How I discovered the power of gratitude

This week as we prepare for Thanksgiving at home, the team at Lisa Kahn Designs and Finding Sanctuary is preparing for a different kind of giving thanks in our office.

This is the story of Project Gratitude, as we call it, and how it came to be an annual tradition for us.

The story begins several years ago, when I found myself in a bit of a bind. The Great Recession was in full swing, and amazingly we had a number of good projects lined up to keep us going. But as the economy started to recover, I realized that nearly all of my biggest projects were beginning to wrap up.

I had been so focused on providing excellent service to the clients we had that I didn’t look ahead, to see what else was coming up.

One day I woke up and realized that we didn’t have any new projects on the books. Also, our cash was low. Really low. We didn’t have enough money in our back accounts to go on for more than a few weeks.

I did a lot of soul searching. I did a lot of thinking, and I spent a lot of time in my sanctuary. It was then that I decided it was time to practice what I really believe to be true.

In truth, I didn’t know what else to do. And my intuition gave me that push – you know the one. The one where it says, “Hey, over here. Let me show you the way out.”

So here’s what I did: I went to a nice stationery store, bought 50 of the nicest notes I could afford, and found my favorite pen. I had 50 notecards and envelopes, so when I went back to my office, I made a list of the 50 people who had the most positive influence on my business and my life in the past year.

I wrote a note by hand thanking each person for every single way they had blessed me in the past year.

The first few were kind of hard. I gritted my teeth as I wrote them. I was suffering, after all (being a victim of circumstance is hard work, you know). The next few notes flowed out a little more easily.

By the time I got to the end, my heart was bursting with gratitude for what seemed like an entire field of glorious roses planted just for me. This is gratitude doing its best work, right here. Gratitude doesn’t change our circumstances. It changes us. And THAT changes our circumstances.

Here’s what I didn’t do:

I didn’t ask for anything. I didn’t mention our need for work.

I said nothing but “thank you” to each person for everything I could think of. I licked fifty stamps and sent them off with a prayer of thanksgiving.

And then an amazing thing happened. A few days later the phone started to ring. People called to thank me for the notes. Some called me in tears, moved by what I had written (I’m tearing up a little myself writing this).

Some sent me emails, and others texted me. Every single person on my list reached out for me over the next few weeks. Every single one.

While I didn’t plan it, and didn’t bank on it (this wasn’t some sort of quid pro quo), my friends and colleagues started to refer work to me.

Within a month of sending those letters of gratitude, I was so busy with new work that I could barely keep up. But I honestly don’t think it was the notes. I think it was the change in my heart that changed the energy around everything I was experiencing.

Gratitude turned things around.

Gratitude ushered in that magical shift that comes with deep and heartfelt gratitude: it opened my eyes to the beauty and abundance that was already all around me. The generous hearts. The helping hands. The kindness. The camaraderie. The laughs.

The beauty of it was blinding. And so we celebrate that shift every year.

Every year we put together gifts and notes of gratitude for our colleagues, vendors, and clients to let them know that we are so very grateful to be taking this amazing journey with them. Every year we write these notes by hand. I want this shift for them as well, you see. I want everyone at my company to operate out of that space of having a heart bursting with gratitude. That’s the kind of business I want to run,

This year we have over one hundred very special people on our list, and most of them will all have a token of our gratitude in their hands by the time you read this.

It’s Thanksgiving, after all. And we are very thankful.

And I am especially thankful for you, for coming along on this journey of Finding Sanctuary. This journey has just begun. I can’t wait to share the rest of it.

With love and oh so much gratitude,

Lisa