The Art of Appreciation

We’ve heard again and again about how good it is to appreciate and make Gratitude lists, but are we doing it? And I don’t mean just writing three things we love and then going into a fog of overthinking for the rest of the day. For it to be transformational, Gratitude needs to be a way of life.

My practice, Gratitude 150, is about doing longer Gratitude lists than you may be used to.

I remember someone who wrote 150 things she appreciated every day. Writing that many things and really feeling them can take over half an hour, but the practice wasn’t just about the half an hour. What it did was train her to naturally look for things to love throughout her day. It also stopped her overthinking so much, because you can’t appreciate and think at the same time. She’d be walking down the street and where most people were judging what they were seeing, or thinking self-conscious thoughts, or just going into all kinds of thinking patterns – she just looked for things to love. She’d appreciate the pavement, and the people who designed and built the pavements, the plants and the gardeners as she walked past the gardens, the architecture of the buildings. Perhaps she’d appreciate the clothes of people who walked past, or their smile, or their beauty. She’d appreciate the sky and the sounds and the cars and the other amazing inventions she walked past. Walking into the supermarkets, she’d be amazed by all the different kinds of foods they were selling. This made visiting the shop – a shop she’d been in hundreds of times – exciting like it was the first time she’d discovered it.

This person had manifested amazing things in her life, money, an amazing career, a great love life, beauty. She often shared this at the Processes Group, the beloved group I ran in London for a decade which attracted thousands of people keen to put personal development into practice. When she jetted into London and stopped by, people would love hearing her explain about her life and how she did it with the art of appreciation.

As I said, the secret isn’t just in the list itself. What the list does is to get you to appreciate as a habit, all day long. And that’s the thing – a long morning practice is useless if you then stop and spend the rest of the day complaining. The true practice we want to get into is an all-day practice. You are using your mind all day anyway, and it’s a lot more fun and easy to use it in a good feeling way (even though it takes effort and focus, especially with the mind chatter constantly trying to get you back to complaining).

In your appreciation, you can also include looking for a new angle on problems you are experiencing. And before that – on the emotions you are having around the problems. (This process is my “What’s Good About…” List again from Feel Better, No Matter What). For example, you can start with looking at “what’s good about being angry” if that’s how you’re feeling. And then, what you’re angry about, for example “what’s good about my friend letting me down.” You can start in the first case with “everyone feels angry sometimes, it’s OK to feel how I feel” or “at least I wasn’t a doormat and perhaps the other person needed to hear what I was expressing.” Then once your feelings are calmer – which is what this process will do – you can go into the problem itself, as it’s hard to see a problem in a different way when you’re in intense feelings.

So we start, in the case of “what’s good about my friend letting me down,” with “he should have let me down because he did, perhaps there is a gift in this like getting me to not be so affected by other people’s behaviour and to stop give my power away,” or “it’s getting me to stand up for myself and be more myself”. The key is to find what feels good for you – it’s not an intellectual exercise and there is no right answer . As you embrace the problematic thought, it lets go of you, freeing you from the problem so you can get on with appreciating your life.

Gratitude 150 and the “What’s Good About…” List are featured in my book Feel Better, No Matter What which is published by Watkins Publishing.