A Homage to Gratitude, the Mother of All Virtues
By Fede Lozano
“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”
Cicero (106-43 BC)
Takk for Maten
In the summer of 2005, I traveled to Bergen, Norway for the first time. I was to meet the family of my then girlfriend (now wife)—the dreaded meet the folks. We sat around a large dinner table, all seven of us, staring intently at the scrumptious spread of food. I was ready to immediately hit the grub and mindlessly overeat, as I usually did, when my girlfriend, only twenty-two at the time, grabbed me gently by the hand and smiled kindly. God, I adore this girl, I thought. My dreamy feelings of love were quickly interrupted, however, when her brother, a muscular and rowdy teenager in saggy jeans who sat on my other side, also took me sturdily by the hand. He too flashed a big smile. Although I suspected, distrustingly, that his was born more out of mischief than out of kindness.
There I was, sitting in a ritualistic circle with a group of people I’d just met a moment ago. The word awkward doesn’t pack the necessary cringe needed to describe how uncomfortable I felt. I looked around the room for a quick exit route. But before I had a chance to pull the emergency cord, the entire family joyfully wiggled each other’s hands up and down like wizards enacting a spell, while chanting in cult-like unison: “takk for maten!” What kind of freaky Viking clan have I gotten myself into?
This turned out to be my first exposure to the philosophies of the 19th-century Austrian polymath Rudolf Steiner, founder of the Waldorf School where my father-in-law has taught for almost forty years and where all his children were educated. According to Steiner, who has now become somewhat of a pedagogical hero of mine, gratitude is an essential human trait. Teachers and parents, he insisted, have the responsibility to inculcate gratitude into children’s early years. I soon became accustomed to the “takk for maten”—thank you for the food—ritual and have now grown to cherish it, especially with my five-year-old daughter. And ever since my heart attack, I’ve found myself giving profound thanks every opportunity I get. Not only for the food, but for every other blessing that life has to offer—big and small.
Now, I know that some of you will inevitably be rolling your eyes by now, thinking this gratitude stuff is fluffy Mumbo Jumbo fit only for post-heart attack softies or for snotty kids in tree-hugging schools. I hope, however, that you don’t stop reading because the cutting-edge research is crystal clear: gratitude can change your life. So read on.
Gratitude Ain’t Weak Sauce
Andrew Huberman is a tenured Professor at the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. The professor has biceps as thick as the textbooks he teaches and the look of a rogue Navy Seal who could break your back with his little finger if you failed to deliver your homework on time. He’s also a YouTube phenom. Through his channel, The Huberman Lab, he posts videos on all kinds of fascinating scientific subjects such as focus, memory, play, trauma, sleep, stress, the immune system, and the list goes on. He’s racked up tens of millions of views. Exacting with his speech and not one to fall prey to hyperbole, he’s as thorough and meticulous with the research as he probably is with his bench-press routine. Anyways, you get the picture—the guy’s an all-around badass.
This is what Huberman has to say about gratitude:
I’d like to emphasize the various aspects of mental and physical health that have been shown to benefit from a regular gratitude practice. There are studies showing that performing a gratitude practice twice or three times or even just once a week can lead to a pervasive and long-lasting impact on subjective wellbeing. People report feeling happier, more meaning, joy, even awe for their life experience simply in response to adding a gratitude practice…So it’s clear to me that an effective gratitude practice has an outsized effect on many, many aspects of mental and physical health.
And for those of you coming to this conversation thinking, gratitude practice, oh that’s kind of wishy washy or woo-woo, it’s going to involve putting your hand on your heart and feeling into all the amazing things you happen to have when things are really terrible, that’s not where we’re going at all.
And equally important to understand is that the neurochemical, the anti-inflammatory, and the neurocircuit mechanisms that gratitude can invoke are equally on par with some of the effects of pharmacology, of things like high-intensity interval training and exercise, and other things that we think of as more potent forms of intervention.
So, if you are of the mindset that a gratitude practice is kind of weak sauce, buckle up because the data actually point to the fact that a gratitude practice is a very, very potent way in which you can steer your mental and physical health in positive directions and that those effects are very long lasting.
And while I regrettably don’t share Huberman’s muscle mass (I’m more of the traditional pencil-neck academic), I do share his spicy enthusiasm for gratitude’s potential to transform your life, especially after reviewing a trainload of research. So as our GI Joe brain scientist suggests, buckle up and join us on the gratitude-hot-sauce express…all aboard!
