THE POWER OF APPRECIATION

By Noelle C. Nelson

A Definition of Appreciation

Appreciation consists of two vital components: gratitude plus valuing.

Gratitude engages your heart. You feel or express gratitude after something pleasing has happened.  A friend helps you out of trouble; you are grateful.  You notice the good things in your life; you are grateful.  Most people are thinking of gratitude when they use the word “appreciation.”

Valuing engages the mind. When you value something or someone, you actively use your mind to think of it, why it matters to you, what it is worth to you.  In the world of finance, when something appreciates, it grows in value. The same is true in the rest of our lives.

We can deliberately select thoughts that value someone or something, rather than thoughts that devalue that person or thing.  Consciously choosing to value the people and things in your life is what makes it possible for you to use appreciation proactively.  You don’t have to wait for something pleasing to happen in order to start valuing.  You can choose to value someone or something before they have contributed anything at all to your life.

The direct consequence of appreciation is happiness. As you respond to people and events with appreciation, your life becomes happier. As you become happier, appreciating becomes easier -- especially when you realize that appreciating is what brought you this happiness in the first place.

Appreciation – valuing and being grateful for – is one of the key components of loving.

 Appreciation as Energy

When you step outside the idea of appreciation as gratitude expressed after the fact, and start to think of appreciation as an energy you use proactively with intention, it’s an entirely different experience.  

Understanding appreciation’s power starts with the realization that all life is first and foremost energy -- yourself included.  Whether a chair, your dog, or your mood, it’s all energy in different forms: inanimate matter (the chair); a living being (your dog); and a mental state (your mood).  Everything, whether seemingly solid (living beings and inanimate objects) or immaterial (thoughts and feeling), has a frequency of vibration.  The energy of appreciation is also expressed through its frequency of vibration.

Becoming an Appreciator

Appreciation is most powerful when it ceases to be something that you do only occasionally, and instead becomes your basic approach to life. When you perceive and interpret people and events through the lens of appreciation, you increase the potential for good possibilities in your life.  In an appreciative state of mind, you don’t deny reality, you just choose to perceive and interpret it in a positive or appreciative manner. You choose to see the benefits to you in the events and people that are coming your way, and you are thankful for them.  This does not mean that you never get angry, sad, or disappointed.  You do, but you work through your negative emotions and return to a generally appreciative way of thinking and feeling.  No matter what your current level of gratitude, you can increase and develop your ability to appreciate.

  Developing an Appreciative State of Mind

Try thinking appreciative and pessimistic thoughts at the same time.  It doesn’t work. You can’t simultaneously think, “I value and am grateful for all the opportunities my life affords me,” and, “Life sucks.”  It’s more than a contradiction in terms; it’s a contradiction in vibration.

How do you step into an appreciative state of mind?  The key is to consistently choose thoughts that express your valuing of people or situations.  Choose not to entertain negative or devaluing thoughts.  Over time, choosing appreciative thoughts becomes second nature.

If you listen carefully to yourself, you may find that the main obstacle to an appreciative state of mind is an unconscious undercurrent of complaining and worrying.  Transform your negative thoughts into more appreciative thoughts by actively countering each negative thought with more positive reflections.  

Choosing appreciative thoughts is a conscious process.  As you practice choosing thoughts of appreciation, also pay attention to your spoken words.  Do you complain a lot?   What do you complain about?   How much do you focus on what is going right, or is pleasant, easy, and reassuring?

Keep in mind that most situations have both positive and negative aspects.   Whenever you find yourself complaining or dwelling on what you don’t like, switch your focus quickly to what you do appreciate.  Practice noticing, thinking and talking about the aspects of a situation that you can value and be grateful for.

Switching your focus doesn’t mean that there aren’t things in your life that need fixing.  If you uncover something in your complaining that does require attention, write it down so that you can take care of it without having to carry it around in your mind where it can interfere with your ability to appreciate life.

Playing the Appreciation Game

Appreciating isn’t a matter of using the exact words “I appreciate” or “I’m grateful for” or “thank you.”  Appreciating is less a matter of the literal words we use and more a matter of intent.  When you are looking to find things to value and be grateful for in any given situation, you are appreciating, whatever your precise words.

Make a game of appreciating.  Deliberately think about the many things you can appreciate about every facet of your current life.  No matter where you are, or what you are doing, practice appreciating. Opportunities to appreciate in everyday life are limited only by your willingness to see them.

