Practicing Gratitude

You know, this can sound, with respect to everyone, quite preachy what Ashish and I are saying, but at the same time, it's more of an a. It's more of an awareness. It's more of an acknowledgment that gratitude and being grateful for these simple little things, eyesight, hearing, food, the taste, these senses we have, it's just something that's just so inherent, so basic, but we sometimes completely lose sight of it. When you don't have wi fi, when you're sitting in business class on a flight, it's crazy.

Hey there, friends. Welcome to Happiness Squad. This is the podcast dedicated to helping you unlock your full potential by mastering the art and science of happiness. We bring on the best leading experts on these topics to help you unlock your true potential and live with more joy, health, love and meaning in your life. Your host is no other than the star combo of Ashish Kothari and Anil Ramjiani, who are both on a mission to provide you with an unfair advantage to be the masters of your experience and leaders in your industry. Get ready to be moved, challenged and enlightened on this podcast. It may change your life. Thanks for being here and joining the squad.

Hey, Happiness Squad. I'm excited to be with all of you today and honored to be with Ashish as we begin and continue to explore his book Hardwired for Happiness chapter by chapter. You know, I connected with Ashish during COVID and our passion for helping individuals unlock their own flourishing and find true meaning in their happiness, health, love and life immediately became clear. I'm on this journey with you and Ashish to explore how each of the nine practices that form the sunflower that Ashish has laid out so beautifully and so simply. You know what I find incredibly unique about Ashish is how he takes what he has learned and and has shared several simple exercises that we can use to change our lives in just a few minutes a day to help us lead a more purposeful life. Today we continue with practice number four, Gratitude. You know, in our haste to accumulate more, be more and do more, we lose track of the good that we already have that truly matters to us. Gratitude has this amazing potential to redirect energies towards being more being and less doing and from less scarcity to more abundance. So let's break free from goals and belongings that don't nourish you. As Willie Nelson says, when I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around. So come join Ashash and I, because at the end of this cast, he shares a beautiful Invitation that I promise will make you give goosebumps to not only yourself, but someone that's very close to you that you're grateful for. Come join as Ashish and I rewire for happiness together. Enjoy. Hey, Ashish, how you doing?

I am wonderful. It was so lovely, Anil, to see you earlier this week, my dear friend in Amsterdam, and so thankful for you to show me around.

Hey, it was a pleasure to have you in this city, in this part of the world was an absolute. Hey, I'm grateful for it. And not to tee it up, but that's our conversation today. It's to talk about the practice of gratitude.

Yeah. And you know, not only that, Neil, I got a chance to see you, but I also got a chance to meet Mariki, you know, who is. Who is in Amsterdam, who, you know, she's part of our Happiness Squad community where, you know, we gather every week as a community to kind of integrate some of these hardwired for happiness practices. So it was actually wonderful because even though it's a digital community, I've met now so many people. So will Mir, who's kind of a member. We had a chance to meet in Boulder. Then I got a chance to meet Mariki now in Amsterdam. And so it's just amazing how these digital communities are also becoming physical. And I was just really, really grateful to get a chance to meet her. We'll have it on our podcast at some point for our listeners to benefit from all of her life journey and her stories. But yeah, I'm so grateful this week for such an amazing time in Amsterdam.

No, I love that, Ashish. I think that this is one where in the last couple years people are now comfortable to reconnect, not just relying on digital networks, zooms to meet up and the fact that you were able to, in such short notice, organize that with her, I'm excited. I'm excited to meet her and more members of our Happiness Squad community in the coming weeks and months as we grow and expand from the US Into Europe. So, Ashish, I think gratitude, we know, is incredibly important, but maybe just if you can share from your experience. I'm presuming it didn't always come easy for you, or was this a practice that you were able to do at the drop of a dime?

