Specific Gratitude.
General gratitude is a mood. Specific gratitude is data.
The Creator's Journey · Chapter X, The Power of Alignment
I want to talk about gratitude without making it sound soft. In my experience it is one of the hardest-edged tools a leader has.
For most of my early career, I did not practice gratitude. I practiced the next thing. A product shipped, and I was already worried about the following release. I thought this was what serious people did. Celebrating felt like lowering your guard.
Fear narrows. Gratitude widens.
Fear narrows orientation. Your attention collapses onto the threat. You see what could go wrong in sharp detail and miss the opportunity next to the problem and the person who has the answer. Gratitude widens it again. You notice resources you already have. You decide from sufficiency instead of scarcity.
Specificity is the whole point. General gratitude is a mood. Specific gratitude is data. “My health” does not count. “The engineer who flagged the risk before it became a problem” counts. Over time you start noticing what works in real time, not only when you sit down with the journal.
When I practice gratitude after a win, I am not being polite. I am correcting the record.
We recognize that the sources of this goodness are outside of ourselves.
Success needs it more than loss
Success is when ego grows fastest. The press release has your name on it. The engineer who stayed late and the early customer who took a chance fade from the story. No meaningful outcome in my career was produced by one person. I learned that on the carrier deck.
The psychologist Robert Emmons, who has spent much of his career studying gratitude, describes its second step as recognizing that the good in your life came from outside yourself. That is the correction a win needs. The leaders who say thank you sincerely, and specifically, tend to be the ones whose teams tell them the truth.
Make it a practice
- Write ten each nightStart with three and build to ten or twenty. Catch up if you fall behind.
- Make each one specificA person, a moment, an action. “Good day” does not count.
- Correct the record after a winList who made it possible before you accept any credit.
- Thank them directlyAfter thirty days, read back through the list. Thank the people who appear most often.
Quick answers
Why does specific gratitude matter for leaders?
Rob Frasca argues that general gratitude is a mood while specific gratitude is data. Naming a person, a moment and an action trains attention to find what is working and widens a leader’s orientation.
How do you practice specific gratitude?
Rob Frasca writes ten specific entries each night, each naming a person, a moment and an action. After a win, he lists who made it possible before accepting any credit, and after thirty days he thanks the people who appear most often.
Sources
- Rob Frasca, The Creator’s Journey (forthcoming), Chapter X, The Power of Alignment.
- Robert A. Emmons, “Why Gratitude Is Good,” Greater Good Magazine, Greater Good Science Center, UC Berkeley, 2010. Source