4 Ways Gratitude Makes You a Better Manager and Strengthens Your Team

Most people hear the word “gratitude” and think of journaling or writing lists. But for leaders, gratitude is something much deeper, it’s a shift in how you show up at work, how you navigate pressure, and how you lead your team through tough moments.

The truth is, many leaders operate in constant survival mode. You’re reacting, firefighting, carrying the emotional weight of your team, and trying to stay composed even when you’re stretched thin. And when that becomes normal, confidence drops, relationships strain, and work starts feeling heavier than it should.

In this episode, Desiree Petrich breaks down four ways gratitude strengthens your leadership identity, improves team dynamics, and creates a healthier work environment. These perspectives will help you handle difficult employees, build trust faster, reduce conflict, and lead with more steadiness — without needing to pretend everything is fine or write in a gratitude journal every morning.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL LEARN:

• How gratitude shifts you out of survival mode so you stop leading from stress and start leading from clarity
• Why gratitude builds self-awareness and helps you see your patterns, your growth, and the moments you should acknowledge in yourself
• How gratitude strengthens executive presence, helping you show up calmer, more grounded, and more influential in meetings
• Why gratitude protects your leadership energy, giving you more capacity to handle team dynamics, conflict, accountability, and tough conversations

If you want to be a more confident leader, build trust, and strengthen the culture around you — gratitude is one of the simplest, most powerful tools you can practice.

When you finish listening:
Choose one moment today to practice active appreciation. Say out loud something you’re grateful for in yourself, in a teammate, or in the effort it took to get through a hard moment. This is where real leadership transformation begins.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Gratitude stabilizes your leadership state so you’re not leading from urgency or overwhelm.
2. Gratitude sharpens self-awareness, which improves communication, delegation, and accountability.
3. Gratitude strengthens executive presence and helps you show up calmer and more confident.
4. Gratitude protects your leadership energy so you can handle difficult employees, conflict, and pressure without burning out.

Practice one moment o

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Transcript

Desiree (00:03.2)
If you're listening to this on the day that it goes live, it is Thanksgiving here in the States. And if there's one word that we always associate with Thanksgiving, it's gratitude. I think of gratitude a little bit differently than others because I like finding the leadership lessons in different moments and in different concepts. And gratitude is no exception. For me, it's not a journaling practice. It's not a quote on Instagram. Gratitude is the way that we show up for ourselves.

the way that we show up for others and the way that we carry ourselves at home, at work, in our health, in life, in general. Gratitude can actually change your leadership identity. It affects your energy, your presence, the way that you move through tough moments. And so today we're talking about gratitude as a leadership advantage. Why does it matter for you, for your confidence, for your awareness, how you show up for your family and for your team? So welcome back to You're the Boss, Now What?

I'm your host Desiree Petrik and our goal here is to help you lead yourself and your team with confidence. So lean in and let's talk about gratitude.

Desiree (01:16.792)
This is a somewhat unnecessary segue into the topic, but I saw a friend of mine post on LinkedIn about the...

Desiree (01:32.974)
of Thanksgiving, and I think most of our knowledge stops at the fact that the Pilgrims and Indians got along for a day and that was the moment that we all understood to be Thanksgiving. But Thanksgiving actually became a national holiday because one woman refused to give up on the idea. Sarah Josepha Hale, an author and editor of one of the most influential magazines of the 1800s, spent 17 years campaigning for a national day of gratitude. She wrote letters.

published articles and lobbied politicians nonstop because she believed that it could be.

Desiree (02:12.398)
it could bring the country together during a time of deep division. And eventually Abraham Lincoln agreed and in the middle of the Civil War, he issued a proclamation in 1863 declaring that Thanksgiving.

Desiree (02:33.794)
declaring Thanksgiving a nationwide holiday. I immediately loved this story, not because I learned something new, but because it reminds me that the meaningful things that often happen.

Desiree (02:56.386)
I was immediately drawn into this story because it's just a reminder that the meaningful things that happen are often because someone was willing to advocate for unity, consistency and connection long before anyone else sees the value. And that person in this scenario is you because if you heard the topic gratitude and you decided to stick around to see how it could impact you and your family and your team, then you're showing up to learn what it means to lead yourself and your team better. And even if no one else

can currently see the value in that. And for that.

Desiree (03:40.897)
and even else.

Desiree (03:48.758)
And even if no one else can currently see the value in your time and effort being put into something like this, it will come. There will come a day and it will change things for the better. It will change you and your team and your family for the better. And for that reason, I'm grateful for you and proud of you for continuing to show up. So let's talk about gratitude. I have four main ways that gratitude can...

