Gratitude isn’t reserved for the holiday season – it’s useful year-round, and in my world, it’s an absolutely essential daily practice. Being grateful can help you in ways you may not even realize and can have a measurable effect on your money. Being grateful is an abundant practice and it makes a difference for both your emotional bank account and your real bank account. Gratitude can help you make powerful financial shifts by operating from a place of abundance rather than scarcity. Especially during tough times, practicing healthy habits is critical to extracting the lessons so you can move forward even stronger. Let’s dive deeper into how gratitude helps your finances.
Giving thanks for your successes and lessons learned
How gratitude helps your finances
No matter what your finances look like today, it’s really important to stay connected to the good in your life. Learning to appreciate the lessons that ultimately help you gain wisdom keep you from negative spins that last too long and protect you against harmful judgment and shame. When you view your successes and failures as an important step to better understanding, those big fears about making mistakes won’t feel as overwhelming.
Here are some ways gratitude can show up in your bank account:
- Focusing on what’s working helps you discover new or creative (and sometimes way cheaper) solutions to a problem. You might be less likely just to throw money at a situation to fix it quickly.
- Being grateful for what you do have removes a lot of the internal pressure to “keep up with the Joneses” and spend on things you don’t really need.
- Appreciating the many people and blessings keeps you focused on feeling good – our minds are tricky. What you focus on expands. Wanting more good things and good vibes? Focus on the ones that are already present in your life.
- Gratitude gives you a greater sense of patience so that you have more ability to resist making risky or short-term, impulsive financial choices. You can interchange the word gratitude with grace most days too. A grateful heart is a graceful heart.
Gratitude is proven to reduce stress, and it’s true how gratitude helps your finances. You don’t have to just take it from me. Hear what NY Times bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage and Big Potential, Shawn Achor has to say about gratitude:
“When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism. The role happiness plays should be obvious—the more you pick up on the positives around you, the better you’ll feel—and we’ve already seen the advantages to performance that brings. The second mechanism at work here is gratitude, because the more opportunities for positivity we see, the more grateful we become. Psychologist Robert Emmons, who has spent nearly his entire career studying gratitude, has found that few things in life are as integral to our well-being.11 Countless other studies have shown that consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely. And it’s not that people are only grateful because they are happier, either; gratitude has proven to be a significant cause of positive outcomes. When researchers pick random volunteers and train them to be more grateful over a period of a few weeks, they become happier and more optimistic, feel more socially connected, enjoy better quality sleep, and even experience fewer headaches than control groups.”
Rather than falling into the trap of self-criticism, refuse to beat yourself up over something that you didn’t know or didn’t realize. It’s all going to be okay. No matter where you are in your financial journey, it is never too late to start again – and gratitude helps you love yourself as you learn new ways to improve your money situation. That’s how gratitude helps your finances.
If you’re looking for some gratitude exercises specific to money mindset, check out these gratitude tips right here. Inspiring yourself can be tricky some days, but I guarantee you that consciously counting your blessings can boost your mood and your bank account.
Connecting with community to keep the blessings flowing
A growth mindset has its roots deeply grounded in gratitude. Being thankful for your money successes and lessons can help reduce fear, stress, and anxiety when it comes to your financial life. Another key piece of the puzzle? Sharing your experiences with a supportive community who can cheer you on and magnify those blessings, especially if you’re just starting your money journey. You’re not in this alone, so you don’t have to experience it alone, either.. If you are looking for help getting your $hit together or learning how to invest the money you have, join my community and get started with a Money Mindset prep course today.