Sharing Thanks After Thanksgiving: A Weekly Ritual

Our winter holiday season has almost passed us by, and hopefully some of us got to enjoy the time with family and friends over stories, laughs, good food and some much-deserved rest. Even though the holiday starts with Thanksgiving (although my wife would say it really starts with Halloween, her favorite holiday), and turkey and stuffing is well since in the rear-view mirror, let’s not forget what the intent of the Thanksgiving holiday is. Let’s try to actively remember the intent of that holiday every week.

Our lives as entrepreneurs are hectic, stressful and sometimes fraught with anxiety. One of our team members commented to me, when learning about my job responsibilities, “Oh, I guess you are the Chief Worrying Officer…”. At the time I wish they had substituted the terms “planning” and “strategy” for “worrying”, but the point was made. It is so easy for the business-as-usual conditions of dealing with standard challenges to spiral into filling your mind with the negative elements that stress can create when there’s too much of it, especially if you don’t have positive energy to counterbalance it.

One practice I follow is to pause, breathe, and take stock of all the wonderful and amazing things that our teams have accomplished each month, and all the positive elements for which we have to be thankful. For me, the “inventory of thanks” really starts with my family, which was the whole reason I started my business 15 years ago. I cannot be thankful enough for the hugs, support, mutual gratitude and positive thinking that my family shares with me.

I’m also incredibly thankful for our leadership team and our broader team, including our employees and our closely-held business partners. It blows me away how much positive energy we have created for our team-mates and clients, not to mention how we’ve moved our clients’ business forward in significant ways.

I’m thankful for the flexibility to squeeze in a decent workout nearly every day. With an investment of energy and discipline into my physical and mental health, I’m probably in the best shape in decades. That often means getting into the office early, like the proverb about “healthy, wealthy and wise”, but I’m still working on the “wise” part.

Making time to take stock of what we’re thankful for, and then sharing that actively with everyone in our circle (family, company, clients, peers, and advisors), can fill our minds and hearts with the positive energy and confidence to balance against that daily onslaught of challenges. So let’s go be thankful today!