Last month, I asked you to join me in a month-long daily gratitude practice. I had no expectations. I only offered a practice that greatly benefits me in my daily life. You touched me with your kindness and generosity. I am truly inspired by your participation.

I learned the more I express gratitude, the more I allow myself to open my heart and better appreciate all the wonderful things in my life.  I learned to see gratitude through your eyes. I learned I enjoy my journey more when others play along.

I am deeply grateful for the people who helped spread the word and fully embraced this daily practice. You have helped me more fully embrace who I am. I am forever thankful for your direct and indirect influence.

During the month of December, I invite you to join me in another learning opportunity.  An opportunity to share your gratitude more directly with others.

Are you up to a new challenge?

Of course you are.  So here’s what I have in mind. 

Giving a gift a day for 30 days.

Gifts come in all shapes and sizes. True gifts come from our heart. They are delivered with genuine sincerity and with no expectations. They are an expression of who we are. They are something of need for the person receiving the gift.  They are given to people we know or total strangers.

The daily practice is simple, give a gift of some kind to anyone you want.

What are gifts? Here’s some food for thought.

• Words of Gratitude. Expressing our deepest sincerity for the people who make a difference in our lives.
• Acts of Services. Doing favors. Lending a helping hand. Saying “Yes” to a request when our first thought is to say “No.”
• Gift of Quality Time.  Spend quality time with a person with no strings attached. For the sake of being present and enjoying their company.
• Gift of money. Buy coffee or lunch. Donate to a food or toys.

Share your gifts in any way, shape or form. There is no set method for your daily gift practice. All I ask is you

Have fun. Get creative. Stretch yourself. Commit to a daily practice. You can do it.

On December 1st, you have an opportunity to join a group in a month-long quest.  I invite you to commit to a month-long journey of deliberately giving from your heart.

Will you commit to daily gift giving?

Please join me in 30 days of daily status updates sharing the gifts you have given. If you are using Twitter, please add the hashtag #30Gifts to your tweets so we can follow along and celebrate your success. On Facebook, “like” the WeVivify page and tag your status update with WeVivify (@WeVivify).

I trust you will find this learning experience fun and exciting. I look forward to hearing what you learned from your daily gift practice.

Thank you for allowing me to share a gift with you.

Gratitude is the foundation of our happiness. Celebrating all the good we have in our lives warms our soul. We honor who we are at the deepest levels. We see the inner beauty we have to offer. We recognize the inner beauty of every one we meet.

Gratitude, don’t leave home without it!

As our genuine authentic self-bubbles to the surface, we communicate with heart. We love, serve, give, and add value first. We nurture and bring kindness to our relationships and ourselves. We see our relationships as an extension of ourselves.

We are one with our fellow-man.

I can oversell anything with the best of them. I don’t want to sell. I want you to experience gratitude for yourself.  I want you to own your gratitude. Sir Ken Robinson described it perfectly in his stellar book, “The Element.” Personal ownership comes in stages.

• Aptitude – I get it – Firm conceptual understanding
• Passion – I love it – We receive delight and pleasure from our experience
• Attitude – I want it – We have emotional connection
• Opportunity – Where is it? – We seek out this experience

In my last post, “30 days of Gratitude,” I invited you to join me in a daily practice of gratitude during the month of November.  By virtue of reading the last 2 posts, you have the aptitude and passion to fully experience all the good gratitude has to offer. The intention behind the design practice is to heighten your awareness beyond aptitude and passion by ascending to attitude and opportunity.

Put simply, to own your gratitude.

On November 1^st ,  you  have an opportunity to join a group in a month-long quest. Will you be joining us? Please join me in 30 days of daily status updates about something you are grateful.

If you are using Twitter, please add the hashtag #30Gratitude to your tweets so we can follow along and celebrate your success. On Facebook, “like” the WeVivify page and tag your status with WeVivify (@WeVivify).

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” – Wayne Gretzky

The month of November is for sharing our gratitude with each other and ourselves. Many of us struggle to give and receive in our lives. We grow and lead from the struggles and challenges we faced. Creating awareness and taking on our struggles is a gateway to being our true authentic self in the world.

Genuine leadership requires ownership of our own challenges.

Much of my life, I have struggled to accept all the kindness and good in my life. I ignored or brushed it off. I never owned it.

Last fall, my coach challenged me to integrate gratitude as part of my daily routine. With all my might, I resisted. I failed to recognize the benefits that fully embracing gratitude offered me. Given my life-long challenges, it is easy to see why I struggled to accept this challenge?

Being a coach myself, I knew resistance was a sure sign I was ignoring something that required my attention. After some self-talk, I reluctantly accepted the challenge. I set my intention to connect to what I was grateful for and to deeply feel gratitude when people offered it to me.

To be successful, I had to design an easy fail-safe daily practice. My practice needed to provoke my curiosity, expand my focus and clarity, and create a repeatable plan of action for inviting more gratitude into my life.

