Can Gratitude Change Your Life? Resilience in Life and Leadership: Episode 049

How can gratitude affect your perspective, your circumstances, and your life? Does it really make a difference? Stephanie talks about the importance of gratitude in your life.

Everyone has resilience, but what does that mean and how to we use it in life and leadership? Join Stephanie Olson, expert in resiliency and trauma, every week as she talks to other experts living lives of resilience. Stephanie also shares her own stories of addictions, disordered eating, domestic and sexual violence, abandonment, and trauma; and shares the everyday struggles and joys of everyday life. As a wife, mom, and CEO she gives commentaries, and, sometimes a few rants, to shed light on what makes a person resilient. So, if you have experienced adversity in life in any way, and you want to learn how to better lead your family, your workplace, and, well, your life, this podcast is for you!

https://stephanieolson.com

INSPIRE your team to LEAD WITH SUCCESS and MOTIVATE others with Stephanie bringing 20+ years of speaking experience. If you need to EMPOWER, ENGAGE, and EDUCATE your people-Book Stephanie as your speaker today!

https://www.stephanieolson.com/ask-stephanie-to-speak

Everyone has resilience, but what does that mean, and how do we use it in life and leadership? Join Stephanie Olson, an expert in resiliency and trauma, every week as she talks to other experts living lives of resilience. Stephanie also shares her own stories of addictions, disordered eating, domestic and sexual violence, abandonment, and trauma, and shares the everyday struggles and joys of everyday life. As a wife, mom, and CEO she gives commentaries and, sometimes, a few rants to shed light on what makes a person resilient. So, if you have experienced adversity in life in any way and want to learn how to better lead your family, your workplace, and, well, your life, this podcast is for you!