 Appreciating Yourself

As you continue using the power of appreciation, turn from the broad goal of appreciating life to the more intimate need to appreciate yourself. When you appreciate yourself, you bring out what’s best within yourself.

Who better can appreciate you than yourself? Develop and deepen your appreciation of yourself by exploring what you value about yourself.  Mouthing an empty “I love me” won’t work.  It takes more than that.  You have to identify the specific qualities that make up who you are, cherish them, and feel a deep sense of gratitude for them.

Take a sheet of paper and draw a vertical line down the middle.  On the left side, list the inner qualities and traits you value about yourself.  On the right side, write down why you are grateful for each one of these qualities and traits.   At first, you may feel that there is not all that much to appreciate about yourself.  Not so!  There is a great deal to appreciate about each and every one of us. If, however, you are having a tough time coming up with something, think what friends or family have said about you over the years.  Think about what you are good at and what inner traits are revealed by that. Think about the qualities you appreciate in your friends -- these will often be the qualities that you possess yourself.

It’s important to write down the specific reasons why your individual strengths and character traits are important to you.  This makes it much easier for you to fully and genuinely appreciate yourself.  As you value your qualities and are grateful for them, you recognize the value of who you are.  Valuing and being grateful for yourself builds your self-esteem and confidence.

Appreciating yourself is not to be confused with being arrogant.  Arrogant people spend their time comparing themselves to others and judging themselves to be better than everyone else.  Appreciating yourself has nothing to do with other people.  It is honestly appraising and being grateful for your individual gifts.

Cleaning Up Your Personal Vibration

Cleaning up your personal vibration means weeding out negative beliefs about yourself.  Negative beliefs, which get in a way of developing your appreciative vibration, generally fall into three categories:

1. Putting yourself down: “I’m not talented,” “I never get things right,” or “I’ll never be successful at anything.”


2. Feeling sorry for yourself, taking the role of a victim: “Poor me, I can’t be (or do or have) that,” “Nobody loves me,” or “Nobody appreciates me.”


3. Being self-critical, distorting your self-image so that it includes only your flaws or perceived flaws, and exaggerating those flaws: “I’m boring (or stupid, lazy, unimaginative, etc.).”

As you explore your qualities and begin to value and be grateful for them, many of your negative beliefs and opinions about yourself will simply drop off.  If you still find yourself making self-depreciating statements, stop, and consciously change your negative beliefs into positive statements. 

Self-appreciation is a powerful antidote to unhappiness.  By appreciating yourself, you dramatically alter how you perceive and interpret other people’s behavior.  Instead of interpreting events by worrying – “Did I do it right or wrong?”  “Do they like me or not?” or “Do they approve of me or not?” – you are free to interpret them more objectively.  Free of the need for others’ regard, you have more to give to people. Your more appreciative outlook generates positive responses from others. 

Everybody likes to be valued by others, but when you appreciate yourself, you’re not as needy for others to do so; you’re not dependent on others for your self-esteem.  When you appreciate yourself, people respond positively to your self-confidence and self-assurance.  Your likelihood of success in all areas of life automatically increases.

Deepening Your Appreciation of Others

Appreciating yourself makes it much easier to take the next step – appreciating others.  Since appreciation consists of valuing plus gratitude, feeling appreciation for another arises from consciously recognizing that person’s value and specific reasons why you are grateful for him or her.

When you value others, think about what you cherish about them, what makes them important to you, and why they matter.  When you’re grateful for others, you are thankful that they exist, and you are pleased by their presence in your life.

Think about how you value and are grateful for someone you love.  Can you sense how good you feel when you are appreciating? Can you feel how relaxed you become? How at peace you feel? How very pleasurable it is for you to be in this state of appreciation?  Let yourself become familiar with this feeling.

For others to feel the impact of your appreciation, however, your feeling it isn’t enough. You must be able to express your appreciation, verbally and nonverbally. When you express your appreciation to another person, let the tone of your voice reflect your warm feelings of gratitude.  Allow your appreciation to show in your facial expressions.  Look upon the person in a way that expresses how you value him or her.  Your appreciation will be that much fuller, and have that much more impact, when you show it with all of your being.

