The Art of Being Thankful

It is literally my favorite time of year!! Other people like other holidays, but I love Thanksgiving. What could be better than a whole day dedicated to food, family, and being thankful. I love planning that big meal. It is fun for me to strategize how to cook for two or three days. I get immense joy from making everything and having everyone in my home. But the best part of the season is forcing people to be thankful.

This is something I do everyday. My prayers start with “Thank you”. I start my day with writing 2 thank you notes. But it isn’t a skill that humans innately have. I have discovered this over the last few years with my children. Every year I come up with some weird way to force them to express their thankfulness. We have had thankful baskets, thankful trees and thank you lists. It’s all the same idea. The girls have to right down things that they are thankful for. When they are young, the answers are hilarious, but as they age, they have become more generic. More surprisingly, people look at me like I’m crazy when I tell them we do these things, because they do not with their own children. So why is it that people have such a hard time being genuinely thankful?

The idea of having a thankful heart has been discussed in many publications. I realized it as a business practice while reading Larry Kendall’s Ninja Selling. It follows this concept that putting positive energy into the universe will yield you good results. I have been through and steeped in enough negative energy to never want to feel that power again. The concept spoke to a part of my “hippy-dippy” soul that believes there is good in the world. Furthermore, speaking that good outloud conceals some of the ugliness. Take the way you get news on a daily basis. If it is just from the evening news shows, it may be only the bad stuff. That leaves you with a negative feeling about the world. These shows have picked up on that idea and usually include a careful balance of feel-good stories and happy endings.

Don’t be fooled. This is not an easy practice, in life or in business. Real Estate is tough! My favorite Superior School of Real Estate instructor has a saying, “Rule #1, People Suck”. It may sound counter to the argument of putting positive energy out, but it’s really not. It gives me permission to accept that real estate agents do not follow the rules, and clients can be treacherous. I have had numerous “friends” in the last year and a half of this career tell me that they wanted me to sell their house, only to turn around and list it with another agent or sell it by themselves. I get personally offended, because this is how I feed my family! But if I remember that “People Suck”, it becomes less personal. I don’t suck! I am great at this! I take great care of my clients, do everything in my power to represent them, know all the ins and outs of the process, and have a great team to help us. I have to force myself in those situations to be thankful for the experience. Thank you, friend of 20+ years, for selling your home through another agent and not answering when I asked why! You taught me that I shouldn’t give out free information or count on anything until it is in writing. Thank you, former boarder at my barn, for selling your home to some guy off the street for dirt cheap because you didn’t want to clean it! You taught me that I need to think outside of the box when discussing solutions to clients problems. And all of these situations have taught me that just assuming something will happen will not pay my car payment, so I have to make these things happen, or in these cases, make other things happen. With my thankful mindset, I can appreciate the lesson and heal from the knifing stabbing in my back.

Maybe it sounds too kumbaya for most people. But being thankful is literally the thing that saves my mind from all the anger, hatred, and darkness in society. I choose not to deal with and dwell on that. I choose to focus on the light. There is good in everything. If I spend time taking a bad experience and finding the lesson or the good in it, it is still a bad experience and I still can’t pay the car payment, but I can focus my energy on something that will. If I force my teenagers to do dorky exercises trying to find the things in life they have to be thankful for, maybe they will grow up with an introspective soul. So when their friends stab them in the back, they can learn and grow instead of shrink and hide. Introspection is the key to change. Whether you want to change yourself or the world, you must have the ability to look inside of something, separate the good from the bad, and choose which one to focus on.