Gratitude in Any Circumstance: How to Invite Positivity Into Your Life with Georgian Benta | BlissTalk Podcast

Is it really possible to stay positive when life feels overwhelming? Can gratitude truly shift your mindset — even during tough times?

In this uplifting episode of BlissTalk, we welcome Georgian Benta, gratitude expert and host of The Gratitude Podcast, to explore the transformative power of appreciation, even in adversity. Georgian shares real-life stories and practical strategies that demonstrate how gratitude isn’t just a feel-good habit — it’s a powerful tool for resilience, emotional wellbeing, and lasting joy.

Through years of dedicated practice and interviews with global thought leaders, Georgian has uncovered what it takes to live from a place of consistent gratitude, no matter your circumstances. His message is simple yet profound: by appreciating life as it is, you can unlock a deeper sense of peace, purpose, and positivity.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• The science behind why gratitude rewires the brain for happiness
• How to find beauty and strength in everyday moments — even the hard ones
• “Advanced gratitude” techniques to tap into awe, wonder, and joy
• How to transform challenges into growth opportunities through perspective
• The subtle mindset shifts that help you move from frustration to flow
• Why gratitude is essential for emotional resilience and healing
• Simple daily practices to create a more positive, grounded life

Whether you're dealing with stress, burnout, or simply seeking more light in your day, Georgian’s heartfelt insights offer a roadmap back to yourself — and to a life filled with peace, possibility, and presence.

Gratitude doesn’t mean everything is perfect. It means you choose to focus on what is meaningful — even when it’s messy. ~ Georgian Benta

✅ Links & Resources:

Ready to Feel More Abundance, No Matter What?

 Take the next step on your gratitude journey with Georgian Benta’s powerful course:
 How to Experience Abundance Through Gratitude

In this transformative, self-paced course, you’ll learn how to shift your mindset, rewire your brain for joy, and tap into a lasting sense of peace and prosperity — from the inside out. Whether you’re seeking more happiness, resilience, or clarity, this course offers the tools to help you experience life with a grateful heart and abundant spirit.

Don’t just listen — live it.

 👉 Start your journey now and unlock the power of gratitude today.

Website: https://blisspot.com

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 0:00
 Welcome to the Bliss Spot podcast series where we interview global well-being leaders to share ideas to invite more joy and happiness into your life.

Unknown Speaker 0:13
 Hello, and I'd like to welcome you all here today to join us for the 2022

Unknown Speaker 0:21
 World Gratitude Day. I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by Georgian Benta from Romania, who is a world leader in gratitude. He lives, sleeps, and breathes gratitude, which is incredibly inspirational, and it's brought so many benefits into his own life, and now he teaches people all over the world how to do the same in their own lives. So I'm very excited to hear what Georgian has to say today. Also,

Unknown Speaker 0:55
 Georgian will teach us how to use gratitude to invite more peace, joy, and success into our daily life. And really, that's what it's all about. Like, it's so easy to have a good time when you're on a beautiful holiday or watching a gorgeous sunset, but at the end of the day,

Unknown Speaker 1:13
 it's about enjoying our life every day, just finding the joy in the everyday. And that's what I really, really love about this work. So Georgian, through storytelling and sharing, practical strategies can help us to find more moments of gratefulness in our day-to-day life, or even better, choose to live our life in gratitude. I think, as we're going to find out more about it, it is really more about a way of being. It's like an energetic change to your state that then can flow out into all other areas of your life, to create more positivity. So Georgian's vision is to inspire 100,000

Unknown Speaker 1:52
 people to focus on gratitude and what makes them grateful. And I think he's a long way towards that goal already with the work that he's doing. Georgian's Gratitude Podcast has been featured as one of the top 10 positive thinking podcasts to fuel your forward motion by Rick Huggins on Epic Life Vibes, and Georgian is here today, as I've mentioned, to share with us how to invite more gratitude into our hearts and joy into our soul. I just love that; this is one of my most favorite topics in the whole world. So Georgian, I'd love you to share with us a little bit about your story, how you got into the work, and yeah, where you are today with it.

Unknown Speaker 2:40
 Hello. Hello, everyone. I'm really happy to be here with you, and I'm really grateful that I have this opportunity to speak about gratitude and to reach you, the one looking right now, and I want to thank you personally for choosing to tune in and be a part of it, and that you are choosing gratitude because,

Unknown Speaker 3:06
 as Deborah just shared, it's a wonderful feeling. It's something that's so important for all of us, especially nowadays, with all of the things that are happening in the world,

Unknown Speaker 3:18
 just being able to choose to look at something like this is something amazing that you're doing for yourself and for the people around you. So I'm really grateful that you're here, and I'm grateful that I am here as well with Deborah, and that we are able to speak about this wonderful topic.

