Adding Value: Understanding the Power of Gratitude by Henry Ukazu

Dear destiny Friends,

“Any day your gratitude is higher than your expectations, then that day can be described as good” – Kola Adesina

One of the best ways to achieve success is by practicing gratitude, which invariably is one of the greatest forms of appreciation. However, most people still don’t understand the power of appreciation. It is worthy of note that gratitude and appreciation are currencies which if properly utilized can attract abundant opportunities.

If there is one trait worth cultivating in life, it’s gratitude. Most of us see gratitude from the angle of favour, blessings, and opportunities. It’s important to note that we can be grateful for the pains, setbacks, challenges, betrayals, and failures we experience along the way because it helps us to see life from a different perspective.

It is also stated that we should always be grateful for what happened because if it didn’t happen, it may lead us to disaster. Afterall, every disappointment can be likened to a blessing. According to Oprah Winfrey “Opportunities, relationships, even money flowed my way when I learned to be grateful no matter what happened in my life.”

Gratitude is critical to one’s success.  If you want to be successful, start with gratitude. When you celebrate and appreciate people, success has a tendency of coming to you.

According to Doris Day “Gratitude is riches. Complaint is poverty.” Rich people tend to be grateful for whatever they receive, but uniformed minds tend to take any little favour for granted. Their ignorance clouds their understanding that it’s from the little things that greater things come up.

In the journey of life, nobody succeeds alone, people help us along the way. We all had friends, mentors, partners, teachers, managers, professors, mentors, friends, and family who have helped us to figure out our path and helped us. It’s sad to see how ungrateful some people can be when they get to the top and they forget those who assisted them when they were down.

Sometimes some of us take time to show gratitude to our benefactors, strangers, friends, mentors etc. who have assisted us. Sometimes we even do it sluggishly.

According to James Allen “No duty is more urgent than that of returning thanks.” One might say, I have it in mind, I will reach out, but they fail to understand the words of Arthur Ward, that “feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it,”

There are many ways to practice gratitude –  You can practice gratitude by writing down the things you’re grateful for every morning. You can also be grateful for any little job you have. For instance, each time you open a door at your job, remind yourself that you’re grateful for your job, your co-workers, your customers, and clients.

Gratitude helps you appreciate your successes. When you take inventory of your path, you will discover how far you have come in life with the little steps and progress you have made overtime.

We all have many reasons to be grateful. Once you have the basic things of life like food, shelter and clothing, you are wealthy. Most people are, without mincing words, are very ungrateful; they always think of what they are lacking as opposed to what they have. For instance, you have a life while most people are breathing with the help of oxygen. Some people don’t have legs, hands, arms, or eyes, some are dealing with health challenges, some have no job, no academic qualification etc. The list is literally endless.

The moral here is that gratitude makes you understand you can’t have everything and as such you should be grateful for every little you have. Remember, everyone is dealing with a secret frustration.

Gratitude is not just saying thank you; anyone can say it. After all, most people say it as a reflext action without necessarily meaning it.

Real Gratitude has three components:

Don’t not complain about anything, no matter how similarly bad the situation is; be a love and value finder instead of a fault finder; and take nothing and no one for granted.

According to Jim Rohn, “Learn to be thankful for what you already have, while you pursue all that you want.”

When you are grateful, everything falls in place. Gratitude does not make anyone feel disappointed. If you are filled with gratitude, you’ll know human beings can be unpredictable and as such can disappoint.

Let me share a little story of how gratitude works. There was a story of two women who were begging for food on the street, a man saw them and gave them food and money, one of the women said ‘thank you so much’, while the other woman said thank you, prayed for the man, his family and business. Who do you think the man will support next time if he goes there? I guess the woman who prayed for the man.

That’s simply how gratitude works, when you truly appreciate people, they’ll go the extra way for you.

Ungrateful people are always bitter; they are always complaining. The only formula for success is gratitude. Everything else flows from it: love, contentment, humility, patience, etc. When you show gratitude to people, they have a way of blessing you with more favour and opportunities.

There are many benefits of practicing gratitude amongst which are: Grateful people achieve more; grateful people pay it forward; gratitude attracts goodwill and opportunity because it’s a currency; Grateful people get along better with others; Grateful people are less depressed. A grateful person never takes anything for granted because they knows nobody owes you anything.

It’s sad to note that some people, out of  ungratefulness, always focus on what’s wrong, or the negative experience they had with people, while grateful minds focus on the positive side of human beings and see the negative side as experience of life.

In conclusion, endeavor to start your day with gratitude, and end it with gratitude. You can do this by taking stock of the day’s activities. Be grateful for all that happened no matter how it played out. By doing so, you will learn from your failures, experience, trials, challenges, success, etc.

According to Maya Angelou, “Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer.”