Practicing gratitude is something we’ve (my partner Swathi and I) repeatedly read in many books and heard many people talking about it. We thought of implementing it in our lives too, but somehow we always fell short.

We came across this book “The Compound Effect” by DARREN HARDY, who gave a simple technique to get started. Clubbing that technique with a few simple habit-forming principles shared by James Clear in his book “Atomic Habits”, we were finally able to build this habit. Of course, we had our own share of missed days, experimenting with timings before it became automatic to us.

When we shared about this, many people asked for two things: (1) What benefits we saw for ourselves? and (2) how to get started?

200+ days of writing gratitude together

A few benefits we experienced

1. More optimistic: there are already many small things that are going our way on a daily basis. This deep understanding made us grow more positive.
2. More happy moments: as we realized that not all things that appear to be bad instinctively, actually turn out to be better or less harmful. We now tend to worry less and enjoy the current movement.
3. Give more: as we made note of so many things we are receiving, we started conscious giving by actively asking people how we can help. And surprisingly, giving became a strong relationship builder and we received even more. A super-powerful vicious circle.

Now, coming to the second questions, how to get started with practicing gratitude, let’s first start with a couple of simple questions:

1. Which of these are you most likely to do at the same time every day? (A) Breakfast / Lunch / Dinner (B) Go to bed / Wake up © Exercise / Walk / Read / Any other activity
2. Whom among these are you most likely to interact with on a daily basis? (A) Partner / Parents / Siblings / Grandparents (B) Friends / Colleagues © Relatives / Others

Let’s say you chose Dinner for the 1st question and Partner for the 2nd one. Now, let’s take advantage of 3 simple principles.

Principle 1: Start Small

Start writing just 3 gratitude points per day. Let’s say you are most likely to interact with your partner every day, then start with partner gratitude — we started this way. You can just thank for very small things like getting you water, sharing some information, setting up the bed, dropping to the office, etc. As you progress, you will automatically start writing for other people who helped you during the day and universal forces.