Unknown Speaker 3:38
 I started quite a few years ago,

Unknown Speaker 3:44
 it was when I felt that I hit rock bottom and nothing made sense, and I was praying for a way out, for an answer, for something that could help me,

Unknown Speaker 3:57
 and for me, the answer was gratitude. It's a longer story. Maybe we'll get into it more in depth.

Unknown Speaker 4:07
 But for me, that was the answer, and I've uncovered throughout the years, speaking with many other people that they had similar experiences, and they found gratitude in situations in which they felt like there was no way out and nothing that they could do. And this is one of the wonderful things about gratitude, is that it empowers us. It empowers us to find our resources, to see our resources, and

Unknown Speaker 4:40
 it helps us deal with the challenges that we have much better and much easier.

Unknown Speaker 4:47
 Amazing. Well, now you said that you hit rock bottom, and that's what, and you asked for an answer, which I think is really good, like, because it's like asking, you shall receive, and gratitude was your answer.

Unknown Speaker 5:00
 Answer, or that was your way out of the way that you were feeling. So I know that a lot of people in the current

Unknown Speaker 5:08
 climate and with all the challenges that we're facing, whether it be financial,

Unknown Speaker 5:14
 environmental, in Australia, we've had a lot of floods, you know, this year, which has been quite devastating to many. I know in the UK, there was the massive heat wave that really severely impacted many people. So there's a lot of instability and shifts happening in the world. So a lot of people probably are hitting rock bottom at this moment. So can you just explain a little bit more about your journey? And you said, you know,

Unknown Speaker 5:43
 what was it that made you feel at that rock bottom stage? Because I think it could be really inspiring to others to share your journey, tell us a little bit more about that, and then how maybe the feelings of hitting rock bottom. And I know it was gratitude, but I know too when you've hit rock bottom in your life, because I felt that way myself at various stages. You know, there are things that can really help you, like just taking one step, one day at a time. You know, when things seem overwhelming, and gratitude is a part of that. And I think you can always be grateful for something, because a lot of people say, Well, you know, well, it's easy for you to be grateful because you live,

Unknown Speaker 6:26
 you know, in a developed country, and you've got a house and but I don't have that or, you know, I don't know, there's lots of situations where people really feel they there's nothing to be grateful for. And I know Eckhart Tolle said in a podcast that I listened to of his years ago that he works with prisoners, and he taught them to be grateful for the beauty of a little plant that might be growing on a wall in a prison cell, something like that. So anyway, I'll just get you to elaborate on those things a little more.

Unknown Speaker 6:56
 Yeah. So the first thing that I want to address is this idea of it's easy for you to be grateful, or you should be grateful.

Unknown Speaker 7:06
 There's this thing called hedonic adaptation that

Unknown Speaker 7:12
 prevents us

Unknown Speaker 7:14
 from being grateful in many situations, like, for instance, we get a raise

Unknown Speaker 7:21
 at first we are excited. We have more money to spend each month, but after a while, the thing is that we get used to that level. It's just the baseline for our life. It's just the level at which we are,

Unknown Speaker 7:39
 and we as humans tend to focus a lot on ourselves. To

Unknown Speaker 7:46
 look at our life, firstly, of course, and

Unknown Speaker 7:51
 since we're focused on that, we don't always realize. We don't always compare our life to the lives of people that are that have it worse than we do. And it's not easy, from my point of view, to feel grateful, even if we have many things, even if we have a house, even if we have so many other things that other people could just dream about, because this hedonic adaptation helps our brain not focus on these things, and use the resources to focus on other things that help with our survival. But the thing is that it makes us forget about the fact that we have a house and that it is beautiful, and

Unknown Speaker 8:45
 many of the things that we have in our life as blessings are just in the background for a lot of people. And this is why the practice of gratitude is important, because it helps us see those things, and it was similar for me as well, like when I felt like I hit rock bottom,

Unknown Speaker 9:09
 the feeling that I was given after my asking

Unknown Speaker 9:15
 was a feeling of new appreciation for the things that I had in my life, I felt the same kind of exhilaration, the same kind of appreciation that I had for the city where I live.

Unknown Speaker 9:32
 I moved in the city when I went to college, and I felt the same way, even though I

Unknown Speaker 9:43
 finished college at that moment, and it was so amazing that I was so happy that I was living in that city. Aside from that, when I got home, because when I had that experience, I was outside, I went for

Unknown Speaker 10:00
 a walk,

Unknown Speaker 10:01
 and when I got home, I was so happy that I had a place to live. And it was so it was perfect from many, many points of view, and I just appreciated everything like I did the first time that I moved in there.

