Wake Up to Gratitude | Episode 18

Confluence Financial Partners — Wake Up to Gratitude | Episode #18

Greg: Hello and welcome to the “Imagine That” Podcast. I’m your host, Greg Weimer, Founder, Partner, and Wealth Manager at Confluence Financial Partners. Each month, we’ll explore new ways to help you maximize your life and your legacy and meet some extraordinary people along the way. So if you’re looking to get more out of your life today and legacy tomorrow, let’s get started.

Today’s a little bit of a different conversation, but it’s an important conversation we need to have. To introduce our conversation, I’ll just start with a quote. “Gratitude, Like faith, is a muscle. The more you use it, the stronger it grows.”

That’s our goal today, by the way, to grow our muscle of gratitude. And that quote comes from Alan Cohen, who’s a very successful businessperson, but gratitude is powerful. And there’s some studies that go about how powerful gratitude is. So this Thanksgiving, let’s wake up to gratitude. We all say we’re grateful. And we say, thank you. And thank you sometimes can just be, you know, just be a throwaway line. Hey, thanks. No, no, no. Let’s not say it. This Thanksgiving let’s not say thank you from our heads. Let’s say it from our hearts. And when you really look at the benefits of gratitude, it’s amazing what it can do to the human body.

You know, America this year, and the last couple of years have had so much anxiety. And it’s been proven by the way that if you are grateful, it is very, very difficult to be grateful and anxious at the same time. Let’s be grateful. It’ll, it’ll, it’ll help with the anxiety I think of the world.

So let me just share with you a statistic that is amazing. Practicing gratitude has been shown to improve sleep, boost, immunity, decrease risk of disease. Imagine that. Like, it really does have an effect on people. And like, when you look at some of the research, there were two psychologists and I, and I know this is getting a little deep into gratitude, but there’s science behind it. And then we have so much to be grateful for, I’ll talk about that, but there was a Dr. Emmons and then doctor— they had three groups, one group wrote about gratitude. The second group wrote about irritations. And then the third group wrote about activities that happen in life with no emotion. And it is amazing what they found. They found that after 10 weeks, the people that wrote about gratitude were more optimistic, felt better, happier, had fewer visits to the doctors.

So anyhow, this episode is about gratitude. Gratitude is powerful. What you dwell on, you multiply. What you dwell on, you multiply. So here’s some things that I just want to share that that could help you have more gratitude from your heart in our lives. Here’s just some exercises that we could maybe practice together to become even more grateful. One, and this is easy. A lot of listeners probably already doing this, but a question. Do you write down something that you’re grateful for every day? On my to-dos like at the bottom of the page, I just put like something I’m grateful for. And it doesn’t need to be world peace.

It could be air conditioning. I don’t know. It could be heat. It could be the food that we are able to eat. Write down something that you’re grateful for. My daughter, Morgan, she gave me a jar and I could write down like something I was grateful for all the time. Now, you know, if you have kids, make sure you have, when you die, they read it. So, you know, you got to say something like nice about every kid. But it was awesome. At first, I’m like, I got it for Christmas. I think she gave it for me for Christmas. I’m like, that’s cool. I’ll write down whatever. But it’s cool. I look at that jar and every time I look at that jar, I’m grateful because I realize every day, I wrote down something that I was grateful for. You know, there’s also studies that if you write a letter, write a letter of gratitude, maybe, maybe that’s your to do from this.

Maybe you’ve been meaning to tell your mom how much you love her. And just imagine, if you’re a parent, how great it would be if one of your children wrote you a letter. Why not be that child? Why not write that letter to your child or to your parents and write the letter? And hopefully that will be wonderful for them. My guess is though it would also be wonderful for you to let someone know how much you really are appreciative of them. This is something we stumbled on last week in my office. And that is, I’m going to give you a gratitude awareness challenge. So I was sitting in my office, and I thought, okay, let me just look around the room and actually be present, right? So I’m in my office all the time. But am I present to gratitude? So it was a form of meditation for me.

I started looking around the room and realizing how much we have to be grateful for. So this is a glimpse into also gratitude and how, how fortunate I feel for so many of the relationships. Let me give you an example. I have a lot of pictures of my office. And I’ve looked at those pictures so often, I don’t know that I see them.

And that day I looked at them and I saw them. And I saw my kids, my wife, my family, I see these pictures. I don’t even look at them. I see them. And I feel them. And it was awesome. I was just so grateful. And now I’ll tell you, every time I look at those pictures, I just look at them in a different way. I looked at my computer and I thought we are fortunate to be able to work with the clients we have.

We have awesome clients. Many are great friends, just great clients. We don’t take that for granted. They could work anywhere and, and clients choose to work with us. We’re grateful for that. I’ll tell you another thing I looked at, I looked at the Mickey Mouse picture. We have, I have a Mickey Mouse picture in my office, and I thought, it just took me right back to when we were all, our team was in Vegas, and I was walking down the road and I saw a Mickey Mouse picture and we bought it. And it just reminded me how grateful I was, not only for that interaction that we had in Vegas, but also for the team. And they mean the world to us.

And we’re so fortunate to have that, but this all came alive. I looked at, I have a hammer. My Pappy was a carpenter. And so I, when, when he passed away, I got his hammer. This was in the eighties. I got his hammer and I got it bronzed and his fingerprints on the handle of the hammer. So it just made me so thankful for my Nonna and my Pappy. And they really gave our family work ethic. And I’d looked at that, I’ve looked at that hammer since the 1980s. And I’m telling you, when I woke up to gratitude by doing that little meditation, it came alive. I participated in a charity event called Folds of Honor. And I have a little memento from the charity event, the Folds of Honor, and, you know, Folds of Honor, for fallen heroes and military. And we have our freedom because people have given their lives. And when you think about that, it’s powerful.

And if we can’t be grateful for that and thankful, and honor those people, shame on us! And it really woke me up. And I felt that. I’ve always cared about — I felt it that day. And so, you know, last thing, I saw my kids and wife, they did it when I turned 50, like, you know, 50 Things We Like About Dad thing. And I, and I actually read it and I looked at it and I thought, man, I look at that every day and I don’t feel it. So my challenge to everybody is, there’s real benefits to you and to your health and to your happiness and to your mental health if you feel gratitude. And this holiday season, this Thanksgiving, let’s take gratitude to the next level. And it may be just writing a to-do every day of something you’re thankful for. It may be send a letter to say thank you to someone. It could be wake yourself up to gratitude.

By the way I did this. I’m like, does that really work? I was wondering. Like, was that just a weird day in my office? No, I did it early this morning, sitting in my family room. Which is just couches and a TV. I won’t take you through the whole room again, but it happened again! It happened again! And I’ll never walk in that TV room, the family room in our house, I’ll never walk in there the same again. Cause I sat there at 5:30 this morning and I did the gratitude challenge. And man, that room came alive. So many of you will be with loved ones this year. Many of you will be with family, thank goodness, we’re allowed to be with family again. But do the gratitude challenge and just wake yourself up to gratitude. And I promise you what you’re going to find: it’s 100% all around you.

Thank you so much for listening and from our Confluence family, we wanted to tell your family and make sure we express our gratitude to all of you. Happy Thanksgiving.

Thank you for listening to the “Imagine That” Podcast. We hope you enjoy this episode and welcome you to reach out to Confluence Financial Partners with your questions and comments. If you’d like to hear more episodes, head over to ConfluenceFP.com/podcasts or find us wherever you get your podcasts.