If you're not familiar with gratitude lists, creating them is a really, really wonderful way of shifting your perspective in order to appreciate what's going WELL in your life...and hopefully help you create more of it. It can move you into a more positive mindset, help you feel at peace, open-hearted and in balance.

This exercise can be really powerful if you do it regularly (highly recommended) or even if you do it once for a pick-me-up.

My personal way of going about this is to create a list of 30 things I'm grateful for. While this may sound ambitious, I find that once I get past the first 15 - 20 items, I have to dig a little deeper to find the things for which I'm truly happy and thankful, but which have been a bit obscured from my sight.

(These tend to be the really special ones, that help me really absorb how blessed I am.)

I'm also a huge fan of another layer of this practice, which involves being grateful for something that you want, but which you don't have yet. This involves painting a mental picture of what achieving your goal will look like, and also how you will feel once you have it.

Identifying the specifics of the dream is like planting the seeds which can bloom into reality. Feeling the gratitude is like fertilizer, to help stimulate the growth.

Do you have a gratitude practice? Right now, I invite you to think of five things that you're grateful for today.

Want to keep going? Expand your list to 30 items and write them down.

Not done yet? Send your gratitude into the future for your dream which will be coming true later on.

Did you realize something that surprised you? I'd love to hear about it!