Welcome to It's a Good Life with Brian Bafini, founder of America's largest business coaching company.

Here's a short, classic cut from one of our all-time favorite episodes.

Well, the top of the morning to you and welcome to It's a Good Life.

I am very grateful to introduce our guest to you today.

His name is John Israel, otherwise known as Mr. Thank You, so you can tell we might have something in common.

I'd love to dive right in with give our listeners a definition of gratitude and what that means to you.

Yeah, well, the best definition I found of the word gratitude is from Dr. Robert Emmons of

UC Davis.

And here's what he says, gratitude is the emotion one feels when you receive a gift or experience

something as a gift.

And it makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

Receiving a gift unexpectedly, you didn't do anything for it.

That emotion, that joy, that surprise, that delight, that in its own way is gratitude.

The other part that I think is more relevant very specifically to what you said is the experience of something as a gift. And that's really where, you know, we talk, we both talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of salespeople. And when you live in a world where you eat what you kill and you're responsible to put food on the table, every deal, every

conversation is important. And so if it doesn't go your way, it's easy to feel stress. It's easy to

feel anxiety. You know, you add on top of that everything that is on social media, the news,

just forcing us into our negative bias, which we're prone to look for what's wrong before we

look for what's right. So gratitude is really

just the reflective state of the ability to look at anything that's happening and find the good,

find the value, and really see the gift in any experience. I don't know if you're aware of this or not,

but we actually produce for our members, we have 10,000 members who receive the notes from us

every month. We provide six million notes every year to our members. And we say, hey, the goal is

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