How to Shift from Blame, Shame and Guilt to Gratitude

Hey there. Great day to you. I hope you are having an awesome day. Let me know where you're from and what are you doing. Let's talk about the power of gratitude. And I had my team do a little research on gratitude and the neuroscience behind it and I found it fascinating, but also pretty interesting. Let me see if I get my glass on. You're going to see a little bit of a glare. Hi there, fairy. Hi there, Vishal. Cheryl. Good morning, Cheryl. Hey there, Jim Dupre. Hope you're all doing great. Hi there, Ingrid. I was doing a little research online and thank you Des, you're awesome. Also Mr. Dave. Hi there Dave. Hey, Sandra. Alright, so I was doing a little research. I've got my little computer right here next to me and I was trying to figure out and many years ago I did a little research as well, but I forgot what I'm going to be talking about today is some of my daily rituals. I've got a little inner size for you to do as well and I want to just read something to you. And forgive me for not looking right at you while I'm reading. I've got my little contraption. I'm at my home in Telluride, Colorado. I'll show you the views here in a moment. Actually, let me see if I could flip this and I'll take you outside in just a moment. But look at my view out there. That's Telluride, Colorado. That's the ski hill. I'll come back to that in just a moment. Let me just get my settings right. I'm on my cell phone with my computer here and it's not easy getting full on WI fi. So I'm so grateful that there's my first grateful for this. But apparently back in 1621 when the native American Indians and the Pilgrims got together, the Indians had a ritual of being grateful for their harvest. And this is where they, they broke bread together. But according to folklore and I guess legend and some fact, it wasn't until many, many years later when President Abraham Lincoln established Thanksgiving as a national holiday. And that was during the Civil War. And that's become an American tradition. For those of you that are watching me from around the world right now, Thanksgiving is this Thursday here in the United States. About a month ago, Canada celebrated their Thanksgiving. And so I'm always fascinated with, you know, some of the cultural aspects of Thanksgiving and being grateful. I'd love to know from each one of you, what do you do to be grateful? How do you get into the consistent emotion of Gratitude because it's so easy, wouldn't you agree, in today's day and age to get caught up in all the things that aren't working well and, and sometimes it's hard to remember. Breathing is something to be grateful for. Every time you breathe in, you're taking in 10 to the 22nd power of hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and other elements that then create your cells, your organs, your tissues, your bones. And we are regenerating all of our organs every five to seven years. Everything is been regenerated. I mean, that is something to be grateful for. The miracle of life, right? And so, Suzanne, every morning your feet touch the floor, you're grateful. Well, you know what's interesting is a really dear friend of mine, Adam Markell, we were at, I think lunch a few months ago and he said every day when he wakes up, as soon as his eyes open and he swings his legs across the bed, he said he feels grateful for being alive. And he reminds himself that somebody probably close to him didn't wake up that morning. And he did. So one of his morning rituals is being grateful for being awake and alive. And that's actually one of the rituals that I started doing many years ago. And that was to wake up with questions that I'll share with you in just a moment on gratitude. Grateful to have drinking water. Grateful. Yeah. Tell me what you're grateful for. Like hi there, Flor from Singapore. And Don Cieri. Joanna. Joanna from, you know, being Alive. Hi, Maureen. And again, I'm coming to you from Telluride. Let me show you a little view before we really dive deep. And hey, Shasheen Shah. Hey, everybody. Say hi to Shasheen, who just joined it. He's my dear buddy here in Telluride, Colorado. And hi, Annette from Israel. Morning, evening ritual. Kelly, you write them down. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Do you want me to take you outside for just a moment, show you a little bit of the beautiful mountains? Give me a second. Let me just unplug this. All right, come with me, I'll show you just a little tour. This is our mountain condo. It's a three bedroom place up in the mountain. And this is our just. There's our little sitting area there in our living room. And I've got a nice little fire going. It's 10 o' clock in the morning, but wait till you see this. Let me, let me take you outside. Are you ready? All right. It's a little sunny right now. They're making snow too. So take a look at this. I am grateful for this right now look at this beautiful day in Colorado. This is the San Juan Mountain range and they're trying to make some snow right over there and the gondola is right there to go into town where my friend Shasheen lives. There's some beautiful mounds all the way up there where we ski. You see some of the runs, you'll see a few runs here. But