Gratitude works, but there’s a difference between rotely jotting down what you are grateful for in a notebook versus really feeling those things. There’s a difference between forcing your mind to think of positives when you are ruminating versus training your mind to notice and absorb every little thing you feel joy about as you go about your day.

I list gratitude each morning because I love the practice and the reminder. Blank paper is my exhale. It puts my mind in a positive headspace and ensures I am not going through the conveyor belt of life so fast that I’m missing what matters. But what works for me might be different for you. I notice this with our twin daughters. One loves journaling while our other daughter says she stares at a blank piece of paper and it stresses her out. (I suggested she skip it.) Yet I still want her to discover a way to see the world that allows for more joy. While gratitude is a scientifically proven practice to enhance well-being, there are other ways to more deeply connect with life and raise the bar mentally and emotionally from surviving to thriving.

What are you focusing on?  This is something we have to decide carefully. “We get fixated on what we happen to be looking at in a moment,” says Grandmaster Tony Morris, an eighth-degree black belt and owner of Sun Soo Martial Arts.“If I have a flashlight that shines a light out, that cone of light has a limit. Where am I pointing it at? My flashlight illuminates what I’m pointing it at, but wherever I am not pointing it, I’m not seeing those things. We can redirect our flashlight and focus on something else. We can choose to redirect our cone of light and aim it somewhere else. If you’re focusing on the wrong things, that becomes the summation of your experience. There’s a bunch of other stuff we can shine the light on,” Grandmaster Morris says.

Recently I read an article that said many young people are looking at life and saying: Is this it? Is this all there is? Reading this article broke my heart a little because I know life can knock us down and stick our faces in the dirt, but life also can be glorious and include all of the other ladder rungs in between. “In a lot of ways, the world really is like a giant buffet. There are a bazillion options. Choose the parts you want to put on your plate,” Grandmaster Morris suggests. “The items at the buffet aren’t going to jump onto your plate. You have to place your order with the cosmic cafe. If you say, ‘I don’t know’ or talk about what you don’t want, the server is going to bring you exactly what you ask for, what you pay attention to. If you’re not happy with what you have or feel, then turn your attention to something you are happy about. Make a different choice. Sometimes people forget they can make a choice.”

We all need human connection, friendships, family and community in a myriad of ways to feel and be grounded. “When a person is disengaged, that person becomes isolated and super vulnerable,” Morris says. “A pebble on a sidewalk is susceptible to whatever forces it encounters, nothing is tethering it to its place. When you tether it, you can kick that rock and it stays tethered in all different directions. People are like this with respect to their social construct. If someone retreats, recedes and disengages, that person becomes isolated and more vulnerable. As life becomes chaotic, that person feels threatened all the time. We all need to be engaged in many different connections where we can have cross-linked mutual support, noticing and experiencing things together and building optimism.”

Empower yourself by taking action. One of the reasons Morris has mirrors in every direction you turn at Sun Soo Martial Arts is so people can see themselves. The more we can see ourselves and others accurately, the more we can get over our stuff. Taking steps to where you want to go begins by seeing where you are. “Let’s not dwell or place all of the emphasis into a place where we don’t want to be," Morris says. "I want to invite you to the possibility of a different experience. Can you accept that the set of tools you have right now can be arranged in a certain way to get you from where you are to where you want to be? You have enough resources. Now let’s plot a course." 

By modeling some of these practices, we teach others how to build emotional toolkits. We demonstrate how to do more than handle life; we teach others how to love life. As Morris says, “We need to put energy into where we want it to go.”