Choose Gratitude: How a Grateful Heart Reframes Hard Challenges
Gratitude is essential to a joy-filled and meaningful life. It is also one of the most reliable antidotes we have for the ailments that quietly wear down a heart: frustration, envy, despair, and the slow erosion of joy.
When gratitude is authentic, it does something almost no other discipline can do. It does not argue away pain or pretend a hard season is not hard. Instead, it turns our attention toward what we still have, not what we lack, and in doing so, it changes what we are capable of carrying.
I have seen this truth up close, in a moment I still return to often.
A Medal Given Away
In the biggest race of my life, I finished, and almost without thinking, I gave my medal to a volunteer who had gone out of his way to help me that day. He had no stake in my result. He was simply there, serving, expecting nothing back.
Handing him that medal felt like a small price for what his selflessness had given me. Gratitude has a way of doing that. It takes the focus off ourselves and places it on others, where it belongs. His quiet service lifted me that day, and it has stayed with me for decades since.
That is what gratitude does. It builds bridges between people instead of walls that separate them. It makes room for humility, and humility clears space for joy.
What the Research Confirms
For most of my life, this was simply something I believed because I had lived it and because Scripture had taught it to me. But gratitude has also become one of the most carefully studied subjects in modern psychology, and the findings echo what faith has always known.
In a landmark study, psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough asked participants to write down, each week, a short list of things they were grateful for, while other groups recorded daily hassles or simply logged neutral events.
After several weeks, the gratitude group reported measurably higher well-being, more optimism about the future, fewer physical complaints, and more hours of sleep than the comparison groups.1 The simple act of counting blessings, on paper, changed how people felt and how they functioned.
That finding matters even more in sport, where the pressure to perform can quietly turn into exhaustion. A 2020 study of nearly 600 NCAA student-athletes found that gratitude was one of the strongest predictors of lower burnout and that grateful athletes also tended to describe stronger, more trusting relationships with their coaches.2 Gratitude, in other words, is not a soft or sentimental add-on to competitive toughness. It is protective. It is part of what allows an athlete to compete hard for an entire season without being hollowed out by it.
Put simply: gratitude is not just good for the soul. It is good for performance, for relationships, and for staying whole through a long and demanding season.
Cultivating an Attitude of Gratitude
How, then, do we build this into our lives?
Scripture itself warns us against coveting what belongs to someone else, against measuring our lives by what the next person has and coming up short. Instead, we are called to be content with what we already have. To count our blessings is simply to live that out, day by day: to notice what has already been given to us, rather than fixing our eyes on what we lack.
I once read about a man who believed he had lost everything when his business failed. A mentor asked him gently, “You’ve lost everything, have you? Do you still have a wife who loves you? Children who love you? Do you live somewhere with real opportunity?” One by one, the man answered yes. The mentor wrote each answer down and handed him the list. “It sounds like you haven’t lost everything after all.”
The man agreed. He had simply never thought about his life that way before. He went on to start again, this time carrying a different posture toward what remained.
That is the invitation gratitude extends to every one of us, especially in the middle of a hard season: to consciously count what is still true and good, even while the storm is still moving through.
I want to be careful here. Despair is real, and it deserves to be taken seriously, not brushed aside with a slogan. I have walked through hard seasons myself. But I have also come to believe, both from experience and from what the research now confirms, that gratitude is the more powerful and more durable response to hardship. It does not deny the storm. It simply refuses to let the storm have the final word.
Being grateful for the gifts we have been given, including the people who show up for us when it counts, is at the heart of what gratitude is.
Choose gratitude today. Count your blessings, and watch the good, the joy, and the love already present in your life begin to grow.
Blessings,
Coach Weber
Philippians 4:13
Endnotes
1. Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(2), 377-389.
2. Ruser, J. B., Yukhymenko-Lescroart, M. A., Gilbert, J. N., Gilbert, W., & Moore, S. D. (2020). Gratitude, coach-athlete relationships, and burnout in collegiate student-athletes. Journal of Clinical Sport Psychology, 15(1).
Picture: In their collegiate running days with different collegiate teams, Anna Brooks-Thomas and Elizabeth Weber were former high school teammates. The gratitude on their faces as former teammates meeting up again says it all.