Wouldn't be a great thing if you could turn gratitude into a way of life. So it was muscle memory, it was habit. Well, in fact, you can and that's what we want to talk about in this last session of the module on thankfulness and gratitude. First, we need to understand the power of discipline and even more than discipline, the power of habits. And my goal for you with this skill set. And with all of the six skill sets that we have in this course on overcoming stress, I want you to understand how to turn these concepts into skills and the skills and the habits.

Now, the Greek fathers said First, we create our habits when we're young and then our habits create us. Robert ringer, calls it the million dollar habits He wrote a book saying that success is the result of good habits, failures, the result of bad habits by the way that's in life in general, that's in dealing with stress. The key is that you feed the good habits, you starve the old habits. And I want to teach you very briefly about habit formation. Now, as you're learning to be thankful, as a way of life, you want to discipline yourself in order to become a good person and a skilled person and dealing with these kinds of skills. Now, discipline is is rooted in the old Greek word give Nakatsu.

What does that sound like? Gim not so it's really the word gymnastics. We get the word gymnastics for it. So think about that. concept of an Olympic player, say in the Summer Games, who's a gymnast, how they practice over and over and over and over and over again, until everything to do is a match muscle memory, it's habit. And that's how we have a way of life that's successful.

We're constantly feeding the good habits, we're starving the bad habits. And we're practicing, practicing practicing. Now there's some implications to habit formation. Number one is you need to be purposeful you need to know the kind of habit you're trying to develop and why. Because if you don't have a big enough why you'll have trouble with how so have a clear understanding of the benefits of achieving that habit. And the the negatives or the deficits of not accomplishing that habit.

So, create, create a clear view in your mind of your purpose, what you're trying to accomplish the habit, you're trying to develop what that looks like, and then why it's important. So you need to have a sense of purpose, about your habit. And then secondly, you need to understand that habit involves pain. It does. It's not easy to constantly be tired. training, you know, your muscles get sore.

In this case, you want to do something else. Instead you stop and you you read a book that help you get here or you listen to a DVD or watch a DVD or listen to a CD or a podcast that will stimulate you to grow further you watch a YouTube video that will help you get there. But you may be wanting to do something else maybe watching something on Netflix instead. But you stop to discipline yourself to do the right thing, short term pain for long term gain. And you practice a little bit of of saying no to yourself on the short term, instant gratification. So you can have the long term result and in this case victory over the issue of stress.

So beyond being purposeful you need to understand it's going to be painful, to develop habit but it's only short term. After a while those muscles will heal and it will become natural And then finally, it's practice, you need to practice, practice, practice, it's repetition. Just as a gymnast, when they're on the uneven bars, practices and practices and practices falls down many times, they know exactly what they're trying to do. They're purposeful. They, they understand that it's going to be painful, and they have lots of pains and aches and hurts, maybe some things are broken. But they keep that on over and over again until their muscle memory kicks in.

So when they're when they're competing in the Olympics, or the World Games, they don't even think about it, they just go into automatic pilot because of muscle memory. And that's what needs to be true of you when it comes to developing the habit of gratitude, around life being thankful for life or any of these other skills that we're talking about. So I want you to develop habit formation. I want you to discipline yourself to be great in this area. And that happens by practicing over and over and over again. Now a lot of the specialists say 21 days it takes of doing the same thing repetitively for it to become a habit, I maintain another 21 days or 42.

So it becomes really deeply embedded within you. But whatever it takes you on a stick out of over and over and over again, even little bits every day, practicing the thinking, gratitude, the feeling, gratitude and the expression of gratitude, to build this into a habit in your life. That's the practice you have it. So what I want you to do is to think through these five, these three areas, thinking, feeling and expressing, and begin to really build into your schedule, into your calendar, or use reminders on your apps, but something that will allow you to remember every day two practices. Now the first the first and the third one, thinking and expressing you could do many times a day. I want to urge you to do at least four times a day every day, at least for the next seven days.

I try to keep it up. And then of course, the whole area of feeling gratitude is really about journaling. And probably once a day is good enough for that, but I want you to do it at least daily and preferably multiple times a day for number one and three. So it becomes a way of life. And my action step for you is to put that to work. But also, I'm going to give you a little tool there seven easy exercises that help you be filled with gratitude.

And I want you to take a look at this document that we're making available in the Resource Center, read it through and see if some of these tools will help you more effectively. Be grateful as a way of life do you have it? Hey, the right view toward life by thanking that's where we want to get you. We want you to have the attitude of gratitude. When you rise up in the morning when you lie down at night, around lunch around dinner and then throughout the day, we just want it to be a spirit of gratitude for big things and little things just make it a way of life. I'm looking forward to how this works.

For you in the days to come and look forward to you in our next module as we start to attack a right view toward problems by embracing them.