01/18/2026
Dear Readers,
The young woman practically sprinted up to the front after I finished speaking to a group of Atlanta real estate agents.
She held up her phone and blurted out, “Let me show you something—I’m so excited!”
Her lips turned up as she enthusiastically continued, “Look what I did.”
I dropped my gaze to the screen, and she added, “I’m a real estate agent and while you were speaking to us today about the power of appreciating people, I couldn’t help it: I got my phone and started writing posts on social media about how much I appreciated my clients—because I do!”
Noticing her words of gratitude under the pictures she showed me, I nodded in approval.
“Then, I sent my landscaper a quick email just thanking him for all he does for me. What’s funny is that he said it made him feel so good, he immediately did that same thing for some of his other customers!”
As she spoke, I realized we were both caught up in the powerful ripple effect of gratitude.
And that’s how it works.
Once you begin to share appreciation, you start looking for more things and people to appreciate and you almost become “obsessed” with the creating feelings of thankfulness. It’s like your mind has no room for anything else.
It’s just powerful stuff.
On the way home from my talk, I started thinking about the upcoming year and I couldn’t help but reflect on what the young woman in the audience had said to me.
I realized there's a powerful choice we can make in the new year:
We can continue to get sucked into a lot of worry and stress and resentment—and our minds will be full of that—or we can make a commitment to focus on all the good in our lives, and we can focus on how we can positively impact others.
Because I assure you, we will encounter many, many people who need to be impacted.
Whether we know it or not, they are silently begging to be appreciated, forgiven, encouraged, valued . . . and loved.
Will we dwell on our own hurts, our conflicts, our resentments, and our fears, or will we choose to focus on making a positive difference in the lives of others?
As I write in my newest book The Five Secrets of Luck, if we choose to seek out and find people who have deep, raw, unseen pain-- and empathetically minister to those deep hurts-- it will also help heal us.
The beauty of it is . . . it’s our choice.
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