HOW TO Transform Your Life: GRATEFUL Journaling in 10 Minutes

I believe that if you can learn to focus on what you have, you will always see that the universe is abundant and you will have more.

I believe you need to be equally ambitious as you are grateful.

I always felt grateful for even the small things. I always used to celebrate the small things.

Rise and shine, it's enspresso time. Good morning, Believe Nation, it's Evan. My one word is believe and I believe in you. I believe you have an amazing gift inside you that I want to see explode exploded onto the world. So grab your coffee and sip on today's message: Keep a Grateful Journal. Over to you, Oprah Winfrey. I wake up every morning, espresso keep me going.

I wake up every morning.

As I've grown older, I've learned to appreciate living in the moment, and I ask that you do too. I've asked I'm asking this graduating class, those of you here, I've asked all of my viewers in America and across the world to do this one thing: keep a grateful journal. Every night, list 5 things that happened this day, in days to come, that you are grateful for. What it will begin to do is to change your perspective of your day and your life. I believe that if you can learn to focus on what you have, you will always see that the universe is abundant and you will have more. If you concentrate and focus in your life on what you don't have, you will never have enough. Be grateful. Keep a journal. You all are all over my journal tonight.

Gratitude is a game changer for entrepreneurs. It's a game changer because it balances the scale. Entrepreneurs, so often we are driven, we're ambitious, we want more, we want to achieve more, we want to go go out and accomplish these huge things, and that's awesome. But suddenly that strive to do more, to be more, to be better, often that can come from a dark place. When we don't accomplish it, we spiral down, we get depressed, we get negative. And so the gratefulness helps balance the scale. I believe you need to be both. I believe you need to be equally ambitious as you are grateful. One of the practices that I do with my team is I have a private Facebook group and every morning I'll post 3 things that I'm grateful for. And it might be some big thing, it might be like, "Today is YouTube filming day and I'm so excited to be here with you and make these amazing videos for this audience!" And sometimes it's something like, "I'm grateful for the clouds in the sky because it makes me appreciate the sun," or, "I'm grateful for Timo and his cuteness and his energy level." Just finding 3 things out of my life to find the balance, to balance out that crazy ambition. I think it's really important that you have both. And so if I look at my YouTube channel as an example, on the one hand, I think that I should be doing more. I think that my channel should have 10 million subscribers, that I should be having a way bigger impact, that I suck. I think that I suck. I think that comparing myself to a Tony Robbins or a Les Brown, young Les Brown, or an Eric Thomas or any of these guys, I feel like I suck and I still have a long way to go to to get better, and I'm working really hard to do it. And I think that I'm awesome. I think that my channel is awesome. I think that it deserves to have a Nobel Peace Prize for this channel. I love the impact. I love you guys. And so I hold both thoughts in my head at the same time. I have crazy ambition to want to do more, and I'm so grateful for everything that I have right now. I think you need both, because if you only have the gratitude and the happiness, then you don't strive to do more. And if you only have the ambition, then that can be a really dark place because you're not balanced by anything else. So it's equal parts gratitude and ambition together. I think that's a really important balance that I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs don't have. I feel like entrepreneurs too often are carried way too much by the ambition side and haven't brought up the gratefulness enough. Now I've got some special bonus clips for you, but before getting to that, my question of the day: Ties into Oprah's 5 things. I want you to write down in the comments below 5 things that you are extremely grateful for today. Leave it down, I'm really curious to see what you have to say. Thank you guys so much for watching. I believe in you. I hope you continue to believe in yourself and whatever your one word is. Much love, enjoy the bonus clips, and I'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of en-espresso.

Gratitude is one of the most strongest forms of power in attracting good things. You know, if you truly feel grateful for the things in your life— I always felt grateful for even the small things. I always used to celebrate the small things. Now I might be celebrating the bigger things, but I always celebrate every little good thing that would happen to me in my life, even before I had any kind of money or any of that. I would celebrate and I would feel grateful for it, and it just gave me more. And this is exactly the same thing that's happening right now. I still remain grateful and more comes.