No Thank You
I never considered myself to be a particularly grateful person. It wasn’t like I was blatantly ungrateful, it’s just that I never really spent time truly counting my blessings. Take the following example. For six years, my wife and I tried to have a child, unsuccessfully. We went through all the tricks in the book (use your imagination) coming back empty handed every time. It was an extremely frustrating period. While our friends seemed to be popping out babies left and right, we were having tiring conversations about whether we should adopt. And although we were on the waiting list for IVF treatment, we didn’t want to get our hopes up.
When we finally did start treatment, the doctors quickly discovered that it was my equipment that was faulty. Reading three words on the medical report—low. sperm. count.—felt like, forgive me, the biggest kick in the balls. My wife, forever understanding and supportive, reassured me that we still had a fighting chance. I moped around our apartment for the next couple of weeks, feeling useless, while she went into action, measuring her temperature religiously while jabbing her stomach full of hormones like the female Viking warrior that she is.
After several more uncertain months of waiting, the day finally came. My wife’s eggs were to be retrieved, fertilized with my seemingly uncooperative sperm, and inserted back into her in a procedure I can only describe as surreal. “One egg fertilized,” the nurses would chant in a subdued celebration, while my wife and I observed the clinical procedure nervously. “Two eggs fertilized, three eggs fertilized,” they continued. As they went on counting cheerfully, I began to feel queasy. And while it was my wife who quietly endured the physical pain, it was me who needed most of the support. I remember stumbling out of the clinic happy the procedure went well, but even happier that it was over.
A couple of weeks later, we finally got the call we had been waiting for: my wife was pregnant! You would think that this should have been one of the most gratitude-filled moments of my life. After all, I had all sorts of reasons to be profoundly grateful. Grateful for the mind-blowing advancements of medical science. Grateful for the medical professionals who through their hard-earned skills had literally created life for us. Grateful for my wife who persisted through all sorts of agonizing procedures without one complaint. Grateful for the Norwegian healthcare system, which offered us this expensive service practically for free.
I do remember feeling very fortunate that the process was successful and that we would soon be parents. But the gratitude I felt was short lived and it wasn’t communicated strongly enough. I remember thinking I should write an article to thank everyone involved in the miraculous life-giving procedure but soon dropped the idea and was back on the hamster wheel, not much happier or sadder than before the entire IVF ordeal began. Nine months later, Emma, our beautiful daughter, came kicking into this world while my wife and I stared at her in absolute awe. And while I was of course elated that she had ten fingers and ten toes and was now a part of our lives, I remember also being preoccupied by work and by the many other petty things that seemed at the time important but really were not.
I recall shooting out a random work email from the hospital delivery room to a close colleague who immediately wrote back: “What are you doing, dude? Don’t you dare send me another email right now.” (God bless you, Martin.) I’m also ashamed to admit that a couple of days later while my wife and child were still at the hospital, I considered delivering a TEDx talk, which I’d been invited to give at a business school. What I failed to realize is that the most momentous of “deliveries,” the one which should have taken all my undivided attention, had already happened in front of my very eyes. Embarrassing as this all sounds, that’s where my mind was—everywhere and nowhere. Six years later, though, something would happen in that same hospital that would completely change all that.
Your Brain on Gratitude
“How would you feel if in the middle of your most distraught moment, unbound from your every day comforts and scared for your survival, a complete stranger saved your life?” This is the first line in a study by Antonio Damasio and colleagues with the aim of mapping out the neurobiological events in the brain during experiences of gratitude. Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California and one of the world’s leading figures in the study of emotions and consciousness, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to measure blood flow in subjects’ brains while they observed stories of Holocaust survivors receiving life-sustaining help. The subjects were instructed to put themselves in the shoes of the concentration-camp survivors and imagine that it was them receiving the help. They were then asked to rate how grateful they felt during each of the helping events.