Well, look, I've had quite a journey when it comes to gratitude. I always say in my life, over the last five to six years on my journey, if there is one of the nine hardwired for happiness practices that has had the biggest impact on transforming Me from a. From a place of constantly stressed, disgruntled, a bit frustrated, just putting on a Persona of, like, smile, but inside, just, like, being torn apart to today where, like, I exude joy, right. Exude sunlight. I was with some clients this week, and they said. They literally said, you embody joy. Like, I can't imagine somebody else other than you leading Happiness Squad. And I shared with them. Yeah. That is, you know, to me, one practice that has made the biggest difference is gratitude. You know, as many of our listeners hopefully by now know. You know, I've been, you know, I spent 25 years in consulting and look as a consultant for the first 20 of them. You know, you're trained to find the problems. You're trained to find the issues. Right. Your eye. My eye is so good at finding issues. There can be a page with 250 words, and my eye directly goes to the three words that are misspelled. Right? And so, I mean, I was really, really good at finding all that's not good. What can be better. Right. Because that's what we want to serve clients on is to help improve their performance. And so I could very quickly find those things that don't work. And by the way, you know, as. As. As, you know, right. Our brain already has a negativity bias to begin with. Our brain is designed, you know, it kind of evolved over so many millions of years to keep us safe. It didn't, you know, evolve to keep our. Keep us happy. And so we always. All the negative things, you know, just basically stick to us. All the positive things just bounce off. And so, no, I was actually, you know, this was a learned. This was a learned skill actually, over the years. But my, you know, I always found the negative. I was not necessarily very grateful. In fact, I didn't even have what I now call in all the work I do with my clients and with people. I didn't have the eyes to see. All that was actually with me. Right? So it's. You really need to develop an eyesight. You really need to develop your attention on the positives, dude.

I find that beautiful. And I know that in conversations we've had in the past, you've always quoted Helen Keller to me, because given that she doesn't have eyes, she doesn't have ears, she doesn't have the ability to hear, speak, or see, she's still manifesting and able to generate so many different things that she's really excited about and grateful for. And, I mean, I think there was a poem that you once shared with Me. Right.

Well, there was a beautiful. Yeah, there's a letter. It was a letter called Three Days to See. To our listeners, I strongly encourage you to search for three days to see. And you'll find it. You'll find it. And it was just a beautiful, heart touching letter around that she wrote, you know, around if she had three days to see all that she would see. And I mean, it's beautiful because, you know, there's so many of us who have eyesight and we never think about being grateful for that. We just take them for granted. In fact, you know, you talked Helen Keller Anil one of her most beautiful quotes that are so present for me and I always remind myself and others about that. She said, I cried, I had no shoes till I met a man who had no feet. Right? Let me say that again. I cried, I had no shoes till I met a man who had no feet. You know, I invite our listeners to consider how often are we in the midst of doing some amazing things and small things happen and we get so frustrated. I just took this transatlantic flight back and then connected in Chicago and I, you know, went to Denver and the WI fi wasn't working on the plane and there were a couple of people who were so upset that the WI fi wasn't on. Like, it's this classic extreme example, you know, of like, you're flying, man. Like, it was like, you know, 50 years ago, 80 years ago, right? This journey that we had that we undertook, right, Would have taken so long. And we were just traversing, we're flying in this metal tube and. And there's literally somebody having the worst time in their life. Mind you, sitting in business class, I was way back in the economy and I could see the whole, you know, oh, my God, I can't believe the WI fi is not working. And da, da, da, da, da. And like, you know, it's what we pay attention to. And by the way, that's the reason that when we practice gratitude, the benefits are huge, right? We 34% reduction in stress and ill, right? When we actually practice gratitude, 10% increase in happiness and life satisfaction. You know, think about how much we spend trying to get more, more and more in order to be happy, running faster, working harder. And our new motto, right of do less and be more is frankly, not do less, be more. We have already so much that if we can focus our attention on all that we have, if we truly count our blessings, you know, we can be happier by just doing literally less doing, appreciating what we already have. By the way, also a lot lower reduction in negative emotions. And I experienced it personally as I started doing the gratitude practices. It's not that, you know, when things don't go well, they don't affect me, but, you know, what happened was the amplitude of the effect of the negative actually went down. So I wasn't that affected by it. And the time it took me to recover back from that setback also increased because I started spending less time anil on why did this happen to me? Who is to blame? Oh my God. You know, all of that rumination changed to, okay, this is what's happened. And I can, with a more positive mind, think about where do we go from here?

