Unexpected Gratitude

The other day I was working at a café here in Toronto, with a view through the window into the climbing gym where my youngest was in an after-school program. This has been our weekly routine for some months now and it is working beautifully. As I sat there, feeling stressed by what was on my plate, I felt a huge wave of gratitude come over me: my son was doing something he loves with a good friend, while I was preparing for a workshop on a topic that is meaningful to me, for a law firm that inspires me. I felt so grateful that I can do this work and be paid for it! And on top of that, I was feeling grateful and excited to be preparing to be a coach on the Feminine Power internal team to offer one-one bonus coaching calls to women who signed up early for the recent Feminine Power 7-week course. Reading these women’s answers to their pre-session questionnaires was inspiring me so much - I felt such a sense of privilege to be able to Make Room For Them and their visions. It seems to me that women are rising all around the world – an army of “courageous love warriors”, to quote Debbie Ford in Courage: Overcoming Fear and Igniting Self-Confidence. I felt grateful to be a part of that, even as I felt the stress of it.

So as I sat in the café, energized by my feelings of gratitude, I realized that that I needed a quote to end my session with Lash Condo Law, the inspiring law firm where I was delivering the workshop. I started to flip my much-loved copy of The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good for You and How To Get Good At It by Kelly McGonigal, which was the focus for this particular workshop. This book, and McGonigal’s Ted Talk, have been a game-changers for me as I have worked to shift my relationship to stress to a more positive place.

It was with a sense of synchronicity and awe that I read this quote which I ended up using:

When I committed myself to the process of embracing stress, I didn’t anticipate the biggest way it would affect my everyday experience of life. To my surprise, I started to feel a flood of gratitude in situations that I would also describe as highly stressful. It wasn’t an intentional mindset shift; the gratitude just showed up. I still haven’t fully figured out why this was the biggest change for me, but it probably has something to do with what was most toxic about my experience of stress before I embraced it – a habit of resenting the things in my life that caused stress because I found the experience of stress so distressing.

I’ve observed that the effects of embracing stress seem to follow this pattern – changing exactly whatever is most toxic about the relationship each person has with the stress in her or her life. Students tell me about being less afraid, less lonely, or more enthusiastic about life. They feel less victimized by their lives, or less guilty for having a stressful life. Some are able to trust others more, others are able to stand up for themselves for the first time. Some find themselves feeling less angry about things that happened in their past and more hopeful about the future. My working hypothesis? That in each case, this is just what was needed to transform their experience of stress. [emphasis added]--Kelly McGonigal, The Upside of Stress, p.221

Wow! These ideas resonated with me so much, and even more as I type the words out now to share with you.

What about you?

What in this post and quote resonates with you?

Wishing you a beautiful Canadian Thanksgiving!