In the summer of 2018 I came across a Facebook post that introduced me to Rachel Hollis. If you’re not familiar with Rachel, I recommend looking her up. She has an amazing story and her and her, now ex-husband, have built and are still building an incredible business all about personal growth. When I learned of her that summer, I was in the midst of my own transition and trying to figure out how I was going to turn my love for photography into a viable business. I started tuning into Dave and Rachel’s morning show that they did live on social media, and I bought Rachel’s book, ‘Girl Wash Your Face', an awesome read.

In her book and throughout her conversations on her live events, Rachel talked about her gratitude practice. She also walks you through the practice on her podcast, episode 72, I believe. So, when she created a gratitude journal, ‘Start Today’, I was right there the day they released and purchased two. In the meantime, I had begun doing the practice in a small journal I already owned. September 8, 2018 was my first entry.

Today I am grateful for:

1. Rain on a metal roof.

2. Coffee

3. Footballs games and a talk with Jake after.

4. Not spiders…not grateful for creepy spiders!

5. Silence

After the gratitude you write down “TEN DREAMS I MADE HAPPEN”. There is a whole process in which your create those ten things. Anyway, this is the practice she taught and it’s the practice I did for two years. I have a pile of her journals to prove it. I started the practice not just because I liked Rachel and Dave Hollis, I started it because I had been trying for years to find my path and I was completely lost. Gratitude seemed like a simple and appropriate place to try and reset. I was hooked almost immediately and it soon became a habit. What I did not expect was just how it would not only change my mornings but my thoughts throughout the day.

As I continued to fill out the journal each morning, I began to notice, just as Rachel said, that I was also looking, throughout my day, for things to put on my list the next morning. Something I have known inwardly most of my life but had never really completely comprehended until this point…whatever you spend your time believing or thinking or looking for, is typically what you will find.

I know that I am guilty of spending entire days expecting and looking for the worst in people or life, and that’s exactly what I would find. As a child, I do remember feeling scared and lonely and finding solace when I would go outdoors and look for things in nature to distract me. Laying in the grass and watching big, billowing clouds cross the sky, or leaning up against a beautiful tree and tracing out the branches above. I believe that is one of the reasons I found myself loving landscape photography so much, so I began to take ‘gratitude walks’ with my camera. I would look for something that I liked and then I would begin to hone in the smallest details of that scene. This is when I really began to find my own practice.

There is something so special that happens when we begin to practice gratitude. I’m not an expert but I have been reading about gratitude and how it can actually rewire a persons negative thinking patterns. I also believe that when we learn to not just be grateful and say or write a few things on a page, but to really search out the most minute details of a moment or scene, we create a whole new perspective of our world and even the people in it. For me, creating my own practice of gratitude for the simplest and smallest things, has taught my brain to find gratitude not just in the good and beautiful but in the hard and difficult. It has trained my brain to first seek the good. Something I am more than grateful for.

Would you like to start a gratitude practice of your own? If so, stay tuned for my next blog as I map out my simple practice and gear up for my next ‘Change It Up’ 2021 Challenge, Daily Gratitude Walks.