After a year of health struggles, I am super grateful for the different aspects of my life, especially being able to continue working on this blog. Also, a big thank you to all the presenters and readers of the blog articles.
The field of positive psychology studies positive emotions and includes developing strategies to cultivate positive emotions. There are many positive emotions, like gratitude, hope, joy, optimism, and love. According to the broaden and build theory, positive emotions can broaden awareness and response to events with building cognitive flexibility, resiliency and adaptive coping skills. The broaden and build theory posits that positive emotions can coexist with negative emotions, and that positive emotions increase robust strategies of effectively coping with negative feelings. There is an abundance of research about positive emotions benefiting the mind and body.
Gratitude practice is generally a good thing. Thus, I am very excited to present my interview with Marc Reklau, bestselling author, coach, consultant, and motivational speaker, who wrote, the book, “The Life-Changing Power of Gratitude”. Marc is very energetic and enthusiastic in sharing his wisdom about the topic. We discussed many aspects of gratitude in the interview. He talks about his own gratitude practice with honesty and humor. Gratitude practice can be a powerful antidote for painful emotions. Gratitude practice is a choice. It also includes changing perspective and thus requires cognitive flexibility, as we zoom in and focus on the good. Marc discusses how we need to be intentional about gratitude practice as we all experience habituation to things, (even good things) in life. He points out that gratitude begets gratitude. For example, once we start making a list of things to be grateful, we find other things to appreciate that we did not initially think about.
Marc also addresses the tough topic for being grateful for the negative events in life. He makes a unique point that he is not grateful for the negative events in life but appreciates his learning from coping with the negative stressors. He adds that we have no control over what events occur in life, but we have control of how we respond to the events. I love Marc’s point that we often connect the dots between events from hindsight. Hindsight is 20/20. I also love his discussion between gratitude and forgiveness practices. Much gratitude to Marc for the interview.
Hope readers enjoy my interview with Marc. Please see link below.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IRzjde4llwyu7hipcVJpTW6PhfdE864i/view?usp=sharing
Marc can be reached at: marc@marcreklau.com