Over the past couple years, the Thanksgiving week’s tip covered the topic of gratitude and included the evolution of my personal daily gratitude practices.
If you missed them or as a primer for today’s tip, you can find them here:
- How practicing gratitude can improve health (2022)
- A Thanksgiving health tip that can be practiced every day (2023)
I’m still practicing as described in last year’s tip, so I don’t have anything to add regarding how to practice gratitude other than to re-recommend reading Thanks! or Gratitude Works! for a variety of other gratitude practices that you might find beneficial.
Instead I’d like to discuss a rarely recommended idea about what to be grateful for: our problems.
Why our problems are worthy of gratitude
Being grateful for the “good stuff” in our lives is natural and easy. But when it comes to obstacles, challenges, problems, and other “not-so-good stuff”, then the natural and easy responses are usually stress and a desire for easy resolutions.
“So why on God’s green Earth would I want to be grateful for my problems?”, you might ask.
To which I’d reply, “Because both physical and mental growth occur just outside of our comfort zones, and problems are precisely what make us uncomfortable.”
Let’s do a brief thought experiment to prove that point.
Think back to some things you’re really proud of accomplishing in your life so far. This could include stuff like graduating college, starting a business, losing a specific amount of weight, climbing a mountain, getting out of debt, raising a respectful child, quitting smoking, volunteering, or mentoring a younger co-worker (just to prime your mental pump).
Got your own answers? Good.
Now, why are you proud of those accomplishments?
There are probably a few reasons, but I’ll bet one of them is that some aspect of the situation challenged you. In order to be successful, you had to learn something new or improve upon an existing skillset. You also had to exhibit some degree of consistency, persistence, creativity, physical exertion, patience, grit, and a host of other virtues.
Doing all that stuff was hard! But the effort (and subsequent growth) kept you engaged and is what produced the sense of fulfillment when you achieved your goals.
If whatever you accomplished hadn’t been challenging—if you had been able to basically sleepwalk your way through it all without needing to learn, improve skills, or exhibit your virtues—you probably wouldn’t even remember the situations, much less be proud of them.
OK, thought experiment done.
The point of all this is to say that neither of us would be the people we are today had we not experienced exactly what we have.
Of course, we each still (and always will) have problems, some of which might be beyond our current capacity to overcome. But if it weren’t for our experiences with past challenges, the latter category would be far bigger than what it is.
And that seems worthy of our gratitude.
Putting it into practice
Again, being grateful for the “good stuff” is relatively easy—as is understanding that the “not-so-good stuff” is worthy of gratitude, especially after having lived through it.
What’s a little tougher is being intentionally grateful when we’re squarely in the middle of that not-so-good stuff. So my challenge to you this Thanksgiving is to do just that.
Consider a problem you’re currently experiencing that you wish would just go away or be resolved easily. Then take some time to answer the following questions:
- “What final outcome do I really want? What outcome is the most probable?”
- “Can I influence the outcome? If so, how?”
- “What mental, emotional, or physical skills might I develop in those efforts? What can I learn from the situation if I’m unable to influence it?”
- “How might those skills benefit me in the future?”
- “In the future, am I likely to be grateful for having developed those skills? If so, what’s one way that I can remind myself to intentionally be grateful for the current situation, especially in the moments when the challenge is most acute?”
Answering those questions may not be easy. And, of course, none of the answers will make the challenge disappear. But that’s not really what we’re after anyway.