What I found, you know, 12 years of research, 11,000 pieces of data, I did not interview in all that time a person who would describe themselves as joyful or describe their lives as joyous who did not actively practice gratitude. And for me, it was very counterintuitive because I kind of went into the research thinking that the relationship between joy and gratitude was if you're joyful, then you should be grateful. But it wasn't that way at all. It was really that practicing gratitude invites joy into our lives. And when I say practice, I think this is the part that really changed my life. It changed my family and the way we live every day. When I say practice gratitude, I don't mean kind of like the attitude of gratitude or feeling grateful. I mean practicing gratitude. These folks shared in common a tangible gratitude practice. They either kept gratitude journals. Some of them did interesting things like at 1, 2, 3, 4, like at 12:34 every day, they said something out loud that they were grateful for. One of the things that we do, like we say grace at dinner And so now after grace, we go around and everyone in my family says something they're grateful for. I mean, and what's interesting is when we first started, I have a first grader, a first grade son, Charlie, and eighth grade daughter, Ellen. And at first I thought, and we've been doing it for a couple years now, like they're gonna like, oh God, Mom. And there was a little like, this is, you know, are you experimenting on us? There was a little bit of that. But now what's interesting, even after we did it for like a couple of weeks, that on those crazy busy nights where we're trying to like get to soccer and piano and homework, And Steve and I are just like, we say a quick prayer, we start eating, my kids are like, whoa, what are you grateful for? And it's been extraordinary because not only absolutely does it invite more joy into our house, it also is such a soulful window into what's going on in my kids' lives. You know, so there are some days where my 8th grader will be like, I'm joyful that there's a huge thick wall between my room and my brother's room. You know, something just very, you know, honest. But there are other days she'll say, you know, she had a friend whose mother recently died, and she said, you know, for a month she would say, I'm just so grateful that y'all are healthy right now, you know. And so not only did it make us all more aware of what we had and more willing to slow down and really be thankful for the joyful moments we had, but it let me know where she was emotionally in her life, you know. My son is is always, you know, I'm grateful for bugs, I'm grateful for frogs, but sometimes he'll say, you know, I'm grateful that you picked me up early, or, you know, I'm grateful that I finally understand adjectives, you know? So it's, there's a great quote that says it's not joy that makes us grateful, it's gratitude that makes us joyful, and it's by a Jesuit brother, a Jesuit priest, And I guess I was just amazed to find that bubble up so strongly in the research. It's life-changing.

The next phase here is also to become grateful for what it is that you do have. So if you're starting to try to create change in your life, you want to make sure that you're really focusing on what it is that you do have in your life so that you feel an energy of gratitude. And an energy of gratitude can really open you up to this incredible capacity to feel more energized, to feel more happy, In any given moment where you feel like, oh, I don't have what I need, or I'm not supported, or things aren't working out, the simple step here is to just say, I am grateful for what I do have. When we look and we say, I am grateful for what I do have, we create more of what we want. The energy of gratitude opens our heart and it expands our energy and it makes us a much more wonderful, loving person to be around. With that loving energy, we begin to attract more into our life. So we want to really make sure that that energy of gratitude is a very pinnacle part of this miracle worker process, which is that we stay committed and open to what it is that we are here to receive, and we stay committed and grateful for what it is that we have. So you can begin today just by making a gratitude list and focus on it. There are so many moments when I think, oh my God, I can't believe I have to do this, or I can't believe I have to get to that, and then I just think about what I'm grateful for, and it just spins me immediately out of the crazy chaos and back into a centered place of love. And so I think that this is a really valuable tool for you to begin to use regularly, and it's an active tool throughout the book, May Cause Miracles.

So let me give you the one word secret to happiness. One word. This is all you need to be happy. The most important word ever.

If you had to think of one word that's most important to you, or that sums you up, or that would be kind of like a little Hey, Believe Nation!

If you want to know what the most important one word is for Tony Robbins, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah Winfrey, will.i.am, and Howard Schultz, I have a very special secret video for you. Check the description for details.