I turned to social media for my solution. Here is the practice I designed.

Every day during the month of November, I would tweet or update my Facebook status with something I was grateful for. Each update would focus on something new I was grateful for. I could not repeat the same tweet or subject matter. When I was offered gratitude, I would honor the person’s offering. Externally, I would acknowledge the offering and say “Thank You.”  Internally, I would tell myself I am loved and worthy to receive this gratitude offering.

November came and I began my practice. My practice was limited to my daily tweets for the first 2 weeks or so. Then something magical happened, people in my life started telling me how much they appreciated me. At first, it was just a couple of random occurrences, and then it became a daily occurrence. The more frequent they came, the more I struggle to hold onto my old beliefs. I started embracing my contribution and letting go of my struggle.

My daily gratitude efforts delivered everything I wanted and more. I fell in love with my life again. I owned my struggle. I continue to practice gratitude daily and I hope you are inspired to do the same.

Are you up for the challenge?

Please join me in 30 days of daily status updates about something you are grateful.

If you are using Twitter, please add the hashtag #30Gratitude to your tweets so we can follow along and celebrate your success. On Facebook, “like” the WeVivify page and tag your status with WeVivify (@WeVivify).

The last couple of posts (Re-Gifting, Unwrap your gifts )  have focused on bringing your natural gifts into the forefront of your life. In doing so, we share ourselves in a more authentic way.  We show up in every interaction and situation consciously bearing our gifts.  People recognized what we have to offer and crawl out of the woodwork to receive what we have to offer.  Maybe they always have, but now we are keenly aware of it.

There is something different about it this time around.  Even though we are uncomfortable sitting in the spot light, we like the new-found attention.  It’s an odd, strange feeling to moderately enjoy attention.  We feel good about ourselves and passively seek more. Our old habits and voice tell us to escape back to the safety and comfort of a quiet place. We know this no longer fits our description of who we are.  We no longer want to keep our gifts from the world.  We want to share them and experience all the great feelings this attention bring to us. We crave more.

What do we do with all this new-found glory?

The answer is simple….we take our gifts and we apply them to the things we CARE about most.

A much harder question is what do you CARE about?

CAREs are our highest-level needs, our inner burning desires, or our own personal conditions for satisfaction.  They are ideals that we live by (i.e. I am a loving husband), things we are passionate about (i.e. I am helping others find their passion for life), or lofty goals (I am saving money for my kid’s college tuition).  Living by our CAREs is intrinsically part of our lives.

The more we embody our CAREs; the more purposefully we act and the more meaning we have to our life. We take ownership and responsibility for our actions and in-actions. We begin to reduce our emotional attached to things that are not aligned with our CAREs. We invite playful energy and lightness into our daily lives. Our daily intentions, actions and commitments are clear and resolute.  We are aligned with who our soul desires us to be.

What you CARE about?

In this time of holiday cheer, I have been thinking a lot about “re-gifting.”  No, not in the tempting sense of giving some unsuspecting soul that set of scented candles that Aunt Millie gave you two years ago that has never seen the light of day. The re-gifting I refer to is giving to others gifts that have been bestowed upon you, the gifts that you probably take for granted: the skills, talents, and preferences that you don’t think twice about. I am thinking about the qualities and traits that you probably overlook each day that others admire and wish they had, but that you take for granted.

The way I see it, we have each been given a plethora of gifts unique to us that make up the palette from which we have to choose.  Alone, any one of our gifts or talents is shared by thousands or even millions of other people. For example, our ability to influence another’s mood by our facial expression is shared by every other human being on the planet. Yet I venture to say that your smile is such a unique gift that can warm people’s hearts and brighten their day. Not just any smile will do – your smile is the one they really want.

Most of us probably don’t think of ourselves as a combination of gifts. We talk about our “lucky breaks” and our “good fortune,”  but to hear someone speak of their own talents as ‘gifts’ sounds a bit strange. Some might say it is boastful or even arrogant. To say ‘I have a great smile that can warm the hearts of total strangers’ is not something that comes up in conversation for most of us.

Rather, we are quick to point out our imperfections and faults.  We focus on what we don’t have rather than on what we do have and who we are. Even if we did take the time to take a good, hard look at ourselves, most of us would be more apt to rebuff or devalue our gifts rather than acknowledge them and bask in the beauty of our uniqueness. Rather than be grateful and appreciate the richness of who we are, we magnify and focus on our faults and imperfections.

During this Season of Giving, I invite you to join me in a unique learning opportunity, a study in appreciation.  I ask you to consider the old saying,  “To those to whom much is given, much is expected”, and join me in an experiment. I invite you to learn to by doing…and by giving. Rather than hiding your treasures, the gifts you have been given, I ask that you remove your gifts from hiding and bring them out for the world, and for yourself, to see, and for purpose for which they were intended: to share with the world.

In the next few weeks, have the courage to take an inventory of the gifts you have been given. Take the time to be grateful for who you are, not because of your social status or your job title, your worldly possessions or your bank account, but for the offer you are in the world. Then choose just one gift you have been given and share it with someone.

