We often get so bogged down with work that we forget to enjoy the simple things in life and to NOT take ourselves so seriously.

So as a tribute to all the amazing things we need to be grateful for in life, here is the original Gratitude Dance by the Gratidudes.

You can't watch this and not smile and you just can't do this dance without laughing. It's just that ridiculous.

For those who are looking to express some daily gratitude, check out gratitudelog.com. It's an awesome social network of people who are grateful everyday. You can even send notes of appreciation to friends (along with a cute gift) and make certain gratitude posts private so only you can read them.

Now I've noticed a huge trend that's starting to overtake even youtube. And that's mind movies.

They're like vision boards but in movie form. So instead of having a static image that can easily be ignored, this can actually become a part of your daily ritual.

Alright, this whole concept is best described with an example. So check out this awesome mind movie from personal development junkie, Alex Cattoni. Want proof that this works? She's only 23 and she's already managing a multimillion dollar company, lives a lifestyle only CEOs dream of retiring into, and is a world class photographer.

If you want some inspiration to build your own mind movie, you can check out this page >>

How To Make A Mind Movie - it's easier than you think

Mind movies are great way to remind yourself of your potential and of the fact that you can do anything you set your mind to.

Plus they're fun to do and fun to share! What Alex did was really simple and all she used was her MacBook and Keynote. You can also do your mind movie on iMovie too using one of their templates. Another way is to use PowerPoint. You'll be surprised at how these everyday programs can be used to create something so beautiful.

But for those of you who don't have all that or are a newbie at movie editing, you can check out Ryan Higgins' mind movie software. It's built specifically to get the best out of you for an exciting, fun-to-watch mind movie. I recommend Ryan's software because it also helps you clarify your vision. Lots of people at my office are already looking into this and we're pretty excited about it.

If you wanna get to know more about Ryan's mind movie software, just click here. There's also a bunch of other people's mind movies if you want some inspiration.

Click here to find out how you can make a mind movie like Alex's  >>

Cheers,

Vishen Lakhiani

PS: I think choosing the music is the best part. It's just a little hard to pick a song that is defines your life. I'm thinking some U2.

One of my favorites quotes ever has to be this one:

"Saying thank you is more than good manners. It is good spirituality." - Alfred Painter

Living by this has definitely made life a lot easier, happier, and optimistic. The science backing the benefits of gratitude are undeniable. From boosting happiness to increasing the achievement of goals, gratitude is a simple yet incredibly powerful thing that all of us have to do.

So the next time you say thank you to a person holding the door for you or to a waitress, just remember that you're doing a service for yourself too.

Here are 3 great articles on why you need to start expressing gratitude (if you aren't making a conscious decision to do so already).

PS: A really fun way to make gratitude a daily habit is through GratitudeLog.com.

Read More…

Editor's Note: The following is a guest post written by a goal setting expert Gary Ryan Blair.

Think for just a moment of all the things that require practice: grammar, arithmetic, cooking, and even the guitar. Practice is probably something you think you’re done with when you leave school or give up music lessons. But, have you ever thought of practicing the fine art of gratitude?

The simplicity of gratitude and the powerful effect it has on our lives is unequaled by any other practice of its kind.  There is a special kind of magic in gratitude for it raises our consciousness, recharges our energy, enhances our self-worth, and strengthens our spirit. Gratitude counts.

It’s quite possible to attain great wealth, the best education, and an exceptional quality of life and still be unhappy. This occurs when people live with an absence of gratitude. Success is a process that includes both peaks and valleys, but the one constant in a truly successful life is gratitude.

A successful life requires ongoing growth, and gratitude ensures growth. Gratitude heightens awareness and expands your interaction with the world. Once gratitude becomes part of your nature you begin to see the connections between your success and creature comforts, and the talents and contributions of others.

The farmer plants, waters, fertilizes and harvests the tomatoes you enjoy.
The truck driver delivers the food to the market that will soon feed your family.
The baker kneads and bakes the bread for the sandwich you’ll eat for lunch.
The engineer and architect design the bridge that allows you to get to work.
The furniture maker’s handiwork creates the furniture in your living room.
The plumber fixes your leak, clears your drain and plunges your toilet.
The teacher educates and inspires your children to be the best they can be.
The customer provides the support that enables everyone to receive wages.
The performer engages the imagination and entertains your senses.
The seamstress sews the beautiful clothes that make you look great.
The physician and nurse help to bring your beautiful baby into the world.

Pause for a moment and begin to think of the connections between people and you will immediately understand how important a role gratitude plays in the creation of a happy, productive life. We live in a world where we have much to be grateful for if we would just stop and look around.

