Shivani's story - Art of winning hearts with Gratitude
"I understood that there is something special in everybody, and we should appreciate that."
Shivani: My life is all about before gratitude and after gratitude. Before gratitude, I was a person who did not talk to people or get to know them. I was being with myself all the time, but I used to feel so alone and depressed.
I did not take the chance to understand people or appreciate them. And after gratitude, when I was introduced to this beautiful feeling, I just started seeing beauty in everything.
So, gratitude is for everything you have, or everything you are facing in this life, right? So, I think that because of that, slowly, like my ego, that fear just flew away.
I started talking to others, trying to understand people, giving that space for letting them express and I started listening to them. So, gratitude makes a person a good human being according to me.
Aarushi: Wow, that's so wonderful. And it's one of the most unique things that I've listened to between my conversations about gratitude, and I would love to know more about how gratitude has helped you develop yourself to transform into a person that you like being more.
Shivani: I am studying at Osmania University, Hyderabad. So, I have my mentor, one of the Alumni, Shravan Tedla, who is from Colorado Springs, and he started interacting with all of us over the last three years.
He used it to tell his experiences how he used it to apply gratitude, in his workplace. He used to tell stories on how he uses gratitude and appreciation for his children, wife, and how it like developed a beautiful relationship among them. And slowly realizing that importance, we started writing gratitude cards.
With my team 'Thop', I understood that there is something special in everybody, and we should appreciate that.
And, every time I see something special, I used it to write a gratitude card to them, and they use it to feel happy, and they used to again send me. So, this was a very interesting and beautiful thing, and I am called a gratitude goddess in our team.
What I understood is with gratitude, we start acknowledging things around us. Like, if there is a plant and we are not grateful or do not see any beauty around us, we just see it as a plant.
But when we are grateful, when we see beauty in it, we'll see how beautiful the plant is, how tall it is, how the texture is, how the color of every leaf is. We start admiring it, appreciating it, and acknowledging it, right?
If you have a grateful heart, just that aura around you is enough, you need not do anything. It just makes everything magical.
If you'd like to share your own story, send an email over at aarushi@gratefulness.me with the subject "My Gratitude Story". See ya!