Do you know that really resonates with me, Ashish, Because I recall hearing if I say something positive to you, that resonates, let's say times one, if I see something negative to you, that resonates 4x in your mind. So if you just think what you just said, if you're able to practice that bit of gratitude and you're able to reduce that amplification of that negative thought, just think how resilient you become, how much you're able to bounce forward and you're able to focus more on the positive than you are on those negatives.

Yeah. And there is so much in each of our lives for our listeners. You know, if you're listening, you have ears, think about how many people who are deaf in the world. For them, one of their biggest wishes is that they could hear. You know, many people actually had. They were born with sound ability to hear, and they lost it. Imagine your life without the sound of loved ones. Imagine your life without music. Imagine your life without hearing the beautiful sound of the birds. Imagine your life without being able to hear wind rustling through leaves. Imagine, just imagine what a life of silence is for so many people. And yet again, you know, the ability to hear, when are we actually grateful for that ability? And you can apply that to almost everything, right? Imagine when we went through Covid, so many of us lost the taste, ability to taste and smell. How did food feel like? Imagine so many people who don't have that. So I think there is so much, if our bodies are working, there is so many complex organs and systems that are working, and we can just frankly ground ourselves even in some of that and bring that to light to start to kind of rewire our brain from this negativity bias. Always looking for what's not right to actually all that is actually good in our lives.

I think it's Incredibly powerful, what you're saying, Ashish, because, I mean, I want to go back to you said people not being to eat something you shared with me. 9% of the world population goes hungry. And I know what you and I are talking about. It sounds so simple, like, you know, and I invite our listeners to, you know, this can sound, with respect to everyone, quite preachy what Ashish and I are saying. But at the same time, it's more of a. It's more of an awareness. It's more of an acknowledgment that gratitude and being grateful for these simple little things. Eyesight, hearing, food, the taste, these senses we have. It's just something that's just so inherent, so basic, but we sometimes completely lose sight of it when you don't have WI Fi, when you're sitting in business class on a flight. It's crazy. And so Ashish, I do want to take a step back though, because, you know, I'm presuming that again, you had maybe a pivot moment in your life that made you think, hang on a second, this is something I need to practice more of. Is there maybe an example that you can share with our listeners that resonates with you that almost makes you think, wow, if I only knew then what I know now, my outlook would have been different.