Unknown Speaker 10:17
 I had a pet that I was it was in the background before that I was appreciating so much when I got back, and just all of those little things made me so happy. And for me, that was so interesting. Like nothing changed on the outside, everything was the same. At that moment, I

Unknown Speaker 10:45
 got out of a business that I worked a lot for, and I made many sacrifices for, and

Unknown Speaker 10:55
 that didn't change like

Unknown Speaker 11:00
 that part of my life was the same, but was it was interesting to see for me that even though nothing changed,

Unknown Speaker 11:10
 I was happy, I was appreciating those simple things much more, and that made me more curious about gratitude and about its power, and

Unknown Speaker 11:24
 that's how I actually started to research more on gratitude. And I wanted to speak with other people that had experiences related to gratitude, and I was curious whether or not they had similar experiences, and how was their gratitude journey? And that's how I started the podcast. And I spoke with many people from all walks of life, from all over the world, about gratitude and their own experiences. And yeah, that's, that's the thing about gratitude. It's, for me, it's, it's a life skill. It's so important, because in life, we have ups and downs. We have many challenges. And if we're not able to see the good things, if we're not able to see the resources that we have at hand, it can get pretty rough. And that's, in my opinion, one of the most important things that gratitude can do for us is help us get perspective, get that inspiration, that empowerment, to know that we can do something about the situation in which we are at the moment.

Unknown Speaker 12:41
 So what I hear you saying, if I've got this right, you were having a difficult time, and you went on a walk, and you kind of had, you were asking for help. So you're setting your intent, using your free will for what you wanted. But then it was almost like an awakening, almost that you had this experience where all you could see was the good in the world, and then when you went back into your apartment, you could appreciate your pet, your home, and the things that you so nicely put it that were in the background before came to the foreground. And that was a life-changing experience. Because,

Unknown Speaker 13:19
 yes, I totally relate to that. I've had that type of experience as well myself, where and what from what you're saying, nothing's changed, but you've changed. You've had an internal energy shift, and those filters, the way you were seeing the world, probably through patterns of behavior or conditioning, were gone, and you were just seeing the world as it is for the beautiful place, that it was not through fear or not through lack or thinking that things needed to be different or better. And I was going to ask too, because I'd never heard you. I'd never heard it explained about the was it? I should have written it down the hedonic, was it experience the way hedonic adaptation, hedonic adaptation, I thought that was really super interesting, because

Unknown Speaker 14:09
 for survival, it's like we look for the things we don't have. We're focusing on what we need and what we want rather than what we have. Would you liken that to and this is just me making it up, not based on any scientific research. It's like the ego that sort of keeps us in that feeling of lack, rather than a true self. I call it a true self as spiritual. It's like a spiritual self, or our real self that feels wise and contented and happy and joyful and peaceful and calm, and we all go in and out of that.

Unknown Speaker 14:44
 You know, through stages of our life, depending on what our pressures are and what our challenges are and situation is. But I guess ideally, on a personal journey, you're working more towards that wise, kind, true, authentic.

Unknown Speaker 15:00
 Self the way I see it expanding and then the ego, I guess, becoming more quieter. I see it as like making friends with your ego, or that voice that's always focusing on lack or not enough or what's wrong rather than the good in our life. You know, the beautiful things in our life,

Unknown Speaker 15:18
 exactly, definitely. And it's the same with gratitude.

Unknown Speaker 15:23
 When we are focusing and we're stacking the negatives,

Unknown Speaker 15:29
 we

Unknown Speaker 15:31
 conclude that things are bad, and we

Unknown Speaker 15:35
 we say, okay, life is hard. Life is tough. Life is I don't know many

Unknown Speaker 15:40
 negative words that we can say about it,

Unknown Speaker 15:44
 but it's because we are focusing on those things. And if we just continue to stack the negatives and put one negative on top of the other, and we just see those things that are bad, of course, our perspective will become that, and we will, we will think that the world, the people are bad, the world is a hostile place. It's a tough place to be in, and so on and so forth. But if we stack the positives, and we create a different kind of percentage, because I don't remember exactly I've created an episode about this, but

Unknown Speaker 16:30
 I think we have, we think about

Unknown Speaker 16:35
 60 or 70,000 words every day, and I think about 80% of them are negative, something like this,

