Fireproof your hope. Napoleon said it really well. He said, “Leaders are dealers in hope.” And what I’ve learned is, if you’re facing a lot of problems or adversity or volatility or confusion, you just want to fireproof your hope. You want to protect your optimism. You want to maintain your positivity. Because if you lose that and you become discouraged and you just give up on the future, you give up on your dreams, you have no faith, you don’t believe in yourself anymore, it’s a really dangerous place to be in. So, fireproof your hope. Some ways that I do that, I love journaling, and I encourage journaling. It’s a great way to do a gratitude list. So you practice what Sonja Lyubomirsky, one of the preeminent positive psychologists, and she calls it deliberate gratitude. She studied the world’s happiest people, and she says they don’t just practice random gratitude. It’s intentional gratitude. And I would suggest even additionally, what I call granular gratitude. So it’s not just deliberate gratitude where you actively, on a regular basis, write out what you’re grateful for. I would say also practice what I call granular gratitude, stuff you wouldn’t even think about. Be grateful if you have two feet. Be grateful if you have two eyes. Be grateful if there’s food on your table. Be grateful if there’s a roof over your head. Be grateful if you have people who love you. Be grateful if you have a job that pays for your mortgage and your bills. Be grateful if you can breathe fresh air. Be grateful if you have fresh water to drink. Imagine every time you drink some water, you’ve expressed gratitude. Not every country has fresh water. Be grateful if you have hospitals to go to. Not every place has them. Then you step into this orbit and universe of gratitude. So every day, even if the world around you is a messy place and, externally, you are dealing with challenges or not everything is going well, or even if everything is going amazingly well because we all have different seasons of life, periods in the sunshine, periods in the darkness. But granular gratitude and deliberate gratitude will really, really help you.