It’s quite humbling to think of all the roles that complete strangers play in our daily existence. The sheer ingenuity and effort required of others is one of the most compelling reasons why we must make gratitude a daily practice. Humility is a virtue integral to gratitude. We cannot recognize the need for gratitude without it.

You may be tempted to believe that success and happiness is the result of karma, fate, design, destiny or pure luck but gratitude offers the best guarantee of success. As you practice the fine art of gratitude you automatically enhance your peace of mind and overall quality of life.

Finding something good in each and every day harnesses the power of gratitude. Do you light a candle or curse the darkness? Do you bless each and everything that comes your way, trusting that its meaning will become clear—even if you can't possibly see how in the moment?

One of the best ways to cultivate gratefulness is to count your blessings by thinking of all the good in your life as well acknowledging the contributions of others. This is important for three reasons:

Positioning. By focusing on the positive things in each and every day, you position gratitude so that it has top of mind awareness.

Perspective. By looking for goodness and nobility in yourself and others, you are reminded that there are lots of good people with good intentions in the world.

Power. By being appreciative for challenging lessons and adverse situations you are demonstrating grace under fire. That grace results in greater personal power, self-confidence, momentum, and energy.

Practicing the fine art of gratitude is not only among our most important positive emotions, but one that links directly to physical and mental well-being. It’s in our self-interest to feel gratitude because it makes us better people. When we consciously practice grateful living, happiness follows along with an ability to withstand negative events. An attitude of gratitude provides immunity to anger, envy, resentment, and depression.

While forgiveness heals the heart of old hurts, gratitude opens it to present love. Gratitude bestows many benefits. It dissolves negative feelings: anger and jealousy melt in its embrace, fear and defensiveness shrink. Gratitude deflates the barriers to love.

Gratitude also evokes happiness, which is itself a powerfully healing and beneficial emotion. When we are happy, we like to make others happy, and this fosters kindness and generosity.

Like other attitudes, gratitude can be cultivated. We don't have to wait for someone to shower us with gifts before feeling thankful. We can develop gratitude by reflecting on the gifts that are already ours. This reflection can be done for a minute, a day, or throughout a lifetime.

Most people celebrate birthdays, anniversaries and holidays, but those who cultivate gratitude celebrate and rejoice every day. We can be grateful because we are happy, but we can also be happy because we are grateful.

We tend to forget how very different the laws that govern the mind are from the laws that operate in the physical world. In the physical world, if we give something thing to another person, whether it be a toy, a book, or a diamond, we lose possession.

Yet in the mind, the opposite is true. Whatever we intend for another person we first experience ourselves, whatever we give we gain, whatever we offer flowers in our own mind. If you feel hatred toward someone, that hate boomerangs back and scorches your own mind.

On the other hand, if you offer love and gratitude to someone, that love and gratitude first fills and heals your mind. The words "As you give so shall you receive" are profound statements about the way our minds work.

Enjoy every moment with gratitude and the next time you are eating fruit, remember to gives thanks to the person who planted the tree. That’s making gratitude count!

About Gary

Gary Ryan Blair is a highly regarded speaker, consultant, strategic planner, and coach to leading companies throughout the globe. He helps business owners, corporate executives and sales professionals manage their time, set their priorities, and stay focused so that they can achieve their goals, grow their business, and sustain a lasting competitive advantage.

He's also offering advanced coaching on setting your personal goals -- and getting the results, find out how to make your personal strategic plan.

Great news: Happiness can spread among people in social networks, according to recent research. Joy can literally extend from person to person up to three degrees removed from one another.

My jaw dropped when I read this the other day in an article by Elizabeth Landau for CNN. This piece fascinated me so much I had to share it with you. This is definitely knowledge worth spreading!

Happiness is Contagious in Social Networks

by Elizabeth Landau, CNN

If you're feeling great today, you may end up inadvertently spreading the joy to someone you don't even know.

New research shows that in a social network, happiness spreads among people up to three degrees removed from one another. That means when you feel happy, a friend of a friend of a friend has a slightly higher likelihood of feeling happy too.

The lesson is that taking control of your own happiness can positively affect others, says James Fowler, co-author of the study and professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego.

"We get this chain reaction in happiness that I think increases the stakes in terms of us trying to shape our own moods to make sure we have a positive impact on people we know and love," he said.

Sadness also spreads in a network, but not as quickly, the researchers found. Each happy friend increases your own chance of being happy by 9 percent, whereas each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent. This reflects the total effect of all social contacts.

When framing the question differently, the study found that you are 15 percent more likely to be happy if a direct connection is happy, 10 percent if the friend of a friend is happy, and 6 percent if it's a friend of a friend of a friend.

