Hi my name is Mike Pettigrew and today I want to talk with you about the power of gratitude and specifically how it can help us transform lives and achieve whatever we wish.
Some years ago I went through a truly painful experience where I lost everything. Prior to this, I had been very successful in business and had built a very small business over a series of years into quite a sizeable business which I eventually sold to multinational.
But it’s amazing how life has in store for us things that we couldn’t possibly imagine and within a very short period of time my wife and I lost absolutely everything. It got to the stage where our son was born and I didn’t have enough money to feed my wife or our newborn baby.
When comes down to basic survival and you cant look after your loved ones and you can even feed your loved ones, it’s incredibly frightening.
Each morning I woke up and just wanted to vomit with the fear; it was that intense.
So I had to do something. I had to do something to change the circumstances for our family; because if you are not able to feed your wife and child its incredibly frightening and it was urgent that I find a way through this terrible situation.
Now amazingly, at the worst point I came across a book that absolutely allowed me to transform the situation. And quite quickly (although the circumstances took a long time to completely change) I reached a point where I discovered something truly incredible and this was discovering the importance of the power of gratitude.
I actually decided to do what today I today call my crazy gratitude experiment and basically what I did was, every 30 minutes of the day I would check with myself to see what was my dominant thought and emotion during the previous 30 minutes and I would replace whatever that thought and emotion was with gratitude. At this point I had absolutely nothing to lose, so it was vital that I try something, because I can as I say I had nothing more to lose.
So every 30 minutes of each day I was checking to see what had been my most dominant thought and emotion in the previous 30 minutes and replacing it with gratitude
Now the normally we think of gratitude as something we experience when something wonderful happens.
The amazing thing is that gratitude is actually a cause. Its a cause that can bring incredible effects into our lives.
Gratitude is a thing that can change any problem, what are experiencing. Once we learn how to use the power of gratitude effectively we can achieve anything and we can transform any situation.
Now for me what I noticed very quickly within a matter of three or four days is by bringing up gratitude (by remembering a situation the past where I felt sincere gratitude) and feeling that feeling in the solar plexus area and doing this every 30 minutes, within a few days synchronicities started happening again. Really important coincidences that enabled me to change the entire situation. Coincidences that affect me and our family to this day.
So, over a period of many years through business I transformed my life from being someone who had very little self-esteem and who felt they were useless and they couldn’t do anything.
Gradually through my years of business I built a lot of self-esteem a lot of self-confidence and became very positive and a very positive thinker.
And when you are truly positive it’s amazing how your positivity can pull from the environment all sorts of amazing experiences.
Now, when you lose everything you gradually you cannot remain very easily and over time my positivity became quite eroded.
For a period of time I had to literally learn about the power of negative thinking; because the thoughts and feelings that we carry with us during the day and during the week….our dominant thoughts and feelings actually mould our reality of what happens to us.
So I recognised this and since things were so bad and and we had lost so much I felt awful inside and I was actually expecting more awful stuff to happen.
In fact for a period of one year alone we lost Euro 5000 every single week and you wake up to this each morning and its so hard to remain positive and there was just no quick way out of our situation.
Also, having experienced the power of positive thinking and knowing about the power of the mind and how our emotions and our mind creates our reality; I knew I had to change how I felt and what I was thinking.
This is why I decided to do this crazy gratitude experiment where every 30 minutes I would check what has been my most dominant thought and emotion and replace it with gratitude.
As I say, within a matter of days the synchronicities and the coincidences started happening again and I hadn’t seen these in quite awhile; because as I say I had to learn firsthand about the power of negative thinking.
And to be perfectly honest it was quite a shock; as I believe that most people think quite negatively.
Most people have a lot of negative thought about themselves and their abilities and they have a lot of self-doubt.
I think we all hold ourselves back dramatically from what we can really achieve and gratitude I found enables us to switch off that internal negative chatter that we all carry around with us.
That little voice or rather that rather loud voice that says “don’t bother…you know you will fail like last time…dont even bother trying again” or that voice that says “what’s the point…you know you will not be able to do it” or if we have a great dream of achieving something really worthwhile in our lives that voice that says “it will be too difficult or there will be all sorts of obstacles that will hold me back”.
It’s amazing how this negative voice that we all have within us holds us back from creating and achieving incredible things in our lives.
I I honestly feel that the only difference between a person who achieves incredible things for society and transforms the world and a person who achieves very little remarkable things in their lives; is whether or not we succeed in overcoming these negative thoughts that assail us all.
I have really learnt this; that no matter what we do in life no matter how much hinner transformation we achieve, no matter how happy and fulfilled we become….this negative voice will always be there.
But we need to make ourselves bigger than it and if we wake up in the morning and we feel 52% negative and 48% positive, then all have to do is tip the balance by 3% to win over ourselves.
If we look at the lives of people who really have transformed society, for example Mahatma Gandhi…he was a very very shy man.
And when he graduated University as a lawyer his friends threw a graduation party for him but he didnt even come to his own party.
The reason was because he was so shy and he knew that if he came to his own graduation party, he would have had to make a speech and he was far too shy to make a speech.
Thats why he didn’t turn up. However, if this man had allowed his shyness to dominate we would not have heard of his name today.
The amazing thing is that even though we carry these negative thoughts around with us; if we understand how to overcome that negative voice and particularly if we have a very big vision for ourselves and society, then we can achieve anything.
It was because of his incredible vision and passion and determination that enabled Gandhi to have a huge impact on the world.
But if he had allowed his his shyness to dominate; as I say we would not know the name Gandhi today.
So this means that we can have huge ability to transform our inner emotional state and our thoughts if we choose to do so…if we choose to do so.
Now I believe that the technique that I explained a few minutes ago where; I was bringing up gratitude every 30 minutes and looking at most dominant thought and and feeling in the previous 30 minutes and replacing it with gratitude that was completely manufactured.
In other words; synthetic gratitude. I certainly didn’t feel grateful for the circumstances that I found myself in…so why in the world and I even bother to try such an experiment?
The reason is; I had already experienced the power of positive thinking for many, many years and I knew that my thoughts and my emotions had been quite negative for some time; because I’d experience so much
Therefore, I urgently needed to transform my thoughts and feelings and as I say I had nothing to lose but to try this experiment.
I am convinced that this absolutely works, no matter what circumstances you find yourself in, and no matter how frightening things may be and no matter how much loss you may have experienced.
I am absolutely certain you can transform it through the power of gratitude and all you have to do is remember a time or an event in your life when you felt truly grateful.
All you need to do is remember that experience and dwell on it for a couple of minutes and you will start to really feel the power of gratitude build up within you.
The amazing thing is that it’s like training wheels on a bicycle after a while, after your become proficient at this it’s no longer necessary to remember an event in the past.
This is because we can then spontaneously bring up the power of gratitude and when we get to this stage, our life can become absolutely incredible.
So I’d like to thank you for watching this short video and if you feel that it has benefited you then please do leave a comment below.
And of course if you have any questions I will be delighted to answer them for you.
Thank you for watching and see you in the next episode.
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