Are you going to get sick of hearing me say that word? I got to come up with a short term for it. But there are four different ways that it shows up and it can change the way that we show up in our presence and our energy and our awareness. But first, I want to talk just a little bit about what most of us understand gratitude to be, because we think about gratitude like a journaling practice. And maybe you don't, but I listen to a lot of personal development. I read a lot of leadership and personal development and gratitude journaling is

always a recommendation that comes up when we need to feel more grounded, when we need to engage in some sort of self-care. And there's so many studies about gratitude journaling. It's a fantastic option to get you started. But when I tried, and I promise you, I tried, kind of like meditating, it just wasn't for me, but I did. I tried to gratitude journal. I tried to write down three things every day that I was grateful for. But where I found myself getting stuck was I kept listing the same things over and over again.

I'm thankful for my husband, for my kids, for our warm house, for all of the different things. And it got really repetitive because that's just what was coming to my head when I was.

Desiree (05:32.13)
when I was trying to determine what I was grateful for. Then I read about someone who goes deeper into the practice and they say, you're not allowed to list the same things. You're not allowed to list a generic answer. You have to be extremely specific. So I would say things like, I am grateful that my family of four sat down and played a game of hand of cards and no one fought.

I'm thankful that on my walk today, a really pretty tree made me smile. I am thankful for the fact that every sunset reminds me of my mom. It was very granular in its approach to what you're thankful for. And that's great. And again, gratitude journaling is such a great practice. But then I read about an individual who does something even deeper than that.

They use a form of active appreciation. So now, and you can ask anyone about this, I wrote about it in my book three years ago. So I've been doing it. I just didn't have a name for it. But when you think of someone on a random Tuesday and you just, they make you smile or you think to yourself, I haven't heard from them in a while. I should probably reach out to them, but you know, you're busy and you don't know what rabbit hole you're going to get down if you text them and they text you back, et cetera.

Just text them anyway. Say, hey, I was thinking about you today. I'm so grateful for you. Give them a reason why and then say, happy Tuesday. And that's all it needs to be. And they are going to text you back, I can almost guarantee it, and say, you have no idea how badly I needed to hear that today, almost every time. Because we do not get to hear from people how grateful they are for us and how much they appreciate us. We don't say it and we often don't get to hear it.

and being able to be that person for someone just because you thought about them and they made you smile is such a unique and honestly the most impactful way to give appreciation as a practice. Again, somewhat irrelevant to the topic that we are going into, which is how can we use gratitude in our leadership and our work. But I want you to understand the difference between a very...

Desiree (07:49.248)
entry level way of gratitude journaling and how you can continue to layer onto that when you feel ready to really use gratitude as a practice in your life to love on people and allow them to love on you. With that being said, the four big points, the main points that I want to talk to you about today.

Desiree (08:23.81)
With that being said, there's a reason we're here today. It's because I want to tell you about the four main points of gratitude in the natural progression of a leader's world. There is the state of our world, our survival mode versus our calm, cool, and collected, and on the spectrum of where we are any given moment. There's the awareness. Who do you believe you are as a leader and why? There's your presence. How do you show up externally as a leader?

And then there's your energy or your output. It's what can you sustain? Where is your capacity? Where is your ability to show up day after day? And gratitude plays a huge role in each of these four main pieces of the progression of a leader's inner world. That's what we're going to talk about. That's where we're going to spend the majority of today talking about. So number one, let's jump right in. Your state, your survival mode all the way up into calm, cool, collected and serene.

Gratitude is gonna get you out of survival mode. Most leaders are operating in this survival mode most of the time. Some realize it, that's what burnout is, is when you start to realize you've been living in survival mode too long. But a lot of people don't. They don't realize it while they're in it until it gets to the point where it's gonna break them. So if you've ever walked into work and looked at your inbox and instantly felt your shoulders tense, that's survival mode.

If you've ever reached...

Desiree (10:00.054)
If you've ever reacted too quickly, spoken too sharply, or felt like, I'm just trying to make it through the day, that's survival mode. But gratitude is going to interrupt that cycle. Not in a cheesy way. Again, if I am feeling on the brink of exhaustion and I open up a journal and write three things I'm grateful for, it might help for a minute, but it's not going to make the impact that we need it to.

Gratitude is going to pull you out of this everything is urgent mindset. It'll give you a second to breathe and reset and lead from a calmer place. So yes, there is an action that you can take in that moment. But what I really want is for it to not be a one time fix. I don't want you to use it when you're like you have no other options. If we can use this gratitude practice specifically that actively appreciating people, it's going to compound.

