Hello, how are you doing today? Okay. Let's talk about the dark side of gratitude. And I want to share with you right now that I am all for a gratitude practice, and I'm gonna talk to you about what that might look like, but there is a way that a lot of us weaponize this experience of gratitude against ourselves.

And then we do not follow the call to what we desire most. Okay. We don't look at how we can create the experience that we want. Most. We qu those dreams. So I wanna tell you that this is really normal. I hear this from people all the time. I have thought this myself and I wanna share with you, you are normal if you are doing this, but I wanna bring some awareness to this because you may not be following the path you were meant to be following because you may be using this aspect, this practice of gratitude against yourself. So let me tell you what gratitude, right? You probably already know this, right? You know what gratitude is being thankful for what you have and really appreciating it, right? Gratitude. If you look at it, kind of like as a scale of emotion, gratitude is like the step below love.

So you might notice that if you're doing a gratitude practice where you are journaling, and you're thankful for all of the things that you have, all the experiences that you have, that you have great health that you get to spend time with your family. You know, you get to do all of these wonderful things as a result of your job, for instance, or because you allowed yourself to be scared and do the work anyway, to keep going. Even when it was hard, right? You can have that gratitude and it's gonna feel like a lightness. It's gonna feel light in your body. You're gonna feel open. You're gonna feel almost to that place where you feel expansiveness and love. And a lot of times when we are in a funk, this is super helpful because if you are depressed, if you are feeling a lot of anxiety, if you're feeling overwhelmed and you're feeling very heavy in your body, having a gratitude practice to redirect your mind will help you start to lighten the load.

It's gonna help focus your mind on what you're thankful for. And this is a wonderful practice. I do not want to denigrate it in any way, but what I see is people taking this gratitude practice to the extreme and telling themselves that they should be happy, right? And they try to force themselves to be grateful in a way that prevents them from taking action for their dreams. So it might look something like this. You might tell yourself that you hate your job, and you may tell yourself that you hate the work or you hate your clients, whatever it is. And then you tell yourself, but thank goodness I have a job and I am making money so that I can pay for my children's private school so that I can invest in myself in, you know, this rental property, whatever it is. Right. And instead of really looking at whether or not we enjoy the experience and whether or not we can change the experience, we just tell ourselves, okay, well, I'm just gonna be grateful for it.

And that's it. I'm not gonna change anything. I'm just going to hate it and just be grateful for it. And like, you know, people in other countries would die for this kind of opportunity or, you know, I am the first in my in my family to go to college much less, go to law school. And I am going to suffer through this because they would think that I am an idiot for ever leaving this job. And in the meantime, you have this, pull this desire to do something different, right? Even if you don't hate your job or you hate your clients, you, you just know that, Hey, I want something different. Like there's something out there calling to me. And I think that this is something that would feel really amazing, but because I have this wonderful job that pays me all this money, I am just gonna stay here and I'm going to bide my time until I hit retirement age.

And that'll be it. And you punish yourself by telling yourself that you're grateful instead of having gratitude, being thankful. And at the same time asking yourself what could be different? How might I be able to change my experience? There might be small tweaks, right? You may learn how to create more boundaries. You may learn how to manage your calendar. All of those things w which help in so many different ways in your life, or it could be bigger, right? You could learn to manage your calendar and then have some time for yourself to start exploring what you might enjoy in your life. Right? You might enjoy starting a business. Like I did. Like, I really wanted to just start a business. There was something calling to me to do this. And I asked myself, how could I do this? What might it look like? How could I still work full time and create a different experience for myself?

Because I was not a hundred percent fulfilled in my legal career. I felt gaps. And I wanted to explore different avenues. And I wanted to explore avenues that involved, more creativity. And that for me, was business. It allowed me to really look at what do I want? How can I create that? And what is going to be most valuable to other people where they wanna join me on this journey, right? Same thing for you. Maybe you feel called to create something different. Maybe you wanna be a lawyer and you want to explore a new practice area in your practice. Maybe you wanna go out on your own. Maybe you just want to have time to play because you have been working your butt off so long that you want to create time to play. But instead of following those urges, those passions, those desires, you tell yourself, well, I should just be happy where I am.

I should just be happy because I'm making good money. My family's taking care of, and I don't wanna risk any of that. And I wanna share with you that that is very black and white thinking. We can either have the legal career, or we can have the desire that we're, we are wanna fall, that we wanna follow. And life is not black or white, right? You can have the career that you have, and you can explore what it might look like to start your own practice. When you start asking yourself what experience you could have and what it would take to make it happen, then you can start making a decision. Because then when you make a decision, you're not ruminating about it. You're not wasting all of that energy and time spinning out versus just making that decision so that you can move on.

