Thank You - A Culture of Gratitude

You can never say thank you enough. It was again another author that gave me the inspiration for this video. He wrote the following under the header thanks how long is the list of people to whom you owe thanks? Gratitude is not just a once a year expression used during Thanksgiving or performance appraisals. It's a daily necessity for sales professionals whose goal it is to provide value for as many people as possible. Start counting the number of people to whom you give a sincere and meaningful thanks every day. If it is fewer than five people, start making an effort to look for opportunities to thank more people every day. If I consider this threshold of 5, and from the perspective of a sales professional, I started a list of people that I need to show gratitude to on a very regular basis. Of course. My spouse, my parents, my children, a personal trainer, a barber, a business partner, a customer, an internal customer, other co workers, the flight attendant, the nurse, a server in a restaurant. And this just scratches the surface. As sales professionals and any other profession for that matter, we have many people and many reasons to say thank you. Like I said, you can never say thank you enough. However, there are surveys that suggest that not enough people say thanks in the office. Research says that only 10% of adults say thanks to a colleague every day, and Even less, just 7% express gratitude daily to the boss. If the question were do you frequently thank your colleagues for a job well done? The the percentage is higher, about 40%, but still nowhere near a majority and well below what I would have expected. And there are many other studies that confirm that we do not say thank you often enough. A study of everyday language used around the world has found that in informal settings, people almost always complied with requests for an object, a service, or help for their efforts. However, they received expressions of gratitude only rarely, only about 1 of 20 occasions. While this 5% is even lower than the other number I mentioned, it can be explained we operate on the principle of reciprocity. When we ask people to help us, the default is that they will. People signal the need for assistance frequently, about every minute and a half, according to researchers. And they usually get it. Requests were complied with about seven times more often than not. Another reason for the lack of thank you lies in culture and language. There are some variations across languages. Speakers of English or Italian verbalize thank you significantly more often than speakers of other languages. Researchers attribute this high to what they call a strong ideology of politeness in Western cultures. This doesn't mean, however, that English or Italian speakers are more grateful, because expressing gratitude and actually feeling gratitude is not the same thing. Saying thank you may just seem foundational to an English speaker, while many other languages, like, lack a direct equivalent of that simple we can never say thank you enough in a state of gratitude. We say yes to life. We affirm that all in all, life is good, and it has elements that make life worth living.