Joy

As you are well aware, this coming Thursday is Thanksgiving. What do you think about when you think about Thanksgiving? Food? Quality time with family…catching up? Football? Sharing in abundance? The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade?

According to the Scholastic.com website, the English colonists we call Pilgrims celebrated days of thanksgiving as part of their religion, but these were days of prayer, not days of feasting. Our national holiday really stems from the feast held in the autumn of 1621 by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag to celebrate the colony’s first successful harvest.

As you may have noticed, the title of what you are reading is Joy. What does Thanksgiving have to do with joy, you ask? I'd like you to consider the possibility that what it doesn’t have to do with is the meal that you may be eating, or the football games or family time or anything outside of you that you may be looking to for the source of your joy. After all how many people these days cringe at the thought of eating that meal for the fear of gaining weight or get stresed out by the thought of family time. That's not to say that the meal or the family is the source of pain neither.

What I’m talking about here is how does one generate an experience of joy in his or her life? I think it is fitting at this time of year, especially in the economic climate that they keep telling us about through various media outlets over and over again, we stop to consider gratitude as the beginning of our joyful experience. Sure you could look at all of the things that may be “wrong” in your life, and certainly I can, too. Of course you have the right, the privilege and you are even entitled to look at the circumstances of your life and use those things as evidence of why you should be grumpy, sad, frustrated…or you can be grateful, have an “attitude of gratitude” about not only the things that are easy to be grateful about, but more importantly of the things that are not so easy to be grateful about, like the challenges that you may be facing, and that you have the oportunity, capacity and the resources to face them head on.

So for Thanksgiving this year, I choose to be grateful for all of the so-called challenges that I’m faced with and the challenges that I will be faced with, and of course I am grateful for all of the wonderful things as well…my wonderful family, all of the people who I’ve been so fortunate to get to know and serve over my lifetime…and the list goes on and on.

This would not be complete of course without me asking you some questions. I’d like to do something a bit different this time, though. I’d like to hear back from you the answers to the following questions. Just post it on the comments or email it to coachjang@yahoo.com so here goes…What are you grateful for, right now? Who are you grateful for, right now? What could you be grateful for if you just looked at it differently? How could you create more gratitude in your life? And What would your experience of life be if you cultivated for yourself a permanent attitude of gratitude?

Happy Thanksgiving to you and your family from the Kim Family and the iLead Team, we are grateful to you and for you. We look forward to being your partner in your success! Until next time...

Live FREE and JOYFULLY!