Gratitude and Growth: How Thankfulness Fuels Entrepreneurial Success

In this episode of The End Game Podcast, I’m exploring the power of gratitude and how thankfulness fuels entrepreneurial success. As we approach the holiday season, it’s the perfect moment to reflect on the past year and embrace the mindset of gratitude. In the world of entrepreneurship, gratitude isn’t just a personal practice—it’s the foundation for achieving long-term success.

Let’s explore how a gratitude mindset reduces stress, enhances emotional intelligence, and strengthens resilience. Acknowledging the lessons learned and appreciating the progress made, we set ourselves up for future growth and success.

Tune in as we cover:

• The Power of Gratitude: How gratitude shifts our mindset, reduces stress, and prepares us for success.
• Mindset Foundation: Why gratitude creates a solid foundation for better decision-making and emotional regulation.
• Building Resilience: How reflecting on what we’re grateful for builds resilience, strengthens our emotional intelligence, and fosters personal and professional growth.
• Daily Practices: Simple, actionable gratitude practices that help you maintain a positive mindset and set the stage for success.

If you're ready to embrace gratitude as a tool for both personal and professional growth, this episode is for you.

Listen in, practice gratitude, and set the foundation for your future successes!

Introduction (00:00)
Gratitude as the Foundation for Success (00:28)
Holiday Season Reflection: Past and Future Goals (00:38)
Power of Gratitude in Entrepreneurship (01:31)
Practicing Gratitude for Daily Resilience (02:19)
Science of Gratitude and Positive Mindset (02:36)
Emotional Impact of Gratitude on Mental Health (04:54)
Gratitude’s Role in Resilience and Long-term Vision (06:25)
Positive Relationships through a Grateful Mindset (08:39)
Reflecting on the Past to Pave the Way for Success (10:13)

