Credit: Isengardt
This month we would like to welcome a guest contributor to our blog, Karen Jacke, one of the Global Leadership Foundation Fellows. After my last post on the importance of recognition, Karen was telling me about some learning she had been doing on the theme of ‘gratitude’. I felt that topic would be a perfect complement to the concept of recognition – Gayle.
Taking life for granted. Complacent. Coping.
Amidst all the bad news that comes our way via the daily media, as Gayle alluded to in her last article, most of us would have to admit that we could apply terms like these to ourselves from time to time.
It is so easy to plough ahead with our lives and not notice just how much goodness and beauty surrounds us. We busy ourselves with our work, focused on tasks and complaining about what goes wrong, and often fail to notice, let alone celebrate, all the wonderful aspects of our workplace and the people in it.
Gratitude is a spontaneous celebration that can be sparked by many different experiences in our lives. It can come to us in fairly obvious ways: simply recognizing how thankful we are for what we have, or feeling joy in some happening. It can be sparked by the feeling of love for another person, or being loved by them. It can come to us through creativity – the warm glow we feel at the ‘ah-hah’ moment or when something new comes into being. It can come simply by being understood, from the satisfaction we have when we meet with someone who ‘gets’ us.
Gratitude can also be found, paradoxically, in tragedy. At a time of loss, for instance, gratitude can be sparked by our vulnerability – in being heard by those willing to listen, in being cared for. There can be gratitude in surrendering our sense of separateness – in acknowledging that we are not alone, but are part of something bigger than who we are as individuals … that somehow we are in this together.
The opportunity all of us have is to more frequently touch into the positive energy, generosity and sense of well-being that comes with gratitude . In the same way that Gayle described developing the habit of noticing the small things that others do well, we can also learn to touch into gratitude on a daily basis.
There are many ways to do this. One is to consciously take your gratitude beyond your current expressions of it. This might be by, say, creating a ‘gratitude journal’. This needs to go beyond the child’s-prayer-like list of ‘I’m thankful for…’ items. Rather, it needs to consider what brought you joy today, the time when you were deeply understood, or that flash of creativity you had in a meeting. Each item is then an opportunity to touch into a moment of gratitude.
Something I do on a regular basis with a friend is take a ‘gratitude walk’, in which the two of us explore, together, what has sparked gratitude over the last week. We come away feeling both energized and hopeful.
The crux of this is that what we pay attention to is where our brain develops, so the more we pay attention to gratitude the more we can amplify and intensify it.
From a leadership perspective, cultivating gratitude both within yourself and within your team or company is a great way to build an ‘above-the-line’ culture. A habit of gratitude can boost a sense of being valued and build community and generosity. Such an environment increases the chances that people can hit ‘pause’ when behaviour drops below the line.
Having a gratitude practice also gives you, as a leader, more access to ways to pause and shift your own behaviours when they drop below the line. For instance, you might find yourself dropping below the line after learning that an important project is running late. However, being grateful for the honesty, integrity and vulnerability of the person reporting this news, and taking responsibility for it, could shift your response. You end up expressing your concern about the project’s status in an ‘above the line’ manner.
As Gayle discussed, there’s a lot in business that focuses on the wrong, or on empty praise. But there’s also so much potential to find the positives and to spontaneously let everybody feel your gratitude for them and their work.
We live in times of enormous change. In such times, gratitude can help to ground us and bring us together. Much more of it is needed on the planet right now.
Karen
