037 – Flashes of Elation: Gratitude

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Do you practice gratitude in your daily life? How important do you think it is to be thankful for where you are and what you have right now?

In this episode of The New Music Industry Podcast, I look at the importance of saying “thank you” in our daily lives.

Podcast Highlights:

00:14 – My upcoming book, Flashes of Elation
00:47 – In this episode…
00:57 – Pre-orders
01:20 – Gratitude
01:37 – Living in the moment
02:03 – You get more of what you put your attention on
02:19 – My personal development journey
02:40 – What is success?
03:31 – You can be happy today
03:54 – Thanking others
05:04 – Practicing gratitude

Transcription:

Hey, in recent episodes, we’ve been looking at my upcoming book, Flashes of Elation. This is a collection of essays on the topic of creativity, covering many different aspects of creating and the things creatives tend to struggle with.

It’s just as relevant to musicians and businesspeople as it is to photographers, painters, and anybody that does any kind of creative work, like writing.

In this episode, I want to look at a section called “Gratitude.” And this is the last section I’ll be looking at in this podcast episodes, but if you enjoyed these, consider pre-ordering the book. Pre-orders close on June 30, 2017, and you’ll only be able to claim the pre-order bonuses up until that point.

After that, you can still buy the book once it’s launched, because that’s not the launch day. You’ll still be able to pick up the book, you just won’t be able to get those bonuses, which I promise do come at a nominal feel.

So, let’s have a look at gratitude.

Gratitude

Gratitude is something I practice every single day. It doesn’t matter what kind of day I’ve had, I always identify things I’m thankful for and take the time to be grateful for them before I turn my lamp off to fall asleep.

As human beings, we have a tendency of thinking that we live in three distinct timelines – past, present, and future. This simply isn’t true. You are always living in the present. Yesterday is a memory, and tomorrow is just another “today”, much like today, in fact.

You might be thinking, “I’ll be grateful when I have something to be grateful for.” It doesn’t work that way, because that time will never come. Again, there’s only now. You can either be grateful now, or not at all.

You can either be grateful now, or not at all. Click To Tweet

I’m not a proponent of the Law of Attraction, but the idea that you get more of what you put your attention on is true. What you focus on grows. When you think about what you’re grateful for, more things will come into your experience that will cause you to be even more grateful.

I’ve read a lot of personal development blog posts, articles, and books. I’ve listened to a lot of self-help audios. I’ve spent years and tens of thousands of dollars on my business training. I’ve tried a lot of so-called “success principles” that haven’t worked for me. But gratitude is something that’s consistently worked for me, especially in the last two years or so. So I made it a habit.

What is success? That depends on who you ask, because everyone has their own vision of success, and everyone’s model is correct. There is no wrong answer. You get to define what your goals are.

You get to define what success means to you. Click To Tweet

But we forget that we can be happy now, not in some distant time when we’ve accomplished everything we’ve set out to do. As far as today is concerned, that time doesn’t even exist. You’re here now. So it seems silly to me that anyone would defer happiness because they think that tomorrow will somehow be different. Tomorrow is nothing more than an idea. Time is relative. We’ve convinced ourselves that it’s a resource, when in reality it’s just a fact of life.

I am certainly not discounting what can be accomplished in a month, a year, 5 years, or even 10 years when you apply yourself to a task or project. We all change over time. We all learn and grow.

But right now it’s all about today. It’s always about today. And whether you know it or not, even today you can experience some of that happiness you’re reserving for some future time. Even today you can be someone you like, do something you want, and have a piece of something you desire.

The question is not “why should we be happy today?” The question is “why shouldn’t we be happy today?” If you’re not going to be grateful now, then when will you be?

***

I’ve learned to say, “thank you for your generosity” whenever I have a guest on my podcast. This is not an accident.

I first heard Seth Godin say this on a podcast. And then I heard him say it again and again on other shows he appeared on. I liked it.

If you’ve never had a podcast before, let me tell you something – it’s easy to take your guests for granted. When they don’t even share the episode they were on with their followers, you wonder what you did wrong. Are they too busy? Do they not care? Did I say something to offend them?

To be fair, for some of those wonderful folks, there would be no value in sharing it, because they probably won’t get a lot of exposure from it. They probably won’t sell a lot of products. They probably won’t get a lot of followers or email subscribers. It certainly depends on the show, but they’ve already had to take time out of their schedule to make the appearance, and that in itself is an act of generosity.

I’ve learned not to concern myself with the results too much. I’ll send my guests a friendly email letting them know that their episode went live, and follow up with them on occasion after that. But there’s no value in trying to convince someone to do something they weren’t even inclined to do in the first place. Sharing would be an added layer of generosity.

But no matter what happens, my guests will always get a “thank you” from me. They’ll probably read it and hear it multiple times. That’s because I appreciate them, what they do, and what they were willing to share with me. It isn’t always easy to open up and talk about yourself.

***

When someone says they practice something abstract like “gratitude”, I’m sometimes left wondering what that means. So, let me share with you what that means to me.

I’ll practice gratitude by:

Writing down things I’m thankful for.
Holding a “gratitude rock” in my hand while thinking about the things I was most thankful for that day.
Say “thank you” out loud and in my mind, multiple times per day.

If you do this today, will it make a difference? Maybe, but it will be miniscule at best. And so it is with anything in life, including creativity. Will drawing a doodle on the corner of your to-do list instantly transform you into a star today? No. But you will have done something to practice your creativity.

Don’t overestimate what you can do in a day. Instead, make valuable practices – like gratitude – a habit. Over time, it will become second nature, and it will affect your subconscious. But without repetition, you will soon forget what you think you “know.”

People sometimes say things need to go from your head to your heart before you truly understand them. I think there’s something to that. Facts are just facts. What difference will it make if I read an informative blog post today? Maybe not much, but given enough repetition, it will start to snowball into a wealth of knowledge.

Gratitude can also snowball.

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David Andrew Wiebe

Founder & CEO at Music Entrepreneur HQ

Award-winning composer, best-selling author, professional musician coach, and podcaster of over 10 years. Wiebe helps musicians like you unlock your full potential. If you'd like to be notified whenever the blog is updated, click here to subscribe.

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