Appreciation must be genuine in order to have impact. Its vibration can’t be forced.  If you are not truthfully thinking and feeling appreciation, you will not be emitting its genuine vibration.  So don’t force yourself to appreciate.  Instead, find whatever you can appreciate truthfully.  You don’t have to appreciate everything about someone.  Appreciation works just fine when you’re appreciating even something minute about a person or situation, as long as that appreciation is authentic.

The three critical aspects of appreciation are: appreciation of life, oneself, and others.

The Power of Appreciation

When your heart and your mind – your feelings and thoughts – are aligned through appreciation, your vibration becomes coherent.  Research has demonstrated that when you are deeply feeling appreciation, your heart rhythms become harmonious, ordered, and coherent.  Your brain waves harmonize with your heart rhythms, bringing your whole being into a coherent state.  It is a highly desirable state, since it means that everything is working together smoothly and efficiently.

Coherence equals power.  When your whole being is in a coherent state, it’s as if you’d switched from the power of a light bulb to the power of a laser.  The light waves/particles from a light bulb are diffused. They are “incoherent” (nonaligned), so they go in all directions.  In a laser beam, light waves/particles are aligned in a unified or coherent pattern, which results in a focus so intense that, at very high powers, it can cut through steel.

When you achieve a coherent vibration, appreciation is no longer an occasional event for you. It becomes your habitual, normal state of mind, your way of being. Focusing your vibration of appreciation intensely allows you to effectively transform and attract the experiences you desire.  Transformation and attraction require that you reach the “feeling place” of appreciation -- an active, powerful, excited feeling of passion and enthusiasm.

Using Appreciation to Transform Situations and Attract Decided Outcomes

It’s not about manipulation, it’s about vibration.  Using appreciation to bring about things or experiences that you want in your life has nothing to do with manipulation or control. You cannot use the energy of appreciation to force anyone to do anything you want.  What you can do – and herein lies the magic – is deliberately emit a vibration of appreciation for whatever you desire. Your strong vibration is what makes it possible for those experiences to respond to that vibration and to align with you.

Think of appreciation as a musical tone you deliberately sound and project into the universe.  According to the phenomenon of entrainment, the strongest, most intense vibration “attracts” other vibrations to align with it – to come over, if you will, to its side, and transform the original vibration into something greater than it could have ever been alone.

The clearer, stronger your vibration (like a musical tone that has been precisely tuned), the more powerfully it will draw other frequencies to complete your resonant chord; that is, to provide your decided outcome.  This attraction and alignment happens at the level of frequencies of vibration – the level at which all objects, beings and experiences are one energy. Everything in the universe consists of the same energy vibrating at different frequencies.  Energy precedes matter. All things exist as energy before they ever become observable as matter. Energy interacts with energy freely and constantly.  It knows no time or space. Your mind can change events and experiences.  You can literally change the world around you – and appreciation is the key.  The energy of appreciation can bring you whatever you truly desire.

Appreciation Facilitates Cooperation

Appreciation attracts desired outcomes because it facilitates cooperation.  When you appreciate someone, for example, that person becomes willing to cooperate with you.  This cooperation is essential in bringing about your desired result.

Think of someone who values and genuinely appreciates you.  Play out in your mind a time when that person let you know just how valuable you were to him, and how grateful he was for your very existence.  How does this make you feel? Can you feel your body relaxing? Can you feel how your whole being is receptive to this person who appreciates you? Next, play out a scene in your mind in which this person asks something of you.  How willing are you to cooperate?

Now think of a situation in which you weren’t valued, where someone was perhaps angry with you or resentful of you. How does this make you feel?  Can you feel you body tightening up?  Can you feel that you are closed off to this person? Next, play out a scene in your mind where this person asks something of you?  How willing are you to cooperate?

Appreciation attracts your desired outcomes by aligning your own vibrational frequency and that of the thing you want.  “Becoming one,” in terms of vibrational frequency, is equivalent to a concept of “aligning with” or “harmonizing” vibrations.  Cooperation only comes about when vibrations either align exactly or harmonize.

Five Steps to Using Appreciation to Transform or Attract What You Want

Step One: Choose What You Want to Transform or Attract

Clearly articulate to yourself what it is you want.  Be specific. Make sure your desire is within what you believe is possible. Make adjustments, if necessary, until it is so.