this is Colorado. This is the new mound village here. Anyway, so for those of you that are from around the world now, you got a chance to see a little bit of, oh, hold on one second. See all the way down there, I can't zoom it, but all the way down there there's a peak like right there that's called Wilson mesa. That's about 15,000ft above sea level. It's a beautiful, beautiful mountain. Unfortunately, they, they closed this back around. They closed or they postponed the opening of the mountain for skiing this week. And that's going to happen. Let me go back in December. But anyway, so let's get back into some daily rituals. It is beautiful and breathtaking. JOANNE that's why I come up here. I've had a home here for about 18 years. Maria and I and the kids come up here. Probably about two to three months out of the year we're up here. So Darren says, I'm grateful that you're alive for another day. Maryanne you're welcome. SEAN freeman so let me, I'm going to read some of this stuff. As I mentioned before, I had my team, especially Mark Waldman, who's our resident neuro coach, one of the leading neuroscience researchers of the research in the world, an author of 14 books. You should check out his stuff. I'm very grateful for him. Mark Waldman, Oprah called one of his books the best 10 best books of the year. Last year, the year before. So let me read something to you to put gratitude in perspective. I'll give you my daily rituals and then my wife and I are going to head out for a little trek away from here to go to a hot springs today and tomorrow and just chill. Okay, so let me read this to you. When 221 young adults were asked to keep a gratitude journal for three weeks, a journal for three weeks, their sense of well being, optimism, life satisfaction improved. But when they kept a daily list of their hassles, their moods and coping with stress and day to day behaviors did not improve. Children who feel the most gratitude towards others and about their lives exhibit greater satisfaction and optimism and have better relationship with their peers. Here's a Question for you. What do you think happens when you are either grateful for something in the present moment or if you go into the memory bank and you think of something or someone you're grateful for? Right. What do you think happens in the brain? And I'll give you a little hint. Every positive thought activates brain cells that release neurochemicals that correlate with that activity. So if you have a positive thought, positive memory, a state of gratitude and appreciation, you're actually activating, in many cases, dopamine, the feel good neurochemical you may be activating. Serotonin. If you really feel that emotion of gratitude you are releasing, possibly, especially if you shared with somebody else, you're releasing oxytocin. What is oxytocin? When a mother is breastfeeding or a couple falls in love, oxytocin is being released in the brain in wonderful amounts. And that's why, you know, we almost forget about logic. We feel in love, we feel connected. And so when you are in a state of gratitude, then in many cases, that state of gratitude focuses your attention on more things to be grateful for. And there's a saying in the neuroscience field is energy flows where attention goes, or where attention goes, energy flows. So when you take your attention units every day, we wake up with a certain number of attention units, and it's almost like willpower units, but attention units. When we invest our attention and we place our intention on what we are grateful for right now, we deactivate that stress center in the brain. We deactivate the adrenaline, the cortisol, the epinephrine, the stress hormone, you know, that causes us to have those jitters and those emotions, the energy in motion. Remember, emotions are energy in motion. And you can direct the energy that's in motion in your body through the neurochemistry with your thoughts. See, a lot of people think that they just have emotions, and that is true. But emotions are what give rise to, to feelings. Somebody write this down or type this down. Feelings are nothing more than conscious awareness of the vibration or energy in my body. Feelings are nothing more than the awareness of the vibration, the energy flow in my body. So if you happen to have these sensations that are either destructive, disempowering and you really don't like the emotion or the feeling. Emotions happen at the subconscious level. Feelings are what you sense in the body. And so when you are aware of emotions, you can learn how to switch them. And one of the best ways to switch emotions, by the way, if you're enjoying this, do me A favor. Hit the share button. Let's get some more people to be grateful. Especially on this Thanksgiving week, let's be grateful all over the world. And so the idea of being grateful deliberately is also a part of deliberate conscious evolution of yourself. Let me repeat that. Deliberate conscious evolution of yourself. What if through practice, you could learn how to deliberately be in a state of gratitude even when things aren't going your way? Think about that. What if you could be in a state of gratitude even when things aren't going your way? Can you learn how to be in gratitude of