3 Ways To Make Your Life Easier Right Now

 

Sometimes, the best way to make your life easier right now is by simply going to a place of gratitude and abundance. Whether you are celebrating Thanksgiving or going off from work for the weekend, April Shprintz offers three ways on how to become more grateful and achieve a more fulfilling life.

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3 Ways To Make Your Life Easier Right Now

I’m so glad you’re here. In the United States, we celebrate a holiday called Thanksgiving, and everyone celebrates it in a little different way. My biggest part about it and the biggest tradition is focusing on gratitude and all the things in my life and the world, whether it be close at hand or further out that I’m grateful for and that I appreciate. I encourage you, whether you’re someone who celebrates Thanksgiving or not, to take a few minutes to focus on gratitude. I’m going to share with you three things that gratitude can help you with that you may never have thought of before.

The first thing that gratitude helps me with that surprised me when I learned this as a technique, but I love to use it, is it helps me make decisions. I’m a pretty decisive person most of the time, but if I’m confused, and I don’t know what to do, it is exceptionally painful because I want to make a decision to move. The worst decision you can make is no decision, but sometimes, when I’m in a fearful place, or I don’t know what to do, I can’t get to a place where I can make a decision that I feel good about.

If you’re making a decision out of fear, a lot of times, you might spend money on something that you don’t need to spend money on because you’re scared, or you might make a choice that means you’ve taken those other options off the table because you made it out of a place of fear. You can hurt yourself in the long run by making decisions from that place, but when you don’t feel in a good place to make the decision, what do you do? If you focus on gratitude and all the things that you’re very grateful for that you very much appreciate about that specific decision, you can help move yourself to a place where you’re empowered to make a much better decision.

Let’s say, for example, you are trying to make a decision about whether or not you’re going to invest in taking a course that you think will make you better at one of your hobbies, but you’re like, “It’s almost the holidays, and I don’t want to spend a ton of money because I have a lot of things that I’m going to be outlining cash for, but I don’t want to miss this opportunity because they’re having a Cyber Monday sale or a Black Friday sale offering this deep discount. I don’t know what to do.”

You take a moment and focus on that hobby itself, how much you enjoy it, what it brings to your life, and how you appreciate that it’s entered your life. Maybe it calms you down and makes you laugh. You feel so relaxed after you do this specific hobby, and it’s become a place of refuge for you. You’re so happy that you took it up. If you continue to focus on all the things with the hobby that you’re grateful for and all the things that help you, you can move your mindset and the way that you feel to a place where you can much more easily make the decision.

If you continue to focus on things you are grateful for, you can move your mindset to a place where it is much easier to make better decisions. Share on X

One of two things is going to happen. Number one, you’re going to realize that you were in a scarcity place about money that you didn’t need to be in because you have plenty of money, or maybe you want to ask somebody to get this thing that you were going to invest in for your gift. Maybe someone could go in on it, or you might come to a place where you’re like, “I love this hobby. I love what I’m doing with it. I love how it contributes to my life, but I don’t need to buy this extra thing.”

Either way, the way you will know that you got to that place of being able to make a better decision because of gratitude is the way that you will feel. You will feel calm and at peace about it and not worry about whether or not you made the right decision. It’s super powerful that way. Another is the fact of focusing on gratitude. This is having a daily gratitude practice.

If you’re someone who has been reading this for a while, you know I love doing three wins of the day and focusing on things that have been great for me, whether they’re big or small, personal or professional. That’s my gratitude practice. You can do it as a simple gratitude practice. You can do it as wins. You’re focusing on the things that you appreciate about your life that you’re grateful for.

Here’s what’s amazing. It helps you position yourself to take more actions that you will be grateful for. Have you ever noticed that if you put in a ton of effort to do a great workout, you tend to eat better after normally or make other healthy decisions in line with it? It is because you’ve subconsciously told yourself, “I want to take care of myself. I want to do things that are good for me.” You’ve made it even easier for your unconscious mind to offer up these different options for you of doing things that align with taking care of yourself and being healthier.

It’s the same way that when you build one good habit, it can often be pretty easy to add another good habit right alongside that one because you’re able to leverage the momentum that you already have. The way that focusing on gratitude helps you do this is because your unconscious mind is your unpaid assistant. It is 80% to 88% of your brain that does nothing but tasks that have become habits or tasks that have been given to it, whether it’s keeping your heart beating, keeping your lungs breathing air, or doing the things that you’ve done so many times because you’ve consciously directed yourself to do it like driving home. Your subconscious mind can automatically do it for you.

 

You will hear me go back and forth between calling it your subconscious mind and your unconscious mind. It depends on your pattern of thinking. They are the same thing. A lot of people who are scientific like to call it the unconscious mind. Much longer ago in history, they always called it the subconscious mind. Either one, it’s the same thing. It is the powerhouse that is running everything that you’re doing.

 

If you leverage it and focus on those things that you’re grateful for, not only is it going to point out more things for you to be grateful for. It’s also going to help you by helping direct you toward the opportunities that would lead you toward more to be grateful for. It’s one of the things that I talk about when I say, “If you want something, focus on that thing that you want, not how you get there because your unconscious mind is going to help you do that by pointing out those possibilities for you.”

 

This is a big one. Gratitude will help you diffuse anger and annoyance. I have a good friend who for many years was unable to have children. She and her husband were trying. She wanted to have a child more than anything in the world, and she was blessed with twins. They are rowdy and crazy, and sometimes they make huge messes.

When those things are at the place where they can get on her nerves because she has so much to do, or she’s suffering from a lack of sleep, she loves to focus on what it was like before when her house was perfect, and it was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop, and, more than anything, what she wanted was a child in her life so that it wouldn’t be quiet and perfect all the time.

When she thinks about the feeling that she had, when she found out that she was having the girls, how excited she was, and how grateful she is that they’re in her life, it makes it so much easier for her to ignore whatever is going on that’s driving her crazy because she remembers that gratitude and that feeling. Give one or all of these a try in honor of the week where we focus on being grateful because gratitude can be a powerful force in your mindset work and your life. Here’s to your success.