Erica: Hey, girl. By now, you know I have Her Collective, my online community for ambitious women who are done doing it alone. Her Collective is for the women who are smart, capable, and driven, but they find themselves stuck on the sticky floors like self doubt, burnout, and waiting for permission that quite honestly never comes. Inside HER, you get more than motivation. You get real support, real strategies, and real momentum. We work on things like clarifying what you want now and what's coming next, building confidence without burning yourself out, navigating hard conversations, career moves, and leadership moments with clarity, and surrounding yourself with women who actually get it. This isn't about hustling harder. It's about moving intentionally with the right tools and the right people in your corner. If you're ready to stop spinning, start choosing yourself, and build a career in life that actually feels aligned, I'd love to welcome you inside her collective. You can learn more and join us at www.joinhercollective.com. Because honestly, girl, you were never meant to do this alone. Did you know that a regular practice of gratitude can quite literally change the chemistry in your brain. Happy Thanksgiving week. I'm your host, Erica Rooney. We are full on into that one week of the year where everybody is expressing their gratitude, their appreciation, their thankfulness for their health, their families, their careers, but it's not always easy to be grateful. Not when we're headed into this recession with thousands of people losing their jobs right before the holiday. There are people who are out there battling scary health diagnoses, the loss of family members, people in the midst of divorce. And gratitude just seems impossible. It is much easier to be grateful when life is on the up and up. When you've landed that new position, you've gotten a raise, you've gotten engaged, you know, you've watched your kids do something amazing. But what about when life sucks? When you're at your wit's end? When you're feeling just hopeless? Now that's where the practice of gratitude really needs to come in, and it is needed the most. In positive psychology, psychologists have defined gratitude as that positive emotion that we perceive when giving or receiving a benefit from someone or something. When we thank others, when we thank ourselves, the universe, whatever higher power app be, it actually has a healing effect. The benefits of gratitude are endless. It's been shown to make you happier, giving you an enhanced mood, make you more aware. It improves your physical health by helping you sleep better, a stronger immune system, less aches and pains, and even, you guys, optimum blood pressure. Hello, if there hasn't been a reason to be grateful, it is to keep our hearts in check. But people who are grateful tend to have more empathy, they are better communicators, and they have stronger interpersonal relationships. And that makes you a better leader. Gratitude quite literally has the power to rewire your brain. So, it's been found that people who express and feel gratitude have this higher volume of gray matter. Now there's a whole bunch of brain jargon in there that doesn't exactly jive with my HR executive coach brain. But when I read through the study, it found that gratitude wires and fires new neural connection to the bliss center of the brain. It fosters a cognitive restructuring by evoking positive thinking and reduces fear and anxiety by regulating the stress hormone. It also enhances the neurotransmitters responsible for happiness. When we get into the practice of consciously expressing gratitude every day, we help these neural pathways to strengthen themselves and ultimately create a permanent, grateful, and positive nature within ourselves. Now, I want you to think of this like a path in the woods. That path that everybody takes every single day is worn down. It's easy to follow. If you walked up to the woods and you saw that path, you would take it, right? If you are not naturally a grateful person and you have not been practicing gratitude, your path is not going to be worn like that. It's going to be covered in vines, rocks, trees, brush, who knows what. Okay? But the more you take it, the more that path becomes visible. It becomes wider. It becomes easier to walk down. So, start doing that every single day. Start whacking those trees down, clearing the brush so that gratitude becomes that permanent, positive nature. The Mindfulness Awareness Research Center of UCLA stated that gratitude does change those neural structures of our brain. It makes us happier. It makes us more content. And when we activate the reward center of our brain, gratitude exchange alters the way that we see the world and how we see ourselves. So scientists in 2,008 conducted a study to actually measure the brain activity of people thinking and feeling gratitude. And what they found was that gratitude caused synchronized activation in multiple brain regions, lighting up parts of our brains that reward center, right? And also the hypothalamus. Meaning, that gratitude can boost neurotransmitter called serotonin and activate the brain to produce dopamine. And guys, dopamine is our brain's pleasure chemical. We always want more of it. That's why we're reaching for the treats. That's why we do the things that make us feel good. Because dopamine is released. So, the more we think positive, grateful thoughts, the happier and healthier we feel. Now, one thing that's really cool to think about is our brain is very flexible. It can mold, it can change. So, that positive thinking, that regular practice of gratitude can become a way of life when you make it a habit. When your brain is constantly flushed with positive thoughts, you can expect to improve in every area of your life, in relationships, in your health, performance at work, reaching your goals, hitting new milestones. Literally, everywhere. Gratitude though, we all know it's not a magic bullet. If you are really going through it, you're not going to be able to just sit down and think about all these grateful thoughts and have all of your problems just disappear. It's not going to cure your feelings of sadness or depression and it's not going to stop all of the pain that you may be going through. But I want you to think of gratitude as a piece of resilience arsenal. Think of it as something that you can rely on to help you out of those hard times. You guys, when I was really stuck in my sticky floor, when I was going through it, having issues in my marriage and just not happy with my job, every single day, I would wake up, I would pick up just a plain notebook, and I would make myself write out at least three things that I was grateful for. Those three things could sometimes be as simple as I was grateful to be breathing. It meant I was alive. I was grateful that I could write in the journal because not everybody has the skill of writing and reading. I was grateful for the roof over my head. Sometimes, those were the only three things that I could muster up being grateful for. And as I practice that, I could add in more. And I found that on the days that were really hard, those are the days I needed it most. And I would try to make myself come up with as many things that I could be grateful for as possible. When we can find moments of gratitude we become more resilient. We know that this too shall pass. We understand that we have survived 100% of our bad days. We know that we will bounce back. When we are grateful, we know that if we are being laid off from a job, it's only opening the other door of opportunity. And y'all know my favorite quote from Toon Day is the beauty of uncertainty is infinite possibility. When you feel stuck in this feeling of uncertainty, find gratitude in knowing that there is infinite possibility on the other side. So, with all of this in mind, I am so very grateful for you, friend. I am grateful for your support, for your downloads. Six months ago, I don't think that I could've imagined that I would be in this place today but because of you, I am. So, thank you. From the bottom of my heart, thank you. I hope you have an amazing Thanksgiving. And this Thanksgiving week, I am so thankful to also share with you my ebook, level up your LinkedIn content kit. If you're not sure what to post this this Thanksgiving on your LinkedIn, what's too personal, what's not personal enough, if you're not sure how to post in a way that will help you gain meaningful and valuable connections that will help you grow your network and land your next level role. You need to download this book right away. I am not kidding. This is a quick and easy read. It will give you instant results to literally 10 x your network. Don't wait. Download it today. The link is in the show notes. And as always, rate, review, and subscribe to the show as it helps those who need to hear it see it first. Have a great Thanksgiving.