Some leaders see enormous value in giving thanks. Being grateful and expressing
that gratefulness determines their leadership. They make gratitude a daily practice.

Like the ex-chairman of insurance broker Willis Group Holdings, Joseph Plumeri,
who spent about 25 percent of his time thanking people by phone or a handwritten
card.

Why is that?

What is the pay-off for those leaders?

Gratitude is so powerful because:

– Gratitude Makes You Choose
Every time you look at a certain situation you determine what “glasses” you wear.
By glasses I don’t mean literally glasses but how you frame your perspective of
the situation.

What you see through your chosen glasses determines your reality. By choosing your
glasses you choose how to translate each leadership situation. Again and again.

That’s how you create your truth. And that in turn drives your decisions and actions.

This makes you powerful. The most successful leaders ignore others’ translations
of their ideas, skills, habits, and hires. These people instead chose their own
translations and succeed.

This doesn’t mean that leaders who choose glasses with a gratitude perspective are
choosing for denial or phoniness. They choose the gratitude translation.

You also choose how you look at things. Choose to choose gratitude.

– Gratitude Connects You To The Present Moment.
Gratitude requires noticing what’s around you right now.
For being grateful you need to be in the moment. And that is such a powerful present:
to be present.

Work situations force us to think, to be busy, to plan the future.

Gratitude is the vehicle to connect to the present moment. It’s like waking up from a dream that took you to the past or in the future. Waking up to this moment and be in that moment.

And when you are really here you notice what’s around you. You listen differently,
you connect differently, you engage differently, you lead differently.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote “Life is available only in the present moment.” That’s the
same for leadership:

– Gratitude Makes You Acknowledge.
A gratitude focus brings awareness to all those little things that most of the time
get unnoticed.

The employee who always brings in coffee for other employees; the employee who has
worked for the organization for 23 years and never missed one staff meeting; the
employee who always shovels the snow of the stairs of the employee entrance.

As a leader you want to acknowledge what’s there.

It’s already there only waiting for you to be seen.

Gratitude validates.

Gratitude expresses, “yes, that’s what I like.”

Gratitude makes us lead beyond the mundane.

It calls for the three C’s: Courage, Creativity, and Connection.

Food for Thought:
Thanksgiving, after all, is a word of action.
W.J. Cameron