A motivating speaker who can motivate you as well as give you the tools to be happier would be Shawn Achor. With his Tedx talk listed as one of the top 25 most popular, we are sure you will find some potency in his teachings.

Why Gratitude Is Important

There are many reasons why gratitude is important as well as powerful. First of all, it feels good! When we are grateful we are acknowledging our appreciation and allowing ourselves to bask in it!

Brene Brown talks about how joy is actually one of the most vulnerable emotions because many people begin to dress rehearse tragedy when confronted with feelings of pure joy. The only way she has found in her research that people were able to tap into full joy was through gratitude.

Cultivating gratitude has even been shown to rewire the brain to look for positive input instead of negative input. This is part of the reason why Shawn Achor researched gratitude in order to bring it into one of the practices to use in the 21-day happiness challenge.

Since gratitude simply makes us feel good to be in this creates happiness within us. Shawn explains is incredibly important to our health and even our productivity levels!

Shawn says, “Those who are happy experience 31% higher productivity, 37% higher sales, 3x greater creativity and 23% fewer fatigue symptoms. Happy people are also up to 10x more engaged, 40% more likely to receive a promotion, and 39% more likely to live to age 94.” This is what Shawn called the happiness advantage.

How To Be Grateful

Within the 21-day happiness challenge, Shawn gives the simple and daily exercise to mentally pause and list 3 things you are grateful for. Each day choose new things and allow yourself to feel fully grateful for them as you state them.

You can also do this by forming a gratitude journal and writing down what you are grateful for. There is a big benefit in writing down what you are grateful for as you are putting your gratitude into physical form on paper.

This then helps you manifest through the law of attraction more to be grateful for. You can also follow our template here on forming a gratitude journal. Another practice within Shawn’s challenge is to meditate daily for 2 minutes.

You are only required to pick one habit within the challenge although choosing two will only benefit you more. When meditating you can also meditate upon gratitude or follow Louise Hay’s guided evening gratitude meditation.

Another one of his practices is to show random acts of kindness which when you are sending a coworker a nice email, you are expressing your gratitude to them. This is yet another way to train your mind to see more to be grateful for.

Expand Your Gratitude

We have plenty of tools and exercises you can use to cultivate more gratitude in your life. Here is our list of gratitude exercises to use with the law of attraction.