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Friday, October 3, 2014

Intentional Gratitude: The Bounce Back

What do you do if you set your  
pre-gratitude intention and things go
...not as you intended?


Paving the way by feeling grateful in advance for something is not immunity against it turning out differently than intended.  There can be a host of extenuating circumstances at work that can influence and affect the outcome. 

If you were feeling the gratitude vibeage and were focused on everything going right and instead everything went wrong.  I would ask you this:
How did you bounce back when that happened?
Using our thoughts, intentions and feelings for creating goodness in our lives is a powerful force.  When they do not manifest as we had focused on, it can feel anti-climactic and downright crummy!

This is where choice comes in...
You get to choose how you respond to the outcome!
How cool is that?  You get to choose how you respond to a successful intentional gratitude effort as well as to one which was not so successful.

If you have the experience that what you intended with the focus of feeling and being grateful didn't manifest:  Did you handle it with more flexibility?  Did you bounce back easier?  Rather than get mired in the disappointment? 


Let's look at the opposite scenario: 
Have you an experience when you felt that niggling feeling about something, someone, an event or experience that was going to go sideways, and sure enough it did.  

Then in domino tipping fashion that one thing may be followed by another then another.  Further proving your point that you knew that nothing good was going to come from this and your intuition was correct.  You had anticipated and braced yourself in advance to be disappointed, upset or angry.  And you were one, two or all three and then some.

In the event that the niggling feeling did not come to pass, then you may have shrugged it off casually with a semblance of relief, while still possibly waiting for something wrong to happen.

I've certainly have been there done that!

So how did you bounce back when that happened?

Were you prepared for clean up afterwards when things got messy or depending on the circumstances you may have even felt that you were going deeper and deeper into the abyss.  Preparing ourselves for a potential disaster doesn't mean that we are preparing to respond, rather we may be still in a reaction state.  

If your intentional gratitude vibe doesn't manifest I invite you to choose to look at it as: 

  1. A way to practice your try try again attitude.
  2. A chance to celebrate your ability to bounce back easier
  3. A way to increase your gratitude muscle by looking at the bright side of what you did create...a chance to learn!
Think of Gratitude like a muscle, flex it, use it and it strengthens!


Enjoy the process and celebrate the effort!