Your life is going to change day by day as you can start to actively appreciate your team, specifically for what it is that they're doing. You are going to be able to appreciate your children for the fact that they are there and they are healthy and they have the ability to be smart enough to fight. I have to remind myself all the time, I have smart, healthy kids and the fact that they're arguing is just helping them to engage in conflict, healthy or not.

You're going to be able to appreciate your husband or your wife for what it is that they spend time doing for you, even if their love language doesn't match yours. That consistency of doing that on a daily basis and telling people about that is what's going to compound into you not needing to take every little thing that happens in your life personally. It's going to give you space to think instead of react. And a couple of episodes we talked to a couple of episodes ago, we talked about assuming positive intent.

That's just showing up in a grateful way of, I am grateful for this moment and recognizing, like being smart enough, being emotionally intelligent enough to stop and to think about how could this play out differently? That is how you're going to be able to think instead of react. It's going to remind your brain, hey, not everything is falling apart today. I have things to be thankful for. And even though right now in this very moment feels very stressful.

Desiree (12:20.694)
I have been reminded day after day how amazing my life is. And that is how gratitude is going to make that.

Desiree (12:37.506)
And that is how gratitude can start to shift your state of being, your nervous system from a constant and perpetual state of survival mode. Maybe not all the way to calm, cool and collected because life happens and adulting is hard sometimes, but it will start to move you out of that state of survival mode so that you're not going to break under the pressure of all of the things that are happening around you. You're going to be able to remember and to recall that gratitude on a day-to-day basis. But it does take you consistently

engaging in the practice and not internally but externally sharing it with other people. So that's number one. It will change your state of being if you can be consistent with it. Number two, your awareness, your self-awareness, being able to see your patterns. It's going to

Desiree (13:31.586)
The reason this one made the list is because I have been hearing over and over again people saying, it's really hard to say out loud that I'm proud of myself. I don't know about you, but I'm a huge Dancing with the Stars fan and they just had the finale last night, which is why I stayed up till 1130 and am exhausted today. But one of the contestants said the first few dances, I was not proud of myself. I got done dancing and I couldn't say it because I wasn't. But by the time...

I continued to push myself and to be thankful for the fact that I'm here in the room with amazing people, I can now truly say that I'm proud of myself and I became more vulnerable to share more parts of myself with the people around me. That is what gratitude can do for your awareness. You're gonna be able to see and understand why you think and say the things that you do. Because one of the...

The things I think we don't think about within leadership is how fast we are needing to move. We're reacting, we're answering questions, we're trying to keep things on track for our families and for our health and for our team. And in the process, we stop noticing ourselves. We stop noticing where our fuel and our energy is. We stop caring that we are about to break, but as long as our team doesn't break, as long as no one can see that we're struggling, it's gonna be okay.

And we assume that's what leadership is. But gratitude, that practice, it helps you slow down just enough to see what's actually happening within your own head, within your own leadership. It allows you to reflect on that current state that we just talked about, being able to say, am I in a state of survival mode? Not in a judgmental way, not getting down on yourself, not I should be better or I should be able to handle this better, but in an honest and grounded and human way.

Being able to say, I'm really struggling and go and ask for help, or I'm really proud of myself and saying that without needing to say, you know, to feel bad for being unhumble or overly arrogant. That is what gratitude can do for your self-awareness. Being able to say both things, I need help and I'm proud of myself and feeling no certain way about it.

Desiree (16:04.556)
One of my favorite things about self-awareness is that it will never fully be realized. You will never become fully self-aware because you are constantly growing. Your outside circumstances are constantly changing. The people that make up your team are always gonna be.

Desiree (16:26.806)
There is always going to be turnover within your team that's going to require you to become more self-aware with different types of individuals. Self-awareness will never fully end. But I want you to recognize the past versus the present. I know we're supposed to look towards the future and constantly be pushing ourselves, but I read about this concept called appreciative inquiry. You might look back on your life and say things were easier when or

It was so much easier to keep weight off when or this job was so much better in these aspects because and we look back on the past and think to ourselves it was better then. But I don't I can't put my finger on why or I don't know how to use that information to make things better now. And when I read about appreciative inquiry it was saying along the lines of your circumstances in the past whatever moment you currently are looking at are so different.

from the circumstances that you are under right now. There is no way that you could identically.

Desiree (17:40.92)
there is no way that you could reinvent that exact same set of circumstances. There really isn't. So appreciative inquiry is just what made those moments good? What made it feel easier? How can I take little pieces of information as opposed to the whole story that I'm essentially competing with my own self against? How can I take little pieces of that information and bring it into now?

