This Year, Start a New Year’s Gratitude Jar

Resolutions are great but lets face it, most people fail a couple of weeks into the new year. There are many ideals and goals people have which are motivated by ‘willpower’, which in turn is a conscious state of mind that doesn’t really help people propel past the harder times when they eventually come around.

Instead of setting the bar so high you cant reach it, work towards the goal. This is achieved by appreciating and congratulating yourself each day on how far you’ve come from the day, week, month or year before. At the end of the year, if you’ve managed to spare about a minute to write your gratitude of the day, you can reflect on the progress with hindsight vision. If the goal is a physical milestone, see if you have managed to accomplish it.

The way to start is simple – use sticky notes to write about what you were grateful for either that day (if you do it at night) or the day before (if you do it in the mornings). This is particularly helpful to people who have an all-or-nothing behaviour patterns, but just about anyone can benefit from small goal wins. Put these stickies in a note a jar and make it part of a morning routine, as simple as brushing your teeth. If life is currently not that great for you, there are always things to be grateful about – maybe you ate something delicious, or you are grateful for a potential job prospect that you have been applying for, or maybe you had a good conversation with someone. The point is, its better for morale to look back o the things you did accomplish rather than notice you didn’t yet reach a particular goal.

Try it out for a few weeks, and notice if there are changes. This is sure to shift your perceptions on life and automatically makes you notice the positive rater than negative events that are happening around you. As well, the more positive you put out into the universe, the more it will reciprocate in kind. So why not give it a go even if you don’t believe in the magic of “the universe” and such; it wont cost you anything beyond the price of post-its and you may see your life is not as bad as you think. People generally dwell on the negative but if you purposely work at finding at least one thing you are grateful for in one day, you will notice more and more of those things coming your way. My life did a 180 when i started my gratitude jar, and now just 3 years later I have a case full. I haven’t yet decided what i will do with all these colourful notes, but it will come to me when the time is right.

What I liked best about the process is that people are unlikely to read it, and if they do they only get snippets, wheras a notebook is easy to misplace or leave in a spot people might read.  There is a centralized location for them to go, its private and helps keep you on a schedule without making it feel like a chore.  It helps with consistency and it becomes second nature, which may in turn give you the confidence to start other projects you’ve maybe put on the back burner, or completed for a few weeks before forgetting about its existence.  Worked for me!