This study was one of the first to offer a comprehensive understanding of the wide-ranging impacts of gratitude on the biological mechanisms of the brain. The results uncovered activation in brain areas, such as the medial prefrontal cortex, which are related to all sorts of awesome, pro-social process such as:
· empathic behavior
· the generation of meaning in one’s life
· fairness and economic decision-making
· moral cognition and subjective value judgments, i.e., evaluating right and wrong
· perspective taking and theory of mind, i.e., understanding that other’s experience of an event can be different to the way we experience that same event
· rewarding social interactions
· interpersonal bonding and social support
· pain relief
These discoveries are encouraging, especially considering that the gratitude felt by the subjects wasn’t even related to personal events. Subjects were simply reacting to someone else’s life-saving story. So, the next time your mood needs a quick pick me up, just think that it’s quite likely that at that very moment, someone somewhere is saving a helpless person’s life. And as we now know on the morning of May 6, 2021 that helpless person turned out to be me.
Gratitude on Steroids
Anja, my surgeon, had worked diligently for several hours to heal my failing heart. In the process, she was forced to resuscitate it three consecutive times. Once I was finally stable, her job was done. And just like that, she was gone.
This rockstar of a woman just saved my life—multiple times—and I have nothing to say? “Wait!” I said to her, mustering as much energy as I could but only achieving a bit more than a whisper. Anja turned around and took a couple of steps towards me, as I murmured: “Thank you. Thank you so very much.” The edges of her eyes contracted above her surgical mask, as she simply replied: “No problem.” A terse answer only a no-nonsense Norwegian could pull off with such panache. She walked away once more without further fanfare.
“Waaaaait!” I pleaded again. She turned around staying put this time. “Please thank your team for me,” I said. They had, after all, offered invaluable support, through thick and thin. She turned to look at the dozen or so exhausted doctors and nurses in the room and said proudly: “God job, alle sammen”—good job, everyone. The room fell silent, with the odd machine still beeping in the background. They quietly glanced at each other, slowly, one by one, sharing a tiny yet powerful moment of connection and appreciation that only silence can provide. As I was wheeled out of the room, I knew that that brief yet profound sight of shared comradery and gratitude would forever leave a mark on me.
I spent the following week at the ICU and heart ward where I received personal treatment rivaling that of a Four Seasons Hotel. I was watched over by dozens of nurses who were the exemplification of compassion and competence. Barbara was one of them. A Faroe Island native, she’s a gentle, soft-spoken woman with penetrating yet nurturing eyes who took care of me for the first two days, tending to my every need. Everything from swabbing my dry lips with a tiny sponge of water, to spoon feeding me, to providing me with a cornucopia of medications and painkillers, to performing other more lurid procedures, of which I’ll spare you the details. And as peculiar as this may sound, the many hours I spent reflecting and convalescing next to Barbara and her colleagues were some of the most joyous of my life. So, when I was discharged from the hospital with a reasonably clean bill of health on International Nurses Day (out of all days!), I felt oddly sad to leave.
Recognizing that you owe your life to perfect strangers is a, well, strange feeling to have. It’s also beautiful, uplifting, and profoundly liberating. It takes the notion of gratitude to another level. I now wake up every morning with a ritual: I put my hands together, bow my head, and acknowledge that I owe my life to Anja and Barbara and a handful of other people whom, prior to my moment of need, I never even knew existed. As Marcus Aurelius suggested: “When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love.” Now I know that each time I do this, I’m not only honoring my savior-strangers, but I’m also helping to light up my medial prefrontal cortex like a Christmas tree while stimulating all sorts of wonderful neurobiological reactions that make me a better human.
Gratitude Letter
Each year as a final class assignment, I ask my university students to write a gratitude letter to a loved one and, if possible, deliver it in person. The letters, which I collect at the end of the course, are profoundly touching. Bursting with love and appreciation, they serve as an opportunity for these young people to truly open up to their parents and other close relatives. For many, it’s an excuse to finally say the beautiful things they’ve wanted to say for a long time. It’s always baffled me to realize that some of the most loving things we can say to another human being turn out to be some of the most difficult to communicate.
If it wasn’t for the strong confidentiality agreement behind the letters, I would share some of their content here. Suffice is to say, though, that twenty-somethings can be intensely reflective, inspiringly raw, and deeply affectionate when given a chance. Assigning this exercise is highly self-serving, of course. Just imagine yours truly, sprawled on my couch in my favorite pajamas, fireplace crackling in the background, as I read over dozens of these beautiful letters while my brain overdoses on feel-good neurotransmitters—a genuine gratitude bacchanal!
Here are some of the comments I’ve received from students after they’ve delivered their assignment:
· “I was smiling the entire time I wrote the letter and didn’t realize I went a little over one page.”
