Hi there! You're listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi. I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

Today is episode 237, a quick word before Thanksgiving. Now listen, if you need practical Thanksgiving help hosting recipes, that kind of thing, I've got you covered there.

There is a Thanksgiving themed pre-order bonus for folks who order my upcoming book, the Lazy Genius Kitchen, with downloads on how to host Thanksgiving, as well as the most lazy genius turkey recipe around.

If you still need a recipe for a turkey, links for those are in the show notes. There are also lazy genius podcast episodes about gratitude, full rhythms, opening and closing ceremonies, and lots of other things that could be beneficial to you this week.

But even listing those things out reminds me how much there is to potentially think about this time of year.

This week is a holiday week for a lot of you. It's the middle of the fall season. You're maybe trying to get an early start on Christmas things, so you can enjoy that time as well when it comes.

It's really easy to feel like this particular week of the year is pretty condensed, right? I mean, it's hard for me at least.

It's hard for me to let Thanksgiving just be Thanksgiving during Thanksgiving week. So I want to take a few minutes to center us this week before everything kind of ramps up, whatever that looks like for you and your family.

I went back to one of my favorite books that is perfect to revisit this time of year. It's a book written by Diana Butler Bass called Grateful, the subversive practice of giving thanks.

I love a good subversion and gratitude was always something that needed it. I never found conversations around gratitude, practices around gratitude, or even just the posture around gratitude. I never felt like they met me where I was.

I'm all for being grateful, and I have been known to use it in parenting, you know, like a kid is complaining. And I asked him to try and think it's three things they're grateful for to sort of counteract it.

It's not a bad idea, but then I'm actually doing to them what I often feel, which is forced gratitude seems hollow when it's forced.

I could never get my head around what it really means to be thankful to mark the moments when I am and how they change me. It just always felt like another chore, you know, like another thing I was supposed to do like drinking a lot of water or going on date night or something.

I couldn't seem to make it work in my life. And then I read this book. I read grateful and everything changed. It really did subvert the idea I had in my head, and it taught me a new way to see gratitude.

So in this very, very specific titular season of Thanksgiving, I want to share some words and thoughts mostly from this book that will hopefully give you a grounding perspective that has really helped me.

One of the many things that used to frustrate me is that I didn't always feel grateful in the moments that I thought I should. Has that ever happened to any of you? Or I didn't feel grateful when everyone else did.

Or maybe the way I felt about a particular moment or event or person, it landed differently for me than it landed for someone else.

And when my own experience of something was different than someone else's who was also maybe experiencing gratitude, but maybe more outwardly or in a way that I felt was more like normalized, I felt like my gratitude wasn't quite right that it didn't really count that I wasn't seeing the full picture.

That posture always kept me on guard. I would kind of like like temper my reaction until I had a better understanding of everyone else's reaction. And then I would know more fully how I was supposed to act like what I was supposed to say how I was supposed to feel.

Then I read this foundational thought from Diana's book. It's like in the very first chapter. There is no one experience of gratitude. Rather, it is a complex and episodic thing and one that is deeply personal. For all its uniqueness and complexity, there is a common core to feeling grateful.

We recognize a circumstance, event or situation, even if it is a trial as a gift. We have received some unexpected benefit. We respond with words and actions and we become our best selves in the process.

Gifts are not only pleasurable, but the right gift at the right time can change us. When such gifts arrive, we know it. Something deep within rises to the surface. That mixture of love and appreciation we call thanks.

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