Be specific with our gratitude

Have you ever noticed how vague we can be when we express what we're grateful for?

In English, the word “love” is abstract and applied to many different things. I hear people talk about the foods that they love like, “I love ice cream,” more often than they talk about the people in their lives whom they love. 

When I first started dating my now partner of ten years, I told him that I didn’t want to be taken for granted. By that point in my life, I recognized the essence of “love,” to me, was actually gratitude. Instead of saying “I love you,” we say, “I’m grateful,” which is short for “I’m grateful for you.” We also share what we are specifically grateful for before we eat together. It is our version of “saying grace,” which is a short prayer that some people say before a meal. We slow down to reflect and then share whatever is top of mind. I introduced the practice in my own family. My brothers and I share what we are grateful for at our weekly sibling dinner. For example, whenever we have a hard time supporting our mom, I’ll say, “I’m grateful that we work together as a team.”

“I’m grateful” reflects that we notice something that feels like a bonus in life. Another way to describe the small things we are grateful for to share “something that made me smile.” For our CuriosityBased weekly team meetings, we spend time connecting before diving into the work. To do this, we choose a different question every month to answer in addition to sharing a personal high and low. For each week in November, we talked about what made us smile. Stories include playing with a neighbor’s new litter of puppies and seeing a double rainbow on an otherwise cloudy day.

Even gratitude expressed as affirming feedback to a colleague is more powerful when it’s specific and detailed. Notice the difference between “you’re amazing” and “you’re so skilled at learning new ways to make our process more efficient”! You can check out this video to learn how to do this.

There are health benefits to expressing gratitude. The Mayo Clinic wrote, “Studies have shown that feeling thankful can improve sleep, mood and immunity…Your brain is designed to problem-solve rather than appreciate. You often must override this design to reap the benefits of gratitude.”

Expressing gratitude in this way forces us to practice inward curiosity—we have to share specific examples and stories from our lives.

I’m grateful for my colleagues for trying their best as we ride the ups and downs of this past year together. I’m also grateful to CuriosityBased supporters. It's not easy running a small business. Your encouraging words and engagement in response to our newsletter reminds me why our work of helping people practice curiosity in the world matters.

I’m Dr. Julie Pham and I founded CuriosityBased to help people practice curiosity in the world, starting in the workplace, because that is where we spend most of our waking hours. Subscribe to the CuriosityBased YouTube channel and to our weekly newsletter for helpful communication and relationship-building tips.