What a perfect first, coming so soon after Thanksgiving. Greg found this site online and shared it with me. Due to very cold temperatures today, and having the sniffles, I remained house bound all day. This created the wonderful opportunity to try out the site and express gratitude to some of my favorite people, my children and my grandson Dayan.
The website is elementofgratitude.org and this is their gratitude gram project. It is all free. The site is easy to navigate and the grams extremely easy to create. From my computer (or my iPhone would work as well) I uploaded the recipient’s photo, chose a filter if I wanted one, and added a personal message. After the gram was completed I could email it, or post it to twitter, Facebook or Pinterest. I would like a texting option so I can send gratitude grams to my younger grandchildren who don’t have Facebook pages, and I’d like an option to post directly to the recipient’s own Facebook page, rather than sharing from my wall. Over all, though, I like the site.
The idea behind the #ThxLeads2Giving project is that thanks leads to giving. The website states: Research has shown the benefits of gratitude for physical, psychological, and relational health include higher levels of life satisfaction, positive emotions and social interaction, and lower levels of depression and envy. With the evidence indicating how important gratitude may be, each of us can actively cultivate more of this virtue in our own lives and help activate more abundant gratitude in the world. There is a cyclical relationship between gratitude and giving. Dr. Robert Emmons, professor of psychology at UC Davis and the world’s leading scientific expert on gratitude hypothesizes that gratitude “moves recipients to share and to increase the good they have received,” thereby creating opportunities for others to experience gratitude and for the original giver to reap the myriad rewards associated with gratitude.
#ThxLeads2Giving seeks to show the world how gratitude and thankfulness leads to giving and vice versa. They have declared tomorrow, December 2, as Giving Tuesday, with a focus on Global Gratitude. With gratitude being foundational to my life, I am happy to have found this site. I look forward to sharing gratitude with others by telling them, often, how thankful I am for them and for journeying together through life. Thanksgiving is more than a day set aside once a year to express gratitude….it is a lifestyle, lived daily and expressed frequently. I….am….grateful.