There’s so much to be grateful for. And expressing that gratitude not only helps you, it helps others. This week, Janine and Shannon talk about the importance of gratitude and ways to express it.
Discussion topics include:
- The gratitude that Shannon and Janine feel for you, our podcast listeners
- The value of keeping (and reviewing) a kudos file
- The impact of expressing gratitude to others
- Shannon’s quick-thanks method that allows her to express gratitude without letting perfectionism get in the way
- The Getting to Good Enough mugs! (You can buy one of your own if you want.)
- Not letting perfectionism extinguish fun impulses to express thanks
- Janine’s method for saving money on greeting cards (she thinks it’s brilliant)
- Organizing thank-you cards to use later
- How Shannon uses the app Postagram to send postcards on the fly to her mother
- Finding things to be grateful for in your life
- Creating a habit of coming up with a gratitude list
- The effect of perfectionism on gratitude
- Being grateful for the “good enough” things in your life
Thank you so much for listening!
Links:
- Janine’s blog post about her kudos file
- Janine’s blog post on how she stores her greeting cards to send later
- Postagram
- The Getting to Good Enough mug
I am very grateful that I have opened myself up to the willingness to declutter a storage unit full of papers and photos. The other day, I was going through a box and came across a couple of letters that I thought were gone forever. I used to teach 8th grade English. About four or five years after I had two students in class, I received letters from them. One was from a boy who always worked hard in my class and had a great attitude; he was so upset when his first grade was a B-minus that it spurred him on to do better and better work. He said that I had been the first person who believed that he could be a writer. The other letter was from a boy who was in a stage of adolescence where he didn’t care about anything or anyone; he hung around with people who were bad influences, but he said that I never gave up on him. I always made sure that whenever I had to chastise any student that I would do so in private. I would call him out to the hallway and chew him up and down. He said that just knowing that I believed in him helped him to grow out of his “bad” period. He was a very smart boy who was also an excellent writer…he just didn’t want anyone to know it. When I read these two letters for the first time in 25 years, I sat down on my sofa and bawled like a baby. These two letters are absolutely precious to me, and I am so grateful that I found them. If anyone ever is thinking about writing a former teacher, do it. You will make their whole year when they hear about how they had an effect on you.