Unknown Speaker 16:46
 and the power that we have is to change that, and this is where gratitude can help us. We can change this percentage, and we can think more positive thoughts, and we can focus more on the things that are working and that are great in our life, because there always are some things that's that's the interesting thing, even if you don't feel right now that you have things that you can focus on, that you can be grateful for, just the simple fact that you're breathing right now, just being aware of air coming in,

Unknown Speaker 17:29
 going out, just realizing becoming aware of this simple thing, can

Unknown Speaker 17:38
 get you into a state of gratitude, and you can go on with just looking around you and seeing things that you appreciate, that once were

Unknown Speaker 17:52
 just a dream, that once were just something that you wished you would get to experience or to do or to have. And, yeah, that's that's what I think it's important to start wherever you are, and you'll for sure, find some things that you can be grateful for. And from then on, you can start looking for that constantly. It's similar to the

Unknown Speaker 18:22
 moment when you when you want to buy a car, or you buy a car, you see it everywhere.

Unknown Speaker 18:29
 When you're in the process, you have the sensation that there are so many cars that are similar to what you want or what you bought,

Unknown Speaker 18:39
 when we are looking for these things that we can be grateful for, we will start seeing them everywhere we are, everywhere we look. And that's why I love to

Unknown Speaker 18:56
 talk with my listeners and to call them gratitude seekers, because if we seek the gratitude, we will find it.

Unknown Speaker 19:05
 I love that, because it's where our focus goes, energy flows. That's one of my favorite sayings. So we're focusing on exactly that's all going to see, and we're going to dwell on, dwell on, but if we're focusing on the good, and there's beauty all around us all the time in life, like the world is a very beautiful place, not minimizing people's challenging times or experiences. I think we're going through a massive shift, and we're looking for tools that can help to support our energy and support a shift, or move through that shift in the best way possible. And I really believe in my heart and from personal experience that gratitude is one of those tools. It's free. Everybody who's alive is breathing. It's available to everybody. Our breath is, I think, often taken for granted, because it's actually our life force that it connects us to the beautiful.

Unknown Speaker 20:00
Universe that's all around us. And, you know, we have that exchange with trees in terms of energy and breath, like it's the breath is amazing. So that's something that anybody and everybody can appreciate on the planet. If there's absolutely, you know, nothing

Unknown Speaker 20:18
else that they can focus on, that certainly very good starting point and just moving on a little bit like when I was researching for World Gratitude Day. This is the first World Gratitude Day event that Bliss Spot has ever done, and so we're really excited and grateful to be doing it. But when I was researching and I was absolutely flabbergasted that it started in 1965, which is over 50, over 50 years ago, because gratitude is seen to be fairly new agey and a little bit out there. I think more and more people are adopting it, because when they try it and it just makes common sense. It's like, it's not even rocket science. It just makes sense to focus on the things that make you feel good and invite more of that energy into your life. And like attracts like. And you know, it just makes total common sense. But you know, there is a lot of scientific research behind gratitude and how it impacts your hormones, how it has a positive impact on depression, obviously, if you're releasing more serotonin into your body because you're focusing on things that make you feel good. So there's a lot of science behind gratitude, and that's Bliss Spot loves things to be scientifically backed. And,

Unknown Speaker 21:45
you know, I think that we are educating people that it's not just some airy-fairy thing that works for some people or not for others. So maybe if you could explain a little bit more about that, Georgian, like, the scientific benefits to gratitude.

Unknown Speaker 22:05
Well, the beautiful part is that in the last years, there has been so much research on gratitude, and it's continually growing. I've actually been looking at some stats from

Unknown Speaker 22:21
scientific papers on gratitude, and

Unknown Speaker 22:26
the chart is something like this, you know, like a lot of growth in there in the last few years. And,

Unknown Speaker 22:36
yeah, there are many benefits to gratitude from many points of view,

Unknown Speaker 22:42
especially when it comes to mental health in general.

Unknown Speaker 22:49
I don't remember right now something specific that I could share, but I'm sure that in the interview I'll I'll remember some of the things that I that I read about gratitude

Unknown Speaker 23:05
in terms of the research that has been done, but in general, it helps us sleep better. It helps, of course, our mood in general. These are some of the conclusions of research, and it's helpful in so many situations, like I've seen

Unknown Speaker 23:27
research that's very, very specific, even I think it was post-COVID.

Unknown Speaker 23:35
There has been some research on the impact of gratitude post-COVID.

Unknown Speaker 23:42
So many, so many interesting things that are

Unknown Speaker 23:47
being found related to gratitude. But

Unknown Speaker 23:51
the most important part, from my point of view,

Unknown Speaker 23:55
as something that's very practical that you can use is that it has been found that gratitude is most powerful when you go in depth, when

Unknown Speaker 24:08
you're not just saying,

Unknown Speaker 24:10
Okay,

Unknown Speaker 24:12
I'm grateful for my house, my dog, and my partner.

