What To Say Now: Episode 26 
The Attitude of Gratitude

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Dan Stewart (00:15): Hello, everyone. It's me, Dan Stewart. Welcome to episode number 26 of What To Say Now. This is my favorite episode of the entire year so far because it's about my favorite holiday of the entire year, which is Thanksgiving. So raise your hand for me and say, howdy if you love Thanksgiving as much as I do. It is literally my favorite holiday ever and 2020 it's going to be a very interesting holiday. You can't turn on the news without hearing about it's time to quarantine if you're going to celebrate Thanksgiving with family. Many of us are planning our zoom Thanksgivings, where we'll have a full table, but it's going to be full of laptops. It's going to be an interesting and different year this year and yet some things are going to absolutely remain the same.

Dan Stewart (01:04): The purpose of today's episode is to prepare you to really tap into these feelings of gratitude and to experience the wonders of stress relief and confidence that come along with this willingness to embrace gratitude. So I'd like to say hello to a few people that are tuned in here. Thank you for being here today, I definitely appreciate it. And very much I'm looking forward to getting your feedback on today's session.

Dan Stewart (01:31): So let's talk about gratitude. I mean what is this thing called gratitude? Why do we really do this? We're all taught as children to say, thank you. It's one of the first things our parents teach us. Someone gives you something. What do you say? You say, thank you, right? You're taught that. And the reason that we do this, the reason that we learn to give thanks is because it reinforces within us the value that other people bring into our lives. I'm going to repeat that. We say thanks because it reinforces within us the value that other people bring into our lives. Okay.

Dan Stewart (02:11): So think about this. You have a choice. You can live life in reaction where your internal experience is one that's driven by whatever happens to happen at any moment in time, or you can live very intentionally based in gratitude for the things that you get to experience and the people that you get to share those things with. Right? It's really hard to feel overwhelmed and stressed out while you're counting your blessings. Right? So it's a very smart move to go ahead and remember to take a moment every single day, and especially in November to make sure to express gratitude to different people in your lives.

Dan Stewart (02:53): One of my daily practices, which I'll encourage you to adopt, is to reach out to people when you haven't spoken to them in a while, just to tell them that you appreciate them. I did that last night. I was walking my dog and I made a phone call to a guy named [Sean Shalles 00:04:38]. He's a past member of happy grasshopper. His life has changed in a lot of ways since we last worked together. And I just wanted to reach out and tell him that I appreciated him. And we had a really nice chat as a result of that. So he probably thinks, Oh, wow, Dan was really doing this great thing to reach out, but I was really doing a great thing for myself, right? We've got to feed ourselves first guys. We have to enrich ourselves so that we have this strength, this wellspring of capacity to then pour into other people. So when you have that practice of exhibiting gratitude to people in your lives, you're strengthening yourself every single time that you do it. Okay?

Dan Stewart (03:55): So let's dispel a myth here. We've got to get this right out of the way. I think too many people walk around with the sense that they can't win, or they can't feel peace and joy and happiness and certainty until they've won. A lot of us spend our lives, postponing, our joy we'll tell ourselves, oh, we'll finally be happy when this happens or when that happens. When I finally have this much money, when I finally have that many subscribers, when I finally have this, that, or the other thing we're postponing our joy, and what I want to connect you with today is that that joy is accessible for you immediately.

Dan Stewart (04:36): So I'm getting a couple of messages here. I'm just going to type back to those. Hello to Brian and Melissa Chiming in here, I appreciate that. So let's keep going here a little bit, right? So we're dispelling the myth that we have to wait until after we win to experience this sense of joy and happiness. And I want to express some gratitude right now to a friend of mine named Roberta Ross. I love you, Roberta. I don't know if you're here and you're watching this right now, but you are a person who has impacted my life in incredibly meaningful ways and I'm sincerely grateful for you.

Dan Stewart (05:14): So, much of what I'm sharing with you today. I've learned from working with Roberto over the past several years. She helped me understand that I didn't have to wait to grow Happy Grasshopper into this big successful thing before I could really enjoy the experience of it. So here I am expressing gratitude to you Roberta in a very public way. Thank you for that. And one of the ways that I'm going to give back today is by providing a framework to each of you who are watching this, that you can follow as you're working on expressing your thanks and your gratitude to the people in your life this year.

