One of the hardest things to do when you’re chronically or extremely stressed is to practice gratitude.
When you start practicing gratitude, you will be able to handle stress very well. And I wish someone had given me this advice when things were too challenging for me. When I was extremely stressed, I did not practice gratitude regularly. That time in my life is not only marked by the worst time in my career, but it also involved the last days of my mother’s life. She had Alzheimer.
All I thought every day is to get to work and try to get the job done before some event happened to my mom. I was always stressed out and exhausted all the time. I wasn’t thankful for all the daily things that I have that make up a great life. I didn’t recognize the beauty in my life because I was blinded by stress, fear, and worry.
If you’re an attorney who is extremely stressed, and you find it hard to be thankful for all the good things you have in a day, I believe you can follow my 5-step Meltdown Preventative Process, and you will find your way to being thankful and having gratitude.
I’ve talked about the Process before. Let me quickly review the steps.
First, you Discover your current situation. You do a deep dive to look at exactly where you are.
You next look for Opportunities that you could incorporate in your life to decrease the stress and increase the chance of recognizing the good things present in your world.
Then, you develop a blueprint of the changes you intend to make to decrease the stress.
Finally, you Implement the changes.
Later, you conduct a review to determine whether the changes are sufficient or if you need to implement more changes to make your life more satisfying, thus regularly exercising gratitude.
My Process sounds simple, and it is, but sometimes it is hard to find your way out of an extremely stressful work situation. If you find it hard to work the Process alone, ask for help.
Having a life that you’re thankful for when you wake up in the morning is worth it. I know I close almost every message with the statement that life is too short to spend it unhappy or miserable, but it always seems appropriate.
So, today I will close my note being grateful for being alive, and it’s my opinion that life is too short to spend it overly stressed and too short not to practice gratitude.