A Mason's Work

[00:00] Yesterday, we talked about what gratitude does for your performance, for your team,
[00:05] for the people around you.
[00:07] Today, I want to get into what gratitude actually is, because I think most people are only aware
[00:13] of kind of one version of it.
[00:15] At least when we say gratitude, they think of one side of the coin, as it were, or one
[00:22] end of the spectrum.
[00:23] But on the, let's say the shallower end of the spectrum, and not that shallower is good
[00:28] or bad, it's just maybe the place you have to start.
[00:33] At one end of the spectrum is what I would call appreciation.
[00:37] It's what most people are familiar with.
[00:41] It's that outside-in kind of feeling where you notice something in your environment.
[00:49] You see a good piece of work that someone did.
[00:51] You had a conversation that goes somewhere useful.
[00:54] You see something on the road and you, wow, that's beautiful.
[01:00] Or you get this just the right moment where it's, you know, a light breeze or just the
[01:08] right temperature in your tea or coffee.
[01:12] You register at that moment, like, this is good.
[01:15] I appreciate this.
[01:17] I like it.
[01:18] Um, that's the kind of prompt that we're talking about.
[01:22] That's an appreciation sort of prompt that your body and your mind create for you.
[01:30] Um, when the environment is in some way pleasing the interoceptive sort of language here, the,
[01:37] that feeling that's making its way, uh, you know, from the outside, when something good
[01:43] happens through the inside to a lived experience of appreciation is kind of the way the early
[01:50] parts of the gratitude process work.
[01:54] The appreciation appreciation kind of thing is something that you can do and cultivate on
[02:03] a daily basis.
[02:04] It's something on any given day, like a Tuesday, you can, you know, without going through a ritual
[02:10] or without having done anything in particular, you can notice these things in your day.
[02:15] And as you start to build that sensitivity, that awareness, uh, you can move to, uh, higher
[02:25] levels of gratitude.
[02:27] So appreciation is really just like we talked about last week with the minimum viable environment
[02:32] for work, uh, as the floor of work that you need to have before you can start.
[02:37] Appreciation starts to become the minimum sort of viable conditions for gratitude to, uh,
[02:45] the deeper levels of gratitude to emerge.
[02:47] It's, uh, something that you kind of can't skip because the more you train that sensitivity,
[02:53] that awareness, that, um, appreciation, the more frequent you can access more frequently
[03:00] you can access the higher levels of gratitude and what that really kind of feels like.
[03:05] But let's stay focused on appreciation.
[03:09] It's, it's a process that is, uh, strangely enough, repeatable and you can cultivate this
[03:18] awareness as you go.
[03:20] You don't have to develop a complicated journaling process or some sort of meditation practice
[03:27] per se, although I recommend all of those things.
[03:30] Um, what it does take is, uh, a conscious, uh, intention to take a moment of time to carve
[03:39] out a little piece of time in any given day or any given process or cycle to increase your
[03:49] noticing, to increase the things that you are looking for your sensitivities and awareness
[03:55] to, again, cultivate that sense of appreciation.
[04:00] When I say this is harder to do, uh, cutting time out, uh, is one thing, right?
[04:07] So you can say, okay, well, I'm going to take five minutes at the end of this hour and I'm
[04:11] going to think about this and see what happens.
[04:13] When we are going through our everyday life, however, it's very common that your only sort
[04:22] of lens is, um, that gap analysis that we kind of talked about a little bit yesterday,
[04:28] where you're looking for what's missing or what's broken or what you need to fix or repair
[04:34] or mend, or in some way bring back to whole, what we don't notice is the kinds of things
[04:44] that are already doing exactly what they're supposed to.
[04:47] They're already delivering the results that they're supposed to have.
[04:51] That bias is a negativity bias.
[04:54] It's this, um, this sort of mental frame of mind that you're running because that's largely
[05:00] how people operate in general.
[05:04] All of the work is usually, uh, in your everyday life is usually is designed essentially to close
[05:12] these gaps, to, to identify an ideal state and close it.
[05:16] And in that process, we lose the sensitivity or we push away maybe that awareness of what
[05:25] is really also working well and, uh, doing kind of doing the job.
[05:30] Uh, this is a subtle note to your IT guys in the world.
[05:35] No one calls them up on a regular day when the computer is working just fine.
[05:41] This is kind of a challenge when you start to really begin to develop your sense of appreciation.
[05:50] You need to take that time and flip that mental script to make it work.
[05:56] So today's challenge is simple.
[05:58] At some point today, stop what you're doing and notice one thing that's working.
[06:06] You don't have to write it down.
[06:07] You don't have to do anything.
[06:08] Just start the noticing process.
[06:10] That's the beginning of that minimum, uh, viable awareness that you can use to begin the appreciation
[06:22] process, which leads to what we'll talk about more tomorrow, which is really kind of a deeper
[06:29] version of gratitude.