Why Gratitude is the Ultimate Leadership Superpower

Despair, Anxiety, Depression, Hopelessness, Frustration, Overwhelm. If you are alive in 2025, then you might be feeling any or all of those emotions (and others!) as we navigate hard, hard situations that occur without warning. But there’s a no-cost, 100% accessible, personalized, private, practical, and proven antidote to rewiring your brain for resilient, effective, and visionary leadership.

Gratitude.

That’s right. Gratitude.

A Practice

Take a moment, right now. Right in the middle of reading this article. Stop everything else, just for a moment.

Breathe.

Take another deep breath. Really feel it pushing as deep in your abdomen as you can, and then let it fill your belly, your lungs, pushing your collarbone up. Hold for a count of 4.

Then exhale fully, mouth open. Try that one more time.

Step away from the keyboard and take out a pen and a piece of paper. The back of a piece of junk mail will do.

Closing your eyes or lowering them to a soft gaze, think of three things you’re grateful for today. Really think about them. Why are you grateful for them? How do you feel? Write them down. 

Stay in this space of gratitude for as long as you’d like, and then return to your day.

Easy, right?

Develop a Daily Practice

Follow the process above, but before you begin, grab a journal. That’s where you’ll record your specific gratitudes.

Change it up. Each day as you think of three things you’re grateful for, focus some of those on the people who have helped you get to where you are today. Make sure that each day’s worth of gratitudes is different, unique. No repeating.

How Gratitude Builds Strong Leaders

When we practice gratitude, we remind ourselves that all is in fact not lost, in spite of what our social media, news, and surroundings may be telling us. We remember the gifts we have received. Taking the time to not only think about what we’re grateful for but feeling that sensation in our body helps rewire our neural pathways. We embody the experience of gratitude and shift our perspective to seeking out the positive. We move from thinking about what we’re missing out on, what we fear we may lose, what we may not get (promotion? raise? new job?) and think about all we’ve received. We remember treasured moments and deeply valuable relationships in our lives.

We feel more relaxed. We feel more in control when we think about all we’ve been given, and all the gifts we can use to make a positive impact. And when we feel relaxed, positive, in control of ourselves, hopeful for the future, then we’re apt to be less reactive. 

With what we’re facing in our country’s current landscape, the tone within all manner of discourse, and the actual threats to our democracy, our way of life, and our way of expressing our values through the work we do as contributing to the good of our society, it is vital that we ground ourselves in gratitude, resource ourselves, and steel our resolve so our leadership and our work is focused, timely, and radically effective.

Where I Learned Gratitude

By the time I was 23, I had dropped out of college, was up to my eyebrows in debt, was effectively homeless, without a drivers license, and was unemployable, sick with untreated trauma, depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and a mean cocaine habit. 

Newly clean and sober but with most areas of my life on fire, I stumbled into a 12-Step meeting one Tuesday evening only to find the leader opening with a topic I could not understand:  Gratitude.

The speaker was an older man, sober longer than me, but still considered himself new in recovery. His life was still somewhat in the repair and rebuild stage, and yet here he was, listing out all the things he was grateful for. His health, which was nearly lost to alcoholism. His wife who stood by him still. The way the sun hit his face in the morning.

The effect on me was immediate, and I realized I’d only been focusing on what wasn’t working in my life. Like begets like, I thought. So what would happen if I changed my thoughts, and focused on what was working?

There’s always something to be grateful for. 

Even if it’s as simple as taking a moment to really breathe.