Yeah. So look, I'll give a recent example of something that happened, by the way, I give an example in my book around this accident that I had when I was driving back from work one night so they can hear about that and how my experience of that changed. But there was something even recent. Over the summer, we took a flight from Mallorca back to London. It was the last leg, frankly, of our journey, last stop before flying back home. We had spent about eight weeks in Europe at that point, across multiple countries. We had picked up so many souvenirs, et cetera, for our times in those different places. And we showed up in London, the three of us, Lizzie, Ashwin and me, the bags didn't show up. Okay? And, you know, you can imagine all of a sudden, right? And I could actually see the power of this practice that I had been doing for the last, you know, five years, how it had actually fundamentally changed my brain, how it had actually changed how I was experiencing the world. Right. Pretty big deal, you know, they didn't even know where the bags were. So it wasn't the fact that the bags didn't show up, but nobody actually knew where the bags were. Right. That was. That was actually quite interesting. I looked at it and, you know, I could see my wife and my son. My son especially was quite upset that the bags hadn't shown up. No surprise. His. One of his favorite games was in there. And. And obviously Lizzie had, you know, picked up some things. They were in there. But, you know, it was interesting. The first three thoughts that were going through my head really were the following. My first thought, frankly, was, you know, I was grateful for the three of us were together. What mattered most in my life, they were right here with me. So I wasn't that. You know, again, it wasn't. You know, it wasn't that I didn't care that the bags didn't show up. Which is what, you know, after the second day of me staying calm about this, my son said, it's like you don't care about the bags. And I said, no, actually, I do care about the backs, but frankly, I care about, first of all, the three of you more. And the second is, you know, I'm reminded of, you know, this was in the summer, right? The Russia, Ukraine. You know, it's still such a terrible crisis that the world is going through. But I was like, look, you know, there are so many refugees who've lost everything. I mean, we just lost three bags. They've lost houses, they've lost money, they've lost bank accounts, They've locked loved ones. They've lost a way of life. Why? You know, this is so small, right? Again, it's not that the loss is less. It's the amplitude and the effect it has on us is less. And I'll tell you that the next part of it, when we actually did get the bags again, they got really excited that we got the bags. And I'm like, guys, we don't know how many showed up, what state they're in. So again, it's about the. It's the amplitude of the ups and the downs. And so to me, you know, not letting what happens outside affect us, we still take action. I still did all the things that needed to be done. I called airlines, I was texting them. I was exploring different ways to find it. But, you know, the. The negative energy, the anger, the frustration. I didn't have any of that, because think about it, if I had let myself go through all of that five days later when we got the bags, it wouldn't have been worth it because I was mourning the loss of something that actually I hadn't lost. Right? So anyway, I think that's a very real recent example, and I'm not sure, you know, five years Ago, I would have actually had that same experience. And I'll tell you what changed for me, right? For our listeners. So I'm like, that's great that you've changed. How did it change? It was very simple. I started doing one of the simple practices that were initially tested by Robert Emmons, one of the leading researchers in the field of gratitude, and then has been built on by work done by Dr. Marty Seligman, the father of positive psychology, as well as Sonia Lyubomirsky in the book How Happiness, which is basically a gratitude journal. So I started Anil about in 2016, as I was researching the field of flourishing. I came across their work and I put it to practice. You know, I started writing every day what I was grateful for, right? Very methodically, very consciously, what are things that I'm grateful for? Over time, I shifted that to once a week. And initially I beat myself up, right, to say, oh, you've just gotten lazy. I, by the way, started to see the world shift in my own eyes. Within 12 weeks, I was actually starting to notice. I was actually happier. I was less stressed. I was actually looking at all the things that were positive, that were good, that were happening out there. So I had started to do that. And then I was also beating myself up because I was only doing it once a week till I found the research done by Dr. Sonia Lyubomirsky, who actually found that you don't need to do gratitude journal every day. In fact, those who did it every week, and she specifically identified Sunday, those who practiced once a week writing down three things that they are grateful for, have a significant improvement in their life. Satisfaction in happiness, reduction in stress. So lots and lots of benefits. But that's the practice, my dear friends, those who are listening, every day. You know, you can choose a day on a Saturday or a Sunday or a Tuesday and just sit down at the end of the day and write down three things that you're grateful for. Make a list, and be just very conscious, right? And if you go to my book Hardwired for Happiness, I even outline a gratitude map that you can use to truly develop this power. Your eyesight, your ability to see, you know, across all the different realms of things that you already have. How many cups you have that are filled and overflowing with gifts from the universe, Once you start counting them, the rest of the cups that are unfilled are not going to matter.

Are you enjoying the show so far? Let me ask you a few questions before going back. Have you ever wondered why so many of us struggle with stress, anxiety and burnout and feel stuck in life. Heck, maybe you're going through this right now. Well, the reason for this lies in the evolutionary biology of our brains, which are hardwired for fear. It's part of the reason why our team named this podcast Happiness Squad. It serves as a reminder that happiness is what really matters and that we are in this together. And that is why we are so excited to share with you a resource to help you on your journey. One of our hosts, Ashish Guattari, launched a book, Hardwired for Happiness, and it is a 1Amazon bestseller. When you get access to this book, you will discover nine secular practices that can change your life and are backed by scientific evidence from psychology and neuroscience. Learn how you can integrate Hardwired for Happiness practices in every part of your life to unlock your best self, regardless of how busy you are. Shift from knowing to doing to being with a range of journaling, meditation and group coaching exercises and so much more. Go to www.happinesssquad.combook to get access right now. We also have bonuses on the page that you don't want to miss. Once again, www.happinessquad.com book and now back to the show.

