Daily Gratitude: Optimism is such an important quality for you to cultivate. Even when things seem to go wrong, know that they aren’t really going “wrong”. They are teaching you something. It’s simply your job to figure out what it is you’re supposed to learn. Everyone talks about all the attempts at creating the light bulb that Edison made before he hit the right one. But you better believe that Thomas didn’t just hop from one attempt to the next. I will bet you he had an evaluative period in between attempts where he asked “what did I learn from this?” In fact he once said he discovered 13000 (or whatever the actual number was) ways not to make a lightbulb. Can you look at your “failures” and “mistakes” in this way and ask the universe what it’s trying to teach you….and is there a better way you can approach this failure? Never let any opportunity?

Daily Gratitude: How do you “think” about things? Most people actually have pictures in their mind, not words. Try this. See if you can just think of the word “car”. How’d you do? I bet you either saw an image of the word sitting in a dictionary, or more likely you pictured some specific type and color of a car. We are visual people. Seeing the word “car” doesn’t really make you feel one way or another. Perhaps you have bad memories of a boarding school teacher yelling at you or another student for an incorrect spelling. But many people will feel something almost automatically if they see an actual car – perhaps one they want or one they had in the past. These feelings just pop up. Then we normally assign a “good” or “ bad” adjective to those feelings. In many cases next comes some sort of action. That action may simply be telling another about their great desire to have a blue Lamborghini. Sometimes the action is to figure out something they need at the store and to go get it just to be in A car. If it’s something you want, those feelings cause you to take one or more actions. This leads to results. This may sound inconsequential but if you sometimes wonder why you did something, you should be able to trace it backwards. It’s the feelings part that tends to get us in trouble and once we recognize that, and know where the feelings lie in the process, we can do something about it if the results aren’t what we desire. Always go back to the thought and the subsequent feeling.

Daily Gratitude: This is something we all should examine at least once a year, if not more frequently. It’s a very hard question for most of us to answer. In this day and age we’ve been conditioned to strive for this, work for that. Maybe when we were children our parent instilled in us the idea of values and virtues but it didn’t take long for that to be replaced by accolades (or disparagement) when we brought home our report cards. Performance became the key indicator for everything. When I was working I used to argue with all the other leaders and I was definitely an outcast. They could only see someone’s worth and value based on their performance- how many cases they cranked out. They would not look at quality as an indicator of worth. The person who cherry picked 10 easy cases was a “more valued person” than the one who took the challenge of a complicated and complex case that required hours to complete properly. We needed both kinds of people in order to get through the numbers of cases we had but it was only the “productive” ones that got rewarded. What is your worth? How do you measure it? Is it even important to measure it? Was Mother Theresa heralded for the exact amount of people she met and helped or is she remembered for what she is – a caring, courageous and loving person? There are no numbers you can attach to that. Take some time this week to think about what your true worth is. What are you contributing to the world?