The heart that begins each day with appreciation finds abundance in the most ordinary moments.

And that is the thought for today.

Welcome to Seven Good Minutes. I'm Clyde Lee Dennis.

Thanks for joining me for what I believe will be seven of the most enriching minutes of your day.

In today's episode of Seven Good Minutes, we talk about starting with gratitude, not pressure. Enjoy.

There's a moment each morning when you first open your eyes, and in that brief space between sleep and full consciousness, you have a choice.

You can either reach for your phone and immediately flood your mind with the day's demands, or you can pause and ask yourself a different question.

What am I grateful for right now?

This simple shift in your morning ritual can transform not just your day, but your entire relationship with life itself.

By the end of this episode, you'll understand why starting with gratitude instead of pressure

creates a foundation of abundance that makes everything else in your day flow with greater ease and joy.

Most of us have been conditioned to wake up in survival

mode. Before our feet even hit the floor, we're mentally rehearsing our to-do lists, worrying

about deadlines, and feeling the weight of everything we need to accomplish. We've trained

ourselves to believe that pressure and urgency are the fuels that drive success.

But what if I told you that this approach is actually working against you?

When you start your day from a place of pressure, you're activating your nervous system's stress response

before you've even given yourself a chance to fully arrive in the present moment.

Your body floods with cortisol, your mind becomes

narrow and reactive, and you spend your precious energy fighting against the day rather than flowing

with it. Gratitude, on the other hand, is like tuning your internal radio to a completely different

frequency. When you begin with appreciation for what's already present in your

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