Newsletter #1: The Practice Pause

The Practice Pause:

Humor me.  

It’s Monday morning.  This short note is one email of a dozen 

or dozens already staring at you from the unread inbox. 

Two, maybe three things have already annoyed you this morning.  

You have a ton of work to do and I’m asking you to put the world on pause for one minute.  If I could take a second to shove in earplugs when we started trading gunshots in Iraq (I’m sensitive to loud noises, what can I say), you can give yourself a minute for this:

Grab any writing utensil and any paper item -notebook, post-it, junk mail envelope- and write down three things you are grateful for in the last 24 hours. It doesn’t matter how small.  It could be squeezing through the light before it turned red, the look of the sky when you woke up, taking a second to enjoy that first sip of coffee, or realizing that hail damage sucks a lot less than getting your house torn apart by a hurricane or a tornado. Pick anything that works for you. Write all three down.  Repeat tomorrow morning. 

Despite how it feels sometimes, the world isn’t conspiring against you.  How we show up impacts how we read our challenges and the people around us. We don’t see the world as it is -we see it as we are.  Practicing gratitude starts a subtle shift in the world around us. 

You’re working to change things.  Begin within. 

More to follow.

Ryan