Your desire must be both sufficiently specific for you to focus on and believable to you. If you are truly aligned with your desire, you are much more likely to attract what you seek.  If your desire exceeds what you think is possible, you won’t be able to launch a genuine vibration of appreciation, and you will be unable to attract what you want. Instead of setting yourself up to fail, choose something that you believe is possible.

Step Two: Determine the Feelings behind Your Desire

Figure out what your desire means to you; ask yourself what its value is to you.  Explore your feelings relative to you desire.  Generate specific feelings of valuing and gratitude.

Only when something has meaning for you do you value it.  A good way to determine what your desire means to you is to ask what you could do, be, or have once you desired outcome is realized.  How will it change your life? How will it affect those around you?  Your work? Your hobbies and other activities? Gratitude comes on the heels of this valuing.  When you realize what your desire means to you, it’s easy to feel grateful.

Step Three: Weed Out Conflicting Thoughts and Beliefs

Explore your thoughts about the thing you want. Examine your beliefs about it, its availability, and your ability to have it. Replace negative beliefs with positive ones.  Work with affirmations supporting your new positive beliefs.

Ask yourself: “What are my thoughts about this thing that I want?  What beliefs do I hold about it, its availability, and my ability to have it?  For your vibration of appreciation to be most powerful, your thoughts and beliefs must agree with the thing you want. A genuine belief supports vibration of appreciation.  Contradictory thoughts cancel each other out vibrationally, and nothing happens.

Remember, a belief is simply a habit of thought, something you repeat to yourself regularly and frequently.  Choose beliefs that serve you, and repeat them to yourself until they become your new habit of thought.

Step Four: Launch Your Vibration of Appreciation

Appreciate what you already have.  Launch your desire with focused, intense appreciation. Clear out any worry, fear, or doubt that gets in the way.

You start by valuing and being grateful for what you already have. Then you launch your desire vibrationally with clarity, focus, and intention, all the while replacing any negative thoughts with positive thoughts.

Too often, when we have less of something that we want, we denigrate (belittle) what we do have, expressing dissatisfaction. Such an attitude makes it difficult to attract anything different.

As long as your vibration around money, for example, is critical, blaming, and dissatisfied, you will align yourself with the vibrations of further money situations about which you will be critical, blaming, and dissatisfied!  You cannot attract more dollars if you don’t appreciate the dollars you already have. Develop a sense of value and gratitude for the money you have, no matter how little or how much.  Appreciating the money you have is the foundation from which you can successfully launch appreciation for money you desire.

Once you value and are grateful for what you already have, it’s time to launch your desire vibrationally.  In a place where you won’t be disturbed or distracted, sit comfortably, and close your eyes.  Think about all that you value in the thing that you wish to attract.  Think about the good things it will do for you.  Think in personal, intimate terms that have true meaning for you.  Be grateful, with all your heart, for the wonderful things your desire will bring to you.  Feel your appreciation in this way for three to five minutes.  Then relax.  Let it be done – your vibration of appreciation has been launched, and it will seek to align with that which will fulfill your vibration.  Appreciation attracts more things to appreciate.

If you could keep a clear, focused vibration of appreciation, your desire would come to you with surprising speed.  However, what frequently happens is that negative thoughts and feelings get in the way of launching a clearly focused vibration.  For example, “What if this doesn’t work?”  “What if nothing happens?”  “What if I’m not doing this right?” These “what ifs” reflect worry, fear, or doubt. Worry, fear and doubt do not mix well with appreciation.  It’s hard to genuinely value and to feel grateful for an experience when you are simultaneously worrying about it, fearful about it, or doubting it.

If this is the case, your vibration becomes discordant, and as such, cannot harmonize with the thing you seek.  If you allow worry, fear, or doubt into your vibration of appreciation, you will create a self-fulfilling prophecy.  You won’t be able to attract your desire to the degree you want, because your vibration will not be maximally focused.  So when worry, fear or doubt crosses your mind as you’re trying to launch your desire, simply say, “I don’t need to think about that now,” and go right back to valuing and being grateful for the thing you desire.  Later, you can examine those worries, fears and doubts and work through them, replacing them with positive thoughts that will support you appreciative intention.

Step Five: Be Alert to the Unfolding of Your Desire

Be open to the variety of ways in which vibration aligns with what you want.  Take an appropriate action.  Adopt an attitude of trust, and hopeful, enthusiastic expectation.

