Gratitude can be defined as the quality of being thankful. It's most commonly emphasized during the month of November in the midst of the arrival of Thanksgiving, but it should be embraced year-round. Negative emotions like worry, doubt, complaining, etc can take front and center in the day to day of most people's lives. Practicing gratitude takes the backseat. When you really think about it, how often do we dedicate time to reflect and appreciate the blessings in our lives? All of the good things, even the little things?
If you're looking for a shift in your attitude, happiness, and attraction of positivity in your life - practicing the power of gratitude may be the ideal start.
The Science Of Gratitude
Gratitude is arguably, the “ultimate positive emotion". Gratitude is strongly associated with different aspects of psychological and physical well-being. According to research, grateful people have more positive emotion, life satisfaction, vitality, optimism, pleasant feelings, empathy, generosity, and less depression and stress.
In her book, The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, Sonja Lyubomirsky discusses eight ways gratitude boosts happiness:
- Gratitude promotes savoring positive life experiences.
- Gratitude may increase a sense of confidence and self-worth, by encouraging you to consider what you value about your current life.
- Gratitude helps you cope with difficulties.
- Gratitude encourages kindness and other moral behavior.
- Gratitude helps strengthen relationships.
- Gratitude inhibits envy.
- Gratitude helps undermine negative emotions.
- Gratitude keeps us from taking the good things for granted.
The Power Of Shifting Your Thoughts
How often do you inadvertently create negative situations in your mind and thought patterns, without ever considering the positive outlook? For example, as women age, we have been conditioned to feel negative about “getting older" or saying goodbye to our “glory days". I began to adopt this habit during my mid-twenties when I honestly felt I had no other life-changing milestones to look forward to. I remember incessantly complaining about reaching my mid-twenties a few years ago, but what changed my thought pattern around this negative emotion was my mother.
At almost 60 years old, she has always proudly professed her age and celebrates aging each year with gratitude. It reveals how she feels about herself, healthy, vibrant, and beautiful. She conditioned her mind to correlate birthdays with gratitude because of a very important notion my grandmother taught her when she was a young adult.“Birthdays are a blessing. God granted you another year to live in your fullness. Every day and every year you grow older is a gift from God that is unfortunately not granted to everyone."
Can you see how this very small shift in the context of your thoughts and expression can inspire you to view the positivity in a certain circumstance?
The 21-Day Gratitude Challenge
Practicing daily gratitude is a positive psychological intervention you can work towards incorporating in your daily lifestyle. It requires very little commitment, just simply a shift in your attitude and deliberate mindfulness. It begins with looking at all situations whether good or bad from a positive perspective. Will you begin to look at the glass as half full or half empty? Looking at the glass as half-full will allow you to discover unforeseen opportunities, benefits, and positive outlooks for any situation.
Your inspiration to practice gratitude can be derived from a religious or spiritual context. One persistent theme within the power of gratitude is “appreciating what you have in order to attract more". Your positive energy will shift, therefore your positive energy and outcomes will shift too.
If you're ready to shift your mindset, you can check out a few gratitude challenges here, here, and here.
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"For example, if you’ve fundamentally changed what your product is and does, it’s likely that your brand is out of alignment with the business. Or, if you find your company is developing a reputation that doesn’t serve it, it might be time to pump the brakes and figure out what needs to change.
She continues, "Sometimes you’ll see companies (especially startups) announce a name change that comes with updated messaging, visuals, etc. That usually means their vision has changed or expanded, and their previous branding was too narrow/couldn’t encompass everything they planned to do."
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The Brand Doula was born in 2019, and its focus is on putting "the experiences, goals, and needs of women of color founders first," as well as brands with "culture-shifting missions."
According to Lola, culture-shifting is "the act of influencing dominant behavior, beliefs, or experiences in a community or group (ideally, for the better)."
"At The Brand Doula, we work with companies and leaders that set out to challenge the status quo in their industries and communities. They’re here to make an impact that sends ripples across the market," she says.
"We help the problem solvers of the world — the ones who aren't satisfied with 'this is how it's always been' and instead ask 'how could this be better?' Our clients build for impact, reimagining tools, systems, and ways of living to move cultures forward."
The Brand Doula has worked with many brands, including Too Collective, to assist with their collaboration with Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty and Balanced Black Girl for a "refresh," aka rebrand. For businesses looking to rebrand, Lola shares four essential steps.
1. Do an audit of your current brand experience — what’s still relevant and what needs to change? Reflect on why you’re doing the rebrand in the first place and what success would look like after relaunching.
2. Tackle the overall strategy first — before you start redesigning logos and websites, align on a new vision for your brand. How do you want your company to be positioned moving forward? Has your audience changed at all? Will your company have a fresh personality and voice?
3. Bring your audience along the journey — there’s no need to move in secret. Inviting your current audience into the journey can actually help them feel more connected to and invested in your story, enough to stick around as changes are being made.
4. Keep business moving — one of my biggest pet peeves is when companies take down their websites as soon as they have the idea to rebrand, then have a Coming Soon page up for months! You lose a lot of momentum and interest by doing that. If you’re still in business and generating income, continue to operate while you work on your rebrand behind the scenes. You don’t want to cut existing customers off out of the blue, and you also don’t want so much downtime that folks forget your business exists or start looking for other solutions.
While determining whether the rebrand was successful may take a few months, Lola says a clear sign that it is unsuccessful is negative feedback from your target audience. "Customers are typically more vocal about what they don’t like more than what they do like," she says.
But some good signs to look out for are improvements in engagement with your marketing, positive reviews, press and increase in retention, and overall feeling aligned with the new branding.
For more information about Lola and The Brand Doula, visit her website, thebranddoula.com.
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