· “Call me dramatic, but it was life changing and the people close to me can actually feel the difference (in a positive way!).”
· “I still find myself reflecting more and trying to do things that bring me and the people around me joy.”
For all this assignment’s beauty, I recognize, however, that some of my more traditionalist academic colleagues would cringe at the thought of it. “It’s not academic enough,” they would most likely say, “It’s not rooted in research.” And while I would of course disagree, I would forgive them for thinking so. Fortunately, though, the skeptics wouldn’t have to take my word for it. University of Pennsylvania Professor Martin Seligman, the man widely recognized as being the founding father of the positive psychology movement, has done all the work for me.
He and his colleagues studied 40 distinct happiness interventions. The goal was to evaluate the impact each intervention had on people’s positive emotions, and how much meaning and engagement the interventions generated in people’s lives. These interventions included tasks like journaling about moments of thriving; reflecting upon things that went well each day; and receiving feedback on personal strengths.
It turns out that out of the 40 interventions, the most effective and potent one was the “gratitude visit,” which asked participants to write a letter of gratitude to someone who had been particularly kind to them but had never been appropriately thanked. Seligman notes: “In fact, participants in the gratitude visit condition showed the largest positive changes in the whole study. This boost in happiness and decrease in depressive symptoms were maintained at follow-up assessments one week and one month later.” And during a time when depression rates amongst college students are sadly at an all-time high, I think this assignment is just what the doctor ordered.
Gratitude Journaling
Professor Robert A. Emmons from the University of California, Davis is widely considered the world’s pioneer in gratitude studies. He and a colleague conducted a ten-week study where they split hundreds of college students into three random groups. One group was asked to journal a couple of lines a week about recent events which they were grateful for. The second group journaled on things that had recently annoyed them. And the third group, the control group, wrote about neutral events. All participants were asked to continuously record their moods, coping behaviors, health behaviors, physical symptoms, and overall life evaluation.
The results? Well according to Emmons, “participants in the gratitude condition reported considerably more satisfaction with their lives as a whole, felt more optimism about the upcoming week, and felt more connected with others than did participants in the control condition.” The gratitude subjects also reported sleeping and exercising more. You read that right: it turns out that reflecting upon the good in your life can help with your sixpack! Emmon’s general conclusion was that “it appears that participation in the gratitude condition led to substantial and consistent improvements in people’s assessments of the global well-being.”
The study also involved the participant’s spouses or significant others, which in my opinion adds the most important twist to the story. These partners were asked to rate how they perceived the subjects’ attitude or mood and general life satisfaction during the study. Not surprisingly, the participants who journaled on gratitude were rated higher by their partners in these characteristics. This, I think, is the proverbial proof in the pudding. When the wifey or hubbie starts to notice a positive change in your behavior, you know that your gratitude journal was a good investment.
Gratitude at Work
Speaking of investment. For the company managers reading this: yes, gratitude is also a powerful behavior at work. A 2022 Gallup report found that employees who receive authentic and personalized recognition—i.e., acknowledgment, praise, and thanks—are:
· 73% less likely to “always” or “very often” feel burned out
· 56% less likely to be looking or watching for job opportunities
· 44% more likely to be “thriving” in their life overall
· 5 times as likely to feel connected to their culture
· 5 times as likely to see a path to grow at their organization
· 4 times as likely to recommend their organization to friends and family
· 4 times as likely to be engaged
I admit that statistics like these may feel meaningless and empty—they’re difficult to wrap your head around. So, it’s sometimes helpful to take a step back and recognize that all these numbers are tied to thousands of real human beings with deep and genuine needs, wants, and concerns.
Take, for instance, the following personal situation of mine. I offer training services to many different universities and corporations. Out of all these clients, there’s one in particular that pays less than half my usual fee. I’ve never really minded and have always looked forward to more work with them. Why? For the straight-forward reason that the person in charge of the program is one of the kindest people I know and always makes it a point to thank me, personally and publicly. More importantly, her gratitude oozes authenticity. Last year, she even wrote a poem about me as a show of appreciation for my work and improved health. There she proudly stood, in front of the 60-plus workshop participants on the last day of a five-day program, reading off her creative lines one by one as I struggled (and soon failed) to keep from sobbing. That short, unforgettable moment was worth more than 50 paychecks combined. Heck, for this woman I’d perpetually work for free.
