When a Crisis Strikes - Appreciation—A Key to Transforming Your Life

Appreciation is a way of giving thanks to the things we are glad about in our lives. It is one of the major keys to living a joyful life. According to the dictionary it is “thankful recognition”. It’s a way that can lift your spirits quickly when you start to focus on all that you are grateful for in your life.

Sergio and I both learned to appreciate all the good things we had in our lives. Even though we were separated and going through hell for almost four years, our family had our health and that was something to be grateful for. Business was coming in, without any sales or marketing efforts, and I am sure we had a lot of help from above. Sergio was able to send me money every week so that I could call home and talk to my family. Any little thing that we could be grateful for helped to bring in light into our situation and helped to give us some hope too.
Gratitude and appreciation are so important because no matter what the circumstances are, you can always find some little thing to be thankful for which will help you to get to a higher energy level to be able to attract good things into your life.

Appreciation is also the key to having good relationships. When you can focus on the good parts of a relationship or person, you are seeing the person with love. This will cause even more good energy to flow between you and that person. When you first fall in love, all you can see is the goodness of that person. With time, the “honeymoon phase” will end, and those little things can start to get on your nerves. If you allow those things to bother you and continue to focus on them, it’s only going to get worse. But when you can focus on the good things—which appreciation does for you—then you will only see more of that.

One of the best ways to get into the appreciation mode is to think of ten things that you are grateful for every night before you fall asleep and in the morning when you wake up. When you do this as you are going to sleep, you’ll put yourself into a positive state that will carry you through the night. When you do this in the morning, it helps start your day in a positive light. This is one of the keys to living a joyful life. No matter how dire the situation may seem, find those ten things to be grateful for…they may be miniscule but it will help. What are the three top things you are grateful for most right now in this moment?