Unknown Speaker 24:18
That doesn't elicit much feeling that doesn't make you really get into that feeling of gratitude, really experience it. And instead of that, for instance, you can, you can say, I'm grateful for my dog, for the fact that he's always happy to see me. He's always happy to see me that

Unknown Speaker 24:45
whenever I'm feeling lonely, he's always there, and I love the feeling of

Unknown Speaker 24:51
his fur when I when I pet him,

Unknown Speaker 24:56
and all of the details and you.

Unknown Speaker 25:00
It's so powerful when we can use as much

Unknown Speaker 25:04
visual and audio and

Unknown Speaker 25:10
all kinds of senses, when we, when we think about gratitude, when we when we think about the things that we are grateful for. For instance, when we when we think about this summer,

Unknown Speaker 25:24
we might be thinking about the summer evening, the smell that's specific, that the freshness of the air, the breeze that we feel on our on our skin,

Unknown Speaker 25:40
maybe the sun is still up a bit and we feel the warmth of the sun on our skin. And if we're talking about

Unknown Speaker 25:50
something that we're grateful for when we were at the seaside, for instance,

Unknown Speaker 25:56
the sand beneath our feet,

Unknown Speaker 26:01
the sound of the waves

Unknown Speaker 26:05
and the person that we that was next to us. You know, when we

Unknown Speaker 26:11
build a picture like this, without all of our senses,

Unknown Speaker 26:16
the gratitude is much fuller. It's much more complete, and we

Unknown Speaker 26:23
get to relieve those beautiful experiences by doing this. So what you're saying is, when you, like, fully immerse yourself in the experience you're imagining, yeah, you're really imagining the sun on your face, or the water lapping over your feet as you walk along the beach, or something like that. It's far more powerful, which makes sense. I actually heard once. I'm not sure if this is true, but I did, I think was backed by research that

Unknown Speaker 26:52
if you imagine yourself doing 10 sit-ups, it's as powerful as if you've done the 10 sit-ups themselves. I do practice that sometimes, if I don't have enough time for exercise. So but I know the power of visualization is very, very strong, and thoughts have power. They have energy. I know that if I think of a really sad thing, I can cry just because I'm really, and it's not that I'm it's because I I'm really feeling it. My thoughts have made me, you know, I really go there and next minute, tears are rolling down my cheeks. Or if you think of a really happy, joyous occasion, your energy feels like, like it does have an impact, a very physical impact, on your body, your thoughts do. So I've heard somebody say once it's impossible to be I think was when I was studying kinesiology, actually,

Unknown Speaker 27:45
that it's impossible to be unhappy and

Unknown Speaker 27:50
grateful at the same time. They just don't make she can't be unhappy and grateful. So I think that's very powerful in itself, isn't it?

Unknown Speaker 28:01
Yeah, well, in

Unknown Speaker 28:03
my opinion, I have a more controversial opinion on this, in the sense that,

Unknown Speaker 28:09
of course, when there are two different opposite feelings, it's harder to feel.

Unknown Speaker 28:17
I don't know sad and happy at the same time. And

Unknown Speaker 28:22
that doesn't mean that if we are choosing gratefulness, we are not

Unknown Speaker 28:30
 feeling happy instead of sad, you know, like they are opposites. So

Unknown Speaker 28:37
Tony Robbins, for instance, he also said this, that I think we can be

Unknown Speaker 28:44
angry and grateful at the same time, or something like something similar to this, and, yeah, that makes sense. But when you're grateful, you're grateful when you're angry or angry, you know, like there are two separate things from my point of view, it's bit harder to feel do things at the same exact same time. Okay, you can go from feeling angry to feeling grateful, but it's it's harder to do so at the same time.

Unknown Speaker 29:16
But yeah, gratitude is definitely helpful for

Unknown Speaker 29:22
the moments when when we feel unhappy and then when we feel sad. But that's not to say that it's not important for us to accept those feelings as well, like I doesn't.

Unknown Speaker 29:36
Yeah, so the fact that I know a lot about gratitude,

Unknown Speaker 29:41
 I have many, I've built many good habits related to gratitude. That doesn't mean that I don't feel sad sometimes. And I think this is a very important distinction, especially for our listeners,

Unknown Speaker 29:55
 you don't have to be perfect. You don't have to

Unknown Speaker 29:59
 be great.

Unknown Speaker 30:00
 All the time it's we have a wide range of feelings that we get to