Uncommon Gratitude

What if the very things we take for granted, complain about, or try to avoid are actually life's greatest teachers, from the people who trigger us to our daily annoyances, from our failures to the uncertainty of tomorrow. These might be the unexpected sources of our most profound growth and joy. And that's what we're talking about in today's episode, so let's dive in.

Welcome to the School of Self-Image, where personal development meets style. Here's your hostess, Master Life Coach Tonya Leigh.

Hello, my friends. Welcome. Welcome to today's episode. This is coming out the day before Thanksgiving, so happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate here in the US. And for those who are not in the US, just so you know, tomorrow the majority of us will be eating turkey that one time a year, probably some sweet potato casserole, especially if you're in the South, green beans, and if you're in the South that is also turned into a casserole, some dressing, some cranberries, pecan pie.

I find that all of our Thanksgivings are a little bit different, but they share some commonalities. And one of them being this is the day where we focus on giving thanks, on being grateful. And with that said, I don't think we do this enough. I don't think this should be a one-time deal once a year, but gratitude, or as I like to call it, celebration, has become a way of life for me and it has carried me through some of the hardest times. And I believe to this day that celebrating my life has been one of the core principles that has allowed me to create a life I'm absolutely in love with.

We just came off the three-day workshop called Calm, Cool, and Connected. And one of the principles that I taught during that workshop was staying connected to your celebrations, because in life we often focus on what's going wrong. We focus on what we don't have. We focus on what we don't want. We focus on our failures. We focus on all of the things that when we focus on them, it makes us feel terrible. But I want you all to realize that in every moment of your life, if you will pull the camera back and you will look from a meta view, you'll start to notice that there are so many things to be grateful for.

And gratitude has become a practice that I especially use during my hardest times. It's easy to be grateful when everything's going well and good in your mind, but what about when things aren't going the way you had planned? What about when you have failures? What about when you just can't seem to get ahead? That's when we often throw gratitude out the window, but that's when I use it the most. I have had a really difficult season, and I have been more grateful than ever. And that gratitude practice, that celebration practice has allowed me to handle it with grace. It's allowed me to stay relatively calm and poised because I realize that even in the hardest moments, there are always things to be grateful for.

So today, I want to talk about uncommon gratitude, the things that maybe you haven't even thought about being grateful for. And the first one is being grateful for the people who trigger us. I know we hate it. We don't like when someone comes around and is complaining or is what you may consider, quote-unquote, toxic, but these people are going to show up in our lives, and perhaps we are that person to someone else. I'm not so evolved that I don't think that perhaps maybe I trigger someone. We are all so human and we all have different belief systems. We all have different ways of looking at the world. We all have our own sensitivities. We all have our own triggers. And yet when someone triggers us, we blame them. We want to shut them out of our lives. And I want to challenge you that you may be doing yourself the biggest disservice when you do that. And here's why.

I have come to view these people as my biggest teachers. I like to call them my PETs. They're my personal emotional trainers. Now, I want to be clear that I don't go out looking for these people. I prefer to be around people where I'm not triggered. I prefer to be around people where it's so effortless to think beautiful thoughts. People that I have shared values with, I have maybe a shared future with, these are people that are fun to be around and those are the people that I seek out. But inevitably in life there will be people that show up that trigger us. It's very normal. And I don't think the answer is to remove these people immediately. I think first you need to learn the lesson that this person is trying to show you.

You know the saying "What you resist persists"? And what I have found is that when I resist these people, when I try to cut them out of my life, when I try to ignore them, they show up as a different person. Inevitably another person just like that come into my life and I'm like, "Okay, this isn't working." And I realize if I look at what is being triggered, then I can heal it. And I don't even think it's healing it. I think it's letting it go. I think that's what healing is. It's just letting go of whatever that thing is that you're holding onto.

So I want to give you an example. I had a person in my life who it seemed like every time I was around, I was being triggered by them. And I didn't like who I was around this person. I wasn't myself. I was performing. I was trying to people please. I was trying to do all of these things that at the end of the day, I wasn't settled within myself. And finally one day I was like, "I don't want to continue feeling like this." I love this person, but I don't love who I'm being around them. And I became extremely grateful, not only for the trigger, but also for this person because this person became a source of growth for me. And I realized that what the problem was is I had never set boundaries. I had never fully spoken my truth. And when I realized that, it was such a beautiful moment for my own journey that I would've never had had I not welcomed that experience into my life and been willing to learn from it.

It seems these days anytime someone gets triggered. They just want to cut people out versus either sitting down and saying, "I'm feeling this way and I want to explore it." And sometimes you do that with the person or sometimes you do it on your own, but I don't think the answer is just to cut people out. I think the answer is to lean into it so we can learn from it and grow from it. And then at that point, if you want to cut that person out, go for it. But don't do it before you've learned the lesson because if you don't, you're just going to go around cutting people out of your life all the time and it's going to keep showing up.