And then you can say to yourself, well, I made a decision. I took a look at practically what it would require. And I decided, this is not what I wanted. Now, if you do that evaluation and you still can't get the desire out of your head, then there's something that you have not asked yourself. It's time to reexamine your decision. Because part of you is telling you that it is what you want and that you are willing to do hard things to make it happen. I did not know I was willing to do so many hard things until I decided I wanted a business until I started taking action to create my business and realized I was really enjoying the creative process and was willing to do what it took to make it work. Even if that meant doubting myself, learning how to overcome fear, to learn all of the web stuff.

I was willing to do all that hard work so that I could do this. This is gonna come up, right? Like we are going to have desires and they do not seem compatible with what we have currently going on in our life. We have thoughts. Like we're not, we don't have enough money to do that thing. We need to save more money. We need to, you know, do these things before we start. I wanna offer to you that if you're not using gratitude against yourself, that you will be able to start pausing and asking yourself, what is it that I want? Like if sky were the limit, right? Like if the sky were the limit and you could have whatever you wanted, no strings attached, what would it be? And then what would it take for you to make that happen? And instead of taking your brain to the finished product, ask yourself, what's step one.

Well, step one, I would need to learn more about this particular area of the law. I would want to have a business where it was a hybrid model, where I would be online and helping people that way. And I would also have an office part-time and I would meet people that way. What is it that you want get really clear on it? Just what sounds fun to you instead of telling yourself that you know what, I'm not even gonna think about it because I should just be grateful for what I have and anything else I'm, I'm just torturing myself. I shouldn't even bother thinking about it. I have it really good. Now I should just stay here. I'm gonna have a great pension plan. I'm gonna, you know, be able to take care of my family. And can you even just hear the tone of my voice when I say that, like my energy comes way down.

And if you feel like you are being weighed down by the things, things you think you should be grateful for, if you are feeling the weight of the world on you, and it is preventing you from answering that voice in your head, that is telling you that you are meant for more, that there are bigger things out there that there's an ambition that you have, that you're not taking action on. I want you to ask yourself, am I forcing myself to feel grateful? And then in the process shutting down that voice, or am I being really grateful right now for what I have and allowing myself to expand my ideas of what is possible for me, hear it that way, allow yourself to expand the idea of what is possible for you, because you can be grateful for what you have right now. And you can start changing the way you look at how you might be living your life.

How there might be something else out there for you that there might be an answer to that call. That's been nagging at you. You can love everything in your life and be grateful for it because it's given you everything that you have to this point, and you can want more and it's okay. You're allowed no matter what other people might say about your ideas or what that little voice in your head, that's always questioning what you do. Right? I have it too. It's like, no, I don't know. That might not be a good idea. You shouldn't do that. Just ask yourself, well, what might be possible? Because when you start asking yourself what might be possible, you open yourself up to ideas. You open yourself up to possibility. And when you do, then you can start asking yourself the questions like, well, what steps would I need to take next?

That's what I did with my business. I asked myself what I wanted. I asked myself, did I want to spend time in a store? did I want to spend time? You know, fidling on my website. Like, what was it that I enjoyed? Did I enjoy talking to people? Turns out, yes. I love talking to people. I actually did this thing. And this was years ago, I had in interviewed some people, some of my friends and asked them questions about what they thought about these different aspects of my personality and asked them, you know, what did they want as lawyers? Like what were they looking for? And whether or not like the things that I was interested in would interest them. Like this was just one of the things out of the dozens of things that I tried, just to get an idea of what I wanted, because I looked at possibility.

And when I looked at possibility, it allowed me to play around and just have fun and, and ask my friends for help and say, Hey, like, what are you interested in? Like, do you see me doing this? And it was just an idea to help me get curious about what else was out there for me. And when I did that, it helped me expand my idea of what was possible and expand my idea of what I did enjoy. Cuz sometimes we don't spend enough time with ourselves to really recognize what we enjoy. Especially if you're coming from the legal practice. We're just so busy all the time. We're never making time for ourselves, but if we are making time to have conversations and be inquisitive and get really curious about what other people see in us and what they think our strengths are, it allows us to see more possibility.

All right? So this was a really short episode, but it's something that I've seen so much with people really weaponizing gratitude against themselves, closing themselves down from possibility rather than opening themselves up and starting to poke and prod at the ideas at the voice that the urge that they have to do something more. And that is what I want to encourage you to do. Now, if you want help with this, I help lawyers who are already very successful in their practice in their life, but they wanna take their life to the next level. Book a call with me. You can go to Dina, cataldo.com/strategy session. And we're gonna take a look at what is going on in your life right now. We're gonna get like a litmus test of what's happening. And then what we're gonna do is start to open up your eyes to the possibilities that are in front of you, of how you can start taking action so that you can only achieve what you wanna achieve. Follow that voice, but do it without the overwhelm, do it without working yourself to the bone. So often we think that that is the answer that we just need to work harder, but really what it is is starting to get your brain focused on possibility on what is available to you and starting to open yourself up to the changes that you wanna see in your life. All right, my friend, I hope you have a wonderful week and I will talk to you soon. Bye.