Gratitude · 4 min read
The power of gratitude
I want to be careful with this one, because gratitude has become one of those words that gets used so often it stops meaning much. Journal three things you’re grateful for. Post a sunset with a caption about blessings. I understand why the advice exists, and I don’t think it’s wrong exactly, but in my work with executives and founders under real pressure, and with women rebuilding their sense of self at a career inflection point, that version of gratitude tends to land as one more task on an already full list. Something to feel guilty about not doing rather than something that actually changes how a person moves through their life.
So let me describe what I actually mean, because it’s a different thing entirely, and it’s something I return to often in coaching, not as a technique but as a lens.
The leaders I work with are, almost without exception, oriented toward what’s missing. This isn’t a flaw. It’s often exactly what made them capable of building something significant. The founder who scans for the gap in the strategy before anyone else sees it. The executive who notices the one metric that’s off in a quarter full of good ones. That instinct is valuable, and I would never coach someone out of it entirely. But left unchecked, it becomes the only lens available, and a person can build an entire career, even a successful one, standing on a foundation that only ever registers as insufficient.
Gratitude, in the way I mean it, isn’t the opposite of that instinct. It’s a second lens, held alongside the first, not replacing it. It’s the practice of actually letting yourself register what’s working, what’s already been built, who has already shown up for you, before moving straight to the next gap. Not because the gap doesn’t matter. Because a person who can only see the gap eventually can’t see anything else, and that’s not sustainable, no matter how driven you are.
I think about this often in the context of the women I coach who are at a threshold, leaving a role, re-entering after a break, redefining what success means to them after years of chasing someone else’s definition. There’s a particular kind of gratitude that matters here, and it’s not gratitude for the circumstances. It’s gratitude for the self who got them through the circumstances. I ask clients, sometimes, to actually sit with everything a younger version of themselves navigated to get to this exact point, the decisions made with incomplete information, the resilience nobody applauded because it looked like just getting through a Tuesday. Most people have never once thanked themselves for that. They’ve moved straight from one demand to the next without ever turning around to notice what they survived, and built, along the way.
This connects to something I believe about how people experience their own lives. People don’t experience reality directly. They experience it through identity, memory, and perspective. A person who has trained their perspective to notice only deficit will experience an objectively full life as somehow lacking. A person who has trained themselves to notice, honestly and specifically, what is actually working, experiences the same objective circumstances quite differently, not because reality changed but because the lens did. Gratitude, done properly, is lens work. It’s not about pretending things are fine. It’s about seeing the whole picture instead of only the part your habitual attention has trained you to see.
I felt this myself building the people function at Traveazy through years that included a pandemic and two mergers. There was no shortage of things to worry about, genuinely, urgently. But I also learned, out of necessity, to notice what was holding. The team members who stayed steady. The systems that, imperfectly, worked. My own capacity to keep functioning under pressure I hadn’t been tested by before. Noticing that wasn’t naïve optimism. It was accurate, and it was fuel, in a way that constant vigilance for what might go wrong never could be on its own.
If you want a practical version of this, it isn’t a journal, unless a journal genuinely works for you. It’s a habit of pausing, at the end of a hard day or a hard quarter, and asking a more specific question than “what am I grateful for.” Ask instead: what actually held, here, that I haven’t given myself credit for. Who showed up. What did I do that I’d have doubted myself capable of a year ago. Answer specifically, not generically. That specificity is what separates real gratitude from the platitude it’s often mistaken for, and it’s the difference between a practice that changes how you lead and one that just makes for a nice photo.