Her poem sits over my fireplace. It serves as a reminder of the unrivaled power behind genuine gratitude. Having said this, if writing a poem for your employees, clients or business partners sounds like a bit too much, I don’t blame you. Luckily, as we’ve now learned, all it takes to touch—and thus motivate—someone is an honest thanks. So the next time a colleague contributes to your success or brings her best to the office, don’t forget to give her a shout out with a genuine show of gratitude. It will go a long way—for you, for her, and for the bottom line.
The Meaning of Gratitude
Okay, so gratitude is clearly good for the giver, the receiver, and the organizations where we work. But why is that? And how does gratitude evolve from a relatively simple behavior to long-lasting value? To understand these questions better, let’s put on our favorite pocket protector and nerd it out by digging a bit deeper into gratitude’s definition and mechanisms.
The Oxford English dictionary defines gratitude as “a warm sense of appreciation.” Now, if we unpack this further, appreciation in turn can mean four distinct things:
1. To notice, perceive or have awareness of. 👀
E.g., I appreciate that my brand-new pair of swanky Italian reading glasses are sitting on my desk, and that they are clean and shiny, and ready to be used for another one of my writing sessions.
2. To recognize as valuable or useful. 💎
E.g., I appreciate the capacity my glasses have to take my increasingly blurry vision and turn it into astonishingly clear and crisp visual appearances during the many hours I spend reading and typing on my laptop.
3. To be thankful for. 🙏
E.g., I appreciate the human ingenuity, tradition, and craftmanship from the dozens if not hundreds of individuals involved in designing, manufacturing, marketing, and transporting the glasses from the factory floor all the way onto my face.
4. To rise in value. ⤴️
E.g., The more I reflect on how much this pair of glasses has helped me become a better educator (after all, they also make me look smarter!), the more my enjoyment of, and gratitude for, them appreciates.
This is a useful, although admittedly obsessive, way of dissecting the multi-layered meaning of gratitude since it helps us understand that first, we must bring deep awareness to the goodness in our lives, and not take it for granted or ignore it (Definition 1). When we make it a point to be present and aware in order to really notice the good, we naturally begin to recognize its value and the practical impact it has on us (Definition 2). This recognition, furthermore, permits us to be thankful to the individuals responsible for bringing that value to life (Definition 3). And routinely being grateful for the goodness in our lives, and especially to those responsible for creating it, stimulates an upward, virtuous cycle of increased positive emotions and general wellness (Definition 4).
As Tal Ben-Shahar, happiness scholar and creator of Harvard’s most popular course, likes to say: “When I appreciate the good in my life, the good appreciates.”
Gratitude Broadens & Builds
The reason why “the good appreciates,” or builds over time, goes straight to the heart of one of the most influential concepts of positive psychology: Barbara Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory of positive emotions. Professor Fredrickson is a Stanford-trained social psychologist turned neuroscientist who was dubbed “the genius of the positive psychology movement” by Martin Seligman, whose work we’ve already visited (remember the gratitude letters?).
Two decades ago, Fredrickson concluded:
Positive emotions have a complementary effect: they broaden people’s momentary thought-action repertoires, widening the array of the thoughts and actions that come to mind…It is important to note that the personal resources accrued during states of positive emotions are durable—they outlast the transient emotional states that led to their acquisition. By consequence, then, the often incidental effect of experiencing a positive emotion is an increase in one’s personal resources.
Yes, I know, that quote was a bit obscure. But I’ve included it anyways because it matters—a lot. What Barb, our Stanford genius, is basically saying here is that when we experience positive emotions, they tend to open up the possibility for other positive emotions to virtuously creep in and grow.
So now going back to gratitude, people who are regularly grateful are more likely to feel loved and cared for by others—they feel the world has treated them fairly. This mindset, or general stance towards life, expands their ability to be vulnerable, trust, make lasting bonds, and offer help to others. These behaviors turn out to be great social resources that inevitably have an upward spiraling effect on people’s lives, on the people around them, and on society as a whole.
For example, in an oft-cited longitudinal study, a random group of hundreds of female undergraduates of Harvard College (then Radcliffe), were measured 30 years later on their desire to contribute to the welfare of society. The researchers called this measure: “generativity motivation.” Those with the greatest motivation to contribute to the wellbeing of others, not surprisingly, tended to have been helped themselves by influential mentors in early adulthood. “Mentors may also have supported the psychological growth of those women high on generativity motivation,” the researchers concluded. It seems like the Hollywoodesque concept of “paying it forward” is a real thing—a natural, and highly reassuring, tendency we have as humans to broaden, build, and share the good in our lives. How about that for a warm-and-fuzzy feeling?