Maybe it is a warm smile to a frowning stranger.  Or replacing a typically sharp response to your significant other with a hug of compassion. It could be an offer to stay and help  a struggling colleague, rather than rush out the door to beat the traffic. It could be reaching out with an encouraging word and a cup of coffee to an acquaintance who has just be laid off.  It doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be real, and from the heart.

Just pick one – and re-gift away. If you want to really challenge yourself, and you really want to grow, do it again. Repeat it every day for a week. You may find it is contagious…and that you become a serial re-gifter!

We are each a unique combination of gifts to the world, each  a wonderful masterpiece, complete, magnificent and absolutely perfect. And when we offer ourselves in the service of something greater than ourselves, for something or someone we care about, we celebrate and truly live. In using and sharing our gifts, others expand and thrive, we shine, and we make the world a better place.

In early October, I saw Cami Walker on the Today Show. She has written a wonderful book entitled “29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change Your Life .”  As the titled suggests, you can change your life in 29 days.

While I have not tried giving a gift a day for 29 days, I recently completed a month of tweeting something I am grateful for everyday.  This conscience daily effort has raised the bar on my feelings of gratitude.  I have been inspired to more deeply embrace all the good that is in my life.  I have expanded my recognition beyond the obvious things into to a greater awareness and appreciation for all the great things in my life.  I have more energy, love, and happiness. Better yet, I bring this energy to every conversation. As the saying goes, “Life is Beautiful.”

On Dec 1st, I will start my 29 days of offering a gift to the world.  You can follow my gift offerings on Twitter (@davidmcgraw).

If you feel inspired to do the same, please join me in the 29 day challenge. I promise you will be inspired to do bigger and greater things.

I look forward to hearing about your experience.

For more information on Cami Walker’s 29 Gifts program, please visit 29Gifts.org

I attended a conference awhile back.  One of the central themes was what gift do you offer the world. Talk about a heavy question.  Did you feel the weight that question carries?  I will bet your body tensed up and you became a bit distracted by your thoughts.  Take a moment to recollect yourself.

Ready? Great.  Let us see if we can lighten this question into something less daunting.  Here we go.

The question of gifts is an important question to answer. Knowing our natural gifts is an integral part of finding our voice.  Finding our voice gives us strength, courage, and freedom to step into our greatness. The fact you are reading this post is a direct result of me finding my voice.

Without my voice, I was drifting through life. With my voice, I act more purposefully in life.  I look forward to sharing my true authentic self with people and causes that matter most to me.

The gift you offer the world is not your work experience or learned skills. Your gift is your innate natural abilities that show up in every interaction and experience you have.  You share your gifts without any conscious effort at all.  Our gifts are the obvious things in our lives.

Sometimes we struggle to see the obvious things in our lives. Clearly seeing our gifts can be a struggle for even the most self-aware.  When our actions and ideas become obvious to us, we accept them with an unshakable knowing.  We unconditionally accept them, at times diminish their importance, and take them for granted.  We need to bring them to the forefront of awareness and share our gifts with more conscious intention.

Before we can do that, we need to become keenly aware of what our true gifts are. The best way to I have found to uncover our gifts is a three-step process.

1.  What gift do I offer the world? What is obvious to me? Write on a piece of paper, every thought about what your gift is for the next 15 minutes.  Write longer if you can.  The intention here is to capture your top of mind responses as well as the ones that arrive after the obvious ones have been written.   Typically, a person will exhaust all the extremely obvious stuff in the first 5 minutes and then begin to uncover deeper hidden more valuable gifts.

2.  What is obvious to others may not be obvious to me? Invite a diverse variety of people in your life to provide some important feedback to you. The best way to enhance our awareness, learn new skills, and build self-confidence is by soliciting and receiving feedback from people we trust. Positive and negative feedback is equally as important.  Encourage your respondents to freely provide their responses.  Unconditionally accept this feedback as a gift they are providing you.

Here is a sample request. Please feel free to use it as is or modify it in any way.

Will you take a few minutes and provide some important feedback for me?  I am looking to expand my self-awareness and improve the way I show up in the world.  I would greatly appreciate your help in identifying what personal qualities I bring to the table.  What positive qualities do you notice? What annoys you about me? General characterization is fine, but responses that are more specific will be more beneficial to me.

I am open to receiving any and all feedback you would like to share with me. I am deeply grateful for your willingness to be open, honest, and reflective with me.  Please feel free to address any aspect of our relationship you would like to address.

In gratitude,

3. Reflect on the responses received and repeat number 1.

People who deeply care about us, love us more for our natural gifts than anything else we may bring to the relationship. Find your gifts and liberally share them with the world.  Love and happiness will come in abundance.

I hope this exercise is helpful to you.  I look forward to hearing how this exercise was helpful or not helpful to you.

Thank you for allowing me to share a gift with you.