One of the things for me was it was so much easier to keep weight off after I had my first child as opposed to my second. And when I took time to think back to what were the circumstances within my life at that time, I said I was teaching group fitness. Can I do that now? Just because I might not have the exact same set of circumstances. I have a different job, different responsibilities, et cetera. But can I teach group fitness now? Could that potentially help me in this moment? Yes, it could.

Appreciative inquiry is just picking and pulling at little pieces of the maybe the habits that you were engaged in or the type of people that you spent the time with or the type of job or the type of tasks within that job that you were doing that you can pull into the now. That's going to help you to feel grateful for the past and use that gratefulness that appreciation for who you were and how you felt back then into your present day. That is going to change your self-awareness because you're not competing with your past self.

you are saying, how can I utilize that information to make my present self better? Speaking of presence, number three is your presence. Number three, how can we use gratitude to show up externally even more confident and engaged and self-aware than I am right now? Because gratitude will strengthen that executive presence. A lot of people don't actually know what executive presence is, because we talk about it a lot, but it's not

always explained and at its core, executive presence is how you make people feel when you walk in a room. Gratitude plays a lot bigger role in that than most people realize because if you're not practicing gratitude, you might feel resentful of having to go to yet another meeting. You may be frustrated that a decision has to be made or maybe you were frustrated that a decision was made too hastily.

Desiree (20:05.728)
You might blow off networking events or lunches with a mentor or mentee because you just don't have the time and you feel overwhelmed. When you are stressed, when you're overwhelmed, when you're doubting yourself, people can feel that. They hear it in your tone. They can see it in your body language. They pick it up in the way that you talk through decisions and the way that you talk to people in general. And that's all assuming, like I said, that you show up at all and that you're not so overwhelmed that you start

turning away invitations to connect because you just can't handle what it would take.

Desiree (20:49.282)
the toll that it would take on your schedule. But when you can lead with gratitude, not a performative kind, not the, I'm gonna pretend that I'm thankful for this and show up that way, but a genuine appreciation with all of the things that we've already talked about, with the people around you, your presence is gonna shift. You get to remind yourself that you're thankful for the opportunity to be in the room, to have a seat at the table, to have an influence on...

on others by mentoring them or to be worthy of your mentors time and energy. When you can remind yourself on a daily basis how grateful you are for those things, that's gonna change the way that you show up. I am constantly trying to remind myself that despite the fact that I make somewhat hasty decisions because of my disc style or my working genius, I tend to make decisions really quickly and don't always think things through.

I have to remind myself how grateful I am for people that are different than me, that are gonna make sure that all the boxes are checked and that I'm not gonna regret making a hasty decision. When we can share that with act of gratitude and tell people that are different from us or to thank the things that might feel really cumbersome in the moment, like having to go to a dentist appointment and thank those things, not even necessarily people, but those things for the life that we're living and the...

Desiree (22:21.314)
the privilege of even being able to do those things or afford those things. That's when you're gonna start to show up as more self-aware, which will in turn change the way that you show up for other people. Your presence will be calmer, but your energy will also stabilize. You will feel differently about showing up and the impact that it has on yourself and others, which then ties us perfectly into number four, your energy, your output, what you can sustain.

is a direct pull from all of the pieces that we've already talked about into what does your leadership energy look like? Because leadership requires a level of energy that most people don't see. This is why every time I sign off of an episode, I say leadership is a privilege, but it's also a big responsibility. Because a lot of times we don't have people to talk to or vent to. We don't have the ability to just take a day off on one of the most important days of

the week. know, leadership requires an energy that most people don't see. And a lot of leaders don't even realize how much of themselves and their energy they're giving away until they're running on fumes. And all of a sudden we recognize the signs of burnout and it feels like we're too far gone. Your attention, your emotional bandwidth, your ability to stay patient, your capacity to make decisions, it all adds up. And when you're drained,

not just because you're tired.

Desiree (24:01.676)
And when you're drained, not just because you're tired, but because you are physically drained of the energy that it takes for you to be constantly giving, your leadership changes. You become shorter with people. You rush through conversations to get to the next thing. You avoid decisions that need to be made because it just feels too hard. You react to things that you would normally handle calmer. Delegating.