You know this there, there are several things I'd love to break down from there. So the first is as an observer, observing you in that moment. And I'm sure we've all been in some shape or form, something went lost, something went missing, something didn't go the way you had planned it to go or for you and your family. And suddenly that stress falls on them. Just observing how you, in that split second, you didn't react, you paused, you took a step back and you reflected before you acted. And I just, I want to go back to that example because I think, you know, for all our listeners, you know, I think it's just that opportunity to be aware, which is the first practice, being self aware, acknowledging that something's happening, stepping back. And I can imagine, Ashish, that Lizzy and Ashwin were like, but, dad, why aren't you reacting? Why aren't you freaking out? You know, you're the outlier here, right? And then you're the weird one is, oh, you're the weird one, right? And my wife says the same thing to me sometimes. Like, yeah, you know, you're almost the outlier because people want to rant, they want to feel frustrated, they want to feel stressed. But imagine what you said earlier about the reduction in stress. You still slept those nights. You still were able to be relaxed and enjoy those days in London. In fact, we met up and you were in a great space. So can you imagine if you ruin your trip, we meet for the first time and. And that experience would have just ruined everything. When three, four days later you got your bags back and in hindsight you'd. It's. It's right, exactly.

By the way, Anil, the beauty of this work, right? And you and I are obviously committed to doing this work together. And we're doing this with the foundations course and the community. The power here is actually there's two levels, right? So if you think we talk about gaming level one and level two. Level one is exactly what you just, just becoming aware and pausing and not let the negative bias go away, right? Take you down. But when you do this consciously over time, dear friends, you don't even have to do it consciously. And I give you the analogy of think about when you first learned to drive a car. You know, I remember it took me, by the way, five tries to get my driving license. I'm sure you must be going like, holy moly, like, why is he on the road? But it was quite intense. I learned as an adult how to drive a car. We didn't have a car growing up. And I remember the first time, the brake, the accelerator, the clutch, the steering, how much to turn and getting a feel for the turn of the car, checking the rear view mirrors. It was just so much to be aware of and needed so much conscious effort. And think about how we drive cars now. And I'm sure yours was the same experience. It actually needed all your focus and attention. And now you see people drive, you know, they're having a cup of coffee, they might be putting on makeup, they are also on a phone call, they might be talking. There's so many things people are doing right at the same time, even if they're not doing any of that. Right? Driving becomes embodied. Our body learns how to drive. The same thing happens with these practices. When we continuously practice, we go from knowing about them to. To doing them. And when we go do it a bunch of times, we become them. So that's what's changed for me, by the way. And people have actually been able to notice, right? We develop new neural circuits. Our ability to actually focus on all the positives goes up. So we don't have to consciously do this. We just experience the world that way. And at least for the practice of gratitude, I feel that's where I am, right? To me, it's all the positives are always Evident. I don't see the glass half full. It's, you know, half empty. It's always half full. In fact, it's frankly 90% full. Because there is so much that is happening that I've been blessed with in my life and so many other people are, you know, regardless of where they are, just, just count everything in your body that's working right now. I don't even say forget about all the external because people will say, yeah, maybe you're well off or you have a good job or you're doing things you love. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. It's not about doing. Literally go and count every part of your body and organ that's working. If tomorrow they stopped working, that would be your biggest issue in life, right? If you have legs, think about life without legs. People lose legs all the time in accidents. If you have fingers, imagine life without fingers or without hands. Imagine if you had a heart condition. Imagine if you had. Like. There is so much that we take for granted so often. Say, well, it's about doing and what I have externally. No, we already have so much, we just forget to actually take stock of it and be grateful for it.

You know, Ashish, I agree. I mean, back to your point there, 15% of the world's population suffer from some sort of disability. It's crazy when you, when you just think about that and I, you know, something that you and I had a bit of a disagreement on and you had a course correct me on this was declaring versus writing down. Because I agree with you, it's important that these small steps, these small habits, eventually these micro practices can, can actually become, like you said, going from knowing to doing to being. But there is a difference. And then I thought, oh, if I just declare I'm grateful for. It's just as good as. And you said, no, no, actually you, you've got to jot it down. Can you maybe help our listeners and including myself, why is that? Why is it so important to jot these down? Whether, like you said, Sonia Lubimisky says, whether it's once a week, depending on the day of the week, why is it so important to write it down versus declaring it?

