How Being Grateful Helps You Achieve Your Professional Goals

Living in “my world” is different. I get friendly mocking all the time about it but let me tell you. It works for me. I wake up happy, I go through the day happy and I laugh a lot! Even in my sleep. (But that’s another story.) My secret…well at least one of them…I’m grateful for everything. I begin my workday ready to do more and accomplish more of my professional goals with the mindset that I am extremely grateful for all I have accomplished already.

Every morning before I get out of bed, the first thing I do is I think of 5 things that I’m grateful for. Sometimes they’re simple like I’m grateful for my comfortable bed with all the covers. Sometimes it’s a bit deeper like I’m grateful for the health of all my family members. Sometimes they’re the same as the day before…but all the time, I’m grateful. Sincerely grateful. This morning as I washed my face and brushed my teeth, I thought how grateful I am for running water, as there are hundreds of millions of people who don’t have running water in their home. When you start your day that way, everything seems good.

If you always focus on what you don’t have, it’s hard to appreciate what you do have. On the path toward achieving your professional goals, an abundance mentality goes a long way. It allows you to focus on your past successes and draw on that memory bank to create future successes. Positive, progressive thinking promotes positive, progressive results. To achieve your professional goals, a positive, progressive mentality will be an asset that accelerates your progress.

Critics of positive thinking believe that you avoid reality when you think only of the positive and avoid the negative. Nobody can avoid the negative. Whether or not you let those thoughts dominate your thinking and ultimately control you is the issue. You might not have control of your situation but you do have control over how you cheese to think about it. Being grateful is a state of mind and since it involves your own mind, you have control over how you choose to view things.

Positive thinkers understand that it is through positive, progressive thinking that you can see more possibilities. In order to achieve your professional goals you need to be able to see possibilities. When one way doesn’t work you have to be able to find another way.

Any of the world’s greatest inventors understand this. From the light bulb to the computer and everything in between, the inventors had to be able to deal with hundreds or thousands of setbacks before achieving the results, or professional goals that they desired. Each time something didn’t turn out the way Thomas Edison had hoped, he was grateful for having found one more way that didnt work and knew he was one step closer to finding out what would work. His patience changed the world as we know it.

Being grateful for what you have doesn’t mean in any way that having more is not a good thing. Have as much as you like! It is simply a reminder to be grateful for all the things that you have, including, and perhaps most especially for the things that all the money in the world will not be able to buy you. Because in the end, whatever you have, you can’t take with you. But you can enjoy what you have right now if you remember to be grateful for it!