The beauty of social media is the ability to connect with many great people I wouldn’t otherwise be able to, and my connections include many great USA citizens who are celebrating Thanksgiving Day this Thursday.

In the UK the nearest we ever got to a Thanksgiving was when we used to celebrate our Harvest Festival.  When I was a child the Harvest Festival was a big deal at school.  The Harvest Festival was a form of thanksgiving where we celebrated the food we received and gave to those less fortunate of us. (My mother regularly cleared out her “tins cupboard”, to pack me off to school, with my donation for the school hampers, they usually gave to the elderly and sick).

Now I may simply mix in the wrong circles, but it’s literally years since I heard about the Harvest Festival.  When we were kids, my family were big on manners, and we were automatically taught to say “Thank you”.   It was the done thing, and if we violated this exercise in politeness, we were taken to task with a big frown.

Of course as a child, I didn’t realise the significance of those words and why they are so important. It took me years to stop being polite with my “Thank you’s” and to mean them with sincerity.   Much of my growing awareness stemmed from my life simply not working.  I was tenacious enough to want to discover why.  One of the reasons it wasn’t working had a lot to do with my polite ”Thank you” and here’s why.

• We are all transmitters radiating who we really are in our being, whether aware of it or not
• The essence of what we believe, think and feel is being communicated to everyone we meet without saying a word. It’s called energy, and what we send out, we receive right back
• When we say one thing, but are thinking another, on a level, it is picked up by others and we become in-congruent
• Saying “Thank you” without meaning it means we become in-congruent
• Feeling grateful when we say “Thank you” means we are in alignment with our truth
• Feeling gratitude and appreciation are akin to feeling universal and unconditional love
• Getting in touch with our feelings of gratitude must be practised like a muscle
• The more we practice, the more we feel grateful for, and that means we focus more on things we are grateful for
• What we focus on grows
• What we pay attention to grows
• When we practice, focus on and pay attention to our gratitude we get more things and people to be grateful for
• When our world is full of things to be grateful for, it means we have a world filled with love

In my country the UK, we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.  I think as a result we fail to celebrate and exercise our muscle of love and it’s collectively sorely missing.  My parents were right. Saying “Thank You” is essential, the piece they didn’t quite understand to teach us was that we needed to say it with meaning.  Do you say “Thank you” politely or “Thank you” with gratitude?  

We are really excited to have launched our new book “The 50 Biggest Mistakes Brilliant Leaders and Managers Avoid – And What They Do Instead”. We have a great special offer right now, which you can find out about at www.peoplediscovery.co.uk

Christina Lattimer is the owner of People Discovery.  She is on a mission to help bring inspirational leadership to the attention of the world  "I believe our working lives can bring fulfilment and happiness through inspired leader and followship. I help organisations get clear about their meaning and purpose, be able to enthuse and engage their people, and plan for success”  Visit www.peoplediscovery.co.uk for more information