Once you’ve launched your vibration of appreciation for that thing you desire, anticipate its arrival with joy and enthusiasm, and constantly look for signs of its coming into your life. Your vibration of appreciation will begin to attract experiences, situations, and people that align in some way or another with the thing you seek.  Your job is to be alert to the unfolding of your desire, to take appropriate actions to further it, to be open to sometimes surprising variations you’ll attract, and consciously choose attitudes that support your desire. 

Whenever something comes along that it is even remotely connected to the fulfillment of your desire, appreciate it, value it, and be grateful.  Be alert to the infinite number of ways vibration will start aligning with your desire. Value the opportunities that come your way, be grateful for them, and act on them.  Think of your desire as unfolding in the series of events leading to its eventual fulfillment.

Expect your desire to be fulfilled, and be willing to exercise patience.  Adopt an attitude of trust.  You’ve launched your vibration, now trust that vibration can do nothing other than hook up with a like vibration. Like attracts alike.  It’s scientific!  Keep yourself on course by cherishing your desire regularly, always with great appreciation, and appreciating whatever you currently have. 

By continually valuing and expressing gratitude for whatever comes your way, while expecting the fulfillment of your desire, the strength of your vibration of appreciation increases, and the thing you seek can come to you all the more easily and rapidly.  You are in an emotional state of happy expectation, because all along the way you are perceiving the small and large ways in which the fulfillment of what you want is developing.

Eagerly anticipating or happily expecting the thing you desire is important.  It keeps you from falling into a state of longing – that is, thinking about how unhappy you are that you don’t have the thing you want.  Longing conflicts with appreciation. Longing produces a frequency of vibration completely at odds with the vibration of contentment and joy.  Choose to appreciate the thing you desire rather than long for it, and you’re much more likely to attract it. It is imperative to transform your feelings of longing into feelings that harmonize with a vibration of appreciation.  Transform your jealousy of anyone who has what you want by realizing that their accomplishments show you how available your desire really is.

Appreciating Your Way to Loving Relationships

No one ever gets married saying, “And in five years we’ll hate each other and get divorced.” No one ever begins a significant relationship of any kind saying, “In three years I’ll be miserable.”  What happens?  Why do initially wonderful relationships go sour? -- Because we’ve simply stopped appreciating.  Appreciation can make an amazing difference in the happiness you experience in your relationships. 

  Appreciation Goes Hand in Hand with Falling in Love

When you first fall in love, appreciating the beloved is as natural as breathing.  You are enraptured by everything your sweetheart says or does. You are on a fascinating journey of discovery of that person you cherish. You value every moment together. You treasure every word from your beloved’s lips. You cherishing the way your beloved looks, looks at you, looks at the world.  For all of this, and much more, you are immensely grateful. You are amazed and delighted at how your whole life has changed.  You are in a state of constant, intense and all-encompassing appreciation.

Fast-forward two years.  You hardly look up when your mate walks in the door. You say “Hi, how was your day?” and go right back to what you were doing. You vaguely hear your mate telling you about his or her day but don’t pay any attention to it. There isn’t an ounce of appreciation, not a hint of valuing, not a whisper of gratitude. Without the constant flow of appreciation, love dies. Without appreciation, love suffers an erosion of feeling until eventually nothing is left but the habit of being together.

Appreciation Gets Love Going Again

Fortunately, appreciation is one of the easiest energies to revive.  You start simply by choosing to think appreciative thoughts instead of critical or negative ones.  As you change your thoughts about your mate and your relationship, your feeling will follow.  Once appreciation is at work in a relationship, the love starts to flow again.

Appreciation can transform a hurtful, hurting relationship into a loving one.  And it can nurture a love relationship through the normal growing pains of conflict and disagreement into its joyous fulfillment, without ever going down the path of criticism and contempt.  Appreciation is love and respect made practical.

Appreciate Your Partner

The love or lack of it stem from what you choose to make significant.  When you focus on what you don’t like, don’t value, or don’t cherish about your partner, you feel resentment.  Conversely, when you focus on what you do like, do value and do cherish, you feel love.  How you feel about anything your mate does or doesn’t do comes from your interpretation of the behavior, not from the behavior itself.

The more you appreciate about your partner, the more you will find to appreciate. Practice appreciating your partner when all is going well, so you will have a good stock of things to appreciate that can help you through the rough times.

