Gratitude is “a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation for life.”
~ Robert Emmons
In The How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky talks about how research is highlighting the multiple benefits of gratitude. These include increased self-esteem, better ability to deal with stress, and increased social bonds. In other words, people who are consistently grateful are happier, more energetic, more helpful, and empathic.
As science demonstrates the power of gratitude, it is important to think about how to cultivate it within your organization. I offer three ways to bring it alive for your fundraising team.
- Acknowledge Your Staff and Colleagues
An acknowledgment goes deeper than a compliment. A compliment focuses on what the person did while an acknowledgement focuses on who the person is. When you acknowledge someone you are appreciating and celebrating their character and values.
An acknowledgment sounds like this – “Sue, you took a stand for honesty in that meeting.”
Practice delivering acknowledgements. The best ones are short and simple. After you deliver an acknowledgement, leave a space for the person to receive it and allow yourself to notice the reaction. Just like you would after you ask a donor for a major gift.
- Share and Celebrate Successes
I often notice that fundraisers move past their successes quickly and jump into the next thing that needs to be done. Create many opportunities within your organization to share good news and celebrate success – a gift received, feedback from a donor, a great event, or the launch of a new initiative.
Robert Emmons, an author and professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, explains that practicing gratitude can help us build “a sort of psychological immune system.” He states, “There is scientific evidence that grateful people are more resilient to stress, whether minor everyday hassles or major personal upheavals.”
So use your staff meetings, internal newsletters, or email to spread the good news. Take time to pause when something good happens to someone on your team. You will be banking this gratitude to help you through the tougher times.
- Look for the Learnings in Failure
We will all face failure at some time. If we don’t embrace failure, then we will only choose to do things that are within our comfort zones. Much has been written on the resistance to risk that fundraising organizations face. We need to celebrate failure to ensure that our organizations innovate and grow.
So after something goes wrong, create opportunities for your team to ask “what was the gift in this?” What can be learned? How have we grown?
I think we can all think of an example (or many) of a time when what seemed like a disaster or failure, turned out to be a chance to create something even better. By creating a culture of gratitude within your organization you can reframe challenges into opportunities.
These three ideas are meant to create ideas for you to implement within your organization.
During my meditation this morning, Deepak Chopra described gratitude as saying to the universe “please bring me more of this.”
I ask you “What are you and your organization saying to the universe?”