Yeah. So look, when it's about. Actually it goes back to the core insight from neuroscience, right? Which is neurons that fire together, wire together. It's about having enough tact. Time. Enough time, right? So the idea behind, we can think about and say, yeah, I'm grateful for my legs. Okay, great, I'm grateful for this. It's about truly being able to stay with it, really being able to stay with the experience and really be able to savor it. When we actually allow ourselves in our mind to relive that moment, relive what we are grateful for, why we are grateful for it, right? Robert Emmons in his work highlights two key elements when it comes to gratitude. The first one is an affirmation of the goodness in life. So first, we actually affirm what is good. The second is we recognize and bring to light that the source of goodness is actually outside of you. So there are so many things that are good not because of something we did, but because of something somebody else did outside. And so it's so powerful when we do that, when we write down, when we savor that moment, relive that moment, we are creating a longer period, right, for our brain to actually form that memory, for us to form those circuits. And that's why it's important. Otherwise, you know, thinking about it alone is, can be quite superficial. In fact, friends, I will tell you a beautiful practice that we started doing as a family that has had actually a quite a big impact on our family lives. I have a 13 year old, and if any of you who are parents of teenagers, I think you can notice the report that came out from the CDC three weeks ago. 60% of girls and about 25, 30% of boys, teenage boys reporting signs of anxiety, stress. There's a lot of disillusionment out there. In fact, one in three girls, one in three teenage girls, dear friends, contemplated suicide in 2021. One in three think about that. And often it is because we have lost track of how much we actually have what all we have. If we ground ourselves in all that is positive, it makes a big difference. And so, you know, rather than preach, you know, kids never do what you tell them. Kids, kids, actually reluctantly, right? They, they, I mean, it's super hard, right? But kids, kids get involved, they notice what you do and they emulate that. So we just made it a ritual now, once a month, once a week, right, we actually sit down around the dinner table and we go around Lizzie Ashwin and I actually talking about what are we grateful for? And actually really having a conversation around it. I haven't got him to do a journal yet. That's something that I do. But you know, just having, right, that's level two. But just even having that conversation of, hey, can we actually think about, you know, all the, all the positives, right, like even, like small things. Like, you know, there was the other day, our Car broke down. And we're like, oh, my God, the car broke down. And I was like, yeah, but you know, you know, how many people don't have a car? Think about the fact that we have a car for it to break down, you know, so it's these little moments. I think there are real opportunities, teaching moments for our younger generation and for us always, when we lament something that is gone, there is something that was there in the first place that for so many people, doesn't exist. So again, it's about noticing. It's about awareness. It's about connecting. It's focusing on what actually we want to focus on.

It's so beautiful what you've said there, Ashish, because I think for those parents out there that don't realize that they set an example for their kids, whether they're young or they're teens, preteens, and I appreciate you sharing that story. If I just. It's funny. List off. Gratefulness Jar Gratefulness Map Gratefulness Journal. There's so many different tips and different practices that people can take and try within their own lives, within their family's lives. What I'd like to do, Ashish, though, is I'd like to shift and maybe talk a bit about how. Have you seen from your experience, gratitude being incorporated at work? I know I've shared some personal examples from my side with you, but maybe some people think what we do at home, what we do for ourselves, may not actually apply at work. Can we bust that myth together?

Yeah, absolutely. So, look, gratitude, an attitude of gratitude is truly what that is. We can bring that to any aspects of, you know, to every aspect of our life. In fact, you know, it is true. You know, I'm sure so many of you have heard this saying, right? It's by a Christian, you know, monk who said, it is not the joyful that are grateful, it's the grateful that are joyful. Right? Today there is so much stress, there is so much lack of meaning. There is so much happening at work where people don't feel valued. In fact, we did, you know, we did a survey when I was at McKinsey. And one of the top things that employees value, look for truly, right, like highest in the. In the top three is being valued by a manager, being valued by a company, okay? And that's one of the top reasons people leave is they don't feel they're seen. They don't seem they're valued. A very simple way, dear friends, for you to actually help connect people to the important role they play in each other's lives and in driving the performance of the company is to embed a gratitude practice. So I had one of my clients did this, and I invite you to consider doing it with your teams. Look, every team writes status reports once a week, right? Four box, six box, eight box. Here's the, you know, here's, here's our objectives, here's the performance against them, here's the actions we're taking, here's the issues, here's the key meetings have a box at the bottom that says, who are three people that we are grateful for? And go around with your team identifying people who are on their teams who have done something above and beyond to make a difference that week. Write them down and when you send the weekly report out, copy them on it. And more importantly, call them the week after and thank them and make them recognize and appreciate. And notice how quickly within four to eight weeks, you start to see a fundamental improvement in your team morale, in your team engagement, in the output that you have together and just an overall environment. A key way to increase flourishing at work is to actually express gratitude.

