Thankful

Lord, thou who has given so much to us, please grant us one more thing … a grateful heart!

– George Herbert

Happy Turkey Day! As we approach the holiday season, we would like to offer all of our family, friends, and clients our most sincere best wishes for a wonderful Thanksgiving week. May you be blessed with abundant gifts, and most importantly, may you have a grateful heart.

I love Thanksgiving and consider it my very favorite holiday. Of course, I am a huge fan of stuffing myself with turkey, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce and overdosing on football games on TV, and I love the opportunity to spend time with family for a long weekend. But my favorite part of Thanksgiving is that it provides us all with an opportunity to stop and give thanks for the many blessings in our lives. It is a rare chance to practice the skill of gratitude.

Gratitude

We at Concentus believe there is one skill that clearly stands out as critical to achieving a great quality of life and fulfillment. People who are able to master the skill of gratitude tend to be happier and enjoy a better quality of life, and they are also able to extend their success and happiness to the people around them.

Gratitude is an important skill to develop because it is the key to the enjoyment of the wealth and blessings you possess. It is a natural tendency for many people, especially for successful wealth creators, to be highly focused on having more, achieving more, earning more, and accumulating more. We all tend to spend most of our time thinking about our next conquest, that which we want but do not have. While it is helpful and productive to maintain an achievement mentality, we also risk losing sight of the need to enjoy, and be thankful for, all of the blessings we have now. Instead of being thankful for what we have, we fixate on what we want. Instead of thinking about what is working, we focus on what is not working. When we refine our skill of gratitude, we can balance our desire to achieve more and accumulate more, with the enjoyment of the blessings that we already possess.

Gratitude is a skill – it is a mental habit that must be practiced and reinforced to ingrain it into your mindset and the culture of your family. Like any skill, gratitude must be practiced and exercised through active awareness of being thankful.

This is why I love Thanksgiving so much. It provides us all with an opportunity to practice the skill of gratitude – with a great awareness of the things we are thankful for. In fact, Turkey Day may be the only time of the year that we mindfully remind ourselves to be thankful.