A couple of weeks ago I was listening to my son’s Aikido teacher in the Dojo teaching the students about fear. What he said was so powerful that I needed to share it.

As the students were facing a scary simulated attack by the instructor, I observed them flinching from fear. He then showed them how to overcome that fear. What happened next was magical. What he said was “if you hold an attitude of gratitude, and truly feel it in your heart and your mind, then there’s no room for fear”. So the students applied it immediately, and then, gracefully and calmly, they dealt with the situation by moving out of the way of the blow and protect the attacker. So not only did they act with balance and alignment, but they also had the capacity to protect the attacker from his own anger.

So I made a point of practicing gratitude more deliberately than I usually do. I shared the concept deeply with my clients, and they shared it with their friends, families and colleagues.

This morning, I received a message from a client who told me that she had shared the practice with a friend who is a teacher, and he will be lobbying his school to place the value, and practice, of gratitude front and center at his school.

As they say, the best things in life are free, we just need to be open to them and create the habit of surfacing a state of gratitude. How do you maintain an attitude of gratitude?

#attitudeofgratitude

Sleiman “Slayman” Abou-Hamdan