I had the day off of work on Friday for one of our quarterly Global Gratitude Days, and it got me thinking about what gratitude actually is and my process for getting there.

The thing about gratitude is it’s an energy thing. You can’t force it. I mean, you can try, but if your underlying feeling is actually resentment, and you force yourself to say “I’m grateful,” it won’t do much except create dissonance within you. The universe works on vibrations, not words, so if aren’t truly and genuinely grateful, it won’t hear what you have to say, and the fake gratitude won’t actually do anything. And why does genuine gratitude matter? If you don’t genuinely, deeply, with all your might want others to succeed, you’ll consciously and subconsciously sabotage all the things around you. And if you somehow have the mental fortitude to keep it to yourself, the dissonance will drive you mad. On the contrary, when you get to genuine gratitude, things just don’t bother you as much. You don’t take feedback or rejection as personally. You see the world with more forgiveness and generosity, and this makes it so much easier to roll with the punches, to navigate change and hardship, and to continue to show up with a mindset that moves things forward.

So do how do you do real gratitude? It’s actually quite simple, but I made a few diagrams to illustrate my point.

Introducing the Resentment-Gratitude scale. It is my opinion that the opposite of gratitude is resentment, and the only way to move from resentment to gratitude is to stop and feel all the emotions and feelings that are sitting between your current state and a state of extreme gratitude.

The process for moving up the scale is quite simple (I said it’s simple, but it’s not easy.) You have to check your resentment-gratitude score. If it’s greater than 3, process your feelings. If it’s less than or equal to 3, don’t talk to anyone, take a nap, and process your feelings. You have to repeat this, over and over again, in all pockets of stillness in your life (and yes, you need to create as many of those as possible.) It might take you years to move the needle if you’ve built up a lot of “gratitude debt.” But if you keep doing this over and over again, eventually, you will find yourself in a state of genuine gratitude.

As for me, I was probably a 2 or 3 on this scale on Thursday last week. It was one of those weeks where I just overdid it, and I couldn’t quite catch up during the week. But over the course of the Gratitude Day and the subsequent weekend, I followed my process, and I can confidently say that I’ve reentered a state of deep and genuine gratitude.

How are you doing on the resentment-gratitude scale today?