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142 Days of Gratitude
In mourning and trying to rescue her business, being grateful was far from her mind. That is until a friend prompted her to do a gratitude diary exercise on Facebook for five days. She would continue to write her diary for 142 days.
This book is about how this daily practice helped her overcome challenging times and opened her heart and mind to the profound power of gratitude as a force for personal and social good.
It’s not your typical business book, memoir or self help book. It’s a combination of all 3 underpinned by a bit of science and philosophy as well.
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Foreword
I’m so grateful to my friend Sue. Not only is that a very appropriate thing to say about this book, but for many other reasons too. I’m grateful to be reminded of the impact that a seemingly small thing can have on another person. When Sue called to tell me about this book and how my Facebook post had been the catalyst for her life-changing journey with gratitude, I was deeply moved. I don’t take any credit for that post — the idea was not mine and I was grateful to my friend Jeanette for introducing me to this. And she, no doubt, is thankful to whoever passed it on to her, and so it goes on — small things shared in a spirit of caring by ordinary, flawed human beings. Somewhere along the chain, it lands where it is needed, making an impact beyond what could be imagined, and changing a person’s life.
I’m grateful for the insights I’ve gained from Sue’s book — particularly on how the practice of gratitude strengthens the awareness and experience of social connection. This alone would make gratitude enough to change the world for the better. So much of the pain we experience individually and collectively stems from a failure to understand how deeply we are all connected. As Sue’s book points out, awareness of our interconnectedness is a foundation of empathy, which in turn forms our moral cognition — our capacity to ‘do the right thing’. Not all traumas are the same, but we all have them — those painful times of loss, injury, attack, rejection or betrayal which can seem overwhelming. In the pain of trauma, it can be hard to feel empathy, and so trauma often leads to disconnection, isolation and a narrowing of focus onto the self.
As the saying goes: ‘Hurt people hurt people.’ Without something to pull us back into connection and empathy, we pass our traumas on — either as revenge or as indifference. Sue’s book shows gratitude is a simple but powerful way to bring us back into connection and empathy. One potential criticism of gratitude is that it could lead to a passive acceptance of wrongs we should actively fight. Voltaire’s novel Candide mercilessly satirised this perspective in the character of Professor Pangloss who, no matter what terrible misfortunes are inflicted, continues to cheerfully declare that they live in the ‘best of all possible worlds’. Sue’s story avoids this pitfall. She certainly did not just passively accept (with gratitude) the betrayal she experienced. Instead, she took action to do all she could to keep afloat and to fight what was wrong. Her gratitude for the betrayal came much later; in retrospect, she could see how she and the business had grown through the challenge. Gratitude was an inner resource which gave strength and perspective.
On a personal level, I’m grateful for Sue’s care of my son Nick, who became best friends with Sue’s son Josh at primary school. For a while, the two boys were always at Sue’s place or ours, and Sue and Jobst parented Nick as we parented Josh. As the African proverb says, ‘It takes a village to raise a child.’ Sue and Jobst were an important part of the village for our family.
I’m also very grateful that Sue is a person of integrity in the business world who thinks deeply about the consequences of her decisions on others and the planet. She is a leader who understands that individuals and organisations are part of an interconnected world where we can only thrive by seeing our suppliers (and their suppliers) and our customers (and their customers) as partners in a vast mutual enterprise which ultimately includes all living beings on this planet.
Gratitude helps us to understand this. For this, I feel deeply grateful.
Mike Lowe, Founder and CEO of Discover the Other
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