Thanksgiving Hack: How Gratitude Creates a Positive Feedback Loop Between You and Your Creation.

When my clients and I embark on a new initiative of creation, one of the critical pillars that I insist on being present is the force-multiplier of gratitude.

And specifically, dynamic gratitude.

I will get into what I mean by dynamic gratitude in a moment, but first I’d like to pull a veil aside to reveal a paradigm that you may or may not be be operating in yet.

Whether our world-view is science or spiritual, quantum or woo-woo, evidence-based or intuitive, or a healthy collusion of all, we will eventually see that somehow, someway, the universe is responsive. Less a hand of cards we are dealt and more a hand of cards we are consciously or unconsciously creating, pruning and adding. Our reality, and the quantum field of potential behind it, are responding dynamically to the information they get from us through certain key channels.

At this point the “woo-woo” alarm can go off, despite the broad evidence of countless human lives and the scientific evidence of things like the double-slit experiment, etc. All good, but bear with me, using nature as a relevant model:

Until 1997, if you and I were taking a walk in the forest and I said to you, “The trees are talking to each other” you would have thought I had gone mad. But in that year, professor Suzanne Simard published a landmark study in Nature demonstrating trees are actually communicating and sharing energy, nutrients and information. They were doing this via their roots and using underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi like neurons to both convey requests and respond to requests. A sapling in the shade, or poor soil, is depleted of nitrogen and/or carbon and sends out the information to the grove, which confers to see where the most of those are, and that tree responds with a donation that routes all the way back to the sapling through the underground network.

Put in simple terms, beyond the limits of our initial perception, under the ground, for millions and millions of years, there has been a connective network that is always communicating so that need is heard and responded to.

So is out-of-the-question to propose that just beyond current perception there is a network of sorts that is responsive to consciousness — to intention, actions, and finally, to gratitude?

Which brings me to the point of this: dynamic gratitude to generate a positive feedback loop for creation.

There is now a tremendous amount of evidence-based work on gratitude’s impact on human happiness, resilience, etc. That even the practice of a morning gratitude list can be more effective than SSRIs in uplifting mental states and wellbeing. But my experience with myself and clients, high-impact leaders around the globe, points to something even further:

Dynamic gratitude is a force-multiplier toward that which we want to create.

By dynamic gratitude I mean gratitude generated in real-time as events unfold that feel aligned and supportive of the direction we are creating toward, or simply in alignment with the kind of experience we wish to be having.

There is sudden grace and ease in even the most mundane of daily processes — instant inner expression of gratitude. There is interest from an influential investor in a Series A round I am initiating — instant inner expression of gratitude. A key employee has just exhibited new behavior after a tough feedback exchange the previous week — instant inner expression of gratitude.

That dynamic expression of gratitude lets that quantum field know, in a very, very targeted way, what it is we’d love more and more of in our endeavors and life.

Leaders mistakenly think that they give direction by pointing to and complaining about what they don’t want. It can’t work. It can’t work any more than if you take your nephew to a 32 flavor ice cream shop, ask him what he wants, and he responds, “I don’t want vanilla.” You still have no idea what to get him.

Just like the power of intention and action, dynamic gratitude lets the quantum field know, in real time (BR Skinner’s direction for the most effective feedback to change behavior), exactly what we want and how we want it.

And just like in any positive and scaling feedback loop, we begin to experience more of it, and more of it.

I have seen this again and again in my client’s endeavors and in my own life — the multiplier effect of increasingly greater flow, greater results, greater serendipity, greater ease, all toward their target creation.

The super-hack of this is to express gratitude for the amazing things yet to come — I do that to create an energetic vacuum that the universe naturally abhors and seeks to fill. Do this and get ready.

There is also a powerful precipitate experience in that we find ourselves increasingly taking note of the all the positive/aligned things happening in our lives, as opposed to only the negative ones (our current cultural conditioning that propels that). This has enormous impact on mental health and personal happiness. Which in turn creates more expansive possibility (science!). Which in turn creates exponentially bigger outcomes.

Still, I hear some:

“Yeah — I don’t know…”

I hear you.

But should there be a connective and responsive network just beyond your ability to perceive it, that is generating your reality moment to moment, and is eager to make that something that serves you, is it worth the week-long experiment to simply see what happens?

I know that even before you got to this very word, I have already given thanks for your readership and the time you have given me.

“If the only prayer you ever said in your entire life was, ‘Thank you’, that would be enough.”

— Meister Eckhart