How to Have More Money

Gratitude and Gravy!

 

As I write this, it’s five days before Thanksgiving. In that spirit, I think it’s appropriate to write about gravy (one of my all time favorite things about turkey day), and giving thanks, or gratitude. Ever notice how the words “gratitude” and “gravy” are kind of similar? It’s because they both make everything better! More on that later…

 

You may be asking, why are you writing about gratitude in a personal finance blog. Well, I absolutely know for sure that the most important part of a sound financial management plan is gratitude. How to have more money starts with gratitude.  If you are not spending time every day making an effort to be grateful, you will continue to wither, either financially or in your ability to enjoy your money.

 

If you don’t have a gratitude practice and you don’t know how to start, let me share my practice with you. I practice gratitude by being thankful for my life every single day! I try to spend a few minutes each day thinking about the abundance in my life and giving thanks for it. I started doing this years ago, when I first began to realize how important gratitude is in order to be joyful and to have meaning in our lives. Sometimes, when I’m feeling a little less than joyful, I sit for a few minutes and start listing all of the things in my life that I’m grateful for. That immediately helps me gain some perspective when I desperately need it.

 

A gratitude practice doesn’t take long. It’s not complicated, either. All you have to do is take a few minutes, while you are driving or brushing your teeth and start listing out the things you are grateful for. These things can be as simple as a bird singing in a tree or an extra spoonful of gravy on your taters (tee hee). Sounds silly, I know but, it’s gratitude for those small things that opens you up and helps you change your perspective so you can receive more abundance! My practice has taught me that true gratitude is fundamentally necessary not just for financial abundance, but for happiness and a successful life.

 

A gratitude practice doesn’t just help you feel more abundant. It does some other things, too. First, it changes your focus. If you are thinking about what you have to be grateful for, you are no longer focusing on your problems or the negativity in your life. It gives you a little space from the situation so you can take a breath and relax a tiny bit. What a relief that can be! Second, when you are practicing gratitude, something strange begins to happen. You begin to see that the problem is not really a problem but a sort of lock and key. Every difficulty, problem, negative thing or whatever, is an opportunity to learn something. There is no experience that does not contain a lesson. When looking for the lesson, you inadvertently turn the key in the lock and open the experience, allowing you to become a wiser, more effective person.

 

Finally, the practice of gratitude eventually gives you perspective in so many ways. Perspective is a natural by-product of gratitude. You can’t practice gratitude and not gain perspective. I think about how practicing gratitude over the years started to give me more perspective and I am truly amazed. It began to make me aware of my shallow attitudes and beliefs by revealing the things that really have value to me. This had the effect of making me aware of how I was misplacing my priorities. This is a truly priceless result of being grateful.

 

This is especially important when you are trying to get your finances under control! Also, when you practice being grateful for what you have, you begin to become aware of more things to be grateful for. These may be things you already had but through gratitude, you begin to see them differently, as valuable and precious.  See how gratitude makes everything better? Gravy does the same thing!

 

I think if you can find gratitude, or the possibility of gratitude, in every moment then not only will you become more grateful, you’ll become more mindful and learn self-control! Unless, of course, you are currently giving thanks for the pizza or double cheeseburger with fries that you are about to inhale! (What? No gravy?) Even then, that can be something to be grateful for. Not the deliciousness of a cheeseburger, but the knowledge that you are aware in that moment. Awareness is a huge thing to be grateful for because it brings self control. So, when you are eating the cheeseburger, you are doing so with the knowledge that you have the choice not to eat it. That’s the first step in making better decisions, even if you go ahead and scarf the whole thing in record time.

 

So, as you belly up to the table next week, I hope you are fortunate enough to have a magnificent turkey feast with plenty of gravy to enjoy, because not everyone will. When you are staring down that plate full of green bean casserole and that dish of can shaped cranberry Jell-O type stuff, take a moment to be thankful for everyone around you. Even the annoying relative who acts like a jerk every year but still insists on showing up early and leaving late. In the end, all we have is each other, and a bunch of dry leftovers. With a little gravy made of gratitude and human kindness, we can make everything better!

 

Happy Thanksgiving!
Joy Alford-Brand

Your Dollar Lama

 

P.S.  Don’t forget to check out Money Basics for a quick, fun read about money management and our online courses by clicking here to help you with credit management and budgeting.