the emotion of the result? Because it's going to help you grow and develop. So just think about that for a moment. Gratitude activates the neurons of positivity. Gratitude activates the neurons of possibility. Gratitude activates the neurochemistry of feeling good. And as I mentioned when we started, it's so easy to focus on the things that aren't working in your life. It's so easy to focus on the lack of money or the relationship you want, or the weight that you want, or the business growth you want. It's so easy to focus on that. And we are almost by default focusing on those negative things. So one of the things to do is to develop daily rituals, practices that activate the right neurochemistry that'll get your attention units focused on the things that you want. Does this make sense? If you like this, I'm watching myself on my cell phone with my computer in front of me and I hope you like the views of Telluride that I showed you just before. But hit the like or the love button if you're liking this. I want to read something to you. So I've got about four paragraphs that I want to read to you that I had my team research on the neuroscience. And all of this by the way, has all of the end notes of buy by the way. For many of you, you know that it's Black Friday this Friday in the United States. And Black Friday means that some of the best sales the year are happening all over the Internet. If any of you want to participate in my company's Black Friday sale, Neurogym, where many of our products are on sale at 50% off, blow your mind. My team will put a link below this to give you an opportunity to get some of our best selling programs for half off. So they'll do that and you can take care of that if you want to. But let me read this to you. Practicing gratitude for a few minutes a day can change your brain in ways that enhance your confidence and mood. Your self love and your ability to feel compassion for others is enhanced when you feel gratitude. When you experience deep gratitude, you'll also strengthen the circuits in the brain that are involved with moral decision making. Which means you can help yourself, your family and your children become more socially responsible, responsible. Simply ask them to write down each day the things they feel grateful for. And this is something that happens. Let me show you something. This over here, believe it or not, is my gratitude coin that I had created. And I'll read this to you. It says, live in harmony with universal laws. And on the back it says I am grateful law of gratitude. And in the middle over here it says, the universe provides abundance to those who are grateful. And then I've got some of the emblems that I wanted for health, wealth, vitality, etc. And what I do with this, I have one of these in my pocket. So when I travel and I put my hands in my pocket, I can touch this and remind myself, think of one thing you're grateful for. I have it in my car, I have it in my office, I have it everywhere so that I keep remembering. Be grateful. Be grateful. Be grateful. Be grateful. Be grateful. I'll share my morning ritual with you in just a moment. But this reminds me just to be grateful. The other thing that we do with this, whenever we have a family dinner or we have friends who come over and sit at the dining room with us or sit in the living room with us, we pass this coin around and it's a pretty heavy coin. It's like a gold coin, but it's not gold. When we have friends over, then what we do is we pass this coin around and we ask everybody to share what's one thing that you are grateful for. And everybody goes around the table before dinner and during dinner and guess what will happen? This little coin starts to activate everybody's gratitude neuromuscles. Alright, so that's one of the tools that we use or one of the tricks that I use is just as constantly staying a state of gratitude. Let me share with you a couple other notes that I mentioned to you. And this is all neuroscience based. And so my team did a whole bunch of research on this. So this is not know, hypothetical, this is not airy fairy woo stuff. This is real neuroscience of gratitude. And then right after I share with you a couple of these, by the way, if you just joined, we're talking about gratitude. I'm here at my home in Telluride, Colorado and I was hoping to ski but the ski hill doesn't open now. It's supposed to open up Thursday, but now it's opening up in December because we don't have enough snow. So it's nice and Sunny. It's about 50 degrees right now. So let me share with you something over here and this all around gratitude being able to change your work life and your relationship to money. Researchers found that business people who practice gratitude showed more patience, experienced greater happiness, and were less materialistic than those who didn't spend time counting their blessings on a daily basis. If you create a ritual of writing letters expressing gratitude, especially if you are feeling anxious, depressed or stressed out, you'll strengthen those parts of your brain that give you the power to improve your behavior and change your habits and will help you achieve your goals. So gratitude has been shown to help business owners as well. The other thing