Gratitude in Practice: (Grateful) Kae

I thought it would be fitting to round out this month of FIG collection by taking a deep dive into the particulars of different gratitude practices. And we’re starting this little series with a blogger who incorporates gratitude into every single post she writes!

Grateful Kae is no stranger to my blog (see her first guest post here), but today she’s returning to talk all things gratitude. She’ll pull back the curtain on some of the little rituals that help brighten her days and I hope her down-to-earth approach to gratitude will inspire others.

Welcome, Kae!

Hi! Thank you so much for having me back, Elisabeth! It is truly an honor. [Aww. Thanks for saying Yes!]

People who have read my blog know that gratitude is kind of my “jam”, so this is definitely a topic I’m happy to guest post about. 🙂 Elisabeth sent over a series of questions to get me started (she is seriously an expert interviewer!), but I had so much to say about the first one, that I never even made it to the rest of them! Oops! Guess I’ll have to come back a 3rd time. 😉

What prompted you to start a blog and why did you call it “Grateful Kae”?

My own gratitude journey began a few years before I started my blog in 2020. 

At the time, my boys were quite young- probably early elementary school aged. My husband and I both work full time; I was working long, stressful, rotating 12-hour nurse shifts, the boys were busy in sports and activities, we own a home, and it’s just REALLY HARD to juggle it all! It was a messy and beautiful time of life, right in the thick of raising our little family. 

Now, I had every right to feel frazzled and a bit stressed out. There’s no question that being a working parent is not always rosy. Every day is not always awesome! But on the whole, my life was good and I was quite happy. However, I had developed the bad habit of complaining a lot, I guess as a coping mechanism for some of my overwhelm.

It usually wasn’t even about big/ important things! It was just sort of becoming my default mode. “There was traffic. The boys are loud. Ugh, I’m tired. Ew, we need to clean. Why is it so cold. These pants look terrible on me.” Etc. (Again, it’s totally okay and normal to feel overwhelmed at times or not be thrilled to have to make yet another dinner. Also, important note, if you’re persistently feeling depressed or unhappy, that’s a very different story.) 

But in my particular case, it was literally just a bad habit, really. (I have sadly never been a natural Pollyanna. I tend toward being a worrier/ complainer, so this was pretty “on brand” for me, but it was getting worse.) [Picture Elisabeth wildly waving her hand screaming ‘Me too!’]

          An old photo of me. 😆

On one particular winter evening, after listening to me rattle off that day’s “problems”, my husband asked me point blank, “Do you ever realize how much you complain?!” And for whatever reason, instead of slapping him (hehe!), I had one of those lightbulb moments: “He’s right! I do!!! It’s true. I constantly complain!” I hadn’t really paid attention before, but I suddenly HEARD it loud and clear. 

And what was even the point? Was I accomplishing or changing anything by griping all the time? No, I wasn’t. I was just making myself (and others around me) sort of miserable. 

Long story short, it was a paradigm shift moment for me. I decided then and there that I did NOT want to live the rest of my life being a chronic Eeyore. I ended up diving into the study of gratitude, to see if I could develop a more positive mindset, like a muscle. 

I credit Janice Kaplan’s book The Gratitude Diaries with really kick starting this journey for me. [I really enjoyed this book, too!] Much like I did, she had realized that she was increasingly adopting a real Debbie Downer attitude in life, so she set out on a project to try to fix it. Her book outlines her year-long mission to “look on the bright side”. 

I remember that the chapter on reframing really stood out to me. She shared a story of a cold, winter day where everyone around her was grumbling about the weather. But as part of her experiment, she decided to not partake in the GrumbleFest and instead said, “Thank goodness I have these warm cozy boots to keep my feet dry!” I mean, either way it was going to be cold… does saying, “Dang it’s cold; this weather is horrible” somehow make the weather not cold and horrible? Unfortunately, no. But focusing on her cozy, warm boots and how good they felt on her feet maybe did give her mood a momentary lift. [Oh dear – I mean, I did come up with Five Top things about winter in Canada, but the overwhelming tone of that post was negative; Kae, I know you can relate!]

The book really inspired me to give it a try myself and see how it felt. I started playing what I’ll call “Catch the Complaint”. For a few days, every time I opened my mouth to say something negative (i.e. to complain!), I made myself pause and see if I could at least try to spin it. 

That afternoon, I walked into the gym and I remember the employee scanning my card saying, “Yuck, it’s really snowing out there.” I started to say, “Yeah, brrr! It’s so cold!” but instead decided to say, “Yeah, it sure is pretty!” Same snow, different story. That same day, I ran into an acquaintance who asked how we’d been. I felt my standard response on the tip of my tongue, “Ugh, crazy busy!”, but instead I made myself say, “Thankfully we’ve managed to stay pretty healthy this winter!” [Same snow, different story. I love that short and snappy statement about reframing! I’m stealing this, Kae!]