I love that. I really do. And I, you know, I've had conversations at my company where, you know, for the listeners out there, I used to come from a place of lack, right? Used to think, oh, crap, I don't have that to do this role or I don't have this tool or I don't have this resource or this support. And every time I did that, Ashish, I always felt like I was falling short. I wasn't able to do what I wanted to do. And I came from a place of lack of. When as soon as you do that reframe and you think to yourself, hang on a second. I come from a place of abundance. I work for an amazing company that's got incredible resources. I can put time in the diary of any member of leadership or a peer or somebody who's got expertise in a space that I'm looking to understand, and they jump at it. They immediately support, they help because they appreciate that we all are going through challenging times. Or as you've said to me, Ash, we're working harder than we've ever before. You know, we're, we're actually expected to deliver more than we've ever had before. It's not like our hours in the day are increasing. If anything there, it's, it's, it's a static. So how do we find a way to reframe and come from a place of abundance? And that's something that's dramatically changed my perspective at work and it's allowed me to even express gratitude more so than, than resentment or than feeling like, again, I'm coming short of what I need. And I, and I do invite all our listeners. These are practices that can take split seconds. Whether it's a note that you put into a jar, whether this is something you put into your journal, or as Ashish just said, you're around the table with your team and you're able to, to celebrate. You're able to express that gratitude. This is all about coming from a place of abundance, something that we all have and we should celebrate. So, Ashish, I, I'm. I think that there's so many amazing opportunities here that I'm hoping our listeners even come back and tell us more of how they themselves practice gratitude. For members of ours on the Happiness Squad community, we actually even created a gratitude wall so people are able to upload photographs or stories or quotes or things that allow them just express in that moment something that they're grateful for and give others the idea of, oh, that's something maybe I can look out for. I can play detective on and see where somebody in my household or somebody at work is. I'm able to express gratitude to them. So it's such a beautiful and powerful practice that can take literally seconds to do, as you rightly said, Ashish, to become just part of your consciousness.

Yeah, it's about upgrading our brains and truly developing a positivity bias versus a negativity bias. It's how we experience the world. It is not how the world is. It is how we experience the world. That in the end is all that drives our level of happiness and flourishing. So, my friends, it is one of those practices that is right here, right now available to you. Build an attitude of gratitude, start counting your blessings, and I promise you, your darkest days are not going to be so dark. And those days where, you know, you used to see a silver lining on a cloud, for those of people who can see a silver lining on a dark cloud, you'll start to notice that there are no dark clouds. There are little small black dots on big canvas of white. They are nothing. So you don't need to go into developing a way to see the silver lining. The clouds are really. The sky is right there above the weather changes. These are so small.

Ashish, as I've said before, I'll say it again, truly grateful for you. I appreciate this time. And you know, just as a closing thought from my side to our listeners, you know, this may not seem easy, this may seem difficult. And that's okay. If emotion that's of a negative bias overtakes you, that's okay. Just know, as we've talked about before, it's a feeling. It's a feeling that will pass. And as long as you're able to do level one, be self aware and step back. You can then take the advice and tips and practices that Ashish has mentioned to take yourselves to level two by just doing small micro practices each day that can build you for mighty accomplishments. Ashish, I'd like to say thank you. Any closing thoughts from your side, my friend?

No, this is it. Anil. I'm grateful for you my dear friend. We're off to Costa Rica tomorrow. I'm grateful for my family. Do this now. Dear friends, as we close this already, write down three things that you're grateful for right now. In fact, if one of them has to do with an individual, send them an email right now as you wrap up this podcast, send them an email. Actually, even better, send them an email and ask them to listen to the podcast. Subscribe to it. It's a simple act that you can do that can spread joy in the world and help others around you start to build this practice. So give thanks and give them something. And here's something you can give them for free. Share our podcast with them. As you know, we are on a mission to democratize happiness and touch a billion lives and we would be so grateful and thankful for you in helping if you can help us spread the word and get more people to be able to access this resource for free and integrate that into their lives. Thank you and have an amazing rest of the week.

Big hugs Ashish.

Cheers.

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