gratitude has shown, and again, this is scientifically based research, and that's people who practice gratitude are healthier, happier, more effective and more resilient. All the things you need more for success. They report better physical and psychological health, they engage in more healthy activities and they are more willing to seek the help of others. They're more willing to help others. When children, adolescents practice gratitudes, their grades go up, their stress goes down, family relationships improve and high risk behaviors decline. The other thing it says, spiritual resilience goes up. Okay, so I have a little inner size I call them. And most of you know that my new book comes out in 2018 called inner size the new signs to unlock your brain's hidden power and one of the inner sizes that I want you to be aware of. And right after this, I'll show you my daily AM and PM gratitude rituals and then I'll let you go off and enjoy your day. And if you like this, hit the share button. Let's get more people on the gratitude bandwagon. Alright, so if you take out a sheet of paper and you write down one negative feeling, thought or emotion that you are struggling with. So you take out a sheet of paper, you take one negative feeling, thought or emotion that you are struggling with, then write down three things that you are grateful for. And the more you write, the more you're going to feel the negativity melt away. And by contrast, when you have something that you're struggling with and your focus is on that struggle, you're actually releasing the neurochemistry of struggle. You're releasing the neurochemistry and sometimes of negativity. But when you switch, flip the switch. Okay, from negativity or a disempowering emotion that you're struggling with, and you convert, you flip the switch in your brain to something positive, something you're grateful for. You're actually going to enhance all of the neurochemistry of gratitude. You're going to enhance the positivity circuits. And what you can also do is when you take a look, okay, at what you wrote down, the thought, the emotion or the result that you don't like, and that's causing you to use up your attention units and you do something called mental contrasting where you look at it on a piece of paper, paper, get it out of your head, put it on a piece of paper when you look at it, and then close your eyes and see yourself releasing it and moving yourself towards the vision, the goal, the emotion, the gratitude that you want. You're actually teaching your brain how to overcome release. Let go of anything that's negative in your mind and through your end, that's being expressed through your emotions. Does that make sense? Pay attention to how you feel. And also what this does, believe it or not, is it strengthens the empathy and the self love circuits in the brain. Neuroscience. This is pure neuroscience. I want to make sure that I had all the neuroscience research and maybe my team. If you could also just post these sources for a lot of the research that our team did for you. There's 1, 2, 3, 4. But it's about six bodies of scientific research to corroborate everything that I'm sharing with you right now. Hi there, Heidi Nord, great to have you on here. And again, if you're liking this, hit the like or the love button. Also hit the share button. Okay, so let me shift over to my daily practices before I give you my daily practices. Do you enjoy these Tuesday morning trainings? Are you getting, you know, lots out of it? Because I like to bring you content and really good stuff and I want to just support you and just get you to focus your attention and your intention and your behaviors on achieving your goals and dreams. And if you want us to send you a link, by the way, to the Black Friday sale that we have with, you know, 50 of percent off many of our programs, just type in yes in the comments and my team will send you a link via Facebook and you can take a look at our programs that we have and you get the best deals of the year right now. It's a short window that we're doing this for and if you like it, do me a favor and share it with your friends and family. We're keeping it really tight to only friends and family, but your friends and family will help as well. Okay, so let me share with you my daily gratitude session, or what I do is when I wake up, before I do anything else, and I open up my eyes, I've made it a habit to start every day with a smile. And you may go, why? And first and foremost, I remind myself that I woke up. My father used to say when I used to ask my father when I moved away from home when I was 19 years old, I just asked my father, how are you, dad? We're on the phone. He goes, what do you mean, how am I? I'm alive, I'm above ground. And that was his rule for being happy. As long as he was above ground, he woke up. That was one of his rules for being happy. So I made it one of my rules that every day that I wake up, I choose to be happy. And I'm going to start my day with just a smile. I woke up. Sure, I may have some aches and pains and things that aren't going my way at that time, but you know what? Every flipping day that I wake up, I'm grateful. So I start off with that. And I remind myself, not all the time, you