I think about a dear friend of mine who one day had the courage to sit down with me and she expressed how she had been feeling so much jealousy around me, and it was one of the most beautiful conversations that I've ever had with a friend because I held space for her. I allowed her to vent. I allowed her to tell me how I had triggered her, and there was so much healing in that for her and for me. And those are the kinds of conversations that can bring so much intimacy. It can bring people closer. It can bring a level of understanding that you will never have if you are not grateful for those triggers and the willingness to lean into them so that you can learn from them.

I think about some of the women that I work with who they're triggered by their husband's behavior, for example. And when they're willing to be still with themselves and to truly feel the gratitude of what this is showing them, I see transformation happen. They discover that maybe there are childhood wounds of abandonment and their spouse is just showing them that that's a part of themselves that they haven't let go of, that they're still hanging onto. And so I challenge you all to be grateful for the people in our lives who trigger us. Let's use them as our personal emotional trainers. Let's use them to show us parts of ourselves that maybe we have abandoned, maybe parts of ourselves that we aren't honoring, maybe how we haven't set boundaries, or maybe just limiting beliefs that this person is showing us that needs to be transformed. So that's the first uncommon gratitude.

The second one is being grateful for your failures. I know, no one wants to fail. It's not fun. It's not what we plan for. But if you are setting out to live a beautiful and expansive life, failure is a part of that. This year, I've had some failures, I've had some things, I've made some mistakes, and I'm willing to do that. And I'm actually very grateful for them because when I make them, I realize it is an opportunity to learn. It's an opportunity to learn why I made it, what needs to shift within me, what I can learn from it, so then I can apply that to my future. A lot of the lessons that we need to learn are going to be learned in the mistakes, not in the successes.

Another way you may end up being grateful for your failures is when you look back and you realize that it was because you failed at something, that it put you on a different path that actually served you. An example I can think of is with my marriage. Now, I don't consider it a failure, but maybe by society standards you would because it ended, but that put me on a whole different journey, a journey of me becoming, coming into myself. And without that, I would not be where I am today. And so I want you to think about the gratitude in the failure, how failure maybe has helped you with innovation and creativity, how maybe failing forward has taught you to be resilient and has actually created results, the lessons that you've learned because of failure.

And the willingness to fail, I think, is such an important topic, is such an important skill because so many of you may not be living the life that you dream of because you have a fear of failing. But what if you decided that you are going to experience gratitude in the failure, that you're going to learn from it, that you're going to use failure to grow you and to expand you and to make you a better human?

The third uncommon gratitude is the gratitude of the daily annoyances. Okay, hear me out. I discovered years ago that the things that I was complaining about, when I really looked at them, were things that I was so grateful for. For example, the laundry piling up. When I really thought about it, I'm like, "Oh my goodness, I have clothes. Apparently I have an abundance of them because they're piled up in the laundry room." And then I looked at Sarah's clothes and I was like, "I have a healthy daughter." So many things that we complain about are actually gratitude in disguise.

Think about what you complain about. Maybe you complain about your kids' messiness. You have kids and sounds like they're being pretty normal. It's what kids do. They make a mess. Think about maybe complaining about having to pay your taxes. That means you made money. It means that you had a surplus of money if you're having to pay taxes. Recently, I got very annoyed with someone on my team, very annoyed. And I realized, okay, this person is first of all being a personal emotional trainer for me. And secondly, I pulled the lens back and I thought, "First of all, I have a team and I'm very grateful for each of them, even when they may annoy me." And I'm sure I annoy them too, so let's just put that out there and be clear.

But I just started to go on this gratitude rampage around this certain person and how I know that she is trying to do a good job and she's doing a good job in so many ways. And the fact that I have a community that I can be upset when something's not delivered properly. And I just went from being so annoyed to experiencing the gratitude and also the gratitude of that failure of learning, okay, this is what we need to do. This is what we need to put in place so this doesn't happen again. So it checked off all the boxes, personal emotional trainer, failing, and the little annoyances, right?

I want you to try this. The next time you're annoyed, just ask yourself, "Is there anything in this that I could be grateful for? Is this something that is a blessing in disguise?" Because annoyances need to be honored. I'm not telling you to ignore them because it may mean that a value is not being honored, that you are out of integrity. And I think we can honor that and also be grateful for the lesson, be grateful for what you have. I feel like there is gratitude in so much that we overlook every single day. Are you all with me?

