Here is the full transcript of professional hypnotist Jane Ransom’s TEDx Talk presentation: Discover the Three Keys of Gratitude to Unlock Your Happiest Life at TEDxChennai conference.
Listen to the MP3 Audio: Discover the Three Keys of Gratitude to Unlock Your Happiest Life by Jane Ransom at TEDxChennai
TRANSCRIPT:
You are a great audience. I hope you know that. You’ve been amazing today. Yeah, thank you.
And you have my deepest respect for choosing to be right here, for choosing to spend a whole day learning and growing. When you change yourself, you change the world; you have my gratitude. And gratitude is gold.
When my two brothers and I were little kids, we rode the bus to school. There was a boy on the bus named Robbie. He was mentally handicapped. He had a low IQ. He spoke kind of funny. The other kids made fun of him. Robbie never took offense. He was so sweet natured. The other kids wouldn’t play with him but I always liked Robbie because he was nice.
Robbie became my friend, and he taught me some important things. Great teachers don’t need big IQs; they need big hearts.
When I think of Robbie, I think of gratitude. One morning, around eight years old, I’m late getting ready for school. As my two brothers leave the house, I’m still pulling my little dress on over my head, open my underwear drawer – empty!; dash to the laundry room, grab some underwear from the clean laundry basket, put those on, pull on my socks, lace up my shoes, find my lunch box and begin to run. It’s a half mile to the bus stop, down a hill, then around a sharp turn. Before I can even see the bus I hear its horn… mm-hmm… telling me to run faster.
Taking that last sharp turn, I look up, see all the kids faces in the bus windows frowning at me for keeping them waiting, and the driver, shaking his head with impatience, almost there when I feel something creeping down my legs and realize that when I grabbed that underwear from the clean laundry basket, I must have gotten my mother’s underwear. Hers is bright white cotton just like mine, only a whole lot bigger. And suddenly I have to stop running because that bright white underwear lies wrapped around my feet.
I look up. All the kids’ faces, howling with laughter, I set down my lunch box, reach for the underwear, pull it back on, pick up my lunch box again, holding the underwear in place, hobble to the bus.
Then what happened? As the bus door swung open, all that laughter shrank into silence. Not one kid would make eye contact with me, much less let me sit with them except there in the back was Robbie waving at me with one hand and then with the other patting the seat beside him, just like always.
I sat down, ready to burst into tears, ashamed, full of self-pity, so sorry for myself. Robbie waited quietly until the bus began to move and then he kind of elbowed me, made a funny face. We both began to laugh. The more we laughed the less ashamed I felt.
And then something truly remarkable happened. My heart swelled with gratitude for Robbie. And that was when full of gratitude — I didn’t just feel unashamed, I felt wonderful. Gratitude can take us from feeling sorry for ourselves to feeling joy.
Over the decades, turns out it’s me who’s the slow learner, because I’ve had to learn gratitude more than once. Think I’ve finally got it and want to share with you the full scoop on gratitude.
New scientific research reveals that doing a daily gratitude exercise will make you happier, more self-disciplined, more able to achieve your goals, even physically healthier, and perhaps, best of all, gratitude frees us from emotional pain. If you want to let go of emotional pain, choose gratitude.
Or if you simply want to feel more joy, choose gratitude, because when you feel more joy, you make the world more joyful. You need just three easy keys: emote, extend, and exercise.
Emote: meaning it’s not enough just to think about gratitude; you’ve got to feel the emotion.
Extend: as in extend your gratitude beyond yourself to include other people. Be grateful for other people.
Exercise: do your daily gratitude exercise.
Emote, extend, exercise. Say it with me: emote; extend; exercise.
When you practice gratitude correctly, you tap into neuroplasticity, brain plasticity. That’s the discovery that we can restructure our physical brains by using our minds to create better brain cell connections. When you use the three keys you unlock your neuroplasticity.
When you emote you fire up the hippocampus, your brain center of learning and memory. When you extend your gratitude to include other people, you spark the most highly evolved areas of the human brain devoted to social intelligence. And finally, in order for those wonderful new brain cell connections to go into long-term memory, to spread out into the subconscious where they become deep beliefs that drive you forward, that takes the regular repetition of daily exercise.
Emote, extend, exercise. Say with me: emote, extend, exercise.
Gratitude is especially powerful at healing childhood wounds. One of my clients, talented architect, grew up with a cruel abusive father. And my client was carrying around a sense of victimhood which was understandable. But it made him feel helpless, less self-confident which was limiting his personal and professional success.
Using the three keys, my client began doing a daily gratitude exercise. Within one month was attracting better customers making more money. Plus now he’s just a whole lot happier. He emailed me to say how glad he is, “just being thankful for the things I have”, he wrote, “instead of focusing on the things I don’t have.”
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