For a Better Life, Be Grateful for the One You Have

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

Good evening and welcome to the Warrior Soul Podcast. My name is Chris Albert and I'm your host and the owner of Warrior Soul Apparel. Today I want to talk a little bit about gratitude. Now this is a word that's been thrown around so much in recent times and you hear it on a lot of self help sites, you hear it on a lot of podcasts, you hear it from a lot of successful people. They say that they practice gratitude, but what does this mean?

Why do we need to be grateful? Why is gratitude so important for us? And one of the things I do every day is I journal, I write my thoughts down, and it's a good exercise for me, and I think it'll be a good exercise for you. But a lot of these people recommend journaling gratitude. So what I want to do is I want to go through a few of the things that I'm grateful for, just to give you a sense of what this is and and what kind of importance it can have for you.

Now I know this sounds a bit hippy dippy. I know it sounds a bit woo woo, but it really can help you if you practice it the proper way. So sit back and just bear with me for a moment while I read through this. And it starts, I'm grateful to live in a place and a time where there's so many opportunities. I'm grateful for having food and shelter.

I'm grateful for the good people I have around me, and for my girlfriend who supports me in everything I do. I'm grateful for my life and for the person I've become. I'm grateful for not being rich. At times my desperate financial situation has only made me hungrier and more determined. I'm grateful that my last business failed.

The experience taught me more about business and life than I would have ever learned in some classroom. I'm grateful for my failed marriage. To truly appreciate a good relationship in some ways you have to experience a bad one. I'm grateful that I was homeless. It's allowed me to appreciate everything that I have now, and it's given me the desire to help others who are in similar situations.

I'm grateful that I'm not a gifted athlete. It's forced me to work harder to understand the human body and to help others achieve their goals. I'm grateful for having had my heart broken more times than I can count. Each time it's brought me closer to where I'm supposed to be and set me free of comfort and dependence on others. I'm grateful for having ulcerative colitis.

It's forced me to have respect for my body to avoid pollutants, and it's given me knowledge about the human body that I would have never learned. I'm grateful that I never knew my father. It's forced me to find other mentors and to seek my own path to becoming a man. I'm grateful for having loved ones and friends who've died. It's taught me to truly appreciate the living, and to never take any relationship with a loved one for granted.

I'm grateful for the long periods I spent alone without a relationship. These times allowed me the freedom to move to new places, to see the world, and to seek new adventures that made me the person I am today. I'm grateful that I was bullied as a kid. This gave me empathy for those who might not be in a good place right now. And it's given me the strength to push myself to be better.

Now these are, this isn't something that I just wrote all in one time. These are things that I've written over the last few months in my journal. And the reason why I do this, like I said, is to give myself some perspective, to make me understand every time I run into an issue, that there's always an upside. That you can always learn something from even the worst of things that happened to you throughout your life. And in some ways, some ways, actually in many ways, is more value value to be gained from a negative experience than there is from a positive experience.

Because if you're only getting positive feedback in your life, if you're only experiencing the easy things, then that's not what makes you stronger. You know, it's like, it's like that old picture, old meme says, Smooth seas don't make for good sailors, right? Every trial and every tribulation that's come to you in your life, everything that's ever happened to you, you can find a positive in that. And you can find something that you've learned that's made you stronger, that's made you a better person, and that's given you some perspective on what you've gone through in your life and some perspective when you face new problems that come up. Now, the tricky thing about gratitude, right?

The tricky thing about gratitude is that one everything I just said was said in hindsight. Sometimes in the moment it's really hard to say, all right, well, know what, this could be a good thing. This is going to teach me a lesson. This is something that's going to make me better. Because we get so wrapped up into what's happening to us in our lives.

But what you need to do is kind of translate that into a basic philosophy of life. And you tell yourself, when I come across a problem, when I run into some difficulty, I'm not gonna cringe and cower. I'm not gonna give up. I'm not gonna cry about it, because if I cry about it or dwell on it, the only thing that's gonna happen about happen with that situation is that you're not going to get anything done. You're not going to solve the problem.

What you can do is appreciate everything that you do have in your control. You can appreciate everything that you can do to solve the problem. And you can live in the moment and rise up to the occasion to fix it. And then you can look back on the experience, regardless of what happened. You can look back on the experience as something that led to personal growth.

Too many of us let our pasts get in the way. Too many of us use our pasts for excuses for why we haven't achieved what we want to achieve now. And the more we do that, the more we dwell, the more we don't accomplish anything. I'm not telling you you have to be the happiest person in the world. I'm not telling you that you have to walk around with a smile on your face 24/7.

But I am telling you that if you want to succeed in this life, you need to be strong. You need to be the kind of person who when they run into problems, they fight. They put 110% into overcoming that problem, finding a solution, learning from it, and then moving past it to bigger and better things. Life is far too short to sit there and dwell. Life is far too short to not try to make your life better. And so what can you do here? Well, what I do is every day I start my day by writing things down that I'm grateful for. And it can't just be okay, hey, I'm grateful for my family, I'm grateful for my friends.

You can include that stuff because that's important stuff to be grateful for, but find something in your life that once was a negative, that you used to look at like it was the worst thing that ever happened to you, and find the positive for that. Find the positive behind that pain, and understand that the pain is what's made you stronger. The pain is what's made you you. And because we've experienced pain, because we've experienced darkness, because we've experienced loneliness, because we've experienced depression, we can also experience glory. We can also experience accomplishment.

We can also experience extreme happiness, because we know what the other side of the coin is. So to all of you out there, one, I want to thank you for listening. Two, I want to encourage you to be grateful. And three, I want to encourage you to live your best life. I'll be back to you soon with another episode and a huge announcement for this podcast.

We are taking on a co host. Talk to you guys later. Peace.