The study, published in the British Medical Journal, used data from the Framingham Heart Study to recreate a network of 4,739. Fowler and co-author Dr. Nicholas Christakis of Harvard Medical School charted friends, spouses and siblings in the network, and used their self-reported happiness ratings from 1983 to 2003.

Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of "Stumbling on Happiness," called the study "a stunning paper by two of the most respected scientists in the field" in a statement he e-mailed to CNN.

"We've known for some time that social relationships are the best predictor of human happiness, and this paper shows that the effect is much more powerful than anyone realized," Gilbert said. "It is sometimes said that you can't be happier than your least happy child. It is truly amazing to discover that when you replace the word 'child' with 'best friend's neighbor's uncle,' the sentence is still true."

If you are the hub of a large network of people -- that is, if you have a lot of connected friends or a wide social circle -- you are more likely to become happy, the study found.

But the reverse is not true.

"You might only have one friend or two friends or something like that, and if you become happy, you're not going to try to get more friends. You're probably going to stick with what worked in the first place," Fowler said.

The researchers are also looking at the phenomenon on Facebook, which has more than 120 million active users. This study, which has not yet been published, looked at who smiles in their profile pictures who doesn't, and whether their connections also smile or not, Fowler said.

"We find smiling profiles cluster in much the same way as happiness is clustering in the Framingham Heart Study," he said.

It's not just happiness that spreads in a social network. Fowler and Christakis have also looked at trends in cigarette smoking and obesity using the parts of the heart study network.

They found that when someone quits, a friend's likelihood of quitting smoking was 36 percent. Moreover, clusters of people who may not know one another gave up smoking around the same time, the authors showed in a New England Journal of Medicine article in May.

Social ties also affect obesity. A person's likelihood of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given time period, Fowler and Christakis showed in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2007.

And, like happiness, both smoking behavior and obesity seem to spread within three degrees of separation in a social network, Fowler said. Beyond three, things get fuzzier.

"Eventually you get out far enough in the social network that you're competing with all these other cascades of happiness and unhappiness that are sort of duking it out," he said. "Happiness on average wins, but once you get far enough away from someone in a social network, it's not possible to detect their effect anymore."

GratitudeLog.com, The Website that Spreads Happiness

This phenomenon is precisely what Mike Reining and Vishen Lakhiani, the guys behind GratitudeLog.com, a new website focused on gratitude, are trying to tap into.

I know these guys, and it’s their dream to make the world a happier, more joyful and abundant place. I hope some of you have signed up to GratitudeLog. We’ve mentioned it on FinerMinds a few times. (Those of you who are actively using the website; you’ll know what I’m talking about!)

On GratitudeLog, you can easily log what you’re grateful for everyday, which in itself is a powerful exercise. Research shows that practicing gratitude each day boosts your happiness set point by 25%. But there are additional happiness gains to be had by using GratitudeLog that you won’t get by keeping a private gratitude journal.

First, even just going to the website and seeing thousands of people sharing what they’re grateful for is guaranteed to put a smile on your face. As for the second benefit, you can use GratitudeLog to send and receive appreciation among other users and your friends.

This is a social network based just on happiness and gratitude, and, well, being a part of that is positively joyful.

Check it Out: www.GratitudeLog.com

When was the last time you felt grateful for something?

Ok, and the last time you actually expressed your gratitude for something?

Scientific studies show that expressing gratitude on a daily basis literally makes people happier. Gratitude research by McCullough and Emmons revealed that only a small daily dose of gratitude makes you more alert, enthusiastic, determined, optimistic and energetic. Additionally - a grateful person feels less depression and stress, is likely to help others, exercises more regularly and makes more progress toward personal goals. And above all - grateful people are more likely to be loved.

And this ain't some new age mumbo jumbo folks - this is from scientific studies!

Enter the Gratidudes...

Two guys that call themselves the GratiDudes have taken the whole concept to a higher level. They're aiming to change the world by helping people to become more grateful with a funny Gratitude Dance. The video has already gained huge popularity in YouTube. The idea is simple - all you need to do is to write down the things you are grateful for, turn on the video and do the dance!

You have to watch it yourself, smiling and laughing is guaranteed! Showing your gratitude can be a lot of fun - and having fun is one of the ingredients of happyness!

Don't forget to let us know how it worked (and what funny situations you ended up in)!

PS - that's not all, the guys behind FinerMinds will be launching a new website soon that will give everyone a unique way to express gratitude to the world and to loved one. Check out GratitudeLog.com. It's launching in a few days and this is the first public hint of it on the Internet. Remember, you heard it first on FinerMinds!