Gratitude does not have to be challenging! In this episode we discuss ways to challenge yourself and others to get in the gratitude mindset.
We have been focusing gratitude on our blog and on the Feed Your Soul with Kim Podcast.
Gratitude is not just for Thanksgiving time, and it should be practiced the whole year. In our Feed Your Soul six component system: body, emotions, mental, lifestyle, mindfulness, and self-love- gratitude can bring positive outcomes in all areas.
Join us on this weeks’, Feed Your Soul with Kim Podcast we are looking at creating a gratitude challenge where you challenge yourself to experience more gratitude. In this podcast we will explore:
Three different gratitude challenges.
What is the benefit of bringing in more gratitude?
Step by step plan on how to increase your gratitude- easily!
Kim McLaughlin is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, inspirational coach, speaker, and writer. She helps people who feel frustrated overwhelmed and overloaded, and it shows up in overeating. She has a Master of Arts Degree in Clinical Psychology. Kim is a certified Intuitive Eating Counselor, and she assists people to gain peace with food.
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Kim McLaughlin:
Welcome to the feed your soul with Kim podcast. I am Kim McLaughlin your host I help people have peace with food and to feed their soul. I want to help you put food in its proper places nourishment and increase your satisfaction in life. I am a psychotherapist, a blogger, author, speaker, and I focus this podcast on giving you ways to understand food differently, and help you in your relationship with food, you can find out more at feed your soul unlimited.com. Hey, welcome to the podcast, I am glad you're here we are continuing our discussion that we had in our last podcast about gratitude. It made me think about all the ways we could invite more gratitude into our life. And I wanted to just have a little bit of a deeper conversation about what gratitude might look like. If you look in the shownotes, you'll see that I have offered a free ebook on gratitude, which also has a journal which I kind of like and and today we're going to talk more about gratitude and how to do something that I like to do for myself. And I put it in the book The e book about certain ways to, to engage in more gratitude. And I put it also in the journal because it's really important to me at least to have a place to write down what I'm grateful for. So what we're going to talk about today is is it's called what we're calling design your own gratitude challenge. It's really a challenge either for yourself or you with others. And it's not challenging, right, it's not going to be hard, it's going to be impactful, and it's going to be powerful. So one thing you can do is look on the blog, feed your soul unlimited.com. In the blog section, I have various blogs on, on gratitude and how to create more gratitude. Also, you can go get the gratitude journal and ebook in order to have more gratitude in your life. It's something that I just said was important. And I think adding gratitude into our lives is something that's really critical, I would say that it becomes this idea of focusing on what's good, what are we thankful for? What are we grateful for, and really seen and seen that that there are things that are good going on, because I would challenge you that in the light of any tough situation, there is somebody something to be grateful for. I also want to put kind of the asterisk on it too, that if you're going through a particularly hard time where things are really bad. This isn't that kind of they call it spiritual bypass or emotional bypass to allowing yourself and being okay with being upset, and it's okay to be upset. It's okay to feel the lack of gratitude and like there isn't any right now. And this isn't something to engage in when things to feel really hard. And it doesn't feel like you want to feel grateful for anything. I get it. That's okay, this is something to come back to. And it can be little sparks of kind of this greater idea of what could I be grateful for as things start to feel better, and what I want to encourage you that it actually is a way to help make things better. But when things seem particularly hard, don't emotionally bypass, going through the emotions, it's okay to feel upset and save your gratitude for later. So I just wanted to put that out to you. I wanted to give you three different ideas about how to engage in more gratitude starting now and see what works for you. And these are things you can do or kind of create them in your own way for you to challenge yourself to experience more gratitude. So one of the ways to do it is to take 21 days and and what we're calling this is 21 days of gratitude. And what you could do is invite friends, family members, colleagues to join in with this idea of twit for the next 21 days. We're going to take five minutes each morning, and focus on listing the positive aspects of our lives. So these are things that you feel grateful for that when you look around in your life, this thinking, I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for that. I have been writing my gratitude journal. And I really, it's pretty easy for me. Because if I just look around the room, or if I look at what's going on in my life, I can say I'm grateful for these certain things, or these certain people. And it makes me focus on what I like. And you could do this with a group of people, like I said, friends, family members, colleagues, invite them to join in for 21 days, one of the things I think is fun is to have them on a text list. And every day, everybody writes down, and sends to each other what they're grateful for. And it becomes this long list of, of seeing, or putting out what you're grateful for. But also hearing what other people are grateful for. This creates this group experience of one accountability, that everybody knows that they're going to be expected to send out their gratitude list. And also, you know, you're going to get that list from others. So it can be inspiring about what are other people seen that they're grateful for. And then you can look at your life and and feel inspired possibly to see if you're grateful for those similar things in your life. This challenge makes you have a different perspective, it helps you take a step back. And it it helps you look at your life through a new lens, more of a positivity lens, I like the idea of what we focus on grows. So I think of when I talk to my clients, I'll talk about how there are all these things going on in our lives, some not so good and some good, we can focus on what's not good. And what happens is that when we focus on the things that are not good, that we don't like, that are horrible, we, we see more of that, and we feel pretty down and discouraged. When we focus in a different direction on things that we like things that are good things that we feel grateful for, then that actually increases our idea of, oh, those things feel good. Those things make me feel happy, those things make me feel peaceful or joyful. And then we actually then look for more of those things. And that's what I want for you in this 21 Day gratitude that we're talking about, that you do that for 21 days, I hear often the talk of and you've heard it too about, you know, 21 days to create a new habit. And I haven't whenever I've done a gratitude challenge, I've written down things that I'm grateful for. I haven't kept it on for over