know, that there's probably millions of people that would trade whatever they're experiencing in their life right now for my life. And no matter how bad your life is in certain areas, or not even bad, but no matter how hard your life is in certain areas, there's somebody who will trade your worst life for theirs, right? And so remind yourself of how grateful you are even when times aren't, you know, to your taste, aren't, you know, going your way, you know, the winds are knocking you around. What can you be grateful for? And what about you woke up? What if you just woke up, up, and you said, okay, I'm happy because I woke up? And so I do a body scan as well. When I lay in bed, you know, I just, you know, I'm thankful. I like to be grateful. And I look at, you know, what am I grateful for? And these are the questions I ask myself as I'm laying in bed. What am I grateful for? My spiritual growth. And I just mentally play that in my head. I ask myself, what am I grateful for in my mental health? And I come up with two or three things about my mental health. What am I grateful for? For my emotions, having emotions. Happiness, sadness, shame, guilt, disgust, anger. Wow. I've got this orchestra of emotions that I can sense and feel what's happening within me and outside. Wow. That's pretty powerful. So spiritual, emotional, mental, and then physical. What am I grateful for with my physical body? Gotta have fingers and hands that work. I've got a voice, I've got eyes that I see through. I've got senses. I've got a body that can walk. I've got a mouth, ears, and nose. I've got 100 trillion cells in my body working its magic, regenerating 10 million new cells every minute while 10 million die off. Oh, my God. Wow. And so what am I grateful for about my work? What am I grateful for about my family? What about am I grateful my kids? What am I. I just play two, three, four minutes of what I'm grateful for before I put my feet on the ground. And so that's my daily gratitude in the morning. And I just. I just started off that way. That's part of a ritual that I know when I do that, I feel freaking great. And I want to feel great. So why not start off with an inner size that allows me to feel great? I can deal with all the other stuff after that. I'm grateful for water, hot water, cold water, food, the people who plant. And there's so many things to be grateful if you just take the time to be aware, because it's so easy to go down the rabbit hole of what isn't working. And guess what? When you're in a state of gratitude for what you have, you'll have more energy to focus on fixing, correcting, making better. Some of the things that you know aren't working exactly to your taste right now. And then during the day, I look for, you know, things I do. Mindfulness, purpose, practices of just things. You know, whether I'm grateful for the fire, the trees, the mountain, the snow, the sun. I look for things throughout the entire day to be grateful for. Even the lessons during the times that are not right for me or not to my taste or not working out, I'm like, I'm grateful for the lesson that I'm not aware whereof yet. So there's always a way to frame things in a way that empowers you versus disempowering you. And this is one of the neuroscience tricks of framing, looking at things in a way that will empower you, inspire you, move you forward, even though it may not be to your taste. This is a skill that you can learn like t tennis or chess or music. It's a skill you learn of how to direct your attention. And so when you are grateful, you find more things to be grateful for. And so then in the evening I'm going to wrap this up. Then the evening I asked myself what am I grateful for about the day? And I just go through a two or three minute checklist in my mind. I go to sleep with a smile on because I focus on the stuff that I'm grateful for. I also give my brain the instruction to come up with solutions to the stuff that's not working in my life right now. And then I let my subconscious do the work while I'm sleeping. But I want to be focusing on what I'm grateful for and being in that positive mindset, that positive neurochemical chemistry of gratitude. And using my motivational circuits, my left prefrontal cortex, which will help me figure out how I can achieve my goals versus what happens when I focus on things that aren't working. And I activate my right prefrontal cortex and deactivate the genius part of my brain. And so we've been covering the neuroscience of gratitude. I'm going to take you outside again for one last view of what I've been looking at while I've been doing this. I'm grateful for this beautiful day in Tell Ride Colorado. I'm here with my wife on a little bit of vacation for 10 days and I hope you have awesome day. Whoops. Go this way. And I will just say alright so if you enjoyed this, hit the like or the love button. Hit the share button. Let's get the the world, you know, focused on gratitude. And the more we have people focusing on gratitude, the more we will have to be grateful for. Have an awesome Thanksgiving. We'll be back to you next week from San Diego. Be back home then. Have an awesome day. And if you want information on our Black Friday sale, just type in yes. Bye bye now.