Sage advice from an IU gratitude professor

I enjoyed coffee with Y. Joel Wong over the holidays. Joel is a tenured professor in the Counseling and Counseling Psychology Programs at Indiana University. One specialty of his is gratitude, and its link to well-being.

I met up with Joel at Hopscotch Coffee in Bloomington so I could express a belated form of gratitude to him for being part of a Q and A session hosted by my employer during the last Asian American Pacific Islander Month.

After graduating from college in his home country of Singapore, he pursued graduate studies in counseling psychology at the University of Texas at Austin before being hired by Indiana University.

One thing I learned from Joel is that expressing true gratitude goes beyond simply saying “thank you” for something someone’s done for you.

“If you are truly grateful to someone, tell them why. It doesn’t have to be a long story. Keep it simple. Tell them what is it that they did that was so meaningful to you. There’s a difference between a performative type of thank you versus an authentic expression of gratitude”

I expressed my gratitude to Joel for his online list of 130 Gratitude Prompts, which can complement gratitude journaling, another positive psychology practice that Joel promotes.

“If you want to get into the habits of practicing gratitude and making it part of your life, start a gratitude journal. Simply write what you are grateful for. For example, I’m grateful to someone or grateful for something and then provide the reason. If you run out of ideas, use one of my 130 gratitude prompts. If you want to up your game, you can even do gratitude journaling in a group,” he said.

“The other thing that I recommend is take time once a week to express a brief gratitude note to someone. Two sentences written in an email privately to an individual, for example. Personalize it, something very specific and practical. The benefit of doing that is that when you express gratitude to someone, you feel more connected to them. Research shows your mental health improves. You are also blessing that person. You’re making the person feel valued and connected. There can be a cascade of positive benefits that come out of that,” he said.

Over coffee, I told Joel that I appreciated his online list so much that I planned to use it during a Christmas gathering, asking each family member to blindly select a number between 1 and 130 and then answer the respective question. Joel was pleased.

Last May, during his presentation with my coworkers, I put him “on the spot” by asking him to answer questions from the list – an unplanned action. “You tricked me,” Joel recalled and laughed.

Prompter #128: Which aspects of my culture has made me a better or stronger person?

Answered Joel: I can think of many things growing up in Singapore. When you’re in your own culture, you don’t see the strengths of your culture. It’s only when you leave that you recognize some of them. A very important value in Singapore culture is pragmatism. Pragmatism has been a very useful value that has helped me in my work as a professor. I tend to be very idealistic, which is why I entered this profession. I’m not here primarily to make money. Pragmatism teaches us that compromising is not a dirty word. If you are in disagreement with someone, trying to negotiate a middle ground is not a bad thing at all.

Incorporating Joel’s list in a gratitude exercise on Christmas Eve proved very worthwhile. I learned new, important things about other family members. My wife and I used Joel’s list on New Year’s Day, too. She and I learned new things about each other through our gratitude discussion – even though we have been together seven years!

“Cultivating a gratitude mindset is not so much about specific skills or things to try, but kind of a way of thinking about life. So much of our life involves striving for things that we don’t have, right? But gratitude adopts a different perspective. Gratitude is not pursuing what you don’t have. Instead, you actually desire what you already have. Gratitude retrains our minds to look at the things that we have with a fresh pair of eyes with childlike wonder, with a sense of excitement and thrill again. If we live a life that way, that’s a happy life. That’s a life of contentment.

“Gratitude has both an intrapersonal component and an interpersonal component. Intrapersonal, meaning that you know you can be grateful for the sunshine or for things that are going well in your life or your health. But don’t neglect the interpersonal component, which is very critical. So often, we are grateful to someone, but we don’t say it. We feel it in our hearts and think that the other person knows that we’re grateful for them. If you just keep it in your heart, you are missing out on a multiplicity of blessings because people can’t read your minds. Make the person feel good, that they matter, that they aren’t taken for granted, that they are valued, that they are being seen for what they did for you. That is one of the most meaningful things and simplest things that we can do for people. Just communicating to them that I did not take you for granted, I value you, I noticed good things that you did for me. So, if you haven’t done that in a while, make that a part of your life. Express gratitude in very specific ways to people who have blessed you, who have helped you.”

Email Scott at scottsaalman@gmail.com.