https://stephanieolson.com

Transcript

Stephanie Olson: 0:00

Thank you for listening. Please share with anyone you think will benefit from this podcast. Hello, and welcome to resilience in life and leadership. I am Stephanie Olson, your host, and speaker of a lot of things. So if you are looking for a speaker for your event, whether it be a business event, whether it be a women's event, a youth event at a school, college, I am your go to gal. Now some of the things I speak on is trauma in the workplace, or how trauma affects us in life, resilience in life and leadership. The name of this podcast is exactly what I talked about how we can take our trauma and turn it into triumph. That's one of the things I speak on. I speak on things like dei diversity, equity and inclusion, and how you can do that in your workplace and make it more effective multi generational conversations in the workplace. Those are some of the things that I talk about. And I would love to come to your business to your nonprofit, or your event and talk about all of those things. I also do faith based messages. And so women's events and things like that. Love, love that stuff. But that is what I do. In a nutshell, I would love to come and be a part of what you are doing. But today, I want to talk a little bit about our the way that we handle circumstances actually, how do we handle the things going on in our lives? How do we handle the good things? And how do we handle the really negative things? Because I think, right now I can look out the window and say, Gosh, it's a beautiful day. But I don't really know what the rest of the day is gonna hold, do I? Life happens. And so it could be a day that a lot of incredible things happen. Or it could be a day where there's a series of events that just don't go well for me. Or it could be a day where something massively amazing happens. Or it could be a day where something tragic happens, God forbid. But but we all know, those are our days, you know, I think back to 911. And for those of you who experienced 911, you know exactly where you were, when that happened. And it was a morning, just like any other morning people were going to work. We were doing our thing, I was actually a mom of a very young baby. And I was I was nursing my baby, when that happened, my oldest daughter, and had no idea that our world, our nation was going to change in an instant. I mean, that's exactly what happened. Our nation changed in an instant. And we had no idea. Now, there are really hard conversations that you could have around that. Because when you're talking about things like you know, the loss of a loved one, when you're talking about the tragedy that we we saw and experienced. Those are things that everyday life just doesn't you don't connect with that in everyday life there. There are things that happen that are just overwhelming. But still, how we handle those situations, how we work through those tragedies, how we work through those difficult days. That is the game changer. And I was talking to someone the other day who you could just tell they sounded not good. There was something going on their life in their life, you could tell that was not good. And so when I asked about that they were very honest and said, You know, I just I just have a lot of stuff that's happening. I have a lot of stuff that's going on and it's just been a very difficult season. They kind of listed the things and you know, they were definitely I'm not I'm not gonna say they weren't important things, but they weren't your great tragedies. They were things that are doable things you have to deal with things that kind of suck in life, but nothing that comes to the level of something like 911 nothing that comes to the level of a loss of a loved one or anything, just stuff in our life that we deal with every day. And this was my suggestion to that person. And this is something I've tried to do on a daily basis, as much as possible. We aren't all perfect at this. And I'm not going to pretend that that I am, or that any of us will ever be or attain that we won't. But one of the things that I heard, or let me say it this way, I heard someone say once, and I thought this was extremely profound. What if you only had today? The things that you thank God for yesterday? And I really sat in that and thought, Okay, what did what did I think God for yesterday, because I don't know if it was anything at that moment. But what are the things that we can be grateful about, because there's always something there's always something we can be grateful for. And even if it's a tragedy, like 911, a loss of a loved one, I'm grateful that I got to spend that amount of time with that person, my dad passed away, three years ago, and I can say, he adopted me when I was six years old, and married my mom, and I can say I am grateful. As much as I miss him, as much as that loss really was hard. I can say, I'm grateful that he adopted me, and that he was in my life was imperfect. Here's my dad, I was a teenager. At one point, it wasn't always perfect. But I am grateful that he was in my life. You know, I think sometimes we need to look at the things that we are grateful for. And maybe it's not even something as serious as that maybe it's something like I am just having a crappy day at work. I am struggling. What am I grateful for right now? Well, I am personally very grateful for my dog who is sitting next to me right now. I'm grateful that even through this crazy pandemic that we had, that now I get to work from home. And we, you know, have the ability to do things like what I'm doing right now, or to connect with people over overseas that we would never have been able to connect with back in the 90s, or the 80s. I'm grateful for that. I'm, I'm grateful that I have a job. I'm grateful that I have a house and a home and shelter during the storm. I'm grateful that I have milk in the fridge. I'm grateful that I have shoes on my feet and clothes on my body. I'm grateful for those things. I'm grateful that I have an incredible family that I have an amazing children, that I have an incredible husband and a wonderful support system and friends and family at church. Those are things I'm grateful for. And none of those things are perfect, except for my dog over here who is yes. But otherwise, none of those things are perfect. But what are you grateful for? Because what that does is it takes you out of that things are crappy right now. And I'm gonna sit in that I'm in a camp in that and that's where I'm gonna go. And it puts you in a different place of, you know what, maybe things aren't that bad. And if things are really bad, maybe there's some things that I can pull the positive out of. That's important. What are you grateful for? What are the things that you can look at today and say, okay, yeah, this is good. Even in the midst of the storm. That person I was talking to said, said, you know, yeah, I do that when when things are great. Well, we can all do that when things are great, right? But it's when we're in the storm. There's a song by Casting Crowns called praise, y'all pray called, praise you in the storm. And I love that song and I've sung it before. If we can all praise God during the great times, right? Sometimes we do some times we don't, we can all put a smile on our face when things are fabulous. But what when? What about when things aren't? What about praising God in the midst of the storm? That's when it's powerful. What about saying I have gratitude in the midst of ridiculously difficult circumstances? That's when it's powerful. And you have the opportunity to take a new perspective, to look at things a little differently. And to maybe look at somebody else's life and say, Wow, look at how they're reacting to their circumstance. And mine is this. What can I learn from them? So, my challenge to you today is to write a gratitude list. Doesn't have to be long, doesn't even have to be profound. Just write a little gratitude list in what are you grateful for? Maybe do that every day. I think that's a good plan I might do that myself. Grateful for I'm grateful for you. Thank you for listening. Please share with anyone you think will benefit from this podcast.