Now, the final uncommon gratitude is one of my favorites, and it is gratitude for the future, being thankful in advance, what I call celebrating ahead of time. It is one of my favorite things to do, especially towards the end of the year. I love to have a very intentional practice. In fact, if you're in the membership, we're going to be doing this pretty soon as part of our two-hour workshop where we are going to plan out our 2025. But I love to spend time being very grateful for my past year, all the lessons, the annoyances, the people that grew me, all of it. And then I love to fast-forward to one year from now and ask myself, "What will I be celebrating one year from now?" And I like to start celebrating it now. I like to celebrate ahead of time.

And the reason why I love this is that the reason why we want anything is because we are after a feeling. I want you to really think about this. The reason why you want to grow your business, the reason why you want to find a partner, the reason why you want to lose weight, the reason why you want to remodel your home, the reason why you want to get a promotion, it's all because you are after a feeling, and yet things outside of you don't create your feelings. You create your feelings based on your thought. And I love knowing that I don't have to wait one year from now to feel the feeling of already having achieved that thing.

Now, here's where it gets really fun, is that as you embody that feeling, whether it's confidence, whether it is joy, whether it is delight, whether it is peace, whether it is confidence, whatever it is, whenever you embody that now, you are now becoming a match for what it is that you want. Energy is a real thing. Like attracts like. We all know the difference on a day when we're feeling very confident, how we show up, what we see, what we experience, versus those days when we're feeling insecure and how we show up and what we see, what we notice, and what we create as a result.

And I love celebrating ahead of time as well because I have found that the anticipation is even better than the arrival. How many of you have planned a trip and just been so excited just thinking about it? You're like, "Oh my God, I'm getting ready to go to the Caribbean. This going to be so much fun," and you're so excited. It's the anticipation of the arrival of the trip that often is the best part. And so for me, celebrating ahead of time is me getting into that energy of anticipation, being open to receiving it, being excited about receiving it. I love thinking it's on its way. I don't have to focus on it not being here yet, which reminds me of lack and scarcity. And that is an energy that is opposite of it being here.

I love being in the energy of it's here. It's on its way. I can just show up and tend to the details of my daily life, curate my days on purpose, knowing that if I stay in alignment with that, it is going to show up. I don't know how. I don't know when. I can have a goal. I can have that destination in mind, but my job is just to be open to receiving it and being in alignment with it. And that comes from celebrating ahead of time, the uncommon gratitude practice of being thankful for your future in advance. And so I want you all to think, what do you want to be celebrating one year from now? And why not start celebrating it now? So those are four uncommon gratitude practices that I highly encourage you to practice and to use these to expand you, to make life more interesting and fun, and more than anything, to help you feel better because gratitude always feels good.

And with that, I just want to say thank you. Some of you tune into this podcast every single week, and I don't take that for granted. I am very honored that you spend time with me. I know time is precious, and it means a lot that you are a part of this community. And I appreciate the messages too. Just the other day, I went on iTunes and I was searching for a podcast and I happened to stumble upon mine and I was like, "I haven't read the reviews in so long." And there were so many just beautiful and thoughtful reviews, and some of them made me laugh.

For example, there's one from IDoLoveBurgers. First of all, I love that handle because I love burgers too. But she wrote, "She's that girl." She went on to say, "I have never left a review for a podcast before. Keep in mind, I've been listening to podcasts since 2019, but when I have to audibly say out loud, 'Yes, Ms. Leigh,' or, 'Speak, Tonya,' like someone that's listening to a good sermon at church that I needed to hear, I have to say something. What got me here is The Decision Switch, an episode she did. Tonya, please never stop what you're doing. I hope you continue to get your flowers time and time again." Thank you. "Continue to be full of grace, full of honesty, full of swagger in everything you do. You just help me make two major decisions about one thing in my life. Never stop."

You all, this is why I do what I do. I realize that some of you will never be a part of the membership. I may never meet you. But if you come across just one podcast and you learn something that changes your life, I will feel like I have served my mission in life. I will feel like I am doing the work that I was called here to do. And so thank you all so much. And even for those of you who haven't left me a review but you tune in every single week, I appreciate you so, so much.

We have done how many episodes now? We're getting close to 500. I know we're 400 and something, and I show up week after week. And some weeks I'm like, "What are we going to talk about this week?" But there are always ideas. There are always things that I'm wanting to say. Sometimes it's harder than others. Sometimes I have to search deep. But I think this practice has been so good for me too. And just being a woman who shows up for her mission, even when it's hard, even when my brain is telling me that it's not good enough, even when sometimes I'm like, "Is this worth it?" I'm reminded, it's so worth it. And guess whatever you want in life, it is so worth it too. Be a woman who shows up for her dreams.

All right, my friends, I love you all and I will see you in next week's episode. Cheers.