Imagine thinking to yourself, ‘I appreciate our associate Shawn. He’s reliable, creative and gets along well with others in the office. I think I’ll let him know.’ Consider telling your spouse or partner, ‘I just want you to know I notice what you do around here the way you keep our family stable and help provide a home for me. I see how hard you work and we couldn’t have the life we do without your efforts.’
Gratitude has enormous power. Martin Seligman, past president of the American Psychological Association and the single most influential person who has guided positive psychology to its current pre-eminence in the mental health field, has found that gratitude is one of the five personal qualities which is tied to overall happiness. So what is gratitude?
In their classic tome, Character Strengths and Virtues, A Handbook and Classification, Seligman and Christopher Peterson note,
Gratitude is a sense of thankfulness and joy in response to receiving a gift, whether the gift be a tangible benefit from a specific other or a moment of peaceful bliss evoked by natural beauty. The word gratitude is derived from the Latin gratia, meaning ‘grace,’ ‘graciousness,’ or ‘gratefulness.’
Gratitude in its highest expression is found in the delight in the ordinary, as 19th century writer and philosopher G.K. Chesterton asserts. If that is true, what a gift it provides the opportunity to experience appreciation and delight because of people and circumstances which naturally exist in our lives.
Can Gratitude Flourish In The Legal Arena?
But consider this quintessential irony provided by the modern legal environment: In order to succeed, many people claim, one must be hardheaded, hard-working, have a scintillating intellect, and value analysis over sentiment. A strong sense of irony and a clever, sometimes withering, skepticism compose both the shield and sword for the well-respected, successful attorney. The very imagery of ‘shield’ and ‘sword’ reinforces the adversarial nature of the law. Yet what if the key to success resides in a sense of wonder or awe found in the most basic elements of existence?
Professor Robert Emmons of U.C. Davis is, perhaps, the nation’s leading researcher on gratitude and its benefits. His research reveals that gratitude is correlated with higher levels of well-being, greater social connectedness, and a higher correlation to spirituality. Grateful people also place less importance on material acquisitions. In one study, Emmons had students keep a daily gratitude journal in which they listed at least 5 things they were grateful for at the end of each day. They found participants experienced higher levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, attention and energy than those in the control group (who kept a journal which listed daily hassles).
Exercise Your ‘Gratitude’ Muscle
Seligman, Emmons and others focus on trying to come up with exercises that actually cultivate gratitude. As Seligman relates in Authentic Happiness, he was struggling to find an exercise for gratitude when a student suggested the class have a gratitude night. Each person would recall a person in his or her life who had provided deep and lasting gifts, and who had not been really acknowledged. The student would then write a letter to that person, describing the gifts given by that person (in as much detail as possible) and what those gifts had meant. Then, on gratitude night, each student would invite the person and read his or her letter. Mothers, brothers, and teachers all came, and everyone was deeply moved no one could keep the tears from their eyes. At the end of the semester many student evaluations recounted that evening as the high point of the course. This gave rise to Seligman’s ‘gratitude visit’ in which he suggests that people write a letter of appreciation to someone in their life, and read it to the person they are ‘honoring’ with their recognition and gratitude.
The gratitude journal is another exercise that strengthens our ability to witness those things that we would otherwise take for granted. Researchers have found that keeping a gratitude journal over a period of six weeks markedly enhances a person’s sense of well being. I recommend this exercise also for the things you will learn from your reactions to the task. If you demur because it appears ‘soft’ or ‘silly,’ you might want to look at what inside you disdains recognizing and expressing the good things in your life. After a week or two, you may recognize those people and circumstances that you previously took for granted. After all, what’s the good of having wonderful things in your life if you don’t recognize them? (Remember, this journal is for the writer only. You don’t have to list ‘my wife’ so you can show it to her and seem like a good guy; nobody else is going to read it. It should be private and personal to derive any value from the effort.)
How frequently do those of us who are blessed with health stop and give thanks for our freedom from pain and physical limitation? Lawyers are very smart folks living and working among intelligent people but how often have you stopped to consider and appreciate the wonderful gift of a good mind, or how much fun it is to think and interact with others who are equally witty?
Count Your Blessings
We are a wealthy and, in many ways, overindulged culture. We are bombarded with advertisements that tell us we can’t be satisfied without certain things only our consumer economy can provide. People who travel a good deal often remark upon returning that our culture is marked by this sense of enforced dissatisfaction promoted by a consumer economy. We can resist that force, however, by spending just five minutes before we go to bed recounting our blessings.
For me, tonight, I might say that I love the way my golden retriever calms down when I rubbed his ears after he came in frightened by a thunderstorm. I am grateful that I am 58 and still have energy to run my practice and teach at the same time; for the soup my wife got me this afternoon because I came home not feeling so well; for hanging out with my 15-year-old daughter (we’re in different parts of the house) while her mom is out tonight, for realizing that her simple presence brings me a sense of well being and joy. I’m happy I found a book that interests me (Henry Clay’s biography) from the library; I am grateful that I was able to come up with an argument that will support a revision of a court commissioner’s ruling (which is like an appeal to a judge in a family law matter); I’m happy that Springsteen still puts on great shows after 33 years and that my wife and I could go to one this weekend so she could finally see what I had been carrying on about for so long; I’m grateful that Don Hutcheson has been kind enough not only to allow me to contribute to The Complete Lawyer, but to get this piece in a bit late.
Unless you’re struggling with depression, so that you’re biochemically unable to experience the joy of the simple or the sublime, I challenge you to not be able to come up with five things to be grateful for every night for six weeks prior to bed time. If Seligman, Emmons and others are correct, your productivity will rise, your sense of well-being will skyrocket and your creativity and mental skills will be sharp and satisfying. What lawyer wouldn’t want those assets?
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