You get the idea. Now, I KNOW, some of you are probably rolling your eyes. Some things can’t really be reframed, and I get that it doesn’t always help. It’s not helpful to tell an exhausted mom with 1 kid in meltdown mode and 1 kid vomiting, “But honey, at least you don’t have cancer!! Look on the bright side! You’re SO blessed!” (cue Rage Against the Machine music) 🤣

But I do think that it works more often than not, especially for your run-of-the-mill day to day complaints (which was where I was struggling! Just sort of dragging a dark cloud around). As I experimented with reframing, I found….hey, this actually feels… pretty good! I started treating it almost like a little game. 

Of course, reading The Gratitude Diaries wasn’t a magic fix. Old habits die hard. The mere act of naming this problem in myself did help me notice it more easily, though. Inspired to keep the momentum going, I began a formal gratitude practice. This is not very complicated: you just write down things you’re grateful for.

The cool thing about it, though, is that because you know you’re going to have to write things down, you’ll find yourself looking for things to be grateful for throughout the day. [This is exactly why I say Happy Things Friday has literally changed my life. Knowing I was on the lookout for Happy Things made me much more receptive to those special moments that before would have slipped by unappreciated…] I would find random positive thoughts popping into my head that weren’t there before. (e.g. Really noticing when someone waved me ahead at a stop sign. Paying attention to how soft my blanket was. Feeling grateful that my soup was just the right level of hot-ness. In other words, FIGS!) [Eating soup at JUST the right temperature is such a delight! I hate when I take a spoonful and burn my tongue!]

To keep myself consistent and build the new habit, I start jotting down my daily gratitude entries on the back of my Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff tear-off desk calendar page. Pairing it really helped: each morning, I’d read that day’s “positivity tip”, tear off the page, flip it over, write down whatever I was grateful for, and store it in the little box in my desk drawer. (Fun tip: at the end of the year on New Year’s Eve, I sat by the fire and read through all my entries from the whole year.) [I’m sure you’ve shared this before but I didn’t remember – what a great, positive way to end the year!]

I found that I loved this daily practice! It was for my eyes only, so I could write down the silliest or most miniscule things if I wanted. I was happy to find that usually, coming up with gratitude entries was actually not very hard…. even on rough days! This was the key, I think. Realizing that EVEN on days that were craptastic, there was still always something I could come up with, even if some days I had to get back to basics and write things like, “I am grateful that my lungs work and allow me to breathe” or “I am grateful that my roof is not leaking during this rainstorm.” 

When I decided to start my blog, which curiously does not exclusively focus on the topic of gratitude!, I knew that I did want it to be an underlying theme hence the name GRATEFUL KAE. I wanted it to be a place where I could feel free to unpack some of these thoughts and challenges, and continue to explore this positivity and gratitude-seeking journey.

I also wanted to manifest, or project, who I’m trying to be. I’m not just Kae, I’m GRATEFUL Kae. 😉 Fake it til you make it, right? 😉 

Daily gratitude practice continues to shape my life. I STILL struggle with complaining!!! I do!! (Literally, my husband just called me out on it the other day. 🤣) But I’m committed to sticking with it, because I feel like it’s a bit like a river carving out a canyon. I just have to keep going… and going… and going….and one day hopefully I’ll look up and be like, Whoa, this canyon is getting really wide!

I’ve now moved my personal gratitude practice over to a digital version (on a journaling spreadsheet I made- I wanted to be able to better archive and save my gratitude entries long term), and I also close every blog post with a Daily Gratitude. My goal with that is to make sure that even when I’m blogging about the most RANDOM topic (like I often do, lol!), the theme of gratitude remains present. I hope it might inspire readers to pause for a second and think of their own gratitude entry for the day. 🙂

For me, my gratitude practice has been like a living meditation. (For the record, I’m terrible at actual meditating.) You know how when inevitably your mind starts wandering, they say, “Come back to your breath”? It’s the same thing with gratitude. You won’t always feel grateful. You’ll get distracted by sucky situations and your “gratefulness” will wander off and wax and wane. But I just keep trying to come back to it over and over again, returning to my “breath”.

In closing, I’ll share two of my favorite gratitude inspirations. 

1. The grateful “way of life” is really what I’m chasing! Not fully there yet, but working on it… 🙂 

2. The lyrics from a song I used to sing as a child in Sunday School, called Why Complain. It’s been over 30 years now since I was that little girl in Sunday School, but this song has stuck with me all these years. I think of it so often! 

Why Complain – by Evie from “A Little Song of Joy for My Little Friends”

Here’s the YouTube link if you want to hear it! I guarantee it will brighten your day. 🙂 [How have I never heard this song before?!]

Thank you for having me, Elisabeth, and thank you for all the work you’re doing to spread the F.I.G. life!! At the risk of sounding VERY cheesy, I am so grateful to know you and to call you my friend! [Right back at ya’!]

Thanks again for visiting here today.

Your turn.

• Do you have any gratitude-centric questions for Kae?
• If you have a regular gratitude practice how/where do you record things you’re grateful for?
• What Winnie-the-Pooh character do you most closely resemble emotionally? I’d have to say my default is probably Eeyore. It is DEFINITELY not Tigger!