the 21 days. But I do notice that I then start looking for more things that I'm grateful for more things that make me happy or joy filled. Because I've started that I've started down that road. So this is one idea. 21 days of gratitude, do it with others invite family, friends, colleagues to join in and text each other about what you find out each week, or I'm sorry, each day that you are grateful for another thing you can do a second idea. And once again, you can mix and match these ideas together. You don't have to follow them exactly as I tell them, but they're their ideas to help spark your imagination of what you can do. Second thing you can do is a 30 days of thankfulness. It's where you start spending time looking at areas in your life that you're thankful for relationships, employment, housing, friends, different things in front of you a car, certain anything that you have, or that you see that are reasons for you to feel thankful and really look deep into what is in your life. People situations that really make you feel thankful. And as you move through these 30 days of thankfulness. Notice if it sparks you to see more things that you're thankful for more things that make you feel good about life. Another thing you can do with this 30 days of thankfulness is You could have it be focused on a person or a situation that you're struggling with what I have found that when I focus on the people or situations that I'm struggling with, and I think about what about those people or situations I'm thankful for, it actually turns it around for me and helps me to start to view the person or the situation differently. I had somebody at a job that I was at who I thought was particularly difficult. And when I started to think about how this person was helpful for me, and had a skill set that I didn't have that really helped in the business helped things move further, I actually ended up feeling more and more thankful for the person. And I really gave them more benefit of the doubt because I saw how much I saw how valuable they were to me, even though sometimes they were a little irritating, I saw their value. And that really helped me have a switch in terms of how I saw this person. Hi, there. This is Kim and I wanted to talk to you about ways that we have to support you. I know when you're listening to this podcast that you are wondering about emotional eating and wondering what you can do differently with food and I want to have you go get the EMI and emotional eater quiz. This quiz is so helpful to help you determine what's going on for you how food is affecting you, and then what you can do about it, go to my website, feed your soul unlimited.com and click on the link for that EMI emotional eater quiz. I know this quiz will help you get on the right track with food. Another way to experience more gratitude is to do a third or not 13, you could do 13 or 14 days of gratitude. This is actually something that I do a lot and I think is super helpful. What I do is I keep a journal for 14 days, and I write down what I'm grateful for. I will do it in a journal. And I'll just write gratitude 12345. And I'll do five things every day that I'm grateful for. What I do is I challenge myself to think every day of five different things that I'm grateful for. So every day I don't say I'm grateful for my husband, or I'm grateful for my car, I say something different every day. So what ends up happening is that I have a long list of things that I'm grateful for. And it challenges me to think out of the box of what I normally find that I'm grateful for. So what happens is I actually my journals right here is I, I will write in the first few days. All right, kind of the general things I always do. I'm grateful for my meditation, I'm grateful for my journal, I'm grateful for my friends, I'm grateful for my family. And I'll do those things in the first couple of days. And then what will happen is, as I get to day 3456, I challenged myself to come up with five different things that I'm grateful for. And it ends up having, or allowing me encouraging me to think outside the box and to think about what am I grateful for what are the things that really are giving me joy, because that's what I want to focus on. For me the idea of, of engaging in more gratitude really, truthfully, is it's very self centered on my part is it helps me feel better, it helps me feel more positive, it helps me think that life is going in a good direction. And that's what I want to have. I want to have a life that feels like it's going in a good direction. And if I'm grateful for things, it means that there are things that I see that are for my benefit and moving me in the right direction. This is why I think you getting that download of the gratitude ebook and journal is going to be super helpful because it will be a way to spark those ideas for you. I personally have found this to be really beneficial. I remember hearing about this years and years ago, I met somebody who he had this huge array of this spiral notebook. You know, those ones that you get, like at CBS that are once a use for school, and every day for years, he would write down every day five things that he was grateful for. And I found that to be so curious, I had never met somebody who was so focused on wanting to see things that are good As I said earlier in the podcast, if life doesn't feel so great, yes, I get it. And that happens. And we don't want to emotionally bypass the feelings of things that don't feel good. But even within that, there might be something that you find joyful and feel grateful for like a flower that's just blooming or, for me, I oft I, I love finding pennies on the ground, I will always pick them up and just say thank you, because I'm grateful that there's plenty of money, and I find it even on the ground. And it might sound silly to you, but that's something that I do. And that brings me a lot of joy. So those are some of the things that I do in order to feel more gratitude. I want to encourage you to get this kind of this gratitude Ness going on for you and see what it does for you. I'd love for you to you can DM me on Instagram at feed your soul unlimited. And let me know what happens for you or write a note in the podcast reviews and let me know what you think and what you're doing. I really would love to hear how this works for you. Because I know for myself that it is one way that I have felt better in my life. And you might wonder how is this related to food? It's it's one of the many tools I find that helps me refocus my mind and my emotions, and my self esteem, self worth and self love. Because it gets me in a direction of seeing what's going on. That's good, because I don't know about you. But I can get caught up in the negative a lot. And the more I can see what is good in my life, because like I said earlier, I can focus on what's bad, or I can focus on what's good. And I found that there are many points in my life where I have that choice. And, and I want to make the choice to do that more. So I'm going to encourage you to do that more. We love to have dual bowls in this podcast, and I think the doable is get that gratitude ebook and journal and download it and work on it. See what you want to do for yourself. Do one of these three challenges that I've talked about and see what works for you. I am really grateful. You've been on the podcast with us today and I look forward to talking with you more about gratitude and other things related to ending emotional eating. Bye everyone.