A Walk in the Mountains
I hope you’re down for some more warmth and fuzziness because following is a lovely encounter that I recently had with Espen, a close friend of mine. It exemplifies the power that gratitude has to “broaden and build.”
My relationship with Espen doesn’t go way back. Nonetheless, we’ve recently developed a solid bromance. He’s a tall, blond, blue-eyed Norwegian who could easily make Ken, the doll, insecure about his body image. We met in a corporate training program, which I led a couple of years ago, and quickly hit it off. A hardcore engineer, officer in the Norwegian Armed Forces, and Senior Vice President at a global shipping giant, Espen is a family and company man far from your typical touchy-feely, flower-picking hippie. So when I received a deeply touching and vulnerable get-well video from him last year, I was floored and moved.
Espen was out in nature as he held his phone closes to his squared, well-chiseled face. His wrinkled forehead, shaking upper lip, and slow, meandering speech exposed a profound concerned for my wellbeing. Those seven digital minutes he offered have stuck with me ever since. Regretfully, it took me a while to get back to him, until I reciprocated with a video of my own letting him know how grateful I was for our friendship and that despite my silence he was often in my thoughts. (You were warned about the bromance.)
Three weeks ago, Espen and I finally met face-to-face and went for a long Saturday-morning powerwalk, as ageing fortysomethings do, in the Bergen mountains. We paced along a well-marked trail and took in the stirringly colorful summer scenery. Espen explained how he had recently showed his father our video exchange. His dad was astonished by the care we showed each other. “Where did you learn to do that?” his father asked him. At first, Espen didn’t put much thought to the question, shrugging it off and thinking it was simply his dad’s way of showing surprise. A couple of days later, though, Espen realized that he had missed a special chance to connect with his father. The next time they met, Espen pounced all over the opportunity:
“Dad, remember when you asked me about those videos that Fede and I shared? Well, I thought about it at length, and I concluded that much of the source for my ability to appreciate and care for others comes from you. It was you who taught me this—through your deeds. And for this, I am deeply grateful.” His 75-year-old father slowly teared up, visibly touched by his son’s reflection. “This was one of the most meaningful conversations I’ve had with my father. The guy’s an old-school Viking. He’s not one to cry easily,” Espen told me smiling as we made our way over the last hill.
Espen’s decision to send me that first video sparked into life a virtuous set of occurrences, which eventually enabled him to broaden and build his emotional resources by sharing a uniquely impactful moment of gratitude with his father. That conversation, in turn, enabled his father to recognize the influence he’s had on his son’s life, and is now enabling me to share with you the transmittable virtues of gratitude.
Caveat No. 1
Despite its widespread benefits, it’s important to understand that gratitude has a limited shelf life, i.e., its impact doesn’t last forever. As Seligman makes clear: “But by three months, participants in the gratitude visit condition were no happier or less depressed than they had been at baseline.” This proves why it’s critical to make gratitude not just a one-off, but an integral, daily part of our lives.
Caveat No. 2
Like all feel-good emotions, gratitude increases in value and is healthier for us when it’s shared with others. For all its virtues, however, gratitude could easily turn unconstructive if all it does is help to develop a self-centered attitude: I’m so blessed, my life is so great, all these great things happened to me. And while some self-focus is necessary and healthy, as a rule of thumb we should try to keep gratitude more about others and less about us. As Seneca taught in Rome two millennia ago: “The wise man enjoys the giving more than the recipient enjoys the receiving.” In fact, Emmons goes even further in describing the deeply interpersonal nature of gratitude:
The experience of gratitude, and the actions stimulated by it, build and strengthen social bonds and friendships. Moreover, encouraging people to focus on the benefits they have received from others leads them to feel loved and cared for by others. These are social resources because, in times of need, these social bonds are wellsprings to be tapped for the provision of social support. Gratitude, thus, is a form of love…”
And so, our story began with an awkward circle around a dinner table. It then transported us to the hospital where a life was created and another one was saved. It took us through the Bergen mountains. And now, happily, it ends with love.
If you want to learn how to make gratitude an integral part of your life, join us for our Life Design & Leadership Program.