This one is a big one for me. Delegating feels hard because when your energy is drained, your trust in others starts to feel less stable and it just feels easier to do it yourself. And the worst part about that, the most frustrating part about that is that nothing significant has to happen for all of these things to be true, for us to feel this way. Nothing big or tragic has had to happen for you to feel.

like you become shorter with people or rush through conversations. It's just leadership. We start to get drained if we're not utilizing the rest and the tools that we need. And this is where gratitude can become a really powerful tool because it's the combination of what we've already talked about. But it has a much larger impact than what we would typically expect from something seemingly so simple like gratitude. It will shift you out of bracing for impact.

and feeling like you're constantly needing to put out that fire. And that's where most of our nervous system is.

Desiree (25:37.4)
bringing together all the pieces we already talked about, gratitude stabilizes your nervous system. It will bring your stress levels down to a tolerable level. It will remind you that you're not behind, you're not failing, you're not alone, you are showing up, you're trying and you're leading. And sometimes that's all that we can ask of ourselves. So when your energy is grounded, this is the goal, we can get our energy grounded instead of constantly feeling frantic. Everything gets easier.

Hard conversations will stop being terrifying. They will stop draining you when you actually get up the courage to have them. You're gonna have more capacity for strategy instead of just putting out those fires that pop up. Your patience is gonna last longer. My husband always says, God doesn't give you patience. He gives you opportunities to practice patience. I think that was from a movie like Evan Almighty or something like that. But every time that my patience starts to wane, he'll say that to me.

When I have been practicing gratitude though and really starting to focus on how I can feel in a constant state of gratitude, my patience just lasts longer. Your team will also get a steadier version of you, as will your family. You're not going to come in at 8 a.m. already exhausted from the moment.

Desiree (27:02.872)
from the morning. Gratitude will not give you more hours in the day. I wish that it would, nothing will. But what it will give you is more capacity as a leader to think, to lead better and to stay more grounded, to stay more consistent and more stable. That's what will make you a better manager.

Desiree (27:26.154)
That's what will help conflict on the team. That's what will help the team dynamics on a day-to-day basis. Again, not as a quick fix, not as a one-time deal, but as a consistent and compounded practice over time. So you might be thinking, okay, that's all great. It's interesting. What do I actually do with this information? I'm not asking you to journal. I'm not asking you to write out a list. I don't want you to pretend everything is fine.

I never want gratitude to be a way to cover up hard things. I want you to feel those hard things and express those hard things. But I do want you to practice one moment of gratitude a day, not shared.

Desiree (28:21.76)
If all you can do at first is notice the things that you're grateful for, you don't even have to write them down. Just say, wow, I am so grateful to have experienced that sunset, to have gotten off the couch, put on my shoes, went on a walk, and to have experienced that sunset. Noticing it is just fine, but saying it out loud, that's where the shift is gonna happen, sharing those moments with people.

not only the moments that make you smile internally, but also the moments that make you really thankful for the people that are in your life on a daily basis. And it can be as simple as saying, appreciated how calm you stayed in that conversation. It wasn't easy and it could have gone a different way. Thank you for that. You could say internally, I'm grateful that I handled that better than I would have six months ago. Acknowledge the effort that you put in and the progress that you've made. You could say to someone, thank you for asking that question.

It made the meeting more interesting. It made the decision easier to make. The number one thing I want you to be able to say though is I'm proud of myself for how I showed up today and every day going forward. Doesn't have to be big. These moments of gratitude just have to happen and it has to be real and genuine because you can practice.

Desiree (29:36.834)
the more that you practice, the easier it's gonna get and the more impact it's gonna have because it compounds on itself. So this week, pick a moment, a day, say things out loud, send me a message if you want to share and have someone hold you accountable. One moment where you acknowledge something really good in you, in someone else or in the effort that it takes to get through a really hard moment. That's where you will find the most impactful moments of gratitude.

And you're going to be surprised how quickly it shifts the way that you lead. And that tiny moment of intentional gratitude might be just the most impactful part of your day. So I want to take one moment to say how grateful I am for you as the listeners. Being able to share these episodes with you is not only impactful for me and my business and being able to create relationships, but it's also impactful for me because I get to think through things. I get to

determine how it is that I feel about things and share stories of the impact that I've been able to make in my own life. And that in and of itself is appreciative inquiry. And I'm grateful for you for being here to listen. I honestly can't tell you how much it means in the next three episodes. My friend Tessa and I, she's been on the podcast many times. You might recognize her. We read the 15 commitments of conscious leadership. It's an amazing book, fantastic book.

and it is going to be broken down into three separate episodes because there was no way we could fit it into one. So make sure you hit subscribe. Make sure you're following along for that next three-part series on We Read the 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership so you don't have to. And if you're listening to this in the week that it releases or in December of 2025, happy holidays. And just remember that leadership is a privilege, but it's also a really big responsibility. And you're the boss now. So what are you going to do with it?