it, there's always three sides, and that's true with gratefulness too. No matter how terrible a situation might feel or be or look or seem, there's always a positive to it. There's always something to be learned. There's always an opportunity to be had. There's always something that can come out of it that, although in this moment may not feel very positive, can ultimately lead to positivity down the road. And that's Those are tied together, hand in hand, being mindful being grateful. Lead to the ability to be positive, right? So if you can truly act on mindfulness and truly act on gratefulness, you will live your life through a lens that is incredibly more positive than those pessimists sitting next to you, right? If no one, if your friend is never looking for the positive and always looking for the negative and never asked themselves what's actually great about this, you're likely to feel going back to the energy experience we talked about in one of the prior podcasts. Introverted, extroverted. Where do you derive energy from versus give energy? You're likely to find that that person, that friend, that sphere of influence, that business acquaintance is to, is likely to drain energy from you. Right? So if you can truly be mindful, truly be grateful, truly be positive, you actually derive energy. From situations like this, you won't actually have that energy be drained from you. So again, going back to some of the other stuff, all of this is intertwined and frankly, all of it does have science behind it and all of it feeds back into this idea of having such a strong foundation for your mindset and your health set. So how you can use that attribute or that trade or that or hone that talent. And how you can be grateful can really go a long way in creating that proactivity and positivity that I talk about so much as the lens we really need to work towards looking through when we think about both our personal and professional lives. So there's a, I've actually been part of a gratitude challenge. One of my mentors actually did a 30 day gratitude challenge where the idea is you wake up every day and you just say something, you know, in this instance you could write something that you are in fact, grateful for. Ideally, it's not the same thing every single day. In fact, it really shouldn't be. What I did is I would wake up every morning. I had some old business cards I didn't use anymore. I was actually just writing on those business 30 days. And then saving those cards and going back and looking through them, you'd even be shocked. In a 30 day span what the different things I was grateful for in, you know, in that challenge. So again, I challenge you to as you think about how you shift toward a mindset of. Not just being present, but also being grateful. I challenge you to do the same with a gratefulness or gratitude challenge where you just truly write every morning something new and unique that you are grateful for in that coming day. Again, thinking through that, that's creating a forward looking outlook, a positive outlook, a proactive outlook, and you start every single day off on the right foot. That's a, an old anecdote and it is true for a reason because when you start off on the right foot and the right mindset and the right health set, you're preparing yourself to be more resilient. And more effective, both personally and professionally every single day. So I challenge you on a gratitude challenge of 30 straight days, something new every single day, and then save those and look back and review so that you can be even more grateful for the things you were grateful for during this 30 days. So in conclusion, I think it's important that we again, take the lesson learned here around, not just what I talk a lot about. And the idea of being mindful and being present that is so critically important and candidly, you need to be able to do that skill before you can truly be grateful in minutes and moments of severe agita, anxiety, fear, depression. So you can pull back, take a breath, ground yourself and be present. And then figure out what is actually great about the seemingly not so great situation. And if you can do that and you can master that skillset, you will wake up every morning, more positive, more proactive. More forward thinking and frankly, more effective personally and professionally every single day. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your end game coach. I'm here to teach you how to be present today so that you can expand tomorrow. And create the ultimate end game of your wildest desires. If you liked this episode, don't hesitate to share, rewatch, subscribe. I look forward to talking to you soon. I hope you take my my advice on a gratitude challenge. Start the clock 30 days, new one every day, keep those. So you can review those over time and there's nothing stopping you from no longer than 30 days. Again, I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim. Talk to you soon.