So when we call gratitude and mental tool, what we're doing is identifying its function as a way to correct for negativity rights.

It's a way of taking the spotlight of your attention and consciously turning that spotlight from the threats to the good things in our lives, and there are always good things.

That's Jeremy Adam Smith. He's the editor of Greater Good Magazine, which is produced by the Greater Good Science Center out of UC Berkeley.

He's also the co-editor of the Gratitude Project, which is a book that collects a lot of stories and insights from the research conducted at the Greater Good Science Center.

There's always something good you can find in the course of a normal human life, even if it's just family, even if it's this cup of coffee, even if it's feeling warm at that moment.

You know, there's always something you can feel grateful for even in the midst of terrible situations.

Now, before we go any further, let's just address the question of gratitude. Why are we talking about this?

We recently did a show on the Gratitude Advantage and the Gratitude Advantage work. In fact, we actually used some of the research written about by Jeremy Adam Smith in that conversation.

But I wanted to come back to it because gratitude is a well from which we can draw resourcefulness as we pursue our goals.

Stepping into the New Year means deciding what to do with the next 12 months in front of us. It means choosing what to do with the time that we're allotted.

And there can be some challenges in that. The first thing is where do you start? There's so many things we could be doing in the New Year. How do we even decide what we want to do?

And then beyond that, as we are settling into the goals we've decided on, how do we stay the course? How do we operate from a place of abundance throughout the year so that we actually can achieve those goals?

Hi, I'm Joel Miller. I'm the Chief Product Officer here at Full Focus. And in today's episode of the Business Accelerator podcast, I want to pull these two threads together.

In such a way that we can see how to get clear on what we want and how to step forward into the future.

We're going to do that first in a conversation I had with our CEO, Megan Hyatt Miller, about the power of lists.

Lists are a really simple thing and yet they have so many applications, including helping us decide what we want.

After that, we're going to return to the conversation with Jeremy Adam Smith and talk more broadly about gratitude, goal achievement, and how gratitude can help us not only overcome negativity bias, but also access other prosocial emotions and behaviors, you know, the kind of stuff that makes life worth living.

This episode is brought to you by Belay and they're offering to Business Accelerator listeners a free resource called 25 things you can delegate to an assistant.

To get that, simply text BA255123. That's BA to the number 55123.

A list is a simple thing, but it's a really powerful thing. I shared some ideas about lists with our Business Accelerator clients and one of our weekly calls.

I was impressed to see just how responsive the group was to this simple idea. It turns out that a list can help open up so much possibility in terms of how we approach a problem.

I don't know how we get by without them. In fact, I think the truth is, if you sit down and think about how you use lists, you don't get by without them. You're using them all the time.

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