Actively look for more to appreciate for the more you appreciate your mate, the more loving feelings will emerge.

Appreciation Facilitates Cooperation

Competition ruins relationships. Struggling against each other leads to bad feelings. When you compete against each other, more often than not, neither of you is satisfied. When you appreciate both your partner’s and your own preferences, you seek to fulfill them both.  As you work cooperatively toward that end, your individual satisfaction grows.  As your personal satisfaction increases, so does appreciation of your ability to work together, and as a couple you become stronger.  You both appreciate your relationship. Spend time every day appreciating your relationship, even if only for a minute.  Put all your heart into appreciation.  That intensely focused moment of appreciation, repeated on a regular basis, will wondrously nourish the love in your relationship.

Appreciation Counteracts Jealousy

When you appreciate your mate, that appreciation increases your partner’s desire to be with you. Think of it: when someone values you and tells you how much he appreciates you, do you want to leave?  Quite the contrary, the more someone makes no effort to chain you, the freer you enjoy his appreciation of you, and the more likely you are to want to stick around.

Actively appreciating the other is the foundation of a thriving relationship.

Appreciating Your Way to Rewarding and Fulfilling Work

Work is tremendously important part of life.  Whether you are a homemaker, a dental assistant, a small-business owner, or a CEO, your work impacts how you feel about yourself and your place in the world; how you perceive your value to yourself, your family, and your society; and, more often than not, what determines your success and abundance.

What does work mean to you? Eager involvement in a vocation you love?  A duty you must fulfill? A paycheck?  Great co-workers you enjoy working with?  An obligation you wish you could avoid?  A way to pass the time?  Something that gets you out of the house?  A place to meet people?  Situations that challenge your mind? Too much responsibility for too little pay? Endless boredom interspersed with annoyance and frustration?  Constant deadlines that stress you out?  A hindrance to time spent with your family?  Arguments with co-workers?  A rude, insensitive, and demanding boss?

For too many of us, work is a hardship, a constant struggle, a sentence we serve until we can retire and finally enjoy life. Appreciation can change that negative outlook.  When you look at your work through the lens of appreciation, work acquires an ease and flow, and you become focused on the common intention with your co-workers, bosses, and customers.  Appreciation helps you recognize your value, your contribution to the larger scheme of things.  With it, work ceases to be drudgery and instead supports and enhances your life.  Work brings you joy, and in the process, brings joy to others.

When you recognize and appreciate your role at work, you can see its meaning and significance.  Questions of status become less important, since everyone’s work has value.  You no longer envy others’ jobs or salaries.  In the absence of comparison, your self-esteem increases.

Appreciate Yourself in Your Work

Start by appreciating yourself.  Ask: What do I bring to my work?  What skills?  What particular talents?  What parts of my personality contribute to my job?  You probably take your unique qualities for granted.  Instead, value your skills, talents, and contributions.  Be grateful for your abilities. You’ll see your self-esteem arise almost immediately, and with it the sense of pride that accompanies genuine ownership of your qualities and abilities.

Appreciation does not equal arrogance.   You value your skills and contributions for what they are, without thought of how much better or worse you are than anyone else.

Appreciate What Your Work Does for You

Although a paycheck may be your first thought when you ask yourself to appreciate what work provides you, work actually contributes a great deal more to your life.  It provides the outlet through which you express and exercise your talents, skills, and abilities.  When you appreciate how your work allows you to express yourself, work becomes far more than a job; it becomes a means of personal fulfillment.   Work gives you a sense of purpose, and your work affects other people.  When you appreciate how your work allows you to matter in the world, you see your work with new eyes.  Appreciating your work places it in a larger, more meaningful context, from which you can draw pride and a deep sense of self-worth. Any work can be appreciated in this way.  No matter what you do -- your work has purpose in the larger scheme of life.

Do you want to see your business flourish?  Then appreciate what you offer, be it a product or a service, and appreciate those who purchase and use it.  People sense when you truly appreciate yourself, your product, or your service, and are attracted to you by virtue of the vibration you create.   When you deeply, wholeheartedly appreciate your clients or customers, they know it.  And a fake smile doesn’t cut it; vibration cannot be fooled.