Dan Stewart (05:51): So let's cover some simple ways to give thanks this year, right? So first of all, let's just acknowledge whether you diligently communicate with the people in your life on a consistent basis or not. The holiday season is a great time to get back in touch. It's a wonderful time, everything about this season is perfectly aligned for you to say, now is the time to work with the people in my database and to go about re-establishing those relationships and those connections. So let me help you do that, right? Here's some activities that you can engage in a very simple ways to give thanks.

Dan Stewart (06:31): You should send someone who's made a difference in your life, a handwritten note, or a thank you card. Write it down real quickly, get it in the mail. If you're our subscriber, you can do that through our system, of course, but I'm encouraging you right now, whether it's us or any other means of doing it, send somebody a handwritten card just to tell them, thank you. Not to have a sales agenda, but just to express your gratitude for them. That makes a big difference.

Dan Stewart (07:00): Another way that you can give thanks is by giving your time to your family. Give your time to your close friends. People that really need you. I tell you, I remember this raising our son, Ben, when things were really busy and I didn't have as much time to spend with him when he was a small boy, his behavior would quickly decline, right? And when I fed him, when I spent time with him, when I got down on my hands and knees and I played with him and I occupied his world, his behavior immediately improved, right? So our children, especially the children, whether they're your children, your grandchildren, your nieces, your nephews, or cousins, whoever they might be, there are people in your life that will greatly benefit from you spending time with them. So that's one way that you can give thanks to people.

Dan Stewart (07:57): The next one, and I use a device for this called a reMarkable, this is my favorite way to take notes. I'm going to encourage you to take notes for yourself. Express gratitude to yourself. Right? How many of us have an inner voice that's just a jerk to us 24/7. I know I've been guilty of that at times in the past. Why not write yourself a note that says, "Hey, really great job having a salad for lunch today, instead of junk food. Hey, really great job getting all your to-do lists done before noon." You can write yourself just little notes of encouragement like that. You need to be the person patting yourself on the back. Sometimes it's okay to do that. Too many of us live within the space where we can't express gratitude to ourselves and therefore we don't have that well of gratitude to share with others.

Dan Stewart (08:50): So, as you're doing this, you're writing out these things, I would encourage you to adopt a tradition that my wife started in our family. I'm so grateful for this. Way back when we hosted our very first Thanksgiving for the family, we rolled out a table runner, and she made this herself. She didn't buy it. She just got some fabric. She hemmed the edges. She rolled it out down the center of the table and at the end of dinner she brought out pens and she asked us each to write on the table runner something that we were grateful for. And we did, right. And the next year it came out again and we wrote something else. And the year after and the year after the year after. So here we are, that table runner has now been expanded. It's been widened twice. We've written on the front and on the backside. We have dozens and dozens of family members and guests of family members and people we loved who've passed away. We've got our family history of gratitude on this table runner.

Dan Stewart (09:54): And I'm telling you if there's a fire and there's something we need to say, that's on the list of things that all of us would want to take with us. It's a really precious record of the things that we've been grateful for over the decades that we spent together. So I strongly encourage you to go ahead and take that. Stick that in your R&D file rip off and duplicate that family tradition started by my wife. You will be grateful that you did. I promise you.

Dan Stewart (10:21): And then the last one that I'm going to mention here for you today, is text or email a friend, right? Text or email a friend of something that's inspired your appreciation. This could be a sunset. It could be a poem. Just earlier today I was on the phone with my friend Kim and I share with her a poem about forgiveness. It was awesome to have that connection and to make that share there. So when you're doing this, you're really giving them a boost, right? It's a great way to pay forward your gratitude into another person. So this is the time to do that. And again, there's just no better time of year to make these connections and to share this with people then right now, as we're moving into the holiday season.

Dan Stewart (11:10): So if you don't have a system for this already, please know that we do at Happy Grasshopper and it's called Chirp. So you can just go to happygrasshopper.com/meetchirp, and you can learn all about it. It's super inexpensive. It's a high quality way to express gratitude to the people in your life that you care about.

Dan Stewart (11:31): So thank you everyone for joining me here today. I sincerely appreciate you. And again, extended shout outs and love and hugs and lights and song and music and happiness to you, Roberta Ross. I sincerely appreciate you. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Talk soon. Bye.