Most people end the year with notes of thanks. I’m ringing in the new year by suggesting we all orient our focus on gratitude. What I’ve learned is that gratitude is not the place you arrive at, but the starting point.

Every morning since my mom died, I’d been thinking “I’m so grateful to be alive” the instant I wake up, and before I open my eyes. At the outset of 2023, I decided to extend that momentary thought into a gratitude practice.

I started listing ten things I was grateful for each day and why. I would catch myself venting about something and remember to reframe and find the grateful-angle. I allowed myself to intentionally rewrite mental scripts, even the benign ones. Instead of the occasional “I didn’t sleep well last night,” I incorporated “I’m so grateful for all the good rest I did get last night,” as every day’s second thought.

In the process of implementing this practice, I discovered that most of us (myself included until the recent past) go around mistaking our awareness of our general good fortune (having a home, a family, and food to eat) as gratitude. In fact, they aren’t the same thing at all.

Practicing gratitude means thinking grateful thoughts daily. It means working consistently on paving those neural pathways in your brain, instead of defaulting to a negative framework.

When you start practicing it, you discover that like the other side of the coin we never bothered to flip over, gratitude has been in our palms all along. We’ve just all gotten accustomed to holding a grievance. We commiserate with each other. We connect over shared complaints. We use interactions as opportunities to vent.

If we decided to flip that coin over, and keep remembering to flip it back over as often as we need to (which might be moment by moment), we would see that reasons for gratitude are ever-present. In every scenario and relationship, there is a blessing.

The question is: do we want to feel small, and experience ourselves as victims, or do we want to find reasons to say thank you and really mean it?

I’m choosing to say thank you because after trial and error I can report: it feels better!

There is nowhere positive to go from anger, resentment, and so on. Gratitude is a springboard to growth and expansion.

I hope you’ll join me by starting to practice gratitude today.

Make a list of 10 things you’re grateful for and why.

Do that tomorrow, too. And the next day after that.

This new year, lead with gratitude.

It’s not always easy. Some days, some seasons, it may feel like there’s nothing worth saying thanks for. On those days, at least be grateful to be here.