Welcome to episode 236 of Live Happy Now. I'm your host Paula Phelps thanking you for joining us. If you're even a casual listener of our show, you probably know that we love gratitude. So when we learned about the book, The Thank You Project, cultivating happiness, one letter of gratitude at a time.

We knew we had to talk about it on the show. And what better time to talk about it than right

before Thanksgiving. Nancy Davis-Co is a freelance writer, podcast host, and author of The Thank You

Project. She talked to me about how the project started, what it taught her, and why each of us

can benefit from

writing thank you letters. Nancy, welcome to live happy now. Thank you so much, Paul. I'm really

glad to be here. I appreciate the invitation to join you. We're glad to have you here. This is such a

great topic because we are a huge gratitude nerds here. So your book fits right in with the things

we love talking about. And I wonder, first of all,

if you have always had an interest in gratitude or if it's something that you cultivated recently.

I have not. I mean, I considered myself a grateful enough person. I was somebody who grew up in a

household where you wrote thank you notes or you didn't get to play with the thing or use the thing. So I would say I had pretty good gratitude habits. But

the way that these gratitude letters evolved really changed the way I think about it. I think,

you know, writing a performative thank you on somebody's Facebook wall or writing,

Dear X, I liked the gift, thank you for sending to me, is very different from what I'm talking

about in the thank you project, which take a little bit more work and a little bit more

consideration. So I think I have become an officiado of gratitude. I stumbled into it,

and now I realize, you know, how magical it is to think about it in a deliberate way.

It really is.

And you chose to practice it through letter writing.

And can you explain what made you decide to start this and a little bit, I guess just a little bit of background on

how you came to this. It was the end of 2015 and I'm a 1966 baby, so I knew 2016 was going to be,

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