Transcript

0:10

Welcome to the end game podcast season two, where I bet you didn't know what you didn't know. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your end game coach. Sit back, relax, and tune in to today's episode, Gratitude and Growth, How Thankfulness Fuels Entrepreneurial Success. Thanks everyone for joining. Today we're going to talk about just how being thankful helps to fuel entrepreneurial success. And we do that through the foundation of gratitude. As we're coming into the holiday season, specifically Thanksgiving and Christmas, this tends to be a moment in time for reflection, or I should say it should be a moment in time for reflection, and that should be reflection over the year past, and candidly should be our reflection through the lens of what you're grateful for. Now, it's also an opportunity, especially as we turn through the new year into next year, it's also an opportunity to be looking forward and to set new goals and create your plan in budget and, you know, ideas and outcomes for next year. But in order to do that, you have to start with what are your lessons learned? And more importantly, what are you grateful for from this year? Right? There's a famous adage. Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. And this is a great example of why. Looking back, really spending time on reflection from the past year and then through the lens of gratitude that really helps to create that fuel for future successes. So that's what we're going to talk about today, and we'll start with just the idea of the power of gratitude in the setting of entrepreneurship. But as we say all the time, This is not just professional. This, this also obviously spills over into personal. And as you're sitting around the Thanksgiving table with family or friends or all of the above, this is a moment where you're going to hopefully pronounce what you're grateful for, whether that be in the past year or more broadly or generally. So again, example, kind of personal, but as we think about professional power of gratitude is there. And this goes back to how you set the right mindset and foundation through. The power of gratitude, the different practices, some of which we've talked about before, most of what we've talked about before, which is waking up and being grateful from kind of second number one that sets the foundation for the day as you create that behavior in that practice that will start spilling over into many other facets of that day and of future days. And then you will create this compounding phenomena where next thing you know, the whole world just seems easier and your stress levels are less. And that is the foundation through which. You now can make better decisions, you can stretch yourself more, you're more resilient and therefore more apt to be successful and there's science behind this. And again, as a psychiatrist, I've talked about some of this in the past, but you can truly think yourself or imagine yourself into positivity, and you can actually do that in such a way where your brain will truly respond as if something really great happened to you. As an example, you can imagine yourself winning an award or. Or being successful or being grateful in some way by giving to a foundation or, or donating time to a charity or some sort of food bank. And even just imagining it will actually turn on areas of the brain that are important for positive mood, gratefulness. And again, just kind of exactly mitigate the stuff that tends to get in our way with anxieties and depressions and all these You can truly will your mind and Do guided meditations or imaginations that will actually do very similar things to as if you were really doing it, meaning you could put yourself in a scenario where you're giving back to an organization or a population or a cause that means a lot to you. You could imagine yourself doing that and meditate and do that for five minutes, 10 minutes, and your brain will light up very similar as if you were in that setting. And so you can truly practice your way into being more grateful. And that leads to. That's stronger, more resilient mindset and a better foundation for being successful. So there's an immediate connection or a well known connection between gratitude and just emotional intelligence. We've also talked about that in the past, being able to be self aware and empath and empathetic. And having good emotional regulation, all of those things are intertwined. And if you think you can have empathy for someone else or be really great at state regulation or emotional regulation and be kind of emotionally unwell or ungrateful or negative and pessimistic, the two do not jive very well together. Not that it's impossible, but if you want to live your life in a way that you are, you have great state management, great empathy, great self awareness. Great emotional intelligence in order to do all those things. Great. You have to be coming from a grateful or gratitude mindset. So the world and life and everything around it will present itself in ways that can become. That may be perceived as challenges or may create emotional unrest. And that is less likely to happen if you're approaching the world and your day in the mindset of gratitude. So there's, there's true emotional impacts here, as well as the idea of just health and wellness. Again, your, your mood states are directly impacted here. So not only your ability to manage your emotions, but also just. The chances you will end up, you know, overly anxious or depressed go down if you help to reduce those cortisol levels, which you do through things like. Parasympathetic stimulation. We talked about some of that, and that comes down to meditation and mindfulness and gratitude. So using these techniques we've talked about before and here again today, go a long way in creating emotional stability for yourself, as well as then the capability to be a very successful person, whether that is personally. Or professionally, I mentioned it already, but we know for, for this is studied that we know that coming at it from an optimistic, grateful mindset will actually help to reduce stress levels, reduce cortisol levels, reduce the risk of mood and anxiety issues and create better balance, not just in the brain. Of your mindset, but also in the world externally, including your decision making capabilities. You can imagine we've talked about in the past. If you're about to make a very important decision and you're doing that under really great emotional intelligence, some amount of empathy and emotional regulation and state management, you're much more likely to make very important decisions better, quicker, stronger, and more effective. Then if you're trying to do it, you know, again, in kind of a, a very negative mood state or some dysregulated emotional state, and all of that ties back to mindset and ultimately, one of the things that really impacts that is gratitude. Um, the other thing gratitude directly impacts, and it's a little bit of resilience, but this idea of being able to see big picture or longer term. Right. So if you're not grateful, you're not in a kind of gratitude mindset, you're constantly living your life with the effect of other things and everything becomes important, everything becomes urgent, everything becomes a chore and task, and you can't then really pull up and look at the future, right? People struggle to look into the future when they can't get out of their own way. They struggle to look in the future when they're not. Grateful and building resilience and looking at things as opportunities. So cultivating that kind of grateful mindset allows us to look into the future, which by the way, if you're going to be a successful entrepreneur, you want to be thinking 10 steps ahead. You don't want to be trying to drive the car from the rear view mirror. And if you're not in a grateful mindset, the chances that you are driving your car through the rear view mirror tend to be pretty high. So not only does it help reduce stress and kind of mood stability, it also allows us to be forward thinking, forward looking and more sound and kind of small decisions today or big decisions today that might turn into bigger decisions or outcomes into the future. Also, it turns out that when you are bubbly and positive and coming from a grateful mindset, you're more likely to have positive relationships. I know that that might seem shocking, but. If you are in a workplace or have a family member, who's kind of the curmudgeon or that the kind of workplace negative individual, those people tend to end up isolated, tend to end up not being part of the culture as much and certainly tend to not be leaders. And so as we think about how are we better leaders? How are we better managers? How do we take more control? How do we get what we want out of life that comes through the idea of positive relationships, And that, you know, again, tends to be much better in those who are grateful, you know, enjoy and are positive influences and positive personalities as compared to the negative. And so, again, this directly correlates to your ability to manage others. It directly correlates to your ability to engage outside vendors and investors and your customers or clients or patients. So being grateful. Really provides you a better toolkit for communication and relationship, which goes a long way as an entrepreneur. Oh, and also goes a long way in your personal relationships, including potentially your marriage. So again, coming at your personal relationships in the same manner will also really help to boost overall outcomes, including your own personal ones. But again, also professional being grateful, as I said, often also, or certainly should also include a reflection piece. So it's. This idea that being grateful kind of paves the way for you to have a better outlook and be able to be more forward looking and out of the kind of right here and now chaos. And in order to be truly successful, part of your gratefulness has to come from what you've, you know, what you've been able to achieve or, or what you're truly grateful for that has already passed. So again, as we think about Thanksgiving and we think about. Uh, the holiday season, it is imperative that we look back and it's okay to look in the rear view mirror. We have to drive through the front, but the rear view mirror is important, right? It's there for a reason. So we want to make sure that we're reflecting, we're reflecting individually, we're reflecting with our partners, we're reflecting with our teams. And part of that reflection should be an exercise in gratitude around. You know, again, what, what were the opportunities? What do we do? Well, what are we thankful for? And then you can point into the future and talk about the move forward. So again, just to kind of button this up a bit, we, we find that from a scientific perspective, coming from a gratitude mindset goes a really long way. And helping one be successful and paving the road to be kind of solution oriented and forward thinking. We do have to use the same lens and looking into the rearview mirror, reflecting on the past so that it helps inform our future. We should be doing that as part of our day to day practice and certainly at any given moment in time, but specifically around this Thanksgiving holiday, we want to make sure to take an extra special pause or an extra long pause. For reflection and gratitude, and then, you know, really act upon that as it relates to you and your mindset and your goals and the future outcomes you're looking to achieve. So, in summary, gratitude goes a really long way and helping to. Set the foundation and the mindset to be successful personally and professionally. We know that there are different practices for gratitude and you can use guided imagery or meditation. You can physically do the things that bring you great joy and that create this gratitude for those around you. And again, these different practices will go a really long way in setting the foundation for your future successes. They're very simple things, just like a gratitude journal or waking up first thing with positive thoughts and, you know, speaking out loud, which are grateful for just setting that daily foundation and using that mindset to then journey through the world that day, that week, that month, and then it builds upon itself and becomes a practice. And that practice becomes a habit and that habit becomes a lifetime of successes. Thank you all for listening. Please like subscribe and share this episode and have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday and holiday season in general. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your end game coach. I'm here to teach you how to exist today so you can expand tomorrow and create the ultimate end game of your wildest desires. Talk to you soon.