When thinking about personality and strengths, appreciativeness usually won’t come to mind for most. Yet, it is a vital personality trait because it builds personality from the inside out. Having gratitude for daily things and activities and even circumstances will add to one’s personality by adding balance, direction, and understanding, for example. How? Traits that are positive such as those are strengthened because the feeling of gratitude is the gateway to positivity, including positive traits. By practicing gratitude regularly, positive feelings enhance our positive traits which most people have but may need to work on developing. Gratitude helps your brain work on these traits.
What are some ways that gratitude strengthens personality? Here are at least five ways.
1. Gratitude helps you be more flexible and understanding.
Appreciation helps you see your circumstances in a positive light, which brings perspective through adjustable insight. When we adjust or adapt, we add flexibility and understanding to our list of traits which is extremely useful in getting along with others and in life. Flexibility and understanding enhancements to personality through gratitude go a long way and can be useful as a leadership tool as well.
2. Gratitude helps you attain greater wisdom.
Gratitude lets you figure out how to look at your life positively. By figuring that out, you add perspective and can open the door to greater wisdom as a personality trait. Wisdom often is defined as the quality of having experience, knowledge or good judgment. With gratitude, our judgment and experience are relatively boosted towards the positive (i.e. with a positive lens) adding to our wisdom. Gratitude’s ability to strengthen wisdom lets us become better versions of ourselves ultimately benefiting ourselves and those around us.
3. Gratitude makes you a more patient person.
It takes time to formulate a grateful perspective in one’s mind and judgment. However, the act of doing so adds greater patience to our personality because we’re figuring out how to apply our gratitude lens. This patience coupled with understanding is how abundant gratitude can be unlocked in our lives. The act of being grateful lets us become more patient and by gaining patience, we add wisdom, flexibility and understanding to our repertoire.
4. Gratitude helps you see yourself and your circumstances with more clarity rather than being lost or buried in challenges.
Appreciation for things, people or life circumstances gives us clarity to what makes life that much sweeter and richer without necessarily being unrealistic either. The use of gratitude therefore brings a clearer lens to our perspective making us more insightful. Such insight keeps us from becoming lost or buried in challenges that can make some feel overwhelmed.
5. Gratitude helps you to overreact less and be a voice of calm and even reason.
Before finding gratitude, we may hesitate or be inclined to overreact quickly to a situation or toward a person. With gratitude, we are forced to become more patient in order to see the positive using sound judgment. After rooting the habit of gratitude, we overreact less and can become a voice of calm and even reason especially in tough life circumstances. Seeing the positive and using a gratitude lens gives us the patience and wisdom to not overreact but rather use the gained perspective towards building a solution to our problems and worries. Calm and reason can more easily replace frustration and outburst. As a result, our personality is strengthened from the inside out.
These are at least five ways that gratitude strengthens our personality from the inside out. They are powerful and meaningful solutions and paths to how we can enhance our lives so that we may live life to the fullest. Certainly, a habit of gratitude takes time, but building this into our toolkit brings about vital changes that can lead to rich and meaningful living.