Annie:
Welcome to the Whole Assistant Podcast. I'm your host, Annie Croner. I'm a former assistant who's passionate about our profession and I'm also a certified coach who's invested in your success. You've come to the right place if you want to know what it looks like to stand in your power and achieve success as an assistant. From overwhelm and burnout. Now, onto today's episode. Welcome to this special Thanksgiving Day episode of the Whole Assistant Podcast. One of my favorite things about running a podcast that releases its episodes on Thursdays is that once a year I get to record a podcast episode to be released on Thanksgiving Day here in the United States.
Annie:
So if you're joining us from around the world, this will be relevant to you too, but especially to my people who are here in the United States. Happy Thanksgiving. And today we are talking about the power of Gratitude. This is going to be a very short and sweet episode because I want us all to go rest and rejuvenate and have fun with our friends and family. But before I do, I going to share with you guys a bit about gratitude. Just got online, did a little bit of research and I found a few statistics that I'm now going to share with you. First of all, a single act of gratitude can instantly increase happiness by up to 10%. And I think that this is really profound.
Annie:
Can you imagine if we were all to incorporate more gratitude into our lives, how much happier we would be? It also reduces depression or decreases depressive symptoms by up to 35%. And I'm going to share a cool story about this in a minute here. It also improves life satisfaction. So people who practice gratitude regularly report a significantly higher levels of life satisfaction. This also leads to improved sleep. So regular gratitude journaling can lead to a 25% increase in sleep quality. Which makes sense, right? Because if you go to bed and you are spinning out on all the things that are going wrong in your life, the chances of you falling to asleep sooner or quicker are less. Actually, intentionally putting pen to paper in terms of a gratitude journal can actually lead to higher sleep quality.
Annie:
I love this. So I'm going to share a couple of experiences with you. One is from a dear friend of mine. I'm not going to name her name here because I, I did not ask permission to share her story. But a dear friend of mine from my college days has suffered with depression on and on and off throughout her life and she told me that she had learned somewhere, read somewhere that like actually writing journaling, something that you're grateful for every day actually increases your life satisfaction, actually makes you happier. So. So instead of journaling, though, she said she wanted to write me a daily gratitude email. Now, I will say that she did this for a long time, well over a year.
Annie:
So every single day in my inbox, I would get an email from her, and it would be either a short little mention of something, I think one time, I'll never forget, she wrote that she was grateful for peanut butter. She must have had peanut butter that day. And that's all the email was. And then other times, she would share entire paragraphs of things that she was grateful for and even our relationship, and how she was grateful that she had a friend that she could write to. And I loved receiving those emails. In fact, I told her at one point that we should create a book based on those emails. And she wrote me for, oh, gosh, it must have been two years at minimum, every single day. And I started to look forward to those emails.
Annie:
I think it was also good for her because I think she was also using me as an accountability buddy for the gratitude. And that was really, really cool. And I just got to support her in that way. And also it made me more cognizant and more aware of those things that I was grateful for. So during a really dark time in my life, for those of you who don't know and are new to the podcast, I had a stroke several years ago. And on the heels of that stroke, I lost my marriage, lost my job, had moved back with my family, and it was a really hard time. I was only 28 years old when it happened. And within a year, I basically key components of my life.
Annie:
And I had a friend give me three different journals. And one of the journals was to write down something I was grateful for every single day. And I started using that journal. And sometimes it would be really trivial, right? Sometimes it'd be something so small that I was really grateful for. Like my friend writing me about that she was grateful for peanut butter. And sometimes I would actually have something really substantial to write about. But what I loved about actually intentionally writing in a journal, something that I was grateful for every day, was that throughout my day, I was on the lookout. I was on the lookout for things that I could be grateful for.
Annie:
I remember I had a couple close calls with cars almost hitting me, but not hitting me, and I was grateful for that. And like, that's going in my gratitude journal tonight. I had therapists who I really admired and appreciated during that time, and I was often grateful for her and her work with me. I had my family that I lived close by and they were really helpful and I was really grateful for them. Just a lot of things that I was grateful for during a really, really dark period of my life. And I'm actually considering getting back into the gratitude journaling because while things are going really well in my life, I want to make sure that I am intentionally being grateful for my life and I'm not taking anything for granted. So I wake up a couple times a week and I will go for a walk. And on that walk, it's my time to be quiet with myself.
Annie:
It's my time for prayer. And oftentimes where my brain likes to go is lack. All the things that I wish I had that I don't, all the stresses that I'm feeling currently in running my business, all the things going on with my boys, everything. And I will frequently return to gratitude in those moments. I'm like, you know what I'm really thinking in lack right now? I'm really thinking about all the things that I don't have or things that would be nice to have. And I'm just going to tap into gratitude in this moment. I'm just going to tap into those things that I can be truly grateful for and I'll just start listing them out. And I have to tell you, even in like a meditative walk to the coffee shop to get my coffee in the morning, it just sets my day off on the right foot.
Annie:
Even if the walk started out with me feeling anxious and kind of out of control or anxious about a certain situation with a client or whatever, whenever I return to gratitude, I just find that I feel so much better and much more centered when I am done with that walk. So that's what I have for you guys today. Really short and sweet. I would encourage you to adopt a gratitude practice as well. There's actual statistics around gratitude making you feel more fulfilled, increased life satisfaction, especially if you deal with any sort of depression, gratitude can really be a good boost for you. So I hope you found this episode helpful. Be intentional. Be whole.
Annie:
That is all for now. I help assistants apply the concepts I share on this podcast. If you're ready to take your growth deeper and you're curious whether working with me in a coaching capacity is right for you, please email me at [email protected] to schedule your complimentary discovery call.
