The Power of Graditude: Four tools to create a fabulous and Abundant New Year

2026 can be your year, the year you practice the social experiment of incorporating gratitude into your daily routines and your life. Gratitude helps you understand what you want for yourself and helps you develop a new relationship with your thoughts. Noticing the areas of your life that are working, stacking habits around gratitude and giving thanks, create an inspired path forward.

Thank you is a bridge from your unconscious worried fear patterns to the here and now, where hope and miracles can be expected. Consistent use of gratitude and mindfulness show measurable changes reflected on brain images in weeks not years. Gratitude helps quiet our overactive threat circuits in the brain which interrupts negative thought loops, that often misguide us.

Here are four tools to create a life that brings joy and abundance.

1: Observe your thoughts:

We increase our emotional intelligence by tuning into meta-cognitions, awareness of our thoughts. Dr. Robert Rosenthal discovered that when people believe they will succeed or fail, their behavior subtly changes in ways that make our beliefs more likely to come true. This is called the Rosenthal effect, this theory shows that our beliefs, and thoughts direct our awareness and outcome at an accuracy rate of 89% of the time. Gratitude helps you take a more accurate picture of what is happening in the moment and helps align your behavior to find your desired outcome.

2: Give thanks to your body:

Thoughts and beliefs interact with our nervous system, hormones and immune system, shaping how we respond to our environment. Taking time each week to express gratitude for your health and what is working in your body, helps you tune into your internal body systems signals. Interoception is our ability to notice what our body is telling us, deepening our awareness of the many signals from our physical and sensory world. Often we are unaware of our body signals, making it difficult to best understand what we need or want. Tuning in with kindness and gratitude to our body, helps you read signals and slow down to ask your body what is needed for emotional or physical safety.

3: Imagination:

Imagine that you already have what you want and then ask yourself how do you feel at this desired place. Your brain can not tell what is fact or fiction. Gratitude helps us see when things are becoming closer, its a creative space. Our brain has a difficult time predicting a new and unfamiliar future outcome, as we prioritize familiar and rely on the past to predict our future. Imagining and talking about a new desired future helps you bridge the gap between now and your preferred future.

4: Journal:

Gratitude journaling helps direct your attention to what is working well in your life. It’s helpful to write down ten things you are grateful for and why you are thankful for them, each day. Doing this for a month completely changes your understanding of your present moment and how you interact with yourself and others.

It is also a great practice to become more aware of how setbacks influence your perceptions of daily life. For example, writing about a setback and then listing ten things you learned from this setback or that brought surprising positive outcomes. This helps you have a wider understanding and more flexible way of responding to challenges.

Gratitude is a pivot from external validation, to one of internal knowing and curiosity. It’s a guide out of fear and often our unconscious need to engineer predictability. The part of our brain that lights up when using mindfulness and gratitude brings in organization, planning, better understanding of the present moment and a deeper access to our authentic self. Our authentic self is harnessed by looking inward, illuminating our vision to see what we want and what we like.