Think highly of your clients and customers.  Value them. Be grateful for them not just for their purchase of your product or service, but for who they are as human beings.  Let their well-being matter to you.  Be grateful for how you contribute to their well-being with your product or service.  Send out a powerful vibration of appreciation and you will attract like appreciation of yourself and your product or service.  Such an attitude inevitably contributes to success. Since you appreciate where you are right now, you are in the best place from which to launch something yet more wonderful.

Work and everything associated with it -- your co-workers, customers, clients, bosses, your salary, promotions, and all the rest -- give you a wonderful opportunity to apply your appreciative skills.  No longer will you view work as drudgery.  Instead, appreciation gives you tools, confidence, and motivation to make of work what it was always supposed to be: a source of happiness, success, and fulfillment.

Appreciating Your Way through Crisis

How do you feel when you experience crisis?  Panic, fear, anger, depression, despair, anxiety, and confusion – these emotions can lead to chaos in your heart and mind, and inability to focus or to see your way through. In a state of crisis, your heart rate is jerky, random and incoherent.  Your heart activity generates signals that travel back to the brain and influence what you perceive, how you think and make decisions, and how you feel.  A chaotic heart rate is reflected in chaotic thoughts; you are unable to focus clearly and think productively.

Appreciation can soothe you, by bringing order to your cataclysmic thoughts and feelings, and allowing you to see possibilities. Appreciation can literally lift you out of mental and emotional chaos. Find something, even something small, to appreciate in the moment of crisis, and you can calm yourself and restore your mental clarity.  When you are in a place of great negative emotion, your range of thought and feeling is extremely limited.  You cannot see beyond your fear, anger, or despair.  As you appreciate, you reconnect with a broader range of thought and feeling, and can see possibilities beyond the immediacy of your distress.

When faced with a crisis, your emotions are the first thing you should deal with.  You can’t think clearly in the midst of powerful negative emotions.  You certainly can’t appreciate before those emotions have been expressed.  The danger lies not in expressing your emotions, but in dwelling on them.  Acknowledge painful emotions. Don’t pretend that they don’t exist in order to get to appreciation faster – it won’t work.

For example, if you are just been diagnosed with cancer, allow yourself to feel shock or fear. Allow the emotions to flow through you, expressing them in ways that seem appropriate and safe to you. Then, as soon as you can, instead of returning to the thoughts accompanying those emotions, running them through your head over and over, thereby amplifying them, ask yourself, “OK, what can I value here? What can I be grateful for?”  Your first appreciative thought might be something is basic as “I am still alive right now.  I can appreciate that.   Where there is life, there is hope.  I can appreciate that.” Almost immediately, you fear and panic will begin to subside, as long as you don’t return to your earlier thoughts. Remember that your thoughts are within your control!  Stick with appreciative thoughts as much as you can.  From there, you will be able to see a slightly larger range of possibilities.

Crisis tends to overwhelm.  Too much happens too fast, or you feel threatened by something too powerful or too unknown to cope with.  When you are overwhelmed, you feel powerless and you freeze up.  Fear, shock, or despair take over.  You don’t move, you don’t act, you don’t respond effectively.  When you are overwhelmed, all you can see is complete disaster.

Appreciation can free you of this paralyzing immobility by empowering you to respond, thereby lifting you out of helplessness.  The moment you find something of value in yourself or a situation, you liberate yourself from being overwhelmed.  You can see alternatives other than disaster, so you can take action.  Your ability to function has been restored.  Appreciation of what is and what can be helps us heal and move on.

 This book describes the transformative energy of consistent, proactive appreciation which can propel your life from good to great, from troubled to joyous, from struggling to successful.   You will learn about a kind of appreciation that can change your very approach to life and living.

You will learn how to use the energy of appreciation in your search for happiness in life.  You’ll discover the benefits of appreciating proactively, and learn how to appreciate most effectively to receive the most benefits.

CONTENTS:

• A Definition of Appreciation


• Appreciation as Energy


• Becoming an Appreciator


• Developing an Appreciative State of Mind


• Playing the Appreciation Game


• Appreciating Yourself


• Cleaning Up Your Personal Vibration


• Deepening Your Appreciation of Others


• The Power of Appreciation


• Using Appreciation to Transform Situations and Attract Decided Outcomes


• Five Steps to Using Appreciation to Transform or Attract What You Want


• Appreciating Your Way to Loving Relationships


• Appreciating Your Way to Rewarding and Fulfilling Work


• Appreciating Your Way through Crisis